Cedric Robinson’s anthropology of Marxism

By AVERY F. GORDON
Race & Class Vol. 47(2)

Abstract: In meditating on the significance of Robinson’s body of work, particularly An Anthropology of Marxism, Gordon discusses the profound originality of his enterprise. At its heart lies a rigorous deconstruction of the terms of western civilisation which exposes the philosophical and historical compromises made by Marxism and Liberalism with the tenets of bourgeois rationality. The blindness within Marxian thought to socialist and radical traditions outside its purview, documented and analysed by Robinson, is his starting point for a broader and more generous historical materialism that recuperates a fuller range of human experience.

Keywords: Black radical tradition, historical materialism, Marcuse, Marxism, utopia

They came to Thessalonica . . . and Paul . . . reasoned with them out of the Scriptures . . . And some of them believed . . . and of the chief women not a few. But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the city on an uproar . . . crying. These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also.
Acts 17:1–6

Sometimes, there is a wonderful moment in reading when, all of a sudden, a book’s importance becomes apparent as an embodied insight. Such a moment of profane illumination is always well-prepared in advance, but usually arrives, unpredictably of course, in the form of a revelation. When I first had the opportunity to read An Anthropology of Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson, that moment came for me at the close of chapter 4, ‘The discourse on economics’. There, Robinson writes:

A more profound discontinuity existed between the inspirations of earlier Western socialist discourse and Marxism. Where once the dispositions of power, property and poverty had been viewed as affronts to God’s will and subversions of natural law, for Marx they were the issue of historical laws and personal and class ambition . . . By evacuating radical medieval philosophy from socialism’s genealogy, Marx privileged his own ideological rules of discursive formation, providing a rationale for distinguishing a scientific socialism concomitant with the appearance of capitalist society from the lesser (‘utopian’) and necessarily inadequate articulation of socialism which occurred earlier. So doing, he deprived his own work of . . . profound and critical insights . . . Notwithstanding their keen appetites for history, Marx and Engels had chosen to obliterate the most fertile discursive domain for their political ambitions and historical imaginations. Possibly even less troubling for them, they displaced a socialist motivation grounded on the insistence that men and women were divine agents for the fractious and weaker allegiances of class.

It was the image of men and women as divine agents that registered, for me, the significance of Robinson’s critique of Marxism. This image did not conjure up religious solidarity or collectivities of well-dressed parishioners or regressive notions of posthumous justice, although it did remind me of the famous passage from The Acts of the Apostles about those ‘baser sorts’ who ‘turned the world upside down’. Rather, it pinpointed the moral stakes of the Marxian objective and the grace it promises, described eloquently by Robinson as ‘the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degradation’. And it located the impulse to realise that objective in our sovereign and creative divinity, that is, in our spirited consciousness and in our proven ability to remake the conditions and history in which we live. For me, in this image, the confines of Marxism’s powerful world view – historical laws, class ambitions, scientific socialism, capitalist society – were lifted and the heterodox grounds for an alternative world view set in place, right there in the insistence that men and women were divine agents and not just the fractious and weaker subjects of capitalism’s class struggles. For what is illuminated here is a utopian socialism, unnecessarily narrowed and slighted by Marx, in which it is possible to realise the scandal of the qualitative difference because it is already part of who we are and how we conceive of ourselves as a people. To conceive of ourselves as divine agents is to see ourselves as the executors – not the supreme rulers, but the guarantors – of our world and our imaginations. To ground socialist aspirations in a divine agency is to remove the stigma attached to the utopian and to measure our freedom less by what subordinates us and more by what we are capable of divining.

