Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism. Thus, several years before the recent explosion in “whiteness studies,” Robinson proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe’s modern encounter with African and New World labor.

This particular form of English racialism was not invented by the ruling class to divide and conquer (though it did succeed in that respect); rather, it was there at the outset, shaping the process of proletarianization and the formation of working-class consciousness.

It was there—not Africa—that the “Negro” was first manufactured. This was no easy task, as Robinson reminds us, since the invention of the Negro—and by extension the fabrication of whiteness and all the policing of racial boundaries that came with it—required “immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies in the West” (4).

There is yet another reason for Robinson to begin in the heart of the West. It was there—not Africa—that the “Negro” was first manufactured. This was no easy task, as Robinson reminds us, since the invention of the Negro—and by extension the fabrication of whiteness and all the policing of racial boundaries that came with it—required “immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies in the West” (4). Indeed, a group of European scholars expended enormous energy rewriting of the history of the ancient world. Anticipating Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I (1987) and building on the pioneering scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop, George G. M. James, and Frank Snowden, Robinson exposes the efforts of European thinkers to disavow the interdependence between ancient Greece and North Africa.

Robinson observes, “Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks—men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension” (121).

Therefore, the first waves of African New World revolts were governed not by a critique of Western society but rather a total rejection of the experience of enslavement and racism. More intent on preserving a past than transforming Western society or overthrowing capitalism, they created maroon settlements, ran away, became outliers, and tried to find a way home, even if it meant death.

The contradictions of colonialism produced the native bourgeoisie, more intimate with European life and thought, whose assigned task was to help rule. Trained to be junior partners in the colonial state, members of this bourgeoisie experienced both racism from Europeans and a deep sense of alienation from their native lives and cultures. Their contradictory role as victims of racial domination and tools in the empire, as Western educated elites feeling like aliens among the dominant society as well as among the masses, compelled some of these men and women to revolt, thus producing the radical Black intelligentsia. It is no accident that many of these radicals and scholars emerged both during the First World War, when they recognized the vulnerability of Western civilization, and the second world crisis—the international depression and the rise of fascism.

Therefore, the first waves of African New World revolts were governed not by a critique of Western society but rather a total rejection of the experience of enslavement and racism. More intent on preserving a past than transforming Western society or overthrowing capitalism, they created maroon settlements, ran away, became outliers, and tried to find a way home, even if it meant death. However, with the advent of formal colonialism and the incorporation of Black labor into a more fully governed social structure, a more direct critique of the West and colonialism emerged—a revolt set on transforming social relations and revolutionizing Western society rather then reproducing African social life. The contradictions of colonialism produced the native bourgeoisie, more intimate with European life and thought, whose assigned task was to help rule. Trained to be junior partners in the colonial state, members of this bourgeoisie experienced both racism from Europeans and a deep sense of alienation from their native lives and cultures. Their contradictory role as victims of racial domination and tools in the empire, as Western educated elites feeling like aliens among the dominant society as well as among the masses, compelled some of these men and women to revolt, thus producing the radical Black intelligentsia.

The way they came to the Black Radical Tradition was more of an act of recognition than invention; they did not create the theory of Black radicalism as much as found it, through their work and study, in the mass movements of Black people.

Du Bois, James, and Wright eventually revised their positions on Western Marxism or broke with it altogether and, to differing degrees, embraced Black radicalism. The way they came to the Black Radical Tradition was more of an act of recognition than invention; they did not create the theory of Black radicalism as much as found it, through their work and study, in the mass movements of Black people.

Robinson took up Cruse’s challenge to develop new theories of revolution where Marxism failed, but he moved well beyond Cruse’s positions. Eventually, Robinson came to the conclusion that it is not enough to reshape or reformulate Marxism to fit the needs of Third World revolution; instead, he believed all universalist theories of political and social order had to be rejected.

Robinson, on the other hand, takes the same existential condition but comes to different conclusions: slavery did not define the Black condition because we were Africans first, with world views and philosophical notions about life, death, possession, community, and so forth that are rooted in that African heritage. And once we understand how to define ourselves in terms of this collective identity, Robinson implies, then perhaps we can understand the persistence of nationalism and various forms of race consciousness (which have never been fully contained under the limited rubric of “nationalism”).

Surrealists explicitly called for the overthrow of bourgeois culture, identified with anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia, and turned to non-European cultures as a source of ideas and inspiration in their critique of Western civilization. In 1925 the Paris surrealist group asserted in no uncertain terms, “We profoundly hope that revolutions, wars, colonial insurrections, will annihilate this Western civilisation whose vermin you defend even in the Orient.” And seven years later, amid economic crisis and the spread of fascism, the group issued a document titled “Murderous Humanitarianism” (1932) that consisted of a relentless attack on colonialism, capitalism, the clergy, hypocritical liberals, and even the Black bourgeoisie.

For these Black intellectuals and activists, their dissatisfaction with socialist realism had to do with the suppression of key elements of Black culture that surrealism embraced: the unconscious, the spirit, desire, magic, and love. That most Black radicals did not jump headlong onto the surrealist bandwagon, ironically, has to do with its similarity to the revolutionary core that was recognized as having always existed in African and Black diasporic life. To paraphrase Cedric Robinson, surrealism was not the path to inventing a theory of Black radicalism, but it might have been a path to recognition.

In a 1967 interview he explained, “Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation.” Surrealism also helped him to summon up powerful unconscious forces: “This, for me, was a call to Africa. I said to myself: it’s true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black.”

Robinson identifies a tendency on the part of New World Africans to avoid direct confrontation and the use of violence in the Caribbean and North America; instead, these New World Africans sought to recreate village life on foreign soil. Indeed, Robinson places great emphasis on the absence of violence throughout the Diaspora and the critical importance of spiritual and psychic well-being.

What was stunning in the writings of Marx and Engels, then, was not their mere recognition of class struggle but rather their sympathies in that struggle. While Kant and Hegel threw their support to the bureaucrats as that stratum which constituted what Hegel designated as the “universal class,” Marx and Engels proposed the industrial proletariat, wage laborers. But quite possibly that was less an error in judgment (as Cox supposed) than a deceit: even in their own times, notwithstanding their different historical contexts and their specific political maneuvers, it should have been obvious that Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Engels all concealed their faith in philosophy.

Driven, however, by the need to achieve the scientific elegance and interpretive economy demanded by theory, Marx consigned race, gender, culture, and history to the dustbin. Fully aware of the constant place women and children held in the workforce, Marx still deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation.

Marx's conceit was to presume that the theory of historical materialism explained history; but, at worst, it merely rearranged history. And at its best (for it must be acknowledged that there are some precious insights in Marxism), historical materialism still only encapsulated an analytical procedure which resonated with bourgeois Europe, merely one fraction of the world economy.

Marx’s conceit was to presume that the theory of historical materialism explained history; but, at worst, it merely rearranged history. And at its best (for it must be acknowledged that there are some precious insights in Marxism), historical materialism still only encapsulated an analytical procedure which resonated with bourgeois Europe, merely one fraction of the world economy.

But of equal and perhaps greater interest are the efforts of renegade radical thinkers to determine what those seductions were and how to recouperate radical theory from its blunders. These particular critics of Marxism were products of other histories, other intellectual traditions, and other, neglected participants in the world economy. When I took up this work, I was interested specifically in those radical thinkers who had emerged from what I have termed the Black Radical Tradition; how some of the most illustrious and perceptive of them came to terms with Marxism is explored in Part III.

Ironically, to Black radicals of the twentieth century, one of the most compelling features of Marxism was its apparent universalism. Unlike the dominant historical discourses of the nineteenth century, historical materialism was inflected by an internationalism and a scientific rigor which plainly transcended the obnoxious and sinister claims for destiny exhibited by such conceits as German nationalism, British imperialism, the racism of the “White Man’s Burden,” and so forth. For a time, then, Marxism might have seemed an effective antidote to contemporary discourse. But Marxism’s internationalism was not global; its materialism was exposed as an insufficient explanator of cultural and social forces; and its economic determinism too often politically compromised freedom struggles beyond or outside of the metropole.

