The Black Radical Tradition fails to meaningfully challenge racial capitalism by overly focusing on cultural expression at the cost of a broader movement.

Black Radical Tradition; racial capitalism; Black Geographies; South Asia Studies

The Black Radical Tradition posits an unbroken line of community, history, and struggle. It claims to be resistant to the maneuverings and mutations of capitalist development. The Black Radical Tradition is outside of the dialectics of capitalism and the theory of Marxism. The tradition accuses Marxists of selectively choosing the 20th century as its temporal concern. For Robinson, this is a sleight of hand because it foregrounds European struggles and conveniently disconnects the Black Radical Tradition from earlier forms of struggle. I argue there is an incomplete theorization of racial capitalism in the Black Radical Tradition that does not allow Robinson to see the Black Radical Tradition's defeat. This might seem stunning considering Robinson popularized the term "Racial Capitalism," however I argue the full force of racial capitalism never influences Black struggle in Robinson's works. This is in contrast to capitalism's decisive influence amongst European and white workers. The only place capitalism does come into play is in the form of imperialism and even that is profoundly limited. As I will show in this section, Robinson fails to apply the most rigorous critique of political economy to the Blacks Radical Tradition. This has resulted in a dichotomous system, separate from one another, unlike the integrated world of capital all proletarians find themselves in. I propose a different approach to racial capitalism rooted in value-form theory, systemic dialectics, and communization. In this section, I will lay out my own perspectives and critiques of the Black Radical Tradition, Black Marxism, and Cedric Robinson. I will bring to bear the dynamic force of capitalist social relations which have penetrated all forms of life on the globe. This will show that the defeat of the Black Radical Tradition was epochal, requiring a fundamentally new approach to the question of Black liberation. Robinson is certainly correct in challenging classical Marxist conceptions of capitalism. One-hundred and fifty years after Marx wrote his great works, we can see capitalism in a different light. Capitalism is not revolutionary. In fact, it goes through many periods of stagnation. Capitalism does not sweep away the old order. In fact, it reorders many of them into its very logic. Capitalism does not create a universalistic class, but constantly reproduces new divisions of difference and domination. Capitalism does not only produce the free waged laborer. It in fact produces the unfree proletariat, the slave, the indentured servant, the tenant farmer, and the incarcerated. Capitalism also creates a unique form of organizing the globe, called nation- states, culminating in the larger order of colonialism and imperialism. We can credit all of this to Robinson's intervention in Black Marxism. However Robinson's refusal to see racial capitalism as a total system that leaves no social relationship, politics, or tradition untouched has made it difficult to see and theorize the defeat of the Black Radical Tradition. Racial capitalism is a total category and system. The value-form, a concept virtually left untouched in the Black Radical Tradition, is the defining concept of our period. This does not mean the exclusion of gender, nationalism, and race is inevitable or even possible. On the contrary, I argue the value-form produces these very differences and dominations from its own internal logic. So that differentiation and domination is not a subset of value-form, but its substance. This is in sharp contrast to Marxists who treat the value-form as only (abstract) socially necessary labor time. For such Marxists, differentiation and domination are the products of a devious bourgeoisie, class struggle, or some other contingent process. I argue against the contingency thesis, and instead posit that differentiation and domination on the order of race, nation, and gender are necessary to the categorical logic of the value-form. The value-form could not exist without these forms of difference and domination. We cannot separate the critique of political economy from race because it is always racial in every dimension. I show that the concept of historical being used by Robinson is a metaphysical devise that blocks the analysis of the value-form's impact on the Black Radical Tradition. Following this, I will demonstrate the consequences of introducing value-form analysis to Robinson's argument and specifically the concepts of formal and real domination of labor. Considering that Black people were slaves, workers, or unemployed--or more broadly speaking proletarians--this concept holds primacy in analyzing the development of Black liberation. I will also introduce the concept of systemic dialectics in analyzing the Black Radical Tradition. Cedric Robinson has correctly pointed out the racialist and stage-ist assumptions of historical dialectics. Systemic dialectics does not read Hegel or Marx