Reserve Text: Greg Meyerson, Rethinking Black Marxism, (Continued)64. In his foreword to Black Marxism, Robin Kelley suggests similarities between it and some of the whiteness studies(BM, p.xxiii). In the light of the materialist history sketched above, I would say, to be more precise, that Robinson's historiography is largely opposed to materialist whiteness studies though quite compatible with works on whiteness such as Roediger's seminal Wages of Whiteness, which underlies Kelley's own description of Robinson's discussion of the making of the English working class. Just as Roediger emphasizes the white working class's processes of racialized self making, so does Robinson emphasize parallel processes among the English working class (and other ethnicities--see his comments on Jews to which I refer below). And Kelley, Roediger and Robinson see class formation as involving something more than can be explained by traditional Marxian divide and conquer theories. Roediger, in language similar to Kelley's "capitalist trick," refers to the Marxian construction of white workers "as dupes, even if virtuous ones." Kelley and Robinson would certainly concur with Roediger's comment that racism doesn't just "'trickle down' from the commanding heights of the economy."
65. The Linebaugh/Rediker/Allen material sanctions two points that allow for a critical purchase on the framework in question. First, Roediger, attempting to understand the particular psychodynamics of racialized class formation among the Irish, argues that they responded to their grueling migration to America and recruitment into the exactions of a wage labor regimen, thru simultaneous longing for a pre-industrial past and harsh rejection of that very longing, a process that shaped the choice of whiteness and the repudiation of blackness.
66. One of the many problems with this hypothesis is the failure to problematize sufficiently the process by which black people came to stand in for their (the Irish) former selves. But the other problem is this. The Irish proletariat had been previously subject to dispossession and transport in situations that were certainly as traumatic as the situation faced by early and mid nineteenth century Irish. Those victimized by Cromwellian conquest likely saw relatives killed or starved, had to undergo enslavement and transport to Barbados, where they were subject, not to the exactions of wage labor but the exactions of slavery. No similar psychodynamic occurred. Instead of defining themselves against blackness, the Irish came to unite and fight with their African counterparts and caused such social control problems that the plantation bourgeoisie barred Irish from the militia, choosing African slaves in their stead. Why given the trauma of being separated from a pre-industrial past and being integrated into an exacting quasi capitalist labor regimen ("puritanical work discipline," according to Linebaugh and Rediker), did they not make themselves white?
67. Second: lynching in the U.S South has often been seen as requiring some sort of psychoanalytic perspective to account for its horror, the depths of its rage and violence. Though Roediger's focus on racial self making takes place before the infamous period of frequent lynchings, he suggests that the psychodynamic underlying the activity of nonblackfaced racist mobs (who often lynched their victims) was present among those who would dress up in black face and engage in mob violence against African Americans. In referring to such mobs, I'm assuming he's referring to not just non-black faced antebellum mobs but post-bellum mobs as well.
68. A basically Freudian analysis of lynching is called upon to explain the extraordinary violence and rage of the activity. On p. 93 of Wages, Roediger quotes Vine Deloria approvingly when the latter says that "the white man must no longer project his fears and insecurities onto other groups, races and countries. Before the white man can relate to others he must forego the pleasure of defining them." Something like this combination of self definition and definition of the other thru aggressive projection and obliteration of that other has come to define the pathology of whiteness in America and some such hypothesis involving "the prelogical thought of the phobic" was deemed necessary to explain the mob ritual of lynching. This definition of the pathological self bears a fundamental resemblance to Robinson's description of the narcissistic psychic processes underlying Eurocentrism--which establishes itself by erasing the other (blackness). For Robinson, however, this process has nothing particular to do with blackness, but derives from the deeper and prior process ("architectonic") of intra-European racism.
69. In "Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Labor Competition" (which discusses Roediger in depth), I suggested that the psychodynamics of ambivalence play no significant explanatory role in the phenomenon of white supremacist violence. The ambivalence thesis when applied to the post-bellum lynch mob, explains the rape myth as the result of the white man's complex sexual jealousy. This "jealousy only breaks out into the open" post-bellum as, according to Trudier Harris, "sexual competition between black males and white males" was suppressed during slavery. The "communal rape" of black men is rooted in the white man's subconsciously craving what "he is forced to destroy"--the black male penis, which is in turn a symbol for "the white man's craving for power and mastery." This kind of analysis, really quite ridiculous as an empirical explanation for postbellum violence, is, as I point out in the above mentioned essay, attractive in great part because the Marxian analysis of racial violence is reduced to an economic determinism and because the Marxian category of ideology is reduced to some version of a brainwashing thesis. In the case of antebellum blackfaced mobs, Roediger goes psychoanalytic because "it is difficult to think of job competition with free blacks" as central to such mobbing (Marxism has been equated with the labor competition thesis) (Wages, p. 106). So a sexual competition thesis replaces a job competition thesis.
70. It is worth pointing out that the rape myth was not exactly ready made, already there, for use post reconstruction. As many have noted, from Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells to Angela Davis, the first waves of lynch violence during reconstruction itself were legitimated as responses to insurrection not rape instincts. The rape myth came later in response to the threat of multiracial populism--from the Knights to the various farmer's alliances. Neither Roediger's version of the whitening process of Irish minds nor Robinson's violence prone European mind explains these processes.
71. Linebaugh and Rediker's facts about the death toll from hanging in 17th century England suggest additional reasons for skepticism concerning appeals to the pathological white male mind, however historicized, to explain mass violence. Horrific as the period of lynching in the U.S south was, the horrors of 17th century hanging are easily comparable and lasted far longer. And there is no good reason to offer a psychoanalytic explanation in the case of southern lynching but not in the case of 17th century hanging. A class struggle approach can explain quite easily both periods of spectacular violence. The Roediger account, rooted in the importance of blackness, claims to explain lynch violence in the U.S but cannot even offer a plausible story to account for the English violence. Robinson could "explain" both kinds of violence through recourse to the European "collective psychic state" that "extends" from group to group, situation to situation, without being able to explain the particulars--words like "extend" functioning to cover up this fact.
72. Robinson, Roediger, and Kelley are all concerned to stress agency, invention, making--in Roediger's case, he stresses creative, often tortuously complex, working class self making which resulted in working class whiteness. This "making" necessarily involved the white working class in the invention of blackness as a point of contrast. In contrast to (his reading of) the Marxian tradition, which in accordance with its positing of workers as virtuous, will focus on (white) workers resisting racialization, Roediger wants to call attention to (white) workers' creating these racist practices: to reiterate, racism doesn't just "'trickle down' from the commanding heights of the economy" (Wages, p. 9).
73. Kelley makes similar points about Robinson, that the invention of the negro implied the corresponding fabrication of whiteness. Recalling Kelley's comment about the English working class above, racism was not an invention of the ruling class that trickled down but was already there--the tension between racialization as invention or making and racialization as "already there" needs exploration and I will explore it in a moment. For now, though, the point I wish to make is that on this view, working class culture is autonomous in both the English case and the American case. In addition, for Robinson there is of course the "making of the black radical tradition," yet another example of the autonomy of culture.
