Cedric Robinson’s 1983 Black Marxism^[1] is a work that has had a second, and even third life. First revived first in academic circles by the proselytizing of his acolyte, acclaimed historian Robin D.G. Kelly, the book was again revived in popular circles by the waves of Black Lives Matters protests that sought in it (along with works of prison abolitionists) a theoretical and historical narrative to broaden the immediate convulsive moment of protest towards a vision of how society might change, and under the impact of what form of mobilization. In this sense, it played a role in BLM protests similar to Graeber’s Debt during Occupy. One couldn’t find a prescription of how to protest in it, nor could one find among most protesters a familiarity with its core ideas, but nonetheless those set into motion found themselves drawn to it, and searching for guidance in its pages.

Robinson’s work was originally produced in the aftershocks of the 1970s, following a years-long process in which the New Left, born of the interracial integrationist struggles of the civil rights movement, gradually fragmented along ethnic lines, with various ethnically separated organizations espousing a variety of nationalisms. Black Marxism attempted to provide a theoretical grappling with that diaspora of the left – depending on how one interpreted it, either to justify it and give it firmer grounding, or to work towards a new synthesis on which a regroupment was possible.

For August Nimtz, at the time a former nationalist and pan-Africanist who had moved towards the interracialism and Trotskyism of the Socialist Workers Party, the answer was straightforward. His 1985 review in Journal of African Marxists was one of the first confrontations with Robinson’s text, where he characterized it as a book by a nationalist who “has had to familiarize himself—if not always understand—class analysis.” Nimtz’ insightful review has languished for forty years in even more obscurity than Robinson’s book, until it has now been reprinted as a central element of the subject of this review — Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique, a book which collects various material Nimtz has published over the years, as well as autobiographical materials and new essays, into Nimtz’ most sustained literary confrontation with nationalist thought.^[2]

There are layers upon layers to the discussion, almost too many to sort through. Nimtz describes how his focus today differs from how he reviewed the book at the time, with each successive chapter of his critique prefaced by an introduction describing the context and moment of its production. Beyond that, Black Marxism itself has transformed, both as a matter of its reception and the use (or misuse) to which its own arguments have been put, and more directly by the 2000 preface that recasts some of its arguments. Further, even Nimtz’s original review 40 years ago was subtitled “The ‘Class v. Race’ Debate Revisited” — the topics under discussion being ones that had been debated for decades prior, and the authors Robinson surveys each having undergone complex evolutions of their own, grappling with the same topics in their own ways. A critical evaluation of Black Marxism and Nimtz’s response thus finds itself at risk of being lost in the nightmarish weight of the past even as it tries to assess what might concern us at the present.

Black Marxism is an ambitious text, with elements of historical analysis, political economy, and literary critique, attempting to span world history from the time of ancient Greece to the modern day. The first of its three sections attempts to give a historized account of the development of Marxism as a tradition. It first develops a broad (though often contested) account of the prevalence of racial thought in ancient times, the development of the industrial working class and workers’ movement in England (as well as its limitations and debates over economic and national narrowness), and finally treats the emergence of Marx with special attention to his views on national development and national consciousness, concluding ultimately that Marxism failed “in determining the historical force and character of ideology as nationalism.”

The second section of Black Marxism traces a “counter-history” of what Robinson considers the roots of a Black radical tradition – beginning with early encounters between Europe and Africa dating to ancient Egypt and then the Islamic world, moving to colonization and the slave trade, and then finally to the heroic slave rebellions and national uprisings of the New World. He concludes with an attempt to define what the “radical tradition” running through such entails.

Having set out two legs of a classic Hegelian triad (Robinson remains throughout an acolyte of Marx’s method even while often a critic of his analysis or conclusions), Black Marxism presents in its third and final section an account of 20th century figures who navigated a struggle for racial freedom or pan-Africanist national liberation while also active and self-avowed Marxists, focusing on W.E.B. Du Bois (particularly the production of his magisterial Black Reconstruction in America), C.L.R. James (particularly his groundbreaking history of the Haitian revolution, Black Jacobins), and Richard Wright (especially his neglected 1953 novel, The Outsider, fusing racial anger to French existential despair).

Any one of these sections, and in fact any subsection of such, would be grounds for a rich debate – and indeed Black Marxism has been a fertile tree from a thousand discourses to spring. That alone makes it worthwhile, but it is a different question to say to what degree any of the specific analyses it advances are correct, much less what direction, if any, it points towards in terms of action and organization.

To these three themes, the 2000 preface by Robinson to a reprinting of Black Marxism adds a fourth, which unfortunately reframes the text that follows. Before, Robinson had seen Marx’s method (at least as he understood it) as worthy of emulation and sought to supplement the analysis, while also reaching for a new culturalist national dimension. But 20-odd years of reaction, the death of the Soviet Union, and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism had soured Robinson on Marx more thoroughly. His new preface gives an account more shallow and accusatory than prior, accusing Marx wholesale of only addressing economic oppression; now the authors he examines at the end are no longer characterized as synthesizing Marxism with other traditions, but inventing a “Black Radical Tradition” to overtake Marxism. With this new preface, the work as a whole becomes too easy to read not as an all-sided historical interrogation, but instead a narrow anti-Marxist polemic – all the more so to those who only sought to extract its “lessons” rather than follow the course of its investigations for themselves.

Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique

Among the responses to Robinson, Nimtz stands out not only for the relative earliness of his work, but also for his desire to defend a straightforward orthodox Marxism. Thus, in some ways Nimtz almost pre-emptively responded to the points that Robinson would draw out in his 2000 preface. In his 1985 review, the first key argument made by Nimtz is to defend Marx’s method, and in particular to critique the equation made by Robinson between the specific countries and periods Marx most studied (contemporary Europe, where he lived) with the broader analytical and theoretical grasp of his project. Here, as in a few other places, he ends up not so much illustrating deficiencies in Robinson’s account of race and capitalism as in Robinson’s account of Marx. For example, he explains that “A major element in Robinson’s thesis is that Marx and Engels failed to see that Europe’s proletariat bought into its racist legacy and that its revolutionary potential was, thus, undermined.” But of course, as Nimtz goes on to quote at length, Marx and Engels advocated staunchly for the freedom of the Irish and described how anti-Irish racism undermined the cause of the working class as a whole. What prevents this exercise from becoming merely a litany of “Marx did not anticipate” gotchas and responses is that In the course of dismantling these “straw men” of Robinson, Nimtz provides an overview of Marx and Engels’ own writings and views on racism, nationalism, colonialism and slavery – especially but not only regarding the Civil War, a theme which is throughout Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique.

