Antinomies of Black Marxism

Cedric Robinson’s widely acclaimed study on Marxism and race has enjoyed a celebratory renaissance in recent years, becoming commonplace across the disciplines and beyond to activist and left circles. This volume contests its now enormous influence, bringing together leading scholars of Marxism to reassess the decisive question of race and Marxist thought and practice.

Robinson claims in his classic work that Marxism is a Eurocentric construct that advances a false universalism unable to explain racism, and in doing so he dates racism back to ancient times and concludes that it is ingrained in the consciousness of Europeans so decisively that they are incapable of confronting racism at all. The Antinomies of Black Marxism brings together varied approaches of Marxist scholars to critique this assertion of Robinson’s, affirming that racism is a modern development of capitalist exploitation as it puts forward trenchant and uncompressing critiques of Black Marxism to reassesses Marxism and its method of dialectical and historical materialism. Emphasising multiethnic, transnational proletarian struggle against capitalism at a time of epochal crisis, this book critiques Robinson’s hostility to Marxism as untenable as it propagates race over class consciousness that threatens to undermine working-class unity.

This indispensable compendium makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates on race, class, capitalism, and social inequality, and is essential to classes on Black studies, Black social thought, ethnic studies, and courses in sociology, anthropology, and history. It provides a thorough analysis and critique of one of the landmark contemporary critical theorists in US political and social theory.

Salvador Rangel is a formerly undocumented migrant worker from Mexico who spent many years working in construction sites and factory shop floors throughout the U.S. South. He currently works as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College. His academic and public scholarship deals with labor, migration, citizenship and global capitalism.

William I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous award-winning books, including most recently The Global Police State (2020) and Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism.