The term refers to African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean writers, organizers, and revolutionaries who have drawn upon Marxist theory to understand — the better to destroy — both racial oppression and class exploitation, including colonialism. So it refers to a theoretical and political tendency within Marxism. It’s analogous to Marxist feminism, which of course draws upon Marxist theory to understand gender oppression.

People sometimes say that Marxism has a “race problem,” meaning that Marxists don’t take race seriously. But honestly, I can’t think of a theoretical or political tradition, whether liberalism, black nationalism, or critical race theory, that offers more insights into racial oppression than Marxism, and this is largely due to the Black Marxist tradition — although you of course find hostility to racial oppression and colonialism in the work of classical Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, and in the work of Karl Marx himself. And yet many people, including people on the Left, are unaware of this tradition of theory and practice.

Black Marxism is not homogeneous, but the central idea is that capitalism has historically been the main pillar of racial oppression in the modern era. And by racial oppression, I mean the political, legal, and social domination or control of African and black peoples.

What does it mean to say that capitalism is the main pillar or foundation of racial oppression? Black Marxists point to two fundamental characteristics of capitalism — capitalists’ ceaseless drive for cheap labor and resources, on the one hand, and workers’ competition for jobs, on the other — as the root causes of racial oppression. So notice right away that, while racial oppression is produced and motivated by capitalism according to Black Marxists, it is obviously not the same thing as class exploitation. Rather, it facilitates the exploitation of black labor and, thereby, of all labor.

And to say that racism in its modern form is a product of capitalism is not to diminish in any way whatsoever racism’s horrendous consequences. Quite the contrary. Black Marxists emphasize how black peoples in the modern era have confronted political and social domination as well as the extreme forms of economic exploitation this domination has enabled. The political oppression of black peoples is horrible in its own right, and it also makes possible especially brutal forms of labor exploitation.

To be more specific, one inherent characteristic of capitalism is capitalists’ ceaseless drive for cheap labor and resources. This drive stems from the fact that capitalists compete with one another and so are constantly looking for ways to reduce their costs of production. One way to keep labor cheap and docile is to politically oppress workers — to dominate and control them and so prevent them from organizing and resisting effectively. Capitalists would prefer to oppress all workers, but a second-best option is to dominate some significant section of the working class — maybe women, maybe immigrants, maybe black workers.

Black Marxists say that black peoples have been oppressed horribly by capitalists, the government, and the police not as an end in itself, or out of racial malice alone. Where large-scale racial domination and inequality exist, the purpose is generally to facilitate the exploitation and control of black labor — think of plantation slavery and sharecropping and low-wage and precarious work in the United States. In many cases, the motivation behind racial domination also includes the dispossession of land and resources controlled by specific racial groups. Colonialism obviously entails such dispossession and is driven by capitalists’ unceasing quest for cheap resources as well as for cheap labor.

Racial oppression is also often supported and enacted by white workers. This is where another fundamental feature of capitalism — workers’ competition for jobs — is important. But let me emphasize that, for Black Marxists, large-scale systems of racial oppression and inequality have generally been the projects of powerful ruling classes — in conjunction with the states they control or dominate — and that these classes have a material interest in cheapening and exploiting the labor of African and black peoples, or seizing the resources they own. Racial oppression is especially brutal and enduring when powerful ruling classes and states have a material interest in it.

Now, the motivations behind individual acts of racism are complex and cannot always be explained in precisely these terms. But explaining the interpersonal behavior of this or that individual is not what Black Marxism is about. As I say, it seeks to locate the main impetus behind large-scale institutions of racial domination, and its claim is that the exploitation of labor — class exploitation — is generally that impetus. Institutionalized racism is very different from interpersonal racism.

Yes, exactly, and the heterogeneity of colonized peoples generally. Somewhere W. E. B. Du Bois writes — in Color and Democracy, I think — that colonized peoples have vastly different histories and cultures and physical characteristics. What unites them is not race or skin color but poverty, brought about by capitalist exploitation. Their race is the ostensible reason — or justification — for their exploitation, Du Bois says, but the real reason is to make profits from cheap labor, black and white. The oppression of black workers, he emphasized, inevitably cheapened white labor as well.

Racist ideology or white supremacist ideology — racism in a cultural sense — is generally developed, diffused, and institutionalized by ruling classes and state agencies as a way to justify and rationalize racial oppression and inequality. Racial animus or hatred per se is not the primary motivation for racial oppression — the wealth or profits generated by the exploitation of black labor is the key motive — but racism justifies this oppression and becomes a reason for its perpetuation.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that certain racist and supremacist notions don’t long predate capitalism. But these have been limited in scope and influence until they become hitched to the material interests of powerful capitalists and states, at which point racist ideas are systematized and institutionalized and so become a material force in their own right.

Race, accordingly, can become both the social criterion and moral justification for the political and social oppression that makes the exploitation of black labor easier and more intensive than might otherwise be possible. And there’s something more. As I mentioned, workers who are not racially oppressed nonetheless see their own labor cheapened and their potential collective power diminished by the racial divide that is created by the oppression of black workers. For Black Marxists, then, racism is obviously extraordinarily important in its own right, notwithstanding the idea that Marxism has a “race problem.” Black Marxists are in no sense “class reductionists.”

Now, there have been “vulgar” or simple-minded Marxists and socialists who have claimed that the problems of oppressed black workers are no different from the problems all workers confront. This is obviously wrong. Historically, white workers have been exploited, sometimes quite ruthlessly, but in the United States they have never faced anything like the political, legal, and social oppression of black workers.

The great American socialist Eugene V. Debs once said that “we have nothing special to offer the Negro,” meaning, nothing other than the class politics the Socialist Party was offering to white workers. But as William Jones has shown, this quip has been taken out of context. In reality, Debs was an ardent foe of racism, and he criticized socialists who ignored racism or who thought the class struggle “obliterated” the need to address racist laws and institutions. Racism was an obstacle to class solidarity, Debs thought, and so had to be fought by all workers. Paul Heideman’s edited collection Class Struggle and the Color Line includes writings by a number of American socialists and communists, black and white, including Debs, who understood the profound importance of confronting and destroying racism among white workers and in the larger society.

Today it’s fair to say that most Marxists by far, due in part to the work of Black Marxists, understand that the various institutions and laws and norms of racial oppression are different from and every bit as evil as the exploitation of black labor — even as they expedite that exploitation. Racist practices infuse workplaces — they operate “at the point of production” — but they also extend into society as a whole and shape the relations between governments and their subjects. These racist institutions and laws and practices must be fought in conjunction with the fight against class exploitation.

Some Black Marxists stress that white workers can be violently racist, although their racism is different from that of capitalists. An important insight of Black Marxism, in fact, is that racism is not of one piece — it takes different class forms in different economic and political contexts. For white workers, racism is often motivated by a fear that black workers — or certain ethnic groups, or immigrants — will take their jobs or drive down their incomes because they are willing to work for lower wages, or because they are forced to work for lower wages or no wages at all.

Capitalists, naturally, try to stoke this fear. Out of this fear, you see white workers trying to exclude blacks (and certain white ethnic groups), often violently, from better-paying jobs or whole industries as well as from trade unions. The result is what’s called a split labor market, with black workers relegated to lower-paying jobs or even, in some contexts, excluded from the labor market altogether. Again, racist or supremacist beliefs become a means of justifying this exclusion and violence. The term “split labor market,” I should note, was developed in the 1970s by a Marxist sociologist, Edna Bonacich, but the basic idea goes back at least to Du Bois.

Now, it’s important to remember that workers don’t have the power to hire and fire workers — that’s what capitalists do. So split labor markets only arise when capitalists have an interest in acceding to the demands of racist workers. But capitalists sometimes push back against workers’ demands to exclude black workers from certain occupations or industries — above all, when there are labor shortages, including shortages of skilled workers or the labor shortages that strikes create. Capitalists in the United States were notorious for using black strikebreakers to replace striking white workers, a move that both undercut strikes and typically inflamed the racial animosities of white workers, reinforcing the racial divide in the working class.

Marxists do not, of course, regard working-class racism as inevitable. Through organizing and class struggles with capitalists, they believe, white workers can come to understand the need for broad, multiracial class solidarity, and that capitalism is responsible for the dearth of good-paying jobs, not other workers struggling to survive.

The political implication of this perspective is that class struggles will and should be integral to any strategy of black liberation or decolonization — both at the point of production and in civil society more broadly. If the exploitation of black labor and the simultaneous exclusion of black labor from better-paying jobs are the economic foundation of racial oppression, as Black Marxists propose, then that foundation has to be undermined, if not destroyed altogether. In their struggles against racial oppression and class exploitation, moreover, black workers will need the broadest possible solidarity from workers of other racial groups in order to succeed, even if racism promises to hinder such solidarity. Hence the need to fight this racism at every turn. Class solidarity is especially important, of course, where the racially oppressed workers are a minority, as in the United States.

This tradition includes an incredibly impressive group of people. A short list of Black Marxists would include, in addition to Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Claude Ake, Neville Alexander, Manning Marable, and Stuart Hall. Paul Robeson was very close to this tendency and to Du Bois in particular. Malcolm X was apparently moving toward this tradition in the year before his assassination. It includes African revolutionaries like Kwame Nkrumah, Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, and Eduardo Mondlane. Prominent Black Panthers and some Black Power advocates, including Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) belong to this tradition. And James Baldwin, who was both a friend of Martin Luther King Jr and a fan of the Panthers, was close to it by the early 1970s — just read his book No Name in the Street. No other theoretical or political tradition that has tackled the question of racial domination can boast of such a brilliant lineup of writers, intellectuals, and revolutionaries.

Until recently, actually, there was no dispute. Everyone — everyone on the Left anyway — understood that Du Bois became a Marxian socialist before writing, at age sixty-five, his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, and subsequent radical works, although there are certainly traces of Marxism and socialism in his earlier work. Du Bois’s Marxism is obvious in his posthumously published autobiography. Du Bois eventually became a fellow traveler of the communist movement — a staunch Stalinist, actually — and joined the Communist Party, or what was left of it in the wake of McCarthyism, in 1961, when he was ninety-three.

Recently, a group of liberal sociologists has vigorously denied or downplayed all this, and they have concocted something they call “Du Boisian sociology,” which they have bleached of all traces of Marxism — a real whitewashing, so to speak. Not surprisingly, this group equates Marxism with “class reductionism.” People who are interested can read an exchange between myself and one of these faux “Du Boisians” in Catalyst. I wrote my defense of Black Marxism as a response to this denialism, which is based on a profound ignorance of both the later Du Bois and the Black Marxist tradition.

For sure. Black Marxism is just a part — although I think the most interesting part — of a broader multiracial and multinational tradition within Marxism that seeks to understand racial domination as well as ethnic and national oppression, including colonialism. This broader tradition includes classical Marxists like Luxemburg and Lenin, but also the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who wrote about the “Indian question” in Latin America, and the Japanese economist Kamekichi Takahashi. It includes people of South Asian descent, from M. N. Roy to A. Sivanandan, among many others. It also includes Ho Chi Minh, who had some interesting things to say about European racism, as you might imagine.

This tradition also includes white European and North American figures like the Austromarxist Otto Bauer; Max Shachtman, who wrote about race in the United States; and Herbert Aptheker, a friend and literary executor of Du Bois, who wrote a great book on American slave revolts. And the tradition includes more recent figures like Eric Hobsbawm, Theodore Allen, and Benedict Anderson, who is famous for his idea that a nation is an “imagined community,” an idea also applicable to race and ethnicity. It also includes white South Africans who were involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, including Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe.

Very much so! A number of interesting and important writers immediately come to mind, including the Columbia historian Barbara Fields, Adolph Reed and his son Touré Reed, Kenneth Warren, Zine Magubane, Cedric Johnson, August Nimtz, Preston Smith, and the Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby, a self-described “Afro-Analytical Marxist.” And these are only figures in the United States.

It was, ironically, although not only by him. I say “ironically” because Robinson was a strident opponent of Marxism. He thought that Marxism, like “Western” culture as a whole, was blind to racism and in fact implicitly and often overtly racist, and that its categories were inapplicable to non-European societies. For Robinson, as for the “Du Boisian” sociologists I mentioned, there is only one kind of Marxism: vulgar, class-reductionist Marxism.

But because Robinson wrote a book called Black Marxism, I think a lot of people just assume that he himself must be a Marxist or pro-Marxist. But nothing could be further from the truth. Robinson apparently did not even want to call his book Black Marxism, but I believe his publisher thought it would sell better with that title.

Black Marxism has many flaws, including an awful rendering of the thought of actual Black Marxists, especially the ideas of Du Bois and C. L. R. James. Robinson’s view of Du Bois as an alleged critic of Marxism is based on a truncated reading of Du Bois’s work and on a profound misreading of Black Reconstruction in America in particular. His take on Du Bois is similar to that of the “Du Boisian” sociologists. Robinson claims, with no evidence whatsoever, that Du Bois and James abandoned Marxism, which allowed them to discover something he calls the “black radical tradition.” But this is pure fiction — neither Du Bois nor James abandoned Marxism. Du Bois’s commitment to Marxism and the communist movement only deepened over time, even after Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech in 1956 exposing Joseph Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary of that same year. As I mentioned, he joined the Communist Party very late in his life, just a couple years before his death. That would be quite odd, if you think about it, for someone who allegedly gave up on Marxism.

