In 1989, Cedric Robinson suggested Immanuel Wallerstein to Routledge to review Robinson’s book proposal for An Anthropology of Marxism. Calling the proposal “interesting” and “provocative,” Wallerstein recommended publication on account of the “sound” scholarship, a “qualified” author, and the project’s originality. However, Wallerstein could not help but add that Robinson was a “fossil.” Robinson, Wallerstein cautioned, was “a political theorist in an era when the very term has died out,” and this “blather about the demise of Marxism,” Wallerstein remarked, was “just that.”Footnote 1
Twenty-eight years later, Robin D. G. Kelley, a prominent historian of black radical politics, observed in the Boston Review that Cedric Robinson’s recent passing at seventy-five years old “went virtually unnoticed.” He thought this was regrettable. Despite minimal media attention, Kelley believed that Robinson’s scholarship had covertly inspired Black Lives Matter’s calls “for an end to ‘racial capitalism’” and influenced how BLM activists saw “their work as part of a ‘black radical tradition.’” Though Robinson never desired “intellectual celebrity, his influence was greater than perhaps he may have realized.”Footnote 2 Ironically, Kelley’s essay appeared at the beginning of an exponential increase in scholarly attention to Robinson’s work. According to Google Scholar’s citation aggregator, Black Marxism was cited 1,441 times between its publication in 1983 and 2016. Between 2017 and 2025, that number grew to 8,898. Even if these numbers convey only a partial picture, they suggest that over 80 percent of published citations of Black Marxism have appeared in the last eight years, four decades after its publication. That would make Robinson a celebrity of recent vintage.
How do we account for this belated, and sudden, canonization of Robinson’s work in general and of Black Marxism in particular? Why did Robinson change from a “fossil” to, apparently, the hidden influence behind the largest American social movement in the twenty-first century? And what might this process reveal about the 1970s, when Robinson wrote Black Marxism, and our own moment?
These questions are the subject of this article, and answers to them are not obvious. Already in a 2017 article on the topic, Kelley indicated one possible reason for Robinson’s comeback. Black Marxism, he suggested, gives an account of how race and capitalism intersect to produce our current political economy inflected with racism.Footnote 3 In the contemporary conjuncture, such an account was useful because, as Nikhil Pal Singh observes, racial capitalism had “been taken up with more frequency and generality” to include debates ranging from “the history of slavery and capitalism to the impact of mass incarceration and subprime lending to the politics of #blacklivesmatter.”Footnote 4 By its very proliferation, defining racial capitalism had become difficult. Robinson, the line of thinking went, promised a way forward.Footnote 5
There is some plausibility to this account, except for a crucial fact: as a theoretical exposition of racial capitalism, Black Marxism has left many contemporary readers underwhelmed. Indeed, critics have repeatedly expressed reservations about the text’s lack of definitional precision and its impressionistic treatment of racial capitalism. Zachary Levenson and Marcel Paret, for instance, turn instead to debates in the South African antiapartheid struggle—debates that pre-date Black Marxism and, in their view, offer a more rigorous account of racial capitalism as a political-economic formation. A reader would be mistaken to even view Black Marxism as “a book about the political economy of racial capitalist regimes” instead of “a wide-ranging mapping of the Black radical tradition.”Footnote 6 Similarly, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has cautioned that “we would be better served by going back to the development of the idea of racial capitalism, which was not in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, but in the Marxist tradition in South Africa.” Robinson, she notes, uses the phrase “very sparingly … and certainly not in any kind of comprehensive way that gives us a real working definition or understanding of it.”Footnote 7 Taken together, these criticisms highlight the gap between what readers have recently sought in Black Marxism and what Robinson actually wrote. These critiques are not confused. Rather, they address a different intellectual project than the one Robinson himself set out to undertake.Footnote 8
What many Marxist critics have identified as weaknesses are better understood as signs of a deeper temporal disjunction that has yet to be satisfactorily explored. As they correctly suggest, Robinson was not attempting to write a political-economic theory of racial capitalism. His use of the term emerged from a different set of questions. In this sense, Black Marxism has been pressed into service as a political-economic heuristic when it was, from the outset, a civilizational and cultural critique. It is as if the text, now revived to address the contemporary conjuncture, has returned as revenant, called back to life only to be judged against standards it never claimed for itself. In what follows, I argue that this uneven reception has less to do with Robinson’s clarity and more to do with divergent expectations. Readers searching Black Marxism for a theory of exploitation or accumulation will find it lacking, but only because the problem Robinson aimed to solve lay elsewhere.
As is well known, Robinson meant Black Marxism as an explicit rejection of what his generation called “economistic” theorizing which reduced race and culture to the logic of political economy.Footnote 9 In correspondence with Immanuel Wallerstein, Robinson claimed that “positivistic materialism” errs when equating “capitalism and social structure … with culture.”Footnote 10 In this he was of a piece with his moment, now retroactively periodized as a “cultural” or linguistic turn in history and literary studies.Footnote 11 What must be recognized, Robinson insisted, “is that the emergence of social classes is historical rather than deductively rational or, inductively, according to the logic of capitalism.”Footnote 12 It is this historical emergence of social classes that Black Marxism sought to recover.
What is less known is Robinson’s alternative to “economism”: he insisted that capitalism, while economic in form, was also the vector through which a broader Western civilizational and cultural system was imposed onto the rest of the world. Black Marxism excavated a history of what he called the “racialism … deep in the bowels of Western culture.”Footnote 13 That racialism preceded and fundamentally shaped capitalist social relations; it acted as a “material force.”Footnote 14 Racialism explained a key problem of the twentieth century: why the Western European working class had not overthrown capitalism as Marxism predicted. It also forwarded an alternative revolutionary subject: the black diaspora, which, to Robinson, represented a much greater contradiction to the capitalist system. Unlike his contemporaries, Robinson did not define culture as the historical emergence of meaning in the play of signifier and signified. He did not turn to culture to stress contingency in history or as a synonym for what Dipesh Chakrabarty would, decades later, call “historical difference.”Footnote 15 By culture, Robinson meant civilizational struggle between world-historical groups, the emergence of peoples—not discursive meaning.
Black Marxism historicizes the emergence of those peoples. Charting the history of European racialism required narrating a civilizational conflict: a racial capitalism emanating from the West and, through its hemispheric enslavement of black peoples, eliciting what Robinson called “an essentially African response.”Footnote 16 His racial capitalism and black radical tradition must be understood within a “dialectical matrix,” as entwined and refractory cultural-historical phenomena.Footnote 17 Racial capitalism, for Robinson, is not an exclusively political-economic structure; it is simultaneously a Western civilizational formation.
At the core of Robinson’s work lies what, from a contemporary vantage point, may seem a puzzling tension. While he described race as “metaphysical,” “primordial,” even “inevitable” and an “expression of our species mind,” he also emphasized that the “meaningfulness of race consciousness” was shaped by specific “world historical moments.”Footnote 18 Rather than resolving this apparent contradiction, Robinson wrote as though essentialist and historicist logics could be thought together. Today, that might appear inconsistent. How could race be simultaneously primordial yet historically contingent? By the time Robinson composed Black Marxism, critiques of biological essentialism and appeals to historical contingency were already well established. What had not yet fully consolidated, however, was the treatment of “essentialism” as a generalized methodological prohibition within the dominant critical idioms of the late twentieth-century academy: one that rendered appeals to cultural inheritance, civilizational formation, or transhistorical structures presumptively suspect.Footnote 19 Robinson’s work occupies a transitional intellectual space in which such registers could still be mobilized together, even as the conditions for their later disqualification were already taking shape.
Robinson drew from an older lineage, one he described as rooted in Hegel and Vico, that treated the historical and the essential as not opposing terms but dialectically intertwined.Footnote 20 The true essence of a thing could only be understood in its historical unfolding. Robinson’s indebtedness to such a tradition has largely been overlooked, in part because of Black Marxism’s belated reception. What now appears contradictory was not Robinson’s confusion, but the result of a subsequent shift in theoretical common sense. That these terms could be thought of as contradictory is itself an artifact of historical change. At the very moment Robinson defined culture as emergent from world-historical struggle among peoples, many others were redefining culture as the play of linguistic signs. Thus Black Marxism arrived just as the academy was forgetting how to read it.