Nimtz then moves to address Robinson’s trinity of “Black radical” scholars and activists – Wright, James, and Du Bois. Here he raises an important issue which Robinson omits entirely. Robinson’s account of “Marxism” is, with certain exceptions, an effectively unitary tradition that culminates in the “official communism” of the Soviet Union and its allied parties. But Nimtz, like many of the 20th-century Marxist left, is not of that tradition – his views are with the Trotskyism of the Socialist Workers Party. So what Robinson’s heroic figures confront is, by and large, not “Marxism” in the sense of Marx and Engels themselves, but a particular reconstruction of it by parties with a vested political and national loyalty to an existing state regime. (And when they came via a Trotskyist tradition, such as James, their disputes with the tradition were not on the question of race, but on the question of a characterization of the Soviet Union).

This also presents a lacunae in Nimtz’s own treatment of Robinson. While he correctly argues that Wright’s disavowal of “communism” was in reality a disavowal of Stalinism (and in fact he could go further in explaining how it was more the issue of Soviet foreign policy and artistic freedom than racial issues directly), he is in a sense ungenerous in not exploring how the same process could describe the limitations of Robinson himself. This is to say that Robinson’s “straw men” might not apply to Marx and Engels themselves, nor to Lenin, or even Trotsky, but they certainly could apply to many self-declared inheritors of such traditions. Marx stood for anti-colonial uprisings and against racial chauvinism, for the equality of women and for an end to the bourgeois family, and for a broad conception of the world proletariat rather than only the workers of Europe. But if that is not the Marx we are presented with today, or that Robinson saw, perhaps that is also the fault of many self-professed adherents of Marx who came after and stripped him of these features.

Robinson encountered throughout the 70s “class-exclusive” Marxists aplenty, echoed in the narrow and reactionary “anti-woke” leftists of today from Compact and Damage magazine to the American Communist Party and even some aspects of what authors such as Vivek Chibber write in Jacobin. A more sympathetic reading of Black Marxism places it in response to such figures even more than Marx or Engels themselves: a plea not for an alternative to Marxism, but a more expansive one, in dialogue with those traditions and aspects of struggle that had grown up elsewhere alongside it. For example, Robinson’s treatment of Marx on Eurocentrism is substantially better than Nimtz’s review might lead one to think; he does eventually discuss Marx’s opposition to bigotry within the British working class, and even his views (such as in the famous Zasulich letter^[3]) that the historical account of capitalism’s rise in Europe in no way conditions that this pattern must repeat itself similarly elsewhere. In cases such as this, Robinson, just as much as Nimtz, seeks to extend Marx’s thought and develop it internally to the tradition, rather than to levy a blanket grounds for dismissal.

While Nimtz does not adequately see this side of Robinson or grant him the grace he does to Wright or Du Bois, sadly it is indeed Nimtz’s negative critique that most properly responds to Black Marxism as recast through its 2000 introduction, or even more through its popular usage today, where it is most often invoked as a cudgel to stand in the way of thought about Marxism (just as the caricature of Marxism that Robinson confronts has been invoked as a cudgel to stand in the way of thought about race).

The remaining articles reprinted in Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique do not mainly address Robinson explicitly, but address similar arguments in greater depth. The first is drawn from a 2002 essay for Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, and addresses Marx’s purported “eurocentrism” – elaborating further on his advocacy for Irish freedom, and his writings in support of the liberation of slaves during the U.S. Civil War, as well as the aforementioned Zasulich letter describing the potential he saw in the Russian peasantry.

Following that treatment of Marx on colonialism and Eurocentrism is a discussion of Marx on race, drawn from an appendix to Nimtz’s 2024 co-authored book: The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time. Here we need not dwell on the specific quotes of Marx’s that have been used to impugn his views on race, nor exactly how Nimtz contextualizes and defends Marx. Suffice to say that I’m glad he did the job, and sorry he had to.

In answering criticisms from Wulf Hund, Nimtz takes the opportunity to expand further on his own vision of Du Bois and C.L.R. James at the height of their work. Rather than disillusioned anti-Marxists who embraced nationalism, Nimtz presents them as active socialists deliberately inspired by Marxism and seeking to operate in its spirit – and even, as in the case of James, directly chastened by Trotsky to pay even greater attention to the revolutionary capacity of the Black American proletariat. Here, Nimtz also cites the recollection of the American Communist and then Trotskyist leader James Cannon who wrote “Everything new and progressive on the Negro question came from Moscow, after the revolution of 1917, and as a result of the revolution—not only for the American communists who responded directly but for all others concerned with the question.”^[4] Finally, Nimtz addresses concretely how we might begin to understand a Marxist account of racial oppression and liberation – taking the example of Cuba, a society that had been marked as deeply by the “peculiar institution” of racial slavery as deeply as Brazil and the United States. Today, of course, Cuba, while far from a paradise (racial or otherwise), is substantially more racially equitable than the latter two societies. What changed? A revolution in which there was “the beginning of the end to all the perks that came with private ownership of the means of production in Cuba, including those of racial privilege.”

From Marxology to the Modern World

By now the themes of Nimtz’s response to Robinson and other cultural nationalists are clear – a pedagogical explanation of Marx’s historical materialism coupled to a recounting of his advocacy and analysis surrounding the Civil War (and, to a lesser extent, anti-colonial struggles), and a gloss on how that laid the framework for thinkers such as James and Du Bois who came after to build on. But as useful as this is, it does not yet touch the most burning question that has sent so many radicals again and again to the pages of Black Marxism – what does it tell us about what to do today?

On this score, Nimtz is not able to give as directly polemical a reply against Robinson, because, maddeningly, Robinson has no real suggestion of his own answers to polemicize against. His definition of the “Black radical tradition,” in theory the topic of Black Marxism, is maddeningly tautological: “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”^[5] This is to say it is the sum total of historical struggles by Black people motivated by the desire to preserve themselves. Unlike the tradition of Marxist thought, which can be identified with certain core beliefs, debates, organizations, analyses, and programmatic demands, we are confronted less with a “tradition” and more with a mere historical record. In this record are heroic figures, powerful stories, tremendous victories such as the Haitian Revolution, as well as tragic defeats. Robinson recounts much of this well. But there is no tradition, properly speaking, just an assemblage of fact, and a desire to shore it up into a narrative. This is already evident in how Robinson speaks of “discovering” the tradition. Traditions, typically, do not need to be discovered. They are already upheld and transmitted and celebrated – that is precisely what makes them traditions; that without external intervention they already are imbued into the living memory and practice of a people.

If Nimtz’s defense of Marx tends to fix on the 1850s and the American Civil War, Robinson’s fixation remains earlier still. Black Marxism’s middle section on “The Roots of Black Radicalism” is undoubtedly its best – bringing together many strands of then-current historical research to tell a compelling story of the early slave rebellions in their myriad forms, from maroonage and escape to rebellious free communities to localized uprising and ultimately to participation in the wave of New World revolutions and the beginnings of anti-colonial organizing in Africa. But for Robinson, these historic movements, still more distant than the “general strike of the slaves” of the Civil War, constitute the tradition that must be rediscovered and looked towards.