74. It is clear that these writers are responding to the perceived inadequacy of the structure/agency split they see inhabiting Marxist theory. It is also clear that they see some notion of the autonomy of culture, the irreducibility of culture to class, as warranted. And there seems to be something like a shared debt to E.P Thompson, or if not exactly debt then reference point. It has been my point throughout this essay that the class/culture split, however interpreted, is a reification, and thus produces explanatory aporias that historical materialism can overcome.
75. The reliance on the (relative) autonomy of culture from class covers over an inconsistency or tension to which I have just referred. If this autonomy points to agency and self invention on the one hand, it points at the same time to processes that are not so much invented as discovered, not so much invented as "there at the outset." (Kelley's description of the raced English working class). The difficulties associated with this ambiguity can be seen if we scrutinize Robinson's discussion of "the invention of the negro."
76. Robinson notes that "the creation of the Negro, the fiction of a dumb beast of burden fit only for slavery, was closely associated with the economic, technical and financial requirements of Western Development from the sixteenth century on." If the subject of this process is here western development, in a few paragraphs he gets more precise. For "only the accumulated interests and mercantile activities of the ruling classes and bourgeoisies of Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain could have accomplished such a massive scale of exploitation." And it is clearly this context of massive exploitation that is invoked as explaining "the Negro." The inventive component of the term is foregrounded in Robinson's comment that "this 'Negro' was a wholly distinct ideological construct from those images of Africans that had preceded it," differing "in function and ultimately in kind" (BM, 81-2) Historical materialists would be more than a little pleased by this analysis, which is perfectly adequate as a shortand. A more fleshed out account would do what Allen, Linebaugh and Rediker do--show how these racializing processes were shaped in the cauldron of class struggle.
77. It ought to be said that Robinson himself would not interpret his own lines as consonant with historical materialism in great part due to his conflation of class analysis with capitalism (understood, as mentioned at the start of this essay, "as an objective process") and his insistence not only that racism preceded capitalism (a point with which, as I've emphasized, historical materialists should agree) but that racism and capitalism did not, in Kelley's words, "break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of 'racial capitalism'" (xiii).
78. The apparent parallel between Allen's invention of the white race and Robinson's invention of the negro begins to breakdown rather quickly. Because, for Robinson, in spite of his talk of the Negro as "wholly distinct ideological construct," this wholly distinct construct is nevertheless viewed as "the culmination of a process a thousand years long and one at the root of European historical identity"(BM, 82). The metaphors of culmination, like Kelley's talk of racial capitalism "flowering in the cultural soil of the west," is dubiously teleological and an utter mystification(BM, xiii) This longue racial duree hides the particulars of the class struggle which explain in turn the particular character of the racialization process. As part of making his argument about the invention of the negro as the culmination of a long, long process, Robinson notes that "the collisions of the Black and white 'races' began long before the events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that prefigured modern African slavery"(82). As evidence for this point, he quotes Constantin de Volney on his visit to Egypt:
But returning to Egypt, the lesson she teaches history contains many reflections for philosophy. . . . Just think that this race of black men, today our slave and the object of our scorn, is the very race to which we owe our arts, sciences and even the use of speech! Just imagine, finally, that it is in the midst of peoples who call themselves the greatest friends of liberty and humanity that one has approved the most barbarous slavery and questioned whether black men have the same kind of intelligence as Whites. (Robinson, p. 342)
79. The irony, a point which crystallizes the difference between historical materialism and Robinson's black marxism, is that the very person Robinson quotes in support of a historiography rooted in the twin reifications of western civilization and the black radical tradition himself forged his "egalitarian and multiethnic conception of humanity not in isolation but rather through solidarity and connection within and among social movements and individuals." Volney's antiracist arguments about Africa were part of an internationalist abolitionism: "he assailed the ruling logic of nationalism," Linebaugh and Rediker note. According to Thomas Jefferson, so Linebaugh and Rediker suggest, "Volney was the principal object of the Act Concerning Aliens of 1798, which was designed to promote 'purity of national character'" (L & R, p.342).
80. Linebaugh and Rediker close their book with the comment that "the early 1790's were a expansive time for redefining what it meant to be a human being. But that time would not last" (L and R, p.352). For as long as there are ruling classes, for present purposes, as long as capitalism exists, class struggles will be ongoing but the ruling classes will have a decided upper hand. In the aftermath of the British expeditions against Haiti, aided by the formation and dissemination of the "biological category of race," this "multiethnic conception of humanity" became "unthinkable within ethnic and nationalist historiography":
Volney disappeared from radical scholarship, except among the pan-africanists and "ethiopianists" who kept him in print. What began as repression thus evolved into mutually exclusive narratives that have hidden our history. (352)
81. Though Robinson and Roediger appear to be indebted to Thompson, the splitting off of culture from class which characterizes Robinson's text throughout repeats the very move that Thompson went to great pains to critique. And though Roediger, like Thompson, emphasizes class formation and class experience, his working class appears too autonomous, at times nearly sealed off from ongoing processes of class rule. This autonomy, inconsistently maintained as I have argued elsewhere, requires Roediger to supplant class analysis with psychocultural analysis--a substitution that the Thompsonian language of class formation serves, I think, to mystify.
82. Though I've here lumped together Robinson/Roediger and Kelley as engaging in a kind of historiography conceptually opposed to the historical materialism of Linebaugh, Rediker and Allen, it should be (and has been) noted that Kelley is often on the other side. Witness his own comments in praise of Linebaugh and Rediker's work:
What would the world look like had the Levellers, the Diggers, the Ranters, the slaves, the castaways, the Maroons, the Gypsies, the Indians, the Amazons, the Anabaptists, the pirates. . . won? (L & R, back cover)
Of course, the good guys lost and counterrevolutionary ideological, political and economic structures were imposed, structures that have been stable enough in the face of repeated challenge to maintain class domination. But Kelley's question is a historical materialist question, one that in some sense had to be asked by Linebaugh and Rediker themselves before they uncovered the supporting material. Further, it is a question largely barred from asking within the tradition represented by Robinson and defended by Kelley in the foreword. Had Kelley called serious attention to such movements in his foreword, he would not have been able to offer a defense of Robinson.
83. Robinson's response, given the logic of his position, to Kelley's comments on Linebaugh and Rediker would be that it is inappropriate to mix together Ranters, Levellers and Maroons inasmuch as the former two and the last operated through rival metaphysics, different racial architectonics. That as a result of this European architectonic, the Levellers and Diggers could not have won--that their resistance could only have been a blip or "undercurrent" (which is perhaps why he doesn't mention it) in an ongoing racializing process (this is how he views the English-Irish proletarian unity of the Chartist movement)--one which had to win as "the substratum of western thought was unprepared for anything else."
84. Further, Robinson views the kind of multiethnic class struggle uncovered by Linebaugh, Rediker (and Kelley in other work) as almost perverse, associated with an excessive violence caused either by Africans being influenced by the violence promoting Euro racial architectonic or by virtue of a deracination from an authentic African culture. The anarchic, deracinated violence associated with "class wars" is to be opposed to the absence of mass violence characterizing the true African tradition: thus in his discussion of such multiethnic class wars against the Spanish ruling class in Venezuela, he notes the absence of any "vision of an african state," (138), such vision presumably being informed by a racial architectonic, a shared epistemology, that is disturbed by other ethnicities.
