13

Race
B re n n a B h a n d a r

INTRODUCTION

I want to suggest a different metaphor for theoretical work: the metaphor of struggle, of
wrestling with the angels. The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off,
not that which you speak with profound fluency… [M]y own experience of theory – and
Marxism is certainly a case in point – is of wrestling with the angels, a metaphor you can
take as literally as you like. (Hall, 2019a [1992]: 75)

The place of ‘race’ in Marxism might be best understood through the struggles
of various intellectuals to articulate the centrality of racism and racialisation to
capitalism. The struggle lies in apprehending the complexity of the thing itself –
the mutability of ‘race’ as a concept and its consistent presence in the multifari-
ous modes of dispossession and accumulation that characterise the variegated
forms of capitalism that emerged in the crucible of slavery and colonisation. But
it also emerges in efforts to write against traditions of Eurocentric Marxist
thought that failed to grasp that complexity. Rather than characterise these strug-
gles as being situated ‘within and against’ Marxist traditions of thought, it may
be more useful to consider the frameworks of analysis that scholars writing from
non-Eurocentric vantage points have developed – to see them as driven by an
urgency to grapple with the complex and unstable histories of race and capital as
necessary to understanding the present, rather than as intellectual engagements
confined to academic debates about the generative causes and effects of capitalist
modes of production.
 RACE 233

Another important aspect of how ‘struggle’ informs the field of scholarly

work that has illuminated the relationship between race, racial formations and
capitalism is that field’s connection to political histories and social movements –
in a twofold sense. The long histories of rebellion and revolt by enslaved and
colonised peoples globally inform scholarly reflections on race and capitalism.
But the struggle against the resistance of anti-capitalist, left social movements
and their intellectual touchstones in Europe and North America to incorporate
an anti-racist politics into their organising and thinking has also informed the
work of many militant scholars writing in black radical and anti-racist left tradi-
tions. This long-standing struggle has gained increasing poignancy in the cur-
rent moment, when long-standing economic inequalities that have materialised
in and through forms of racial subordination have rendered many black, brown
and Indigenous communities particularly vulnerable to the ravages of the global
Covid-19 pandemic (Nuorgam, 2020; Taylor, 2020; Younge, 2020).
The breadth of critical traditions of thought and activism that have sought
to grapple with Marxism’s blind spots as to how colonialism, enslavement and
imperialism have been central to the development of capitalism is truly expan-
sive; and, in different ways, many of these critical traditions are cognisant to
greater or lesser degrees of the place of race in these entanglements (James, 1989
[1938]; Spivak, 1999; Roediger, 2019). We can distinguish within these broad
swathes of intellectual and political work scholars who have focused their atten-
tion on race in all its complexities, as part of their engagements with Marxism,
or as central to their Marxian analyses of spatial configurations of capitalism
(Wilson Gilmore, 2007); struggles for freedom from capitalism (Kelley, 2003);
and capitalist state violence (Sivanandan, 1982), to name but a few examples.
In this chapter, I have chosen to explore the theoretical interventions of three
very different scholars: Stuart Hall, Cedric Robinson and Angela Y. Davis. Hall’s
early approach to questions of race and class engaged a trenchant re-working of
Gramscian and Althusserian concepts in order to develop a conjunctural analysis
of race and the manifold ways in which it is expressed through class. He re-ori-
ented Marxist analyses of class composition and class consciousness to produce
a comprehensive reconsideration of how politics, policing, labour relations, law
and criminal justice and, eventually, media and cultural forms were fabricated
with and through colonially inscribed histories of race and racism in the UK,
the Caribbean and elsewhere. Cedric Robinson’s work, unlike Hall’s, presents
a wholesale critique of Marx’s work; he developed the view that Marxism gen-
erally reflects an overly reductive understanding of the ways in which race is
fabricated in conjunction with capitalist modes of appropriation and exploitation.
He also challenged, at a foundational level, the Eurocentrism of Marx’s work
and argued that by disregarding the many autonomous and pre-capitalist social-
ist movements, Marx and Marxist scholarship have unnecessarily narrowed the
horizon of liberation to a schema overly determined by bourgeois epistemology.
Finally, I turn to the work of Angela Y. Davis, whose very conceptualisation of
234 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARXISM

race as inherently gendered opened an entirely different space of engagement

with Marxism and communist traditions of revolutionary change. We have, then,
three towering intellectual figures who engaged, transformed, built upon or broke
with Marxist theory in ways that deepened our understandings of the manifold
ways in which capitalism is always racial, yet, at the same time, contradictory and
uneven, replete with resistance and vulnerable or weak points in its formation. In
the case of Hall, we encounter a re-working of Marxist concepts and methods to
account for the ways in which race is expressed through class, albeit in a manner
that is contingent on the particular conjuncture of economic, political and cultural
forces at work. In Robinson, we have a theorist whose path-breaking work on
racial capitalism situated him in the position of resolute critic of Marx. Finally,
Angela Y. Davis is a committed communist intellectual who shows that, while
for the purposes of analytical reflection ‘race’ is often hived off from ‘gender’
and even ‘sexuality’, in practice these axes of subject-making and subordination
cannot be separated – thus the challenge for Marxian engagements with race is to
understand how race, as a concept that is inherently gendered, moves through the
fabric of social relations in capitalist societies.