Such a possibility is a profound and dissident challenge, particularly in the post-cold war era, when capitalism appears ascendant, ubiquitous and more dominant than ever in the minds of both the Left and the Right and in which socialist alternatives, to the extent that they can be heard, must respect the supremacy of capitalism or ‘globalisation’ to rule our current lives and the means by which we imagine living otherwise. A utopian socialism which holds fast to the urgency of recovering human life from the spoilage of degradation and which rejects the sovereignty or the inevitable authority of that which appears to rule us will inspire some, frighten others and surely annoy even a few more. However, for those familiar with Cedric Robinson’s scholarship over the past twenty-five years, this unorthodox warrant will come as no surprise. From The Terms of Order to Black Marxism to Black Movements in America to An Anthropology of Marxism, Robinson has pursued a consistent and rigorous deconstruction of the terms of western civilisation – its politics, its historiography, its economics its racial
ontologies, its ‘intoxications’ and its ‘trivialisations’.3 At the heart of Robinson’s critical project has been the exposure of the philosophical and historical compromises Marxism and Liberalism have made with bourgeois society, compromises which, among other results, wedded the foundations and promise of socialism to capitalism. It is, in my view, the distinctive contribution of An Anthropology of Marxism to refuse those compromises on the grounds that they are not now nor ever have been necessary. It is a critical contribution, like all of Robinson’s work, forged in an enormously erudite and gracious spirit of reconstruction.

Marxism’s blind spots

In order for there to be any sense in asking oneself about the terrible price to pay, in order to watch over the future, everything would have to be begun again. But in memory, this time, of that impure history of ghosts.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

An Anthropology of Marxism is concerned with the western origins of Marxism, with the place of capitalism and bourgeois society in the longer history of western civilisation’s deprivations and modes of comprehension, and with rehabilitating the socialist tradition. These themes and concerns were already evident in the book for which Cedric J. Robinson is probably best known, Black Marxism: the making of the Black radical tradition. First published in 1983, this magisterial work questioned Marxism’s indebtedness to western ‘constructions’ in light of the Black radical tradition and the ‘denigration’ to which it had been subjected. While acknowledging the significance and influence of the Marxist opposition to class rule and the socialist vision that underwrites it, Black Marxism nonetheless stands as a rebuke to its ‘ominous’ limitations. Robinson states:

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 which is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures. Certainly its philosophical origins are indisputably Western. But the same must be said of its analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view. This most natural consequence though has assumed a rather ominous significance since European Marxists have presumed more frequently than not that their project is identical with world-historical development. Confounded it would seem by the cultural zeal which accompanies ascendant civilizations, they have mistaken for universal verities the structures and social dynamics retrieved from their own distant and more immediate pasts. Even more significantly, the deepest structures of ‘historical materialism’ . . . have tended to relieve European Marxists from the obligation of investigating the profound effects of culture and historical experience on their science. The ordering ideas which have persisted in Western civilization . . . have little or no theoretical justification in Marxism for their existence. One such recurring idea is racialism . . . Though hardly unique to European peoples, its appearance and codification, during the feudal period, into Western conceptions of society was to have important and enduring consequences.

In an effort to explain how Marxism could provide no theoretical justification for the historical emergence and persistence of a racialism so embedded in western culture and so consequential to its development and existence, Robinson showcases his signature method of critical inquiry and Black Marxism realises its most significant achievements. To summarise a work rendered far more complex than I can do it justice here, these achievements are threefold.

First, Robinson painstakingly and persuasively outlines the significance of the precapitalist history of racism within the West to the development of a fundamentally ‘racial capitalism’ and a racialised workingclass consciousness consistently mistaken by Marx and Marxists as derivativ and epiphenomenal. Marxism’s brief for the ‘universality of class’ and for the essentially autogenetic origins of capitalist society are confounded, in Robinson’s presentation, by the ‘particularities of race’ and by the persistence of ‘architectonic possibilities previously embedded in [western] culture’.

Second, Robinson exposes a costly reductionism at the centre of Marxian socialism’s attachment to the figure of the revolutionary proletariat. As Robinson shows, this intellectual, moral and libidinal investment bound the development of Marxian socialism to nationalism, racism and bourgeois epistemology in such a way as to create a blind field at the very centre of the socialist vision. Around this blind field was created a historiography, a politics and a morality, in short, a structure of anticipation or expectation, comprising an entire way of seeing. ‘When in its time Black radicalism became manifest within Western society as well as at the other junctures between European and African peoples, one might correctly expect that Western radicalism was no more receptive to it than were the apologists of power.’