But what are we to take from this history, for today? Are there plantations that can be run away from, hills in the interior of our nations that troops cannot reach, with thriving native populations with which we can intermarry? And are the figures of such a tradition only worthy of celebration? After all, the Jamaican maroons which Robinson praises eventually settled their wars with the British by signing treaties promising to return runaway slaves to the plantations from which they fled.^[6] During the great slave insurrection of 1760-61 known as Tacky’s Revolt, the maroons also played their part in its violent suppression.^[7] Later still, during the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion against the racist treatment of and poor conditions of then-freed Black people, it was the Moore Town Maroons who were called out to bloodily suppress it, eventually arresting its instigator, Paul Bogle. All told, the suppression of Morant Bay carried out by the Maroons and directed by the British government resulted in the murder of well over 500 and arrest and summary execution of hundreds more, including Bogle.^[8]

With the end of slavery in Jamaica, as elsewhere, Black people were emancipated from direct ownership, but not from the servitude of poverty and wage slavery. What had before been an oppression that manifested primarily in racial terms became transformed into one in which racial oppression was an aspect of a broader form of domination by the capitalist class, and in which some, such as the Maroons (who had their own settlements and land), could cement or maintain special privilege or treatment by turning on their brethren of the same race, but different class position. The same divide-and-rule by which the capitalists enticed white workers to break solidarity with Black workers was also capable of turning Black people against one another. Time and again, even while the poison of racism and racial oppression remained dire enemies to the oppressed of all races, skin color proved to be no special bond of solidarity that could bind Black people together in common cause.

But perhaps Robinson does not want us to simply celebrate and replicate maroonage. After all, he tells us that the situation has evolved: “Over the many generations, the specificity of resistance—at best securing only a momentary respite—has given way to the imperatives of broader collectivities. Particular languages, cultures, and social sensibilities have evolved into world-historical consciousness. The distinctions of political space and historical time have fallen away so that the making of one Black collective identity suffuses nationalisms. Harbored in the African diaspora there is a single historical identity that is in opposition to the systemic privations of racial capitalism. Ideologically, it cements pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action. It deepens with each disappointment at false mediation and reconciliation, and is crystallized into ever-increasing cores by betrayal and repression.”^[9] The reader who can distill a political program, much less an analysis, from this prose, soaring as it may be, is more astute than I.

Further, any believers in the idea that a single “Black collective identity” has been forged over time might wish to take a look at the depressing popularity today of the ADOS (American Descendants of Slaves) movement, which argues that it is specifically Black people who are descendants of American slaves that should receive affirmative action and potentially any future reparations, and that Black immigrants are able to traffic on their race to receive advantage without having undergone the same manner of historical oppression.^[10]

In any case, it is left to Nimtz to articulate his own program directly, rather than responding to arguments Robinson does not advance. Part of this is to point to what he considers glaring absences in Robinson’s “tradition.” This begins with the absence of the most significant Marxist parts of the biography of Wright, James, and Du Bois, but hardly ends there. Among the absences Nimtz notes is Fredrick Douglass, whom he suspects “was persona non grata in Robinson’s church—not even a mention in Black Marxism—because the abolitionist never subscribed to race-fundamentalism and race-exclusion political work. But Douglass used his Monthly newspaper to teach about Toussaint L’Ouverture, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner—which, in theory, should have endeared him to Robinson and his ‘Black radical tradition.’” He also notes the absence of A.M. Babu, a leading figure in the Zanzibar revolution who called for Marxist-Leninist parties throughout Africa, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, and Malcolm X, who began to journey beyond Black nationalism before his assassination, and whose speeches were kept in print by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, of which Nimtz had been a member.

Among those absent, Nimtz gives special attention to Maurice Bishop, the leader of the New Jewel Movement and the 1979 Grenadan revolution, which he describes as “the most authentic Black proletarian revolution to date,”^[11] suggesting that Bishop’s emphasis on integrated cross-racial organizing towards socialist goals meant it could not sit neatly with Robinson’s project, and that the omission from a book written during its peak is otherwise inexplicable. It is certainly true that Robinson, as far back as he reaches in history, doesn’t have anything to say directly about his current moment – but that in itself need not be as disqualifying as Nimtz suggests. More to the point, this seems to indicate a gulf between Nimtz’s broader pan-Africanist experience (even as he experienced a disillusionment that led to outgrowing it), and Robinson’s focus. However global the scope of his broader history and analysis, Robinson’s choice of intellectual figures to discuss roots his ultimate concerns firmly on American soil, and perhaps in a broad nationalism that can only be imagined in a nation where Black people do not constitute a majority (and hence where intra-racial class divisions may at times appear eclipsed in a way they cannot elsewhere).

Nimtz’s Marxism and Modern Race

Nimtz concludes with a new essay, “Revisiting Black Marxism Four Decades Later.” It opens with a powerful recounting of the thesis and history of his prior work on Marx and Douglass, a succinct summary of Marx’s views of American slavery and the Civil War, and how from a class-analytical perspective Marx made the case for abolitionism of slavery as a vital step towards abolition of capitalism – and directed his followers and cothinkers to do likewise, joining and supporting the Union army in its war for Black freedom. This is not the extent of the argument, but it is meant to set the stage for Nimtz’s interpretation of subsequent history (precisely the interpretation that Robinson denies us).

This story is told in part through the journey of Joseph Weydemeyer, a “Red 48er” comrade of Marx and Engels who left Germany following the failed revolution, eventually migrating to the United States. There he formed the American Workers League, the first Marxist organization in the United States. With the coming of the Civil War, he joined up with the anti-Slavery cause (as did many of his comrades), eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Following the war, he articulated a Marxist position on Reconstruction as not only a universal right to vote but a transfer of land and wealth to the emancipated slaves as well. In contrast, Nimtz explains that Douglass, like many other militant Republicans, failed to support Thaddeus Stevens’s proposals on land redistribution and thus, as Douglass would later write, “left the former slave completely in the power of the old master.” The Marxist proposal went deeper than the radical liberal emancipationists because it was willing to strike at the most holy sacrament of the bourgeois – private property.^[12]

With Marx and Engels dead before the full extent of the counterrevolutionary defeat of reconstruction became evident, Nimtz argues the task of explaining it fell to Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction – a work fully in the spirit of Marx which described the process that destroyed Reconstruction and created a new form of racial oppression as one carried out jointly by the propertied classes of the North and former slave South (the latter left intact by the half-measures of the capitalist Republican party).