STUART HALL: ARTICULATIONS OF RACE AND CLASS

Through his engagement with the work of Althusser and Gramsci, and as part of
a larger and more sustained interrogation of Marx’s oeuvre (Hall, 1974, 1983),
Stuart Hall reconceived two concepts in particular that form the basis for his
theorisation of the relationship between race and class. These two interrelated
concepts – articulation and correspondence – are re-worked to embed an analy-
sis of race and histories of colonisation and apartheid into the very way we
understand social formations in a Marxian sense. Hall joins critics of an overly
economistic understanding of how class, specifically, takes shape and what it
represents; but he goes much further in reinvigorating Marx’s conception of what
it means for social formations to be ‘determined’ by capitalist modes of produc-
tion, by showing how race and racism can act as both destabilising and stabilis-
ing vectors – which are both contingent and necessary in some sense – to the
formation of class relations.
How are different social formations articulated, and how does a pervasive
economistic reductionism in the way that ‘class’ is conceived of, for instance,
oversimplify and flatten their complexity? In critiquing an economic reductivism
whereby all social formations are reduced down to expressions of an economic
base, Hall wrote:

[T]his simplifies the structure of social formations, reducing their complexity of articulation,
vertical and horizontal, to a single line of determination. It simplifies the very concept of
‘determination’ (which in Marx is a very complex idea) to that of a mechanical function. It
flattens all the mediations between the different levels of a society. It presents social
 RACE 235

formations – in Althusser’s words – as a ‘simple expressive totality,’ in which every level of

articulation corresponds to every other, and which is from end to end, structurally
transparent… this represents a gigantic crudification and simplification of Marx’s work – the
kind of simplification and reductionism which once led him, in despair, to say that ‘if that is
Marxism, then I am not a Marxist.’ (Hall, 2019b [1986]: 28–9)

‘Conjunctural analysis’ as developed by Hall drew on Marxist lineages of the

term (Gramsci and Althusser in particular), while also remaking it into one of
the signature methodological concepts of the Centre for Cultural Studies at
Birmingham. The articulation of a social formation occurs at different levels of
abstraction, and the conjunctural analysis developed by Hall and others presents
a means of focusing on a particular level of abstraction, thereby avoiding the
tendency of some theoreticians to confuse terms and concepts operating on a
(high) level of abstraction with more grounded, place- and time-specific registers
of peoples’ lived realities. This is absolutely crucial to grasp, particularly in this
moment where specific histories of racial oppression are often taken to levels of
generality and abstraction that enable them to be misread as transhistorical and
devoid of social and cultural differences, in ways that obscure their particularities
and impede political lucidity. As Hall wrote:

We expose ourselves to serious error when we attempt to ‘read off’ concepts which were
designed to operate at a high level of abstraction as if they automatically produced the same
theoretical effects when translated to another, more concrete, ‘lower’ level of operation.
(1983: 24)

We might query how such misreadings reflect a refusal or resistance to pay atten-
tion to class differences within a particular racial group, or to deal with political
fractiousness or contradictions that inhere in any social movement, or to repre-
sent any particular history of subordination.
And indeed, choosing which level of abstraction from which to engage a
conjunctural analysis involves ‘a strategic political choice’ (Grossberg, 2019:
42). Thus social formations are articulated through the political landscape of a
given moment, its political economy and labour conditions, issues of poverty
and unemployment, forms of cultural production and media representation; the
conjunctural analysis adequate to grasping this complexity is inevitably partial,
unfinished and contingent (Grossberg, 2019). The ‘articulation’ of social forma-
tions using a conjunctural analysis aims for maximal specificity of the ways in
which race and racial subjectivities have been intercalated with class politics in a
particular location and at a particular point of time, but always in relation to the
longue durée framework of global colonial capitalism, and of modernity itself.
How do these different levels of abstraction relate to one another, how do
we understand the specificities of a given moment and place them in the larger
epochal scheme of things without making lazy connections between the two, and
thereby falling into the perilous theoretical trap outlined above? Hall thought
through the nature of the correspondence between different levels of abstraction
236 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARXISM

