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HOW BLACK MARXISTS HAVE UNDERSTOOD RACIAL OPPRESSION  
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An interview with Jeff Goodwin by Jonah Birch
February 17, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ The rich tradition of Black Marxist thought — one that includes
W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon, among many others
— emphasizes the centrality of capitalism to racial oppression and
its destructiveness for all workers. _

W.E.B. DuBlois, his wife Nina, and their baby son Burghardt in 1898.,
(UAmherst Libraries)

 

Socialists are often accused of ignoring or downplaying racism, or
objectionably “reducing” it to class. But this ignores a rich
tradition of Marxist theorizing about racial oppression that has come
to be known as “Black Marxism.” The tradition of Black Marxist
thought — which includes W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and
Frantz Fanon, among others — emphasizes both the historical
centrality of capitalism to racial oppression and the destructive
consequences of racial oppression for black workers and workers
generally.

_Jacobin_ contributor Jonah Birch recently sat down with New York
University professor Jeff Goodwin, a scholar of revolutions and social
movements who has written
[[link removed]] about
Du Bois and the Black Marxist tradition for _Catalyst_, to talk about
the enduring intellectual contributions of Black Marxist intellectuals
to social and political thought. Their discussion covered the
centrality of capitalism to racial oppression, the heterogeneity of
Black Marxist thought, and the continued life of this theoretical
tradition today.

Jonah Birch

You recently wrote in praise of Black Marxism in _Catalyst_
[[link removed]].
What exactly do you mean by “Black Marxism”’?

Jeff Goodwin

The term refers to African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean
writers, organizers, and revolutionaries who have drawn upon Marxist
theory to understand — the better to destroy — both racial
oppression and class exploitation, including colonialism. So it refers
to a theoretical and political tendency within Marxism. It’s
analogous to Marxist feminism, which of course draws upon Marxist
theory to understand gender oppression.

People sometimes say that Marxism has a “race problem,” meaning
that Marxists don’t take race seriously. But honestly, I can’t
think of a theoretical or political tradition, whether liberalism,
black nationalism, or critical race theory, that offers more insights
into racial oppression than Marxism, and this is largely due to the
Black Marxist tradition — although you of course find hostility to
racial oppression and colonialism in the work of classical Marxists
like Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, and in the work of Karl Marx
himself. And yet many people, including people on the Left, are
unaware of this tradition of theory and practice.

Jonah Birch

What would you say are the key tenets of Black Marxism?

Jeff Goodwin

Black Marxism is not homogeneous, but the central idea is that
capitalism has historically been the main pillar of racial oppression
in the modern era. And by racial oppression, I mean the political,
legal, and social domination or control of African and black peoples.

What does it mean to say that capitalism is the main pillar or
foundation of racial oppression? Black Marxists point to two
fundamental characteristics of capitalism — capitalists’
ceaseless drive for cheap labor and resources, on the one hand, and
workers’ competition for jobs, on the other — as the root causes
of racial oppression. So notice right away that, while racial
oppression is produced and motivated by capitalism according to Black
Marxists, it is obviously not the same thing as class exploitation.
Rather, it _facilitates_ the exploitation of black labor and,
thereby, of all labor.

And to say that racism in its modern form is a product of capitalism
is not to diminish in any way whatsoever racism’s horrendous
consequences. Quite the contrary. Black Marxists emphasize how black
peoples in the modern era have confronted political and social
domination as well as the extreme forms of economic exploitation this
domination has enabled. The political oppression of black peoples is
horrible in its own right, and it also makes possible especially
brutal forms of labor exploitation.

To be more specific, one inherent characteristic of capitalism is
capitalists’ ceaseless drive for cheap labor and resources. This
drive stems from the fact that capitalists compete with one another
and so are constantly looking for ways to reduce their costs of
production. One way to keep labor cheap and docile is to politically
oppress workers — to dominate and control them and so prevent them
from organizing and resisting effectively. Capitalists would prefer to
oppress all workers, but a second-best option is to dominate some
significant section of the working class — maybe women, maybe
immigrants, maybe black workers.