What of race today? Turning to Du Bois again, Nimtz draws on the notion of a “psychological wage” of whiteness, such that workers “were willing to tolerate the rule of capital and thus their own condition as wage slaves.” Unlike subsequent authors who have used this notion to suggest that this gives white workers a substantial material stake in capitalism, Nimtz, in keeping with Du Bois (and a suggestive passage from Marx), emphasizes that this is another form of “false class consciousness” – one form of a broader phenomenon affecting all workers where the boss tempts some with favoritism and perks to undermine solidarity. He suggests that it is the ability to demagogically play on various forms of misery with scapegoating that has helped fuel the success of Trump and MAGA ideology, and from this argues that our task is to build solidarity, not seek reasons why we cannot:

The only effective resistance to the “bait” of the bosses is conscious leadership, on both the shop floor and beyond. “Inevitable” appears only once in the Communist Manifesto, immediately followed by declarations as to the way the working class can defend itself, namely only through solidarity. Trade unions, the elementary organizational tool of workers, and, most importantly, workers’ own political parties—whose nonexistence so far exacts an enormous toll on the American working class—are indispensable. The two-hundred-year history of the class struggle has demonstrated that a communist vanguard is also needed, especially for that most important moment, when the proletariat decides to take state power, “to win the battle for democracy” as the Manifesto puts it. Because, as Lenin, Marx’s most capable student, so presciently put it in 1901, “It is too late to form the organization in times of explosion and outbursts.”^[13]

However, in his analysis of change since the 1950s, Nimtz comes up somewhat lacking. Terming the civil rights movement a “Second Reconstruction,” he suggests its more proletarian composition allowed it to succeed in ways that the first failed. Describing the Floyd protests in 2020, he celebrates their interracial character, in contrast to the more racially exclusive protests against police brutality of past years. This, he suggests, is because the “Second Reconstruction” (whose material gains he does not expound or dwell on) transformed white working-class consciousness, and “The United States, as a result, is less racist and more tolerant than it has ever been. Not to recognize that fact is to fail to see the opportunities that exist in America today to do something far more emancipatory than ever—not the least of which to do transracial political work that fighters before us on whose shoulders we stand would have died for.”^[14]

One feels almost cheated, to be treated to such a sensitive account of the struggles of Marx and his comrades for racial emancipation, of the special emphasis they placed on taking up particular struggles about inequality and repression of one segment of the class to better forge unity and solidarity of the whole of it, and then be reassured that today “despite liberal angst about the Trump moment…the American proletariat is more racially integrated, hence more racially tolerant than it’s ever been.”^[15]

It is hard to fault Nimtz for this too much. He grew up under Jim Crow, and attended a school legally segregated by race. The “Second Reconstruction” did put an end to this, and that no doubt is burned into his experience. But then, that’s the story of capitalism for centuries, is it not? We can always point to where things have improved, but somehow, in other regards, things keep getting worse. What little the Civil Rights Movement won was immediately placed back under attack, and the rollbacks have only grown more audacious in recent years. While Nimtz speaks of the right to vote, the franchise has already been stripped from untold Black people through their felony status – one manufactured by a system of unjust laws and enforced by the most powerful police force that has been known to this planet (and if Nimtz is entitled to ask why Robinson does not mention Malcom, certainly we are entitled to ask why Nimtz does not mention “mass incarceration.”). Beyond that, the undemocratic and unelected Supreme Court has stripped away the force of Civil Rights rulings one by one, opening the way to regressive racial gerrymandering, the return of Jim Crow-era racist “literacy tests” through new mechanisms, and much else.

While the legal segregation of the South was overturned, the effective segregation of the North was maintained, and even deepened. Children today in cities throughout the U.S. attend schools as segregated as in Nimtz’s youth – there’s just no law that says it outright. And when the unwritten lines are crossed, potentially murderous violence still polices them – be it racist police, or extralegal vigilantes reared in racial reaction like George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, or Daniel Penny. Such killers walk free, while those who protest against the racist paramilitary ICE detention centers in Prairieland are subjected to effective life sentences. To belabor this further would be demagogic. Either the reader already knows and feels how unfinished the task of Black emancipation is, or they do not.

While Nimtz attributes the success of the Civil Rights Movement to its proletarian character, another significant factor was the Cold War and the need for the U.S. to pose as a “humanitarian” and “anti-fascist” alternative to the Soviet Union. With its destruction, which Nimtz recognizes as impacting the consciousness of modern-day enthusiasts of the “Black radical tradition,” has also come a profound impact on the socially progressive facade of capital. Nimtz effectively argues for interracial proletarian solidarity in the spirit of the socialist tradition. But he fails to grapple with how difficult that task remains. Within the revived post-Bernie DSA, racial tensions are never far off. While the most egregious “anti-Woke” voices have thankfully taken their leave, and identity-baiting has dulled its roar, disputes continually arise from gentrification and YIMBYism to prison abolitionism to political endorsement criteria that demonstrate the degree to which racial conflict and consciousness remain a third rail. In broader society, even among generalized “progressives,” things are of course far worse, as evidenced recently by the grotesque anti-Haitian race-baiting campaign waged against Darializa Avila Chevalier (whose intra-ethnic and nativist anti-immigrant qualities also pose a challenge to the vision of a developing universal Black solidarity advanced by Robinson).^[16]

It is not only the death of the Soviet Union, or the emergence of a comfortable minority middle class, as Nimtz describes, that have given a resurgence to racialist and nationalist politics. It is also the same issue that he recognizes has birthed such politics in the past – a frustration borne of the inaction or passivity of broad sections of the purportedly Marxist left and labor movement. In the absence of the broad movement of the working class recognizing and taking up prominently the struggle for racial emancipation, minorities, and especially Black people, will invariably turn to nationalist and separatist currents – and fully understandably so. It is the rare, Christlike, individual who is willing to extend solidarity when they feel none is given in reciprocation.

The Divergent Paths of the Midcentury SWP

Perhaps no better example of how badly things can go wrong exists than the sorry fate of the SWP today, which Nimtz delicately avoids mention of (and again, perhaps understandably – after all, it must be painful to reckon with the descent of his former comrades). Long rendered a defunct and aging organization, the SWP lunged at Trumpism as representing some form of proletarian disaffection, following this to reprehensible positions in their denunciation of “woke liberalism” and defense of “MAGA” authenticity, as well as fulsome embrace of Zionism and denunciation of protestors for Palestine. A series of articles defended Rittenhouse and cheered that “Rittenhouse verdict upholds political rights workers need.”^[17] Daniel Penny, likewise, they complain was “framed up,”^[18] and despite the SWP’s then-support of BLM protests, today they write that “Black Lives Matter, antifa and others turned protests against police brutality after the 2020 death of George Floyd into weeks of bloody rioting. Many in these groups are part of the middle-class meritocracy — an insecure and resentful social layer — at a time of sharpening class polarization and tension.”^[19] Thankfully, these are far from the only representatives of “Marxism” on offer. If they were, then it would be hard to advocate other than emulating Robinson in searching for an alternative tradition.