Seen this way, Robinson’s quizzical reception in our own conjuncture becomes clearer. He wrote Black Marxism to answer questions pressing in the 1970s, not the 2010s: who is the revolutionary subject? Under what conditions could it emerge? What is its relation to the rise of modernity? His intervention speaks less to contemporary theoretical debates than to the shifting terrain on which US academics contested the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s. Robinson was grappling with Marxism and the problem of nationalism, with culture and its relation to class formation, and with the forces animating the world-historical dialectic. His work addressed a different problem space: one that helps explain how Black Marxism could be received today as both newly urgent to some and already inadequate to others.
My aim in what follows is to shed light on these as yet undertheorized components of Black Marxism to resituate Robinson into ongoing historical conversations about the global and cultural dimensions of the Cold War.Footnote 21 Competing meanings of modernization and development, historians have argued, made up a central element of Cold War ideological conflict.Footnote 22 Observers have especially noted just how much these understandings of modernization were forged in the Third World.Footnote 23 We can understand Robinson as a theorist with deep ties and sympathies to those Third Worldist and/or peripheral critiques but residing in the metropole, a milieu characteristic of a generation of intellectuals in the period like Stuart Hall, Nicos Poulantzas, Ernesto Laclau, Sylvia Wynter, and others.Footnote 24 We might be able to explain Robinson’s belated reception by just how different his answers were to his generation’s questions than those of his fellow members of the New Left.
The first part of this article demonstrates how Black Marxism intervened in mid-century debates on modernization and development, chiefly in the world-systems school of thought then germinating at SUNY–Binghamton. There, Robinson critiqued world systems’ accounts of the rise of modernity for their inattention to anticolonial dynamics of cultural struggle. I then trace how Robinson developed his conception of culture through thinkers like Werner Sombart and Oliver C. Cox, who theorized cultural Geists (Ger.: Geister) as generative elements of political economy. Robinson’s account, I suggest, unsettles prevailing narratives of the cultural turn as concerned chiefly with discourse, representation, or media. The turn to culture in the 1970s and 1980s was also a struggle over what culture meant. In Black Marxism, we can see how some of these accounts of culture died on the vine, only to be surprisingly reanimated later for other purposes.
The feudal transition and discourses of development
For a book titled Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, few could blame a reader for expecting it to begin with perhaps the transatlantic slave trade, precolonial Africa, or maybe the Haitian Revolution. Instead, Robinson opens with a historiographical review of late medieval Europe. To a twenty-first-century reader, this seems a confounding choice. Yet Robinson insisted that “feudal society is the key” to his civilizational account of capitalism’s development. His synthesis of feudal history revealed how “the social, psychological, and cultural origins of racism and nationalism both anticipated capitalism in time” and “contributed directly to its organization of production and exchange.”Footnote 25 From the outset, Robinson makes his point plain: capitalism was, at its foundations, irrevocably refracted through a preexisting racism and nationalism emergent from Western civilization. He characterized feudal Europe as a “developing civilization” which “from its very beginnings … [contained] racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities … constructed on antagonistic differences” between Europeans. On this view, European feudalism was already a racialized labor system, which meant that “capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution” against feudalism than “the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relations.”Footnote 26
For Robinson, “Western civilization” was forged through the encounter between the former “barbarians” of Northern and Western Europe and the “dying civilization of the Mediterranean” in the late Roman and early medieval period. The peoples of Northwestern Europe were themselves ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, and Robinson emphasizes that their incorporation into a single civilizational formation occurred through Northwestern European’s “assimilat[ion] by the indigenous peoples” of the Mediterranean “as a primarily slave labor force.” That original integration of distinct ethnicities into a civilizational structure by means of slave labor would begin a pattern endemic to future development, Robinson argues; that pattern “would continue without any significant interruption into the twentieth century.” The capitalist mode of production did not abolish slavery so much as “relocate” it from Europe to the Western hemisphere.Footnote 27
That resulting linkage between ethnicity, slavery, and civilization, first forged in the medieval era, became what Robinson described as “part of the inventory of Western civilization,” an ideological kernel that “inevitably permeate[d] the social structures emergent from capitalism.”Footnote 28 To describe capitalism as “Western,” in Robinson’s sense, is therefore already to describe it as racial. For Robinson, racial hierarchy was embedded in Western civilization before the emergence of capitalism; capitalism did not produce that hierarchy but instead became the means through which those preexisting intra-European social relations were carried outward on a global scale.
Robinson considered these claims fundamental enough to frame the opening of Black Marxism. Capitalism, he argued, developed through the global extension of ethnically inscribed slave labor relations forged within European feudal society. Racialized labor arrangements were thus a feudal legacy rather than a capitalist innovation. What distinguished capitalism from feudalism, in Robinson’s account, was not primarily a transformation in productive forms, but the imperial reach through which these inherited social relations were generalized on a world scale.
Why would the character of feudal Europe and the relationship between feudalism and capitalism mark an appropriate beginning to Black Marxism? Robinson leaves a clue in the first sentence of the book’s acknowledgments: “This work was begun while I was teaching in Binghamton, New York.”Footnote 29 Though a seemingly casual detail, it reveals much about Robinson’s interlocutors. He accepted his first tenure-track position at Binghamton University in 1973, recruited by Immanuel Wallerstein to join what would become the Fernand Braudel Center, founded by Wallerstein and his colleague, friend, and research partner Terence Hopkins.Footnote 30
By the mid-1970s, Binghamton was becoming a node within a global network of intellectuals, radicals, and activists who were developing a critique of dominant mid-century narratives of modernization and development. From the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, and through smaller hubs across Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, radical political economists, historians, and sociologists moved between conferences, visiting appointments, and cross-disciplinary collaborations at many or all of these locales.Footnote 31 Among them were figures across the emerging Third World, such as Samir Amin, Ruy Mauro Marini, and Walter Rodney, whose work in African political economy and Latin American dependency theory was already reshaping debates on global development.Footnote 32 Drawing from these currents alongside the Annales school of European economic history, Wallerstein, Hopkins, and others at Binghamton, including Giovanni Arrighi, helped shape what became known as world-systems theory: an interdisciplinary, historical approach to capitalist development from its emergence in late feudal Europe to its global present.
This synthesis emerged as a part of ongoing efforts across the Third World and its allies to redefine modernization and development against the dominant assumptions of mid-century American social science—assumptions that Wallerstein and Hopkins had imbibed at Columbia and Robinson himself had encountered at Stanford.Footnote 33 Wallerstein referred to that contemporary conventional wisdom as the framework of “Weberian sociologists.” By this appellation, he did not necessarily mean “Max Weber himself, but ... the use made of his categories” in postwar American sociology. Wallerstein particularly criticized how American Weberians had bifurcated the world into “modern versus traditional societies.” That division assumed that certain sets of cultural values “preceded … economic transformations” rather than the reverse.Footnote 34 In other words, Wallerstein saw the world-systems approach as part of a broader, Third Worldist attack on what has become known as modernization theory.
Faced with what Nils Gilman describes as “the political problems and prospects of the ‘new states’ in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa,” modernization theory was an elite American approach to the decolonizing world. It served as both an intellectual framework and a Cold War policy weapon, aiming to promote “change that would make these regions more like ‘us’—and less like the Russians or the Chinese.”Footnote 35 Drawing on Weberian notions of modernity as the rationalization of traditional societies, its advocates imagined a singular historical trajectory of modernization for every “new nation,” culminating in 1950s America—what W. W. Rostow called “the age of high mass consumption.”Footnote 36 This transition, from traditional culture to industrial culture to mass consumption, was presented as inevitable. The United States’ task, as Michael Latham puts it, was to “accelerate, channel, and direct” that process toward Western liberal democracy and away from Soviet influence.Footnote 37 That would require building democracies worldwide.
Seymour Lipset argued that such democracies emerged only “under a peculiar concatenation of forces”: societies with high literacy rates, open class systems, market economies, and dense civic association.Footnote 38 Encouraging these social, cultural, and economic conditions, the logic went, would win hearts and minds in the Third World. Winning the Cold War thus required more than market growth and technological progress. It meant cultural transformation: the making of modern subjects.
