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An Anthropology of Marxism

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An Anthropology of Marxism CEDRIC J. ROBINSON University of California at Santa Barbara, USA Ash gate Aldershot • Burlington USA • Singapore • Sydney qzgr;; tr!'W"Ulr:!!PW Wf' I • rtft"lrt ri!W:t!ri:!tlu • nw i!HI*oo · " • , ., © Cedric J. Robinson 2001 Contents All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or othetwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Preface Published by Coming to Terms with Marxian Taxonomy Ashgate Publishing Limited 23 Gower House 2 The Social Origins ofMaterialism and Socialism Croft Road 75 Aldershot 3 German Critical Philosophy and Marx Hampshire GUll 3HR llJ England 4 The Discourse on Economics !51 Ash gate Publishing Company 5 Reality and its Representation 13 I Main Street 161 Burlington, VT 05401-5600 USA Index IAshgate website: http://www.ashgate.com j British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Robinson, Cedric J. An anthropology of Marxism.- (Race and representation) !.Communism 2.Socialism I. Title 335.4 Library of Congress Control Number: 00-111546 ISBN 1 84014 700 8 Printed and bound in Great Brit~in by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall v qzgr;; tr!'W"Ulr:!!PW Wf' I • rtft"lrt ri!W:t!ri:!tlu • nw i!HI*oo · " • , ., © Cedric J. Robinson 2001 Contents All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or othetwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Preface Published by Coming to Terms with Marxian Taxonomy Ashgate Publishing Limited 23 Gower House 2 The Social Origins ofMaterialism and Socialism Croft Road 75 Aldershot 3 German Critical Philosophy and Marx Hampshire GUll 3HR llJ England 4 The Discourse on Economics !51 Ash gate Publishing Company 5 Reality and its Representation 13 I Main Street 161 Burlington, VT 05401-5600 USA Index IAshgate website: http://www.ashgate.com j British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Robinson, Cedric J. An anthropology of Marxism.- (Race and representation) !.Communism 2.Socialism I. Title 335.4 Library of Congress Control Number: 00-111546 ISBN 1 84014 700 8 Printed and bound in Great Brit~in by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall v Preface AVERY F. GORDON1 They came to Thessalonica ... and Paul ... reasoned with them out of the Scriptures ... And some of them believed ... and of the chief women not a few. But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the city on an uproar ... crying. These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also. The Acts oftheApostles nii, 1-6. Sometimes, there's a wonderful moment in reading when, all of a sudden, a book's importance becomes apparent as an embodied insight. Such a moment of profane illumination is always well prepared in advance, but usually arrives, unpredictably of course, in the form of a revelation. When first I had the opportunity to read An Anthropology of Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson, that moment came for me at the close of Chapter 4, 'The: Discourse on Economics'. There, Robinson writes: A more profound discontinuity existed between the inspirations of earlier Western socialist discourse and Marxism. Where once the dispositions of power, property and poverty had been viewed as affionts to God's will and subversions of natural law, for Marx they were the issue of historical laws and personal and class ambition ... By evacuating radical medieval philosophy from socialism's genealogy, Marx privileged his own ideological rules of discursive fonnation, providing a rationale for distinguishing a scientific socialism concomitant with the appearance of capitalist society from the lesser ('utopian') and necessarily inadequate articulation or socialism which occurred earlier. So doing, he deprived his own work of .. profound and critical insights ... Notwithstanding their keen appetites fo1 history, Marx and Engels had chosen to obliterate the most fertile discursive domain for their political ambitions and historical imaginations. Possibly even less troubling for them, they displaced a socialist motivation grounded on the insistence that men and women were divine agents for the fractious and weaker allegiances of class. vii viii An Anthropology ofMarxism Pref ace JX It was the image of men and women as divine agents that registered, Robinson' s critical project has been the exposure of the philosophi ca l hihl for me, the significance of The Anthropology of Marxism's critique of historical compromises Marxism and Liberalism have made with bomgcois Marxism. This image did not conjure up religious solidarity or collectivities society, compromises which, among other results, wedded the fo undations of well-dressed parishioners or regressive notions of posthumous justice, and promise of socialism to capitalism. It is , in my view, the distincri ve although it did