Where did things start to go wrong for the SWP? Ask any of the dozen-odd splits from it, and they’ll tell you right around the year they left or were expelled. Certainly, one touchstone that must be confronted is the Kirk-Kaye tendency (later to become the Freedom Socialist Party), which left around 1965 with differences on a host of issues, most notably orientation to the New Left, the role of China and Maoism in world politics, and of special concern here, the struggle for Black freedom. Richard Kirk (aka Richard Fraser) had been a longtime student of Black history and struggles in America, and developed an approach he called “Revolutionary Integrationism,” which over the course of the Civil Rights Movement the SWP debated and ultimately rejected. While the SWP eventually ended up integrationist, for a span of time it supported Malcolm X’s nationalism rather uncritically, at times even side-by-side with King’s liberalism. But of special import here is not Fraser’s integrationism, but what he meant by “revolutionary”.

In 1954, on the verge of Montgomery bus boycotts, the SWP produced a discussion bulletin containing lectures by Fraser that sought to give a political-economic analysis to Black oppression in America. Fraser’s lectures, as well as his other writings on racial oppression, were unique and prescient in trying to give a political-economic account of the American South post-Reconstruction, as well as their recognition that the unfinished democratic work of the Civil War could no longer be accomplished by bourgeois means, and fell instead to the proletariat.

In those lectures, Fraser observed that “The triumph of capitalism in the South brought not the free labor market, but the adaptation of the plantation system of color discrimination and compulsory labor to capitalist property relations. In this contradiction between the tendency of capitalism to operate with a free labor market and the reality of semi-slave labor, all the weird social relations and prejudices which originated under slavery were intensified by the victory of capitalism.”^[20] This is to say that not only did Fraser argue against a separatist stance and for an integrationist one, but he saw segregation itself as not only an aspect of racial oppression, but a fundamental deforming and structuring feature of the development of American capitalism. He concluded that because of the historical development which left Jim Crow tied up to capitalist production and the American political superstructure, there was little room for “progress towards the solution of the problem of racial discrimination within the framework of the capitalist parties.”^[21] Thus, a full end to segregation and racial oppression could only be achieved through socialism, and a party to achieve socialism could only succeed if it rested on a mobilization of the Black working class to fight for racial equality as part of a fight for the emancipation of the class as a whole.

In a sense Fraser’s approach may be seen as a directly agitational counterpoint to what Stuart Hall would later observe analytically: “Race is thus, also, the modality in which class is 'lived', the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and 'fought through'. This has consequences for the whole class, not specifically for its 'racially defined' segment.”^[22]

This compelling evaluation of the struggle for Black freedom feels very different from the account given by Nimtz wherein the civil rights movement succeeded in a fundamental sense. In fact, it shares its methodology and its broad conclusions (if not many historical specifics, such as the chronology, timing, and geographic evolution) with Cedric Robinson’s description of “racial capitalism” – that the development of the capitalist system occurred not abstractly, but in a world marked by and structured by prior and coexisting non-capitalist social relations, including racial ones, and on that basis a system was produced which was practically inextricable from race. In a sense this is no coincidence, as both took the work of the Trinidadan militant scholar Oliver C. Cox seriously, and sought in their own ways to integrate his pioneering 1948 study Class, Caste and Race into a Marxian framework.

Fraser’s outlook on racial oppression in the U.S. was perhaps best expressed in a neat dialectical inversion he suggested in the 1963 resolution he presented to the SWP: “The IWW used to say that the Negro question was a class question, but actually the converse of this is true: the class question is in large measure the Negro question. It funnels into and concentrates around the Negro issue. What else explains the fact that 200 years of American history — politics, wars, union organization, domestic turmoil, culture — revolve around this issue? That the very survival of American civilization depends upon the outcome of the struggle for Negro equality is taken for granted by militant Negro spokesmen — who, furthermore, warn white America that Negroes won’t stop at ‘civil rights’ but will pull the white masses with them as they ascend to real freedom.”^[23] This striking point, consonant with Nimtz’s commendable insistence on the key role of the Black working class, has been nearly completely absent from the last decade-plus of discourse and debate dating back to Trayvon Martin and then Ferguson.

Despite his insistence on the fight for integration itself as the revolutionary demand ultimately most in line with the historic direction of struggles for Black freedom, and its revolutionary character, Fraser’s appreciation of nationalism ultimately stood somewhere between that of Nimtz and Robinson. While opposing its conclusions, he saw its roots not in theoretical misunderstandings or misleaderships by its proponents. Rather, it appeared as a consequence of failures and retreats on the part of the socialist movement. Responding to a fellow SWP member, Robert DesVernay (aka Vernon), who was a proponent of Black nationalism, Fraser wrote: “Comrade Vernon says the SWP can never understand or have significant relations with even radical Negroes because it is comfortable and at home in a world which is alien to the Negro and which the Negro despises — the world of white America, whose general cultural attitudes are reflected in the SWP…. Vernon is both stunningly right and fortunately wrong. He is right in his enumeration of the qualities estranging Negroes from us; he is wrong in thinking our bad habits are good socialist tactics.”^[24]

Fraser’s writings, and the fertile mid-50s to 60s period of debate in the SWP deserve to be resuscitated and studied as much as other militant analyses of racial oppression in the 20th century. While not forgotten today, they have certainly fallen into considerable neglect – never having been adopted by the SWP itself or reprinted by it outside of discussion bulletins; that task fell to various sects which adopted his views. Most directly, there is the Freedom Socialist Party, which Richard Fraser and his wife Clara founded out of their base of support in the Seattle branch of the SWP. But almost immediately following its inaugural conference in January 1966, it was plunged into a heated internal fight combining tactical, programmatic, and unfortunately deeply personal elements involving Richard and Clara’s acrimonious divorce. Following the expulsion of Richard Fraser, the FSP maintained a literary adherence to his analysis but quickly moved to disregard it in practice, directing its energies into rather uncritical support of the Black Panther Party.^[25] The Spartacist League, expelled from the SWP in 1963, made a point of some years of promoting revolutionary integrationism and reprinting many of Fraser’s writings, and their descendant splits such as the Internationalist Group also lay claim to the program.^[26] Finally, the transplanted British Trotskyists of Socialist Alternative at some point also discovered Fraser’s writings, and have found them inspiring. But such tendencies, whatever their other flaws or attractions, have also done what sects will do, and upheld writings such as Fraser’s as scripture, rather than carrying their method of critical inquiry forward into the contemporary realm of debate and study, and as such, a genuine (i.e. critical) engagement with Fraser’s texts has languished even among their supposed adherents. As for Fraser himself, he eventually joined the New American Movement, and stuck with it as it merged into the DSA, where he remained a member until his death in 1988.^[27]

