Black Marxism

In the late nineteenth century black diasporic intellectuals began to interrogate western Marxism, particularly its international discourse, theory of class formation, historical materialist analysis, methods of critical inquiry, and radical politics. Their engagement with Marxism and socialist theory, however, has prevented neither conflicts nor the development of new theoretical explorations and divisions. Through Cedric J. Robinson's archeological dig we can see how black intellectuals have probed “classical” Marxism and its failures: its economic reductionism; its simplistic understanding of peasant politics; its misunderstanding of the role of racism in the development and trajectory of the capitalist world system; and its dismissal of political struggles outside of the Global North metropolitan regions. For writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Franz Fanon, and C. L. R. James, western Marxism has failed to account for the racial character of capitalism or to provide a historical narrative of blacks' emancipatory politics.