If Marx’s historical materialism was unable to understand Black radicalism’s struggle, consciousness and truth on ‘its own terms’ but only able to receive it as ‘merely an opposition to capitalist organization’, then Black Marxism’s greatest contribution is to have established this radical tradition’s distinction and authority. In Robinson’s presentation, the Black radical tradition stands not simply as a colossal example of a blind spot in the Marxist point of view but also stands living and breathing in the place blinded from view. It is, in the deepest sense of the term, a theoretical standpoint and not merely a set of particular data. Indeed, to my mind, the remarkable accomplishment of Black Marxism was to demonstrate brilliantly just what was in the place of a missed opportunity to see the rich thought and the complex struggle comprising the Black radical tradition – its collective wisdom – as an empirical and historical evidence worthy of theorisation and thus of generalisation. As the book makes abundantly clear, the Black radical tradition is not a supplement to be appended to a partially flawed, but basically sound, theoretical edifice or standpoint. ‘The difference’, Robinson states, is ‘not one of interpretation but comprehension . . . Western society . . . has been [Black radicalism’s] location and its objective condition but not – except in the most perverse fashion – its specific inspiration’. It is precisely the mistake of taking what are ultimately contingent conditions and locations, what Robinson calls the ‘social cauldron’, as the limit of comprehension and inspiration which Black Marxism corrects and which An Anthropology of Marxism extends. And it is precisely the vision of what has been and could be comprehended, as inspiration and as aspiration, which fulfils the ambition of Black Marxism and An Anthropology of Marxism.

The liberation of socialism

In An Anthropology of Marxism, Robinson completes the critique of Marxism undertaken in Black Marxism. Indeed, An Anthropology of Marxism could easily be subtitled, ‘The making of the European socialist tradition’, where the term ‘making’ carries the meaning of ‘an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning’, as E. P. Thompson put it. If ‘Marx and Engels . . . in their . . . historical imagination . . . had believed that socialism was the objective construction of the future, representing a decisive break with the premodern past’, in Robinson’s revisionist history, ‘socialist thought did not begin with or depend on the existence of capitalism’. As he states, ‘socialism and Marxian socialism in particular were not the dialectical issue of the contradictions emergent in the capitalist era . . . the socialist ideal was embedded in Western civilization and its progenic cultures long before the opening of the modern era’. While Marx and Marxism became the principal owners of nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism, they did not, Robinson argues, invent socialism. They gave a ‘destiny’ to scientific socialism by putting ‘older’ socialist ‘currents’ into a ‘secular format’ and creatively ‘formulated a historical system which put the critique nurturing a political movement on empirical grounds’. As Robinson notes, they produced a ‘remarkable and fecund portrait of modern capitalism’s early development’ and, ‘without their intervention, radical politics in both the West and elsewhere might very well have lacked the conceptual purchase which proved so important’. However, these contributions, harnessed as they were to a ‘scientific destiny’, were made at the expense of the ‘displacement’ and the trivialisation of ‘previous and alternative socialisms’, which became in the course of time ‘poorly detailed blueprints or dead-end protoforms’ of the destined socialism awaiting its
future arrival.

Robinson puts proof to these points as he investigates the ‘taxonomy’ and philosophical antecedents of Marxist historiography, the social origins of materialism and socialism and the ancient genealogy of political economy. What we learn, among other important lessons, is that Marx’s fundamental claim that bourgeois society was a necessary precondition for socialism was mistaken. In an especially fascinating historical and theoretical excavation of pre-Marxian and precapitalist socialist discourses, it is poor rural and urban rebels, female mystics and ‘pious women’, Latin medieval philosophers, radical communitarians and communists, as well as ‘thieves, exiles, and excommunicates’ who take centre stage in the making of a socialist tradition forged in a ‘heretical attack on the Church and revolutions against the ruling classes’. Focusing especially on twelfth- and thirteenthcentury heretical Christian opposition to ‘wealth’, ‘feudal power’ and authoritarian corruptions and the variant of socialism institutionalised ‘in the most reactionary institution of medieval Europe: the Catholic Church’, Robinson delineates the ‘identification of wealth and evil’ that bequeathed to Marx the ‘sign of the capitalist, the hoarder of material possessions, the thief ’.

