Cedric Robinson (was Re: [Marxism] The Brenner thesis and L* P*)

["Calvin Broadbent" <calvinbroadbent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Cedric Robinson, in his *Black Marxism* considers that economistic Marxism
has never know what to make of racial, national, and gender oppression. For
Robinson, Marxism has ignored the extent to which 'culture', including
racism, has shaped the trajectories of capital accumulation.

Certainly, one economistic strand of Marxism has tended, and tends still in
the theories of the likes of Ted Grant on Ireland, to reduce socio-political
forces to wage-labour v. capital struggles, abnegating the material
strutural supports for these relations (including national, racial and
sexual divisions of labour).

But it is wrong to separate 'culture' and production, just as it is wrong to
separate 'race' and class, in an a priori analytis of society. The European
imperialists of the highest stage of capitalism (a stage which we *still*
inhabit) drew on, and conjured up, images and traditions of the grandeurs of
earlier imperialisms, like that of the ancient Romans. But it is quite
reductionist, in my opinion, to apply the epithet 'racial' to Roman
imperialism in the same way one would unhesitatingly apply it to British
colonialist imperialism. To my mind, one major difference lies in the fact
of the consolidation of world European supremacy at the time of British high
imperialism, as opposed to the 'multi-national' (sic) imperialism of the
Romans, for whom the 'barbarians' were blue-eyed whites from the North. In
early periods of history, before the advent of a capitalist world system,
ethnocentrism, and tribalism was the general rule. After the advent of a
capilaist world system, racism was, and is, the rule.

See this essay on Cedric Robinson's misunderstanding of Marxism. (I think,
although I might be mistaken, that Robinson identifies himself as an
anarchist, believing that the cultures of black resistance fostered over
millenia and in the crucible of slavery and the African diaspora, offer a
less rigid praxis of anti-authoritarian political struggle. But, as I say,
this seems to leave the objectivities of class position out of the picture).

<http://eserver.org/clogic/3-1&2/meyerson.html>

LOUIS PROYECT WROTE:

Charles, ideology is driven by material social and economic conditions, not
the other way around. When Europeans obeyed economic imperatives to find an
alternative route to Asia and bypass Middle Eastern merchants, they
happened on the New World. Once they were there, they developed racial
ideologies that dovetailed with the need to exterminate or enslave
indigenous peoples. When indigenous peoples, especially in North America,
proved unsuitable for plantation labor, they brought in slaves from Africa.
To explain this injustice to themselves, they once again resorted to racial
myths. When the British invoked Rome,  it was like Hitler invoking Teutonic
legends. The drive for profits explains colonialism and racism, not myths
and legends.

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