As Begüm Adalet observes, this framework rested on “a series of assumptions about modern psyches and postures.”Footnote 39 Modern society, as Lipset suggested, was not exclusively expressed in steel output or paved roads but was itself a culture: a way of thinking and being, a particular understanding of time and space. For these Weberian thinkers, traditional cultures “rationalized” by becoming Western. Talcott Parsons, for instance, described modernization as “a process of reorganization of the normative culture of the system … at the level of norms and subsystem values.”Footnote 40 Successful modernization projects would require cultural change. It meant relaxing invidious hierarchies and loosening cultural norms.Footnote 41 Modernization meant a reordering of the “traditional” cultures of the decolonizing world into the “open” societies of the West.
For many observers in the Third World, this narrative was simplistic at best and pernicious at worst. Some of the earliest sustained critiques of modernization theory came from Latin American elites, especially economists at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL). They argued that the cultural story of tradition-to-modernity ignored the actual history of Europe’s relationship the rest of the world, one of colonial exploitation and uneven development. A leading figure, Raúl Prebisch, introduced the now standard shorthand for this dynamic between First World “core” and Third World “periphery”—terms Wallerstein and Hopkins would later adopt in their own analysis.Footnote 42 The underdevelopment of Latin America, Prebisch and others argued, was not a problem of cultural backwardness but rather of structural inequality in the global economy. The Third World was not mired in outmoded “traditional” cultures; it had been kept underdeveloped by Western economic exploitation from the colonial era onward. Its economies were trapped in a dependent position, exporting raw materials to the industrialized core, which converted them into higher-value manufactured goods and sold them back at a premium.
This “dependency” perspective reframed the central question away from culture and toward altering the terms of trade with the industrialized West. Remedying dependence required a new path of development. To begin this process, CEPAL economists proposed reform-minded solutions such as import-substitution industrialization (ISI), in which protective tariffs and state-led investment would foster domestic industries in the Third World to replace Western imported manufactures.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of dependency theorists pushed this critique in a more explicitly Marxist and radical direction. In Latin America, Ruy Mauro Marini argued that dependency was not only a residue of colonial history but a structural feature of capitalism itself, which continually produced forms of “super-exploitation” in the periphery.Footnote 43 In Africa, Samir Amin advanced a parallel analysis, contending that the global capitalist economy systematically drained value from the periphery through unequal exchange.Footnote 44 For Amin, overcoming dependency would require “delinking” from the capitalist world market—through socialist transformation, regional integration, and other strategies that prioritized autonomous development.Footnote 45 Radical politicians in the Third World echoed similar themes. In 1964, Che Guevara entreated Western powers to eliminate “the exploitation of dependent countries by developed capitalist countries, with all the consequences that this implies.”Footnote 46 The next year, Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah denounced ongoing forms of economic exploitation as simply “the last stage of imperialism.”Footnote 47
Importantly, dependency and world-systems theory’s appropriation of Marx was never orthodox, a fact that irked more traditionally minded Marxists in the period.Footnote 48 CEPAL economists, radical dependency theorists, and world-systems analysts all placed greater emphasis on global trade, uneven development, and the growth of state institutions than on the market compulsion which drove the labor–capital relation. In this, they drew heavily from the nineteenth-century German historical school of political economy.Footnote 49 Their reading of late feudal history drew in part on American economist Paul Sweezy and Belgian historian Henri Pirenne—both students of figures adjacent to or within the German historical school, Joseph Schumpeter and Gustav von Schmoller—whose work later informed the Annales school, and its prominent proponent, Fernand Braudel.Footnote 50 In these accounts, capitalism was not defined solely by the “free” wage relationship between landless worker and capitalist and the market compulsion which it enabled. Rather, capitalism encompassed any economic system producing commodities for long-distance markets.Footnote 51 Just as the German historical school arose “in the shadow of British power” to explain Germany’s uneven development, Third Worldist theorists adapted those methods to grasp twentieth-century inequality in the global South.Footnote 52
It was into this intellectual and political landscape—where Latin American and African Marxists were rethinking global inequality on a world scale—that Wallerstein, Hopkins, and their collaborators moved during the 1960s. Wallerstein’s trajectory in African area studies, coupled with his political radicalization during the 1968 Columbia University protests, pulled him away from the modernization theoretical framework of his early books on sub-Saharan Africa. His encounters with Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and dependency theorist André Gunder Frank cemented close personal and professional ties among the four, who jokingly referred to themselves as “the Gang of Four,” underscoring their shared Third Worldist commitments.Footnote 53 In the same period, Hopkins spent two years lecturing at the University of the West Indies, Mona, engaging with members of the New World Group as they elaborated a distinctly Caribbean version of dependency theory.Footnote 54
These cosmopolitan experiences left Hopkins and Wallerstein changed. They now believed that understanding exploitation in the periphery required an interdisciplinary approach beyond their shared sociological training. As Hopkins put it, this meant melding “two heretofore unrelated fields of scholarly inquiry, European economic history and Third-World political studies,” despite “the dismay for the most part of specialists in each.”Footnote 55 Grasping capitalism in the present required tracing how Europe had historically constructed it to extract wealth from the rest of the world. This meant fusing the objects of distinct disciplines into a single theoretical framework.
Wallerstein and Hopkins envisioned the Braudel Center as an institutional home for this synthesis. “The day of separating the study of historical sequence and the study of structural relationships,” Wallerstein declared in the center’s 1975 mission statement, “is over.” The Braudel Center would “operate on the assumption that there is no structure that is not historical.” To understand a social structure was to know its “genesis and context” and to assume that “its form and substance are constantly evolving.”Footnote 56 Hiring Robinson—a political theorist with deep engagement in sociological approaches within black studies—seemed an ideal fit.
What Robinson encountered at Binghamton, then, was a shared preoccupation, across otherwise opposed schools of thought, with narrating the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This periodizing impulse underwrote modernization theory, dependency theory, and world-systems theory alike. Modernization theorists, drawing largely on Weber’s account of rationalization, explained this transition in cultural terms. Radical dependency and world-systems theorists turned instead to Marx’s emphasis on structural economic forces, supplemented by the German historical school and Annales school interest in long-distance trade. In both cases, the central question remained the same: how to explain the emergence of capitalism out of feudal Europe, and what that story meant for the Third World.
This question would also become central for Robinson as he wrote Black Marxism, and it was the Binghamton milieu where he would sharpen his approach to it and find camaraderie in the process. Robinson would dedicate his first book, The Terms of Order, to Wallerstein, Hopkins, and their wives, Beatrice and Gloria.Footnote 57 He also would list Hopkins as one of the three most influential figures in his intellectual development alongside C. L. R. James and Robinson’s grandfather, Winston “Cap” Whiteside.Footnote 58 But these tributes should not be mistaken for simple affiliation. Black Marxism returned to the same transition narrative that preoccupied social-science research of the moment, but in order to revise and contest it, especially Wallerstein’s account.
It is therefore worth turning to Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System, Volume 1, a key source for Black Marxism (cited or mentioned at least nineteen times) and Wallerstein’s fullest attempt to narrate the feudal transition. Published while Robinson was at Binghamton, it absorbed the insights of radical dependency theory while embodying the Braudel Center’s interdisciplinary method, setting the stage for Robinson to grapple with, and ultimately depart from, its account. Much of the volume engaged technical disputes of late medieval scholarship: changes in feudal land tenure, the spending patterns of European nobility, and the perennial question whether such shifts marked a crisis of feudalism. Beyond these debates, Wallerstein traced the expansion of Europe into the global arena and the ways in which expansion accelerated the development of global capitalism.
It emerged in what Wallerstein calls the “long sixteenth century” and developed an international division of labor ordered along both geographic and, crucially, racial lines.Footnote 59 The world system, he argued, “evolved … a slave class of African origins located in the Western Hemisphere, a ‘serf’ class … in Eastern Europe and a smaller one of American Indians” alongside the tenants of “western and southern Europe” and the “wage workers” of exclusively Western European origin.Footnote 60 Race and racism, in this telling, arose from this multitiered structure of labor, justifying each group’s place within it. Colonial ideologies of civilization and development legitimated capitalist exploitation; they were its consequence, not its cause. Understanding racism, therefore, required historicizing uneven development; it required placing present conditions in the longue durée of the feudal past.
