Black Transatlantic Crossings

In 1983, Stuart Hall crossed the Atlantic to attend the summer school and conference Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Just two years earlier, Cedric Robinson had traveled in the opposite direction, traversing the Atlantic to spend a year in the small English village of Radwinter. Hall and Robinson had both come of age in the era of decolonization and global black freedom struggle. Both sought to rethink the relationship between race and class by challenging reductionist forms of Marxism, and both drew inspiration from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.Footnote ¹ Yet, while today they are widely regarded as the two titans of the concept of racial capitalism, they often traveled in opposite directions.Footnote ² Hall was part of a generation of middle-class intellectuals hailing from the Caribbean; he had read English at Oxford and belonged to a tradition of British Marxism that included luminaries like Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. In contrast, Robinson grew up in Oakland as the child of black migrants from the US South; intellectually, he found inspiration in the longue durée approaches of world-systems theory and the work of Oliver Cromwell Cox, the Dar es Salaam school, and the broad constellation of pan-Africanists that converged in Tanzania in the years after independence.Footnote ³

In the pages that follow, I examine how—on two sides of the Atlantic—Hall and Robinson challenged and reworked Marxist theories of history, dialectics, and revolution. Their analyses often pull in different directions—exhibiting a tension between the drive toward salvage work (Hall) and heresy (Robinson)Footnote ⁴—but they also contain elements of each other: while Robinson provides a critique of Marxist dialectics, he outlines an alternative dialectical framework that centers oppression and resistance to it; and although Hall seeks to rework Marxism by foregrounding themes of race, ideology, and culture, he is ultimately drawn to the moments of possibility that arise when Marxism’s “whole classical edifice begins to rock” (Hall, “Toad” 73). Crisscrossing the black Atlantic, Hall and Robinson thus offer two related but distinct ways of understanding Marxism and its relation to black freedom dreams. For both of these thinkers, “it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition,” as Amílcar Cabral once put it (qtd. in Robinson, Black Marxism 122)—but they raise provocative questions, and sometimes draw diametrically opposed conclusions, about the meaning of “culture” and, with that, the scope and purpose of cultural studies.

To Know What Time It Is on the Clock of the World: Hall’s Salvage Work

When Hall introduced US audiences to cultural studies in 1983, he did so through a series of lectures that developed a Marxism that is more open and fluid in the way it understands class dynamics, capitalist domination, and resistance. The conference Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture took place in a context marked by the global ascendancy of neoliberalism, the landslide victories of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the rise of mass incarceration, black youth rebellion against police violence in Brixton and other parts of England, the debt crisis, and the imposition of structural adjustment policies on the Global South. Hall’s remarks at an event in Australia earlier that year reflected this somber mood: “We live in a world,” Hall noted, “in which socialism is not inevitable.” Taking a leaf from the poststructuralist critique of grand narratives and history-as-teleology, he used his lectures to call on the left to reject economic determinism and class reductionism, arguing that “the notion that every other contradiction in the society really begins with the contradiction between capital and labour [is] not true.” Instead, Hall argued for a more “open” Marxism that would be better attuned to new social movements and the role of culture and ideology in securing capitalist domination: “we must opt for another, a story without an end, a narrative which doesn’t have a conclusion.” The power of such a framework, Hall maintained, is precisely that “[t]here is no closure yet written into it,” and therefore it provides space for politics. Indeed, “if you do not agree that there is a degree of openness or contingency to every historical conjuncture, you do not believe in politics, because you do not believe that anything can be done about it” (“For a Marxism”).

To develop this more “open” Marxism, Hall turned to Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, which takes as its starting point not the given “laws of economic development” but the “current relations of force” (Hall, “Toad” 54). For Gramsci, the ruling classes maintain legitimacy by establishing a dominant common sense. Yet this hegemony is never fixed: it is not given as an automatic outcome of class structure or the mode of production but constructed through a series of struggles and must be “constantly and ceaselessly renewed, reenacted” (Hall, “Toad” 53–54). Since the present is always contingent, one must analyze it conjuncturally—that is, one must remain attentive to the social forces, historical factors, and relations of domination and subordination that, at specific points in time, come together and conflict with one another.

Hall’s “open” Marxism thus moves away from the factory as the privileged site of resistance and toward culture and ideology as crucial terrains in the class struggle. As David Scott notes, this is “a conception of politics understood as strategic practice, as always earned rather than derived, as always a matter of ideological struggle, as always…an ongoing ‘war of position’” (80). The first step in the pursuit of this alternative hegemonic project is to ask, “[W]hat are the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, how did they arise, what forces are sustaining them and what forces are available to us to change them?” (Scott 56). The goal of such (counter)hegemonic politics is to produce oppositional cultures that challenge the dominant common sense and rework the balance of forces, enabling “tendencies…to run another way” (Hall, Hard Road 173).

Overall, Hall’s project was one of renovating and reframing Marxism: a form of salvage work aimed at producing a “marxism without guarantees,” free from reductionism and economic determinism (“For a Marxism”). While Hall worried that questions of race, culture, and ideology had been sidelined by orthodox Marxism, he was ultimately “determined to address these concerns from within the Marxist tradition” (Paret and Levenson 1808–09). This is in contrast to Robinson, who rejected Marxism as a partial theory of liberation developed within capitalist society and its terms of order. Indeed, while Hall emphasizes the importance of conjunctural analysis and hegemonic contestation—what Grace Lee Boggs famously used to refer to as knowing what time it is “on the clock of the world” (qtd. in Mirzoeff)—Robinson offers “an ode to disorder” that calls for a complete rupture with modernity and politics as we know it (Harney and Moten 132).

“The First Attack Is an Attack on Culture”: Robinson’s Heresy

Unlike Hall, Robinson was not present at the 1983 conference at the University of Illinois. One can only speculate as to why: there is no evidence to suggest that anybody considered or did not consider inviting him. Robinson’s book Black Marxism had been published in January the same year but remained relatively unknown; his relationship with Marxism was also more complicated than Hall’s. While Robinson shared with Hall a critique of Marxist theory’s reductionism and linear conception of history, his project sought less to redeem or reform Marxism than to turn it inside out.Footnote ⁵ As he explains in An Anthropology of Marxism, Marxism assumes that bourgeois society constitutes a progressive development from feudalism and that it, moreover, is a precondition for socialist transformation (59). This belies that the socialist critique of property, domination, and inequality preceded the emergence of bourgeois society and “a specific laboring class, the proletariat.” Well before the rise of capitalism, earlier forms of socialism had existed: in fact, “the rudiments of Western socialism appeared as early as the thirteenth century—without industrial production” (59). Capitalism therefore emerged not as a revolutionary negation of feudalism, as Marx insisted, but rather as an intensification and global extension of its “social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes” (Robinson, Black Marxism 10). Failing to break free from these assumptions, Marxism was a continuation of—rather than a break with—bourgeois society and its terms of order.

Contrary to what the title of his 1983 book—Black Marxism—may seem to suggest, Robinson’s project was therefore not one of recuperating a distinctively black version of Marxism. Instead, Robinson centers the black radical tradition: an “accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle” (1). For more than four hundred years, captive Africans continued to rebel, escape from the plantations, and build maroon communities in Brazil, Jamaica, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, French Guiana, Dutch Suriname, the United States, and, most famously, Haiti. “At every opportunity…the logic of marronage was manifest” (141). Black Marxists such as C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright would eventually come to discover this “older tradition” of freedom struggle, finding it “first in their history, and finally all around them” (170).

Whereas Hall seeks to rehabilitate and reformulate Marxism, Robinson thus offers a more thoroughgoing critique that ultimately breaks with Marxist thought. Marxism, he explains, is a theory premised on dialectics and “the presumption that historical movement is the consequence of processes which mature by producing contradictory fruits” (“Inventory” 21). It is this assumption—that capitalism necessarily contains the seeds of its own destruction—that Robinson takes issue with. It is “difficult for Black people,” he writes, to attribute the horrors of colonialism and enslavement to “the consequences of natural processes, or to delude ourselves that we have no special historical part in the ending of these horrors” (22). What Marxist theory cannot see, because of “its Victorian positivistic, scientistic, messianic, and Eurocentric baggage” (Robinson, “Manichaeism” 122), is that black radicalism emerged from cosmologies, traditions, modes of thought, dreamworlds, and ways of being that exist outside Western epistemology and its terms of order: “This was a revolutionary consciousness which 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” (Robinson, “Coming” 383). This does not mean that the violence of racial capitalism was not a condition of the emergence of black radicalism—it was, but, crucially, it was “not the foundation for its nature or character” (369). Western society may have been the “social cauldron” of black radicalism, but, importantly, it was never its “inspiration” (369).

