Robinson’s depiction of racism being the cause not the product of capitalism is ahistoric.

But Robinson never provides evidence of this “shared epistemology among diverse African people.” This notion of Africans as some mega ethno-nation seems to simply be true by fiat, that is, by his assertion that it is true. It is this “truth” that forms the basis for the claim to a pan- “Black Radical Tradition” that compresses hundreds of millions of Africans in and outside of the continent into an undifferentiated category, and conversely collapses hundreds of millions of Europeans. As we will discuss below, this conception of an undifferentiated category of oppressed humanity defined by ahistoric essentialized identities is a hallmark of the identitarian paradigm. This paradigm, which posits some shared interests of a group of people made organic by an essential ascribed identity, generally racial or ethnic, often premised as well on some singular cultural tradition, has come in recent decades to eclipse the language of class – nay, to contrapose class to ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Yet, this view of the African past and present as made up of such an undifferentiated mass that shares a single epistemology and “Black Radical Tradition” misreads the African past as much as it does the present. While it is easy to become seduced by the literary brilliance of the text, the sheer power of its prose, and the vast sweep of history and literature that it covers, we maintain here that more is at work in explaining the left’s embrace of Black Marxism, namely the conservative retrenchment of the late twentieth century. As world capitalism entered a deep structural crisis in the 1970s, capitalists and bureaucratic elites from around the world strove to beat back the power that organized labor, radical social movements, and Third World liberation struggles had accumulated in the preceding period of mass struggle. Capitalist globalization and the neoliberal counterrevolution brought about a change in the worldwide correlation of class and social forces in favor of emergent transnational capital.[8] As proletarian power eroded and the left and socialist movements lost influence around the world in the fin de siècle, the chronic gap between theory and practice, thought and action, showed up as a degeneration of intellectual criticism as well. Rather than seek renewal, much of the left withdrew into post-modern identity politics and other forms of accommodation with the emerging neoliberal social order. The left intelligentsia retreated into the academy, abandoning the commitment to a universal emancipatory project as it turned to celebrating the fragmented particularisms postulated by post-narratives – post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, and so on. The target of condemnation became Marxism, which it claimed was unable to explain racial inequality.[9] The causal explanation of racism now shifted from the political-economy critique of capitalism to psychology and culture. It was in this context that Black Marxism, an Afrocentric and proto-Afro-pessimistic text par excellence, found such resonance in U.S. academia, and increasingly, beyond. A Transhistoric Racialism In his quest to explain racism and subjugation of peoples of African descent, Robinson takes us back to what he sees as its origins in “European” antiquity. For Robinson, capitalism is not the progenitor of racism but its offshoot in a construct that, as Jason W. Moore has noted in a different context, takes flight from world history, from the real movement of capitalism. “The pretext for this flight typically rests on two major claims. One is an empiricist assertion that world history is diverse and therefore cannot be grasped in its combined and uneven patterns. The second is an ideological claim that any attempt to narrate capitalism’s differentiated unity is irremediably Eurocentric.” While both these claims hold for Black Marxism, what concerns us most here is the second. The result, observes Moore, “is a descent into amalgamation of regional particularisms with assertions that the problem of modern world history is Europe – rather than capitalism.”[10] By “racial capitalism,” Robinson tells us, he means a commitment to racialism among Europeans that first sprung from the slave societies of antiquity – a transhistoric original sin that marks millennia of Western history. Let us put aside that “Europe” didn’t exist before 1492: the same historical forces at work that produced capitalism and propelled it to outward expansion also produced “Europe” that became the core of an expanding world capitalist system understood as a differentiated unity, or totality. This theme of a Greek and allegedly therefore European origin to modern racism is not new; it has become a trope among Afro-pessimists and other “race” scholars.[11] Robinson claims that Greek slavery was an “uncompromising racial construct” that was reiterated and embellished throughout European history: “Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power…. from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular protagonists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus.”[12] Ironically, one of the very authors whom Robinson includes as a case study in Black Marxism, C.L.R. James, insisted that “historically it is pretty well proven now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard – civilized and barbarian – and you could have white skin and be a barbarian and you could be black and civilized.”[13] At the same time, Robinson asserts that “racialism” is “hardly unique to European peoples” but does not explain what, then, would have separated the European case from civilizations the world over. For Robinson, Greek slavery is the prototype of modern-day racism, some mysterious particularity of “Europe” that wound its way through millennia to the contemporary era. We know that all the ancient empires as class systems also differentiated groups according to cultural or territorial criteria and involved differentiated relationships to the state or political statuses. So, there must have been something else that arose in Europe to explain why this region became the generator of systems of modern-day racial inequality and the colonizer of the world. That something, of course, is capitalism. We have a vast literature showing how systems of race-based slavery, exclusion, and oppression arose as part and parcel of the rise of capitalism as a world system (we cannot explain the antinomy whereby Robinson discusses much of this literature approvingly even though it refutes his thesis). Racialism, he goes on, “was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of Europeans to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”[14] These internal relations involved ideological conceptions of inferiority and superiority based on cultural (he singles out linguistic) and class distinctions, often adduced to be biological, which organized ancient and feudal domains that later became Europe. Beyond these “ordering ideas” of inferiority and superiority, we can find in Black Marxism no precise explanation of what Robinson understands racism to be, that is, no further conceptual specificity. It is not, in his construct, that these ordering ideas became specified along racialist lines as capitalism evolved, but that they sui generis constituted “racialism.” By conflating these ordering ideas of class rule with “racialism,” Robinson is able to claim that racism originates in “European” antiquity. Remarkably, Robinson gives no explanation as to why we should conflate slavery with “race.” We have no historical evidence of “race” and racialization prior to the modern era, if by this we mean something other than the “ordering ideas” of inferiority and superiority, or anything resembling the scientific racism that reached its apogee from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Yet, at the same time, to reiterate, he asserts that “racialism” is “hardly unique to European peoples.”[15] If so, it begs the question – unanswered by Robinson – what makes the European case different from civilizations the world over?