in a historical manner, but treats Hegel's work as an exposition of a totality, and not of history. The concept of totality will do an immense amount of labor in this final section. This will tentatively set up the development of the race-form which is an internal development of the value-form. Robinson calls it racialism. This is one of his singular contributions to Marxist theory. I see much overlap between the concept of race-form and racialism. The other definitive thinkers who have headed in this direction are Paul Gilroy (2000) and Evgeny Pashukanis (1989). The hope is to finally end the class versus race debates, to finally end whether race is contingent or necessary in capital, and place the struggle against race on the terms of anti-capitalism.74 74 This dissertation has not addressed the question of the state as rigorously as it could have. But the origins of this can begin with the state derivation debates in Germany in developing a more rigorous concept of the state (Holloway, 1979). From there the relationship of the state and race can be unraveled to also develop an anti-state politics and theory when it comes to Black liberation. 106 Historical Being Why hasn't the Black Radical Tradition waged a total war against its oppressors? Robinson argues that "Blacks have seldom employed the level of violence that they (the Westerners) have understood the situation required" (2000, p. 168). Robinson asks why did National Turner not kill poor whites or Toussaint not kill his master's family. He reminds the reader that these are not mere anecdotes, but a pattern that has been repeating throughout the centuries. When there was violence, he argues that it was pointed inward. He explains the meaning of this profoundly historical act of mercy, This violence was not inspired by an external object, it was not understood as a part of an attack on a system, or an engagement with an abstraction of oppressive structures and relations. Rather it was their "Jonestowns," our Nongqause: The renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never been allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or physical sense. For them defeat or victory was an internal affair (2000, p. 168). The meaning of contrasting Jonestown to Nongqause is opaque. Both are failed millennialist movements. Jonestown led to the death of over 900 people; the other the slaughter of 400,00 cattle and the death of 40,000 people through starvation. What is Robinson trying to invoke by these two references? Why is Jonestowns in quotes and why is it 'theirs'? Why is Nongquase 'ours'? Robinson demarcates the boundaries by pointing out it was not Fanon’s fratricide. It was not self-inflicted wounds because the oppressor was beyond reach as described by Fanon in Wretched of the Earth. Nor was it the historic terror found in revolutions. It was certainly not savagery. It was simply not motivated by any external reality. It was the self-constitution of a new politics. I call it class struggle anti-colonialism--the reason for this will be clear shortly. Timothy J. Stapleton argues that it was class conflict which drove the cattle killing and crop destruction. In 1856, a teenage girl, Nongqawuse had a vision. She met "strange figures" who told her the cure to cattle sickness and how to rid the Xhosa of the British (Stapleton, p. 389). The only thing they had to do was kill their cattle, burn their crops, renounce witchcraft among other things. At the time many observers saw this as a backwards superstitious belief. It was beyond comprehension to the British. It looked like mass suicide. It was not a backward superstition of the Xhosa that caused this, but an attack on the privileges of a cattle holding aristocracy. As Stapleton argues, the cattle became the material of wealth in Xhosa society. The chiefs owned upwards of 87 percent of the Xhosa cattle (Stapleton, p. 384). Wealth was determined by ownership in cattle. This was the key that unlocks the cattle killing. Other factors also played a role: the power of the chiefs declined due to the British, allowing for new forms of authority or rise, the drought of 1850 exacerbated class differences and conflict amongst the Xhosa, and other prophecies similar to Nongquwsue were circulating around the time. As Stapleton writes, "...they were striking against a failed political class. Religious leadership from the masses sought to size [sic] the initiative from the impotent royals and aristocrats" (Stapleton, p. 387). Furthermore, whose cattle were slaughtered was determined by which chiefs had collaborated with the British. So not only was this class struggle, it was an anti-colonial struggle. As Stapleton points out "Originating with the commoners, the movement seems to have been the strongest in areas where the chiefs had lost legitimacy because of neutrality or collaboration" (p. 390). This was anti-colonial class struggle. Far too under-appreciated dynamic in the history of liberation. Not only was struggle waged against the colonizer, but also the indigenous ruling elites. The colonizer nor the indigenous elite could understand this deadly dialectic. Robinson develops the lack of