All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

Never enough to repeat again and again and AGAIN! Cedric Robinson’s book:

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
A short but in-depth book review by Errol Lawrence:

There is a notion as popular today as it was in Victorian Britain that African history begins with the intervention of Europeans into African lives. As Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper once put it: ’Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject of history.’ In the particular case of Africans in the diaspora, this notion has found expression in race relations sociology’s ’understanding’ of the legacies of slavery - acculturation, imitation, family disorganisation, identity crises, etc. - which are said to constitute the essence or motivating principle of black politics and struggle.

On the left, the same ’understanding’ has informed the efforts of western marxism to re-interpret black political consciousness and practice as a simple opposition to, even mirror image of, the racism of western capitalist societies. Either way, there is no sense of a history of autonomous black struggle here. Black people have not been actors in history; they have merely been acted upon, and any struggles they have been engaged in have remained ’a gigantic footnote’ to the wider European capitalist processes.

In Black Marxism Cedric Robinson sets out to unearth and examine this ’non-existent’ history of black struggle and the black radical tradition that has been constructed out of it. His purpose is not simply celebratory (’Look here it is it exists’), nor is it to engage in the tempting but ultimately futile exercise of scoring academic points off western scholarship. He is motivated, instead, by the pressing need for the black radical tradition to recognise and understand its past in order that it may continue to develop and inform present and future struggles. Hence, he documents the African response to the encroachments and brutalities of colonialism and slavery - from the wars against colonialism in Africa to the flight of the slaves from the plantation (marronage) ; the establishment of free maroon communities all over the ’new world’ and their determined resistance to preserve that freedom in the face of frequent colonial expeditions sent to return them to slavery.

Robinson then goes on to analyse these responses in the context of the limitations and possibilities presented by the historical and social circumstances in which they occurred. In doing so, he demonstrates how, in the initial periods of colonialism and slavery, the characteristic response was one of disengagement from contact with Europeans. It was still possible in this period, that is, to disengage and reconstitute the community by escaping to the bush or the hills. With the expansion of capitalism and changes in the relations of production and the labour process throughout the eighteenth century, however, marronage became less and less a possibility.

This was an important time in the survival of black communities and cultures in the diaspora, for while the struggle to reconstitute and preserve their communities stimulate the same need to disengage, the gradual closing off of the option of marronage forced them to wait and prepare. It was here that the processes of culture-building deepened and where the previous distillations of African cultures, and the taking of what was useful from both indigenous American and European cultures, was transformed into black cultures. A crucial part of this process was the development of the religious and political ideas that would sustain the black communities and form the ideologies that would inform the next rebellion. The structural basis of the process was black family life which - the distortions of sociologists and anthropologists notwithstanding - the communities struggled to preserve despite the vagaries of slavery. Throughout, these periods of attempted disengagement were accompanied by a surprising lack of violence, particularly when compared to the excessive and brutal reprisals of the European colonialists and their American counterparts and this, for Robinson, is the key to the essentially African character of their response. Indeed, even after the slaves had made slavery no longer profitable so as to force its abolition, the black response was to move away from the whites and the plantations. In the US, this meant mass migrations from the South. In the Caribbean, it meant the cultivation of their own small-holdings to the point where in Guyana, for example, Asian indentured labour was brought in by the British to replace African slave labour on the plantations.

But already world capitalism had developed to a point where it was no longer possible to ’escape’ and it is here, during the nineteenth century, that Robinson documents the change in the black response from disengagement to engaged confrontation. And it is here that he locates the work of W.E.B. Dubois, C.L.R. James and Richard Wright and, through an examination of their work, analyses the contours of this new movement and its engagement with European radical movements and theories. Robinson chooses their work precisely because it shows where the black radical tradition that had formed them, and which they articulated, had reached in its own development ( 1948). Further, an understanding of the development of their work their engagement with European radicalism, their gradual disenchantment with it and eventually, in the case of Wright, the rejection of it as inadequate for explaining either black radicalism or the racist forms in which capitalism has developed provides the historical background to Robinson’s own sustained critique of European radicalism in the opening chapters of the book.

This is not without its ironies, for here we have European radicalism being taught about itself - its limitations, errors and collusions with racism by a black radicalism, the existence of which it denies. Robinson’s arguments here are both concretely historical and theoretical: he locates the genesis of racism within pre-capitalist European social formations, documents the suppression of the debt that European civilisation owes to both African civilisation and Islam and goes further to reveal the multi-ethnic character of the ’English working class’ and the role played by Irish labour in the development of working-class politics in Britain. But perhaps the thing that will stick most tenaciously in the western socialists’ throat is his demonstration that far from being peripheral to capitalism, slavery was a vital moment in its development and entirely in character with Europe’s past. Far from undermining the racial and ethnic differentiations of earlier periods, European capitalism merely exaggerated them. Or, to put it another way, racism was embedded in capitalist relations of production from its inception. European radicalism has never recognised this hidden history and therefore has never been able to analyse or account for it. Thus, far from being able to combat or subvert nationalism, European radicalism has consistently been subverted by it.

What, in the final analysis, Robinson demonstrates very clearly is the ability of the black tradition to transcend national boundaries and accommodate cultural, religious and ’racial’ differences. Indeed, he shows that, in a sense, it has emerged out of the transformation of these differences.

It is, however, this very achievement which reveals one of the book’s shortcomings, for Robinson has not dealt in any sustained way with recent attempts - particularly in Britain - to forge a common struggle against racism and around blackness by communities from different parts of the world but with a common historical experience of colonialism and underdevelopment. The black tradition is also India and Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The absence of this dimension means that the book could be read as an affirmation of the kinds of politics which accept ’racial’ and ’ethnic’ categories as absolute rather than historical and which, at best, can contemplate only temporary pragmatic alliances and, at worst, refuse altogether the idea of common struggle. These are the tendencies which are currently being encouraged by the local state and parties of the left, right and centre. In the face of this, the task of those of us who claim to be heirs to the black radical tradition is to comprehend its recent history as well as Robinson has its past.