Black Marxists say that black peoples have been oppressed horribly by
capitalists, the government, and the police not as an end in itself,
or out of racial malice alone. Where large-scale racial domination and
inequality exist, the purpose is generally to facilitate the
exploitation and control of black labor — think of plantation
slavery and sharecropping and low-wage and precarious work in the
United States. In many cases, the motivation behind racial domination
also includes the dispossession of land and resources controlled by
specific racial groups. Colonialism obviously entails such
dispossession and is driven by capitalists’ unceasing quest for
cheap resources as well as for cheap labor.

Racial oppression is also often supported and enacted by white
workers. This is where another fundamental feature of capitalism —
workers’ competition for jobs — is important. But let me emphasize
that, for Black Marxists, large-scale systems of racial oppression and
inequality have generally been the projects of powerful ruling classes
— in conjunction with the states they control or dominate — and
that these classes have a material interest in cheapening and
exploiting the labor of African and black peoples, or seizing the
resources they own. Racial oppression is especially brutal and
enduring when powerful ruling classes and states have a material
interest in it.

Now, the motivations behind individual acts of racism are complex and
cannot always be explained in precisely these terms. But explaining
the interpersonal behavior of this or that individual is not what
Black Marxism is about. As I say, it seeks to locate the main impetus
behind large-scale institutions of racial domination, and its claim is
that the exploitation of labor — class exploitation — is generally
that impetus. Institutionalized racism is very different from
interpersonal racism.

Jonah Birch

I notice you speak of black _peoples_ in the plural. I assume this
is to emphasize the heterogeneity of the cultural and ethnic groups
within or from Africa who were colonized or enslaved and brought to
the New World.

Jeff Goodwin

Yes, exactly, and the heterogeneity of colonized peoples generally.
Somewhere W. E. B. Du Bois writes — in _Color and Democracy_, I
think — that colonized peoples have vastly different histories and
cultures and physical characteristics. What unites them is not race or
skin color but poverty, brought about by capitalist exploitation.
Their race is the ostensible reason — or justification — for their
exploitation, Du Bois says, but the real reason is to make profits
from cheap labor, black and white. The oppression of black workers, he
emphasized, inevitably cheapened white labor as well.

Jonah Birch

How does racist ideology fit into this account?

Jeff Goodwin

Racist ideology or white supremacist ideology — racism in a cultural
sense — is generally developed, diffused, and institutionalized by
ruling classes and state agencies as a way to justify and rationalize
racial oppression and inequality. Racial animus or hatred per se is
not the primary motivation for racial oppression — the wealth or
profits generated by the exploitation of black labor is the key motive
— but racism justifies this oppression and becomes a reason for its
perpetuation.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that certain racist and supremacist
notions don’t long predate capitalism. But these have been limited
in scope and influence until they become hitched to the material
interests of powerful capitalists and states, at which point racist
ideas are systematized and institutionalized and so become a material
force in their own right.

Race, accordingly, can become both the social criterion and moral
justification for the political and social oppression that makes the
exploitation of black labor easier and more intensive than might
otherwise be possible. And there’s something more. As I mentioned,
workers who are _not _racially oppressed nonetheless see their own
labor cheapened and their potential collective power diminished by the
racial divide that is created by the oppression of black workers. For
Black Marxists, then, racism is obviously extraordinarily important in
its own right, notwithstanding the idea that Marxism has a “race
problem.” Black Marxists are in no sense “class reductionists.”

Now, there have been “vulgar” or simple-minded Marxists and
socialists who have claimed that the problems of oppressed black
workers are no different from the problems all workers confront. This
is obviously wrong. Historically, white workers have been exploited,
sometimes quite ruthlessly, but in the United States they have never
faced anything like the political, legal, and social oppression of
black workers.

