Marx

Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx’s support for emancipation was conditional on the level of ‘civilization’ attained by black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx’s racist defense of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx’s nineteenth-century epithets. This is important because the alleged anti-black racism of Marx and the place black workers occupy in his historical materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualizing the relationship between Marxism and black liberation.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

The last several years have been especially good for Marx scholarship seeking to retrieve a more ‘inclusive’ Marx, who was concerned not only with European or ‘white’ labour but also colonial and non-white workers. One thinks especially of Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins andAndrew Zimmerman’s new edition of Marx and Engels’ writings on the US Civil War.^[i][ii] There is still work to be done, however. Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx’s support for emancipation was conditional on the level of ‘civilisation’ attained by black slaves.^[iii] The most recent incarnation of this interpretation is the scholar of communism Erik van Ree’s piece ‘Marx and Engels’s Theory of History: Making Sense of the Race Factor’, which, given its wide availability online, has even been picked up by the likes of conservative IR magazine The National Interest to help make thecase that ‘Karl Marx Was a Total Racist’.^[iv] It has also been cited on the Left by the sociologist of racism Wulf D. Hund, who employs it to help make sense of Marx’s relative silence on the Haitian revolution.^[v] I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx’s racist defense of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx’s nineteenth-century epithets. Marxists should face these epithets head-on and never seek to whitewash history, but they also shouldn’t allow these epithets to cloud their judgment and impair their perception of Marx’s actual political positions on the substantive issues. In the words of Kevin B. Anderson, we have to learn to recognise when Marx is ‘using what today would be considered a very racist phrase to make an equally strong anti-racist point.’^[vi] Or, as August Nimtz has put it: Marx and Engels’ ‘comments in personal correspondence that were unambiguously racist, sexist or anti-Semitic must be seen in context and in relation to their entire corpus of writings and actions … [We] should be cautious and not rush to judgement based on the vapid criteria of “political correctness.”’^[vii]

In the course of demonstrating the falsity of this interpretation, we will be led into an exploration of Marx and Engels’ comments on free black workers, those of Jamaica in particular and of the Americas and the Caribbean in general. To my knowledge, this specific topic has virtually never been discussed in Marx scholarship.^[viii] We will thus also give the lie to some of the claims of J. Lorand Matory in his recent book, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make, where among other things he asserts that ‘Black “wage slaves”’ – i.e. free black wage-labourers – is ‘a category Marx fails even to acknowledge.’^[ix] What might to some seem a trivial exercise in Marxology has in fact profound symbolic importance. It is no coincidence that both Carlos Moore – the black Marxist turned anti-communist Pan-Africanist – and Charles Mills – the late black Marxist turned ‘black radical liberal’ – each marked their departure from the Marxist tradition with an essay seeking to show that Marx and Engels were anti-black racists. As Moore recounts in his recent memoir Pichón:

My definitive break with communism in all its forms took place at the end of the 1960s when I drafted an essay on the Marxist position on race, Were Marx and Engels Racists? It appeared in 1972 to general condemnation from the left. I was confirmed by many as an unrepentant stooge of American imperialism. However, severing my last tenuous links to world communism was an act of personal liberation.^[x]

And for Mills, writing ‘in what was to be my last paper explicitly within the Marxist tradition’,^[xi]

Marx and Engels’ colorless, raceless workers are actually white … we must ask whether their contemptuous attitude toward people of color does not raise the question of whether they … should not be indicted for racism and the consignment of nonwhites, particularly blacks, to a different theoretical category.^[xii] …

So, I would support that the subsumption of the experience of    the colonized and the racially subordinated under orthodox Marxist         historical materialist categories is doubly problematic. These raceless categories do not capture and register the specificities of the      experience of people of color; and though they are now deployed          race-neutrally, they were arguably not intended by the founders to      extend without qualification to this population in the first place.^[xiii]

As Manning Marable put it in his explanation of ‘Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists’, ‘Part of the rationale for some black nationalists’ fears that Marxism is a form of “left-wing racism” must be attributed to the writings of Marx himself.’ Citing the 1853 passage I will examine in this paper, henotes that such ‘blatantly racist statements by the early proponents of socialism must give pause to many contemporary would-be black leftists.’^[xiv] Thus, the alleged anti-black racism of Marx and the place black workers occupy in his historical materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualising the relationship between Marxism and black liberation.

‘Freshly imported barbarians’

Let us begin by looking at the 1853 passage in question and the responses it has provoked. Marx is reporting to Engels his assessment of a new book published that year by the American economist Henry Carey, The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished. Marx first explains that ‘here ‘SLAVERY’ covers all forms of servitude, WAGE-SLAVERY, etc.’ Marx had been critical of Carey in the past as a ‘harmoniser,’ i.e., one aiming to show that the interests of capital and labour are in harmony rather than antagonistic as Marx believes. He explains to Engels in a mocking tone that Carey had formerly preached ‘free trade’ but had now arrived at ‘protectionism’ as the solution to all of America’s economic ills. Then comes the crucial passage (the original letter is in German; words written in English are capitalised; the italics are Marx’s):

The only thing of definite interest in the book is the comparison   between Negro slavery as formerly practised by the English in Jamaica and elsewhere, and Negro slavery in the United States. He demonstrates how the main STOCK of Negroes in Jamaica always consisted of freshly imported BARBARIANS, since their treatment by the English meant not only that the Negro population was not   maintained, but also that 2/3 of the yearly imports always went to waste, whereas the present generation of Negroes in America is a native product, more or less Yankeefied, English speaking, etc., and hence capable of being emancipated.^[xv]

What has the aforementioned tradition of interpretation made of this passage? Of its representatives, some are critical interpreters of Marx and Engels’ views on race while others are generally sympathetic defenders of Marx and Marxism. They nonetheless all come to the same conclusion. Diane Paul notes that ‘Marx’s and Engels’ public writings on the American Civil War are certainly sympathetic to the cause of the ‘Negroes,’’ but then adds in a footnote alongside the offending passage: ‘However, abolition for Marx presumably depended upon a certain level of civilization.’^[xvi] Manning Marable says something similar:

Marx’s famous and pithy quotation, ‘labour with a white skin cannot     emancipate itself where labour with a black skin is branded,’ characterizes the generally anti-racist and egalitarian orientation of   his entire work. But there were also lapses. … In Marx’s correspondence with Engels in June, 1853, he compares Jamaicans        and Afro-American slaves, arguing that the former ‘always consisted of newly imported barbarians,’ whereas Black Americans were   ‘becoming a native product, more or less Yankeefied, English speaking, etc., and therefore fit for emancipation.^[xvii]

Andrew Zimmerman, whose whole editorial apparatus for his new edition of Marx and Engels’ writings on the Civil War is geared to basically vindicating their views – ‘Marx and Engels opposed racism at every turn,’ he first declares – nonetheless then feels compelled to do an about-face and appease those who will balk at the language of the passage in question:

When Marx remarked, in 1853, that US blacks who were born into slavery were not “freshly imported barbarians” from Africa but rather “a native product, more or less Yankeefied, English speaking, etc., and hence capable of being emancipated”, he did not only denigrate African cultures; he also blinded himself to the many African and    African American political traditions that contributed to the defeat of slavery in the Americas.^[xviii]

Finally, Erik van Ree essentially echoes Paul, whose article he relies on heavily for his whole orientation to the question of Marx and Engels on race:

Both men strongly supported abolitionism. Then again, the question of race remained an issue for them: whether the ‘negroes’ were capable of emancipation at all did represent a real question. In a 14 June 1853 letter to Engels, Marx indicated that, in the past, Jamaica had been importing new negro slaves all the time, making for a population mostly consisting of ‘newly imported barbarians’. On the contrary, the ‘present negro generation in America [represents] an indigenous product, more or less turned into Yankees, English speaking etc. and therefore becomes capable of emancipation’.^[xix]

What all of these interpretations seem to agree on is that Marx thinks support for the emancipation of black slaves should be conditional on their being more ‘civilised’ than ‘freshly imported barbarians’ from Africa. There is of course also justified condemnation of the use of the insulting term ‘barbarians’ as applied to Africans. However, these interpretations are wrong. Marx is giving conditional support neither for slavery noremancipation. Both Marx’s condemnation of slavery and his support for emancipation are unconditional.

Henry Carey and the bourgeois viability of emancipation

Remember, firstly, that Marx is telling Engels what he thinks is most interesting about Carey’s book. Why does Marx find this argument of Carey’s interesting? The answer becomes obvious once we get past the antiquated and offensive language of ‘barbarians’, a term used by Carey in his own discussion, and one used by Marx and Engels in a variety of contexts in a variety of ways. Carey was a prominent – if not the most prominent – economist ofnineteenth century America, now ‘often called the founder of the American school of economics.’^[xx] According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1911, his 1837-1840 work Principles of Political Economy, ‘which was translatedinto Italian and Swedish, soon became the standard representative in the United States of the school of economic thought which, with some interruptions, has since [i.e., up to 1911] dominated the tariff system of that country.’^[xxi] And he became ‘the trusted adviser of both [President] Lincoln and [Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P.] Chase.’^[xxii] Thus, what Marx found interesting was that this prominent economist, spokesperson of American industrial capitalism in the North, who would go on to become Lincoln’s economic adviser, was arguing that American slaves are ‘capable of being emancipated’, i.e., their emancipation can be justified from an economic standpoint – it is economically viable. Just three years prior Marx and Engels themselves had predicted that the forces of American industrialcapitalism would act to emancipate the slaves as soon as it became profitable for them do so, i.e., as soon as the slaves became more valuable as free workers than as slaves:

American cotton production is based on slavery. As soon as industry has developed to the point when the cotton monopoly of the United States has become intolerable to it, cotton will be successfully produced in vast quantities in other countries, which almost everywhere can now only be done through free workers. But as soon as the free labour of other countries provides industry with its cotton supplies in sufficient quantity and more cheaply than the slave labour of the United States, American slavery will have been broken at the   same time as the American cotton monopoly, and the slaves will be emancipated because as slaves they will have become unusable.^[xxiii]

This is why Marx italicises capable of being emancipated, so as toemphasise the striking confirmation of their own view in Carey’s conclusion. Note that there is no mention here of the black slaves’ readiness for emancipation depending on their level of ‘civilisation’. Lest one think that this analysis is an instance of ‘economic reductionism’ and thus somehow insensitive to black agency, it should be borne in mind that exactly the same analysis was made a few years laterby Martin Delany, the ‘father’ of black nationalism.

Delany hoped to establish a cotton-producing settlement overseen by African Americans on land purchased from the ruler of Abeokuta. Such a settlement, he believed, would help to make Africa into an economic power by inspiring cotton production throughout the continent. And if that were to happen, he maintained, the South’s cotton monopoly would be broken and slavery would soon come to an end.^[xxiv]

But what about Carey’s comparison between the black slavery practiced in Jamaica and the other British plantation colonies, and black slavery in the United States? What does his talk of ‘barbarians’ amount to and what relevance does it have for determining whether American slaves are ‘capable of being emancipated’? The British abolished slavery throughout their colonies in the 1830s, but by the 1850s ‘increasing numbers of prominent Britons [had come] to view ‘the mighty experiment’ [of emancipation] as a dismal failure.’^[xxv] Carey concurred, and traced the economic failure of immediate emancipation in England’s colonies to the conditions of its slaves prior to emancipation, which he contrasted with the conditions of slaves in America.