85. In chapter two of Black Marxism, Robinson chastises materialist historiography when, speaking in the name of "historical inquiry," he notes that "we shall be guided less by what we in the abstract have been led to expect should have occurred[proletarian unity]than by what did"(Robinson, p.29). I have tried to suggest, to use his terms, that what indeed should have occurred often did occur. In the next section, we will look at the degree to which Robinson's "ought"--the black radical tradition--did and should occur, whether it can withstand the scrutiny of historical inquiry. But before turning directly to the question of essentialism, I'd like to make a closing comment here about Kelley.
86. The tension in Kelley between the nationalism underlying his uncritical support of Robinson and his admirable internationalism in which he argues in essence that the fight against racism and sexism must be fundamental to class based struggles and are in the interest of such struggles has its source in an ambiguity over the concept of class interest and in a confusion of identity categories with explanatory categories. In arguing against what he sees as a false dichotomy between class based politics and identity politics, he opts for the position that the fight against racism is "in the interest of the working class." But he also says, both in the Nation article, and elsewhere at least by implication, that white workers benefit from racism. If white workers benefit from racism, then fighting it is not in the interests of the white working class.
87. As for the second point: in my second footnote, I noted my strong agreement with what I called Kelley's moral position--"abolition of every possibility of exploitation and oppression." In his commentary on this line from the Black Women's United Front, he notes that it "resists hierarchies." He goes on:
It refuses to privilege class over race or race over gender, or sexuality over class, race or gender.(YMD, 104)
This position forms part of his largely correct critique of his antagonist's falsely universalist and economist understanding of class. The false universalism of this particular kind of "class analysis"--"race, gender, and sexuality are particular whereas class is universal"--presumes that class struggle is some sort of race and gender-neutral terrain but takes for granted that movements focused on race, gender or sexuality necessarily undermine class unity and, by definition, cannot be emancipatory for the whole"(YMD, p.) Kelley notes that "class is lived through race and gender," the larger point being that race, gender, class, sexuality are intersecting, no one experience being primary over the others.
88. As an extension of these points, Kelley links the false universality of this kind of class analysis to an "economism that enables these critics to claim, without evidence, that declining wages are more important to most black people than police brutality or having to wait an hour for a seat at Denny's"(YMD, 115). The point here, a good one, is that moral and political issues--issues of well being and dignity--cannot be separated off from the "hard issues" of economics (not to mention that economics is always about dignity and well being). This kind of point is central to the noneconomic determinist Marxism I have defended here.
89. But: while it is true that the various identity categories intersect--class is lived through race and gender etc.--and while I am also willing to accept that no experience of oppression should be privileged over another, it does not follow that multiple oppressions require multiple structural causes. I have followed people like Barbara Fields in arguing that "race" is not an explanatory category at all. In other words, "race" doesn't explain racism. Neither does "race" as "relative autonomy." While it makes sense to say that racial oppression is relatively autonomous from class oppression, both, on the account put forward here, result from processes of class rule in the context of class struggle.
90. While Kelley is clearly more partisan to multiracial unity than Robinson, both posit Marxism as economist, falsely universalist and set against various particulars. If Robinson valorizes one of the particulars--the black radical tradition--Kelley wants to see the universalizing moment in all of the particulars--fine at the level of experience, but a mistake at the level of explanation. And I would speculate that the contradiction over "interest" is related to the multiple causality model to which he implicitly gives assent, for it's easy enough to see how viewing race and gender as separate causes would lead one to posit separate, even conflicting, interests.
7
91. In his foreword to Black Marxism, Kelley suggests that it is incorrect to label Robinson essentialist, as I have been doing in this essay. Kelley's argument is not very convincing though. He notes that while critics are quick to charge Robinson with essentialism, they are uncritical about the essentialism of terms like "western civilization." But of course my point has been that both terms are essentialist, and work together in Robinson's discourse. The other argument Kelley makes is that Robinson's notion of a common culture is historical through and through. But that a tradition is historicized does not render it immune to the essentialism charge. For the historiography itself seems in many ways to be "a nationalizing myth," a claim Kelley dismisses as simplistic. Slave rebellions, which Robinson sees as essential to the tradition or its carrying out, are part of African heritage but not the European. It's not clear why this should be so.
92. The UNIA is seen as a part of the radical tradition, the black antilogic to capitalism. The African Blood Brotherhood also, but less so, presumably due to its connections to the essentially European CP USA. Black communists are viewed as still less authentic. The connection of Garvey to the Klan and his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, his claim that he influenced them, is screened out in Robinson's necessarily selective account of the tradition. Interestingly, CLR James, who is in the tradition, says of Garvey who's also in the tradition rooted in the absence of mass violence that "all the things that Hitler was to do so well later, Garvey was doing in 1920 and '21." As Garvey noted himself: "we were the first fascists. We had disciplined men, women and children in training for the liberation of Africa." Obviously, the essence of fascism involves if not mass violence then violence against the masses. While it's a mistake to reduce the complexity of the UNIA--they were quite big on the Bolsheviks--that Robinson leaves this unpleasantness out of the tradition is evidence of its arbitrariness, thus its lack of explanatory power.
93. In talking about the Obeah influence in the Haitian revolution, Robinson doesn't critique the limits of this tradition or how it could be taken up by fascists like Duvalier, and made part of a culture of violence. Mobutu, who united with South African fascist mercenaries and who, like Duvalier, was for years a bulwark of U.S foreign policy, is left out of the African essence, despite his commitment to an Africanist "authenticite."
94. Dubois' history (chapter nine) must be read in light of the nationalist politics of the black radical tradition, so that in his study of Reconstruction, Dubois can be interpreted as "returning" to the African heritage of revolt. His move subsequent to '35 in the direction of the Communist Party position on the common interests of the white and black proletariat has to be slighted or viewed as a transgression of the tradition.
95. Some of the problems here impact on the claim that the black radical tradition is rooted in the absence of mass violence. In order to make this concept plausible, Robinson has to construct fictional unities out of historical material, excluding Dessalines, for example, because he's too violent. And he'd have to exclude the Simba, African radicals whose racial terrorism was itself a response to the far greater terror of the U.S and South Africa backed Mobutu in the aftermath of Lumumba's assassination at Mobutu's hands. Yet for Robinson, insofar as blacks are violent ("such violence did not come naturally to African peoples," implying of course that it does come naturally to other "peoples"), they are drifting away from themselves, one last striking example of this being Robinson's use of Gerald Mullin's comment that "'the more slaves came to resemble the indigent freeman whom they displaced, the more dangerous they became" (Robinson, 309, 168).
96. What is especially noteworthy is that here the violence of the slaves is chalked up to presumably European acculturation. Yet Gabriel's rebellion (influenced by Jacobinism) and Nat Turner's insurrection are chalked up to the freedom inducing power of the African tradition. In the former instance, this distortion of history which constructs blacks in multiracial rebellion as somehow duped by "white culture" blends nicely with the tacit anticommunism of this kind of nationalism, which typically reads black participation in this tradition as yet another example of whites (or Jews) duping Blacks.