remind me of the famous passage from The Apostles about contribution of An Anthropology of Marxism to refuse those compromises those 'baser sorts' who 'turned the world upside down'. Rather, it on the grounds that they are not now nor ever have been necessary. It is a pinpointed the moral stakes of the Marxian objective and the grace it critical contribution, like all of Robinson's work, forged in an enormously promises, described eloquently by Robinsonas ' the recovery of human life erudite and gracious spirit of reconstruction. from the spoilage of degradation'. And it located the impulse to realize that objective in our sovereign and creative divinity, that is, in our spirited In order for there to be any sense in asking oneself about the terrible pri ce tu consciousness and in our proven ability to remake the conditions and pay, in order to watch over the future, everything would have to be begun history in which we live. For me, in this image, the confines of Marxism's again. But in memory, this time, of that impure ... history of gh osts. powerful world view- historical laws, class ambitions, scientific socialism, Jacques De: n- id,,' capitalist society - were lifted and the heterodox grounds for an alternative world view set in place, right there in the insistence that men and women An Anthropology of Marxism is concerned with the Western origin .:; of were divine agents and not just the fractious and weaker subjects of Marxism, with the place of capitalism and bourgeois society in the longct capitalisill'SCfass struggles. For what is illuminated here is a utopian history of Western civilization's deprivations and modes of comprehensic,n, socialism, unnecessarily narrowed and slighted by Marx, in which it is and with rehabilitating the socialist tradition. These themes and concerns were already evident in the book for which Cedric J. Robinson is proba bly possible to realize th~dal of the qualitative difference because it is already part of who we are and how we conceive of ourselves as a people. 2 best known, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition First published in 1983, this magisterial work questioned fv1arxism' s To conceive of ourselves as d~ agents is to see ourselves as the indebtedness to Western 'constructions' in light of the Black ra dical executors - not the supr~~Di!ers, but the guarantors - of our world and our imaginations. To ground socialist aspirations in a divine agency is to tradition and the 'denigration' to which it had been subject. Whi le remove the stigma attached to the utopian and to measure our freedom less acknowledging the significance and influence of the Marxist oppositi0n lu b_r-what subordinates us and more by what we are capable of divining. class rule and the socialist vision which underwrites it, Black lliar:t.: i3til · Such a possibility is a profound and dissident challenge, particularly in nonetheless stands as a rebuke to its 'ominous' limitations. As Ro binson the post Cold War era when capitalism appears ascendant, ubiquitous and states: more dominant than ever in the minds of both the Left and the Right and in However, it is still fair to say that at base, that is at its epistemologicil l which socialist alternatives, to the extent that they can be heard, must substratum, Marxism is a Western construction - a conceptualization ui" respect the supremacy of capitalism or 'globalization' to rule our current human affairs and historical development which is emergent fi· om tt.c lives and the means by which we imagine living otherwise. A utopian historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through th eir socialism which holds fast to the urgency of recovering human life from the civilization, their social orders, and their cultures. Certainly its philosophica l spoilage of degradation and which rejects the sovereignty or the inevitable origins are indisputably Western. But the same must be said of its an alyticul authority of that which appears to rule us will inspire some, frighten others, presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view. This most narmal and surely annoy even a few more. However, for those familiar with Cedric consequence though has assumed a rather ominous significance si1 1<:c J. Robinson's scholarship over the past twenty five years, this unorthodox European Marxists have presumed more frequently than not that th eir proj e.::~ warrant will come as no surprise. From The Terms of Order to Black is identical with world-historical development. Confounded it would seem Ly Marxism to Black Movements in America to The Anthropology of Marxism, the cultural zeal which accompanies ascendant civilizations, they hu ve mistaken for universal verities the structures and social dynamics retrieve.i Robinson has pursued a consistent and rigorous deconstruction of the terms from their own distant and more immediate pasts.
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