The Black Radical Tradition was an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle. In the daily encounters and petty resistances to domination, slaves had acquired a sense of the calculus of oppression as well as its overt organization and instrumentation. These experiences lent themselves to a means of preparation for more epic resistance movements. The first organized revolts in the slave castles in Africa, and on board slave ships, were generally communal in the terms of their Old World kinships (Bambara, Ganga, Yoruba, etc.). These rebellions sought return to African homelands and a repair of the discontinuity produced by enslavement and transportation. Later, in the colonial settlements, when conditions were favorable, revolts often took the form of marronage, a concession to the relocation of slavery and to the new, syncretic cultural identities emergent from the social cauldron of slave organization.

The Black Radical Tradition was an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle. In the daily encounters and petty resistances to domination, slaves had acquired a sense of the calculus of oppression as well as its overt organization and instrumentation. These experiences lent themselves to a means of preparation for more epic resistance movements. The first organized revolts in the slave castles in Africa, and on board slave ships, were generally communal in the terms of their Old World kinships (Bambara, Ganga, Yoruba, etc.). These rebellions sought return to African homelands and a repair of the discontinuity produced by enslavement and transportation. Later, in the colonial settlements, when conditions were favorable, revolts often took the form of marronage, a concession to the relocation of slavery and to the new, syncretic cultural identities emergent from the social cauldron of slave organization. Newly transported “outlaw” Africans and creole Blacks, and sometimes Native Americans and European slaves, withdrew beyond the patrolled presence of exploitation to forge egalitarian societies.

As the Black Radical Tradition was distilled from the racial antagonisms which were arrayed along a continuum from the casual insult to the most ruthless and lethal rules of law; from the objectifications of entries in marine cargo manifests, auction accountancy, plantation records, broadsheets and newspapers; from the loftiness of Christian pulpits and biblical exegesis to the minutia of slave-naming, dress, types of food, and a legion of other significations, the terrible culture of race was revealed. Inevitably, the tradition was transformed into a radical force. And in its most militant manifestation, no longer accustomed to the resolution that flight and withdrawal were sufficient, the purpose of the struggles informed by the tradition became the overthrow of the whole race-based structure.

For Du Bois, James, and Wright, Marxism became a staging area for their immersion into the tradition. Black Marxism was not a site of contestation between Marxism and the tradition, nor a revision. It was a new vision centered on a theory of the cultural corruption of race. And thus the reach and cross-fertilization of the tradition became evident in the anticolonial and revolutionary struggles of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

As a culture of liberation, the tradition crossed the familiar bounds of social and historical narrative. Just as in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to take one instance, African marronage infected Native American and African settlements in Florida to produce the Black Seminoles who fought against the United States for three decades, the tradition has effused in myriad forms and locations.

More particularly, I have investigated the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist organization. We are that (because we must be) but much more.

This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle. It takes as a first premise that for a people to survive in struggle it must be on its own terms: the collective wisdom which is a synthesis of culture and the experience of that struggle. The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being. It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma. It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it. It is a construct possessing its own terms, exacting its own truths.

I have attempted here to demonstrate its authority. More particularly, I have investigated the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist organization. We are that (because we must be) but much more.

It takes as a first premise that for a people to survive in struggle it must be on its own terms: the collective wisdom which is a synthesis of culture and the experience of that struggle. … The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being. It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma. It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it. It is a construct possessing its own terms, exacting its own truths.

However, it is still fair to say that at base, that is at its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction—a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures.

It was indeed nationalism, a second “bourgeois” accretion, that most subverted the socialist creation. Nationalism, as a mix of racial sensibility and the economic interests of the national bourgeoisies, was as powerful an ideological impulse as any spawned from these strata. As an acquired temper and as a historical force met on the fields of social and political revolution, nationalism bemused the founders of historical materialism and those who followed them. It was to overtake both the direction of capitalist development and eventually the formative structures of socialist societies as they appeared in the present century.

Necessarily then, Marx’s and Engels’s theory of revolution was insufficient in scope: the European proletariat and its social allies did not constitute the revolutionary subject of history, nor was working-class consciousness necessarily the negation of bourgeois culture. Out of what was in reality a rather more complex capitalist world system (and one to which Marx in his last decade paid closer attention), other revolutionary forces emerged as well. Informed as they were by the ideas and cultures drawn from their own historical experiences, these movements assumed forms only vaguely anticipated in the radical traditions of the West.

Taken together, the efforts of Du Bois, James, and Wright consisted of a first step toward the creation of an intellectual legacy that would complement the historical force of Black struggle. Their destiny, I suggest, was not to create the idea of that struggle so much as to articulate it. Regardless, the Black opposition to domination has continued to acquire new forms. In a very real sense then, the present study follows.

The historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism. This could only be true if the social, psychological, and cultural origins of racism and nationalism both anticipated capitalism in time and formed a piece with those events that contributed directly to its organization of production and exchange. Feudal society is the key.

This variety of uses to which slaves were put illustrates clearly the degree to which medieval colonial slavery served as a model for Atlantic colonial slavery. Slave manpower had been employed in the Italian colonies in the Mediterranean for all the kinds of work it would be burdened with in the Atlantic colonies. The only important change was that the white victims of slavery were replaced by a much greater number of African Negroes, captured in raids or bought by traders.

I believe that, for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists. In other words, the group of capitalists of a given epoch does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch. At every change in economic organization we find a breach of continuity. It is as if the capitalists who have up to then been active recognize that they are incapable of adapting themselves to conditions which are evoked by needs hitherto unknown and which call for methods hitherto unemployed.

Both Pirenne and Davies understood that the biological metaphor of a bourgeoisie emerging out of the Middle Ages, nurturing itself on the "mercantilisms" and administrations of the Absolute Monarchies of the traditional period between feudalism and the capitalism, and on the lands and titles of impoverished nobilities, then finally achieving political and economic maturity and thus constituting industrial capitalism, is largely unsupported by historical evidence. Rather it is a historical impression, a phantom representation largely constructed from the late eighteenth century to the present by the notional activity of a bourgeoisie as a dominant class.

In short, throughout Europe a small group of well-informed men, kept in touch by an active correspondence, controlled the entire network of exchanges in bills or specie, thus dominating the field of commercial speculation. So we should not be too taken in by the apparent spread of "finance."

The bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from others; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds. The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into "racial" ones. As the Slavs became the natural slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation during the early Middle Ages, as the Tartars came to occupy a similar position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so at the systemic interlocking of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the Third World began to fill this expanding category of a civilization reproduced by capitalism.

In England, as an instance, representatives of the great landowners, and agrarian capitalism, in pursuit of their own social and financial destinies disciplined first the church and then the monarchy and finally "the masses" through enclosures, the Poor Laws, debtors' prisons, "transportation" (forced emigration), and the like.

It is easy enough to say that this culture was backward-looking or conservative. True enough, one direction of the great agitations of the artisans and outworkers, continued over 50 years, was to resist being turned into a proletariat. When they knew that this cause was lost, yet they reached out again, in the Thirties and Forties, and sought to achieve new and only imagined forms of social control.

The English worker in the second half of the nineteenth century began to enjoy certain of the perquisites of a labor aristocracy in a world system.

The negations resultant from capitalist modes of production, relations of production, and ideology did not manifest themselves as an eradication of oppositions among the working classes. Instead, the dialectic of proletarianization disciplined the working classes to the importance of distinctions: between ethnics and nationalities; between skilled and unskilled workers; and, as we shall see later in even more dramatic terms, between races. The persistence and creation of such oppositions within the working classes were a critical aspect of the triumph of capitalism in the nineteenth century.

Prior to the nineteenth century, what has sometimes been referred to as the socialist vision was a species of the moral and architectonic traditions that had penetrated European thought in the form of ethical systems and considerations preserved from the civilizations of Egypt, ancient Greece, and Asia Minor.

It was not the working classes in Germany who were at the origin of socialist ideas… . [S]ocialist ideas were spread by a party of the intellectual elite, who saw the proletarian masses as a possible instrument of social renewal. … Indeed, the history of European socialism is dotted by a consistent opposition to the practical activity and consciousness of proletarian classes.

So as utilitarianism and functionalism had served as bases for those elements of the petit bourgeoisie enveloped by bureaucracy, commerce, and the professions—that is, the mainstream of a capitalist social order—socialism became the pennant of those members of the petit bourgeoisie appalled by the cruel lack of restraint and the chaotically foreshortened vision of the bourgeoisie.

While the movements of the working classes tended toward an accommodation with capitalism in the form of trade unionist demands, abandoning revolutionary initiatives to those whose social origins were, most often, the peasant and petit bourgeois classes, socialist theory became more and more dominated by the figure of the revolutionary proletariat.

