#cedric robinson

[improvisedliturgy]

For those African men and women whose lives were interrupted by enslavement and transportation, it was reasonable to expect that they would attempt, and in some ways realize, the re-creation of their lives. It was not, however, an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans in the grasp of slavers, planters, merchants, and colonizers. Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, the values, ideas, conceptions, and constructions of reality from which resistance was manufactured.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

[lucidpiscean]

definitely black studies canon.

[atpeacelikeamf]

Annotation: “wow—a revolutionary theology, a solution”

[asg-stuff]

Cedric’s point is that Marx and Engels missed the significance of revolt in the rest of the world, specifically by non-Western peoples who made up the vast majority of the world’s unfree and nonindustrial labor force. Unfree laborers in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the islands of the sea were producing the lion’s share of surplus value for a world system of racial capitalism, but the ideological source of their revolts was not the mode of production. (via Why Black Marxism, Why Now? - Boston Review)

See Wikipedia for a shorter overview

[racefortheironthrone]

On a previous ask, someone asked about racial capitalism and like what makes it different from regular capitalism

Yeah, I didn't explain what the term meant, although I wasn't asked that before.

To start with, according to Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (1983), there is no difference because all forms of capitalism are racial capitalism, that capitalism by its nature produces racial oppression when it produces inequality.

So why coin the term?

The main thing that Robinson was trying to do was to shift the focus of Marxist thought on capitalism towards the way that capitalism extracts value specifically from the racially marginalized.

This has a lot to do with fights within Marxism about how to think about capitalism - for example, Robinson isn't a fan of the idea from Marx that capitalism was a progressive force vis-a-vis feudalism, and argues that capitalism simply displaced caste systems from Europe to Europe's colonies in the Americas, Asia, Africa, etc. through slavery and colonialism and later systems of racial oppression.

[endlessandrea]

"So the concept of “prison abolition” doesn’t simply mean abolishing prisons, but means working and struggling for a transformation of society as the groundwork necessary to work toward the abolition of prisons. Angela Y. Davis is author of a book called Are Prisons Obsolete? [12] Prisons are obsolete in the sense that the massive expansion of incarceration has clearly not dealt with the ostensible social ills imprisonment is supposed to ameliorate, and prison abolitionists have worked tirelessly to denaturalize the prison and incarceration as inevitabilities. Abolition is about breaking down and getting rid of the political and economic conditions that make the current prison system viable, and that is what it means to “make prisons obsolete.” If we think about property abolition, it requires us to think about what a world beyond the norms, structures, and psychic-symbolic centrality of private ownership might look like, and what the preconditions for such a shift might be. What I’ve learned through a recently completed project, a book of interviews titled Revolutionary Feminisms, [13] is that abolition work begins with centering and recognizing the transformative work, a work of survival really, that exists around us, has always existed, and upon which we must build. "

[pumpacti0n]

"...Robinson turned to Thompson’s English working class. He argues that, even in the “racially pure” circumstances of the emergence of the English workers, race was ever-present because of the social impact of the Irish. In the United Kingdom, the Irish became the cheapest and most exploitable workforce in part as a result of the history of colonialism. English attitudes toward the Irish as colonial subjects were akin to racism.

For both groups, Irish and English, awareness of the other helped shape their class position and their consciousness of that position. The process of class formation in the English working class was simultaneously a process of racial formation in which some workers—even those facing similar conditions and with similar skin tone—were constructed as racialized “others,” a group apart.

This process of racialization was happening between peoples that modern readers would view as “white,” demonstrating both that the process of racialization is ever-present with capitalism and the historical construction of race and its mutability."

Intersectional Class Struggle Theory And Practice - Michael Beyea Reagan

[usefulconcepts]

racial capitalism

“[capital] can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups." Therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value “