In the islands [of the British West Indies] it was held to be cheaper to buy slaves than to raise them, and the sexes were out of all proportion to each other. Here [i.e., in the US], importation was small, and almost the whole increase, large as it has been, has resulted from the excess of births over deaths. In the islands, the slave was generally a barbarian, speaking an unknown tongue, and working with men like himself, in gangs, with scarcely a chance for improvement. Here, he was generally a being born on the soil, speaking the same language with his owner; and often working in the field with him, with many advantages for the development of his faculties. In the islands, the land-owners clung to slavery as the sheet-anchor of their hopes. Here, on the contrary, slavery had gradually been abolished in all the States north of Mason & Dixon’s line, and Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky were all, at the date of emancipation in the islands, preparing for the early adoption of measures looking to its entire abolition.^[xxvi] ....TheProspective Review, (Nov. 1852,) seeing what has happened in the British colonies, and speaking of the possibility of a similar course of action on this side of the Atlantic, says— 

-----"We have had experience enough in our own colonies, not to wish to see the experiment tried elsewhere on a larger scale. …we have no reason to suppose that the whole tragi-comedy would not be re-  enacted in the Slave States of America, if slavery were summarily abolished by act of Congress to-morrow. Property among the plantations consists only of land and negroes: emancipate the negroes—and the planters have no longer any capital for the cultivation of the land…It is allowed on all hands that the negroes as a race will not work longer than is necessary to supply the simplest comforts of life. It would be wonderful were it otherwise. A people have been degraded and ground down for a century and a half: systematically kept in ignorance for five generations of any needs and enjoyments beyond those of the savage: and then it is made matter of complaint that they will not apply themselves to labour for their higher comforts and more refined luxuries, of which they cannot know the value!"----

The systematic degradation here referred to is probably quite true as regards the British Islands, where 660,000 were all that remained of almost two millions that had been imported [i.e., the 2/3 mortality rate Marx refers to – Author]; but it is quite a mistake to suppose it so in regard to this country [i.e., the US], in which there are now found ten persons for every one ever imported, and all advancing by gradual steps toward civilization and freedom.^[xxvii]

In other words, while emancipation had been an economic failure in Jamaica et al, where most of the slaves who were emancipated were Africans who wanted nothing more than to abandon the plantations and work their own land, it would not necessarily fail in the US, where slaves were almost completely ‘Americanised’ and therefore more amenable to integrating into American society as free wage-labourers post-emancipation. Carey’s ultimate prescription, as Marx points out in his letter to Engels, is protectionism rather than immediate emancipation. Marx has no special sympathy for protectionism as against free trade,^[xxviii] and is certainly no ‘harmoniser’ like Carey, who is actually quite defensive in the book of American slaveholders, whom he views as victims of British free-trade policies. Indeed, in 1869 Marx writes sneeringly to Engels apropos Carey’s 1858-60 Principles of Social Science, that ‘Mr. Carey, as a harmoniser,defended [the slave-owners] in all his previous works.’^[xxix] But what interests Marx about Carey’s work is that it is nonetheless arguing that America’s slaves are ‘capable of being emancipated’, contrary to the protestations of naysayers – like the English Prospective Review whichCarey quotes – that emancipation was a disaster in the British colonies and so will be a disaster in the US.

Thus, we can see that the aforementioned interpreters seem to have gotten things backwards. Understandably put off by the word ‘barbarians’ and the phrase ‘capable of being emancipated’, they conclude that Marx must be claiming that the African slaves of Jamaica et al are incapable ofbeing – i.e., should not be – emancipated. Such a conclusion would be remarkable indeed, for it would signal a complete reversal in 1853 of Marx’s position up to that point. But none of these commentators look into Carey’s book itself, and most fail to even note the discussion of Carey’s book as the context that elicits Marx’s comments.

Marx on Jamaica

Nonetheless, for the sake of argument let us entertain the view that Marx’s support for the emancipation of black slaves is conditional on their level of ‘civilisation.’ One way to test this view would be to examine Marx’s other writings on Jamaica. If the critical commentators are correct, then we should expect to find Marx claiming that the former slaves should not have been emancipated, or that they should be re-enslaved. However, we find just the opposite.

Just four years after the ‘barbarians’ passage, Marx was composing a draft of Capital, part of which would later be published as theGrundrisse. Inhis ‘Chapter on Capital’, in order to elucidate the nature of capital and wage-labour as transitory socio-historical relations as opposed to eternal or necessary ones, he drew on the example of the situation of the formerly enslaved blacks and their descendants in Jamaica, about whom an anonymous author (‘Expertus’) had recently wrote to the editor of The Times of London (of which Marx was an avid reader). The author’s argument is that England should cease supporting the costly suppression of the slave-trade and the citizenship of Jamaican blacks, unless it finds a way to provide the colonies with labourers who will restore value to its plantations. In language reminiscent of Carey’s discussion, but far more virulently racist, ‘Expertus’ begins by describing the adverse consequences and economic ruin he sees as having followed from emancipation:

The freed West-India negro slave will not till the soil for wages; the free son of the ex-slave is as obstinate as his sire. He will cultivate lands which he has not bought for his own yams, mangoes, and potatoes. These satisfy his wants: he does not care for yours. Cotton, and sugar, and coffee, and tobacco, he cares little enough for them. And what matters it to him that the Englishman has sunk his thousands and tens of thousands on mills, machinery, and plant, which now totter, on the languishing estate, that for years has only returned begary and debts? He eats his yams, and sniggers at ‘Buckra.’

Twenty millions of gold [i.e. the compensation paid to the slaveholders upon emancipation – Author] have been distilled from the brains and muscles of the free English labourer of every degree to fashion the West-Indian negro into a ‘free and independent’ labourer. ‘Free and independent’ enough he has become, God knows, but labourer he is not; and, so far as I can see, never will be under the present system of things. He will sing hymns; he will quote texts; but honest, steady industry he not only detests, but despises.

Exasperated, he asks, ‘Is there no way of filling some of our islands with an adequate population—a population which will feel the stimulus of competition sufficiently to be urged to work? Is there no mode of inundating that proud and lazy Quashee who cumbers our lands with an influx of men who will give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages?’ (One can see from this use of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages’ how effortlessly it can be made into an apologia for the subordination of the working population, something Marx and Engels were no doubt aware of.) The anonymous author then suggests that in order to provide this labouring population England could perhaps import ‘Coolies from India’ or even buy African slaves, ‘free’ them, and then employ them as indentured labourers for a fixed contract according to strict labour demands. He repeats the now-familiar line that emancipation will not be tried by other nations after England’s failure to demonstrate its viability. In breathtakingly racist tones, ‘Expertus’ then concludes defiantly:

But if we are not to try this experiment, for God’s sake do not sacrifice English pith, toil, and money to Quashee. If Quashee won’t raise cotton, sugar, and coffee, don’t pamper his idleness by reducing other tropical colonies to the state of our own. Do not enter on a crusade to forbid the nigger from working. Cruelty to the African may be a bad thing; but, in my opinion, cruelty to our own kith, kin, and countrymen is much worse. And our present system involves both kinds of cruelty.^[xxx]

So, given the hypothesis that Marx thinks black slaves should not be emancipated unless they are adequately ‘civilised’, we might expect him to agree with ‘Expertus’ that these Caribbean blacks are undeserving offreedom and that means should be found and employed for making them or their substitutes ‘give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage.’

Let us test this hypothesis. Here is the lesson Marx draws from the above screed (aside from reproducing the author’s English epithets like ‘Quashee’ and the n-word, Marx does not quote ‘Expertus’ at all):

The Times of November [21,] 1857 contains a most endearing scream of rage from a West Indian planter. With great moral indignation this advocate—by way of plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery—explains how the Quashees (the free NIGGERS of Jamaica^[xxxi]) content themselves to produce only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption and apart from this “use value”, regard loafing itself (INDULGENCE and IDLENESS) as the real luxury article; how they don’t give a damn about sugar and the fixed capital invested in the PLANTATIONS, but rather react with malicious pleasure and sardonic smiles when a planter goes to ruin, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as a cover for this sardonic mood and indolence. They have ceased to be slaves, not in order to become wage workers, but SELF-SUSTAINING PEASANTS, working for their own meagre consumption. Capital as capital does not exist for them, because wealth made independent in general exists only either throughdirect forced labour, slavery, or throughmediated forced labour,wage labour.^[xxxii]

It should be clear enough which side Marx is on. Marx immediately detects the class and race prejudice of the ‘West India Planter’ behind the pen of ‘Expertus’, and delights in the irony of an argument for slavery whichemploys moral indignation at the workers’ idleness. ‘Expertus’ had in fact spun his argument not as a ‘plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery’, but as the only sure method of convincing Spain and America of the viability of free black labour, and even as the only guarantee that they would not reimpose slavery on the British colonies themselves! But Marx, unlike what we might imagine to be the response of one sympathetic to the ‘emancipate only if civilised’ view, is not taken in by this ploy and sees clearly that this is a ‘plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery.’ He is clearly sympathetic to the black workers who ‘don’t give a damn’ about capital and who mock the ruined planters. They are, as Marx puts it, peasants concerned only with use values and their own enjoyment of the good life. Because of the natural wealth provided by abundant unowned land and good weather, the free blacks of Jamaica are not compelled by circumstances to work for wages to survive. (‘Expertus’ had claimed that Barbados did not have this problem, for ‘the pressure there has been that of people on subsistence, not of redundance on the people; the labourers have been looking for masters, not the masters for men.’^[xxxiii]) This all proves Marx’s point that capital is a transitory socio-historical relation dependent on the forced labour – whether ‘direct’ or ‘mediated’ – of the worker. 

Eight years later in October of 1865, when poor black workers erupted in protest at the colonial government in Jamaica, prompting brutal reprisals directed by the colonial governor Eyre, Marx and Engels followed the events closely in the British press. In response to what became known as the Morant Bay Rebellion, Eyre imposed martial law and upwards of 400 Jamaicans were killed, ‘many of them hanged in reprisals after the fighting had finished.’^[xxxiv] If the hypothesis that Marx believed black slaves in Jamaica incapable or undeserving of emancipation were true, we would again expect him to be less than sympathetic to these rebelling poor black workers. After all, according to this hypothesis, for Marx they were either former slaves or descendants of slaves who had been emancipated ‘before their time.’ It is thus extremely interesting to find that, despite Engels’ use of the n-word, both he and Marx are patently on the side of the black rebels and are appalled (but not surprised) by the mass of extra-judicial killings committed by the English.