In the political field, nationalism is the fact against which the Marxist theory breaks itself. Here is a force which has proved definitely stronger in the modern world than the class struggle which for orthodox Marxists makes the essence of history. The natural result was that the Marxists constantly tended to underestimate a force which did not easily fit into their ideas, and which at the same time was clearly contrasted with the ideals of the class-struggle. It became almost a mark of an orthodox Marxist to despise every nationalist feeling.

The dismissal of culture, that is, a transmitted historical consciousness, as an aspect of class consciousness, did not equip the Marxian movement for the political forces that would not only erupt in Europe and the Third World but within the movement itself.

The contradiction here is that capitalism, even as it spread remorselessly over the world to unite human society into one more or less connected story for the first time, also engendered a perilous and convulsive new fragmentation of that society. The socio-historical cost of this rapid implantation of capitalism into world society was "nationalism."

Racialism insinuated not only medieval, feudal, and capitalist social structures, forms of property, and modes of production, but as well the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences. Western culture, constituting the structure from which European consciousness was appropriated, the structure in which social identities and perceptions were grounded in the past, transmitted a racialism that adapted to the political and material exigencies of the moment.

At the very beginnings of European civilization (meaning literally the reappearance of urban life at the end of the first Christian millennium), the integration of the Germanic migrants with older European peoples resulted in a social order of domination from which a racial theory of order emerged; one from which the medieval nobilities would immerse themselves and their power in fictional histories, positing distinct racial origins for rulers and the dominated. The extension of slavery and the application of racism to non-European peoples as an organizing structure by first the ruling feudal strata and then the bourgeoisies of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries retained this practical habit, this social convention.

In short, there were at least four distinct moments that must be apprehended in European racialism; two whose origins are to be found within the dialectic of European development, and two that are not: 1. the racial ordering of European society from its formative period, which extends into the medieval and feudal ages as "blood" and racial beliefs and legends. 2. the Islamic (i.e., Arab, Persian, Turkish, and African) domination of Mediterranean civilization and the consequent retarding of European social and cultural life: the Dark Ages. 3. the incorporation of African, Asian, and peoples of the New World into the world system emerging from late feudalism and merchant capitalism. 4. the dialectic of colonialism, plantocratic slavery, and resistance from the sixteenth century forward, and the formations of industrial labor and labor reserves.

Before the African and New World Black liberation movements of the post–Second World War era, few Western scholars of the African experience had any conception of the existence of an ideologically based or epistemologically coherent historical tradition of Black radicalism. The presence of such a tradition, the possibilities and conditions of its existence were literally and configuratively alien to these observers. Given the presumptions these students of Africa and its diaspora made about the bases of the identities, cultures, ethnicities, and group formations of these various African peoples, neither space nor time, geography nor periodicity, led them to suspect the presence of such a tradition. In its stead, these observers reconstructed social and ideological movements among Blacks to conform to the exigencies of specific locales and of immediate social causes.1 If in their minds such movements occasionally were allowed some resemblance to one another, this followed from the fact of a general racial order shared by most Blacks, whether as slaves or ex-slaves, rather than the presence of a historical or political consciousness or a social tradition among Blacks.

Before the African and New World Black liberation movements of the post–Second World War era, few Western scholars of the African experience had any conception of the existence of an ideologically based or epistemologically coherent historical tradition of Black radicalism. The presence of such a tradition, the possibilities and conditions of its existence were literally and configuratively alien to these observers.

The makings of an essentially African response, strewn across the physical and temporal terrain of societies conceived in Western civilization, have been too infrequently distinguished. Only over time has the setting for these events been integrated into the tradition. The social cauldron of Black radicalism is Western society. Western society, however, has been its location and its objective condition but not—except in a most perverse fashion—its specific inspiration. Black radicalism is a negation of Western civilization, but not in the direct sense of a simple dialectical negation. It is certain that the evolving tradition of Black radicalism owes its peculiar moment to the historical interdiction of African life by European agents. In this sense, the African experience of the past five centuries is simply one element in the mesh of European history: some of the objective requirements for Europe's industrial development were met by the physical and mental exploitation of Asian, African, and native American peoples. This experience, though, was merely the condition for Black radicalism—its immediate reason for and object of being—but not the foundation for its nature or character. Black radicalism, consequently, cannot be understood within the particular context of its genesis. It is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilization

[T]he similarity of African survivals in the New World points not to tribal peculiarities but to the essential oneness of African culture. That culture was the shield which frustrated the efforts of Europeans to dehumanize Africans through servitude. The slave may have appeared in a profit and loss account as an “item,” and “thing,” a piece of “property,” but he faced his new situation as an African, a worker, and a man. At this level of perception, it is quite irrelevant to enquire from which tribe or region a particular African originated.

In the more than 3,000 years between the beginnings of the first conception of the “Ethiopian” and the appearance of the “Negro,” the relationship between the African and European had been reversed.

[S]ocial intercourse did not give rise among the Greeks and Romans to the color prejudice of certain later western societies. The Greeks and Romans developed no doctrines of white superiority unsupported by facts or theoretical justifications for a color bar.

In the Islamic east, the artistic and intellectual center would gravitate from Damascus and Baghdad to Cairo, as the toll from incursions by Seljuq Turks, Christian Crusaders, Berbers, Arab nomads, and Mongol armies mounted. In the west, the al-Maghrib, the most glorious centers of Islamic culture were to be found on the Iberian peninsula. It was in Spain and particularly Toledo (reacquired by “Christendom” in 1085 after more than 300 years of Muslim rule) that the work of translation was concentrated.

In retrospect the Western potential for creating the Negro had moved closer in a way to its realization. The cultural and ideological inventory was at hand. A native racialism had already displayed its usefulness for rationalizing social order, and with the advent of the Islamic intrusion into European history it had further proved its value by its transformation into an instrument of collective resistance and a negation of an unacceptable past. For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object.

Notwithstanding Philip Curtin's rather casual language in describing the process, we should remember that it was in Venice's affairs of trade that Oliver Cox situated "the first capitalistically organized commerce in human beings."

As Italian capitalism matured, however, this emphasis on trade was to change for three reasons. Briefly, they were the expansion of the power of the Ottoman Turks in the eastern Mediterranean in the fifteenth century, the extension of sugar-cane cultivation from Asia Minor to Cyprus, Sicily, and the Atlantic islands (Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores) at the end of that century, and the collaboration of Genoese capitalists with the ruling classes of Iberia. These events transformed the incidental relationship between capitalism and slave labor into the very foundation of New World enterprise.

Madeira, as it turned out, was the physical and historical juncture where these processes congealed. … [W]ith the introduction of sugar cane and its commercial success … Canary Islanders and Moors—followed by Africans—as slaves, performed the necessary physical labor that enabled the upwardly mobile settlers of Madeira to develop a life style, derived from the tradition of the continental nobility but based upon the physical efforts of slaves producing commercial crops for sale on the markets of the continent, that characterized the emerging social institution of the slave plantation.

The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution. "Sad irony of human history," comments Jaures. "The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation." Nantes was the center of the slave-trade... . Nearly all the industries which developed in France during the eighteenth century had their origin in goods or commodities destined either for the coast of Guinea or for America ... upon the success or failure of the traffic everything else depended.

The money came, in the last resort, from the planters themselves... . The money which was received from one planter was lent again, either to him or to another planter... . Thus it was the planter who was paying, so to speak, for his own enslavement. The profits of the plantations were the source which fed the indebtedness charged upon the plantations themselves. In this sense Adam Smith was wrong: the wealth of the British West Indies did not all proceed from the mother country; after some initial loans in the earliest period which merely primed the pump, the wealth of the West Indies was created out of the profits of the West Indies themselves, and, with some assistance from the British tax-payer, much of it found a permanent home in Great Britain.

The money came, in the last resort, from the planters themselves… . The money which was received from one planter was lent again, either to him or to another planter… . Thus it was the planter who was paying, so to speak, for his own enslavement. The profits of the plantations were the source which fed the indebtedness charged upon the plantations themselves. In this sense Adam Smith was wrong: the wealth of the British West Indies did not all proceed from the mother country; after some initial loans in the earliest period which merely primed the pump, the wealth of the West Indies was created out of the profits of the West Indies themselves

From whatever vantage point one chooses, the relationship between slave labor, the slave trade, and the weaving of the early capitalist economies is apparent. Whatever were the alternatives, the point remains: historically, slavery was a critical foundation for capitalism.

