Donald Parkinson and Gary Levi have opened and closed the summer season with columns that talk about the opposite side of the same coin.

My question on the Nimtz/Robinson debate over BLACK MARXISM starts in the footnotes. Cedric J Robinson wrote Black Marxism: Making of the Black Radical Tradition as a Western Marxist critique of Western Marxism on its own terms. Robinson builds his theory of racial capitalism out of reification, the idea originally conceived by György Lukács in his book History and Class Consciousness. Reification is the process where a thought or concept is transformed into a material commodity (eg ‘marriage’ is no longer a sacred ceremony, it is a matter of licensing purchased from the state). Using reification as his framework, Robinson created “racial capitalism“ in the sense that it was a market system where the notion of slavery was transformed from an abstraction into concrete in a way that dehumanized/transformed the African human into chattel, distinctly nonhuman commodities to be sold. Chattel bond slavery in this sense is not just designating the reification embedded within the existence of the bond, it is also designating the reification transforming the human into the chattel, an animal under US property law treated in the same way cattle or horses were. This process creates the growth of the market for slaves.

Nimtz by contrast is a Trotskyist and so his engagements with Marxism include exposure to Trotsky’s prejudices against Lukacs. The Communist International (and to that extent Communists like Trotsky) denounced Lukacs as an obscurantist who was over-indulging in academicism. Western Marxism and Trotskyism have a complex relationship spanning over a century and the debates matter in this discussion.

Ultimately one is likewise compelled to look at the larger context. Nimtz is publishing with Monthly Review. Last spring, Monthly Review also published Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Piper of Western Marxism?, which said the Frankfurt School was a psy-op run by the CIA. Rockhill also has been responsible for shepherding into English translation several books by Domenico Losurdo, an Italian Communist who claims in said volumes that Stalin was as faultless and pure as the newly-fallen snows.

At the heart of the argument is a very old debate about what kind of Marxism and how it should provide guidance for liberation politics. Should any philosophy be a unified field theory or should its limitations be grappled with? Can Marx's dialectic truly provide measurement in any meaningful sense to issues like quantum mechanics, or should it be reserved and deployed solely as a social science with a critical apparatus grounded in and centered on political economy? 

We occupy a strange moment of contradiction worthy of consideration. In terms of political continuity, it is impossible to deny the distinct dis-connect between the mainstream of the Democratic Socialists of America and the sectarianisms of the last century. It is almost certain that Zohran Mamdani could not be compelled to ever give a flying fig about Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, Max Shachtman, and the rest of that cohort's forgotten politics. But likewise, there no longer is a Socialist Camp to hold allegiance to. Aside from the strained impersonations of sectarianism around China, the vast majority of the people in DSA are not heavily invested in the implications of the Sino-Soviet Split (which for the record began seventy years ago!)

This is what makes the inheritance of the American Left so impressive and unique at this current juncture. The contemporary radical can grapple with multiple texts from different tendencies and use them to inform a unique and new conception of American socialist politics. 

To understand the context of this debate is to consider the birth of the Soviet Union.
The Soviets rejected Western Marxists like Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and the Frankfurt School. Some read it as a power grab on the part of the Comintern, others see it as pushing aside a lot of hypothetical postulates that were beyond ultra-left in practical terms. (We're talking about the period when Left Wing Communism is also being written.)

Moving forward several years, as Stalin consolidated control using "Marxism-Leninism" as a state ideology, he put more emphasis on Engels and specifically Dialectics of Nature. In that book, Engels tried to make the leap from social science into biology by claiming there were dialectical processes in plants. The Dialectics of Nature was the text used to argue that Marxist dialectics went beyond a social science into a unified field theory applicable to all science. 

Does today’s socialist movement need Dialectics of Nature? John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito have both grappled with the text, leading to alternative outcomes. The use of the text in academic and philosophical terms is not equivalent to the use of it in Soviet terms so as to stifle alternative views in the major sciences. Use of this text does not continue the larger project of Soviet censorship and repression of alternative scientific thinkers like Lev Vygotsky, the 1920s pedagogical theorist who has become increasingly revered in mainstream Western teacher training programs after his writings were re-published by the Gorbachev government. Instead, the multiplicity and variety of texts and tendencies availed to radicals in the digital age allows for new ideas and fusions. 