When researching Black Marxism, Robinson saw something else in that past, absent from world-systems theory, modernization theory, and orthodox Marxist accounts alike. Like Wallerstein and even Rostow, he began in late feudal Europe and relied heavily on the same source base: in just the first chapter of Black Marxism, Robinson cited Sweezy, Pirenne, Braudel, or Wallerstein forty-nine times. In that source material, Robinson noticed what he believed others had overlooked. Buried in medieval Europe, he argued, was a long-standing tendency “to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”Footnote 61 Wallerstein had noted racialized labor arrangements in The Modern World-System, but in Robinson’s view had passed over them too quickly, “devot[ing] … a single paragraph on the ethnic divisions of sixteenth-century immigrant labor.”Footnote 62 For Robinson, these processes of racialization were not incidental but formative. They were central to “European civilization,” which, he argued, “assumed its fundamental perspectives during feudalism,” forged in opposition to the rise of Islam and the Crusades into the Levant.Footnote 63
In this reading, practices of racial differentiation pre-dated capitalism and defined the Western civilization out of which it emerged. Where Wallerstein had cast racism as a product of capitalist expansion, Robinson treated capitalism as refracted through the former: racialism had already structured Western European society, and capitalism took shape within that structure. “European civilization is not the product of capitalism,” Robinson insisted. “Capitalism can only be understood in the social and historical context” of its emergence from Western civilization.Footnote 64 Capitalism emerged from, and was shaped from the outset by, a Western European civilization already structured by racial differentiation. In his telling, the earliest capitalist labor systems did not invent racial categories; they adapted and extended older modes of racialization forged in the crucible of medieval Europe’s encounters with Islam and the Crusades.
Wallerstein’s detachment of capitalism from its Western European civilizational roots, Robinson argued, led him to misrecognize key aspects of its character. Certain features of capitalism, Robinson observed, could not be reduced to the rational logic of market exchange alone. They had emerged historically, in part because capitalism developed within a Western European society already shaped by particular cultural and political forms. The system was not merely the outgrowth of impersonal economic forces; its economic structures were themselves inflected by the cultural terrain in which they took shape. Though Robinson would advance this argument more fully in Black Marxism, he had already begun to formulate it in dialogue with Wallerstein nearly a decade earlier.
In 1975, Robinson responded to Wallerstein’s mission statement for the Braudel Center with a short letter, which he called “A Paradigmatic Comment.” Wallerstein, he argued, had grounded his world-systems framework in a Marxian “historical materialism” without sufficiently interrogating its “conflicting theories of consciousness and culture.”Footnote 65 To support this claim, Robinson quoted a letter from Friedrich Engels to Joseph Bloch—a line he would repeat three times in Black Marxism: “Marx and I ourselves are partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it.”Footnote 66 For Robinson, an exclusive focus on the economic dimensions of the world system risked missing the “cultures, languages, historical and social consciousnesses to which the formation of the world-system is an external dynamic.”Footnote 67 The economic analysis of capitalism, Robinson insisted, had to be situated within, and was inseparable from, its civilizational and cultural formation in a particular time and place. Treating those civilizational and cultural forms as merely downstream from economic developments, he argued, obscured the ways racial orderings had fundamentally shaped capitalism from its inception.
Robinson did not reserve this criticism solely for Wallerstein and the Binghamton set. In the same year, he offered a similar assessment of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in the Binghamton-based Third World Coalition Newsletter. Rodney had written the book during his tenure at the University of Dar es Salaam, “where,” as he notes in the preface, “expressions of concern for development have been accompanied by considerably more positive action than in several parts” of Africa.Footnote 68 Here, he nodded to Julius Nyerere’s 1967 Arusha Declaration, which launched the Ujamaa program for state-led development along democratic socialist lines in what would become Tanzania.Footnote 69 Conceived as a scholarly contribution to this national project, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa traced the economic exploitation, political domination, and structural underdevelopment of Africa by European colonial powers, placing that history in the service of contemporary struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. In doing so, it aligned with much of the dependency theory of the moment, insisting that African development required “a radical break with the capitalist system.”Footnote 70
However, Rodney diverged from dependency and world-systems analysts in his relative comfort with orthodox Marxist theories of culture and history. Although he acknowledged “complicated links between the changes in the economic base and changes in the rest of the superstructure of society,” including “ideology and social beliefs,” he ultimately maintained that “it has always been the case that the expansion of the economy leads eventually to a change in the form of social relations.”Footnote 71 For Rodney, these assumptions meant that European capital had an interest in maintaining Africa and the rest of the Third World’s underdevelopment, extracting labor without paying wages commensurate with a capitalist system—in other words, by theft. This was “the exploitation of one country by another” characterized chiefly by “unequal exchange,” which stunted the independent development of colonized or exploited nations and kept them in precapitalist modes of production.Footnote 72
Because Europe was already at the capitalist stage of development when it encountered the Third World, whose societies were at earlier stages, Rodney argued, exploitation was built into the relationship from the start. Remedying this required breaking the relationship so that the previously colonized or exploited nation could “proceed to a level higher than that of the economy which had previously dominated it.”Footnote 73 That leap could only occur, he maintained, through state-led socialism. Thus Rodney adopted much of the approach of dependency theory and world-systems analysis, but retained Marxian conceptions of historical materialism and stadial development that many of those thinkers had rejected. It was along these lines that Robinson took issue with Rodney’s approach.
As Robinson pointed out, the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was “a political event.”Footnote 74 It “defined a whole era of radical politics” in the Third World in its historicizing of Africa’s centuries-long plundering by European powers.Footnote 75 But its prominence did not deter Robinson from arguing that it was, in his view, deeply insufficient. Though he praised the work’s “extraordinary intellectual richness and analytic power which resides and is emergent from the African Diaspora,” Robinson thought that “Rodney falters” to the degree that he cleaves to the “nexus of historical materialism.” Rodney’s “preoccupation” with “economic and political history,” Robinson argued, left him unable to grasp “the thought, the consciousness, and the social organizations of African peoples.”Footnote 76 In focusing exclusively on economic relationships, Robinson believed that Rodney missed the ways culture shapes social life. In this, he had “ignored Engels’ warning” about “lay[ing] more stress on the economic side than is due to it.” For Robinson, what he called Rodney’s “militant economist” approach had caused him to fall prey to the “dogmas” of classical Marxism: assuming that “the working class is the instrument of critical philosophy” and “that class consciousness is the only (true) form of revolutionary consciousness.”Footnote 77 Responding to this particular problem of class consciousness became a central preoccupation of Black Marxism. Like many critics in the 1970s and 1980s, Robinson concluded that orthodox Marxism’s economistic worldview misidentified one of its key concepts: the revolutionary subject—a question central to his own rethinking of political struggle.Footnote 78
In most Marxist theories of class as Robinson interpreted them, wage workers represent the key site of contradiction against capitalist forces of production. They had, historically, been concentrated and organized in Western Europe and the United States.Footnote 79 But these Eurocentric visions of the working classes overlooked, Robinson argued, how twentieth-century revolutions emerged from “peasant-based revolutionary movements” outside Western Europe. Many Marxist thinkers from Lenin forward did account for the revolutionary role of the peasantry, yet even when peasants were incorporated into revolutionary strategy, they were understood as revolutionary insofar as they were drawn into or helped accelerate the historical logic of capitalism and its anticipated transcendence. What such cases revealed instead, Robinson argued, was a more serious theoretical problem: the existence of forms of revolutionary consciousness not derived from a proletarian class position or from capitalism’s developmental effects. These alternative forms of revolutionary consciousness belied the Marxist assumption that “class consciousness is the only (true) form of revolutionary consciousness.”Footnote 80 Instead, Robinson sought other forms of revolutionary consciousness; furthermore, he inquired why European class consciousness always amounted to something less than revolutionary.
In Black Marxism, Robinson addressed both concerns by showing how capitalism developed from a Western culture suffused with “racialism: the legitimation and corroboration of social organization as natural by reference to the ‘racial’ components of its elements.” For Robinson, “racism … was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.” This ideological component of Western culture preceded capitalism, emerging in feudal Europe, and thus, “as a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structure emergent from capitalism.” Robinson coined “the term ‘racial capitalism’ to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency.”Footnote 81 In other words, Western cultural practices of racism preceded and irrevocably shaped capitalist economic relations.