The cultivation of sugar in the English colonies began consequently in the late 1630s. Once the techniques of sugar cultivation and refining were mastered, it rapidly displaced the less profitable crops of tobacco, indigo, and ginger in the islands. With the massive demands for labor that sugar production engendered, the appetite of colonial production for labor increasingly outpaced supply. Having already decimated those aboriginal populations they had encountered in the West Indies, the English mercantile and planter bourgeoisie found it necessary and expedient to expand their Irish (and homeland) strategy to West Africa.

The cultivation of sugar in the English colonies began consequently in the late 1630s. Once the techniques of sugar cultivation and refining were mastered, it rapidly displaced the less profitable crops of tobacco, indigo, and ginger in the islands. With the massive demands for labor that sugar production engendered, the appetite of colonial production for labor increasingly outpaced supply. Having already decimated those aboriginal populations they had encountered in the West Indies, the English mercantile and planter bourgeoisie found it necessary and expedient to expand their Irish (and homeland) strategy to West Africa. As they did so, the scale of their enterprise grew beyond anything seen in English history.

The invention of the Negro was proceeding apace with the growth of slave labor. Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists. Just as instructive, the rebels among these Africans and "negroes" were described as "runaways," a term that has endured in the historiography of the period.

The invention of the Negro was proceeding apace with the growth of slave labor. Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.

This trade, this movement of Black workers, though, did not end with slavery's legal termination in the nineteenth century. Leopold's Congo, Harry Johnston's Central Africa, Cecil Rhodes's southern Africa, Lugard's West Africa, Portuguese Africa, and French Africa as well as the New World's slave descendants all contributed to the further development of the capitalist world system. As peasants, as tenant farmers, as migrant laborers, as day laborers, as domestic servants, and as wage labor, their expropriation extended into the present century.

The role of Black labor in the expansion and preservation of capitalism was not, however, the whole of it. The deposition of Black peoples in the New World had still another consequence—a consequence entirely unintended and unanticipated by the tradesmen and ideologists of slavery. Still, the naivete of the Europeans was substantially of their own making: slavery, as a system and way of life, was hardly a propitious setting for much else.

However, Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks—men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension.

Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks—men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension. … This was the embryo of the demon that would be visited on the whole enterprise of primitive accumulation. It would be through the historical and social consciousness of these Africans that the trade in slaves and the system of slave labor was infected with its contradiction.

There was violence of course, but in this tradition it most often was turned inward: the active against the passive, or as was the case of the Nongquase of 1856, the community against its material aspect. … Rather it was their “Jonestown,” our Nongquase: The renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses. For them defeat or victory was an internal affair. … This was a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism.

It becomes clear, then, that for the period between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, it was an African tradition that grounded collective resistance by Blacks to slavery and colonial imperialism.

It was the mind, metaphysics, ideology, consciousness that was Mackandel’s tool in mid-eighteenth-century Haiti. … It was the same with Hyacinth. His army could rush the cannon of the French forces “without fear or care for the volleys,” shoving their arms into the cannons’ mouths. They knew, they believed that “if they were killed they would wake again in Africa.” On that final day of March 1792, 2,000 of them “died,” to a mere 100 of their opponents, but they were doubly blessed: they won the battle and even their dead were free. … They lived on their terms, they died on their terms, they obtained their freedom on their terms. Thus it was with obeahmen and obeahwomen, and papaloi. These were the terms that these African peasants and farmers had brought with them to their captivity. They were also the only terms in which their freedom could be acquired.

The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. It gave them cause to question the authority of a radical intelligentsia drawn by its own analyses from marginal and ambiguous social strata to construct an adequate manifestation of proletarian power. And it drew them more and more toward the actual discourse of revolutionary masses, the impulse to make history in their own terms. And finally, the Black radical tradition forced them to reevaluate the nature and historical roles of ideology and consciousness. After all it had been as an emergent African people and not as slaves that Black men and women had opposed enslavement.

The Black radical tradition that they were to rediscover from a Black historical experience nearly grounded under the intellectual weight and authority of the official European version of the past, was to be the foundation upon which they stood. From this vantage point they could survey the theoretical, ideological, and political instrumentation with which Western radicalism approached the problem of revolutionary social change. The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. It gave them cause to question the authority of a radical intelligentsia drawn by its own analyses from marginal and ambiguous social strata to construct an adequate manifestation of proletarian power. And it drew them more and more toward the actual discourse of revolutionary masses, the impulse to make history in their own terms. And finally, the Black radical tradition forced them to reevaluate the nature and historical roles of ideology and consciousness. After all it had been as an emergent African people and not as slaves that Black men and women had opposed enslavement.

American radicals have long been imprisoned by the pernicious notion that the masses are necessarily both good and revolutionary… . This viewpoint now dominates the black liberation movement, which has been fed for decades by white radical historians who in this one respect have set the ideological pace for their liberal colleagues. It has become virtually sacrilege—or at least white chauvinism—to suggest that slavery was a social system within which whites and blacks lived in harmony as well as antagonism, that there is little evidence of massive, organized opposition to the regime, that the blacks did not establish a revolutionary tradition of much significance, and that our main problem is to discover the reasons for the widespread accommodation and, perhaps more important, the long-term effects both of the accommodation and of that resistance which did occur.

In the middle tier of these societies rested the native petit bourgeoisie, wedged between the laboring classes beneath them and the foreign and native operatives of capital and the officials of the state above. Their social origins were complex and intertwined. One of their bases was the "mulatto" populations of the former slave societies and the colonies. This "brown" stratum was frequently the natural issue of racial systems where privilege of position and education was sometimes bestowed by white fathers (or mothers).

Where whites are mainly sojourning rulers, their numbers are usually relatively small. Ordinarily "home" is in Europe or America, and they seldom set their roots in the area. Here there is little hope of developing a significant white population. The white man's principal need is not a home but a satisfied and exploitable people to develop the resources of the country. This ruling class adopts a policy of "cooperation"; and, other things being equal, favors are distributed to the mixed-bloods on the basis of their apparent degrees of whiteness among the people of color. Degrees of color tend to become a determinant of status in a continuous social-class gradient, with whites at its upper reaches ... the lighter the complexion, the greater the economic and social opportunities.

Most significant, however, were the attitudes colonial administrators developed toward the activities of the missions. The construction of Black Europeans was overly ambitious in their eyes. In 1938, Arthur Mayhew would advise an Oxford University summer session for colonial administrators that "Before the Great War education was undoubtedly too 'literary.'" And he then reported, with satisfaction, that "[f]rom 1925 onwards great emphasis was laid on vocational training."

In the past missionaries had counted themselves successful if their work in the field of education had produced black Englishmen, Africans who seemed to have assimilated Western culture. But these missionary-educated Africans were anathema to many administrators and others. They were "cheeky" and demanded social equality and political rights.

It soon became clear, however, that the colonial governments had moved too late. "Elite nationalism," one of the first political expressions of the Black petit bourgeoisie, was already propelling complements of the class into the older, more profound tradition of radicalism.

In every sector of the Black world, the dialectic of exploitation would shake an increasing number to their very roots. And in time, as the fractures and contradictions of Western domination became more compelling, their presence and their purpose would become electrifyingly clear.

What I demand of Marxism and Communism is that they serve the black peoples, not that the black peoples serve Marxism and Communism. Philosophies and movements must serve the people, not the people the doctrine and the movement... . A doctrine is of value only if it is conceived by us and for us, and revised through us... . We consider it our duty to make common cause with all who cherish truth and justice, in order to form organizations able to support effectively the black peoples in their present and future struggle—their struggle for justice, for culture, for dignity, for liberty... . Because of this, please accept my resignation from the Party.

What I demand of Marxism and Communism is that they serve the black peoples, not that the black peoples serve Marxism and Communism. Philosophies and movements must serve the people, not the people the doctrine and the movement… . A doctrine is of value only if it is conceived by us and for us, and revised through us… . We consider it our duty to make common cause with all who cherish truth and justice, in order to form organizations able to support effectively the black peoples in their present and future struggle—their struggle for justice, for culture, for dignity, for liberty… . Because of this, please accept my resignation from the Party.