The antecedent sources of Marx’s appropriations are an important part of An Anthropology’s archaeological work and Robinson offers some truly surprising turns and canny discoveries, especially in the chapters on German philosophy and on economics. However, enhancing our knowledge of the genealogy of Marxism per se is not what motivates, in the Robinsonian meaning of that word, An Anthropology’s historical and philosophical inquiries. The purpose of Robinson’s investigation into pre-Marxian socialist discourses is to identify a fundamental ‘conceit’ in Marx’s historical judgment, in the way in which he comprehended the past, the present and the future, and to stak out the consequences of this comprehension for the development and future trajectory of socialist thought. At issue here is the extent to which Marxism can lay claim to being more than a vital theory and practice of liberation, which is certain. The issue is whether Marxism can lay claim to being ‘the radical alternative to political economy’ and the ‘emblematic opposition of the capitalist world-system, and as such, the modern world’s injustices’ for having discovered ‘the secrets of value or historical change’. For Marx and Engels, the secrets of value and change were to be found precisely in the bourgeoisie’s compulsion, as they put it, to ‘create a world after its own image’. For Robinson, Marx and Engels were also deeply informed by this compulsion and ‘in the enterprise of imagining and narrating a world history or a history of a world system – in part derivative of Eurocentrism, in part an habituation to the epistemological presumptions of modern science as well as the Judeo-Christian monotheism’ – they too created a world in the image of their own.

In suggesting that Marx and later Marxists truncated ‘the historical development of socialism’ on the assumption that a ‘scientific’ socialism could not either logically or politically precede the critique of political economy and bourgeois society, Robinson raises the stakes of his queries. ‘If a socialist discourse can be recovered from earlier (‘‘precapitalist’’) eras, such a discovery would rupture the epochal confines of bourgeois epistemology sacred to both Liberalism and Marxism.’ The confines of bourgeois epistemology are marked, at its boundaries, by the centrality of the capitalist world system, by what J. K. Gibson-Graham named a ‘capitalcentrism’ that encloses all previous and future human affairs and arrangements in ‘the evolutionary history of capitalism’. Some of the consequences of capitalcentrism and its privileges are better known today, but they are concisely and powerfully articulated in An Anthropology: the ‘exaggerated’ importance of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; the ‘dismissive treatment of nonindustrial labor’, whether slaves, peasants, indentured labour or women, and their relegation to the ‘dustbin’ of history; the ‘evangelical politics of class struggle’ as the ‘penultimate competition for power’; and the ‘economistic conceit’ which prevented ‘a more comprehensiv treatment of history, classes, culture, race-ethnicity, gender and language . . . and the messiness of human activity’.

It is worth emphasising that Robinson’s argument is not, I take it, that Marx was a man of his time and consequently could not see or anticipate what we can today. (Or, conversely, that Marx’s diagnostic analysis of capitalism is, ironically given the widespread obituaries of Marxism’s demise, more true today than it was in the nineteenth century.) Robinson’s
argument is that Marx dismissed as anomalous, anachronistic, primitive and prehistorical, evidence, especially of an older socialism, which did not reflect the world as it was reflected to him. In that turning away, Marx built into a theory and practice of revolutionary change some of the key ordering terms of the society he was trying to undermine. And, Marxism subsequently inherited a diminished capacity to imagine, anticipate and receive – to comprehend or to interpret without subordination – those potent injuries, diagnoses and remedies not well-reflected in the mirror of capitalist production and bourgeois hegemony.