It depends on who you ask! The subtitle of Robinson’s book Black Marxism is “The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.” When I first saw that, I thought he was equating Black Marxism with this black radical tradition, or at least suggesting that Black Marxists were part of the black radical tradition. And that makes sense. But for Robinson, the two have no connection whatsoever. Marxism is essentially and forever European and racist, and the black radical tradition is essentially and forever pan-African and anti-racist. Robinson is insistent, accordingly, that Marxism has nothing to offer anti-racists. How could it, if Marxism is part of Western culture, which is irredeemably racist?

In the real world, black intellectuals and revolutionaries have of course drawn upon Marxism in an effort to better understand racism, imperialism, and colonialism. This describes Du Bois and James perfectly. They are central to the black radical tradition in any meaningful sense of that term, as are the other Black Marxists I’ve mentioned. I would also include in this tradition non-Marxists who nevertheless see and emphasize the ways in which capitalism is implicated in racial oppression and inequality, and who are therefore anti-capitalist, if not necessarily revolutionaries. I have in mind various social democratic and Christian socialist figures like A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Eric Williams (a student of C. L. R. James), Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and of course Martin Luther King Jr. Baker, who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, was quite close to Marxists, in fact. In any event, all these people surely deserve a place within the black radical tradition.

Yes, the key distinguishing criterion is anti-capitalism. We should understand the black radical tradition as simultaneously anti-racist and anti-capitalist. Radicals think the two have to go together. I don’t see how you can call yourself a radical in this world if you are not opposed in principle to capitalism.

For this reason, I would also place some but certainly not all black nationalists and anti-colonialists in the black radical tradition. But those nationalists who support capitalism, including so-called black capitalism, necessarily support exploitation and inequality. There’s nothing radical about that. This is Frantz Fanon’s central thesis in The Wretched of the Earth. Beware, he warned, of the black bourgeoisie — or of the national bourgeoisie, as he called it. Unlike Robinson, I don’t think anti-racism and anti-colonialism alone make you a radical. There are obviously many elitist and authoritarian anti-racists and anti-colonial nationalists.

Absolutely. He became increasingly open about his hostility to capitalism and his support for democratic socialism in the last years of his life. His education had brought him into contact with many Christian socialists and their writings. King’s doctoral dissertation discusses two leftist theologians, Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. Matt Nichter has written recently about the many socialists, communists, and ex-communists who supported or worked for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King also strongly supported the labor movement, and the most radical unions in the country supported him. King was of course supporting a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis when he was assassinated.

Given this background, King never resorted to red-baiting and in fact looked askance at liberal anti-communists. He appreciated how communists had supported the civil rights movement. One of his last great speeches was a tribute to Du Bois, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. He scolded those who denied or downplayed Du Bois’s communist politics, which he thought only served to reinforce negative stereotypes about socialism and communism.

In fact, I think King must be regarded as one of the greatest socialists in American history. In his crusade against poverty, by the way, King came to support a guaranteed income for all, and he wanted to set this income not at the poverty line but at the median income level of the country. I’m not sure that makes practical sense — people who make less than the median income would presumably quit their jobs and take the guaranteed income! But this proposal clearly reflects King’s hatred not just for poverty but for any economic system that denies people the material resources they need to flourish and not just survive.

That phrase is probably best known from Touré Reed’s 2020 book, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism, although others have also used it. It’s based on the liberal tendency to separate class from racism, to view racism as disconnected from labor exploitation in particular. This is in stark contrast to a major tenet of Black Marxism, which sees labor exploitation and systemic exclusion from better-paying jobs as central to racial oppression. Liberals often separate racism from class and then use racism in a general, abstract sense — as irrational prejudice — as an explanation for racial oppression. It’s an idealist argument — racism as an idea causes the oppression of black peoples. If class reductionism — which, as we’ve seen, Black Marxists emphatically reject — advises us to forget about racial domination, race reductionists advise us to forget about class divisions and class exploitation. So of course Black Marxists and black radicals are opposed to this theoretical move.

To put it another way, the concept of race becomes reductionist and ideological when it obscures class divisions and exploitation within a racial group as well as common class interests that cut across racial groups and are a potential basis for class solidarity. Similarly, the use of racism or racist ideas as an explanation becomes reductionist if racism is disconnected from class interests.