But always we must keep in mind that their brilliance was also derivative. The truer genius was in the midst of the people of whom they wrote. There the struggle was more than words or ideas but life itself.

The real frontal attack on Reconstruction, as interpreted by the leaders of national thought in 1870 and for some time thereafter, came from the universities and particularly from Columbia and Johns Hopkins. … In order to paint the South as a martyr to inescapable fate, to make the North the magnanimous emancipator, and to ridicule the Negro as the impossible joke in the whole development, we have in fifty years, by libel, innuendo and silence, so completely misstated and obliterated the history of the Negro in America and his relation to its work and government that today it is almost unknown.

The political consciousness of Black labor, white labor, and immigrant labor were to be smothered by the social discipline implicit in the legends. Complemented by the terror of state militias, company police, and security agents, the persistent threats of immigration controls, the swelling ranks of reserve labor, racialism was reattired so that it might once again take its place among the inventory of labor disciplines.

In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the black would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression—a skillfull terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.

This new repression of Black labor was the immediate cause and the circumstance of the profusion of protest materials produced by the Black intelligentsia in the last decades of the nineteenth century. And Black history was their desperate invention.

[T]here was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from that we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual, (p. 9)

Where Marx had anticipated and depended upon the rise of class consciousness, Lenin had posited the party in its stead. For Lenin, the party, a small group of trained, disciplined, and professional revolutionists, constituted a necessary first stage in the development of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Consciousness, when it did develop, had come later in the process of the events. The revolution had caused the formation of revolutionary consciousness and had not been caused by it. The revolution was spontaneous.

For Du Bois, America in the first half of the nineteenth century, a society in which manufacturing and industrial capitalism had been married to slave production, had been a microcosm of the world system. The advanced sectors of the world economy could expand just so long as they could dominate and rationalize by brute force the exploitation of essentially nonindustrial and agrarian labor. The expansion of American slavery in the nineteenth century was not an anachronism but a forewarning. But so too, he believed, was its defeat.

For the Black peasants and workers in the British West Indies, however, the “new imperialism” that displaced the Caribbean oligarchy was by far the more formidable enemy.

About 143,000 Indians came to Trinidad up to 1917. Immigration began in 1845; there was a break in 1848–51; then from 1851 right down to 1917 Indians arrived steadily each year. Between 1845 and 1892, 93,569 labourers came, channelled through two main Indian ports, Calcutta in the North, and Madras in the South. The great majority, however, came from Calcutta and after 1872 there were no more arrivals from Madras.

The intra-African negro is clearly powerless to struggle successfully against personal enslavement, annexation, or volunteer (or fight for) protection of his territory. What we ask, will in the coming ages be the opinion and attitudes of the extra-Africans: ten millions in the Western hemisphere, dispersed so widely over the surface of the globe, apt apprentices in every conceivable department of civilised culture. Will these men remain for ever too poor, too isolated from one another, for grand racial combination, or will the naturally opulent cradle of their people, too long a place of violence and unholy greed, become at length the sacred watchword of a generation willing and able to conquer or perish under its inspiration.

Only a few among them came to Britain for explicitly political purposes. Makonnen and Padmore did, but such others as Williams their predecessor and James their contemporary, acquired those purposes while living in Britain. Together, they helped to constitute that generation of Black intellectuals that—at their historical juncture-presumed or perhaps understood that the project of anti-imperialism had to be centered in the metropole. After their time and because of their work, decolonization and Black liberation would return to their native lands.

The theoretical frame for The Black Jacobins was, of course, the theories of revolution developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. James asserted that fact rather frequently in the text. It was not, however, entirely the case. From Marx and Engels, he had taken the concept of a revolutionary class and the economic foundations for its historical emergence. But the slaves of Haiti were not a Marxian proletariat. No matter to James: the processes of social formation were the same:

Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy. In spite of all prohibitions, the slaves traveled miles to sing and dance and practice the rites and talk; and now, since the revolution, to hear the political news and make their plans, (p. 86) … This was a complete departure from the way in which Marx and Engels had conceptualized the transformative and rationalizing significance of the bourgeoisie. It implied (and James did not see this) that bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third World peoples. It broke with the evolutionist chain in, the closed dialectic of, historical materialism.

We can see this is our whole development. The chief, or one of the most striking examples is our application of the law of value to the Russian economy. Today these God-damned scoundrels all turn up and say "of course"! But you could look through the literature of the Fourth International for pages and pages. I do not remember any statements to that effect, (p. 13) … He reminded them that Hegel had distinguished between vulgar empiricism, understanding, and Reason (dialectical thought), charging each with a certain value, a certain threshold of thought. The Dialectic was the ultimate realization of the Mind, of the Subject. Clearly, he suggested, Lenin had been capable of dialectical thought, capable of transcending through his thought the old categories (Second International) that he had inherited: "The Russian revolution of February caused violent changes in Lenin's categories. World War I set him revising the categories of the Second International" (p. 17). On the other hand, however, Trotsky had been limited to Understanding, a necessary and useful stage of thought but one that could end in its reduction to absolute categories: "He would have been able to lecture you on changing categories most profoundly. He talked about it all the time. But fixed and finite determinations held him by the throat to the end" (p. 18). Trotsky had been unwilling to recognize the true significance of Stalinism: "stalinism as a necessary, an inevitable, form of development of the labour movement. The workers are not mistaken. They are not deceived. Not in any serious sense of these words. They are making an experience that is necessary to their own development" (p. 30).

There was, however, much more to these radical Black intellectuals than their class origins and the contradictions they experienced consequent to the racial castes of Western civilization. More profoundly than “scientific” Marxism could suggest, they were an element of a historically emergent social force, the Black radical movement. And though intellectually disciplined in such ways as to oppose its conscious realization, their ideological nurturing as Blacks prepared them for its eventual recognition. It is possible to see, even in such Westernized intellects as James and Du Bois, that the historical force of the Black movement was the more powerful influence. Even their discovery of Western radicalism proved to be insufficient. As we have seen, it became necessary to both of them to attempt to bring Marxist theory to bear on a historical phenomenon for which its analytical vocabulary was inadequate. From the moments of these efforts, neither Du Bois nor James, nor Padmore nor Cox could sustain a commitment to orthodox Marxism.

The outrage, I believe, was most certainly informed by the Africanity of our consciousness—some epistemological measure culturally embedded in our minds that deemed that the racial capitalism we have been witness to was an unacceptable standard of human conduct. It was also the case that the source of our outrage characterized that conduct as inexplicable. The depths to which racialist behavior has fouled Western agencies transgressed against a world-consciousness rooted in our African past.

It was not, however, an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans in the grasp of slavers, planters, merchants, and colonizers. Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, the values, ideas, conceptions, and constructions of reality from which resistance was manufactured.

The first forms of struggle in the Black radical tradition, however, were not structured by a critique of Western society but from a rejection of European slavery and a revulsion of racism in its totality. Even then, the more fundamental impulse of Black resistance was the preservation of a particular social and historical consciousness rather than the revolutionary transformation of feudal or merchant capitalist Europe. Why the pathology of race was so dominant a part of Western consciousness or what might be done to change that character was of less concern than how Black peoples might survive the encounter.

Just as in Africa until the last quarter of the nineteenth century retreat had been a possible response of African peoples, it was similarly the case at the sites of slave labor. In the Caribbean islands as well as in Latin America and North America, Black peoples found means of disengagement. Away from the plantations, in the security of mountain retreats, on the continent toward the up-country sources of the great rivers that emptied into the ocean at the coasts, Black communities could be reestablished. And the very existence of such settlements enhanced the morale of those who remained in captivity. Over the generations, the successive depositions of new labor, the maroon settlements, and the legends of such communities further enriched the radical tradition. And each generation among the slaves contributed to the further broadening of Black consciousness and the ideology of the tradition. And while the trade itself expanded in response to the interactions of exchange, commodity-demands and surplus production in the world system, within the slave communities a Black people evolved. Manifest expressions of Black radicalism such as marronage, arson, the destruction of work tools, and even open rebellion were complemented by less overt forms. When separation was not possible, open revolts might fester; where rebellion was immediately impractical, the people prepared themselves through obeah, voodoo, Islam, and Black Christianity. Through these they induced charismatic expectations, socializing and hardening themselves and their young with beliefs, myths, and messianic visions that would allow them, someday, to attempt the impossible. Their history confirmed these processes; their fruition could be seen in the papaloi of the Haitian Revolution; the obeah men and women who crowd the trial records of slave rebellions in the Caribbean and elsewhere; the Muslim revolts in Brazil; the rebel preachers who appear at the center of resistance in Jamaica, Suriname, and North America.