in analysing social formations. Drawing on the work of Althusser, he noted

that there is no ‘necessary correspondence between one level of a social forma-
tion and another’ (Hall, 1985: 92). Race and racism may be the primary means
through which class is expressed in a particular labour market, for instance, but
this is not necessarily always or inevitably the case. Hall notes that ‘there are no
guarantees’ that a given social group will respond to economic conditions in a
particular way. As Hall put it, arguing against Paul Hirst (but also pushing against
Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism), ‘there is no necessary correspondence’ but
also ‘no necessary non-correspondence’ (Hall, 1985: 92) between different levels
of a social formation. Social relations of race, racism and class oppression do not
(necessarily) adhere to a specific form across space and time.
Hall’s essay ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’, pub-
lished in 1980, is a particularly clear expression of how a conjunctural analysis
operates to identify the (non-) correspondences and articulations between differ-
ent levels of abstraction; in this case, the specific racial and economic structures of
South Africa are examined in order to ‘stretch’ and re-make both the ‘economic’
approaches to race that rely too readily on an economic determinism in their expla-
nation of how race and racism operate under apartheid and, also, the ‘sociological’
approaches which, in using the economic approaches as their primary referent
point, emphasise the non-reductive nature of racial oppression in South Africa.
What is at stake in the contours of this debate, which Hall claims has characterised
the larger field of social science in general? Hall emphasises that ‘[d]ifferences
of theoretical analysis and approach have real effects for the strategies of politi-
cal transformation in such societies’. Thus, an economistic approach leaves the
racial dimension of apartheid reduced down to a question of ‘deeper, economic
contradictions’ whereas the sociological position that race is autonomous from
economic relations means that a change in the latter will not necessarily affect
a political change in the former (Hall, 2019c [1980]: 174–5). The importance of
political struggle was thus one of the key motivations for seeking to better theorise
how racial domination and economic processes are connected to one another.
Political motivations also lay behind Hall’s creative appropriation of
Althusserian interventions into the history of capital, stretching them in the direc-
tion of an analysis of race and racialisation that was largely not on their radar. As
he observed:

The emergent theory of the ‘articulation of different modes of production’ [particularly in

relation to the history of transatlantic slavery] begins to deliver certain pertinent theoretical
effects for an analysis of racism at the social, political, and ideological levels. It begins to
deliver such effects – and this is the crucial point – not by deserting the level of analysis of
economics relations (i.e. modes of production) but by posing it in its correct, necessarily
complex, form. (2019c [1980]: 193)

Hall’s argument about the more nuanced articulations of slavery as mode of

production debates is not just relevant for the way it marks one of the key
 RACE 237

moments at which advances were made in understanding the intercalation of race

and capital as it pertains to unfree and free labour. It is of lasting relevance in
terms of how Hall takes these developments and, in the conclusion of his essay
on race and articulation, offers us a series of insights into the kind of complex
methodology that remains of the utmost relevance to understanding race and
capitalism today. In documenting

the emergence of a new theoretical paradigm, which takes its fundamental orientation from
the problematic of Marx, but which seeks, by various theoretical means, to overcome certain
of the limitations – economism, reductionism, ‘a priorism’ [and] a lack of historical specificity.
(2019c [1980]: 210)

He proceeds to argue that race cannot be properly theorised in the absence of a

complex, if partial, attempt to grasp each level of the social formation through ‘its
own independent “means of representation”’ (2019c [1980]: 215). In other words,
‘class-structured modes of production’ appear and are rendered effective in dis-
tinct if interlocking economic, political and ideological registers (2019c [1980]:
215). Race is operative at each of these levels, and thus Hall concludes that ‘race
is thus, also, the modality through which class is “lived”, the medium through
which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and
“fought through”’ (2019c [1980]: 216) – an insight which was also at the core of
his contribution to Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978: 394). A collective effort,
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, was a series of essays
that analysed how the criminalisation of predominantly black youth was at the
centre of conservative efforts in the UK to create a moral panic, which then in turn
was used to justify racist policing practices and carceral forms of governance.
By grappling with the most pressing debates within the Marxism of his own
conjuncture, Hall argues that a newly emergent paradigm that builds on Marx’s
own account of the complexity of articulation gives us a better chance of under-
standing how race operates in relation to class. But leaving the struggles with
Marxist theory to the side for the moment, he also presents a view of race and
racism as something that is mutable, changing and contingent on a wide range
of other social forces. Race and racism cannot be understood separately or ‘in
abstraction, from other social relations’ (Hall, 2019c [1980]: 212). In relation to
transatlantic slavery in particular, he writes:

Racism within plantation slave societies in the mercantilist phase of world capitalist develop-
ment has a place and function, means and mechanisms of its specific effectivity, which are
only superficially explained by translating it out from these specific historical contexts into
totally different ones. (2019c [1980]: 212; see also Marques, Chapter 14, this Handbook)

One might wonder what Hall would have made of the discourse of ‘global anti-
blackness’ or other such terms that have the propensity to obfuscate the specific and
differentiated forms that racism has assumed at different moments, and are thus
predisposed to bolstering what he termed elsewhere as a ‘gestural’ politics
238 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARXISM

(Hall, 2019b [1986]: 48). Racism has been and continues to be constituted differ-
ently through distinct constellations of class domination, from the racisms of mer-
cantilist theory and of chattel slavery; of conquest and colonialism; of trade and
‘high imperialism; of popular imperialism and of so-called post-imperialism’.
Racism, in each of these cases, was ‘thoroughly re-worked’, taking forms specific
to that mode of extraction, appropriation and domination (Hall, 2019c [1980]: 217).
Margaret Thatcher’s resounding electoral victory in 1979, followed a decade
later by the fall of the Soviet Union, had a massive impact on the British left
(Avtar Brah, in Bhandar and Ziadah, 2020: 36; Hall and Jacques, 1983; Hall,
1988). The oft-criticised turn by Marxism Today – the Communist Party of Great
Britain’s theoretical journal, for which Hall wrote numerous pieces – embod-
ied in the title ‘New Times’ was part of a now forgotten period of intellectual
ferment as the seeds of New Labour took root and socialist ideals apparently
went into hibernation.1 However, one may argue that as Hall’s work turned more
firmly towards media, culture and questions of representation, the conjunctural
analysis he developed through his earlier engagement with Marxism retained an
imprint on his thinking, as he continued to emphasise the complex structural
and conjunctural nature of racism (Hall, 1992). The non-inevitable or contingent
nature of race and racism as part of a larger social field was masked by its appar-
ent rigidity and seeming historical continuity; ultimately, it is attention to what
Raymond Williams termed the ‘structure of feeling’ – ‘the attitudes, beliefs and
conceptions that are always refusing to be so neatly stabilized and fixed’ (Hall,
1992: 16) – which undermines the notion that race and racisms are trans or even
ahistorical formations.

CEDRIC ROBINSON: RACIAL CAPITALISM AND THE BLACK

RADICAL CHALLENGE TO MARXISM

The instability and mutability of race and racisms in the history of the emergence
of capitalism is perhaps the main contact point between the work of Stuart Hall
and Cedric Robinson. Both, albeit in very different ways, sought to explain how
the contingent yet non-arbitrary character of race and racism revealed instabili-
ties that could be utilised, exploited even, for political transformation. Cedric
Robinson’s conception of racial regimes as ‘unstable truth systems’ points to the
contradictory (and, as discussed below, dialectical) nature of their formation
(Robinson, 2007). Not unlike the conjunctural analysis elucidated by Hall, the
idea of racial regimes frames the examination of the political-economic, cultural
and juridical relations that give rise to particular instantiations of race and racial
difference. Before elaborating on Robinson’s materialist theory of racial regimes
of power, a brief look at his critique of Marxism and its failures not only to
adequately theorise race as fundamental to capitalist development, but also to
transcend a partial narrative of European history is instructive.
 RACE 239

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition – a book whose argu-
ably misleading title has led many commentators astray believing it to be Marxist! –
sets forth the argument that race precedes the emergence of modern capitalism and
that attention to the modalities of its operation in feudal Europe reveal the continua-
tion of feudal social relations into the long emergence of capitalism. The critique of
the absence of an understanding of how racialisation and forms of unfree, enslaved
labour persisted throughout Europe from the Middle Ages onwards is enmeshed with
the broader critique of the way in which European history is understood by Marx
and his epigones. The import of this critique is manifold. Robinson sets out a criti-
cal alternative history of forms of free and unfree labour and racialisation in Europe,
which draws on a wide range of historiography, as well as on the signal contribu-
tion of Oliver Cromwell Cox to a non-Marxian theory of the nexus of race and capi-
talism (Robinson, 2019a [1991]: 75–86). In doing so, he challenges the very basis
of Marx’s theory of revolution, which remains affixed to the proletarian subject, the
‘working classes’, a concept that remains insufficiently differentiated in Robinson’s
view. As Avery F. Gordon puts it, this ‘costly reductionism’ reveals how an ‘intel-
lectual, moral and libidinal investment bound the development of Marxian social-
ism to nationalism, racism, and bourgeois epistemology in such a way as to create
a blind field at the very center of the socialist vision’ (Gordon, 2019 [2001]: xvii).
Robinson opens up a terrain for thinking about a Black radical tradition that is not
grounded in reference (solely) to Marxist traditions of revolution. This sets the
stage for his later engagement in An Anthropology of Marxism with a sustained
critique of Marx and Marxism’s failure to adequately contend with pre-capitalist
and non-proletarian socialisms in Europe itself.
Robinson argues that the ‘racialisation’ of different populations, including
those of enslaved and indentured labourers, thoroughly imbued pre-capitalist
social relations. These antecedents to, and ingredients of, contemporary forms
of race and racism are transformed by a globalised ‘economy of difference’
(Robinson, 2007: 29) that sees already existing processes of racialisation change
with the advent of a global colonial capitalism. Robinson, unlike others, is not
of the view that race and racism emerge, ex nihilo as it were, with transatlantic
slavery or European colonialism, but that their precursors can be found in pre-
capitalist European social and political formations. In the opening pages of Black
Marxism, Robinson marshals the history of enslavement within Europe that pre-
cedes transatlantic slavery to support his argument.
The Negro – whose precedents could be found in the racial fabrications concealing the Slavs
(the slaves), the Irish and others – substantially eradicated in Western historical consciousness
the necessity of remembering the significance of Nuba for Egypt’s formation, of Egypt in the
development of Greek civilization, of Africa for imperial Rome, and more pointedly of Islam’s
influence on Europe’s economic, political and intellectual history. (Robinson, 1983: 4; also
Robinson, 2007: 5–6)