The idea that the inability to see beyond your own worldview and your own historical moment is, in effect, a presumption and not an inevitable or immutable law of (capitalist) history itself was already well-developed in Black Marxism. There, Robinson demonstrates that the ‘Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and reformed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of consciousness in culture.’ But in The Terms of Order, Robinson had begun to question the assumption that we cannot fundamentally disturb human knowledge – ‘the relationship betwee existential consciousness and truth systems’ – without resorting to a naive romanticism of ‘self-creation’. A systematic critique of the phenomenology of the political, Terms of Order shows how the illusion of the density and immutability of social order is not only at the centre of western political thought, but is ‘the dominating myth of our consciousness of being together’. In demonstrating the contingency and replaceability of this myth, Robinson developed a method of deconstruction that finds fruition in An Anthropology. On the one hand, this method involves exposing the internal logics, the assumptions, the rules of enunciation and the privileged objects and subjects which establish what a paradigm understands and anticipates and what power/knowledge formation it thus sustains. As Robinson puts it in Terms of Order, ‘I have sought to expose . . . those contradictions within Western civilization which have been conserved at the expense of analytical coherence’. On the other hand, this method involves denaturalising what appears to us as ‘natural history’ by revealing those subversive events, thoughts, behaviours and potentialities that are covered over by a natural history’s references. Robinson’ anthropology is, in this sense, a historiography: ‘To refer the exposition of the argument to historical materials . . . served the purpose of resurrecting events which have systematically been made to vanish from our intellectual consciousness.’ The selection of the points of referenc makes all the difference here.For it is from the ‘vantage point’ of these all-too-real vanishing points – Tonga philosophy and everyday life, Black radicalism, precapitalist socialism – that it becomes possible to not only expose the terms of order from whose vantage point what is illusory and what is authentic is consistently mistaken and often reversed, but to liberate ourselves from them.

The goal of liberation is what the critique aims for. It is to the ends of ‘emancipating’ socialism from the ‘ideological regime rigidly circumscribed by an attenuated and bourgeois construction of class struggle’ that Robinson pushes his critical argument that Marx suppressed an earlier history of western socialism by ‘transfixing’ its origins to capitalist society. This fixation not only locked socialism into a proprietary relationship toMarxism, it also trivialised and marginalised an achieved socialist discourse that could neither be derived from nor reduced to a class-based opposition to capitalism. To liberate or emancipate socialism from ‘bourgeois constructions’, to put Robinson’s point in bold relief, is to see ‘resistance to capitalism’ as a ‘derivative oppositional discourse, whose origins suggest a submerged and perhaps more profound historical crisis’.
The socialist tradition that Robinson uncovers and which finds its exemplar in medieval heretical radicalism was indeed more than an opposition to capitalist exploitation. It issued a morally authoritative analysis of the corrosive abuse of power, of the indignities of unrelieved poverty and of the sacrificial value of private property ownership. It had a ‘consciousness of female liberation’, of anti-authoritarian democracy and of the inhumanity of slavery and ‘imperialist excess’. As Robinson puts it:

Both the ancients and [Marx’s] immediate predecessors . . . contributed to an inferior, more ambiguous, and misogynist consciousness of female liberation to that constituted in medieval radicalism. Similarly, the elevation of natural law philosophy by renegade medieval scholars into a formidable opposition to private property, racism, and imperialist excess was neglected. The alternative discourses, both of the ancient world and of the 17th and 18th centuries, were directly implicated in the legitimation of slave economies, slave labor and racism. Democracy, too, fueled by centuries of popular resistances, had acquired its better champions among medieval socialists.

For Marxism, the implications of this ‘older and deeper’ western socialism are humbling, but not fatal. ‘If not the privileged place claimed for it, it is certain that Marxism occupies a place in socialist history. [But] Western socialism had older and deeper roots . . . its persistent reinvigoration in visions of an alternative social order was the consequence not of class hegemony but a dialectic between power and resistance to its abuses.’ For the moral project that Marxism has shared with many others – the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degradation – the implications provoke an inspiration we would be especially wise to recall today. As Robinson concludes:

Both in the West and the world beyond, the socialist impulse will survive Marxism’s conceits just as earlier it outlived the repressions of the Church and secular authorities. The warrant for such an assertion, I have argued, is located in history and the persistence of the human spirit. As the past and our present demonstrate, domination and oppression inspire that spirit in ways we may never fully understand. That a socialist discourse is an irrepressible response to social injustice has been repeatedly confirmed. On that score it has been immaterial whether it was generated by peasants or slaves, workers or intellectuals, or whether it took root in the metropole or the periphery.