In seventeenth-century colonial North America, marronage appeared first. But as the eighteenth century succeeded the seventeenth, marronage as the prevalent form of Black resistance became increasingly difficult, as merchant and manufacturing capitalists expanded plantation slavery, rationalized the structures of domination between the colonies, and defeated the native Americans. As slave communities formed, marronage was eventually superseded. By the middle of the eighteenth century, for the mass of Blacks the steady transfusion, via the Atlantic, of new Africans, the genius of Black Christianity, the construction of Creole dialects, the founding of Black and Seminole-like maroon communities, the flight to the Black quarters of southern cities, the plotting and actualizing of rebellions, and the construction of familial and communal relations in the slave quarters, were all a part of their preservation as an African people and the nurture of the Black radical tradition. On the other hand, the drift toward assimilation to the Europeans by a fraction of the Black population was of little importance. The crude racialism that walled American culture exacted a toll that only the most desperately alienated at the racial and psychological margins of the Black and white societies could be expected to pay.

The anticolonial struggles that were increasingly mounted from the mid-nineteenth century on were the beginnings of the transformation of Black radicalism into an engaged confrontation with European domination. Indeed, it was as a response to the mass resistances to colonialism that the other human contradictions to which colonial domination was inherently vulnerable were catalyzed. The very nature of colonial dominance required the adaptation or creation of privileged strata among the dominated people. And from the conflict, which was inevitable between the native "bourgeoisie" and their colonial masters, a renegade intelligentsia was induced, one to which the idea of a total opposition, a nationalist confrontation and critique of Western society was necessary and natural.

From the early 1930s on, a radical Pan-Africanism emerged. And in the work of Du Bois, James, and Wright, of Oliver Cox, Eric Williams, and George Padmore, the elements of its first phase were discernible.

When Du Bois and James set about the recovery of the history of the revolutionary Black struggle, they were driven from an implied to an explicit critique of Marxism. As Black men grown sensitive to the day-to-day heroism demanded for Black survival, they were particularly troubled by the casual application of preformed categories to Black social movements. It appeared to them that Western Marxists, unconsciously bound by a Eurocentric perspective, could not account for nor correctly assess the revolutionary forces emerging from the Third World.

In the turbulence of the American Civil War and a social revolution carried through by the mobilized slaves and the white agrarian workers, it had been the manufacturing and industrial working classes that had hesitated, drawn to counterrevolution by racism and a short-sighted perception of their class interest. The class struggle had been distorted and a proletarian revolutionary consciousness among nineteenth-century American workers had been effectively interdicted by the ideological power of racism and the seductiveness of the bourgeois myth of social mobility. It was the slaves (in truth an enslaved peasantry) and other agrarian workers who had mounted the attack on capitalism.

Anticipating the more sustained expositions of Eric Williams and Oliver Cox, Du Bois became convinced that capitalism and slavery were related systemically; that monopoly capitalism had extended rather than arrested that relationship; and that the forces implicated in the dissolution of capitalism could emerge from the contradictions of that relationship. History provided his evidence. In the turbulence of the American Civil War and a social revolution carried through by the mobilized slaves and the white agrarian workers, it had been the manufacturing and industrial working classes that had hesitated, drawn to counterrevolution by racism and a short-sighted perception of their class interest. The class struggle had been distorted and a proletarian revolutionary consciousness among nineteenth-century American workers had been effectively interdicted by the ideological power of racism and the seductiveness of the bourgeois myth of social mobility. It was the slaves (in truth an enslaved peasantry) and other agrarian workers who had mounted the attack on capitalism. It was, Du Bois observed, from the periphery and not the center that the most sustained threat to the American capitalist system had materialized.

It was his study of the revolutionary masses of Haiti, France, Russia and Africa, and his work in England, America and Trinidad rather than the Bolshevik state that would persuade him of the actual fact of Lenin's dictum: "every cook can govern."

However, the evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition. Doubtlessly there have been advantages to this. There have been no sacred texts to be preserved from the ravages of history. There have been no intellects or leaders whose authority secured ideological and theoretical conformity and protected their ideas from criticism. There has been no theory to inoculate the movements of resistance from change. But it, too, is certain that there have been disadvantages; partial comprehensions that it has now become imperative to transcend. The fractioning of African peoples is dysfunctional.

It is now a generation later. In the intervening years the Black radical tradition has matured, assuming new forms in revolutionary movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. In the ideas of revolutionaries, among them Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, Robert Mugabe, Augustinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, Marcelino dos Santos, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Walter Rodney, and Angela Davis, Black radicalism has remained a currency of resistance and revolt. However, the evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition. Doubtlessly there have been advantages to this. There have been no sacred texts to be preserved from the ravages of history. There have been no intellects or leaders whose authority secured ideological and theoretical conformity and protected their ideas from criticism. There has been no theory to inoculate the movements of resistance from change. But it, too, is certain that there have been disadvantages; partial comprehensions that it has now become imperative to transcend. The fractioning of African peoples is dysfunctional.

The critique of the capitalist world system acquired determinant force not from movements of industrial workers in the metropoles but from those of the "backward" peoples of the world. Only an inherited but rationalized racial arrogance and a romanticism stiffened by pseudoscience could manage to legitimate a denial of these occurrences. Western Marxism, in either of its two variants—critical-humanist or scientific—has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of liberation.

The resoluteness of the Black radical tradition advances as each generation assembles the data of its experience to an ideology of liberation. The experimentation with Western political inventories of change, specifically nationalism and class struggle, is coming to a close. Black radicalism is transcending those traditions in order to adhere to its own authority. It will arrive as points of resistance here, rebellion there, and mass revolutionary movements still elsewhere. But each instance will be formed by the Black radical tradition in an awareness of the others and the consciousness that there remains nothing to which it may return.

The Black radical tradition suggests a more complete contradiction. In social and political practice, it has acquired its immediate momentum from the necessity to respond to the persisting threats to African peoples characteristic of the modern world system. Over the many generations, the specificity of resistance—at best securing only a momentary respite—has given way to the imperatives of broader collectivities. Particular languages, cultures, and social sensibilities have evolved into world-historical consciousness. The distinctions of political space and historical time have fallen away so that the making of one Black collective identity suffuses nationalisms. Harbored in the African diaspora there is a single historical identity that is in opposition to the systemic privations of racial capitalism. Ideologically, it cements pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action. It deepens with each disappointment at false mediation and reconciliation, and is crystallized into ever-increasing cores by betrayal and repression. The resoluteness of the Black radical tradition advances as each generation assembles the data of its experience to an ideology of liberation. The experimentation with Western political inventories of change, specifically nationalism and class struggle, is coming to a close. Black radicalism is transcending those traditions in order to adhere to its own authority.

David Brion Davis observes that for at least the medieval era, the distinctions were not as clear-cut in daily life as modern scholars would suggest. Davis, op. cit., p. 33.

David Brion Davis observes that for at least the medieval era, the distinctions were not as clear-cut in daily life as modern scholars would suggest.

Charles Verlinden notes: "The Latin word sclavus, the common source of the words esclave, esclavo, escravo, schiavo, Sklave, and slave, did not take root during that initial period [pre-Middle Ages] when slavery was common to the whole of Europe… . It was only when slaves were recruited from entirely new sources that other terms appeared to indicate the nonfree, and among these were sclavus, derived from the ethnic name of the Slav people and popularized. It appeared first in its Latin form in tenth century Germany."

The Latin word sclavus, the common source of the words esclave, esclavo, escravo, schiavo, Sklave, and slave, did not take root during that initial period [pre-Middle Ages] when slavery was common to the whole of Europe… . It was only when slaves were recruited from entirely new sources that other terms appeared to indicate the nonfree, and among these were sclavus, derived from the ethnic name of the Slav people and popularized.

The nineteenth-century armies of imperialist Europe continued the tradition of relying on substantial recruitment among ethnic minorities, "riff-raff," outcasts, aliens and the peasantry: to the million serfs of the Russian army were added the Asiatic Bashkirs and Kalmucks, Ingush and Ossietin; the Corsicans and Bretons of the French army were augmented by the Legion founded on Kabyle swordsmen, Swiss and other European mercenaries, but by mid-century the army itself had come to be dominated by West Africans; in the Philippines, the Spanish army was native, as was the Dutch army of the East Indies. In India, the East India Company and the Bengal army (1842) employed between them upward of 70,000 natives in their sepoy regiments. In Britain itself, in 1832, the Irish accounted for 42 percent of the army.