Oliver Cromwell Cox, an important Black Marxist sociologist, says somewhere that if beliefs alone could oppress a race, then the beliefs blacks have about whites should be as powerful as the beliefs whites have about blacks. But that’s only true if you forget about class and state power. In a similar vein, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) once said that if a white man wanted to lynch him, that was the white man’s problem. But if the white man had the power to lynch him, then and only then did it become Carmichael’s problem. Cox and Carmichael are just saying the obvious: ideas disconnected from power are impotent. All this isn’t to say that race and racism never matter. Obviously not. Racism can be very consequential and persistent precisely when it is connected to the material interests of powerful classes and states. This is a central tenet of Black Marxism.

Marxists did develop this term, but let me begin by saying that a lot of ink has been wasted in an effort to define this phrase. None of the great Black Marxists from whom we’ve learned so much ever used this phrase — not Du Bois or James, not Cox or Fanon, not Rodney or Hall, not Nkrumah or Cabral. So it’s obviously possible to talk, and to talk insightfully, about race and class and capitalism and oppression without using this term. Simply putting together the words “racial” and “capitalism” does not magically guarantee that you understand the relationship between capitalism and racism. Of course, I’m hardly the first person to point this out.

That said, the phrase “racial capitalism” was in fact first developed by Marxists in South Africa, during the apartheid era. A couple sociologists, Marcel Paret and Zach Levenson, have shown that the phrase was apparently first used by a white Berkeley professor, Bob Blauner, in 1972. But few people picked up on it until the term was widely used by South African Marxists, including Neville Alexander, Martin Legassick, and Bernard Magubane, during the late 1970s and 1980s. Their point was that because capitalism was the foundation of racial oppression in South Africa, the anti-apartheid struggle needed to be anti-capitalist as well as a struggle for democratic rights.

This was in opposition to the standpoint of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and South Africa’s Communist Party. They argued that the struggle for socialism should be postponed until after a democratic revolution — a “national democratic revolution,” as they called it — overthrew apartheid. But this implies, implausibly, that apartheid had little or nothing to do with capitalism and the exploitation of black workers. In fact, the ANC did more than postpone the struggle for socialism — it abandoned it altogether. In any event, for Black Marxists the term “racial capitalism” refers to the fact that capitalism has been the foundation of racial oppression of various types in societies the world over.

Yet many people mistakenly believe that “racial capitalism” is Cedric Robinson’s idea. If they bothered to actually read his book, they’d see he hardly uses the term at all. And Robinson — who, again, is hostile to Marxism — uses the term very differently from Black Marxists. In fact, he understands the term in a race-reductionist way. For Robinson, capitalism is just another manifestation of age-old Western culture, so of course it is inherently racist. For him, capitalism doesn’t create systems of racial oppression, as Black Marxists argue. Rather, the racist character of Western culture, which goes back many centuries, somehow ensures that any economic order associated with it — feudalism, capitalism, socialism — will also be racist.

Again, it’s an idealist argument. Ideas, in this case those of Western culture, constantly reproduce racial oppression from some power of their own, first in Europe and then around the world. But how are these ideas so powerful? Might it have something to do with the material interests of powerful classes and states, as Black Marxists argue? Robinson sometimes gestures in this direction, but for the most part he doesn’t say. The ideas themselves are all-powerful for him. That’s just not a serious explanation for racism.

I should note that a lot of liberals seem to love the term “racial capitalism.” They more than anyone are clearly most responsible for its spread in recent years, at least in the academy. Liberals use the phrase to mean something like an economy in which employers discriminate against blacks and other minorities. Their ideal world is one of nonracial capitalism — labor exploitation without discrimination. This is an ideal very far indeed from the Black Marxist vision of socialism.

But to go back to my initial point, what is really at stake here is our understanding of capitalism, racial domination, and the relationship between the two. It really doesn’t matter if one uses the words “racial capitalism” or not. The Black Marxist tradition itself clearly demonstrates that we needn’t use those words to understand these things. The phrase won’t magically enlighten us, and some meanings of the term — the race-reductionist and liberal definitions — will simply lead us astray.

To return to where we started, it is essential to understand exactly how capitalism has been and continues to be the main foundation of racial domination. That means you cannot eliminate racism without destroying or at least strongly constraining and regulating capitalism. This is the message of the Black Marxist tradition.