97. It is thus not all that surprising to see Robinson basically defending Harold Cruse's comments about Jews, Blacks and Communism. Robinson's point here is, we guess, an extension of his core point that western civilization cannot slough off its "particularities," its deep rooted racializing and ethnicizing tendencies. Here, it is Jewish communists who exemplify this trait. Communism, like capitalism, both of them aiming at universality and both being part of the European mind cannot slough off its particularistic tendencies:Cruse argues that in the first three decades of the movement, the party's most successful period, ethnic nationalism defeated the attempt at Americanization: 'it evidently never occurred to Negro revolutionaries that there was no one in America who possessed the remotest potential for Americanizing Marxism but themselves. Certainly the Jews could not with their nationalistic aggressiveness, emerging out of eastside ghettoes to demonstrate thru Marxism their intellectual superiority over the Anglo Saxon goyim. The Jews failed to make marxism applicable to anything in America but their own national-group social ambitions or individual self elevation. As a result the great brainwashing of negro radical intellectuals was not achieved by capitalism or the capitalistic bourgeoisie but by Jewish intellectuals in the American Communist party."
Robinson, to support Cruse's analysis, then quotes (Cruse quoting) Melech Epstein and Arthur Leibman, who "inadvertently confirm Cruse's reconstruction"(BM, p.387). Universality is really a form of ethnic particularity that functions to suppress incommensurable particulars.
98. There is a subtle logic at work here (the logic of anticommunism) whereby the Marxian hypothesis of divide and conquer is not only simplified, turned into a conspiracy theory involving ingenious bosses and both black and white dupes, but then viewed as a theory rationalizing their (read white or Jewish commmunists) duping of blacks (who once again, by definition, cannot really be communists). Thus does the logic of nationalism at once reject Marxism on the grounds of it being a brainwashing theory (capitalist duping workers) while tacitly importing its own brainwashing theory--substituting (white or Jewish, European) communists for bosses in this role (how perfectly this corresponds to the logic of that classic anticommunist novel, Invisible Man).
99. Robinson claims that the black radical tradition is rooted in a shared epistemology. Though Kelley and Robinson in his updated preface hint that the black radical tradition can be shared with others who are non-black, the most obvious interpretation is that this is not so. Robinson does not discuss the possibility in the text itself of nonblacks sharing the tradition or learning from it. And this leads to my second problem, one in turn tied up with the relativist implications of the notion of incommensurable traditions. While Robinson talks about carrying the black radical tradition forward or "the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic" (just as he talks of the western racial architectonic being extended), he does not talk about critiquing it or revising it. This suggests to me that it is what it is and while it can be transmitted, it cannot be revised or critiqued. This is a problem endemic to if not quite constitutive of ethnicized or racialized versions of identity politics, where as I see it, politics is rooted in belonging instead of the other way around, in which identity is rooted in a revisable, criticizable, justifiable politics.
100. Marxists tend to look askance at identity politics. I would tend to say that that it is unavoidable and irreducible, which is not the same thing as endorsing racial politics or nationalist politics. Communist internationalism strikes me as implying an identity fully as much as any identity politics. But our identities need justification. As Satya Mohanty puts it (and he defends identity politics in the conventional sense whereas I do not), "good social and cultural identities are quite simply based on good explanations of the social world."
101. With these comments in mind, I would like to say a few things about what is called standpoint theory. In certain ways, Robinson's black radical tradition seems like a version of standpoint theory. If I may idealize, standpoint theory is a theory of society that asserts that groups are constructed so as to be differentially positioned and that this differential positioning has epistemic consequences. Those who are victims of oppression occupy standpoints that both promote and partially instantiate, without guaranteeing, insight about social relations of oppression and exploitation. Very simply, victims of racial oppression, gender oppression and class oppression are on the average both more insightful about these processes and more motivated to understand such processes than those who benefit from these social relationships. The black radical tradition comes out of a common history of oppression, a common fund of experience, that affords a vantage point from which to critique "western civilization." Standpoint theory, best interpreted realistically and my thumbnail sketch of it was a realist sketch, nevertheless runs the risk of relativism and this is certainly the case with Robinson. The problem is nicely exemplified in Terry Eagleton's critique of Lukacs theory of class standpoint.
102. As Eagleton notes, Lukacs standpoint theory (and this is true of standpoint theory in general I think) attempts to avoid the dilemma of positivism and historical relativism by theorizing that a certain kind of historical embeddedness or situatedness affords potentially universal knowledge. As Eagleton puts it, in a nice paraphrase of some of the key insights of standpoint theory, "oppressed groups and classes…need to get some view of the social system as a whole…simply to be able to realize their own partial, particular interests. If women are to emancipate themselves, they need to have an interest in understanding something of the general structures of patriarchy." Lukacs, however, solved the positivist/relativist dilemma "by introducing the category of self-reflection." The problem here is that Lukacs has equated knowledge about real social processes with the "universal subjectivity" of the proletariat so that universal subjectivity, put another way, group self knowledge, is in effect identical with objectivity:
If the working class is the potential bearer of such class consciousness, from what viewpoint is this judgment to be made? It cannot be made from the viewpoint of the (ideal) proletariat itself, since this simply begs the question; but if only that viewpoint is true, then it cannot be made from some standpoint external to it either. As Bheiku Parekh points out, to claim that only the proletariat allows one to grasp the truth of society as a whole already assumes that one knows what the truth is. It would seem that truth is either wholly internal to the consciousness of the working class, in which case it cannot be assessed as truth and the claim becomes simply dogmatic; or one is caught in the impossible paradox of judging the truth from outside the truth itself, in which case the claim that this form of consciousness is true simply undercuts itself.
103. For Robinson, it is implied that the journeys of CLR James and Dubois thru the Marxian tradition to the Black radical tradition is a journey beyond the distorting veil of Eurocentrism of and to self discovery as black. The problem here is not with self discovery per se but ethnicized self discovery. Though this formulation too would meet both Eagleton's and Mohanty's independent or realist epistemic criteria if the knowledge afforded by the black standpoint was rooted in a justifiable theory of interests. This theory of interests, which I've tried to suggest is false, would be that the process of racializing subjects as black benefits whites, and thus for a racialized (black) subject to discover the black radical tradition is also to discover both who benefits from racial oppression and how to oppose it. One's identity (as a member of the black radical tradition for example) is good not because it is good to discover one's blackness but because this process of self discovery affords insight into universal, justifiable properties of well being suppressed by racism. This essay has argued both that Robinson's theory of interest and identity are false. That Robinson's black radical tradition is not rooted in good explanations of the social world, that his "shared epistemology" is not an epistemology at all but a nationalist mystification.
104. At any rate, the difference between the two versions of standpoint theory is that Lukac's unambiguously makes claims to universality, while the other may in fact reject it, though there is ambiguity here as well. Is the black standpoint, the black radical tradition, true outright? True only for blacks? Thus false for Europeans? Is it true outright but only intelligible for those who are part of the tradition? (this concept falls prey to the aporias of incommensurability). Is there a difference between the shared epistemology of the tradition and black identity or are they in effect the same? in which case knowledge just is black self reflection, or self knowledge as collective self recognition, and thus dogmatic just in the way proletarian self knowledge would be. (how do you know when you've discovered the tradition? You just know, by looking in the mirror of the collective self).
