Black Marxism can act to resist capitalism without becoming co-opted back into circuits of wage and contract

Put another way, is racism like a Cadillac, the metaphor Malcolm X proposed that is, a renewable, mass-produced form of ideological and social violence running parallel to, and intersecting with, commodity production? Or is racism actually an integral component of making Cadillacs: a practical dimension of enforcing wage discipline and extracting surplus value? Rather than jumping to a definitive resolution between these choices, it is worth observing how a certain oscillation between them comes to comprise what Robinson calls "the black radical tradition." Thus, W. E. B. Du Bois, whom Robinson describes as "one of the first American theorists to sympathetically confront Marxist thought in critical and independent terms” (207), leaned toward the first option, arguing that Marxism failed to "envisage a situation where instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of class by race, cutting square across the economic layers" (Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 205). C. L. R. James, second to Du Bois in Robinson's pantheon of Black radical intellectual protagonists, emphasized the latter, when he described Caribbean sugar plantations as the incubator of the first modern proletariat: “The half savage slaves of Santo Domingo ... showing them- selves subject to the same historical laws as the advanced workers of revolutionary Paris" (quoted in Black Marxism, 385). Differing emphases upon racism's moral valences and economic func- tion have similarly shaped different strategic and political conceptions of “race” and “community” versus “labor” and “class” organization. Emigrating to the United States in the 1930s, James agreed with those who thought Black self-organization was “backward,” even “reactionary,” in a context of industrial working-class struggle. The politics of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor upsurge, and communist party influence led a rising cohort of Black activists and intellectuals to reject middle-class presumptions of older race leadership. To them, Du Bois's politics, even as he grew more radical during the 1930s, continued to rest on an outmoded racial premise. Abram Harris summed up their views: "[Du Bois] is a racialist whose discovery of Marxism as a critical instrument has been too recent and sudden for it to discipline his mental processes or basically to change his social outlook" (quoted in Singh, Black Is a Country, 79). E. Franklin Frazier argued “the  status of the Negro is losing its purely racial character and becoming tied up with the struggle of white and Black workers against the white land- lords and capitalists" (quoted in Black Is a Country, 81). Black socialist George Streator was unsparing: defense of “Negro racialism” was “reac- tionary," obscuring the fact that "the Negro is nine-tenths a laborer" (quoted in Black Is a Country, 80). Du Bois was unyielding: "So long as we are fighting a color-line, we must strive by color organization.” “Science alone could not settle this matter;" nor would the "color bar ... be broken by a series of brilliant, immediate assaults.” Rather, a “long siege was indicated,” with “organiza- tion in boycott, propaganda and mob frenzy,” alongside “careful planning and subtle campaign with the education of coming generations” (quoted in Black Is a Country, 64). Independent Black political activity, in this view, was intrinsically valuable and as important as labor organization. “[We] thought it was, the day of Internationalism, Humanity and the disappear- ance of ‘race' from our vocabulary,” Du Bois admitted (quoted in Black Is a Country, 64). But he was skeptical Black incorporation into working- class politics would eliminate racial antagonism as a dimension of national life and international relations and saw movements of the racially excluded as the cutting edge of democratic politics: a means to reorganizing the state, through legal reform and normative influence. These debates at the onset of the long civil rights movement and the birth of the Keynesian welfare state seem distant, but they illuminate puzzles that have been central to the problematic of racial capitalism going forward. Robinson aligns with Du Bois, emphasizing the precedence of racial ordering as an inheritance of European feudalism presaging the rise of capitalism in the English countryside in the sixteenth century. "Capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world's political and economic relationships," Robinson writes. “[F]rom its very beginnings, European civilization was con- structed on antagonistic differences." The conquests and uneven development of European peoples, exemplified by the colonization of Ireland, seeded the “uneven development of national capitalisms” and secreted racialism as “an enduring principle of European social order" and its settler colonial offshoots (Black Marxism, 29). "The universality of capitalism is less an historical reality, than the construct of this language of error," Robinson concludes (20). The "error" has led to consequential erasures, but also, it should be added, to stabiliz- ing reforms, in which overcoming capitalism's particularistic, violent precedents, and ascriptive hierarchies associated with them, became a means by which bourgeois discourse represented capitalism's historical progress and purported moral development. Focusing on demystifying this ideological procedure, Western Marxists have tended to redouble the progressive error by emphasizing economically determined stages of history and derogating democratic rights and struggles. What Robinson calls Black Marxism, by contrast, pursues a recursive, iterative path, delineating persistent (racial/national) exclusions of Western emancipatory discourses, while at the same time laying claim to an insurgent universality deriving from a stubborn resistance and failure to incorporate Black life into legal and normative capitalist circuitries of wage and contract. James's and Du Bois's respective histories of slave emancipation in Haiti during the French Revolution, and in the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction, exemplify this approach. Strikingly convergent accounts, The Black Jacobins (1938) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935), emphasize ongoing racial subordination in the alliance of emanci- pation and capital, one that laid bare what Du Bois called "the real modern labor problem" throughout the world: the “industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia... despised and rejected by race and color; paid a wage below the level of decent living; driven, beaten, prisoned and enslaved in all but name" (Black Reconstruction, 632–634). In turn, both works highlight what might be called the radical democratic dimensions of independent Black struggle that were manifested in the subaltern revolutionary consciousness and actions of slaves that radicalized emancipatory decrees from on high, not least because they were denied what Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of racial and colonial deference, and that he suggested had effectively bought the acquiescence of white labor (700).