Problems Yet Unsolved

Nimtz’s Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique has done us a significant service. It is probably the single best work to answer slanders about Marx’s views on race, and to begin a study of Marx’s actual views on slavery, racial emancipation, and the anti-colonial struggle. On individual topics within it, there are many places to turn for further study beyond Marx himself. Among those are Zumoff’s The Communist International and U.S. Communism 1919-1929 for a discussion on how the Soviet Union pushed the American Communists to a deeper confrontation with racial freedom, Winston James’ Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia for how early 20th century Black radicals came to Marxism, Naison’s Communists in Harlem During the Depression for where that journey continued, Anderson’s recent Marx at the Margins for a very thorough study of the evolution of Marx’s thought on colonialism and national uprisings, and Aijaz Ahmad’s defense of Marx from “post-colonial” critique in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. James in particular provides a counterpoint to Robinson’s account of Garvey and the African Blood Brotherhood, which neither this review nor Nimtz had space to explore. Likewise, John A. Williams’ The Most Native of Sons provides a counterpoint on Wright (as do his two brilliant, beautiful novels fictionalizing Wright — The Man Who Cried I Am, and !Click Song).

Unfortunately, Nimtz’s strength as a political historian does not carry forward into his analysis of the post-1970s world or the current day, where his vision, while compellingly articulated, is nonetheless, at the least, very partial and incomplete. The persistence of the popularity of Black Marxism itself poses questions that Nimtz’s optimistic gloss on the civil rights movement cannot answer. At one point, Nimtz suggests “Black Marxism provides progressive intellectual cover for petit bourgeois cultural entrepreneurs—hence its popularity in those quarters. In denying the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, it enables that social layer’s ever-present campaign to mislead the Black masses by posing as the alternative leadership, the cat’s-paw for the Democratic Party.” But surely it is not primarily such folks who look to Robinson! And at least anecdotally, I have witnessed the reading lists of folk such as Nimtz describes, and it seems that if they were to embrace Robinson it would be a tremendous step forward for them, not only in terms of theoretical depth, but frankly, reading level. And if Robinson were to introduce such people to works like James’ Black Jacobins and Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, then that would be a greater step still.

If, as Nimtz argues, separatism has time and again been a dead end, why should it continue to arise? Fraser’s writings, through the lens of political economy, give some insight. Contrasting the trends of “pseudo-” or “cultural” nationalism of the American Black population to the national consciousness of the former colonies of Africa or South America, he noted that “The Negro movement expresses separation at the time of its greatest backwardness, defeat and isolation. The oppressed nations express separatism only under the favorable conditions of revolution, solidarity and enlightenment.”^[28] The recurrence of nationalist trends is not due to intellectual currents, but as a response to real conditions. Nimtz makes an overtly similar argument about Robinson, describing the reception of Black Marxism as “a sobering indicator of what was lost with the assassination of Malcolm X—a measure of the generational break in the Black struggle… a return to a world where Malcolm had once been—the metaphysical one and why he eventually broke with the Nation of Islam.”

Departing from Nimtz, Fraser suggested that such trends should not be met with hostile dismissal, but instead, viewed, like Garveyism (a consequence of the defeat of Reconstruction) as capable of “provid[ing] a transition from the abject defeat of the Negroes to the renewal of their traditional struggle for direct equality.”^[29] After all, what if one hails the direction in which Malcolm evolved, should one not also be open to the possibilities latent in where he began? Today, we should be mindful not only of the period of retreat that conditioned the production of Black Marxism, but the period of militant, if often rudderless, upsurge that has shaped and inspired its current reception.

Some of Black Marxism’s enduring appeal is doubtless that it provides a cudgel (at least for those who do not carefully read it) for attacks on Marxism. But we should also be attentive to the positive value it provides. For one, the central section on history of slave resistance in the new world, while restricting itself for the most part to heroic struggles and victories more than shortcomings and betrayals, is nonetheless a sophisticated work of historical analysis, deeply researched, taking into account the Marxian treatment of capitalism and slavery advanced by such authors as Eric Williams, and leagues beyond most popular portrayals, from liberal and nationalist sources alike. The notion of “racial capitalism” it introduces (about which Nimtz has little to say) has proven to be a fruitful step beyond the more static race/class debates of the 1960s and 70s, even if it, like many fruitful concepts, has often been distorted and abused to ridiculous ends. (For example, Nancy Leong’s usage of the term to describe “the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person”)^[30]

In examining my complex feelings about Black Marxism, I have come to realize that whether I defend or criticize it depends in part on who is asking the question. But, in the course of writing this review, I have also realized that it depends on which “me” is being asked. As a stodgy defender of orthodox Marxism, Black Marxism drives me up a wall. Meanwhile, thinking as a historian, I recognize its rare combination of broad scope and obsessively detailed research, the sharp questions it poses, and the evidence it marshals behind its interpretations, all of which flow like streams into the great river of purposeful scholarly inquiry. But then, thinking as an organizer, I find myself with a different attitude again. Here I do not see it as a prescription, or an investigation, but as a statement of and response to a problem, and its enduring popularity as a stinging reminder that this problem not only remains unsolved, but perhaps is rarely even given a full statement. Aspects (and only the most immediately outrageous and murderous) of this problem were foregrounded for a brief moment in the height of 2020 BLM protests, and then, for society at large, promptly buried again as too vast and terrible to confront. To look at this problem for too long, or state too bluntly its pervasiveness and injustice, could send one mad, or send one scurrying for the comfort of a Robin DiAngelo book on White Fragility, which is perhaps the same thing.

Racial oppression in America is no simple matter of inequality alone, but an aspect of a pervasive separation where we have peoples that cannot be separate nations, but whose singular nation is nonetheless constructed so that they cannot be one people. Beyond merely economic battles, or battles over policing, it touches every organization of any size, every workplace, any place where people of different races and backgrounds come together, even conversations between friends and comrades, and if we were to recount and think through every manifestation we encounter in our daily lives, we would find ourselves, much like the extreme ends of white liberal response to BLM, unable to do or think about anything else. One cannot have the massive inequality that exists without separation, and the separation itself feeds on the inequality to perpetuate and justify itself — but also rests on the mechanisms of policing, capital, individual prejudice and much else besides, all feeding on one another in such a tangle that the only way to do away with any of it is, as Fraser saw, is to take measures that uproot entirely the system of private property. That is the problem of “racial capitalism,” that Robinson at least helps to name and describe.