The Daily Telegraph of November 17^th, 1865, had relayed the newsof the rebellion by first playing up the alleged unprovoked atrocities committed by the rebels and then celebrating the devastating British military response.^[xxxv] Nonetheless, Engels from the first takes the side of the rebels and is aghast by the behavior of the British, writing to Marx the same day of the Telegraph piece: ‘What do you say to the NIGGER-rebellion in Jamaica and the atrocities perpetrated by the English? The Telegraph says today: ‘We should be very sorry if the right was taken away from any British officer to shootor hang all and every British subject found in arms against the British Crown!’’^[xxxvi]

Three days later TheTimes of London published a brazenly racistapology for British behaviour, protesting that ‘It were useless to follow the special pleadings of those who in the atrocities committed on their countryman refuse to see aught but the grievances of negroes and thewickedness of the white race.’ Seeking to ‘refute the platitudes of rhetorical sentimentality’, the paper claimed that ‘the negro had no grievances – no grievances, at least, but what he had a legal mode of redressing’, and that as a peasant he had it better than any peasant in England, Scotland, France, or Belgium. Continued the Times: ‘He had Anglo-Saxon institutionsand a constitutional form of Government. Within two generations of African savagery he acquired what the English people won after six centuries of civilised despotism. If he had wrongs, he had the legal means of obtaining redress.’ The Times then proffered a ‘racial’ (and very racist) explanation ofwhy the rebellion occurred, given the supposed bliss of black life in Jamaica:

Why, then, did he not avail himself of these? Why did he plot foul treasons and murders? The answer is not far to seek. The wonderful influence of race has operated as strongly on the negro as on the Sclave, the Magyar, and the Celt. The negro views with jealousy and hatred – we speak, of course, generally and subject to exceptions – the contiguity of another race numerically inferior, but which he feels to be morally superior, to his own. He dreams of the glorious island in which he lives being owned in perpetuity by himself and his posterity.^[xxxvii]

The paper then invokes the boogeyman of Haiti and its ‘barbaric independence’, claiming that the Jamaican blacks were inspired by the neighboring country which flattered the black man’s ‘pride, his vanity, his indolence.’ The paper ends its column by hoping that the British response will halt the ‘treasonous infection’ from spreading to other Caribbean islands, and by praising the loyalty of the Maroons who helped put down the rebellion. 

Marx, reading this, writes to Engels the same day:

The Jamaican business is typical of the utter turpitude of the ‘TRUE ENGLISHMAN’. These fellows are as bad as the Russians in every respect. But, says the good old Times, these DAMNED ROGUES ENJOYED ‘ALL THE LIBERTIES OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CONSTITUTION’. I.e. they ENJOYED THE LIBERTY, amongst others, of having their hides taxed to raise money for the PLANTERS to import COOLIES and thus depress their own labour market below the minimum. … The Irish affair and the Jamaica BUTCHERIES were all that was needed after the American war to complete the unmasking of English hypocrisy!^[xxxviii]

Whereas The Times had dismissed the blacks’ grievances, blamed theirrebellion on racial envy and Haiti, and defended the actions of the British military, Marx does just the opposite. He points out the rebels’ legitimate economic grievances, born of the class struggle waged by the planters – the British government having since taken ‘Expertus’’ advice and set about importing to Jamaica indentured labourers from India^[xxxix] – and condemns in the strongest terms the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of British pretensions to moral supremacy.

A few weeks later Engels is increasingly aghast as more details emerge about British behavior in crushing the rebellion: ‘Every post brings news of worse atrocities in Jamaica. The letters from the English officers about their heroic deeds against unarmed NIGGERS are beyond words. Here the spirit of the English army is at last expressing itself quite uninhibitedly. ‘THE SOLDIERS ENJOY IT.’ Even The Manchester Guardian has had to come out against the authorities in Jamaica this time.’^[xl] Then when a Parliamentary Commission condemned the actions of the British and The Times was forced to eat its words and side with outragedpublic opinion, Engels wrote to Marx in March 1866: ‘Fine revelations from Jamaica. And what an embarrassment they are to The Times…The paper is going DOWN very rapidly.’^[xli]

With the massacre of poor black workers and the economic factors that had prompted the rebellion in Jamaica fresh in his mind, Marx warned German workers not to become the tools of British capitalists who were trying to roll back concessions won by the nascent tailors’ union in London. On May 4, 1866, writing in the German press on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, he wrote: ‘The purpose of this importation [of German tailors to Edinburgh] is the same as that of the importation of Indian COOLIES to Jamaica, namely, perpetuation of slavery.’^[xlii]

In a letter to Engels two months later, Marx commented on the recent mass meeting organised by the Reform League to agitate for manhood suffrage. ‘Tens of thousands of workers, some of them armed’^[xliii] met in Hyde Park, London, nearly leading to violent clashes with the police and military. After opining that the British working class ‘will accomplish nothing without a really bloody clash with those in power’, he criticised the conciliating measures taken by some of the League’s leaders so as to avoid a violent confrontation while, in the meantime, ‘that cur Knox, the police magistrate of Marylebone, is sending people down in a summary fashion, which shows what would happen if London were Jamaica.’^[xliv] For Marx, the black workers’ uprising had become a symbol of both workers’ rebellion and ruling class retribution.

That this is so can be further seen from the fact that two years later in 1868, in a history of the International Workingmen’s Association attributed to Wilhelm Eichhoff but written with Marx’s ‘active assistance’^[xlv] and on the basis of his extensive notes, documents, and advice, Eichhoff and Marx again invoked the rebellion in Jamaica. Speaking of the widespread strikes that had just taken place in Belgium, where ‘Hunger and misery drove the wretches to rebellion and pillage’ and in response ‘the capitalists let the government and military forces intervene and most deliberately provoked bloody conflicts in which many workers were killed, wounded or thrown behind bars’, Eichhoff and Marx state: ‘In modern history only the scenes of carnage and bloodshed during the Negro uprising in Jamaica can compare with these atrocities. Here, as in Jamaica, the capitalists celebrated bloody orgies. Here, as in Jamaica, they hoped to break what was left of the workers’ spirit of resistance and self-esteem by acts of extreme brutality.’^[xlvi]

Finally, Marx again invoked the ruthless crushing of the Jamaican rebellion the following year in 1869. Writing on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association ‘To the Workmen of Europe and the United States’ about ‘The Belgian Massacres’, he opposedhis own explanation of the clashes, based in class struggle, to the view that the Belgian authorities, under French Imperial influence, were looking for a pretext to justify French intervention:

Other politicians, on the contrary, suspect the Belgian ministers to be sold to the Tuileries, and to periodically enact these horrible scenes of a mock civil war, with the deliberate aim of affording Louis Bonaparte a pretext for saving society in Belgium as he has saved it in France. But was Ex-Governor Eyre ever accused of having organized the Negro massacre at Jamaica in order to wrest that island from England and place it into the hands of the United States? No doubt the Belgian ministers are excellent patriots of the Eyre pattern. As he was the unscrupulous tool of the West-Indian planter, they are the unscrupulous tools of the Belgian capitalist.^[xlvii]

How mistaken was Carlos Moore, then, when he averred in the 1970s that ‘to Marx and Engels,’ the struggles of black workers in Jamaica and elsewhere

were, above all, only “nigger” events. This is seen in Engels’ short reference to the Jamaican insurrection of 1865, led by Paul Bogle. In a letter to Marx, dated December 1, 1865, Engels expressed no more than an amused “sympathy” for the “pitiful” struggle against British bayonets and rifles on the part of these “unarmed Niggers."^[xlviii]

We have seen that there was far more to their commentary on events in Jamaica than Moore was and is ready to admit. For doing so would seriously jeopardise his mission to paint Marx and Engels as ‘Aryan’-style white supremacists. Wulf Hund, who thinks Moore treats the issue of Marx’s anti-black racism ‘denunciatively’ from a ‘distortive perspective’^[xlix], nonetheless himself argues that Marx ignores the Haitian revolution because for Marx, ‘On the eve of revolution, the black slaves there were predominantly not a “native product” (as in the United States) but “freshly imported barbarians” (as in Jamaica)’^[l]. Thus Hund employs precisely the same reasoning as Moore: Marx ignored the Haitian revolution, as he ignored all the other uprisings of black workers, including in Jamaica, because these were mere ‘n-word’ or ‘barbarian’ events. But if, as I have tried to show, this argument fails in the case of Jamaica and the Morant Bay Rebellion, why should it succeed in the case of Haiti and its revolution? Although Marx had little to say about the Haitian Revolution, he clearly sided with ‘the insurgent Negroes of Haiti’^[li] in their struggle to free themselves, recognised Haiti as a ‘Negro Republic’^[lii], and noted the pivotal role played by Haiti and its president Alexandre Pétion in ‘the South American revolution’ – by providing Simón Bolívar with arms in exchange for Bolívar’s promise to emancipate black slaves^[liii] (an event Anténor Firmin later adduced as evidence of Haiti’s world-historical significance in his Equality of the Human Races^[liv]). So, while Hund’s query about Marx’s relative silence on the Haitian Revolution remains an important one, his contention that it stemmed from Marx’s anti-black racism – specifically the belief that Haitian blacks were ‘barbarians’ incapable of making history – is firmly refuted by the textual evidence.

The free black worker in Capital

Recently the distinguished cultural anthropologist and scholar of African religions, J. Lorand Matory, has followed Moore and Mills in attempting to make the case that the Eurocentric Marx’s free workers were all implicitly or explicitly white. Matory claims that ‘Marx’s greatest feat of theoretical abstraction and distortion’ can be found in the brief concluding chapter of Capital vol. 1 on ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization’, where

Marx celebrates – as counterexamples of the metaphorical “enslavement” of the free (white) worker and as examples of his proper condition – those parts of the US and Australian settler colonies where almost all of the (white) workers have land of their own, where they can thereby resist the capitalist’s coercive demand for their labor, and where they therefore enjoy a high standard of living and culture.^[lv]

In his reading of Marx’s account of the struggle between capital and labour in the colonies of the Americas, Matory thus imagines that Marx means to refer only to white workers as the representatives of labour. According to Matory, ‘Black “wage slaves”’ – i.e., free black workers or wage-labourers – is ‘a category Marx fails even to acknowledge.’^[lvi] The text, however, does not support such a reading.

