Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique
by August Nimtz, Monthly Review Press, £74

IN 1983, Cedric Robinson published Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. A year later, August H Nimitz published a review of Robinson’s book titled Marxism and the Black Struggle: The ‘Class v Race’ Debate Revisited. This current collection by August Nimitz unpacks Robinson’s misunderstanding of historical and material theory and practice in the writings of Marx and Engels.

The Nimitz collection consists of a preface, biography, his 1984 review of Robinson’s 1983 book, and three wide-ranging essays expanding on the rejection of historical materialism in favour of a race-first approach. A close reading of Marx and Engels’ writings on the ideological and material factors dividing English and Irish workers, and African-Americans and whites in the US, is a central plank of the critique that Nimitz delivers.

Recall that at the dawn of British capitalism, conventional wisdom held that the Irish were an inferior race, despite a white skin similarity to British proletarians. Race is not a biological category. Further, Ireland was Britain’s first colony, producing an imperial ideology that dehumanised the colonised. Ending the division between British and Irish workers was central, not peripheral, to their collective liberation from class domination under capitalism.

A corollary across the Atlantic was the division between black and white labour. To wit: Nimitz details Robinson’s misreading of Marx and Engels. For instance, Marx’s journalism during the US civil war shows his understanding of the importance of ending chattel slavery to liberating enslaved blacks and white workers from their domination under the regime of private property that reproduced labor’s subordination as it created an economic surplus. As we know, private property weathered the storm of reconstruction, destroying both it, and the promise of a society based on substantive equality.

Black radical thinkers such as WEB Du Bois in the 20th century, who read Marx and Engels closely, deepened analysis of racial divisions between white and black workers. 

Du Bois saw “a public and psychological wage” payoff underpinning the white supremacy ideology as a force to contend with in the emancipation of the working majority. 

The mass 2020 black-led uprising, after the police killing of George Floyd that attracted scores of white workers, points to the emancipatory potential latent in labour to unite and fight for a better world, according to Nimitz. On that note of working-class unity, one can make a case for this factor explaining the policy victories of movement politics in the 1930s and 1960s.

Historical materialism, in brief, analyses how working people’s daily labour in and out of the household, paid and unpaid, reproduces their world. Given that capitalism is a global system of class control, understanding how it operates and why is critical.

The US two-party duopoly opposes such an analysis in its centrist and right-wing formations. The rising popularity of democratic socialism in the US is a reflection of labour, especially young Americans experiencing downward mobility in real time, seeking alternative ways of living and working. Recent changes in US electoral politics with the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America is a case in point.

For example, the current affordability crisis in food, healthcare and housing is a baked-in feature of capitalism. In other words, wages failing to keep up with rising prices is a normal trend within a capitalist economy, like recurring contractions and expansions. 

This disproportionately hits black workers, as the last hired and first fired, a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. 

This dynamic reflects the class and race structure of a segmented labour market that operates to suck an economic surplus from workers of every skin colour. Class and race matter.

In an era of cascading crises, from the ecology to the economy and polity, building a broad working-class consciousness of the system’s operating feature of dividing labor to maintain control is essential, according to Nimitz. With that political consciousness, another world is possible. His book is a step in that direction.

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.