Contesting “The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism”

Abstract

This letter is my response to “The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Proletarian Critique,” an article by William I. Robinson of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Salvador Rangel of Swarthmore College, and Hilbourne Watson, professor emeritus of Bucknell University, published in The Philosophical Salon on October 3, 2022. Briefly, the authors contend that Black Marxism is typical of the identarian works that followed the decline of the global Left from the 1970s to the turn of the twenty-first century. In this context, leftist thinkers soured on class analysis and on Marxism generally and, in their stead, pursued arguments that departed from “ahistoric essentialized identities,” as the authors put it, such as European and African, White and Black. This logic enabled Cedric Robinson to trace modern racialism to Europe’s distant past and to remove class struggle and enslavement from African history. The authors sent me a link to the article on the same day that it appeared and invited my feedback. After debating for a long while over whether to respond, I finally did and sent my thoughts to them in an email message in February 2023. Despite the encouragement of friends and colleagues to publish my response, I chose to leave it as an “internal” document. The event that moved me to reconsider my decision was the “Archives Unbound” conference held at UCSB on May 30 and June 1, 2024, to commemorate the transfer of Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson’s papers to the Special Collections of UCSB’s Davidson Library. In listening to the testimonies and presentations of the Robinsons’ mentees, colleagues, and readers, I felt that it was time to publish my response to “The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism.”