The consequences of this mediation appeared in European revolutionary history itself, Robinson suggested. When faced with the imperatives of proletarianization, he argued, Western workers did not demand “an eradication of oppositions among the working classes.” Instead, they were “disciplined … to the importance of distinctions: between ethnicities and nationalities; between skilled and unskilled workers; and … between races.” This, he suggested, was “a critical aspect of the triumph of capitalism in the nineteenth century.”Footnote 82 Western historical consciousness, he contended, bound even its working classes to the basic cultural logic underlying capitalism: racialism. To illustrate the point, Robinson cited Marx’s remarks on English proletarian hostility toward Irish workers in the nineteenth century.
Robinson also drew on the concept of a “labor aristocracy.”Footnote 83 Though often associated with Lenin—who used it to describe how imperialist states shared colonial spoils with labor leaders and the upper strata of workers to mollify their radicalism—Robinson highlighted an earlier use by W. E. B. Du Bois. In “The African Roots of War,” Du Bois applied it to the material advantages of European industrial workers compared with “the degrading conditions of peasants and agrarian laborers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.”Footnote 84 For Robinson, this was more revealing than Lenin’s formulation: it highlighted less the stratification within the Western working class than the structural divide between Western and non-Western labor. Sustained by racialist ideology, this divide led Western workers to imagine their fortunes as aligned with European capitalists rather than with their comrades in the periphery.
Thus Robinson used the term “racial capitalism” to solve a problem specific to his own political moment: identifying revolutionary subjectivity. Racial capitalism described how social formations in Western Europe could not be trusted to bring about radical social change. He intervened in a discursive moment when, as Natasha Shivji notes, “Black consciousness was not antithetical to Marxism,” and Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was a hallmark of this dialogical confluence.Footnote 85 For Robinson, however, the close of the 1970s, marked by the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, had slammed this window shut. “The experimentation with Western political inventories of change,” Robinson declared, “is coming to a close.” The West itself was “self-destructing,” and its culture had, in a seemingly ironic nod to Thatcherism, “engendered no truly profound alternatives.”Footnote 86 It was incumbent upon black radicals to search beyond Marx for analytical tools to understand their world. They could find those tools in their own culture, their own consciousness, which, unlike Western culture, was not “inevitably permeate[d]” with racism.Footnote 87
On its face, this line of critique is unsurprising. Robinson wrote Black Marxism at the height of what is known as the cultural and linguistic turn in the humanities, when scholars across disciplines questioned economic determinism and pointed to culture, language, and discourse as primary sites of analysis. But “culture” itself was not a new analytic: by the early twentieth century it had already become central in anthropology and sociology, though in a register quite distinct from the one animating the cultural turn. In the Boasian tradition, developed by Franz Boas and his students such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, “culture” referred to the learned behaviors, customs, and values of a bounded group, to be understood on its own terms and without recourse to the biologically racist evolutionary “hierarchies of man” developed in the nineteenth century.Footnote 88 By mid-century, modernization theorists had appropriated this framework, recasting “culture” as a set of values or attitudes that either facilitated or hindered economic development and democratization, to be measured and, if necessary, reshaped to align with Western capitalist modernity.Footnote 89
When Robinson wrote Black Marxism in the mid-1970s, a different understanding of culture was germinating. Canonical texts in Western Marxism which revised orthodox Marxist theories of class were translated into English.Footnote 90 Simultaneously, French structuralists drew from the linguist Fernand de Saussure to question any connection between language and its referenced meaning.Footnote 91 Distinct though they were, these intellectual currents converged in rejecting “vulgar” Marxism, which reduced culture to a reflection of economic relations. Theorists of the linguistic turn instead understood culture as “the entire field and process of symbol interaction, communication, and technologies” through which people make meaning.Footnote 92 “Culture” described the contingent play between signifier and signified in specific times and places: meaning was always in flux, and always inflected by power relations spread throughout social life.Footnote 93
This discursive account of culture took hold across multiple disciplines. In anthropology, Clifford Geertz’s interpretive approach framed culture as a “web of significance … spun” by humans, to be understood through “thick description” of symbols and rituals.Footnote 94 In history, Hayden White unsettled the idea that the past could be neutrally narrated, arguing that historians “emplot” events through narrative forms and tropes drawn from literature.Footnote 95 By the early 1980s, the New Historicism in literary studies had synthesized these insights, reading literature and history alike as cultural texts embedded in a network of social meanings.Footnote 96
Western Marxists of the period generally followed these trends in thinking about revolutionary subjectivity, while also attempting to reconcile them with Marxism’s materialist commitments. There were no “guarantees,” as Stuart Hall put it, when it came to working-class consciousness. The mere existence of a working class did not predict revolutionary politics; rather, those politics had to be “articulated to the field of social and political forces.” Revolutionary consciousness did not “emanate” from preexisting, “fully formed social classes.”Footnote 97 On its face, this claim resonates with Robinson’s insistence to Wallerstein that “the emergence of social classes is historical rather than deductively rational or, inductively, according to the logic of capitalism.”Footnote 98 Yet Robinson’s understanding of culture and revolutionary subjectivity did not accord with the cultural turn’s discursive, anti-foundational view.
Robinson did not deny the existence of fully formed revolutionary classes. He simply doubted that they would ever arise in Europe. His revolutionary subject, what he called the black radical tradition, possessed a “coherence … based on the African identities of its peoples.” It gave black peoples worldwide “not only a common task … but a shared vision.”Footnote 99 This teleological certitude diverged sharply from contemporaneous cultural theories.
What accounts for this departure? In the following section, I show how Robinson, like Wallerstein and other Third Worldist economists, drew from the German historical school of political economy. But, unlike Wallerstein, Robinson turned toward their often proscribed, völkisch theories of culture as the expression of world-historical peoplehood. Rather than seeing culture as mere genealogical accident or superstructural reflection, Robinson theorized from an older, alternative tradition which saw culture as an organic totality, expressing a people’s historical Geist.
“The first attack is an attack on culture”
While writing Black Marxism, Robinson gave multiple talks and conference papers repeating the phrase “the first attack is an attack on culture.”Footnote 100 By this adage, Robinson meant that colonialism operated dialectically: the colonizer sought to dominate the colonized through cultural destruction, while the colonized resisted by defending their culture. In that defense, a revolutionary consciousness could emerge. Probably inspired by the recent reunification of Vietnam, Robinson claimed that, time and again, a colonial power “successfully destroys itself by creating a people.” Examples included the creation of “the Haitian people, in the early nineteenth century; the Algerian peoples, in the late nineteenth century; and the Vietnamese people in the very [early] twentieth century.”Footnote 101 This, Robinson suggested, was the dynamic that Rodney, Wallerstein, and others missed when they focused primarily on economic exploitation: they overlooked the revolutionary potential inherent in cultural struggle. Capitalism emerged culturally from the West, and it would be destroyed, culturally, from the global periphery.
This insight would make its way into the text of Black Marxism by way of Amílcar Cabral, the Bissau-Guinean anti-imperialist revolutionary.Footnote 102 Cabral’s claim that “it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition” fascinated Robinson.Footnote 103 He assigned Cabral’s translated speeches in his undergraduate courses while writing Black Marxism, and drew inspiration from Cabral’s idea that defending native culture against colonial domination fostered revolutionary subjectivity.Footnote 104 This vision of anticolonial resistance would form the central tenet of Black Marxism’s theory of culture. But Robinson did not simply apply Cabral’s insights on revolutionary struggle in Africa to the black diaspora as a whole. In appropriating Cabral’s thinking, he also recast those insights in explicitly civilizational terms with conceptions of culture foreign to Cabral himself.
In a Braudel Center working seminar, Robinson defined Cabral’s vision of “national liberation movements … as the recovery of a people’s historical Geist.” Recovering this Geist required rejecting “the social and cultural processes of assimilation and adaptation described as modernization and Westernization.”Footnote 105 This move is crucial. Where modernization theorists saw cultural assimilation into Western norms as the precondition of development, Robinson insisted that liberation required the opposite: the recovery of cultural totalities that colonialism had sought to obliterate. Both modernization theorists and Robinson placed culture at the center of development. But where the former theorized the colonizer’s project, Robinson theorized the colonized’s counterproject. His invocation of Geist—a concept that Cabral never used—underscored the difference, rooting anticolonial struggle in an older intellectual inheritance that viewed culture not as contingent or malleable but as an organic totality expressing a people’s historical being.