The great American socialist Eugene V. Debs once said that “we have
nothing special to offer the Negro,” meaning, nothing other than the
class politics the Socialist Party was offering to white workers. But
as William Jones
[[link removed]] has
shown, this quip has been taken out of context. In reality, Debs was
an ardent foe of racism, and he criticized socialists who ignored
racism or who thought the class struggle “obliterated” the need to
address racist laws and institutions. Racism was an obstacle to class
solidarity, Debs thought, and so had to be fought by all workers. Paul
Heideman’s edited collection _Class Struggle and the Color Line_
[[link removed]] includes
writings by a number of American socialists and communists, black and
white, including Debs, who understood the profound importance of
confronting and destroying racism among white workers and in the
larger society.

Today it’s fair to say that most Marxists by far, due in part to the
work of Black Marxists, understand that the various institutions and
laws and norms of racial oppression are different from and every bit
as evil as the exploitation of black labor — even as they expedite
that exploitation. Racist practices infuse workplaces — they operate
“at the point of production” — but they also extend into society
as a whole and shape the relations between governments and their
subjects. These racist institutions and laws and practices must be
fought in conjunction with the fight against class exploitation.

Jonah Birch

Earlier you mentioned that Black Marxists see workers’ competition
for jobs in capitalist societies as linked to racism. Can you say more
about that?

Jeff Goodwin

Some Black Marxists stress that white workers can be violently racist,
although their racism is different from that of capitalists. An
important insight of Black Marxism, in fact, is that racism is not of
one piece — it takes different class forms in different economic and
political contexts. For white workers, racism is often motivated by a
fear that black workers — or certain ethnic groups, or immigrants
— will take their jobs or drive down their incomes because they are
willing to work for lower wages, or because they are forced to work
for lower wages or no wages at all.

Capitalists, naturally, try to stoke this fear. Out of this fear, you
see white workers trying to exclude blacks (and certain white ethnic
groups), often violently, from better-paying jobs or whole industries
as well as from trade unions. The result is what’s called a split
labor market [[link removed]], with black
workers relegated to lower-paying jobs or even, in some contexts,
excluded from the labor market altogether. Again, racist or
supremacist beliefs become a means of justifying this exclusion and
violence. The term “split labor market,” I should note, was
developed in the 1970s by a Marxist sociologist, Edna Bonacich, but
the basic idea goes back at least to Du Bois.

Now, it’s important to remember that workers don’t have the power
to hire and fire workers — that’s what capitalists do. So split
labor markets only arise when capitalists have an interest in acceding
to the demands of racist workers. But capitalists sometimes push back
against workers’ demands to exclude black workers from certain
occupations or industries — above all, when there are labor
shortages, including shortages of skilled workers or the labor
shortages that strikes create. Capitalists in the United States were
notorious for using black strikebreakers
[[link removed]] to
replace striking white workers, a move that both undercut strikes and
typically inflamed the racial animosities of white workers,
reinforcing the racial divide in the working class.

Marxists do not, of course, regard working-class racism as inevitable.
Through organizing and class struggles with capitalists, they believe,
white workers can come to understand the need for broad, multiracial
class solidarity, and that capitalism is responsible for the dearth of
good-paying jobs, not other workers struggling to survive.

The political implication of this perspective is that class struggles
will and should be integral to any strategy of black liberation or
decolonization — both at the point of production and in civil
society more broadly. If the exploitation of black labor and the
simultaneous exclusion of black labor from better-paying jobs are the
economic foundation of racial oppression, as Black Marxists propose,
then that foundation has to be undermined, if not destroyed
altogether. In their struggles against racial oppression and class
exploitation, moreover, black workers will need the broadest possible
solidarity from workers of other racial groups in order to succeed,
even if racism promises to hinder such solidarity. Hence the need to
fight this racism at every turn. Class solidarity is especially
important, of course, where the racially oppressed workers are a
minority, as in the United States.

Jonah Birch

You’ve mentioned Du Bois, but who are the other key figures in the
Black Marxist tradition? Who are the architects of the ideas you’ve
been discussing?