105. Robinson, as discussed earlier, speaks convincingly of the role of nationalism and nationalizing myths in securing class rule (though it needs pointing out that these myths are imposed thru a process of class struggle-thus the importance of Linebaugh and Rediker). Yet as I have tried to show, a double standard is at work. Nationalism secures class rule for Europeans but not for Africans. For the latter, nationalism is self knowledge not ideology. This essay has contested this view of nationalism. I would add here that the double standard is literally sanctioned by the doctrine of incommensurability, for if the two traditions are incommensurable (I put aside here the incoherence of the notion), there are indeed two standards (of evidence, of truth, of value).
106. In his preface, Robinson notes that "the shared past [which anchors the shared epistemology] is precious, not for itself but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being." Later, he notes, speaking of black collective identity, that "The distinctions of political space and historical time have fallen away so that the making of one black collective identity suffuses nationalisms. Harboured in the African Diaspora there is a single historical identity which is in opposition to the systematic privations of racial capitalism"(BM p.317)107. Thus, it might appear that his defense of black collective identity is rooted in good explanations of the social world. But if this identity is politically justifiable, based on good explanations of the social world, then non-blacks can be a part of it, in which case there is nothing particularly black about it. One reason this is so follows from good theories of knowledge. (The best explanation of a good explanation involves its universality (thus its sharability); explanations that literally cannot be shared are untranslatable or incommensurable, and the concept of incommunsurability is profoundly incoherent, saturated in relativist assumptions and therefore incompatible with the best explanations of explanation itself--a concept which is staunchly realist.)
108. If the identity transcends its explanatory content, then it is indeed essentialist. If the argument is that only black collective identity can truly oppose racial capitalism, then the argument is circular--not susceptible to empirical demonstration. This too follows from the premises of incommensurability--where evidence is not theory dependent but theory determined, a tautology of the theory or world view. It is thus not surprising that if only members of the black radical tradition, who must be black, can oppose racial capitalism, based on an understanding to which nonblacks do not have access, it is not surprising that members of this tradition, who transcend the corruptions of the western metaphysic, can themselves not really understand its standard of human conduct. Its "nastiness" can only be characterized as "inexplicable." (BM, 308): "the depths to which racialist behavior has fouled western agencies transgressed against a world consciousness rooted in our African past."
109. The essence of this identity, I would argue, is not its opposition to racial capitalism but its belonging, its being "harboured" (with the word's implications of shelter, refuge, home, anchor) in the African diaspora. That the shared epistemology is nothing but the shared past is suggested in Robinson's comment that this shared past "contains philosophy, theories of history and social prescriptions native to it," that it is "a construct possessing its own terms, exacting its own truths [my highlighting]." Knowledge and truth have indeed, pace Eagleton's critique of Lukacs, become nothing but collective self ownership. Understanding has indeed become equated with group self understanding, a claim "which cannot be assessed as truth and is thus simply dogmatic." Finally, I would note that the relativism haunting Robinson's formulations becomes clear here in the notion of "own truths"; what is also clear I hope is that despite its associations of tolerance, relativism by virtue of its dogmatism, just is (the janus-face of) absolutism. Last, this is a rather nice example of how the rights based language of self determination (with its enlightenment roots) can merge almost imperceptibly into what amounts to little more than the fetish of ethnicized or racialized truths. But there are no racial truths in the same way that there is no such thing as proletarian science--there are better or worse theories of racism and better or worse science. Some groups are more likely to support the good theories. Good theories of racism,if available to large numbers of people, are more likely to be supported by its primary victims. But good theories of racism are not equivalent to what its primary victims think.
8
110. In my conclusion, I'd like to engage in what I hope is some instructive tradition building of my own. I want to suggest that Robinson's Black Marxism be itself included in a tradition that includes a rather ethnically heterogeneous and interdisciplinary bunch: Edward Said, Cornel West, Stanley Aronowitz, Houston Baker, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Michael Omi and Howard Winant. I could of course add more names to this list. What ties these names together is a complex conceptuality combining, if I may idealize, the following components:
An economic determinist reduction and misinterpretation of Marxian class analyis; a turn to psychoanalysis, often (though not always) viewed as supplementing the inadequacies of the supposed Marxian fetish of the economy; a tendency toward antirealism, taking the form of notions of incommensurability and especially, radical alterity; a tendency to anticommunism. I have engaged in this regrouping exercise, lifting Robinson's Black Marxism out of his "black radical tradition" in order to show that it in fact can be seen as partaking in a tradition that has no ethnic essence.
111. Let me begin this closing riff with Said, in part because Kelley himself notes the parallel between Said and Robinson, though he does not subject the parallel to critical examination. As Aijaz Ahmad has noted about Edward Said's Orientalism, Said, like Robinson, folds the Marxian tradition into the ethnocentric west, which has defined itself by defining the orient as the dangerous, inferiorized civilizational other--as with Robinson, "all European knowledges of non-Europe are already contaminated with this aggressive identity formation." As this urge to self definition, a version of Jordan's "need to know they (Europeans) were white," constitutes the European imagination (compare Robinson's references to the "European mind"), colonization became just an offshoot of this discourse or this imagination just as racial capitalism was an extension of racial metaphysics. First came the inferiorization of the orient in discourse, then came colonization (Ahmad, 181). Ahmad asks the question that needs to be asked of Robinson: "Why has europe needed to constitute itself in this manner?" The answer Ahmad suggests requires psychoanalysis: Orientalism appears to be a compulsive drive inherent in Europe's unitary psyche, "a form of paranoia," to quote Said (Ahmad, 181-2).
112. So that one should not be surprised that others who do like Robinson and combine economic determinist misinterpretation of Marx with the relative autonomy of race require it. West, Aronowitz, Winant, Baker, and Omi/Winant equate class analysis with economism (class reductionism, mechanical materialism, implying a reflectionist epistemology--superstructure directly reflecting the base) of some sort and Aronowitz, West, Omi/Winant in turn further associate class analysis with epistemological foundationalism, a priori dogmatism.
113. In every case, this reduction of class to the economic sanctions a psychoanalytic turn. For Aronowitz, and West whose own account follows Aronowitz closely, race questions strike to the heart of "the deep structure" of societies marked by social hierarchies." This deep structure is bound up with western rationality itself and the will to dominate nature. And the will to dominate nature is inseparable from the domination of women and non-whites, a domination which goes very deep, so deep as to be "pre-linguistic" and as he put it "transhistorical." (the depths of this at once psychic and epistemic mind set recall Robinson's reference to the bowels of western culture).
114. The parallel with Robinson is strengthened by the fact that the violent othering force of the western mind comes up against a radical alterity it cannot master, which he calls the "ineluctability of difference." This latter idea follows from the epistemological critique of representation--nature and human nature always exceed the controlling efforts of representation. As Aronowitz insists, women and people of color are associated with this uncontrollability of nature--an uncontrollability which simultaneously and paradoxically is part of the exoticizing discourse of representation and what really exceeds it.