Like Hall, Robinson thus centers the role of culture in revolutionary struggles: since “the first attack is an attack on culture,” resistance and rebellion are necessarily grounded in “the need to reverse the ideas, to reverse the values, to reverse even the conceptualizations of movement, causality, forces, etc.” (“First Attack” 73). Yet although both thinkers see culture as “the seed of opposition,” for Hall the “formative context” of black freedom struggles was “not Africa but slavery (even where African ‘survivals’ and influence remain profound)”; these struggles “had more to do with what…[Africa] had become rather than what, in some ‘real’ past, it had once been” (“Pluralism” 153). Robinson, conversely, rejects the idea of a closed dialectic: “bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third World peoples” (Black Marxism 276). While black radicalism emerged within a “dialectical matrix” of “capitalist slavery and imperialism” (167)—as Hall maintains—for Robinson this matrix was never its source. “The Black radical tradition,” he argues, “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” (170).Footnote ⁶ Indeed, what “Marx had not realized fully [is] 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” (121–22). Unlike Hall, Robinson encourages us to consider how these modes of being—which are otherwise to capitalist modernity—had real revolutionary agency and, consequently, how the enslaved sought liberation on their own terms. It was these dreamworlds, cosmic belief systems, spirits, and otherworldly poetics—not the scientific laws of negative dialectics—that provided the revolutionary impetus.

What follows from this is still a kind of dialectics, but it is one based on “a dialectic between power and resistance to its abuses” rather than on “class hegemony” (Robinson, Anthropology 123). This is a “dialectics without determinism,” or what might be thought of as a heretical dialectics in which there are no “savior subjects” or “messianic agents” but which is “rich with legends of people who can fly home across the sea, walk on the water, and traffic with ghostly or divine spirits” (Gordon xxv). This was “the embryo of the demon” (Robinson, Black Marxism 122) that would come to haunt the whole enterprise of racial capitalism.

Black Atlantic Pearl Diving

In an essay on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt uses the metaphor of “pearl diving” to describe Benjamin’s method of working with history. The pearl diver, Arendt explains, “descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and carry them to the surface” (50–51). What guides this type of thinking

From Jamaica to Oakland, Britain, and South Africa, Hall and Robinson both engaged in what might be conceived as a kind of pearl diving, prying loose materials from the depth of the black Atlantic. The pearls they brought to the surface reveal culture as central to anticapitalist resistance and black freedom struggle. Yet despite their many affinities, their work also showcases a profound disagreement on the meaning and source of culture: while Robinson regards the black radical tradition as a mode of living and breathing that is otherwise to capitalist modernity, Hall focuses on how counterhegemonic cultures are formed under conditions of capitalist oppression. For Hall, “What is critical, historically, is not how much of Africa survived, but how the African and other elements were welded into a ‘culture of the oppressed that under slavery enabled the slaves to survive culturally. It is the historical dynamic of culture that must engage us, not the retrospective perspective of ethnographic purism” (“‘Africa’” 174). In contrast, Robinson argues that black radicalism exceeds the terms of the capitalist order with which it contends: “We are not the subjects or subject formations of the capitalist world-system. It is merely one condition of our being” (“Manichaeism” 122). Consequently, while both Hall and Robinson refute the idea that capitalism necessarily produces its own gravediggers—indeed, there are “no guarantees” other than “the promise of liberation”—they give us fundamentally different ways of understanding the relationship between Marxism and black radicalism, capitalism and culture, and modernity and freedom struggle. If these “pearls” offer a glimmer of hope, then how we choose to interpret them has immense implications for what we mean by “cultural studies.”