The dialectic of power and resistance

Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly.

Grandma Dorothy

If An Anthropology of Marxism is, at heart, an effort to rehabilitate socialism for today on the guarantee that it is a ‘persistent and irrepressible response to social injustice’, then who or what ‘generates’ it may be more ‘material’ than Robinson implies. Indeed, the restoration of and incitement to a socialist movement may require an entirely different understanding of historical materialism. And, I believe that Robinson offers such a radically revised conception in Anthropology. The historical materialism Robinson proposes is, in its own way, a dialectics but it trades even the most sophisticated Marxist notions of totality for a dialectic of power and resistance to its abuses. There are four central features of Robinson’s historical materialism that are worth summarising.

First, the historical materialism proposed is a dialectics without determinism but with a strong notion of internal contradiction. Occupying a paradigmatic place in Robinson’s historical anthropology is the story of how the Catholic Church appropriated the most radical impulses of mass poverty movements, of its renegade philosophers and of its ‘pious women’ in an effort to contain their challenges to its delinquent and exploitative rule. The example of medieval heresy and the elevation of heresy itself to a model of oppositional consciousness demonstrate that it is often from within the most ‘reactionary institutions’ that a critical discourse of poverty, property and power arises as the measure of internal contradiction. This model also provides a generative conception of internal contradiction without its usual complement and container, determinism. The Church’s appropriation of its internal heretics is not, in Robinson’s example, a sign of the
determinant power of the institution but a sign of its weakness. Many writers, as diverse as James Baldwin, James Scott, Philip Slater, Patricia Williams and Toni Morrison have eloquently argued that the exercise of power is a taxing enterprise which perverts and weakens those who sustain its exercise precisely because it is sacrificial and is always resisted. To see the powerful as weak and the weak as powerful is not to deny, in an act of wilful disregard, the calamities of unrestrained authority, the dehumanisation of bonded or ‘free’ servitude, the alienations of exploited labour or the violence of dictatorial ideas. Rather, it is a way to expose the illusion of supremacy and unassailability that dominant institutions and groups routinely generate to mask their fragility and their contingency. It is a way to see through to a vision of the authority of our heretical beliefs and resistance as the very material source of historical development andchange.

Thus, second, Robinson’s historical materialism is a dialectics without messianic agents but rich with ‘legends’ of people who can fly home across the sea, walk on the water, traffic with ghostly or divine spirits; who produce profound and enduring knowledge without sanctioned authority; who courageously and quietly rebel against subordinations and inhibitions; and who forge seemingly impossible alliances. The legends which populate Robinson’s historical materialism narrate a heresy that dispenses with the need for a saviour subject, such as the proletariat, or with the need for identitarian hierarchies based on specious racialisms, whether of culture, ethnicity or gender. In place of the security of knowing the laws and modes of social change in advance, Robinson patiently urges us to be comfortable with forms of heresy and socialist opposition, in particular, which may be surprising and which may seem to emerge from anomalous or inappropriate sources. More than a request for tolerance or a celebration of the pleasures of the surprising discovery, Robinson’s historical materialism issues a model of anticipation and reception that naturalises the persistent, irrepressible, not fully understandable opposition to power and its abuses as its historiography.

Third, Robinson’s historical materialism is a dialectics without the presumption of western science but with a mode of knowledge production in which the history of power and resistance to its abuses is the test of theoretical and ethical adequacy. Here, history is neither a fetish nor a substitute positivism. Rather, it is the source of a vantage point centred on the comprehension o how we could live more justly and humanely with each other. Robinson’s historical materialism and his politics are, in this sense, an expression, not of scientific thought, but of utopian thought, for they ‘confront bad facticity with its better potentialities’. As Herbert Marcuse put it, ‘When truth cannot be realized within the established order, it always appears to the latter as mere utopia’. The ‘mere’ utopia is nowhere we can really live, the impossible, the unrealisable, a paradise for unrealistic dreamers, a luxury for those who can afford to be impractical, a ‘breeder of illusions and . . . disillusions’. Robinson rejects the repressive reality principle contained in the dismissal of utopian aspirations as ‘mere utopia’ because from the vantage point he establishes, it is the trivialisation of these aspirations and their manifestations that breeds the illusion of
their unreality and social irrelevance. The possibility of the ‘scandal of the qualitative difference’ is what Robinson’s historical materialism emphasises. Such a vantage point, one must say without embarrassment, is the standpoint of the beloved And, indeed, implied in Anthropology is a severe warning about the dangers of being too much in love with (too committed to) what one hates and hopes to destroy.