That Robinson imported the language of Geist into Cabral’s Marxist theory of liberation underscores a central tension in Black Marxism. On the one hand, Cabral’s wager was recognizably Third World Marxist: the periphery, as the most exploited zone of the capitalist world system, held the revolutionary potential to overturn it. On the other hand, Robinson’s appropriation of Cabral grounded revolutionary subjectivity not in the peripheral position alone but in the black radical tradition, rooted in African cultural continuities forged in but not limited to racial slavery. These frames—periphery-as-revolutionary-subject and Africanity-as-source-of-revolutionary-subjectivity—do not align neatly.Footnote 106 Robinson neither reconciles nor even acknowledges the contradiction; instead, he allows it to coexist. That coexistence reflected both the difficulty of linking a general critique of racialism to a specific genealogy of Black resistance, and the political common sense of 1970s black radicalism, which routinely tied black America’s struggles to those of the wider Third World.Footnote 107 Robinson’s turn to Geist, then, was not simply a flourish of his reading of Cabral. It reflected an older intellectual inheritance, one Cabral did not share, which Robinson encountered instead in the work of Oliver C. Cox.
Trained as a sociologist at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, Cox had published four books on capitalism, race, and culture by the time Robinson wrote Black Marxism, three of which Robinson cited: Caste, Class and Race, The Foundations of Capitalism, and Capitalism as a System.Footnote 108 Interested in treating Marxian insights as “servants, not masters,” Cox engaged Marxism critically, probing its account of capitalism’s origins, its relationship with race, and the impact of culture on these formations.Footnote 109 For Cox, Marx erred in analyzing capitalism solely through its emergence in Britain, which he described as “an essentially closed society.” This narrow focus, Cox argued, “limited [Marx’s] chances of seeing the capitalist system, as distinguished from the national society.”Footnote 110 As Wallerstein would later observe, Cox thought that the nation-state was an inadequate unit of analysis to for grasping capitalism’s emergence.Footnote 111 In a later essay crediting Cox’s intellectual legacy in “deconstructing Western historiography,” Robinson postulated that Cox gleaned this insight “from his readings of Paul Sweezy and Leon Trotsky.”Footnote 112
Because of this critical engagement with Marxism, Robinson originally intended Cox to appear in the final third of Black Marxism alongside C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eric Williams, in a collective portrait of black radical thought in the 1930s.Footnote 113 Together with Richard Wright and George Padmore, they formed a cohort of intellectuals who redefined how racism and capitalism were understood vis-à-vis the black diasporic experience in modernity. Robinson ultimately reorganized the last third of the book to focus more tightly on James, Du Bois, and Wright, but references to Cox, Padmore, and Williams remain scattered throughout these sections.Footnote 114 What bound these figures together, Robinson argued, was not their debt to Marxism but their shared effort to chart the emergence of black “revolutionary peoplehood” in the modern world.Footnote 115
However, for Cox, this interest in peoplehood did not preclude a political-economic analysis. Economic life was important, but it had to be placed in its proper social terrain. This led him away from the orthodox Marxist focus on class relations as the decisive social factor. Capitalism, he argued, should be understood as emerging from a “civilizational or cultural pattern” that “is not merely an aggregation of discrete social traits and material objects.” Civilizations were for him “integrated being[s] with an ethos.”Footnote 116 Capitalism had to be grasped, as Robinson would later also insist, as a formation rooted in Western civilization. In this respect, Cox shared world systems’ and dependency theorists’ debt to the German historical school of political economy, especially Werner Sombart.Footnote 117 Yet Cox’s training prior to the Second World War proved crucial in marking his differences from mid-century developmental thinking.
Cox read Sombart and other late nineteenth-century German political economists during the “heyday of völkisch scholarship” before what Michael Hutter has described as the postwar taboo on “idealist and organic references” to culture and economy, especially the notion of Geist.Footnote 118 For Sombart, while the organization of production mattered for understanding economic systems, the most important variable was what he called a culture’s Geist, a German term which roughly translates to “spirit” or “thought.”Footnote 119 By Geist, Sombart meant the “attitudes toward economic life [that] have prevailed” in a particular era and in particular cultures. These attitudes generated a “suitable form for [themselves] and … thus [create] economic organization.”Footnote 120 In short, cultural attitudes toward economic life irrevocably shape the material form the economy takes. They constitute a culture’s collective will. These attitudes ultimately cause some peoples to form their economies differently from others.Footnote 121 While Wallerstein, Hopkins, and others trained in a postwar environment where biological metaphors had transmogrified into general systems theories, Cox drew from a more völkisch tradition of German cultural theory. He continued to do so even after most had dispensed with these ideas, and with Sombart himself, given the association of both with pan-German nationalism and fascism.Footnote 122
Cox’s reliance on this cultural theory of political economy provided the crucial framework through which Robinson would later conceptualize capitalism. For Cox, understanding the “economic order and social behavior” of a people required first grasping “the social organization, the ethos, the religious sanctions, the system of mythology, the juridical institutions, and so on.” These formed what he called the “spirit” of a people—their “way of looking at the world and of interpreting their destiny within it.”Footnote 123 The resemblance to Herder’s Romantic notion of Volksgeist is striking: a collective “spirit” expressed in national prejudices shaped by climate, morals, customs, and language.Footnote 124 Building on Sombart’s political-economic conception of Geist, Cox framed capitalism not merely as an economic system of social relations but as an outgrowth of Western civilization itself: a cultural organism that generated its own economic life.
If capitalism was fundamentally a Western cultural system, then understanding its nature meant reconstructing European history. Cox located the first stirrings of this “essentially new” culture of capitalism in late medieval Venice.Footnote 125 The city’s “spirit of capitalism,” he argued, was expressed in “the pride and hope of the people” being “concentrated on their ships and their great highway, the sea,” where “foreign commerce remained her fundamental interest.” This ethos produced an “outward drive” that sprang from the society’s collective will rather than from “isolated individual interests.” Capitalism, in other words, was born as a cultural ideal, a way of life, that motivated Venetian citizens.Footnote 126 Once established, this ethos became “irreversible,” proceeding on its own momentum, “not only irrepressible but also covetable.”Footnote 127 Venetian success bred wider European imitation. A cultural Geist willed that success and compelled others to submit to it.
Importantly, this Western capitalistic spirit justified its exploitative economic relationships in cultural terms. Cox argued that capitalism definitionally “form[s] a system or network of national and territorial units bound together by commercial and exploitative relationships.”Footnote 128 In this, he echoes the German historical school’s rejection of David Ricardo’s classical conception of equal trade: trade between states is always already unequal, and uneven development is a structural feature of capitalism.Footnote 129 “When a non-capitalist people … establishes commercial relations with a capitalist power,” Cox explained, “it enters into a system from which it can seldom extricate itself.” Unless it sought “to imitate the social organization” of the capitalist power, the weaker polity risked “complete national subordination.”Footnote 130 For Cox, such asymmetrical relations between developed and underdeveloped economies structured the origins of “race prejudice” which he defined as a “capitalist attitude of contempt for exploited peoples.” He illustrated the point with medieval sources describing how Venetian traders treated the Greek citizens of their client states “like slaves.”Footnote 131
For Robinson, Cox had pinpointed in Venice what became “the very foundation of New World enterprise,” citing a similar passage from The Foundations of Capitalism in Black Marxism.Footnote 132 Within Venetian commerce, Cox identified a culture of capitalism, emerging from Western civilization, that employed racial hierarchy as a means of exploitation. Crucially, this did not originate in Europe’s modern encounter with the wider world. It began earlier, among Europeans themselves. Capitalism, in this telling, did not spread spontaneously, as Marx suggested, like the work of the sorcerer’s apprentice. It was culturally imposed—willed—through conquest and domination.
In the voluminous notes to Black Marxism, Robinson characterized Cox’s project as ultimately trying “to correct Marx’s error.” Quoting Cox’s Capitalism as a System, Robinson highlighted Cox’s claim that Marx mistakenly “assume[d] that feudal society dissolved before capitalist society began.” This “over-emphasize[d] the fragility of feudalism and,” critically, “discount[ed] its uses to the development of capitalism.”Footnote 133 Much as Robinson himself would later argue, capitalism’s roots lay not in the rupture of feudalism but in capitalism’s extension of feudal social relations from Europe onto the globe—relations already saturated with Western civilizational impulses toward racialism.