We might have wondered how reliable a reader of Marx Matory is by attending to his very next sentence, where he seeks to admit that ‘At moments, Marx does lament the fact that similar land in another settler colony, South Africa, was stolen from its indigenous African inhabitants ([1867] 1990: 48).’^[lvii] The passage Matory cites in fact refers not to anything written by Marx but to a discussion of South Africa from Ernest Mandel’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Capital vol. 1.When we do attend closely to the text in question, namely the final chapter of Capital vol. 1 on ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization’, we findnot only that Matory is mistaken but that it is precisely here where Marxincorporated his earlier thoughts on the Jamaican class struggle into the fabric of Capital. For in Marx’s footnote to thetitle of this chapter, he tellsthe reader explicitly that he is dealing with both (white) European immigrant workers and formerly enslaved (black) workers: ‘We are dealing here with true colonies, i.e. virgin soil colonized by free immigrants. The United States is, economically speaking, still a colony of Europe. Apart from this, old plantations where the abolition of slavery has completely revolutionized earlier relationships belong here.’^[lviii]

Recall that Capital vol. 1 waspublished in 1867, within two years of both the abolition of slavery in the US and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. Hence Marx is including both the newly freed African American workers and the other free black workers of the colonies in his discussion of the colonial class struggle. Later in the chapter Marx explicitly discusses the class struggle between (black) workers and capitalists in the Caribbean (i.e., the West Indies) by way of a take-down of ‘that mild, free-trading, vulgar economist [Gustave de] Molinari’, in a manner reminiscent of his earlier criticisms of ‘Expertus’ and The Times. Marx first quotes Molinari and then adds someacerbic commentary:

‘In the colonies where slavery has been abolished without the compulsory labour being replaced with an equivalent quantity of free labour, there has occurred the opposite of what happens every day before our eyes. Simple workers have been seen to exploit in their turn the industrial entrepreneurs, demanding from them wages which bear absolutely no relation to the legitimate share in the product which they ought to receive. The planters were unable to obtain for their sugar a sufficient price to cover the increase in wages, and were obliged to furnish the extra amount, at first out of their profits, and then out of their very capital. A considerable number of planters have been ruined as a result, while others have closed down their businesses in order to avoid the ruin which threatened them. . . It is doubtless better that these accumulations of capital should be destroyed than that generations of men should perish’ (how generous of M. Molinari) ‘but would it not be better if both survived?’ (Molinari, op. cit., pp. 51-2). M. Molinari, M. Molinari! What then becomes of the ten commandments, of Moses and the Prophets, of the law of supply and demand, if in Europe the‘entrepreneur’ can cut down the worker’s ‘legitimate share’ and in the West Indies the workers can cut down theentrepreneur’s? And what, if you please, is this ‘legitimate share’, which, according to your own admission, the capitalist in Europe daily neglects to pay? Over yonder, in the colonies, where the workers are so ‘simple’ as to ‘exploit’ the capitalist, M. Molinari feels a powerful itch to use police methods to set on the right road that law of supply and demand which works automatically everywhere else.^[lix]

Molinari’s lament for the ruin of sugar planters unable to employ profit-creating cheap wage-labour is exactly the complaint ‘Expertus’ had made, while his ‘itch to use police methods’ to discipline recalcitrant labour recalls the bloody and repressive aftermath of the Jamaican rebellion.

Marx: against black slavery and for black labour

So, to return to the claim for which these passages furnish essential evidence, it is exceedingly unlikely that Marx held the ‘emancipate only if civilised’ view attributed to him by the scholars whose interpretation we explored above. Marx did not think that the Jamaican blacks who had been emancipated by the British in the 1830s, though majority African-born, were undeserving or incapable of emancipation. On the contrary, he recognised them as workers – peasants and wage-labourers – who rightly fought attempts by the planter class and British government to reestablish conditions akin to slavery on the island. Far from believing that slaves must first be ‘civilised’ before they can or ought to be freed, in Capital v. 1 Marxeven criticised the British Emancipation Act of 1833 – which ‘forced the “freed” slaves to undergo a period of uncompensated “apprenticeship”’^[lx] – for having ‘administered freedom drop by drop’.^[lxi]

What all of this shows – quite clearly, I think – is that Marx viewed defenses of black slavery (and of slavery in general) as self-evidently absurd from the standpoint of justice. For Marx, if one’s argument involved a moral justification or apology for slavery then this was an immediate reductio of one’s position. He never abandoned the principles he articulated in some of his first work as a radical journalist: that ‘slavery, can never become lawful [i.e., just], even if it exists a thousand times over as a law’;^[lxii] and that ‘man [as opposed to any idol or deity – Author]is the highest being for man’, that there is a ‘categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicablebeing.’^[lxiii]

Even more than this, though, what our exploration of Marx’s neglected writings on free black labour shows is just how misguided it is to attempt to drive a wedge between Marxism and black liberation. The representatives of the ‘Marx as anti-black racist’ interpretation have got it wrong – in their rush to subject Marx to a race-first reading and uncover what they feel must be his inevitable racism, they have neglected to look past the epithets and at what he actually said.

Bibliography

Anderson, Kevin B. 2016 [2010], Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Avineri, Shlomo (ed.) 1968, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization: His Despatches and Other Writings on China, India, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, New York: Doubleday.

Carey, Henry C. 1853, The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished, Philadelphia: A. Hart.

Cohen, G.A. 2001 [1978], Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Expanded edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Davis, David Brion 2006, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, New York: Oxford University Press.

Eichhoff, Wilhelm 1985 [1868], ‘The International Workingmen’s Association: Its Establishment, Organisation, Political and Social Activity, and Growth’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 21, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Encyclopedia Britannica 1911, ‘Carey, Henry Charles’, Eleventh edition.

Encyclopedia Britannica 2021, ‘Henry C. Carey’, last modified 11 December 2021, available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-C-Carey.

Engels, Friedrich 1987a [1865], ‘Letter from Engels to Marx’ (November 1865) in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 42, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Engels, Friedrich 1987b [1865], ‘Letter from Engels to Marx’ (December 1865) in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 42, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Engels, Friedrich 1987c [1866], ‘Letter from Engels to Marx’ (March 1866) in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 42, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Erickson, Edgar L. 1934, ‘The Introduction of East Indian Coolies into the British West Indies’, The Journal of Modern History, 6, 2: 127-146.

Expertus 1857, ‘Negroes and the Slave Trade’, Times, 21 November: 9.

Firmin, Anténor 2002 [1885], The Equality of the Human Races, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Heuman, Gad 1991, ‘1865: Prologue to the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica’, New West Indian Guide, 65, 3/4: 107-127.

Hobbs, J. Francis et al. 1865, ‘The Negro Insurrection’, Daily Telegraph, 17 November: 3.

Hund, Wulf 2021, ‘Marx and Haiti: Notes on a Blank Space’, Journal of World Philosophies, 6, 2: 76-99.

Huzzey, Richard 2015, ‘Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion: Brutality and Outrage in the British empire’, History Extra, 5 December, available at:https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/jamaicas-morant-bay-rebellion-brutality-and-outrage-in-the-british-empire/.

Levermore, Charles H. 1890, ‘Henry C. Carey and his Social System’, Political Science Quarterly, 5, 4: 553-582.

Levine, Robert S. (ed.) 2003, Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Marable, Manning 1987, African and Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to the Grenada Revolution, London: Verso.

Marable, Manning 1996 [1983], ‘Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists’ inSpeaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Marx, Karl 1973 [1857], Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1975a [1842], ‘Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the Estates’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1975b [1844], ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1976 [1867], Capital Volume 1, London: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1982 [1858], ‘Bolivar y Ponte’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 18, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1983a [1853], ‘Letter from Marx to Engels’ (June 1853) in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 39, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1983b [1857], Grundrisse inMarx Engels Werke Volume 42, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Marx, Karl 1984 [1862], ‘A Criticism of American Affairs’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 19, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1985a [1866], ‘A Warning’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 20, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1985b [1869], ‘The Belgian Massacres’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 21, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1986 [1857], ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 28, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1987a [1865], ‘Letter from Marx to Engels’ (November 1865) in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 42, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1987b [1866], ‘Letter from Marx to Engels’ (July 1866) in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 42, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1988 [1869], ‘Letter from Marx to Engels’ (November 1869) in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 43, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1992 [1848], ‘On the Question of Free Trade’ in The Poverty of Philosophy, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1976 [1932], The German Ideology inMarx and Engels Collected Works Volume 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1978 [1850], ‘Review, May to October 1850’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 10, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Matory, J. Lorand 2018, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2003, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Moore, Carlos 1972, Were Marx and Engels White Racists?: The Prolet-Aryan Outlook of Marx and Engels, Chicago: Institute of Positive Education.

Moore, Carlos 1974, ‘Were Marx and Engels White Racists?: The Prolet-Aryan Outlook of Marxism’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 19: 125-156.

Moore, Carlos 2008, Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba: A Memoir, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

Nimtz, August H. 2003, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The “Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Republic”, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Paul, Diane 1981, ‘“In the Interests of Civilization”: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 42, 1: 115-138.

Sazonov, Vladimir 1987, Notes to Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 42, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Stepman, Jarrett 2020, ‘Karl Marx Was a Total Racist’, The National Interest, 15 July, available at:https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/karl-marx-was-total-racist-164792.

Times 1865, ‘The first incidents which gave rise to the terrible outbreak in Jamaica’, 20 November: 8.

van Ree, Erik 2019, ‘Marx and Engels’s Theory of History: Making Sense of the Race Factor’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 24, 1: 54-73.

Vasin, Yuri 1985, Notes to Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 21, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Zimmerman, Andrew (ed.) 2016, The Civil War in the United States by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 2^nd edition, New York: International Publishers.

[i] This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

[ii] See Anderson 2016 and Zimmerman 2016.

[iii] The first appearance in English of the passage in question seems to have been Avineri 1968, p. 430.

[iv] See van Ree 2019 and Stepman 2020.

[v] See Hund 2021. Hund’s question of why Marx did not say more on the Haitian revolution is an interesting one. However, Hund’s explanation – which partially rests on an appeal to the ‘freshly imported barbarians’ line discussed here – is put in doubt to the extent that the line fails to provide such support, as I show below.

[vi] Anderson 2016, p. 98.

[vii] Nimtz 2003, p. 132, n. 35.

[viii] Apart from a few sentences here and there. See Anderson 2016, p. 160; Nimtz 2003, p. 188, n. 6; Cohen 2001, p. 321, n. 3.

[ix] Matory 2018, p. 72.

[x] Moore 2008, pp. 287-288. See also Moore 1972, and 1974–75.

[xi] Mills 2003, p. 122.

[xii] Mills 2003, p. 151.

[xiii] Mills 2003, p. 153.

[xiv] Marable 1996, pp. 236–7, n. 2.

[xv] Marx 1983a, p. 346.

[xvi] Paul 1981, p. 127.

[xvii] Marable 1987, p. 32.

[xviii] Zimmerman 2016, p. xxvi.

[xix] Van Ree 2019, p. 65.

[xx]Encyclopedia Britannica 2021.

[xxi]Encyclopedia Britannica 1911.

[xxii] Levermore 1890, p. 571.

[xxiii] Marx and Engels 1978, p. 501–2.

[xxiv] See Levine 2003, p. 11.

[xxv] Davis 2006, p. 238.

[xxvi] Carey 1853, pp. 19–20.

[xxvii] Carey 1853, p. 32–3.

[xxviii]‘Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticizing freedom of trade we have the least intention of defending the system of protection.

One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.

Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade.’ See Marx 1992, p. 154.

[xxix] Marx 1988, p. 384.

[xxx]

 Expertus 1857.

[xxxi]Both the Collected Works and the Nicolaus translation of theGrundrisse give ‘blacks’ instead of ‘niggers,’ but in the original German text the phrase used is ‘die freien niggers von Jamaica.’ See Marx 1983b, p. 245.