Beyond the scholarly value, which those who come to it for answers often are not yet in a position to evaluate, Black Marxism, and the cultural nationalist trend from which it descends, offers a very human form of appeal. The experience of enslaved Black people in the Americas is relatively historically unique — millions removed unwillingly from their homelands, thrust into brutal and deadly conditions, and subject to a particularly vicious form of torture and degradation that sought to forcibly strip them of culture, language, history, and in a sense humanity altogether. In some places such as Brazil and the West Indies, the end of slavery yielded countries with a Black or mixed population in the overwhelming majority, and what may have remained race consciousness became bound up in the development of nationhood (with all the cross-class compromises and subordinations that entails, to be sure). In such societies, where the enslaved population was more numerous, more frequently replenished with fresh importation, and often from similar regions, one also can find traces of a continuity in elements of African tradition, culture, and even language — as evinced in religious practices such as Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Cadomblé, and festivals such as the West Indian Junkanoo, Bajan Crop Over, and Brazilian Carnival.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Black people were only ever a majority at most in the strip of the “Black belt,” a phenomenon which diminished over the course of the great migrations. In the early 20th century, waves of European immigrants arrived, facing at first extreme adversity and racial prejudice. Over time, they were able to first gain power as ethnic constituencies, and then eventually assimilate into the broader mainstream of American cultural life. Black people, segregated in North and South alike (though only by law in the latter), experienced no such thing. How can anybody begrudge the attempts, however partial and at times historically fictitious, to reconstruct a “usable past,” a sense of a people, a culture, a tradition, all that which the master class of slaveholders had sought to deny? Earlier, we argued that a tradition is more than the sum total of a historical record, and if it must be “discovered” there is a sense in which it did not already exist. But then, the project of Robinson, like the project of Garvey, is not so much discovery as creation, thereby helping people reconcile their felt position in society as well as that imposed on them externally with a sense of historical meaning and purpose, allowing them to reconcile their immediate individual circumstances with a larger whole or brotherhood of others – extending across both region and time.

The frequent charge that Robinson mystifies and reifies race is well-placed. But nor can we blind ourselves to the existence of a non-mystical, non-abstract reality of race and racial division that persists. This reality cannot be overcome by simple appeals for people to cast aside their distinctive communities, bonds of solidarity, demands for justice, and much else that developed under centuries of segregation, and continues to be shaped by the oppression that exists to this day, in the name of simply being “proletarian”. A direct example of this is provided by the history of the International Longshoremen’s Association. Confronted with race-exclusionist policies and a segregated job market, black longshoremen often unionized into their own locals, leading to a system along the East Coast, especially in the South, of segregated unions, dividing the work among them, often unequally. However, these segregated locals, born out of necessity, also provided some measure of strength and solidarity. In New York in 1959, responding to outcry over segregation on the docks, the Black Local 968 merged into the majority white Local 1814. But rather than improving the situation, as Colin J. Davis writes, “leaders had given away what little power they had on the promise of future protection. After joining Local 1814, black longshoremen were leaderless. Once again, they were left to pick up the crumbs given to them by white hiring bosses and their union allies.”^[31] As Fraser argued, the path to proletarian solidarity runs through developing beyond a narrow racial consciousness, not merely “demonstrating” that it need not exist.

If we are to find a way beyond the tired class/race debates, it will not be settled on paper alone, nor by resolving (as worthwhile as such discussions may be) what concept, if any, of race was held in ancient Athens, divergent views on Marx’s writings on colonialism, the nature of the civil war, or even the civil rights movement. It will be by extending the spirit of political economic analysis in search of levers for revolutionary mass action of the whole of the oppressed. This is to say, in that which Nimtz finds and celebrates in Marx’s Civil War writings, that Robinson, whatever his other flaws, finds and celebrates in figures such as C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois, and that Frasier attempted to navigate in the midst of the 1950s and 60s.

The abstract unity of the working class can only be realized through a common battle against the specific barriers to solidarity of the working class – racial oppression and segregation not least among them. The Civil Rights Movement, and those responding to it, tended to focus attention on the American South, closest to the legacy of slavery and home to Jim Crow segregation laws. However, with the (formal) end to those laws, it has become ever more apparent that racial oppression in the North had found a basis and economic structure independent from the ideology and law of the South that was able to fully express its structure once Jim Crow had fallen. A story of contemporary racial oppression that begins there, rather than with the Southern system and its afterlives, could shed new light.

Epilogue: The Haunted Present

The publication of Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique coincides with another critical book on Robinson, The Antinomies of Black Marxism: Critique of the Racial Capitalism Paradigm. Similar to Nimtz’s book, it is a collection of reprinted essays – in this case drawn from a broader selection of authors (with Nimtz’s original 1985 review among them), and edited by Salvador Rangel and William I. Robinson, two coauthors of one of the most savage articles in the book: “The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Proletarian Critique.”

Of the two volumes, Nimtz’s is the better – he has his own research to discuss, as well as the space to stretch out and do so, and he takes time to not only levy criticism on Robinson but in response to develop his own broad Marxist point of view. If this review has criticized Nimtz for ungenerosity, he is nonetheless positively saintlike compared to many in Antinomies, not only Rangel and Robinson, but also Cedric Johnson, whose “Wrong Durée”, in its assemblage of “greatest hits” of other critical responses, has more the character of a high school slam book than a scholarly riposte.

In the current moment under Trump, open racism and fascism have re-emerged, but for many years prior it was something talked about in coded ways as much as overt, a pretense of liberal universalism suffused with high-pitched dogwhistles for those attuned. So much of the discourse around race can only be understood by tuning one’s ears up and down, picking up frequencies and implications as much as honest statements of belief. Despite honest critics with worthwhile things to say such as Nimtz, Joseph Ramsey, and Asad Haider, one gets the sense of something else going on, some agenda at play, with many participants unwittingly drawn into a broader fight that perhaps they want no part of.

If the era of BLM gave birth to a revival of Robinson, perhaps it is the era of “wokelash” that has created a moment for those who seek to bury him again. In reading the criticisms in Antimonies I found myself encountering the same phenomenon I had reading Terry Eagleton’s savaging of “postmodernism”^[32] – a sense that the texts under attack are considerably more sophisticated, whatever their flaws, than the attackers themselves, and in some ways are rendered unrecognizable under the crush of “gotchas”. Even if there are problems to be found, the works deserved a better quality of criticism – one that could at least begin by recognizing the issues which motivated their production.

But what this mode of argument reminds me of still more is the manner in which the right wing invented an enemy in first “Marcusian” thought, then “cultural relativism,” then “cultural marxism,” then “critical race theory,” and more recently “Gramscianism.” In each case, a broader cultural anxiety of some form becomes concretized through the invention of some particular bad academic trend, with one or two authors singled out as providing an ur-text for whatever evil and regressive ideas are the boogeyman of the moment. To their writings are affixed fetish-like powers, like the cursed tomes of horror novels through which eldritch forces may reach out to corrupt mortal minds. It appears that Robinson and his notion of a “racial capitalism” are in line for the same treatment.