Jeff Goodwin

This tradition includes an incredibly impressive group of people. A
short list of Black Marxists would include, in addition to Du Bois, C.
L. R. James, Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Aimé
Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Claude Ake, Neville Alexander,
Manning Marable, and Stuart Hall. Paul Robeson was very close to this
tendency and to Du Bois in particular. Malcolm X
[[link removed]] was
apparently moving toward this tradition in the year before his
assassination. It includes African revolutionaries like Kwame Nkrumah,
Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, and Eduardo Mondlane. Prominent Black
Panthers and some Black Power advocates, including Huey Newton, Fred
Hampton, and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) belong to this tradition.
And James Baldwin, who was both a friend of Martin Luther King Jr and
a fan of the Panthers, was close to it by the early 1970s — just
read his book _No Name in the Street_
[[link removed]].
No other theoretical or political tradition that has tackled the
question of racial domination can boast of such a brilliant lineup of
writers, intellectuals, and revolutionaries.

Jonah Birch

There is a dispute over whether W. E. B. Du Bois was a Marxist, no?

Jeff Goodwin

Until recently, actually, there was no dispute. Everyone — everyone
on the Left anyway — understood that Du Bois became a Marxian
socialist before writing, at age sixty-five, his magnum opus, _Black
Reconstruction in America_, and subsequent radical works, although
there are certainly traces of Marxism and socialism in his earlier
work. Du Bois’s Marxism is obvious in his posthumously published
autobiography. Du Bois eventually became a fellow traveler of the
communist movement — a staunch Stalinist, actually — and joined
the Communist Party, or what was left of it in the wake of
McCarthyism, in 1961, when he was ninety-three.

Recently, a group of liberal sociologists has vigorously denied or
downplayed all this, and they have concocted something they call “Du
Boisian sociology,” which they have bleached of all traces of
Marxism — a real whitewashing, so to speak. Not surprisingly, this
group equates Marxism with “class reductionism.” People who are
interested can read an exchange
[[link removed]] between
myself and one of these faux “Du Boisians” in _Catalyst_. I wrote
my defense of Black Marxism as a response to this denialism, which is
based on a profound ignorance of both the later Du Bois and the Black
Marxist tradition.

Jonah Birch

Haven’t questions of race and ethnicity been taken up by a wide
range of Marxists of many races and nationalities?

Jeff Goodwin

For sure. Black Marxism is just a part — although I think the most
interesting part — of a broader multiracial and multinational
tradition within Marxism that seeks to understand racial domination as
well as ethnic and national oppression, including colonialism. This
broader tradition includes classical Marxists like Luxemburg and
Lenin, but also the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who
wrote about the “Indian question” in Latin America, and the
Japanese economist Kamekichi Takahashi. It includes people of South
Asian descent, from M. N. Roy to A. Sivanandan, among many others. It
also includes Ho Chi Minh, who had some interesting things to say
about European racism, as you might imagine.

This tradition also includes white European and North American figures
like the Austromarxist Otto Bauer; Max Shachtman, who wrote about race
in the United States; and Herbert Aptheker, a friend and literary
executor of Du Bois, who wrote a great book on American slave revolts.
And the tradition includes more recent figures like Eric Hobsbawm,
Theodore Allen, and Benedict Anderson, who is famous for his idea that
a nation is an “imagined community,” an idea also applicable to
race and ethnicity. It also includes white South Africans who were
involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, including Martin Legassick
and Harold Wolpe.

Jonah Birch

Is the Black Marxist tradition still alive?

Jeff Goodwin

Very much so! A number of interesting and important writers
immediately come to mind, including the Columbia historian Barbara
Fields, Adolph Reed and his son Touré Reed, Kenneth Warren, Zine
Magubane, Cedric Johnson, August Nimtz, Preston Smith, and the Harvard
philosopher Tommie Shelby, a self-described “Afro-Analytical
Marxist.” And these are only figures in the United States.

Jonah Birch

What about Cedric Robinson, who wrote a famous book in 1983 called
Black Marxism? Wasn’t the term “Black Marxism” popularized by
him?

Jeff Goodwin

It was, ironically, although not only by him. I say “ironically”
because Robinson was a strident opponent of Marxism. He thought that
Marxism, like “Western” culture as a whole, was blind to racism
and in fact implicitly and often overtly racist, and that its
categories were inapplicable to non-European societies. For Robinson,
as for the “Du Boisian” sociologists I mentioned, there is only
one kind of Marxism: vulgar, class-reductionist Marxism.