Like Aronowitz (West), Winant introduces depth psychology into his account after having dismissed Marxism as economist. He describes the seeming permanence of race and white racism as "the longue duree," which he suggests (he really does not go into much detail) can be explained through the kind of depth psychology proffered by Joel Kovel in his White Racism. As I've discussed at some length elsewhere, Roediger too turns to Kovel when he makes his psychoanalytic turn.115. Kovel's psychoanalytic theory relies heavily on the Freudian concept of anality and the anal character. Insofar as the psychoanalysis of racism relies on something like the white mind or the European mind's anality, its reaction formation against its shit, which it then projects onto those whose color presumably resembles excrement, I'd raise the following counterfactual. The theory quite clearly implies without stating it that if our (humans) shit were white the history of racism would be completely different. An implausiblity which in isolation might not discredit the theory, but it doesn't do it much good.
116. It should be said, this is in accord with his rejection of phenotypic explanations of racism, that Robinson rejects explanations for colonialism based on "a sort of mass psychology of chromatic trauma"(BM, 67) On the other hand, not only is his explanation often couched in the language of mass psychology ("a civilization maddened by its own perverse assumptions and contradictions is loose in the world" and other references), but, as an interesting side point, I would note that Robinson at times defines the opposition between African and European mindsets as one of materiality versus spirituality(BM, 318). In the Freudian analysis of the European mind, materialism is itself the result of the anal character, most spectacularly manifest in the western obsession with money, which is sublimated excrement, filthy lucre. Both the Freudian analysis and the Robinson analysis focus on basically psychological purifying mechanisms, as I have previously noted.
117. Houston Baker, in his essay on Richard Wright's Twelve Million Black Voices, argues that the discourse of historical materialism is what explains Wright's sexism, his exclusion of black women performed by the narrative: "the negative account of black women in 12 million is not simply a function of a simplistic assignment of occupational roles.... " It was the result of a lack and "what he lacked was immunity to the lure of a peculiarly materialist historiography".
118. Baker reads Marxism as a technological determinism that not only marginalizes black women but murders them, eliminating their reproductive function, thus performing a kind of hysterectomy. In the narrative of historical materialism, women are superfluous even for reproduction since "if the way of class consciousness implied by a Marxian critique is pursued then the future will produce an afroamerican modern man birthed in mechanical glory from the womb of the machine." The machine is the "sign of the possibility of male proletarian bonding across racial lines". A bond that necessitates "a violent repudiation of the domestic black woman" and all women for "a Marxian problematic forces the writer to devalue women." Conversely, "if a nationalist history is privileged, black men of the future, as well as those of the folk past, will continue to be of woman born"(Appiah and Gates, p. 218).
119. This opposition of the mechanical and the human is reiterated in Baker's comment (a comment found in more than a few left nationalisms including Robinson's) that Marxism cannot account for "the persistence of felt nationalism," as Marxism can only narrate an impersonal unfeeling process. The complexities of marxian class analysis are reduced to an impersonal, mechanical technical and economic process split off from the cultural/political/ideological realm where feelings reside. From Baker's rhetoric it is clear that Marxism's incapacity concerning nationalism is but a special case of its incapacity before particularity, especially the particularity of deep feeling. The similarity with Robinson is striking, opposing class analysis to cultural nationalism, aligning the former with impersonal processes, the latter with human particulars that Marxism must slough off; aligning the former with death and violence and the latter with life; aligning Marxism with (white) brainwashing that, in Baker's case, prevents black men from coming home to mama.
120. With Marcuse and Derrida, the purifying mechanism dividing west and east is one dimensionalizing consumerism and logocentrism or phallogocentrism: psychoanalysis, epistemological breaks (incommensurability), radical alterity are embedded in both conceptions. In Marcuse, a certain technological determinism as well. The other of the west in Marcuse is quite clearly people of color, especially those coming from the third world (He refers to people of color as "elementary forces" "whose opposition hits the system from without.") For Derrida, the force threatening the west's logocentrism is described as a radical trembling coming wholly from outside or without. In his writings on South African Apartheid, apartheid is viewed as the product of the "west as a whole," and its resistance is "altogether other."
121. I have tried to demonstrate in this essay that the complex amalgam, this package of often interlinked concepts, is deeply problematic and in its explanations of racism and inequality does not fare all that well against a properly interpreted noneconomic determinist historical materialism. I think this particular rival package to historical materialism does underwrite nationalisms of various sorts. In his essay on racism from the same issue of the Nation that produced Robin Kelley's comments discussed above, Manning Marable acknowledges his own ambivalence towards nationalism, arguing that while nationalism is essential in the fight against racism, it nevertheless means "mobilizing people around a concept that is morally repugnant and shouldn't exist." It does exist of course. And it is very much felt. But it is hard for me not to see Marable's own comment as evidence of the incoherence that surrounds the concept of nationalism in our time--for, in essence, it is morally repugnant and shouldn't exist because it performs all the functions of racism, yet is simultaneously necessary to the fight against it. I have tried to suggest in this essay that one big reason for the power of nationalist discourse is that it rests at least partially on an uncharitable reading of historical materialism that amounts to a serious mischaracterization.
122. What we desperately need is a felt class based internationalism which operates by making the fight against racism and sexism itself basic. I have tried here to further the ongoing process of clearing the conceptual ground for this felt internationalism.
Notes:
(1)Cedric, J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, with a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley, and new preface by Robinson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p.xii. I'd like to thank Barbara Foley and Bill Mullen for reading this rather long article at different stages (five or six stages) and offering helpful criticisms along the way.2000), p.xii. I'd like to thank Barbara Foley and Bill Mullen for reading this rather long article at different stages (five or six stages) and offering helpful criticisms along the way.
(2) The reference is to the by now paradigmatic postmodern view most associated with the work of Jean Francois Lyotard that grand narratives are no longer credible.
(3) The criticism has often been made that Althusser's concept of interpellation in the service of social reproduction is a kind of bad functionalism, allowing no resistance. I think this criticism is just though it must be said that the essay in question of ideology is quite contradictory. See "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review, 1971).
(4) See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995,1999), p. 67.
(5) See Ollman, Dialectical Investigations (New York: Routledge, 1993) and Eagleton (1990) for an excellent analysis of some of the problems with the concepts of base and superstructure. Their critiques are to be clearly distinguished from those of the post-Marxist variety, most paradigmatically that of Laclau and Mouffe and repeated ad infinitum. Eagleton and Ollman's critiques help to strengthen class analysis, maintaining the primacy of class. See also Meiksins Wood's work cited above, excellent as well.
I want to distinguish my position from the kind of class analysis that Robin Kelley so rightly skewers in his essay from Yo Mama's Disfunktional, "Looking Extremely Backward." Kelley's argument has several components. He wishes to critique the kind of class analysis that repudiates identity politics for a class politics that can unite people instead of dividing them. He finds this analysis specious. For one, it replaces identity politics rooted in the fight against racism and sexism with an identity politics presumably rooted in universalist concerns-here the referent is either the enlightenment or class as a unifying category-but rooted in its own identity politics--one that takes whiteness as normative and, ironically, American patriotism. Kelley rightly takes these particular defenders of "class analysis" to be collapsing class analysis with "majoritarianism"-and "the majority of Americans we are told are white and heterosexual."