A fear of Marxism and class analysis being entirely displaced by vague identitarian “standpoint theory” (which Meyerson’s 2000 article imputes to Robinson^[33]) may have been well founded in the late 1980s and especially the political wasteland of the post-Soviet 1990s. Certainly modes of identitarian argument or playing the “race card” have not disappeared — but the last decade has been marked by a vast resurgence of interest in Marxism, and a generational shift towards support of unionization and class struggle. Thus we must ask what the anxieties are of this moment that have come to fixate on Black Marxism? Perhaps the same cause behind the turn against police abolitionism, and the same cause behind some elements of the left cozying up to the reactionary Sohrab Ahmari and his Compact magazine. Behind the worst of the current “class exclusive” Marxist crop is a dream of a populist electoral coalition realigning the poor and working class majority of the American population behind some sort of program of union rights and welfare expansion, and perhaps “reigning in” the billionaires. They do not dream of building a broad solidarity across workers by which they can struggle for their own emancipation, a process that necessarily involves transforming the consciousness of workers through this struggle, bringing people to become better versions of themselves, with a sense of community and purpose extending far beyond where it exists today. Rather, they want to pull a fast one and find the right combination of slogans and programs that can somehow unite Josh Hawley and Bernie Sanders to provide Medicare for All. They want a modern-day Kingfish, a Trump for the working man. And if that gets us a better NLRB, which is better for everybody, then, one imagines, they wonder why Black people and other oppressed minorities can’t just shut up, get over it, and get with the program.

The dire enemy of this project is not the right wing, who they seek to conciliate, coddle, and appeal to. Rather, it is what they would view dismissively as the politics of “sectoral interest groups” (such as Black people who wish to cease being killed and imprisoned by racist cops), which can throw a spanner into their coalitional politics, raising concerns that might shatter the shallow unity they seek. This sort of calculus is a form of centrist triangulation, of the same form as the Democratic Party voting trans rights off the island the moment they feared it might lessen their appeal to some mythical middle-American values. One gets the sense that the overall attack on Robinson is motivated not so much by his debatable or wrong answers to how to combat racial oppression, but by his insistence that combatting such is central to any Marxist politics. In opposing “racial capitalism” as a unit of analysis, it allows one to pretend that a Marxism that does not foreground racial oppression is possible.

Nimtz, to his credit, allows no such indulgences – while some critics of Robinson agree that Marx didn’t say much about race, but argue this was correct, Nimtz instead answers both of them by highlighting how much Marx did have to say about race. It is welcome that his 1985 review is made accessible in multiple places. It is unfortunate that in the pages of Antinomies it shares such sometimes dubious company.

While campaigns against “critical race theory” or the like have provided ideological cover for a censorious gutting of higher education and much else besides, they ultimately have a poor theory of politics, viewing it as a matter of controlling ideas, and devoting themselves to combating the dissemination of “wrongthink”. But politics is not merely electoral coalitions, and it is certainly not merely decades-old books that are read by embarrassingly few critics and proponents alike – it is the broader movement of people in organized formations towards socially transformative ends, as compelled by the immediate conditions they face, and shaped by the tools with which they are equipped to face them.

So much of the “class first” debate centers on an imagined appeal to some sort of primal caveman-like American worker – an anti-billionaire Archie Bunker. But there is also the real movement of the working class – carried out among other places in unions as they are actually constituted – representing millions of workers, many Black, many immigrant, many women. This real movement has revived greatly in recent years – from significant and popular strikes, to mass organizing campaigns amongst sectors, such as baristas and Amazon warehouse workers formerly thought “unorganizable.” At the leading edge of this militant upsurge have been workers of all races and backgrounds inspired by other social causes such as Black Lives Matter, not hostile to them. While divisions run deep in the working class, the new generation of militants has found that the way to undercut them is not to shy away from broader causes, but to take them up – from Palestine to racial justice. There are dedicated organizers, serial salts, irrepressible militants who find Robinson far too tame – they’re reading Sakai’s Settlers. And somehow, they are managing to connect to fellow coworkers, and sometimes even winning. At the country’s most important conference on militant labor organizing, Labor Notes, attendees wear pronoun stickers. Some of the older guard may find it silly, but everyone knows that it is firstly a gesture of respect to fellow workers, and any opponent of it is doing the bosses’ work.

If we in the workers’ movement continue to succeed and grow, to develop a militant solidarity that is attentive to causes and issues beyond the shopfloor, standing against oppression wheresoever it rears its head, then this will not resolve the historical nuances of the class and race debates, but still we can begin to render the underlying vitriolic tensions behind them obsolete. Such an outcome would, one hopes, be an earnest dream of Robinson and Nimtz alike.

1. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 2nd ed. (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

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2. Nimtz, Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique (Monthly Review Press, 2026).

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3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/

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4. Nimtz, BM:AMC, 113.

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5. Robinson, BM, 171.

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6. Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal (Bergin & Garvey, 1988)

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7. Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard University Press, 2020)

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8. Gad Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (University of Tennessee Press, 1994) or https://dlocteach.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/morant-bay-rebellion/ for an overview.

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9. Robinson, BM, 317.

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10. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/us/slavery-black-immigrants-ados.html

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11. Nimtz, BM:AMC, 161.

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12. Nimtz, BM:AMC, 143.

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13. Nimtz, BM:AMC, 151.

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14. Nimtz, BM:AMC, 152.

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15. Ibid.

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16. https://haitiantimes.com/2026/06/23/anti-haitian-bias-in-dominican-political-circles-laid-bare-in-ny-congressional-race/

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17. https://themilitant.com/2021/11/27/rittenhouse-verdict-upholds-political-rights-workers-need/

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18. https://themilitant.com/2024/12/21/jury-acquits-daniel-penny-unanimously-case-reflects-crisis-of-capitalism-today/

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19. https://themilitant.com/2026/01/03/mangione-and-the-lefts-love-of-political-violence/

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20. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/idb/swp-1946-59/db/A-n19-1954-db.pdf

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21. Ibid.

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22. Stuart Hall. "Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance." Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (UNESCO, 1980)

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23. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/idb/swp-1960-65/v24n28-jun-1963-db.pdf

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24. Ibid.

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25. https://socialism.com/introductorywritings/a-victory-for-socialist-feminism/

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26. See especially https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/prs3-fraser/index.htm

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27. Ibid.

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28. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/idb/swp-1946-59/db/A30-aug-1955-db.pdf

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29. Ibid.

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30. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-126/racial-capitalism/

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31. Colin J. Davis, "“Shape or Fight?”: New York's Black Longshoremen, 1945–1961." International Labor and Working-Class History 62 (2002): 143-163.

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32. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996)

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33. Gregory Meyerson. "Rethinking black marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and others." Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice 6 (2000).

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