Black Marxism

Black Marxism
Author: Cedric J. Robinson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2005-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807876127

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.

Black Marxism

Black Marxism
Author: Cedric J. Robinson
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0141996781

'A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of Black radical thought' Cornel West 'Cedric Robinson's brilliant analyses revealed new ways of thinking and acting' Angela Davis 'This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle' Any struggle must be fought on a people's own terms, argues Cedric Robinson's landmark account of Black radicalism. Marxism is a western construction, and therefore inadequate to describe the significance of Black communities as agents of change against 'racial capitalism'. Tracing the emergence of European radicalism, the history of Black African resistance and the influence of these on such key thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, Black Marxism reclaims the story of a movement.

Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition

Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition
Author: Cedric J. Robinson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2020-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469663732

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people’s history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century Black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.

Left of Karl Marx

Left of Karl Marx
Author: Carole Boyce Davies
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2008-02-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822390329

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism. Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.

BLM

BLM
Author: Mike Gonzalez
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1641772247

The George Floyd riots that have precipitated great changes throughout American society were not spontaneous events. Americans did not suddenly rise up in righteous anger, take to the streets, and demand not just that police departments be defunded but that all the structures, institutions, and systems of the United States—all supposedly racist—be overhauled. The 12,000 or so demonstrations and 633 related riots that followed Floyd’s death took organizational muscle. The movement’s grip on institutions from the classroom to the ballpark required ideological commitment. That muscle and commitment were provided by the various Black Lives Matter organizations. This book examines who the BLM leaders are, delving into their backgrounds and exposing their agendas—something the media has so far refused to do. These people are shown to be avowed Marxists who say they want to dismantle our way of life. Along with their fellow activists, they make savvy use of social media to spread their message and organize marches, sit-ins, statue tumblings, and riots. In 2020 they seized upon the video showing George Floyd’s suffering as a pretext to unleash a nationwide insurgency. Certainly, no person of good will could object to the proposition that “black lives matter” as much as any other human life. But Americans need to understand how their laudable moral concern is being exploited for purposes that a great many of them would not approve.

Cedric Robinson

Cedric Robinson
Author: Joshua Myers
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2021-09-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509537937

Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian, and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century. In this powerful work, the first major book to tell his story, Joshua Myers shows how Robinson’s work interrogated the foundations of western political thought, modern capitalism, and changing meanings of race. Tracing the course of Robinson’s journey from his early days as an agitator in the 1960s to his publication of such seminal works as Black Marxism, Myers frames Robinson’s mission as aiming to understand and practice opposition to “the terms of order.” In so doing, Robinson excavated the Black Radical tradition as a form of resistance that imagined that life on wholly different terms was possible. In the era of Black Lives Matter, that resistance is as necessary as ever, and Robinson’s contribution only gains in importance. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn more about it.

Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha

Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha
Author: Gary Edward Holcomb
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007
Genre: African Americans
ISBN: 9780813034508

Sasha' was the code name adopted by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay (1889-1948) to foil investigations of his life and work. This work analyzes three of the most important works in McKay's career - the Jazz Age bestseller 'Home to Harlem', the negritude manifesto Banjo, and the unpublished 'Romance in Marseilles.

Decolonial Marxism

Decolonial Marxism
Author: Walter Rodney
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2022-08-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1839764139

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and on the African continent. He was not only a witness of a Pan-African and socialist internationalism; in his efforts to build mass organizations, catalyze rebellious ferment, and theorize an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation, he can be counted among its prime authors. Decolonial Marxism records such a life by collecting previously unbound essays written during the world-turning days of Black revolution. In drawing together pages where he elaborates on the nexus of race and class, offers his reflections on radical pedagogy, outlines programs for newly independent nation-states, considers the challenges of anti-colonial historiography, and produces balance sheets for a dozen wars for national liberation, this volume captures something of the range and power of Rodney's output. But it also demonstrates the unbending consistency that unites his life and work: the ongoing reinvention of living conception of Marxism, and a respect for the still untapped potential of mass self-rule.

The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism
Author: Stéphane Courtois
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 920
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674076082

This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.

The Terms of Order

The Terms of Order
Author: Cedric J. Robinson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1469628228

Do we live in basically orderly societies that occasionally erupt into violent conflict, or do we fail to perceive the constancy of violence and disorder in our societies? In this classic book, originally published in 1980, Cedric J. Robinson contends that our perception of political order is an illusion, maintained in part by Western political and social theorists who depend on the idea of leadership as a basis for describing and prescribing social order. Using a variety of critical approaches in his analysis, Robinson synthesizes elements of psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, classical and neoclassical political philosophy, and cultural anthropology in order to argue that Western thought on leadership is mythological rather than rational. He then presents examples of historically developed "stateless" societies with social organizations that suggest conceptual alternatives to the ways political order has been conceived in the West. Examining Western thought from the vantage point of a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual traditions, Robinson's perspective radically critiques fundamental ideas of leadership and order.