But because Robinson wrote a book called _Black Marxism_, I think a
lot of people just assume that he himself must be a Marxist or
pro-Marxist. But nothing could be further from the truth. Robinson
apparently did not even want to call his book _Black Marxism_, but I
believe his publisher thought it would sell better with that title.

_Black Marxism_ has many flaws, including an awful rendering of the
thought of actual Black Marxists, especially the ideas of Du Bois and
C. L. R. James. Robinson’s view of Du Bois as an alleged critic of
Marxism is based on a truncated reading of Du Bois’s work and on a
profound misreading of _Black Reconstruction in America_ in
particular. His take on Du Bois is similar to that of the “Du
Boisian” sociologists. Robinson claims, with no evidence whatsoever,
that Du Bois and James abandoned Marxism, which allowed them to
discover something he calls the “black radical tradition.” But
this is pure fiction — neither Du Bois nor James abandoned Marxism.
Du Bois’s commitment to Marxism and the communist movement only
deepened over time, even after Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech in
1956 exposing Joseph Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasion of
Hungary of that same year. As I mentioned, he joined the Communist
Party very late in his life, just a couple years before his death.
That would be quite odd, if you think about it, for someone who
allegedly gave up on Marxism.

Jonah Birch

The “black radical tradition” — one hears this phrase quite a
lot these days. What is it, and how is it related to Black Marxism?

Jeff Goodwin

It depends on who you ask! The subtitle of Robinson’s book _Black
Marxism_ is “The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.” When I
first saw that, I thought he was equating Black Marxism with this
black radical tradition, or at least suggesting that Black Marxists
were part of the black radical tradition. And that makes sense. But
for Robinson, the two have no connection whatsoever. Marxism is
essentially and forever European and racist, and the black radical
tradition is essentially and forever pan-African and anti-racist.
Robinson is insistent, accordingly, that Marxism has nothing to offer
anti-racists. How could it, if Marxism is part of Western culture,
which is irredeemably racist?

In the real world, black intellectuals and revolutionaries have of
course drawn upon Marxism in an effort to better understand racism,
imperialism, and colonialism. This describes Du Bois and James
perfectly. They are central to the black radical tradition in any
meaningful sense of that term, as are the other Black Marxists I’ve
mentioned. I would also include in this tradition non-Marxists who
nevertheless see and emphasize the ways in which capitalism is
implicated in racial oppression and inequality, and who are therefore
anti-capitalist, if not necessarily revolutionaries. I have in mind
various social democratic and Christian socialist figures like A.
Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Eric Williams (a student of C. L. R.
James), Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and of course Martin Luther King
Jr. Baker, who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) in 1960, was quite close to Marxists, in fact. In any
event, all these people surely deserve a place within the black
radical tradition.

Jonah Birch

So you’re suggesting that what distinguishes black radicals from
other anti-racists — liberal anti-racists and black nationalists —
is their anti-capitalism?

Jeff Goodwin

Yes, the key distinguishing criterion is anti-capitalism. We should
understand the black radical tradition as simultaneously anti-racist
and anti-capitalist. Radicals think the two have to go together. I
don’t see how you can call yourself a radical in this world if you
are not opposed in principle to capitalism.

For this reason, I would also place some but certainly not all black
nationalists and anti-colonialists in the black radical tradition. But
those nationalists who support capitalism, including so-called black
capitalism, necessarily support exploitation and inequality. There’s
nothing radical about that. This is Frantz Fanon’s central thesis
in _The Wretched of the Earth_. Beware, he warned, of the black
bourgeoisie — or of the national bourgeoisie, as he called it.
Unlike Robinson, I don’t think anti-racism and anti-colonialism
alone make you a radical. There are obviously many elitist and
authoritarian anti-racists and anti-colonial nationalists.

Jonah Birch

And you would place Martin Luther King Jr within the black radical
tradition as well?

Jeff Goodwin

Absolutely. He became increasingly open about his hostility to
capitalism and his support for democratic socialism in the last years
of his life. His education had brought him into contact with many
Christian socialists and their writings. King’s doctoral
dissertation discusses two leftist theologians, Paul Tillich and Henry
Nelson Wieman. Matt Nichter
[[link removed]] has
written recently about the many socialists, communists, and
ex-communists who supported or worked for King’s Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. King also strongly supported the labor
movement [[link removed]], and
the most radical unions in the country supported him. King was of
course supporting a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis when he
was assassinated.

MLK never resorted to red-baiting and in fact looked askance at
liberal anti-communists. He appreciated how communists had supported
the civil rights movement.

Given this background, King never resorted to red-baiting and in fact
looked askance at liberal anti-communists. He appreciated how
communists had supported the civil rights movement. One of his last
great speeches was a tribute to Du Bois
[[link removed]], on the
hundredth anniversary of his birth. He scolded those who denied or
downplayed Du Bois’s communist politics, which he thought only
served to reinforce negative stereotypes about socialism and
communism.

In fact, I think King must be regarded as one of the greatest
socialists in American history. In his crusade against poverty, by the
way, King came to support a guaranteed income for all, and he wanted
to set this income not at the poverty line but at the median income
level of the country. I’m not sure that makes practical sense —
people who make less than the median income would presumably quit
their jobs and take the guaranteed income! But this proposal clearly
reflects King’s hatred not just for poverty but for any economic
system that denies people the material resources they need to flourish
and not just survive.

Jonah Birch

Contemporary Black Marxists seem particularly critical of what they
call “race reductionism.” What exactly is race reductionism?

Jeff Goodwin

That phrase is probably best known from Touré Reed’s 2020
book, _Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism_
[[link removed]], although
others have also used it. It’s based on the liberal tendency
to separate class from racism
[[link removed]],
to view racism as disconnected from labor exploitation in particular.
This is in stark contrast to a major tenet of Black Marxism, which
sees labor exploitation and systemic exclusion from better-paying jobs
as central to racial oppression. Liberals often separate racism from
class and then use racism in a general, abstract sense — as
irrational prejudice — as an explanation for racial oppression.
It’s an idealist argument — racism as an idea causes the
oppression of black peoples. If class reductionism — which, as
we’ve seen, Black Marxists emphatically reject — advises us to
forget about racial domination, race reductionists advise us to forget
about class divisions and class exploitation. So of course Black
Marxists and black radicals are opposed to this theoretical move.

To put it another way, the concept of race becomes reductionist and
ideological when it obscures class divisions and
exploitation _within_ a racial group as well as common class
interests that _cut across_ racial groups and are a potential basis
for class solidarity. Similarly, the use of racism or racist ideas as
an explanation becomes reductionist if racism is disconnected from
class interests.

Oliver Cromwell Cox, an important Black Marxist sociologist, says
somewhere that if beliefs alone could oppress a race, then the beliefs
blacks have about whites should be as powerful as the beliefs whites
have about blacks. But that’s only true if you forget about class
and state power. In a similar vein, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
once said that if a white man wanted to lynch him, that was the white
man’s problem. But if the white man had the _power_ to lynch him,
then and only then did it become Carmichael’s problem. Cox and
Carmichael are just saying the obvious: ideas disconnected from power
are impotent. All this isn’t to say that race and
racism _never_ matter. Obviously not. Racism can be very
consequential and persistent precisely when it is connected to the
material interests of powerful classes and states. This is a central
tenet of Black Marxism.

Jonah Birch

I want to ask you, finally, about the concept of “racial
capitalism.” This is another phrase one hears a lot these days on
the Left. Is this a concept that Black Marxists developed? And what
does it mean exactly?

Jeff Goodwin

Marxists did develop this term, but let me begin by saying that a lot
of ink has been wasted in an effort to define this phrase. None of the
great Black Marxists from whom we’ve learned so much ever used this
phrase — not Du Bois or James, not Cox or Fanon, not Rodney or Hall,
not Nkrumah or Cabral. So it’s obviously possible to talk, and to
talk insightfully, about race and class and capitalism and oppression
without using this term. Simply putting together the words
“racial” and “capitalism” does not magically guarantee that
you understand the relationship between capitalism and racism. Of
course, I’m hardly the first person to point this out.