Contemporary forms of racialisation and racism may be understood as the

inheritance of 500 years of colonial capitalism, but modes of racialising people and
240 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARXISM

populations – in conjunction with status, different forms of labour and ways of liv-
ing – has a history that exceeds this period. Moreover, and relatedly, the omission of
the deep intra-European histories of racial capitalism in Marxist lineages of thought
obscures the profound entanglement of what comes to be called ‘Europe’ in mod-
ern political imaginaries with Islamic and African polities and states that were not
merely acted upon by European imperial powers but were active agents in the mak-
ing of modern history. This has, for Robinson, highly significant implications for
how we understand the history of Black radicalism, and revolution more broadly:
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. (1983: 97)

Robinson elucidates what is specific and particular about a Black radical tradition
that has a global presence, but does so by wrenching the very meaning of ‘radical’
out of an unnecessarily narrow and parochial, Eurocentric and liberal-bourgeois
formation, and by imbuing the idea of ‘Blackness’ with concrete historical mean-
ing. Robinson thus challenges both conventional and Marxian understandings of
the formation of race, racism and racial difference, while also ‘provincialising’
Marx and Marxist understandings of European and world history.
In Black Marxism – building on his critical studies of C. L. R. James, Richard
Wright and especially W. E. B. Du Bois, whose 1935 Black Reconstruction in
America is arguably the most significant single work on the nexus of race and
class – Robinson critiques the notion of the proletariat as the true revolutionary
subject but also dismantles the idea that there was in fact a British working class
that was sufficiently united by class consciousness potentially to provide a solid
basis for international class solidarity. He points to the existence of an ideology
of English nationalism from the mid 19th century onwards which hampered the
‘development of a united working class’, with the racialisation of the Irish dur-
ing this period, including by Engels himself, as a primary example of the racial
divisions among workers (1983: 44). The formation of a labour aristocracy by the
mid 19th century (1983: 50) emerges in the context of a British colonialism that
saw the destruction of the livelihoods of workers throughout the empire in the
service of British manufacturing and industry. It is arguable that the heterogene-
ity of the British working classes, both in terms of what Robinson calls the ‘mis-
taken fixation on industrial and manufacturing centres of capitalism’ (1983: 4)
but also as regards those classes’ racial composition, is a problem that continues
to plague left views of the labouring classes, particularly evident in the discourse
surrounding the Brexit referendum (Virdee and McGeever, 2018).
Yet another aspect of ‘European’ history that is often ignored in understand-
ing both its development and the place of what Robinson calls ‘racialism’ within
it is the ‘almost entirely exogenous phenomenon of Islamic domination of the
 RACE 241