In this sense, it is difficult for me to simply abandon Robinson’s text. The fact is that it remains a very novel intervention and reinterpretation of the Western Marxist tradition to better understand and analyze what racialism and racism, two deadly ideologies, are in materialistic terms. What is the reification process at hand in those two forms of looking at the world?

This underwrites my ultimate query of Nimtz in particular (Rockhill/Losurdo both occupy the same plane of measurement as intellectual historians as opposed to either Black Studies professors). From the beginning, Nimtz is effectively juxtaposing the work of the Socialist Workers Party against Robinson’s scholarship. This is not a new development; the late Jeffrey Perry raised the same argument by asking how Robinson could have neglected mention of the pioneering Caribbean Marxist Hubert Harrison, a Debsian-era radical. Many Robinson critics point out the absence of a particular political thinker, or the absence of any notable female figureheads (hadn’t Angela Davis just recently published Women Race and Class when Robinson authored his manuscript?), or the secularism of these noted Black Marxists despite the overall religious character of the Black Civil Rights movement. This is what could be called the historicist as opposed to theorist lens that a critic can use to read the text. Nimtz, Perry, and those of his mindset pursue a genealogical as opposed to theoretical framework that requires a much larger litany of saints. In this instance, they recycle the Soviet impulse to construct a Cult of Personality, something which Trotskyists practically invented nearly a century ago. 

The challenge with Nimtz’s text is that so much of the text is intended as a rejoinder and correction to Robinson that refers back to the core writings of Marx and Engels. In the second chapter of his book, he writes:

One of the alleged problems with Marxism and one to which Marx himself succumbed, according to Stuart Hall, is its “Eurocentric take” on the “origins of capitalism as organically growing out of feudalism … peacefully evolving out of the womb of feudalism.” This view, says Hall, is belied by the experiences of anyone “from anywhere in the periphery of the capitalist system.” For Hall, of course, the problem is symptomatic of the limitations of what he and others often call “classical Marxism”—in this instance, apparently, that “Marx took [England] as his paradigm case in Capital.”

And there you have the statement of Nimtz’s own political orientation in the text. “Classical Marxism” is reliant solely upon the writings of Marx and Engels and does not include any of the other Marxist thinkers. Even though they no longer feel compelled to use their critique of the Soviet Union, Trotskyists of all varieties claim to be proponents of this Classical Marxism, the tradition before its corruption first by first revisionism and then Stalinism. This implies a hostility toward Western Marxism, exemplified by Stuart Hall as a major luminary of New Left Review.

“Marxism” is far from unified in any theoretical sense. By my count on Wikipedia, there are more variations of Marxism than Baskin Robins flavors of ice cream. The underlying thrust of both Rockhill and Nimtz is fundamentally based on the authoritative impulse to stake out a particularly censored version of Marxist thinking. For Rockhill/Losurdo, it is a retread of uncritical apologias for the Soviets. For Nimtz, it is a distinct view of Marxism that does not reflect willingness to grapple with Lukacs or the other thinkers Robinson relied upon in his book. Part of Robinson’s critique of Marxism was a response to Perry Anderson’s two very Eurocentric books about Western Marxism, which scandalously failed to mention CLR James, WEB Du Bois, Angela Davis, or any other luminaries of the Anglophone Black Left, be they Trotskyist, Stalinist, or otherwise. 

In either case, there is a sneaking double standard in the mix. Especially in this second Trump administration, the Left must defend against McCarthyite-styled attacks on freedom of speech, expression, and gender/sexuality/bodily autonomy rights. Yet simultaneously, we are presented with two books that rely upon the very old and very annoying habit of telling Comrades “Thou shalt not read or think…” 

Why bother with that?

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Best regards,

Andie Stewart (she/they, AMAB)

I don't know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself. -Ilyitch