Ironically, Cox’s insistence that cultural values shape economic institutions and practices did not diverge far in form from the Weberian modernization theory that dependency theorists and world-systems analysts opposed. What distinguished Cox was not the basic claim that a “spirit of capitalism” organized economic life, but the evaluation of its consequences. Modernization theorists presented the imitation of Western capitalist cultures as enviable; Cox regarded it as tragic. “Every people,” he wrote, “tends to have a somewhat clearly defined way of looking at the world.” Yet under colonial modernity, “the world view of all other peoples has been progressively subordinated to the dominant, sophisticated view of Europeans.” To know, he argued, had come to mean “knowledge from the European point of view.” Eurocentrism, Cox concluded, persisted in modern social science, leading “especially economists” to apply “theories of human behavior characteristic of capitalist society to the social systems of all mankind.”Footnote 134 Robinson would later lift this exact passage in an article crediting Cox’s scholarship on European history.Footnote 135
For Cox, the Western academy’s error was more than methodological: it was civilizational. By applying European sensibilities universally, it failed to grasp that the European Geist which underwrote capitalist development always encountered, subordinated, and distorted other Geists as it extended outward. Robinson’s embrace of this theory of culture complicates how we understand his critique of economism. On the surface, his work resonates with the broader cultural turn, where scholars emphasized that knowledge was historically and culturally situated. But Robinson and Cox’s vision of culture diverged sharply from the discursive or structuralist emphases of Foucault or Lévi-Strauss. Meaning did not emerge from “accidents,” ruptures, or linguistic play. It was lodged in what Foucault explicitly rejected: the mapping of “the destiny of a people.”Footnote 136 Robinson’s pedagogical and intellectual project for black studies centered precisely on that mission: charting the historical emergence of black peoplehood.
In a mission statement for a new black studies program drafted at the Braudel Center, Robinson identified the core problem facing the discipline in the Western academy. Western academic institutions assumed that “the sensibilities, the conceptualizations, the categories of experience, and the perceptions of African peoples” were “similar to those of non-African (specifically, European and Euro-American) peoples.” Such assumptions effaced “African notions of time, space, explanation, and order of things, that is rationality.” The culture of Western capitalism had homogenized regimes of knowledge, imposing its categories onto non-Western subjects and silencing alternative epistemologies. What was overlooked, Robinson argued, was “the persistence of a social consciousness which largely escapes the intellectual structures of Western thought.” That consciousness, he insisted, “may well be the key to the ordering of an authentic Black Studies.”Footnote 137
Black Marxism was meant to fill this gap by demonstrating the existence of such a consciousness—or at the very least “to suggest that it was there.”Footnote 138 For Robinson, a proper course of black studies would trace the development of black consciousness as part of a wider dialectic of struggle against the West; it would chart the history of black struggle in modernity’s unfolding. Robinson located its first intellectual articulations in figures like Cox. Though the Western academy had, in his view, “disciplined” them to resist its conscious realization, he argued that their black experience also “nurtured” them to recognize themselves as part of “a historically emergent social force, the Black radical movement.”Footnote 139 This consciousness, Robinson contended, shielded the black intelligentsia of the 1930s, Cox among them, from “the racial metaphysics of Western consciousness.”Footnote 140 Ultimately, Robinson saw it as “grounded from below in the historical consciousness of the Black masses.”Footnote 141
Robinson found in Cox’s thinking a way to conceptualize the rise of modernity as emergent from civilizational conflict forged in the gauntlet of slavery and Jim Crow modernity.Footnote 142 His vision triangulated between Weberian modernization theorists, Marxists, and world-systems analysts. He was not satisfied with what he regarded as the economic reductionism of Wallerstein, Hopkins, or Marx; nor was he persuaded by the Western chauvinism of the Weber-inspired American sociologists. In Robinson’s view, modernization theory described only the Western side of the cultural dialectic that inaugurated modernity. A proper historical study of modernity, he argued, would have to account for both the culture of Western capitalism and the Third World cultures forged in struggle against it. For Robinson, those cultures were not merely the outcome of contingent plays of power. He described culture, instead, as “a transmitted historical consciousness.” Crucially, he argued that Marxism’s “dismissal” of this historical transmission “as an aspect of class consciousnesses” led it to misidentify the revolutionary subject in the European proletariat and to miss a key social force of the twentieth century: nationalism.Footnote 143
Robinson’s observation that Marxism struggled to theorize nationalism had prominent company in the early 1980s. Benedict Anderson, for instance, wrote his seminal history of nationalism, Imagined Communities, after two communist states, Vietnam and China, had gone to war—something Anderson’s Marxism could not fully explain in that moment. He also defined nationalism as a “cultural artefact.”Footnote 144 Yet for Anderson, this meant its nineteenth-century emergence from print culture. Nationalism was a linguistic creation: in a specific historical moment, widespread literacy and print circulation produced new national peoples where none had existed before. Robinson, by contrast, treated nationalism as the expression of a preexisting peoplehood. It was not merely “a historical aberration” of modernity. In his view, Third World revolutionary movements drew on older “ideational systems indigenous to those peoples exploited by the world market.”Footnote 145 Nationalism in this sense preceded modernity; it expressed revolutionary peoplehood. It could be, in Cabral’s words, the “seed of opposition”—the thread which, if pulled hard enough, unraveled capitalism.
This insight buttressed Robinson’s account of the black radical tradition. If racial capitalism embodied a Western civilizational drive toward expansion and exploitation, then “the presence of a historical or political consciousness or a social tradition among Blacks” represented “an essentially African response” to Western culture. This “Black radicalism is a negation of Western civilization.”Footnote 146 Attention to culture and consciousness, Robinson argued, revealed a subterranean struggle: beneath economic life lay a contest between the respective Geists of peoples whom Western modernity had set against one another.
Marx, Engels, and Lenin ignored this cultural struggle, Robinson maintained, to their peril. Though he was familiar with Marxist work on culture after the Russian Revolution, it seems that Robinson saw little evidence that this later work addressed what he regarded as the canonical neglect of culture by Marx, Engels, and Lenin themselves.Footnote 147 Much of European Marxism after the failed German Revolution of 1918–19 did, of course, take up precisely this problem. Yet Robinson remained unconvinced by these revisions. Much of his skepticism centered on an assumption derived from Marx himself: that capitalism represented a progressive historical force in world history.
Lukács, Robinson observed in a footnote to Black Marxism, ultimately occupied a “position identical with that” of Marx and Engels on this point, despite his efforts to revise Marxian accounts of culture. Capitalism, Lukács argued, had made possible the achievement of “self-knowledge,” “the true concrete knowledge of man as a social being.”Footnote 148 Later Marxist theorists, Robinson acknowledged, produced writings marked by “serious disagreements and differences with respect to the historical processes and structural elements” of revolutionary struggle. These differences concerned matters as varied as “the nature of class consciousness, the role of a revolutionary party, and the political nature of the peasantry and other ‘precapitalist’ laboring classes,” yet Robinson found these debates to be so fractious and far-flung that they were “impossible to even summarize.”Footnote 149 For all their strenuously asserted disagreements, they nonetheless shared what he regarded as a fatal premise: “capitalism as a progressive historical force, qualitatively increasing the mastery of human beings over the material bases of their existence.” For those outside Western Europe with direct experience of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, Robinson argued, this conception was not “adequate to the task of making the experiences of the modern world comprehensible.”Footnote 150 Racial capitalism’s drive to enslave peoples and eradicate their cultures could not conceivably be regarded as a progressive historical force in any theory worth its muster, Robinson thought.
Even where twentieth-century revolutionary movements centered peasants and colonized peoples, Robinson thought their most significant political energies emerged only partially through Marxism. Figures such as “Zapata, Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Mao, Fidel, Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, [and] Cabral,” he argued, represented at once “more than Marx and Engels had anticipated in the nineteenth century, and much less.”Footnote 151 They compelled “fundamental revisions” to Marxist thought that, paradoxically, rendered Marx himself “antiquated.”Footnote 152 Yet the historically decisive elements of their revolutionary consciousness, Robinson insisted, arose not from Marxism as such, but from a culturally grounded defense of collective life against colonial domination. Their “idiom of revolutionary consciousness,” he concluded, “has been historical and cultural,” rather than a product of capitalist social relations.Footnote 153 There was a cultural spirit at work in their defense of collective life in the face of colonial attack, one that Marxian approaches centered on economic and social structure consistently failed to apprehend.