That said, the phrase “racial capitalism” was in fact first
developed by Marxists in South Africa, during the apartheid era. A
couple sociologists, Marcel Paret and Zach Levenson
[[link removed]],
have shown that the phrase was apparently first used by a white
Berkeley professor, Bob Blauner, in 1972. But few people picked up on
it until the term was widely used by South African Marxists, including
Neville Alexander, Martin Legassick, and Bernard Magubane, during the
late 1970s and 1980s. Their point was that because capitalism was the
foundation of racial oppression in South Africa, the anti-apartheid
struggle needed to be anti-capitalist as well as a struggle for
democratic rights.

This was in opposition to the standpoint of Nelson Mandela’s African
National Congress (ANC) and South Africa’s Communist Party. They
argued that the struggle for socialism should be postponed until after
a democratic revolution — a “national democratic revolution,” as
they called it — overthrew apartheid. But this implies, implausibly,
that apartheid had little or nothing to do with capitalism and the
exploitation of black workers. In fact, the ANC did more than postpone
the struggle for socialism — it abandoned it altogether. In any
event, for Black Marxists the term “racial capitalism” refers to
the fact that capitalism has been the foundation of racial oppression
of various types in societies the world over.

Yet many people mistakenly believe that “racial capitalism” is
Cedric Robinson’s idea. If they bothered to actually read his book,
they’d see he hardly uses the term at all. And Robinson — who,
again, is hostile to Marxism — uses the term very differently from
Black Marxists. In fact, he understands the term in a
race-reductionist way. For Robinson, capitalism is just another
manifestation of age-old Western culture, so of course it is
inherently racist. For him, capitalism doesn’t create systems of
racial oppression, as Black Marxists argue. Rather, the racist
character of Western culture, which goes back many centuries, somehow
ensures that any economic order associated with it — feudalism,
capitalism, socialism — will also be racist.

Again, it’s an idealist argument. Ideas, in this case those of
Western culture, constantly reproduce racial oppression from some
power of their own, first in Europe and then around the world. But how
are these ideas so powerful? Might it have something to do with the
material interests of powerful classes and states, as Black Marxists
argue? Robinson sometimes gestures in this direction, but for the most
part he doesn’t say. The ideas themselves are all-powerful for him.
That’s just not a serious explanation for racism.

Cedric Robinson uses the term ‘racial capitalism’ very differently
from Black Marxists. In fact, he understands the term in a
race-reductionist way.

I should note that a lot of liberals seem to love the term “racial
capitalism.” They more than anyone are clearly most responsible for
its spread in recent years, at least in the academy. Liberals use the
phrase to mean something like an economy in which employers
discriminate against blacks and other minorities. Their ideal world is
one of _nonracial _capitalism — labor exploitation without
discrimination. This is an ideal very far indeed from the Black
Marxist vision of socialism.

But to go back to my initial point, what is really at stake here is
our understanding of capitalism, racial domination, and the
relationship between the two. It really doesn’t matter if one uses
the words “racial capitalism” or not. The Black Marxist tradition
itself clearly demonstrates that we needn’t use those words to
understand these things. The phrase won’t magically enlighten us,
and some meanings of the term — the race-reductionist and liberal
definitions — will simply lead us astray.

To return to where we started, it is essential to understand exactly
how capitalism has been and continues to be the main foundation of
racial domination. That means you cannot eliminate racism without
destroying or at least strongly constraining and regulating
capitalism. This is the message of the Black Marxist tradition.

_Jeff Goodwin is a professor of sociology at New York University and
currently chairs the American Sociological Association’s section on
Marxist sociology. He has written and published extensively on social
movements and revolutions._

_Jonah Birch is a regular contributor to Jacobin. He has a PhD in
sociology from New York University._

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* Racism
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* capitalism
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* Black Marxists
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