Mediterranean’ (1983: 83). Muslim rule throughout Europe, and the reconquista
that saw the unleashing of virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim violence, ‘leave
tell-tale marks on Western consciousness’ including the ‘demonization of Islam’
(1983: 83). It is in this historical context that a ‘native racialism’ proves its value,
argues Robinson, ‘by its transformation into an instrument of collective resistance
and a negation of an unacceptable past’ (1983: 125); European ‘whiteness’ is shored
up in order to diminish the significance of centuries of Muslim rule over vast parts
of what would become ‘Europe’. These insights have more than a passing rele-
vance for the resurgence of contemporary forms of xenophobia and Islamophobia,
a pervasive if not unifying political ideology across much of Europe.
Robinson’s critique of Marx and Marxism is further and, in some ways,
more systematically elaborated in An Anthropology of Marxism. Robinson goes
beyond what has become a widely recognised critique of the concept of primi-
tive accumulation, for instance, and deconstructs the very epistemological bases
of Marx’s historicism and his reliance on a certain empiricism. Taking the three
fundaments of Marx and Engels’ philosophical writings – political economy,
German idealism and socialism – each in their turn, Robinson points to the ways
in which each of these pillars of their theorisations were unnecessarily narrowed
by ‘the presumption that a field of knowledge, a science, could be an expression
of a particular national culture’ (Robinson, 2019b [2001]: 5). Marxism bears the
hallmarks of modern European thought – empiricism, positivism and historicism
– hardwired into its basic premises, with the result that ‘Marxism crafted a histor-
ical pedestal for itself by transmuting all previous and alternative socialisms into
poorly detailed blueprints or dead-end protoforms of itself’ (2019b [2001]: 17).
As one of the most astute and original critics of Marx and Engels, and indeed,
of the Marxist tradition of scholarship and vision of socialism that their work
gave birth to, Robinson developed a very different concept of the dialectic, one
that did not fall prey to precisely the kind of reductionism that he discerned in the
work of Marx and in later Marxist scholarship. In particular, he rejected the idea
that contemporary racism could be understood as originating in one moment or
set of processes, such as the commodification of African bodies during the slave
trade; rather, he was intent on elaborating how racial regimes are complex, some-
times contradictory, and contingent, even as they operate as clear forms of domi-
nation. Moreover, Robinson was intent on tracing the specific histories of how
race is produced, in order to reveal their complexity. This complexity involved
foregrounding how forms of resistance and the refusal of racism’s violence were
and remain an integral part of racial regimes (Robinson, 1997).
Robinson was preoccupied with understanding how the ‘coincidences of dif-
ferent relations of power’ might collide, interfere with or ‘generate resistance’
(Robinson, 2007: xi). He urged us to be attuned to contingencies, ‘the intentional
and unintended’, the fractured and fragmented means by which relations of power
and cultural forms coalesce in racial regimes. To that end, particularly in his last
book, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007), he reads across domains of
242 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARXISM

technology, capital investment, infrastructure, cultural practices, political econ-

omy and science to uncover the formation of a new racial regime that emerges at
the tail end of the 19th century. Taking the development of film and the motion
picture industry in the USA as the object of study, Robinson also looks to the
use of exhibitions and fairs to fetishise the cultural production of racist commod-
ity caricatures, as well as to the economic and infrastructural developments that
provided the scaffolding for this racial regime; in this way film – and emblemati-
cally D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation – could become a site for the newly
consolidated figure of the ‘Negro’ (Robinson, 2007: 82–126).
Robinson ultimately creates a materialist framework of analysis that fuses
sociological, philosophical and political-economic trajectories of inquiry into the
long history of the making of race and capital; in doing so, he systematically pro-
vincialises Marx and Engels’ epistemological assumptions, revealing the costs of
a reductionism rooted in an attachment to a fundamentally Eurocentric vision of
labour, revolt and resistance. Robinson’s dialectical thought stretches the concept
of negation to account for the neglect and deterioration of different forms of
power and resistance; it is a dialectical form of analysis that is influenced by a
thorough deconstruction of Marxism and thus in no way confined by it. It is thor-
oughly materialist in its composition, but not bound to a historicism that emerged
with the signature baggage of modernity; namely an attachment to empiricism,
positivism and rigidified conceptions of what constitutes political subjectivity.
Whether one is fully persuaded or not, Robinson breathes new meaning into the
idea of a ‘black radical tradition’ while also forging a way of thinking about
capitalism as inherently bound to race and racialism that remains unparalleled
and continues to inspire new thought and research (Johnson and Lubin, 2017).

ANGELA Y. DAVIS: BLACK FEMINISM, FREEDOM AND THE BLUES

Robinson’s focus on the medium of film in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning

sits within a larger body of contemporary radical Black thought that identifies art
and artistic and cultural production as a key site through which to explore histo-
ries of resistance and ways of being that exceed conventional understandings of
history, agency and politics. Music, film, literature, photography and popular
culture are the central foci of Black radical theory that has identified the aesthetic
dimension of life as a fundamental site of both racially inflected ontological
regulation and subordination, and also refusal and resistance. Writing a review
of Fred Moten’s (2017) trilogy consent not to be a single being, whose complex-
ity and brilliance resist easy recapitulation, David Lloyd writes that, for Moten,

the black radical tradition is (above all) an aesthetic tradition…Moten’s claim is not that the
black radical tradition has its accompanying musical forms, but that black music – by exten-
sion, black aesthetic practice in general – is and cannot be separated from black radicalism,
even by so slight a difference as resemblance entails. (Lloyd, 2020: 79)
 RACE 243