The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the 'niggers' in the former slave states of the U.S.A.

Redkey's study of the 1890–1910 period is one attempt to extend this question: "Whether he knew it or not, Garvey was part of a long tradition of black nationalism in the United States. Garvey's followers, moreover, were the same Southern black marginal farmers who had responded to the emigration appeals of Bishop Turner and his followers a generation earlier… . In the pattern of earlier African emigration movements, the lower-class blacks responded eagerly when flamboyant Marcus Garvey pointed the way. No longer isolated on scattered farms and restrained by southern conditions as Turner's followers had been, the black proletariat, crowded into urban ghettoes and disillusioned with their new homes, spread nationalism far and fast. Garvey himself may have been a foreigner but his millions of supporters manifested an old American response of black nationalism."

Edmund Morgan, for example in his study of colonial Virginia, in summarizing the character of "private enterprise" in the colony conjectures: "We may also see Virginians beginning to move toward a system of labor that treated men as things." Though it sounds like Morgan is describing the initial beginnings of this system, this is difficult to square with the evidence he himself has amassed, which led him (one paragraph earlier) to observe: "A servant, by going to Virginia, became for a number of years a thing, a commodity with a price." Further, Morgan had already encountered this system in the mother country: "In England itself, after labor became more valuable, the demand produced a certain amount of buying and selling of industrial apprentices."

Oliver C. Cox, the Black theorist, tried to correct Marx's error: "[Marx] begins his analysis of the nature of capitalism almost where he might have ended it; and as is commonly the case in classical economics, he relegates as subsidiary the very things which should have been the center of his study… . His 'primitive accumulation' is none other than fundamentally capitalist accumulation; and, to assume that feudal society dissolved before capitalist society began is to over-emphasize the fragility of feudalism and to discount its uses to the development of capitalism."

The logical thrust of their argument transforms these distinctions into oppositions between slavery ("pre-capitalist" or "archaic relations of production") and industrialization within particular "economics" (e.g., the American South). The consequence, in the work of the Genoveses, is an aborted design of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries' world system substantiated by a foreshortened sense of the system's historical development and the forms of its integrations.

Du Bois had noted: "[T]here is evidence that the necessities of their economic organization were continually changing and deteriorating their morale and pushing forward ruder, noisier, less cultivated elements than characterized the Southern gentleman of earlier days. Certainly, the cursing, brawling, whoring gamblers who largely represented the South in the late fifties, evidenced the inevitable deterioration that overtakes men when their desire for income and extravagance overwhelms their respect for human beings" (p. 43). James Roark, matching the desperation of the antebellum secessionist planter ideologues with the sentiments of such as Mary Ann Whittle, a plantation mistress ("we have an enemy in our bosoms who will shoot us in our beds"), and the Mississippian William Kirkland (who declared he had rather "'be exterminated' than be forced to live in the same society 'with the slaves if freed'"), concluded: "Mixing reality with fantasy, planters feared that John Bull, Billy Yank, Johnny Poor White, and Nat Turner were all lurking in the shadows. That vision knotted the stomachs of more than just the cowardly."

But why Africans as the new slaves? Because of exhaustion of the supply of laborers indigenous to the region of the plantations, because Europe needed a source of labor from a reasonably well-populated region that was accessible and relatively near the region of usage. But it had to be from a region that was outside its world-economy so that Europe could feel unconcerned about the economic consequences for the breeding region of wide-scale removal of manpower as slaves. Western Africa filled the bill best.

"During the latter part of the sixteenth century the Spanish had to put down slave insurrections in Pachuca, Guanajuato, Juaspaltopic, Alvarado, Coatzacoalcos, Misantla, Jalapa, Huatulco, Tlalixcoyan, Zongolicia, Riconada, Huatusco, Orizaba, Rio Blanco, Anton Lizardo, Medellin, and Cuernavaca."

"Assuming that Loanda was the main embarkation point for Pemambucan slaves, which is confirmed by the linguistic evidence, the model for Palmares could have come from nowhere else but central Africa. Can it be pinpointed? ... The most likely answer is that the political system did not derive from a particular central African model, but from several. Only a far more detailed study of Palmares through additional sources in the archives of Angola and Torre do Tombo could refine the answer."

"Today, there are Six Bush Negro tribes: the Djuka and Saramaka (each 15,000 to 20,000 people), the Matawai, Aluku and Paramaka (each closer to 2,000), and the Kwinti (fewer than 500)."

"In 1757 and again in 1772 large-scale slave rebellions broke out in Suriname. The Akan seem to have played an important role in these, and the Bush Negroes were indispensable to them. The latter revolt dragged on for a number of years with leadership eventually passing to a free-born Maroon."

E. P. Thompson first used the term "brigandage" to describe this phenomenon. In 1965, while describing power in England as it assumed form in the second half of the eighteenth century, he wrote: "It should be seen less as government by an aristocracy ... than as a parasitism—a racket, which the King himself could not break into except by becoming the croupier. It was not wholly a parasitism: the business of the nation had to be carried on, from time to time the 'independent' gentry—and their representatives in parliament—had to be appeased, there were even occasions (although one after another these are called into question as the disciples of Namier break into the archives of the last of the great mafiosi) when the interests of the nation or the class, rather than the family or faction, were consulted. Nor was it only a parasitism: being conducted upon so gigantic a scale, from bases in private and public wealth of such magnitude, and commanding influence which reached, by the most direct means, into the army, the navy, the chartered companies, the Church, the Law, it was bound to congeal into something that looks almost like an estate; to surround itself in a cocoon of ideological apologetics; and to nourish a style of life, of conspicuous—indeed, spectacular—consumption which is associated with a true aristocracy."

In 1827, the Brazilian legislator Cunha Matos had observed: "England aspires to dominate all of Asia, as by means of the settlements and wars that it is undertaking in Africa one must suppose it also aspires to complete dominion over that great region. The countries of both regions have the same commodities and products as Brazil, and as the British must prefer their own territories, they will seek by all means to set up obstacles for us; and to achieve this there is no better way than to deprive Brazil of additional labor: this is the true British policy. I believe with all my heart that Brazil will come to receive cotton and rice from Benguela, wax from China, and sugar from Tonkin: if this does not occur in my time, it will happen in my children's time, who will perhaps remember my prophecy."

“In his speech in the House on 15 April 1831 [Thomas Fowell] Buxton made a telling comparison between the continuing decline of the slave population as against the increase of the free blacks. He pointed out that in the past ten years the number of slaves in the West Indian colonies, excluding manumissions, had decreased by 45,800. The free Negroes of Haiti had, on the other hand, increased by about 500,000 or more than doubled in 20 years.”

"The event which made further postponement of the emancipation issue impossible was the rebellion raging in western Jamaica from the end of December 1831 which was finally suppressed at the beginning of April 1832. Destroying property worth well over a million pounds and coming as it did on the heels of numerous other revolts and conspiracies in other sugar colonies during the previous decade, the Jamaican rebellion was a sure indication that if slavery was not soon abolished from above it would be destroyed from below."

“The event which made further postponement of the emancipation issue impossible was the rebellion raging in western Jamaica from the end of December 1831 which was finally suppressed at the beginning of April 1832. Destroying property worth well over a million pounds and coming as it did on the heels of numerous other revolts and conspiracies in other sugar colonies during the previous decade, the Jamaican rebellion was a sure indication that if slavery was not soon abolished from above it would be destroyed from below.” Richard Hart, op. cit., p. 223.

"Atrocities by rebellious slaves in the United States did not occur often. Rebels killed whites but rarely tortured or mutilated them. They rarely, that is, committed against whites the outrages that whites regularly committed against them. Elsewhere in the hemisphere, where maroon wars and large-scale rebellions encouraged harsh actions, reactions, and reprisals, the level of violence and atrocity rose. But everywhere the overwhelming burden of evidence convicts the slaveholding regimes of countless crimes, including the most sadistic tortures, to every single act of barbarism by the slaves."