[xxxii] Marx 1986, p. 251. Cf. Marx 1973, p. 325-6.

[xxxiii] Expertus 1857.

[xxxiv] Huzzey 2015.

[xxxv] Hobbs et al 1865.

[xxxvi] Engels 1987a, p. 197.

[xxxvii]Times 1865.

[xxxviii] Marx 1987a, p. 199. For historical evidence proving black workers themselves complained in the lead-up to the rebellion that the importation of indentured labourers – funded through burdensome taxation – hurt their wages and employment prospects, and in general strong support for Marx’s analysis of the causes of the conflict, see Heuman 1991.

[xxxix] Erickson 1934, p. 144.

[xl] Engels 1987b, p. 205

[xli] Engels 1987c, p. 236.

[xlii] Marx 1985a, p. 162.

[xliii] Sazonov 1987, p. 640, n. 366.

[xliv] Marx 1987b, p. 300.

[xlv] Vasin 1985, p. 517, n. 394.

[xlvi] Eichhoff 1985, p. 359.

[xlvii] Marx 1985b, p. 49.

[xlviii] Moore 1974, p. 140.

[xlix] Hund 2021, pp. 77, 91, n. 7.

[l] Hund 2021, p. 87.

[li] Marx 1976, p. 309.

[lii] Marx 1984, p. 229.

[liii] Marx 1982, p. 224.

[liv] Firmin 2002, p. 396.

[lv] Matory 2018, p. 71.

[lvi] Matory 2018, p. 72.

[lvii] Matory 2018, p. 71.

[lviii] Marx 1976, p. 931. My emphasis.

[lix] Marx 1976, p. 937.

[lx] Davis 2006, p. 238.

[lxi] Marx 1976, p. 392.

[lxii] Marx 1975a, p. 162.

[lxiii] Marx 1975b, p. 182.

ISSUE 26(2): IDENTITY POLITICS

The emergence of a new generation of anti-racist activists and thinkers battling police abuse, the prison-industrial complex and entrenched racism in the US, alongside the crisis over immigration and growth of right-wing populism in Europe and elsewhere, makes this a crucial moment to develop theoretical perspectives that conceptualise race and racism as integral to capitalism while going beyond identity politics that treat such issues primarily in cultural and discursive terms. The last several decades have produced a slew of important studies by Marxists of the logic of capital as well as numerous explorations by postcolonial theorists of the narratives that structure racial and ethnic discrimination. Far too often, however, these two currents have assumed different or even opposed trajectories, making it all the harder to transcend one-sided class-reductionist analyses and equally one-sided affirmations of identity that bypass or ignore class. In light of the new reality produced by the deepening crisis of neoliberalism and the looming disintegration of the political order that has defined global capitalism since the end of the Cold War, the time has come to revisit theoretical approaches that can help delineate the integrality of race, class and capitalism.

Few thinkers are more important in this regard than Frantz Fanon, widely considered one of the most creative thinkers on race, racism and national consciousness of the twentieth century. Fanon’s effort to ‘slightly stretch’ (as he put it) ‘the Marxian analysis … when it comes to addressing the colonial issue’[1] represented an important attempt to work out the dialectic of race and class through a coherent theoretical framework that does not dissolve one into the other. This may help explain the resurgence of interest in his work that is now underway. At least five new books on Fanon have appeared in English over the past two years[2] – in addition to a new 600-page collection in French of his previously-unpublished or unavailable writings on psychiatry, politics and literature.[3] Although Fanon has remained a commanding presence for decades, the extent of this veritable renaissance of interest in his thought is striking. It is no less reflected in the many times his words have appeared on posters, flyers and social media over the past year by those protesting police abuse, the criminal-injustice system, and racism on and off college campuses.[4]

These ongoing rediscoveries of Fanon’s work mark a radical departure from the tenor of debates among postcolonial theorists over the past several decades – when the prevailing issue seemed to be whether or not he was a ‘premature poststructuralist’.[5] If one were to limit oneself to such academic discussions, one might come away thinking that the validity of Fanon’s body of work rests on the extent to which he succeeded in deconstructing the unity of the colonial subject in the name of alterity and difference.[6] Yet these approaches – some of which went so far as to sanction even the discussion of capitalism or its unitary logic as representing a capitulation to epistemic imperialism – could not be further from what drives the renewal of interest in Fanon’s legacy today.[7]

What makes Fanon’s work especially cogent is that contemporary capitalism is manifesting some of the most egregious expressions of racial animosity that we have seen in decades. One need only note the attacks on immigrants of colour in the US and Europe, the revival of right-wing populism, and most of all, the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the US presidency. This raises the question of why there is such a resurgence of racial animus atthis point in time. At least part of the answer is the work of groups like Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100 and many others, which, in engaging politics from a ‘black-feminist-queer lens’, has put the spotlight on issues of race in as creative a manner as the Occupy movement did for economic inequality.[8] In reaction, a section of bourgeois society has decided to drop the mask of civility and openly reassert the prerogatives of white male domination. ‘Whitelash’ is in the driver’s seat – and not only in the US. This should come as no surprise, since the forces of the old always rear their heads when a new challenge to their dominance begins to emerge.

Not unconnected to this is the growth of reactionary challenges to neoliberalism. This calls for a serious reorganisation of thought, since many have focused so much attention on critiquing neoliberalism that they have had rather little to say about the logic of capital as a whole. It is often overlooked that neoliberalism is but one strategy employed by capitalism at a particular point in time – as was Keynesianism at an earlier point. And just as Keynesianism was jettisoned when it no longer served its purpose, the same may be true of neoliberalism today. What brought down the Keynesian project was the crisis in profitability faced by global capital in the 1970s. Capitalists responded by embracing the neoliberal stratagem as a means to restore profitability. This made perfect sense from their point of view, since it is profitability – not effective demand – that in the final analysis determines the course of the development of capitalist society.[9] Profit-rates did go up from the early 1980s to 2000 as the forces of global competition, free trade, and privatisation were unleashed, but most of these gains were in real estate and finance – whereas manufacturing profitability remained at historically low levels. And since much of the profit from real estate and financialisation has not been invested in the real economy, there has been a decline in recent decades in the rate of growth in the productivity of labour.[10] This at least partly explains the anaemic rate of growth in today’s world economy, which is causing so much distress – not only among those most negatively impacted by it, but also to sections of the ruling class that increasingly recognise that the neoliberal ‘miracle’ has proven to be something of a mirage.

In many respects, this established the ground for Trump. His electoral victory (pyrrhic as it may well turn out to be) is a sign that a significant section of the Right has found a way to speak to disaffected segments of the working class by draping criticism of neoliberalism in racist and misogynist terms – while ensuring that capitalism goes unquestioned. Hence, opposition to such tendencies must begin and end with a firm and uncompromising rejection of any programme, tendency or initiative that in any way, shape or form is part of, or dovetails – no matter how indirectly – with racist and/or anti-immigrant sentiment. Any other approach will make it harder to distinguish a genuine critique of class inequality, free trade, and globalisation from reactionary ones.

For this reason, holding to the critique of neoliberalism as the crux of anti-capitalist opposition no longer makes much sense. Needed instead is an explicit attack on the inner core of capitalism – its logic of accumulation and alienation that is inextricably tied to augmenting value as an end in itself. And racism has long been integral to capital’s drive for self-expansion.

Capitalism first emerged as a world system through the anti-black racism generated by the transatlantic slave trade, and it has depended on racism to ensure its perpetration and reproduction ever since.[11] Marx argued,

Slavery is an economic category like any other … Needless to say we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America. Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.[12]

Marx was clearly cognisant of the peculiar role played by race in American slavery – and he was no less aware of how integral race-based slavery was to capitalism’s origins and development as a world system. But does this mean that racism is integral to the logic of capital? Might racism be a mere exogenous factor that is only built into specific moments of capitalism’s contingent history? To be sure, it is possible to conceive of the possibility that capitalism could have emerged and developed as a world system without its utilising race and racism. But historical materialism does not concern itself with what could have occurred, but with whatdid occur andcontinues to occur. According to Marx, without race-based slavery ‘you have no modern industry’ and no ‘world trade’ – and no modern capitalism. Hence, thelogic of capital is in many respects inseparable from itshistorical development. I am referring not only to the factors that led to the formation of the world market but to the role played by race and racism in impeding proletarian class consciousness, which has functioned as an essential component in enabling capital accumulation to be actualised. Marx was keenly aware of this, as seen in his writings on the US Civil War and the impact of anti-Irish prejudice upon the English workers’ movement.[13] He took the trouble to address these issues in Capital itself, which famously declared ‘labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’[14]

Racism is not and never has been an epiphenomenal characteristic of capitalism. It is integral to its very development. The time is therefore long past for holding onto such notions as ‘there is no race question outside the class question’[15] or ‘the race issue, while important, is secondary to class’. Since capitalism was shaped, from its inception, by racial factors, it is not possible to effectively oppose it without making the struggle against racism a priority. And for this very reason, the present situation also makes it increasingly anachronistic to hold onto forms of identity politics that elide issues of class and a critique of capital. The effort to elevate ethnic identity and solidarity at the expense of a direct confrontation with capitalism is inherently self-defeating, since the latter is responsible for the perpetration of racism and the marginalisation of peoples of colour in the first place. Since race and racism help create, reproduce and reinforce an array of hierarchies that are rooted in class domination, subjective affirmations of identity that are divorced from directly challenging capital will inevitably lose their critical edge and impact over the course of time.

Class struggle and anti-racist struggle have a common aim – at least from a Fanonian perspective. It is to overcome the alienation and dehumanisation that define modern society by creating new human relations – termed by Fanon a ‘new humanism’.[16] But the path to that lofty goal is not one of rushing to the absolute like a shot out of the pistol. It can be reached only through ‘the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative’.[17] Re-engaging Fanon on this level can speak to us in new ways.

II.