(6) Kelley sees the call for class over race and gender identity concerns to be in essence a call to marginalize racism and sexism in order to unite on a class basis (a basis itself based in patriotism etc).
Both Kelley's position and my own wish to make racism and sexism fundamental to class struggle-as he puts it, speaking of the L.A. based Bus Riders's Union-"rather than see race as a problem for working class unity," we should see racism as "in the interest of the class." Kelley's normative categories-his moral center so to speak-is rooted in the statement of the Black Women's United Front-"Abolition of every possibility of exploitation and oppression." With this I heartily concur.My position differs from Kelley's in important respects and later I will suggest that Kelley's analytical categories rest uneasily with the above position. See Robin D.G Kelley, YO' mama's DISFUNKtional! (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), pp.118, 154.
(7) Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, pp. 3, 168-9, 29, 240-1. Further references in text.
(8) As Meiksins Woods shows, E.P Thompson's criticisms of Althusser's attempts to get beyond economic determinism, contain the lineaments of a cogent defense of historical materialism and class analysis.
Karl Marx, Capital Volume One, trans. Ernest Untermann (Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906 rpt. New York: Modern Library), p.833 and p. 329.(9) quoted in Alan Gilbert, Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy: Great Power Realism, Democratic Peace and Democratic Internationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 128-9. Further references in text. For Gilbert and Miller's critique of productive forces determinism, see Alan Gilbert, Marx's Politics (: Rutgers University Press, 1981); see also Gilbert's Democratic Individuality (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1990); see Richard Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Fact and Method (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)
(10) Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso, 1995); The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). All further references incorporated in text.
(11) Edmund Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(NewYork: Norton, 1975), p.386. Note both the tacit racism and nationalism involved in designating without critique the new ruling race as Virginians. As Allen shows in Volume Two, this line between European and African was not analogous to the line between servant and slave. In the early and mid 17th century, there was a significant proportion of free black property owners, a proportion incompatible with racial oppression. Blacks could own European indentured servants.(12) On Bacon's Rebellion see Allen, Vol. Two, chapter 11.
(13) David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (NewYork: Verso, 1991), p.8.
(14) Sue Clegg's article is called "The Feminist Challenge to Socialist History," from Women's History Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1997.
(15) Particular anticolonial nationalisms might help mobilize the people against the colonial aggressor as in Vietnam even as this same nationalism helps lay the basis of its future capitulation to imperialism.
(16) Robin D.G. Kelley, "Integration: What's Left," in Nation, 12/14/98. Kelley says the racial divisions are caused neither by capitalist trickery nor "some innate fear of the other," yet, I will suggest that latter thesis is very much what is involved in Kelley's defense of Robinson, protestations to the contrary.
(17)Of course, Linebaugh and Rediker suggest an international component to Leveller politics-not just in its implications but in its influences. One striking example of this would be the reciprocal relation between Leveller politics and Masianello's revolt in Naples. At the time when revolutionary antinomian resistance was at its height in England, the peasant Masianello and his comrades took over Naples in what could be viewed as a precursor of the Paris Commune. The rebellion was marked by egalitarianism, antiracism and antislavery according to written accounts, written for ruling classes as warnings of the dangers of the motley crew in England. It was likely influenced by the politics of the Levellers and was in turn inspiration for Leveller egalitarianism. The flipside of course was that it was greatly feared by the ruling class.
This information brings to mind how it is that I used to teach Othello. I hope the relevance of this anecdote to the discussion will be clear enough. A while ago, before I finished my phd. I taught Intro to Lit courses at Northwestern night school. The first thing I taught was Othello. I was involved at the time in a militant antiracist organization, The International Committee Against Racism, which was thoroughly multiracial in membership and leadership and had a primarily working class base. Multiracial unity was our watchword. Anyway, to teach Othello, in a Marxist and antiracist way, I first wished to rebut Frank Kermode's comment (based clearly in a whole ideology of the aesthetic concerning how great art can transcend its time and place and achieve the truly human) that Shakespeare's treatment of Othello transcended racism because Othello was "ennobled."
As we all know, racist discourse can ennoble its objects in a certain manner. At any rate, as a corrective, I used Winthrop Jordan's chapter on Othello from White Over Black. I spliced together this account with some Genovese (The World the Slaveholder Made, I believe). And my point was that while slavery institutionalized racism, before slavery was institutionalized, there was "colour prejudice." I took on this notion of Jordan's without any critique. It never occurred to me to interrogate the status of this notion. It was part of the English mind. So there was a precapitalist, preslavery prejudice which really took root post-slavery. In later years, pre-phd, when I taught this play, I finessed this account in an interesting yet still inadequate way. I took up the Kermode's comment about ennoblement and noted that Shakespeare changed the character (Othello) significantly compared to the original Italian play which was far more racist. And I suggested that the racism of the original play was inseparable from interimperialistrivalry going on at the time between the Italian city state and the Ottoman empire over places like Cyprus. Shakespeare's "softer racism" was enabled by different institutional circumstances. No state imperative informing Shakepeare's racism, just colour prejudice, natural ethnocentrism. On my combined account, racism, I think I argued, emerged with capitalism, but it had its relatively autonomous preconditions in what I was calling pre-capitalist England. It is now clear to me that this kind of analysis, impressive in its own way, is dead wrong and rests upon simply denying the complexities of the class struggle revealed by historians like Linebaugh. As I 've argued here and elsewhere, combining the Marxist and the psychocultural is ultimately incoherent and also unnecessary once Marxism is put on a thoroughly non-economic determinist footing. And even in my analysis of the racism of the Italian original, I was tacitly engaging in a bad functionalism-it really did not occur to me that the lower classes might be questioning this sort of propaganda in a fundamental way as we saw 80 years later in Masianello.
I brought up my political involvement because I think now my politics and theory are in line with each other but they were not back then-my theory should have inclined me to support some form of nationalism even though my lived experience suggested its inadequacy.(18) At a Rethinking Marxism conference in the early nineties I heard Richard Lewontin give a talk which included a discussion of the organization, Science for the People, and its battles with Jensenism. Lewontin described his group at first as firemen and women, putting out the fires of racism so to speak whenever they would sprout. But in continuing he changed his metaphor to the hydra to suggest that when one fire was extinguished, or head cut off and cauterized, another would spring up in its place because, he implied, racism could not be eliminated piecemeal. The many-headed hydra, as Linebaugh and Rediker note, while at first predominantly a metaphor of the ruling class, became a metaphor used in working class struggles against the ruling classes. The point of course is to eliminate the cause of the hydra phenomenon and not in a post-Marxist vein become enamoured either of the metaphors' reversability or of the ability of the pesky and trickster oppressed continually to grow new heads, only to have them cut off etc.
(19) This division of the whites would be repeated over and over in subsequent years-think of the divisions between honest workmen and dangerous classes, especially in the aftermath of the 1877 upheavals. Or in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, in the scientific racist language of people like Lothrop Stoddard, "whites" joining forces with the rising tide of color were viewed as racial renegades and monsters.