Marx had not necessarily completely ignored these elements. He had indeed noted that the slave trade formed the prehistory of capital, but, Robinson argued, he failed to recognize the critical element: that “African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension.”Footnote 154 Robinson portrayed the modern African experience in the Atlantic world as an effort to re-create that past in a new hemisphere and preserve a culture that slavery sought to annihilate. Locating revolutionary subjectivity, he insisted, required close attention to this history.
If there was a revolutionary subject, Robinson argued, it was far more likely to be found in the black diaspora than in the European working classes because of that cultural history. The “historical and social consciousness of these Africans” was, he contended, the essential “contradiction” of “the whole enterprise of primitive accumulation.” Their “African peasant roots” disposed them to regard plantation agriculture as both “unnatural” and illegitimate.Footnote 155 Plantation life contradicted their cultural Geist—their culturally transmitted sense of how economic life should be organized. Cultures of resistance did not simply arise from economic exploitation; they drew strength from pre-existing Geists, forged in the crucible of colonial oppression.
In Black Marxism, Robinson mapped a pan-diasporic “historical archaeology” of resistance to that oppression. He traced a connective tissue binding centuries of black struggle across the western hemisphere. This tradition, he wrote, became “a structural phenomenon [that] was a concomitant of the world system and the imperialist expansion it demanded.” It rested on a “coherence … based on the African identities of its peoples” that arose in “the dialectic of imperialism and liberation.” It offered “an integrating experience that left them not only with a common task but a shared vision.”Footnote 156 The history of the black radical tradition, in Robinson’s telling, exceeded the merely theoretical proposition that the European proletariat was the universal class destined to abolish capitalism. He consistently posited, instead, a metaphysically defined, shared vision of African peoples, historically honed and culturally expressed, in opposition to imperialism and colonialism. The Geist animating this tradition seemed, to Robinson, both creative and teleological: he discerned it in the historical record, and in Robinson’s thinking, that culture endowed its peoples with a collective purpose.
For Robinson, this was where radicals should search for revolutionary consciousness: not in the European proletariat but in the black radical tradition and, possibly, other cultural traditions forged in Third World resistance. What Marxists and other materialists missed, he argued, was that capitalism was a conduit of a broader Western culture. Resisting it required not simply economic struggle but a civilizational confrontation. Drawing on Oliver Cox and Amílcar Cabral, Robinson framed capitalism as more than a mode of production: it was a Geist, a spirit, a culturally structured will to domination. Opposition, he concluded, could only come from other Geists forged in resistance. “The first attack,” he insisted, “is an attack on culture.”
Conclusion
At a moment when the American academy was entranced by linguistic, structural, and post-structural accounts of culture, Robinson insisted on the world-historical, dialectical emergence of peoples and their consciousness. Yet unlike his Marxist peers, Robinson’s dialectic did not revolve around contradictory economic relations. Change unfolded instead through civilizational struggle. Though he resembled contemporaries in criticizing orthodox Marxism’s neglect of culture, Robinson’s “culture” was more Hegelian than structural, primordial rather than linguistic, original rather than genealogical. His turn to culture illustrates a more varied, complex cultural turn than previously thought. The cultural turn as it has been transmitted to posterity is a bit too neat, too uniform. It was seemingly not one turn, but many different turns to culture.
Ironically, Robinson clung to the very elements of Marxist thinking that many cultural theorists of his moment eschewed: revolutionary peoplehood, world-historical progress, and universal subjectivity. By the fall of the Soviet Union, all of these concepts were going the way of the dodo. Robinson’s völkisch conception of Geist was even more outmoded, rendered academically untouchable since the Second World War. No wonder that, by 1989, Immanuel Wallerstein thought of Robinson as a fossil.
And yet some elements that had fossilized Black Marxism by 1989 appear newly vital today. Since 2016, as Siddhant Issar observes, our own conjuncture has generated “a need to politicize the link between capitalism and racial domination” against its depoliticization by liberals on one side and many leftists on the other. Robinson provided “a structural account” of that link for an era bereft of them.Footnote 157 What Fredric Jameson called the cultural turn’s “taboo on totality” has, apparently, grown stale.Footnote 158 Robinson invoked the concept unashamedly, referring to the black radical tradition on two separate occasions as an “ontological totality,” a metaphysical culture of resistance forged in, yet not “reducible” to, its history.Footnote 159 After a generation of swearing off searches for the “chimeras of the origin,” scholars and commentators alike have begun speaking of slavery and racism as the “original sin” and “very origin” of the United States, or capitalism, or both.Footnote 160 This has been true of both popular discourse and academic history, particularly the New Histories of Capitalism, which have often insisted on the imbrication of capitalism and racial slavery.Footnote 161 In this respect, Robinson’s claim that racism constitutes the “primordial coding of the world” appears symptomatic of our own prevailing generational mood.Footnote 162 As Fred Moten has observed, Black Marxism revealed a cultural politics that both “preced[ed]” its publication in 1983 and yet still “await[ed]” it after 2008.Footnote 163
Emerging in the wake of the financial crisis, the New Historians of Capitalism have styled themselves “a scholarly revolution,” one that finally “brought mainstream historical accounts into line with long-standing positions in Africana and Black Studies.”Footnote 164 In doing so, they echo Terence Hopkins’s call forty years earlier to merge Third World studies with European economic history. It is little surprise, then, that observers have noted the resemblance between the New Histories of Capitalism and world-systems theory.Footnote 165 Both approach capitalism primarily through commodity circulation rather than wage relations.Footnote 166 Yet when New Histories of Capitalism define it variously as “a form of selfhood or way of being, a system of representation or way of seeing, a framework of trust or way of believing,” they also blur the lines between culture and political economy, reminiscent of older traditions of the German historical school.Footnote 167 That many of these historians have not cited Werner Sombart in that effort is puzzling.Footnote 168 That more of them have begun citing Robinson is not.
Robinson’s intellectual genealogy also raises further questions, especially for his place as a now canonical thinker of contemporary political thought and black studies. As he himself insisted, he had little interest in speaking back to Eurocentric traditions, and his engagement with Marxism came chiefly through the experience of black thinkers grappling with it and, in his thinking, moving beyond it. His project, rather, was to carve out a space for black studies: to link it to black struggle historically and in the present, and to chart the genealogy of its thinking from the masses to its intellectuals. That he forwarded such a radical project with theoretical vocabulary that leaned on nineteenth-century European notions of Geist and Cox’s engagement with Sombart is therefore striking. It is not that Robinson sought to recuperate these traditions; he had no interest in shoring up their authority. The irony, instead, is that a thinker so committed to black study and the political prospects of the Third World drew on one of the most conservative, contested, and compromised strands of European thought in order to theorize its undoing. This paradox is historically illuminating for its own sake. It shows how, even as Robinson sought to provincialize Marxism and the West, his tools bore the imprint of their intellectual histories—much like he observed in the work of James, Du Bois, Cox, and Williams. That paradox is not a flaw, but rather a hallmark, of the complexity, irony, and contradictory nature of any seminal text made canonical long after its original moment of publication.
Seen in this light, Black Marxism poses questions from the past that remain unsettled in contemporary historical debates: what is capitalism? Is it a set of socioeconomic relations? A historical confluence of markets, institutions, and exchange-minded actors? Or is it the expression of a transhistorical Western civilization, inseparable from racial ordering? As Robinson reminds us in the opening lines of Black Marxism, “judgments must be made, choices taken.”Footnote 169
Acknowledgments
This article has had a long gestation, and I am grateful to many people for their assistance along the way. I thank Joshua Myers for generously sharing archival materials from the Braudel Center and the Immanuel Wallerstein Papers, as well as Maggie McNeely at SUNY–Binghamton’s Special Collections. I am likewise indebted to Raul Pizano and Matt Stahl at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Special Collections for their assistance with the Cedric Robinson Papers. I also thank the University of Virginia Department of Politics for summer funding that enabled these visits. I thank the University of Virginia Political Theory Colloquium and Robert Vinson for helpful comments at an early stage. Lawrie Balfour, Kevin Duong, Jennifer Rubenstein, and Eric Selbin were instrumental in the development of this article, and I am grateful for their guidance. I am especially grateful to Mario Rewers, Brandon Byrd, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful engagement, which substantially strengthened the manuscript.
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