Fanon repeatedly emphasises that anti-Black racism is not natural but is rooted in theeconomic imperatives ofcapitalism – beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and extending to the neo-colonialism of today. As he writes inBlack Skin, White Masks, ‘First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of his inferiority.’[18] At the same time, he held that racism cannot be combatted on economic or class-terms alone, since racialised ways of ‘seeing’ and being take on a life of their own and drastically impact the psychic, inner-life of the individual. Both the black and the white subject are impacted and shaped by class domination, but they experience it in radically different ways. Any effort to ignore or downplay these crucial differences for the sake of a fictive ‘unity’ that abstracts from them is bound to fall on deaf ears when it comes to a significant portion of the dispossessed. On these grounds, Fanon insisted that both sides – the economic and the cultural/psychic – have to be foughtin tandem. As he put it, ‘The black man must wage the struggle on two levels: whereas historically these levels are mutually dependent, any unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic … An answer must be found on the objective as well as the subjective level.’[19]

For Fanon, what makes racism especially deadly is that it denies recognition of the dignity and humanity of the colonised subject. As a result, the latter experiences a ‘zone of nonbeing’ – a negation of their very humanity. He calls this ‘an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential form from which a genuine new departure can emerge.’[20] It is a zone of depravity that renders implausible any ‘ontology of Blackness’. The black is not seen as human precisely bybeing ‘seen’ – not once, but repeatedly –as black. The colonial mind does not ‘see’ what it thinks it sees; it fixes its gaze not on the actual person but on a reified image that obscures them. For the coloniser, the black is indeednothing.However, this zone of non-being in no way succeeds in erasing the humanity of the oppressed. The denial of the subject’s subjectivity can never be completely consummated. This is because, as Fanon never ceases to remind us, ‘Man is a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies.’[21]

On this issue, there are striking parallels between Fanon’s works and Marx’s – even if it is rarely acknowledged. In the first essay in which he proclaimed the proletariat as the revolutionary class, Marx defined it as ‘the class in Civil Society that is notof Civil Society’.[22] The proletariat lives in civil society, but unlike the bourgeoisie its substantiality is notconfirmed in it. Since workers are robbed of any organic connection to the means of production in their being reduced to a mere seller of labour-power, they find themselves alienated from thesubstance of civil society. This is because what matters to capital is not the subjectivity of the living labourers but rather their ability to augment wealth in abstract, monetary terms. There is only one ‘self-sufficient end’ in capitalism – and that is the augmentation of (abstract) value at the expense of the labourer. Insofar as the worker’s subjectivity becomes completely subsumed by the dictates of value production, theworker inhabits a zone of negativity. He isdehumanised is insofar as his ‘activity [is] not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.’[23]Self-estrangement is therefore integral to the domination of capital. This makes for a living hell, but it is also what makes the proletariat potentially revolutionary, since ithas nothing to lose but its chains. But what does it have togain? The answer iscommunism, defined by Marx as ‘thepositive transcendence ofhuman self-estrangement … the complete return of man to himself as asocial (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.’ Since capitalismdehumanises the labourer, the alternative to capitalism is nothing less than anew humanism: ‘This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism.’[24]

This is a far cry from any classless, abstract humanism, since for Marx only the proletariat ‘has the consistency, the severity, the courage or the ruthlessness that could mark it out as the negative representative of society.’ It alone possesses ‘the genius that inspires material might to political violence, or that revolutionary audacity which flings at the adversary the defiant words: “I am nothing and I should be everything.”’[25]

But how could everything arise fromnothing? It is only possible if it is not labour that takes the form of a commodity but rather thecapacity for labour – labour-power. As Luca Basso puts it, ‘the capitalist buys something that only exists as a possibility, which is, however, inseparable from the living personality of theArbeiter.’[26] If labour were the commodity, the worker’s subjectivity would be completely absorbed by the value-form and any internal resistance to it would be implausible. Marx’s entire critique of value production – rooted in the contradiction between concrete and abstract labour – proceeds from recognition of the irreducible tension between the subject and the continuous effort to subsume its subjectivity by abstract forms of domination. Here is where the so-called ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ converge in Marx’s work.

There is more than an echo of this in Fanon’s declaration in Black Skin, White Masks that, ‘Genuine disalienation will have been achieved only when things, in the most materialist sense, have resumed their rightful place.’[27] But Fanon also points to a key difference between racial and class oppression, in that the former cuts deeper than the traditional class struggle insofar as people of colour are denied even a modicum of recognition when structures of domination are over-determined by racial considerations.

Fanon’s insights on this issue are most profoundly posed in his discussion of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in Black Skin, White Masks. Hegel maintains that the master wants to be recognised by the slave, for without it he is unable to obtain a sense of self-certainty and selfhood. Hegel acknowledges, of course, that what the master mainly wants from the slave iswork. Yet the master still aspires to be recognised by his subordinates, since he, like all human beings, wants to obtain a substantive sense of self – and that is something that can only be provided by the gaze of the other. So what happens when the master/slave dialectic is structured along racial lines – something that Hegel does not consider? Fanon argues that the situation becomes radically altered. The master is no longer interested in being recognised by the slave, just as the slave is no longer interested in recognising him.This is because when the master is white he does not see the black as even potentially human.[28] Like all masters, he wants work from his slave; but when race enters the picture, that is all he wants – he denies the slave even the most primordial degree of recognition.

To be sure, matters are hardly pristine when race does not inform the class relation. The capitalist ‘cares’ about the worker only to the extent that she provides work – and if the latter can be attained without her, the capitalist will gladly lay her off and employ a machine. However, the capitalist knows that a worker, like any human being, cannot be worked to the point of extinction – otherwise there is no source of profit. And as much as the worker detests the capitalist, she knows that she may well be out of a job if the capitalist is unable to earn any profit. The two antagonists recognise each other’s existence, even as they battle against each another. But when class relations are structured along racial lines even the most basic level of recognition is blocked, since when the other is seen as black it is not ‘seen’ at all.

Since consciousness of self and identity-formation depend on recognition by the other, its absence produces an existential crisis. In Hegel’s text, the slave obtains ‘a mind of his own’;[29] but when the slave is black the lack of recognition blocks the formation of an independent self-consciousness. The general class struggle does not lead immediately to consciousness of self when the slave is black. Instead, the slave aspires for ‘values secreted by the masters’.[30] Denied recognition, but hungering for it all the same, the slave tries to mimic the white. She has an inferiority complex. But her efforts are futile, since no recognition will be forthcoming so long as the class relation is configured along racial lines. This is a veritable hell, since her veryconsciousness is dependent on the will of the master. We have reached a level of reification of consciousness that would startle even Lukács. There seems to be no way out if the master totally dominates the verymind of the oppressed. So what is to be done? The black slave must turn away from the master andface her own kind. She makes use of the socially constructed attributes of race to forge bonds of solidarity with others like her.Only then does the master’s dominance begin to be seriously challenged. Through social solidarity born from taking pride in the very attributes that are denigrated by existing society, she gains ‘a mind of one’s own’.

However, as Hegel notes at the conclusion of the master/slave dialectic, the slave’s independent self-consciousness does not overcome the diremption between subjective and objective. The achievement of subjective self-certainty brings to view the enormity of an objective world that it has not yet mastered. Hegel says that unless the subject confronts objectivity and overcomes this diremption, ‘a mind of one’s own’ turns out to be ‘little more than a piece of cleverness’.[31] Fanon’s argument in Black Skin, White Masks follows a similar trajectory. Fanon views Negritude – at least initially – as the pathway by which the black subject affirms pride in themselves as part of reclaiming their dignity. However, Fanon is wary of aspects of Negritude inBlack Skin, White Masks, since it tends to essentialise the racial characteristics forged by colonial domination. This is evident in Senghor’s statement that ‘emotion is Negro as reason is Greek’[32] – which, as Lewis Gordon has shown, is actually a phrase from Gobineau![33] Negritude runs the risk of becoming so enamoured of its independent consciousness that it turns away from confronting the social realities of the objective world. Identity-formation is a vital moment of the dialectic that cannot be subsumed or skipped over, but it also carries within itself the possibility of becoming fixated on its subjective self-certainty.

The struggle against racism is therefore not reducible to the class struggle; nor is it a mere ancillary or ally of it. The class relation is fundamentally reconfigured once it presents itself through the ‘mask’ of race. Like any good Hegelian, Fanon points to the positive in the negative of this two-fold alienation in which class and racial oppression overlap. Thrown into a ‘zone of non-being’, yet retaining their basic humanity, the colonised are compelled to ask what does it mean to be human in the very course of the struggle. To be sure, they do so by taking pride in the racial attributes created by a racist society. But since it is society, and not nature or ‘being’ that creates these attributes, the subject can cast them off once it obtains the recognition it is striving for. However, this result is by no means predetermined. There is always a risk that the subject will treat socially constructed attributes as ontological verities. Fixation is a serious risk. It is easy to get trapped in the particular, but there is no way to the universal without it.

The nuances of this position are addressed in a striking manner in Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s view of Negritude. Although Sartre praised Negritude in Black Orpheus, he referred to it as a ‘weak stage’ of the dialectic that must give way to the ‘concrete’ and ‘universal’ fight of the proletariat. Fanon is extremely dismayed by Sartre’s position, stating, ‘The generation of young Black poets has just been dealt a fatal blow.’[34] Fanon rejects the claim that racial pride is a mere way station on the road to confronting the ‘real’ issue – proletarian revolution. He credits Sartre for ‘recalling the negative side’ of the Black predicament, ‘but he forgot that this negativity draws its value from a virtually substantial absoluity’.[35] As against Sartre’s effort to relativise the moment of black consciousness, Fanon contends, ‘this born Hegelian, had forgotten that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute.’[36] Claims to liberation cannot find their voice if they are treated as arbitrary; they must present themselves in absolute terms (‘I am nothing and I should be everything!’). But since the black subject inhabits a ‘zone of non-being’, its absolute is imbued withnegativity. Hence, consciousness of selfin this context contains the potential to reach out beyond itself, toward universal human emancipation.

It is not just that negativity is the font from which the individual is impelled toward the positive. It is that upon being subjected to absolute denial and lack of recognition, the individual finds it necessary to draw upon the substantial reservoir of hidden meaning that it possess as a human subject. ‘That which has been shattered is rebuilt and constructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands.’[37]

Sartre’s problem was not in viewing Negritude as a particular, but in rushing too fast to get past it. By the time he writes The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon is long past it as well. But he does not leap there like a shot out of a pistol. Heendures the labour of the negative – by dwelling on the specific ways in which the colonised subject can make its subjectivity known in a world that has become totally indifferent to it. Fanon never takes his eyes off the creation of the positive from out of the negative, of absolute positivity from out of absolute negation, of a new humanism from out of total dehumanisation. As Alice Cherki has noted, he was an incurable humanist.[38]

Given the aborted and unfinished revolutions of his time and since, Fanon’s insistence on neither getting stuck in the particular – that is, pride in one’s race and ethnicity (the mark of identity politics) – nor skipping over it in the name of affirming an abstract, colour-blind advocacy of ‘proletarian revolution’, takes on new significance. Hubert Harrison’s conception (voiced in the 1920s) that struggles of African-Americans against racism represent the ‘touchstone’ of American society[39] – later re-cast in Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanist conception of Black masses as the vanguard of US freedom struggles[40] – reflects a similar understanding of the relation of race and class to that which we find within Fanon’s lifelong effort to grasp their dialectical interconnection.

In some respects, the debate between Fanon and Sartre is being replayed today, as seen in the impatience of some on the left who urge anti-racist activists to ‘get to the real issue’ – as if that were the state of the economy. This is not to deny that the economy is of central importance. But so is the psychic impact of racism and discrimination upon the inner-life of the individual. It is only by approaching those struggling for freedom from the particular nexus-point that defines their lived experience as potentially revolutionary subjects that we can work out the difficult question of how to surmount the matrix of contradictions that define modern capitalism. Just as there is no road to the universal that gets stuck in the particular, there is no reaching-it that rushes over the particular.

III.