This body of work, along with those of Robin D. G. Kelley, Saidiya Hartman and
others, has elaborated the aesthetic dimension of Black histories and Black life
in ways that build upon and critically engage the work of Davis, Hall and
Robinson, among others.
In the introduction to her path-breaking study of blues music and black work-
ing-class feminist consciousness, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998),
Angela Y. Davis quotes Stuart Hall, on black popular culture:

In its expressivity, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep, and varied attention to speech,
in its inflections toward the vernacular and the local, in its rich production of counternarra-
tives, and above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture
has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some main-
stream popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different – other forms of life, other
traditions of representation. (Davis, 1998: xix–xx)

Davis’ remarkable study, which includes her own transcriptions of the entire bod-
ies of Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey and Bessie Smith’s available lyrics, presenting the
reader with a rich archive of material, uncovers a different mode of listening to
the first recordings of blues music and also of interpreting the history of black
working-class women in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
The mode of analysis that Davis develops in this work is one facet of decades-
long work that has sought to interrogate how critical histories of slavery, work,
resistance and struggle cannot be adequately grasped without accounting for the
central role and agency of black women in these social, economic and political
configurations. In a recently published interview, she points out that while the
term ‘racial capitalism’

as first used by Cedric Robinson was originally proposed as a critique of the Marxist tradition
grounded in what he called the Black radical tradition, it can also be a generative concept
for new ways of holding these two overlapping intellectual and activist traditions in produc-
tive tension. If we set out to examine the many ways in which capitalism and racism have
been intertwined, from the eras of colonialism and slavery to the present… I think that we
are not so much ‘stretching Marxism’ as we are continuing to build upon and critically
engage with the insights. (Davis in Bhandar and Ziadah, 2020: 205)

Davis’ engagement with critical theory has more in common with Hall than
Robinson in several ways (Davis, 2005). Yet her style of thought stands out
owing to a feminist consciousness that sets it apart from her contemporaries.
Davis’ earlier work showed the limitations of socialist and Marxist feminisms
that failed to account for the racialised and gendered nature of work and the
labour of women of colour, specifically black women in the USA. For instance,
Davis argued that the Wages for Housework campaign that emerged in the 1970s
(primarily in the USA, Italy and the UK), in conjunction with critical theoretical
work on the place of social reproduction in Marx’s labour theory of value, could
not account for the history of black women’s paid and unpaid labour in the
domestic sphere. This was because that perspective on women and social
244 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARXISM

reproduction assumed a particular concept of gender, wherein the category or

identity of ‘woman’ was defined through ultimately bourgeois, heteronormative
family relations. Davis therefore challenged the idea that recognising and giving
economic value to women’s reproductive labour would lead to the eventual
emancipation of women from the strictures of capitalist heteropatriarchy. From
the history of black women’s reproductive labour under slavery (and, crucially,
its contemporary legacies) to the continued prevalence of black women domestic
workers whose paid labour was sorely undervalued and exploited in the post-
slavery era, Davis questioned fundamental assumptions of Marxism and Marxist
feminist theory and associated political campaigns (Davis, 1972).
In Women, Race and Class (1983), taking the destruction of black family life
under apartheid South Africa as her example, Davis showed how racial capitalism
renders futile the argument that women ought to be paid wages for housework in
keeping with capitalism’s internal logic. In other words, the extreme exploitation
of black male workers and the ‘characterization of African women as “superflu-
ous appendages”’ (Davis, 1983: 235) that saw their banishment from urban and
industrial centres under laws of segregation showed that Black domestic life itself
was deemed totally disposable or superfluous to the operation of capitalism under
apartheid. Davis’ method of analysis was to take Black working-class women and
to centre their realities and histories in unpacking the social, economic and political
structures, processes and events produced in and through racial capitalism.
Relatedly, in her writing on Black women blues singers, Davis challenges con-
ventional writing and scholarship on the blues which, with an implicitly sexist
bias, has underplayed women’s contributions. She creates a framework for under-
standing the political nature of music that on its surface does not fall into conven-
tional understandings of protest music; at the same time, it eschews what would
be a reductive and rather boring exercise of ‘proving’ that the blues music of these
women contained political content. Through her analysis of the lyrics and lives of
three of the most important blues singers of the first half of the 20th century, she
challenges the binary between the ‘personal’ and ‘political’ itself, revealing a much
more complex and at times contradictory relationship between women, the commu-
nities they came from, and issues ‘emanating from racism and economic injustice –
crime, incarceration, alcoholism, homelessness, and the seemingly insurmountable
impoverishment of the black community’ (1998: 92). As she puts it:

Art may encourage a critical attitude and urge its audience to challenge social conditions,
but it cannot establish the terrain of protest by itself. In the absence of a popular mass move-
ment, it can only encourage a critical attitude. Then the blues ‘name’ the problems the
community wants to overcome, they help create the emotional conditions for protest, but
do not and could not, of themselves, constitute social protest. (1998: 113)

In the course of this work, Davis challenges existing scholarship on the blues
and its gender bias, emphasising that ‘women’s blues provided a cultural space
for community – building among working-class black women, and that it was
 RACE 245

a space in which the coercions of bourgeois notions of sexual purity and “true
womanhood” were absent’ (1998: 42). Sexuality and travel (1998: 67), the free-
dom of mobility and of asserting autonomy over one’s intimate relationships,
were two hallmarks of the freedom grasped by Black working-class women in
the decades after the end of slavery. For Davis, the proliferation of blues music
that focused on the themes of love and sexuality reflect the ways in which ‘sexual
love’ in the decades following the end of slavery ‘was experienced as physical
and spiritual evidence … of freedom’ (1998: 45). Blues music was the expression
of this newly found and cultivated sense of autonomy.
Of course, this was not without complication and Davis does not shy away
from analysing the sexist stereotypes that pervade some of the music she exam-
ines. The competition between women, and the representation of feelings of jeal-
ousy that sometimes dramatically reaches a violent pitch in its lyrical portrayal,
was also accompanied by ‘advice songs’ that bound together women in an imag-
ined community rooted in real and widespread experiences (1998: 46–56). These
were different dimensions of a newly found freedom expressed through sexuality.
As Davis notes:

Sexuality is not privatised in the blues. Rather, it is represented as shared experience that is
socially produced. This intermingling of the private and public, the personal and political, is
present in the many thousands of blue songs about abandonment, disloyalty, and cruelty, as
well as those that give expression to sexual desire and love’s hopefulness. (1998: 91)

Women blues singers challenged norms about black women’s behaviour inher-
ited from the era of enslavement, as well as from middle-class black women’s
aspirations towards norms of respectability and propriety. Sexuality and mobility
were two domains where working-class women asserted their independence and
‘fundamental humanity’ (1998: 44).
Ultimately, and drawing on the later work of Marcuse, and especially his
notion of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ (Marcuse, 1978), Davis ‘propose[s] a con-
ceptualisation of “aesthetic dimension” that fundamentally historicises and
collectivizes it. Rather than a unique product of the solitary artist creating an
“individual” aesthetic subversion’, she argues that ‘the “aesthetic dimension”
of Billie Holiday’s work represents a symbiosis, drawing from and contributing
to an African-American social and musical history in which women’s political
agency is nurtured by, and in turn nurtures, aesthetic agency’ (1998: 164). This
aesthetic dimension is also present in the ambivalent relation of spirituals and
religious belief to blues music, which did not adhere to a strict bifurcation in the
lived realities of many black women.
Davis’ work on Rainey, Smith and Holiday is a profound intervention into
the very meaning of what constitutes ‘political’ work, Black feminist conscious-
ness and the conditions for its emergence, the relationship between freedom and
aesthetics, and why both Marxist and Black radical ways of seeing are neces-
sarily reductive when they overemphasise race or class at the expense of gender
246 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARXISM

and sexuality. Taking social relations as a complex whole, rather than a set of
deracinated vectors of race, class and gender, she challenges the very categories
of analysis many radical scholars are habituated to relying upon. Ultimately, in
turning our minds to contemporary movements for abolition, Davis’ work holds
invaluable lessons for how to see radical practices of freedom-making that might
be otherwise hiding in plain sight.

CONCLUSION

The writings of Hall, Robinson and Davis are exemplary of the heterogeneity of
the Black radical tradition and its engagements with Marxian and Marxist
thought. Their bodies of work, so foundational for scholars engaged with thinking
through histories and contemporary manifestations of racial capitalism and racial
subordination, provide intellectual trajectories that simultaneously critique and
exceed the limits of Marxist thought in these fields of study, while, in Hall and
Davis especially, creatively appropriating Marxist concepts and methods. In this
moment of rising fascisms in many parts of the world, enabled by the inequities
wrought by decades of neoliberal austerity and the transformation of state appa-
ratuses into conduits for the privatisation and marketisation of public goods,
frameworks of analysis that enable us to map how race and racisms are encoded
in the very fabric of liberal, capitalist democracies have never been so necessary.

Note
1  For a scathing rebuke, see Sivanandan (1990).

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