(20) It remains to be seen how a leftist or revolutionary multiracial movement would be treated in the present. It is interesting to note however how difficult it is for the media even to see militant multiracialism. I was involved in a communist led multiracial protest against a klan/nazi rally in Chicago. It got brief but national coverage. The protesters were described as black communists even though the picture of the protesters clearly showed their multiracial character. In the L.A. riots, its multiethnic character was replaced by "black rage." The Saxton quote comes from his conclusion to The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (New York: Verso, 1990).
(21)David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1994), p.9.
(22)The Trudier Harris quotes come from "White Men as Performers in the Lynching Ritual," quoted in David R. Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 299-304. On populism, farmer's alliances and the knights, see Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (New York: Verso, 1986) and Michael Reich, Racial Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). "Marxism, Psychoanalysis and the Labor Competition Hypothesis" can be found in the first volume of Cultural Logic (http://eserver.org/clogic).
(23)Michael Parenti offers what I think can be rightly viewed as an interesting parallel to any analysis relying on some mass psychology (that may undergo extensions and permutations). Responding to the view that the violence of U.S foreign policy can be explained by "militarism" (or, in bourgeois femininst accounts, a macho mentality), Parenti notes that "it is not militarism that creates U.S foreign policy but US policy that generates militarism--which is not to deny that militarism may then have a feedback effect of its own, but it will be in directions that do not conflict in any essential way with the interests of [US] global capitalism." He goes on to say that "the need to play the policeman of the world and try to control the destinies of other countries may be a compelling one for policy makers, but it operates selectively in a direction that is compatible with the interests of global capitalism and inimical to socialist revolution." Thus Reagan could terrorize Nicaragua until it cried Uncle but show no such bullying toward the "repressive Chun government of South Korea" or the then white supremacist South African governnment with which it constructively engaged. (Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar. (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989, p.129-30)
(24)Quoted material on Garvey is from Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Boston: Harvard University Press) p. 231. In his various and helpful responses to this essay, Bill Mullen made an interesting point, which follows:
This [reading the essay] put me in mind of this recent passage from Gilroy's THE BLACK ATLANTIC, something I had not entirely 'heard' the first time I read it. This is the
last paragraph of his opening chapter on "The Black Atlantic as a
Counterculture of Modernity:""I have already implied that there is a degree of convergence here with
other projects towards a critical theory of society, particularly Marxism.
However, where lived crisis and systemic crisis come together, Marxism
allocates priority to the latter while the memory of slavery insists on the
priority of the former. Their convergence is also undercut by the simple
fact that in the critical thought of blacks in the West, social
self-creation through labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes.
For the descendants of slaves, work signifieds only servitude, misery, and
subordination. Artistic expression, expanded beyond recognition from the
grudging gifts offered by the masters as a token substitute for freedom from
bondage, therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning
and communal liberation. Poesies and poetics begin to coexist in novel
forms---autobiographical writing, special and uniquely creative ways of
manipulating spoken language, and, above all, the music. All three have
overflowed from the containers that the modern nation state provides for
them."(39-40)I see this as an argument to reclaims 'nationalism' as cultural
internationalism. This for me is a decoding of 'hybridity.' I think it is
a post-Robinsonian move, in that even Gilroy's misunderstanding of Marx
comes partly through Robinson. Greg shows us that misunderstanding (personal communication).First, I think this division of black people taking their pleasure through culture and Europeans taking their pleasure through rewarding work is more than a little questionable (reifying through synecdoche the slave experience for black people and "the artisan experience" for Europeans.)
The experiential versus the systemic is a false dichotomy that some of the best Marxian work soundly deconstructs-Thompson being a notable example. It is a close relative of the culture/class split this essay critiques.s Plus, the whole point of politics as I see it is to achieve or realize common interests that are nevertheless rooted in somewhat disparate experience.
(26) Many of the particulars concerning the politics of the Congo from a U.S standpoint can be found in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, which is historically accurate in many particulars. What's interesting though is that despite a fairly nuanced account of social forces involved in the making of Mobutu and the unmaking of Lumumba and in spite of her intertextual polemic against that
great essentialist text Heart of Darkness, the novel seems to valorize an essential african spirit that renders "it" unconquerable, a spirit that seems more an emanation of the land than of human beings. For an excellent Marxian analysis of the role of imperialism in the Congo, especially for its comparative scope in showing how Marxism accounts for the particularities of imperialist rule and interimperialist rivalry, see David Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). The Kingsolver novel is Poisonwood Bible (New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998).
(27) Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p.238.
(28) See Paula M. L Moya & Michael R. Hames-Garcia, eds, Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
(29) Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an Introduction , p.96-7. See also p. 121 for a similar point. My critique of the coherence of Robinson's tradition as a causal concept does not mean that the concept cannot continue to be used descriptively as long as these concepts do not become quasi causal or essentialist. Descriptively, we will continue to talk of a Black Radical Tradition as well as American Radical Traditions and English, French, Indian, Sri Lankan, Chinese. My point is not necessarily to stop using such language but to be aware of the pitfalls of reifying what are in many ways arbitrary notions.
(30)Kelley supports my argument that Robinson's epistemology is relativist in his assertion that
"Robinson believed all universalist theories of political and social order had to be rejected"(BM, p.xvi.).(31) For critiques of the concept of incommensurability, see Mohanty above; Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Roy Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (New York: Verso, 1986); Dudley Shapere, Reason and the Search for Knowledge (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984); Alan Gilbert, Democratic Individuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Larry Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996; Alvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1986) and anything by philosopher of science Richard Boyd.
(32) Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (NewYork: Verso, 1992), p. 182.
(33) See Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism (New York: Praeger, 1981) pp. 94-8. For relevant works by West, see his essay "Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression," in Nelson and Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988) and Prophesy Deliverance (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1982).
(34) Houston Baker, "On Knowing Our Place," from Henry Louis Gates and K.A Appiah, eds., Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives (New York: Amistad), p. 213
(35) In Baker's poststructuralist theory of the sign, words and concept can always be refunctioned, unfixed and rearticulated, with the exception of the concept of historical materialism. Baker would never say nationalism forced anything. I see, despite the different particualrs, a similarity between this view in which Marxism means the domination of women and the view that Marxism-Marxian internationalism, class analysis-- means the domination of whites, or more precisely Jews. This is a version of Robinson's double standard noted above. We might say that the poststructuralist theory of the sign more and more needs a fixed point, an other against which to define its plasticity and that other is historical materialism. For a view of black women in CP influenced movements that acknowledges both CP masculinist iconography and the important role these women played in the movement, see Kelley, Hammer and Hoe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1990.
(36) See Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 256-7; Jacques Derrida, "Les Fins de L'homme," in Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972) and "Racism's Last Word," Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed.," Race," Writing and Difference (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 338. Derrida is inconsistent on epistemological breaks, sometimes arguing vociferously against such possibilities: but it is possible to interpret the contradiction in the following way: the West is trapped in logocentrism and can only engage in interminable analysis while the East actually does break from logocentriism.
(37) Manning Marable, "Beyond Color Blindness," Nation, Dec. 14, 1998.
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