The fullest expression of these insights is found in The Wretched of the Earth, whose focus is the actual dialectics of revolution – the struggle for national culture and independence against colonialism. One of its central themes is the ‘Manichean divide’ that defines the colonial experience. So great is this divide between coloniser and colonised that Fanon speaks of them as if they were two ‘species’. It would appear that the racial divide is decisive, replacing class dominance as the deciding factor. For some commentators, Fanon’s discussion of the Manichean divide indicates that he has rejected or supplanted the Marxian view of class.[41] However, the appearance is deceptive. First, Fanon is not endorsing this divide; he is describing it. Second, he does not pose this divide as stable or impermeable. As the revolutionary struggle progresses, he shows, it begins to fall apart. He writes,

The people then realize that national independence brings to light multiple realities that in some cases are divergent and conflicting … it leads the people to replace an overall undifferentiated nationalism with social and economic consciousness. The people who in the early days of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manicheanism of the colonizer – Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel – realize en route that some blacks can be whiter than the whites … The species is splitting up before their very eyes … Some members of the colonialist population prove to be closer, infinitely closer, to the nationalist struggle than certain native sons. The racial and racist dimension is transcended on both sides.[42]

We see here how the struggle for national liberation unites the people and breaks apart the racial dichotomies that define colonialism, thereby pointing the way to the death of race and racialism as socially defining features.

Clearly, Fanon does not set aside class relations in his critique of colonialism. James Yaki Sayles, a New Afrikan political prisoner who spent 33 years in a maximum-security prison and wrote what I consider to be one of the most profound studies of The Wretched of the Earth, put it this way: ‘The existence of Manichean thinking doesn’t make economic relationships secondary to “racial” ones – it does exactly what it’s supposed to do: It masks and mystifies the economic relationships … but doesn’t undermine their primacy.’[43] He adds, ‘When Fanon talks about the “species” breaking up before our eyes … he’s talking about the breakup of “races” themselves – the “races” which were constructed as part of the construction of world capitalism, and which must first be deconstructed along with the deconstruction of capitalism.’[44]

Does this mean that Fanon adopts Sartre’s position in Black Orpheus that class is primary and race a ‘minor term’ by the time of writingTheWretched of the Earth?[45] That may seem to be the case, since racial identity is not its guiding or central theme; it is instead the struggle for national liberation and the need to transcend its confines. Yet this is precisely what undermines any claim that he has changed the position outlined inBlack Skin, White Masks. In it Fanon also connects racism to class relations by pointing to the economic factors that drive its social construction. And in that work he also poses the deconstruction of race as the essential precondition of a new humanism. As he so poignantly put it, ‘Because it is a systematic negation of the other person, and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality, who am I?”’[46]

Most important, Fanon held that while race is a product of class relations, which serves as their mask, it is not a secondary factor. While racereflects class formations, the reflection is not a one-way mirror image. The reflection is taken up in consciousness and performs a sort of doubling bymirroring its origin at the same time asreshaping it. Determinations of reflection are not passive butactively reconstructive. And since racial determinations are often not superstructural but integral to the logic of capital accumulation, efforts by people of colour to challenge them can serve as the catalyst for targeting and challenging class relations.

Whereas racial identity is the major focus in Black Skin, White Masks, national identity takes centre stage inThe Wretched of the Earth. But thestructure of Fanon’s argument remains very much the same. In both works, the path to the universal – a world of mutual recognitions – proceedsthrough the particular struggles of those battling racial, ethnic or national discrimination. This separates Fanon’snew humanism from an abstract humanism that skips over the lived experience of actual subjects of revolt.

As Fanon sees it, this humanism can emerge only if the colonial revolutions transcend the bourgeois phase of development. He writes, ‘The theoretical question, which has been posed for the last 50 years when addressing the history of the underdeveloped countries, i.e., whether the bourgeois phase can be effectively skipped, must be resolved through revolutionary action and not through reasoning.’[47] Fanon is directly referring to the debates in the Second International prior to World War I and the congresses of the Third International in the early 1920s as to whether revolutions in technologically underdeveloped societies must endure the vicissitudes of a prolonged stage of capitalism. Building on the work of previous Marxists,[48] he emphatically rejects the two-stage theory of revolution, arguing, ‘In the underdeveloped countries a bourgeois phase is out of the question. A police dictatorship or a caste of profiteers may very well be the case but a bourgeois society is doomed to failure.’[49] This advocacy of permanent revolution was a very radical position. It was not put forth by any of the political tendencies leading the African revolutions, Algeria included. Even Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré refrained from such wholesome condemnations of the national bourgeoisie. Fanon was nevertheless insistent on this point in prophetically arguing that if they did not ‘skip’ the phase of bourgeois nationalism, the African revolutions would revert to intra-state conflict, tribalism and religious fundamentalism.

How, then, did he envision bypassing the capitalist stage? Central to this was his view of the peasantry. The peasants tend to be neglected by the national bourgeoisie, which is based in the cities. They constitute the majority of the populace, vastly outnumbering the working class and petty-bourgeoisie. Although they are not included in the agenda of the nationalist parties, they turn out to be the most revolutionary. Fanon insists, ‘But it is obvious that in the colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary.’[50] This is surely an exaggeration, which does not take into account the pivotal role of the Nigerian labour movement in the struggle for national independence, let alone the situation in countries like South Africa (where the labour movement later proved instrumental in forcing the elimination of apartheid). Although Fanon is painting with all-too-broad a brush, his view of the peasantry is not without merit. He argued that since most of the newly independent states in Africa had not undergone industrialisation on a large scale, the working class could not present itself as a cohesive and compact force. It has not been socialised by the concentration and centralisation of capital. The working class is dispersed, divided and relatively weak. The peasantry, on the other hand, is socialised and relatively strong precisely because it has been largely untouched by capitalist development. Their communal traditions and social formations remain intact. They think and act like a cohesive group. Theylive the Manichaean divide that separates them from the coloniser. Hence, the message of the revolution ‘always finds a response among them’.[51] They are therefore unlikely to put their guns away and enable the bourgeoisie to lord over them.

This issue of permanent revolution is also the context for understanding Fanon’s view of revolutionary violence. He did not subscribe (contra Arendt and others) to any ‘metaphysics of violence’. His advocacy of violence washistorically specific. He argued that a people armed would not only be better equipped to evict the colonialists; most importantly, it is needed to help push the revolution beyond the boundaries set by the national bourgeoisie after the achievement of independence. It is no accident that one of the first demands of the leaders of the newly independent states was for the masses to give up their arms – the presence of which could impede their embrace of neocolonialism. Fanon also emphasised the need for adecentralised as against a centralised political and economic apparatus that could succeed in directly drawing the masses into running the affairs of society – including the most downtrodden among them, like the peasantry. He warned against adopting the model of statist Five-Year Plans and advocated support for cooperatives and other autonomous ventures. No less significantly, he argued strenuously against a single-party state on the grounds that, ‘The single party is the modern form of the bourgeois dictatorship – stripped of mask, makeup, and scruples, cynical in every respect.’[52] He conceived of parties in terms of ‘an organism through which the people exercise their authority and express their will’ and not as a hierarchical, stratified force standing above them. Most importantly, he emphasised the critical role of consciousness and revolutionary education in providing the most indispensable condition of socialist transformation – overcoming the depersonalisation of the colonised subject. He wrote,

It is commonly thought with criminal flippancy that to politicize the masses means from time to time haranguing them with a major political speech … But political education means opening up the mind, awakening the mind, and introducing it to the world. It is, as Césaire said, ‘To invent the souls of men.’[53]

Needless to say, Fanon’s strictures were not followed by the leaders of the national independence struggles, who found a comfortable place for themselves within the framework of the bourgeois phase of development – even when (indeed especially when!) they anointed their rule as some form of ‘socialism’. But were there  the material conditions present at that time which could have enabled the African revolutions to bypass the bourgeois phase? I am not referring solely to conditions of economic backwardness or underdevelopment, since these would not be decisive barriers if the newly independent nations were in the position to receive aid and support from the workers of the technologically developed world. Marx, after all, held at the end of his life that economically backward Russia could bypass a capitalist stage of development if a revolution centred on the peasantry linked up with proletarian revolutions in the West.[54] Yet in the context of the African revolutions of the 1950s and ’60s, such aid could not be expected – in large measure because forces like the French Communist and Socialist parties disgracefully supported French imperialism’s war against the Algerian Revolution (something that major left-intellectuals inside and outside the French CP at the time, such as Althusser and Foucault, never managed to find time to condemn).

This problem consumed Fanon’s attention in the final years of his life, and marks one of the most controversial aspects of his legacy. In the face of the failure of the established French leftist parties to support Algeria’s struggle for independence (with which he became openly identified by 1955), he issued a series of sharp critiques of the working class for failing to fulfil its historic mission. He writes,

The generalized and sometimes truly bloody enthusiasm that has marked the participation of French workers and peasants in the war against the Algerian people has shaken to its foundations the myth of an effective opposition between the people and the government … The war in Algeria is being waged conscientiously by all Frenchmen and the few criticisms expressed up to the present time by a few individuals mention only certain methods which ‘are precipitating the loss of Algeria.’[55]

In a colonial country, it used to be said, there is a community of interests between the colonized people and the working class of the colonialist country. The history of the wars of liberation waged by the colonized peoples is the history of the non-verification of this thesis.[56]

These statements are often taken as proof that Fanon dismissed the revolutionary potential of the working class tout court. However, only a year later Fanon stated in another piece forEl Moudjahid, ‘the dialectical strengthening that occurs between the movement of liberation of the colonized peoples and the emancipatory struggle of the exploited working class of the imperialist countries is sometimes neglected, and indeed forgotten.’[57] Might he have had himself in mind? He now considerably revises his earlier position, as he speaks of ‘the internal relation … that unites the oppressed peoples to the exploited masses of the colonialist countries’.[58] And as The Wretched of the Earth (written a few years later) clearly shows, he did not close the door to the possibility that the working classmight fulfil its historic mission even while criticising it for not yet having done so:

The colossal task, which consists of reintroducing man into the world, man in his totality, will be achieved with the crucial help of the European masses who would do well to confess that they have rallied behind the position of our common masters on colonial issues. In order to do this, the European masses must first of all decide to wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty.[59]

Nevertheless, the hoped-for aid from the workers of the industrially-developed West never arrived – notwithstanding the heroic efforts of numerous individuals in France and elsewhere who spoke out in favour of the independence of the African colonies. In lieu of any significant support from the industrially-developed West, how were the African Revolutions going to obtain the resources needed to sustain genuine independence, let alone move further towards the creation of a socialist society?

Fanon responded by turning his energies to Africa as a whole. This is reflected in his decision to become a roving ambassador for Algeria’s FLN, travelling to over a dozen countries pushing for an ‘African Legion’ to come to the aid of the Algerian struggle and revolutions elsewhere on the continent. It is also reflected in his effort to create a ‘southern front’ of the Algerian struggle by procuring a route for the shipment of arms and other materiel from Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Niger. Concerned that the French might strike a rotten compromise with the FLN to keep it within its neocolonial orbit, he was trying to radicalise both the Algerian and sub-Saharan struggles by cementing closer relations between them.

