An Anthropology of Marxism

204 Pages·2019·1.34 MB·English

by  Cedric J. Robinson

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF MARXISM
Robinson_Anthropology FINAL PGS i
AN ANTHROPOLOGY
Robinson_Anthropology FINAL PGS ii
Cedric J. Robinson
OF M AR XISM
Second Edition
With a new foreword by H. L. T. Quan
Preface by Avery F. Gordon
The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill
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© 2001 Cedric J. Robinson
Foreword © 2019 The University of North Carolina Press
Preface © 2019 Avery F. Gordon
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Originally published by the Ashgate Publishing Company in 2001.
The University of North Carolina Press edition published in 2019.
Designed and set in Swift Neue LT and Futura by Rebecca Evans
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the
Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Robinson, Cedric J., author.
Title: An anthropology of Marxism / Cedric J. Robinson ; foreword by
H. L. T. Quan ; preface by Avery F. Gordon.
Description: Second edition. | Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina
Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018036573 | ISBN 9781469649900 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781469649917 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469649924 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Communism. | Socialism. | Materialism.
Classification: LCC HX73 .R6 2019 | DDC 335.4— dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036573
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CONTENTS
Foreword by H. L. T. Quan vii
Preface by Avery F. Gordon xiii
1 Coming to Terms with Marxian Taxonomy 1
2 The Social Origins of Materialism and Socialism 18
3 German Critical Philosophy and Marx 60
4 The Discourse on Economics 88
5 Reality and Its Representation 117
Notes 125
Index 165
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FOREWORD
It is no small matter that Cedric J. Robinson’s An Anthropology of Marxism,
first published in 2001, is back in circulation. It is particularly poignant
that his passing in June 2016 “went virtually unnoticed in the media,”
despite the fact that “today’s insurgent black movements against state
violence and mass incarceration call for an end to ‘racial capitalism’ and
see their work as part of a ‘black radical tradition’—t erms associated with
Robinson’s work.”1 It is no exaggeration, then, to say that An Anthropology
of Marxism (hereafter, Anthropology) is likely one of the most important
works that one can read on socialism and the perseverance of our col-
lective struggles for justice. For students of socialism and, by extension,
Marxism (as theories and praxes), Robinson’s inquiry is fairly straight-
forward: what to make of the historical disfigurement, which is a conse-
quence of an intellectual priority that privileges Marx’s “own ideological
rules of discursive formation,” and, in so doing, deprives “his own work
of the profound and critical insights” (115). For Robinson, Marx, Engels,
and Lenin erred both in judgment and in their lack of research thorough-
ness. As Anthropology makes clear, the entire edifice of Marx’s theory of
capitalism, and, by extension, of revolutionary transformation, relies
on the assumption that bourgeois society is a precondition of socialism;
yet historical accounts reveal that “the rudiments of Western socialism
appeared as early as the thirteenth century— without industrial produc-
tion” (59). In other words, insofar as Robinson’s historical sleuthing is
concerned, socialism appears to have occurred independently of industri-
alization and the advent of bourgeois society. To suggest that a thing (i.e.,
a social formation) cannot occur before something else (another social
formation) happens first is to prioritize that something else over all other
things.2 And in the ordering of things, especially in the case of capital-
ism and its achievements, to suggest that the socializing of resources for
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shared wealth cannot occur prior to the systematic exploitation of land
and labor, and the wholesale privatization and accumulation of property,
means that our very sense of sociality and its associated values are those
of capital and its savage terms of order.3 Moreover, the marginalization and
trivialization of actual historical experience in theory building reflect a
general hostility to so-c alled distractions from “pure theory,” with grave
consequences, not least of which is the vulgar reductionism that ludi-
crously celebrates bourgeois achievements, all the while privileging the
industrial working class over all others (as if such a discrete phenomenon
could ever exist).
In its earliest incarnation, Anthropology served as a course reader for a
political theory graduate seminar at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, where Robinson taught for more than three decades.4 Until the
2001 publication, this reader introduced Robinson’s students to an en-
tirely different historiography and, thus, a different approach to study-
ing socialism— one that elucidated the fact that socialism (re)appears
constantly in different contexts, with different actors. At a minimum,
this phenomenon suggests that it must be possible to study a culture of
socialism and, hence, an anthropology. The reader, like the book, begins
with the phrase “According to legend,” allowing Robinson to unmask
one of the most celebrated modern fictions— that bourgeois society is
a precondition of socialist transformation. Key to Robinson’s critique of
Marx’s theory of social change is his recuperation of democratic history
from bourgeois historiography and Marxian historical materialism.5 An-
thropology suggests that when one is not encumbered by capitalism as a
love object, it is possible to excavate an archive wherein both the social-
ist critique of property and socialism predated capitalism. As Robinson
demonstrated, there is a “disconnect” between historical formations of
socialism and its representations—a “profound discontinuity existed be-
tween the inspirations of earlier Western socialist discourse and Marx-
ism” (115). The reader ends at precisely the same point as its book form:
“The socialist impulse,” Anthropology concludes, “will survive Marxism’s
conceits just as earlier it persevered the repressions of the Church and
secular authorities” (123). In other words, just as it historically predated
Marx and Marxism, socialism will assuredly prevail beyond the nominally
understood terms of Western socialism. This is a remarkable declaration
in the wake of the political and historical developments of the late 1980s
and early 1990s in the West, when many pronounced socialism to be dead
viii FOREWORD
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or dying.6 For Robinson, one could say that the writings have always been
on the wall because the privileging of the Marxian discourse necessar-
ily engenders a disconnect between the potentialities of actual socialist
struggles that are people- led and the decays of elitist vanguardism, as
exemplified by the implosion of the many state- managed economies that
were occurring during this time.
While Robinson’s contributions to reforming our understanding of
Marxism and Marx’s writings are many and invaluable,7 Anthropology
should not be read simply as a critique of Marxism or even a rehabilita-
tion of Marxian historiographies. Instead, Robinson’s sight is on socialism
writ large, and Anthropology opens up new terrains for unearthing histori-
cal verifications of our collective socialist impulse. In a typically transparent
fashion,8 Robinson states that his objective “is not to simply critique the
self-s erving historical practices of Marxism or renounce Marxist conceits”
(17). Rather, Anthropology “diverges” from the many studies of Marxism
that “are enveloped in hagiography,” and thus is chiefly “concerned
with those socialist discourses in the West which preceded Marxism” (16,
emphasis added). Robinson’s clear-e yed understanding of the historical
formations of socialism is especially notable when contrasted with the
generally breathless reception evident in the works of his contempo-
raries. Both Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and
Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations prematurely and erroneously
celebrated the end of ideological struggles, especially those between
capitalism and socialism.9 With the dissolutions of the Soviet Union in
December 1991 and Europe’s Eastern Bloc in December 1989, socialism
was presumed to be no longer viable in the “New World Order” of corpo-
rate globalization and the neoliberalization of everything.10 Capitalism,
in the form of neoliberalism, was thus presumed to have already dem-
onstrated its own mastery and triumph over its existentialist foe, social-
ism.11 In the wake of these developments and within the context of what
Martin Jay characterizes as “fin de siècle socialism,” Robinson’s optimism
is an unwavering act of faith12 in the ability and role of ordinary women
and men to make their society anew. It is a counterdistinction from the
ever- fretful wondering about whether there might still be “a Left left.”13
For Robinson, it is neither historically accurate nor analytically sound to
even contemplate binding the fate and politics of the demos with an elit-
ist hagiographic endeavor whose conceits have long been exposed. His
insistence that history matters, especially those historical antecedents
FOREWORD ix
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