The suppression of an association of Black voters, the Partido de los Independientes de Color, led to armed revolt and "the ensuing racial war, still insufficiently studied, led to a nationwide extermination of blacks of quasi-genocidal proportions." Casal, op. cit., p. 14. This was "the little war of 1912."

This was "the little war of 1912." Casal recalls as a child listening to the stories in her family: "A grand-uncle of mine was assassinated, supposedly by orders of Monteagudo, the rural guard officer who terrorized blacks throughout the island. Chills went down my spine when I heard stories about blacks being hunted day and night; and black men being hung by their genitals from the lamp posts in the central plazas of small Cuban towns."

In 1912, the anti-Black movement in part inspired by American influence in Cuba reached a culmination. The suppression of an association of Black voters, the Partido de los Independientes de Color, led to armed revolt and "the ensuing racial war, still insufficiently studied, led to a nationwide extermination of blacks of quasi-genocidal proportions."

In Brazil and Cuba, the formation of Black petit bourgeoisies was retarded by a number of intervening factors. In Brazil, after the abolition of slavery and the organization of a republican government in the late nineteenth century, European workers were imported to provide the social base for industrialization, partly as a response to the failure of Blacks to appreciate the advantages of exchanging freedom for proletarianization. The liberal Brazilian sociologist, Florestan Fernandes, has lamented: "Seeing and feeling themselves free, the Negroes wanted to be treated like men or, as they saw it, like those who were masters of their own lives. A fatal lack of adaptation on the part of the Negroes and mulattos resulted. The attitude and behavior of the ex-slaves, who conceived of their freedom as being absolute, irritated white employers. The Negroes assumed that since they were 'free,' they could work when and where they pleased. They tended not to show up for work whenever they had money enough on hand to live for a while without working; they especially did not like to be remonstrated with, warned, or reprimanded."

Lourdes Casal has fewer doubts about a later event in Cuban history that has remained equally obscure. In 1912, the anti-Black movement in part inspired by American influence in Cuba reached a culmination. The suppression of an association of Black voters, the Partido de los Independientes de Color, led to armed revolt and “the ensuing racial war, still insufficiently studied, led to a nationwide extermination of blacks of quasi-genocidal proportions.”

In Brazil, after the abolition of slavery and the organization of a republican government in the late nineteenth century, European workers were imported to provide the social base for industrialization, partly as a response to the failure of Blacks to appreciate the advantages of exchanging freedom for proletarianization. The liberal Brazilian sociologist, Florestan Fernandes, has lamented: “Seeing and feeling themselves free, the Negroes wanted to be treated like men or, as they saw it, like those who were masters of their own lives. A fatal lack of adaptation on the part of the Negroes and mulattos resulted. The attitude and behavior of the ex-slaves, who conceived of their freedom as being absolute, irritated white employers. The Negroes assumed that since they were ‘free,’ they could work when and where they pleased. They tended not to show up for work whenever they had money enough on hand to live for a while without working; they especially did not like to be remonstrated with, warned, or reprimanded.”

"The removal of the Indians was explained by Lewis Cass—Secretary of War, governor of the Michigan territory, minister to France, presidential candidate: 'A principle of progressive improvement seems almost inherent in human nature... . We are all striving in the career of life to acquire riches of honor, or power, or some other object, whose possession is to realize the day dreams of our imaginations; and the aggregate of these efforts constitutes the advance of society. But there is little of this in the constitution of our savages.'" Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Harper and Row, New York, 1980, p. 130. Cass, like his predecessor in what was termed at the time "Indian removal," was responsible for the expropriation of millions of acres from native Americans, thus promoting "their interest against their inclination."

In an essay published in 1903 entitled “The Talented Tenth,” Du Bois went to great pains to establish the fact of the existence of an educated and propertied Black elite in the United States. In it, he briefly described the history of the 34 Black colleges and universities in existence at that time, and gave some indication of the status of their curricula; he reported on the total number of Black graduates from white and Black colleges from 1876 to 1899, and gave a representative sampling of their occupations, and an estimate of their property.

“Populism had put in the minds of blacks certain higher expectations of life, and these could not be beaten out by the boots of any Secret Nine or Red Shirts or other terrorist groups. Incorporated into the blacks’ past by 1900 were not only the heady power given to them and protected for them by Reconstruction governments but the more sober experience of Populism. In the Populist movement black people got a sense of being equal participants in the political process, rather than mere recipients of federal favors; of gaining their ends by the power of the vote. Numbers of blacks had worked and socialized with white people of similar interests on a level of relative equality if not actual integration; had had the experiences of organizing and campaigning, of committee work, party politics, national conventions; of listening to and talking and reading about advanced economic ideas such as co-operatives and unions.

In 1925, one Black Marxist took stock of his society: "The slow growth of Marxism among negroes has been wholly due to the inability both of the social democrats and the Communists to approach the negro on his own mental grounds, and to interpret his peculiar social situation in terms of the class struggle. Today the American negro has evolved his own bourgeoisie, even though as yet but petty. And more and more the lines sharpen in the conflict between the white and black bourgeoisies. The negro petty bourgeoisie rallies the negro masses to him in his struggle against the more powerful white bourgeoisie, and the negro masses are permeated with the belief that their social degradation flows from the mere fact that they are markedly of a different race, and are not white... . The negro is revolutionary enough in a racial sense, and it devolves upon the American Communist Party to manipulate this racial revolutionary sentiment to the advantage of the class struggle."

The force of Du Bois's work was more than the ideologues of American Marxism required and, on the other hand, more than American academic history could accept. More than two decades would pass before Black Reconstruction would again receive serious attention in either circle. By that time, Du Bois was nearing his nineties and the American Communist Party had been reduced to a sect. By the third decade, the shadow of Du Bois lay across American historiography.

It was … the absence of a manufacturing infra-structure after Independence, the development of essentially feudal relations in agriculture, the struggles of the peasantry to remain landed and self-subsistent, the growth of a landed rural middle class, the creation of a prebendary state bureaucracy, the inability of any of the dominant warring factions of the ruling class to achieve a decisive and long-lasting political and economic hegemony, and the penetration and dominance of foreign capital, which would seriously block all attempts at the capitalist transformation and development of Haiti during the nineteenth century.

“J. J. Thomas was one of those who expressed strong race pride. He was only too conscious of the extent of self-contempt and self-hatred among his fellow blacks in the West Indies. He saw how the values of white superiority had been internalised, with disastrous results. One factor in this process, in his view, was the education of young West Indians by white teachers. He thought their influence was ‘to a very great degree subversive of the national sentiment,’ by which he meant racial consciousness.” “There were individually brilliant blacks. But there had to be ‘some potential agency to collect and adjust them into the vast engine essential for executing the true purposes of the civilised African Race.’”

Claude McKay recalled his own experience in London during the war: “One club was for colored soldiers. It was situated in a basement in Drury Lane. There was a host of colored soldiers in London, from the West Indies and Africa, with a few colored Americans, East Indians, and Egyptians among them … I went often and listened to the soldiers telling tales of their war experiences in France, Egypt and Arabia. Many were interested in what American Negroes were thinking and writing.”

“According to U.S. immigration records, the United Kingdom used up 43.9 per cent of its quota between 1925 and 1929; 22.6 per cent between 1930 and 1934; and a mere 4.4 per cent in the 1936/40 period. This left room, technically, for considerable emigration to the United States from the British colonies in the Caribbean. However, this never occurred or, to be more direct, was never allowed to happen. Through the issuance of visas, and the requirement of substantial bonds, the United States, with the tacit approval of the British metropolitan and colonial authorities, exercised an extremely tight control over the flow of British West Indians. The result was a sharp decline in the numbers of British West Indians entering the United States after 1925. In comparison to the average of thousands a year up to and including 1924, the average for the rest of the 1920s and for the 1930s became hundreds a year. In 1932, for example, a mere 113 British West Indians entered the United States.”

According to U.S. immigration records, the United Kingdom used up 43.9 per cent of its quota between 1925 and 1929; 22.6 per cent between 1930 and 1934; and a mere 4.4 per cent in the 1936/40 period. This left room, technically, for considerable emigration to the United States from the British colonies in the Caribbean. However, this never occurred or, to be more direct, was never allowed to happen. Through the issuance of visas, and the requirement of substantial bonds, the United States, with the tacit approval of the British metropolitan and colonial authorities, exercised an extremely tight control over the flow of British West Indians. The result was a sharp decline in the numbers of British West Indians entering the United States after 1925.