violence towards outsiders in the Black Radical Tradition to preserving historical being and the ontological totality. Robinson connects this to the structures of the mind: creating epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology of the Black Radical Tradition.75 The passage revolves around the change from 'actual being' to 'historical being'. What exactly is historical being Robinson does not elaborate, leaving the reader to speculate. It seems historical being is the 'preservation of the ontological totality" (2000, p. 168). Robinson sheds some light on the meaning of this when he writes "This was a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism" (2000, p. 169). This was a consciousness rooted before capitalism took hold. Because of its earlier origins, it knew of a world outside of the value-form. It was entirely different way of seeing, being, and becoming. In the penultimate sentences of the book, Robinson writes "But always, its focus was on the structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material" (2000, p. 169). To understand the importance of metaphysics for Robinson, I will need to return his first work, Terms of Order. He writes, "...the social sciences as taught and applied in Western experience, prepare the intelligence for formal, structural ontology, eschewing metaphysics and transformation as well as their implications for social and/or historical understanding" (2016, p. 206). He focuses on the concept of transformation through the movement of the negation of the negation. This latter movement is in contrast to stable systems of knowledge which are "convenient illusions" (2016, p. 208). Robinson describes language as a mask of reality, 75 One of the more dangerous and explicit readings of Robinson's argument directly leads to privilege and identity politics. 109 demanding something that can break out of this limitation. He cites Levi-Strauss's emphasis on music, "...a grammar which he is convinced transcends, that is, fails to be restricted by the 'topological constraints' of mind-structure" (2016, p. 209). I read Robinson's usage of music as an approximation for culture which is so central in Black Marxism. It is culture that is the material and historical container of the Black Radical Tradition.76 Robinson writes, "The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture" (2000, p. 170). Robinson's move is to separate culture from capitalism. The Black Radical Tradition seen as culture avoids the damaging consequences of capitalism: alienation, reification, and atomization. Does it also avoid de-industrialization, automation, suburbanization, and commodification? Ultimately, we must make come to terms with whether capitalism is a total system or not? I argue that it is. While its domination is never complete, not because of any specific theory of autonomy, rather capitalism is a self-generating system of contradictions with the proletariat at one pole of that contradiction. My argument is not that Africans had no culture (Stuckey, 1987).77 That would be ridiculous and profoundly racist. Nor is my argument that Africans did not have a tradition which was a powerful resource against colonialism (James, 2012). The history of the Xhosa demonstrates precisely the opposite. Nor does the middle passage completely eradicate such 76 In contrast, Lukacs maintains it is the Leninist organization. 77 The critical intellectual intervention was W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks where he writes about the Black church, "First, we must realize that no such institutions as the Negro church could rear itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in America. He was brought from a definite social environment..." (Du Bois, 1986, p. 495). 110 culture (Sexton, 2011). The works of Sterling Stuckey (1987), George Rawik (1972), Lawrence Levine (1978) among others have demonstrated that African culture persisted in the ante-bellum South. Nor is my argument that culture has no role to play in revolution (Cabral, 1980). Undoubtedly a new culture will have to be developed approximating the movements of the future. Nor am I saying that culture played no role in the Classical Black Liberation Movement or the Classical Workers Movement: it did and at times it was profoundly important (Woods, 1998; Thompson, 1964).78 I am arguing that regardless of culture, my fundamental argument would remain the same.79 My point is that to explain the movements solely in terms of culture is to give the concept of culture explanatory powers which it simply does not have. Both movements were defined by different dynamics, not completely reducible to such dynamics, but should be considered the central dynamics of those movements, and the most powerful explanations which all other dynamics must develop a relationship to. Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, what I am saying is that arguments which center culture as central to liberation as does the Black Radical Tradition cannot explain the absence of the tradition for fifty years. To the extent that real domination of labor by capital and a crisis of profitability has become the defining dynamic of capitalist accumulation, it has had a fundamentally negative impact on the strategic, organizational, and political possibilities of revolution as they were defined by the 20th century. This is not to say that the possibilities of revolution are now over, but that they will not be 78 E.P. Thompson wrote "Class consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms" (1963, p. 1). 79 Vincent Brown writes, "The anthropologist David Scott is probably correct to suggest that for most scholars, the power of slaveholders and the damage wrought by slavery have been “pictured principally as a negative or limiting force” that “restricted, blocked, paralyzed, or deformed the transformative agency of the slave.” In this sense, scholars who have emphasized slavery’s corrosive power and those who stress resistance and resilience share the same assumption" (p. 1244). 111 recognizable to those expected the forms and content of the 20th century to be repeated. Just as importantly, the terrain upon which revolution will take place, is profoundly different than what it was in the previous century. We experienced a certain cultural form and content, which I will not explicate in this dissertation, but that form and content cannot be separated from the material coordinates which it was embedded in: workplaces, homes, and schools (Jameson, 1991). As those have been fundamentally restructured in the last fifty years, it should seem obvious that it will have consequences for culture. The entire premise of Limits is that we must periodize the relationship of the two movements to the movement of racial capitalism to even begin having sensible conversation about "Black culture" or the "Black Radical Tradition". If we return to where we began on Robinson's historical being, we will have to work through it as a concept, and historicize it. Theorie Communiste has the definitive response to the concept of historical being that applicable to Robinson's usage of the term, a is If there is a 'being' of the proletariat, and moreover a being on which the 'realization of communism' depends, the revolution is inevitable. No amount of theoretical tinkering around the 'historical moment' as the conjunctural condition of the becoming actual of this 'being' will change anything. The 'being' will always find its way through contingency and circumstance. Communism 'in its deep content' will remain invariant in 1796 and 2002. All that remains is to name that 'deep content', and, in passing, indicate a little contingent dross due to the 'historical moment' of 1796 or 2002. But how do we separate the dross from the 'invariant' (End Notes, 2008, p. 189-190). While they are responding to the condition of the proletariat and the theory of communism, it is very much applicable to the Black subject and the Black Radical Tradition Theorie 112 Communiste's point is, "...if this 'being' is not just a metaphysics' then it is not 'independent of the forms taken by capitalist domination' "(End Notes, 2008, p. 190). If people of African descent have a specific being which expresses itself in the Black Radical Tradition, then as Theorie Communiste points out there is very little for activists, revolutionaries, or anyone else to do. The Black Radical Tradition seeks to escape the dialectics and contradictions of capitalism. No matter its defeats, there is always a metaphysical concept of Black liberation, outside the material world which acts as a reservoir of praxis. In contrast, the conception I am outlining is historical, social, material and part of the contradictory-dialectics of racial capitalism. Ultimately, Theorie Communiste's point is that there is no inherent metaphysics to the human condition, history, or experience. Most importantly, the Black proletariat is not independent of racial capitalist domination. It is understandable that Robinson is trying to find something outside of capitalism. Everything that has become internal to the totality of capital has not been able to pose a revolutionary alternative (Postone, 1993). For Robinson the internal movement of the dialectics of proletarian consciousness and politics based on European conditions does not result in communism or anti-racialism. Robinson stands at the end of one century of communist revolutions and correctly sees their limitations. In doing so Robinson creates a new metaphysics. If Lukacs created one around the proletariat, then Robinson does so around the Black Radical Tradition. I argue there is no historical being hanging above history, ready to attack capitalism. Like the workers movement, revolution and fundamental challenges are actually very rare in its history. The Black Radical Tradition has long quiet periods. It has required the same internal battles for clarity of strategy, intellectual positions, political program that the workers movement has. Neither is sacred, but profaned movements, for it is the logic of racial capital to profane 113 everything it touches. As I will show later in this section, both the workers movement and the Black movement attempted to escape racial capitalism, but both ultimately built racial capitalism and became trapped within it.