Finally, then, Robinson’s historical materialism is a dialectics without fatalism but with a sensitivity to the question of fate. In the struggle against power and its abuses, three questions of fate, which are also questions of individual and collective trust, become paramount. These questions are: what is fated for us? Who cares about our fate? And, to whom can our fate be trusted? In such a struggle, the unpredictability of the outcome can become itself a kind of fatalism, a way in which we conceive of and think about fate. Fatalism can take many forms – it can be cynical, apocalyptic, fanatical or just resigned. It can also, as in the dominant tradition of Marxism, be built into the very architecture of a theory of history and revolutionary change. We
return here to the problem of the nature of a capitalist world system whose power is so vast that it determines not only what is but what could be as well, a system not only capable of obliterating the traces of its origins but determining its own future trajectory, including its demise.

Robinson’s historical materialism rejects capitalcentrism, of whatever variety, because it yields a biased preoccupation with and investment in the fate of a seemingly sovereign system. There is an implicit standpoint in capitalcentrism tied to the question of fate. This standpoint is the standpoint of the life of the capitalist world system. The life of the system is the source of analytical attraction and cathexis. The life of the systemis the source of intellectual and political authority. The life of the system pulls in tow and sometimes in thrall. The life of the system sets the fundamental parameters for what is to be known and done. The life of the system is the measure of our freedom, the image out of which our will to change it and the effective exercise of that will is carved and beholden. As I have suggested, Robinson operates from a different standpoint and offers an alternative notion of fate in which ‘we are not the subjects of or the subject formations of the capitalist world-system. It is merely one condition of our being.’ If we are not the subjects of the capitalist world system, not under its dominion, then we do not need its sovereign authorisation to direct and protect our fate. We may instead, with the force of the history of the dialectic of power and resistance to its abuses in mind and in hand, insist that we possess precisely the divine agency to motivate a socialism that can eliminate all those fractious and weaker allegiances which degrade our existence.

From start to finish, An Anthropology of Marxism argues that Marxism was not the first expression of an authentic and viable socialism and that it will not be the last. Our socialism today will no doubt take global capitalism as one crucial and deathly condition of our being and our opposition but, as Cedric Robinson has shown over the years and in collaboration with others similarly motivated, we are not the subjects of the world capitalist system – it is only one condition of our being. Robinson’s critique of Marxism, then, is not a rejection of Marx’s
insights nor a denigration of the authenticity of the commitments made byMarxists to a rigorous and ethically sound theory and practice of liberation. The target of Robinson’s discerning critique is the presumption of the ownership of the properties – the resources, rules, definitions, agencies, legends, imaginations – that are the vital components of an ambitious theory and practice of liberation without conceit. What Robinson has called the ‘proprietary impulse’ of Marxism is the impulse of the property owner who is obsessed with maintaining and increasing his property at all costs. The proprietary impulse and the havoc it wreaks
is by no means unique to Marxism. But neither, Robinson asserts, is the socialist critique of private property. We are thus indebted to Robinson for giving us the means to imagine a non-proprietary socialist critique of private property. Moreover, he has given us not only the means but an inspiring vision of how we are and can be together in the variety of our efforts to replace the harms inflicted upon us by the abusive property of private power with the goods we communally value. ‘He . . . pursued a critique . . . that implicated an alternative historical
agency, an alternative signification of liberation, an alternative reconstruction of modern history, an alternative epistemology of human desire.’ Cedric Robinson used these words to introduce Richard Wright. I can think of no better ones with which to conclude and to thank him for the rare and precious work he has given us.