It may be true, as Adam Shatz has recently argued, that Fanon’s efforts were rather quixotic, since ‘the southern Sahara had never been an important combat zone for the FLN, and there was little trust between the Algerians and the desert tribes.’[60] However, this should not cause us to lose sight of his broader effort to convey the militancy of the Algerian struggle ‘to the four corners of Africa’ as part of rejecting any compromise with capitalism. As Fanon put it, the task is ‘To turn the absurd and the impossible inside out and hurl a continent against the last ramparts of colonial power.’[61] This was no mere rhetorical declaration, since he spent the last several years of his life working incessantly to coordinate activity between the various revolutionary movements in Africa. He forthrightly stated, ‘For nearly three years I have been trying to bring the misty idea of African unity out of the subjectivist bog of the majority of its supporters. African Unity is a principle on the basis of which it is proposed to achieve the United States of Africa without passing through the middle-class chauvinistic phase…’ In case there is any doubt about the provenance of this embrace of permanent revolution, he states on the same page: ‘We must once again come back to the Marxist formula. The triumphant middle classes are the most impetuous, the most enterprising, the most annexationist in the world.’[62]

For Fanon ‘it is no longer possible to advance by regions … [Africa] must advance in totality.’ The key to that, he held, was Congo – since ‘a unified Congo having at its head a militant anticolonialist [Patrice Lumumba] constituted a real danger for South Africa’.[63] For if South Africa, the most industrially-developed country in Africa, was brought into the orbit of revolution, the material conditions might be at hand to push the continent as a whole beyond the confines of capitalist development.

Despite their verbal commitment to Pan-Africanism, virtually all the leaders of the newly independent states – including the most radical among them – were more interested in gaining acceptance and aid from the major world powers than in promoting pan-African unity. Close as he was in many respects to Nkrumah, Fanon was embittered at Ghana’s failure to provide material aid to Lumumba in the Congo, and he grew increasingly embittered at the failure of the African Legion to get off the ground. It became clear that for the new leaders of independent Africa, the way forward was to ally with one or another pole of global capital – either the imperialist West or the so-called ‘communist’ East. Fanon was opposed to this approach.

It [is] commonly thought that the time has come for the world, and particularly for the Third World, to choose between the capitalist system and the socialist system. The underdeveloped countries … must, however, refuse to get involved in such rivalry. The Third World must not be content to define itself in relation to values that preceded it. On the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavor to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them. The basic issue with which we are faced is not the unequivocal choice between socialism and capitalism such as they have been defined by men from different continents and different periods of time.[64]

Fanon was clearly not satisfied with existing ‘socialist’ societies ‘as they have been defined’. He was aware of their deficiencies. But this does not mean that he conducted a thorough analysis of them or acknowledged their class basis and thoroughly oppressive character. This is unfortunate, since it has led some followers of Fanon to whitewash their crimes, which has only fed into the general discrediting of the Left for supporting regimes which were as exploitative of their working class as imperialist ones. No less importantly, the lack of a thoroughgoing critique of ‘Soviet-type’ societies on Fanon’s part rendered his effort to conceive of the transcendence of the bourgeois phase somewhat abstract and even quixotic, since it was left unclear how technologically underdeveloped societies might skip the bourgeois phase if they could not depend on the beneficence of the purportedly ‘socialist’ regimes.

Fanon cannot be blamed for his rather inconclusive discussion of how to surmount the bourgeois phase of development in The Wretched of the Earth, since he was only beginning to explore the issue of permanent revolution and he passed from the scene only days after the book came off the press. However, we who today face the task of developing an alternative toall forms of capitalism – whether the ‘free market’ capitalism of the West or its state-capitalist variants – do not have that excuse. Fanon’s work may not provide the answer to the question, but it does provide resources that (in conjunction with the work of many others) can aid our effort to do so.

Today’s realities are of course far different than those that defined Fanon’s life and times – on an assortment of levels. But they also provide new possibilities for coming to grips with the problems he was addressing, especially at the end of his life. Fanon departed from the scene declaring, ‘Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet murders him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.’[65] These words are hardly rendered obsolete by the fact that today many from the global South are trying to find their way into Europe, as is seen from the response of the European powers to an influx of refugees which is transforming the continent. It may turn out that the growing presence of the global Southinside the global North provides a material basis for thinking out new pathways to the transcendence of neocolonialism and class society, just as the racist resurgence that has accompanied it gives new urgency to working out the dialectical relation of race, class and gender anew. Fanon’s work will live on so long as these problems continue to concern us.

BACK TO ISSUE 26(2): IDENTITY POLITICS

References

Anderson, Kevin B. 2010, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Basso, Luca 2015, Marx and the Common: From ‘Capital’ to the Late Writings,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1999, ‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition’, in Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, edited by Nigel Gibson, New York: Humanity Books.

Bird-Pollan, Stefan 2015, Hegel, Freud and Fanon: The Dialectic of Emancipation, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Cherki, Alice 2006, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, translated by Nadia Benabid, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Coulthard, Glenn Sean 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cox, Oliver Cromwell 1948, Race, Caste and Class: A Study in Social Dynamics, New York: Doubleday.

Debs, Eugene V. 1903, ‘The Negro in the Class Struggle’, International Socialist Review, 4, 5: 257–60.

Dunayevskaya, Raya 2003, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Fanon, Frantz 1967, Toward the African Revolution, translated by Haakon Chevalier, New York: Grove Press

Fanon, Frantz 2004, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz 2008, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz 2016, Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, Paris: La Découverte.

Gordon, Lewis R. 2015,What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought, New York: Fordham University Press.

Harrison, Hubert 2001, ‘The Negro and Socialism: 1 – The Negro Problem Stated’, in A Hubert Harrison Reader, edited by Jeffrey P. Perry, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1977, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Books.

Hudis, Peter 2012, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism,Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Hudis, Peter 2015, Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades, London: Pluto Press.

JanMohamed, Abdul 1986, ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature’, in ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lee, Christopher J. 2015, Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Marx, Karl 1975a, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’, in Marx–Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1975b, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, inMarx–Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1976, ThePoverty of Philosophy, inMarx–Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1977, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1983, ‘Preface to Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto’, in Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘The Peripheries of Capitalism’, edited by Teodor Shanin, New York: Monthly Review Books.

Parry, Benita 1987, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 9, 1: 27–58.

Roberts, Michael 2016, The Long Depression: How It Happened, Why It Happened, and What Happens Next, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Shatz, Adam 2017, ‘Where Life Is Seized’, London Review of Books, 39, 2: 19–27, available at: <https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n02/adam-shatz/where-life-is-seized&gt;.

Wyrick, Deborah 1998, Fanon for Beginners, New York: Writers and Readers Publishing.

Yaki Sayles, James 2010, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Chicago: Spear and Shield Publications.

Zeilig, Leo 2016, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution, London: I.B. Tauris & Co.

[1] Fanon 2004, p. 5.

[2] See Gordon 2015, Lee 2015, Bird-Pollan 2015, Hudis 2015, Zeilig 2016. See also Coulthard 2014.

[3] See Fanon 2016.

[4] For specific expressions of this, see Hudis 2015, p. 1.

[5] See Parry 1987, p. 33.

[6] See especially JanMohamed 1986 and Bhabha 1999.

[7] Of course, vital appropriations of Fanon’s work occurred in recent decades that were outside the purview of most postcolonial theorists – as by South African youth during and after the Soweto Uprising in 1978. The impetus for this came from the Black Consciousness Movement and not the ANC – which adhered (as it still does) to the two-stage theory of revolution, which calls for a prolonged stage of national capitalist development while pushing a socialist transformation off to the distant horizon.

[8] For a fuller discussion of these developments, see Taylor 2016.

[9] For more on this, see Hudis 2012, pp. 169–82.

[10] For a substantiation of these claims, see Roberts 2016.

[11] For a pathbreaking study that put forward this thesis, see Cox 1948.

[12] Marx 1976, p. 167.

[13] See Anderson 2010, pp. 79–153.

[14] Marx 1977, p. 414.

[15] See Debs 1903 for a classic formulation of this position.

[16] Fanon 2008, p. xi.

[17] Hegel 1977, p. 10.

[18] Fanon 2008, p. xv.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Fanon 2008, p. xii.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Marx 1975a, p. 186.

[23] Marx 1975b, p. 274.

[24] Marx 1975b, p. 296.

[25] Marx 1975a, p. 185.

[26] Basso 2015, p. 4.

[27] Fanon 2008, p. xiv.

[28] It is therefore no accident that one of the most commonly circulated posters during the US Civil Rights Movement was the simple – albeit enormously profound – statement, ‘I am a Man.’ Curiously, thousands of virtually the same posters resurfaced, in a new form, during the street protests against police abuse in Chicago, New York, and other cities in 2015 and 2016 – although many of them also read, ‘I am a Woman.’

[29] Hegel 1977, p. 119.

[30] Fanon 2008, p. 195.

[31] See Hegel 1977, p. 119: ‘Having a “mind of one’s own” is self-will, a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude.’

[32] Fanon 2008, p. 106.

[33] Gordon 2015, p. 54.

[34] Fanon 2008, p. 112.

[35] Fanon 2008, pp. 112–13.

[36] Fanon 2008, p. 112.

[37] Fanon 2008, p. 117.

[38] Cherki 2006, p. 64.

[39] See Harrison 2001, p. 54.

[40] See Dunayevskaya 2003, pp. 267–73.

[41] See Wyrick 1998, p. 132: ‘In fact, Fanon believes that colonialism causes the Marxist model of base and superstructure to collapse altogether because economic relationships are secondary to racial ones. That is, the Manichean thinking on which colonialism depends blots out other distinctions, hierarchies, logical patterns.’

[42] Fanon 2004, pp. 93–5.

[43] Yaki Sayles 2010, p. 304.

[44] Yaki Sayles 2010, p. 181.

[45] Shatz thinks that Fanon had already reached this position by the end of Black Skin, White Masks (Shatz 2017, p. 20). However, Fanon’s emphasis on ‘reaching out for the universal’ and creating ‘a new human world’ is better seen as a concretisation of his insistence (in critiquing Sartre) that black consciousness is the mediating term in the movement from the individual to the universal.

[46] Fanon 2004, p. 182.

[47] Fanon 2004, p. 119.

[48] Alice Cherki, who knew Fanon very well, reports that the transcripts of the proceedings of the first four Congresses of the Third International, which debated this issue, held ‘a great fascination for Fanon’. See Cherki 2006, p. 93.

[49] Fanon 2004, p. 118.

[50] Fanon 2004, p. 23.

[51] Fanon 2004, p. 69.

[52] Fanon 2004, p. 111.

[53] Fanon 2004, p. 138.

[54] See Marx and Engels 1983, p. 139.

[55] Fanon 1967, p. 65.

[56] Fanon 1967, p. 74.

[57] Fanon 1967, p. 144.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Fanon 2004, p. 62.

[60] Shatz 2017, p. 26.

[61] Fanon 1967, pp. 180–1.

[62] Fanon 1967, p. 187.

[63] Fanon 1967, p. 192.

[64] Fanon 2004, p. 55.

[65] Fanon 2004, p. 235.