New evidence and understandings about the structure of successful early societies across Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere are sweeping away the popular assumption that early societies tended toward autocracy and despotism.
This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Archaeology has a more valuable story to tell: Collective action and localized economic production are a recipe for sustainability and broader well-being. The Mesoamerican city of Monte Albán, which was a major regional urban center for 1,300 years, is a shining example. It is a powerful case study that early investments in public infrastructure and goods foster longer-term sustainability.
There is a rich vein of insight here for some of the most pressing challenges faced by humanity: billions of people living in poverty, and collapsing social structures in the developing world. And in the wealthy industrialized world, many are increasingly disillusioned by the flaws in our political and economic models.
But if we’re going to use the models from the ancient past, can we be confident about how early societies really operated?
Researchers have begun to identify archaeological evidence that works as indicators for political and social behaviors and institutions:
Is there evidence of extreme wealth disparity or equality in lifestyle or burial?
Does monumental architecture foster exclusivity (elite tombs, aggrandizing monuments, evidence of dynastic legitimation) or access (e.g., open plazas, wide access ways, community temples)?
Are palaces prominent or is it not clear where the leader resided?
Does art emphasize lineal descent, divine kingship, and royal patron deities or does it feature more abstract themes such as fertility or integrative cosmological principles?
There is a lot we can determine from a society’s tendency toward the first or second option in each of these questions about whether it was more autocratic or associated with collective/good governance.
In a study of 26 early urban centers in Mesoamerica, Monte Albán was one of 12 that was characterized as a collectively organized city based on a series of indicators. Prior to the city’s abandonment, Monte Albán was not highly unequal: there were few, if any, lavish tombs, no great caches of household riches or other evidence of extreme wealth differences, and no large, ornate palace that was unequivocally the ruler’s residence.
From early in the site’s history, the city’s core was centered on a large plaza that could have accommodated a significant proportion of the site’s population. Flattening the hill’s rocky top and then defining and creating this large open space entailed planning, coordination, and cooperation. Until very late in the city’s history, material representations of rulers were relatively rare, and there is an overall lack of ruler aggrandizement. During the city’s first four centuries (500–100 BCE), there were few depictions of seemingly important individuals or leaders. Rule was largely faceless.
How did it happen?
In this light, let’s travel to the early sedentary villages (c. 1500–500 BCE) in the Valley of Oaxaca—the largest expanse of flat land in Mexico’s Southern Highlands. They were situated on or near well-watered land.
Around 500 BCE, however, a new hilltop center, Monte Albán, was established at the nexus of the valley’s three arms, where agriculture was far riskier due to unreliable rainfall and a dearth of permanent water sources. During the era of its establishment, not only was Monte Albán larger than any earlier community in the region, but many other settlers moved into the rural area around Monte Albán.
This marked shift in settlement patterns and the underlying processes associated with the foundation of Monte Albán have long been debated. How can we account for the immigration of people, some likely from beyond the region itself, to an area where they faced greater risks of crop failure?
One perspective, reliant on uniform models of premodern states as despotic, viewed the process from a basically top-down lens; leaders coerced their subjects to move near the capital to provide sustenance for the new center.
Yet more recent research has found that governance at Monte Albán was generally more collective than autocratic, and in its growth period, productive activities were collective, centered in domestic units and not managed from above.
By the time Monte Albán was established in the Valley of Oaxaca, more than a thousand years had passed since foragers transitioned from mobile lifeways to sedentary communities. Maize, beans, and squash, which had been domesticated prior to village formation, were key elements of an agricultural economy, with maize providing the bulk of calories. Early villagers also exploited a mosaic of other natural resources including clay for making ceramic vessels and figurines, stone for making tools and ornaments, and plant materials for processing into a range of woven products.
The shift to sedentary life was a long social process through which formerly dispersed populations not only adjusted but committed to living in larger communities and interacting with more people on a daily basis.
The Valley of Oaxaca has a climate that is semiarid, rainfall is unpredictable and spatially patchy across the region, and not all sectors of the valley floor receive the minimum annual precipitation necessary for reliable rainfall farming of maize, the region’s staple and culturally most important crop.
The prime factor that determines the productivity of maize is the availability of water, and a diversity of water management practices have been used since prehispanic times. These manipulations, which increase agricultural yields, include wells and pot irrigation, check dams, and small-scale canals, all of which were easily managed or implemented at the household level.
The Valley of Oaxaca was a core politico-economic region. Prior to Monte Albán’s founding, most of the populace resided in one of three clusters of settlements that were separated from the others by largely unoccupied areas, including the center of the valley where Monte Albán was later situated. In each arm, a cluster of smaller communities surrounded one larger settlement that had special functions and served as the “head towns” of small competing polities.
This millennial pattern was broken when Monte Albán was built on a steep hilltop in the center of the valley. The settlement’s establishment and rapid growth in size and monumentality set off a dynamic episode of innovation and change that included demographic, dietary, and other economic shifts. Populations grew rapidly not only at the new center, which became the largest and most monumental city in the valley’s early history, but also in the surrounding countryside. The center and rural communities were integrated through an emergent market network that provisioned the city.
This dramatic episode of change required the coordination of labor to build the new city. The rocky hilltop was flattened into a large main plaza with monumental buildings constructed along its edges. The scale and orientation of this central plaza represent a key transition from prior community plans in the region. Residences for the city’s burgeoning population were constructed on the steep slopes of the hill by creating flattened spaces, or terraces, shored up by stone and earthen retaining walls, each of which sustained a domestic unit.
The allocation of the hill’s apex for civic-ceremonial space and the lower slopes for commoner residences was a blueprint for a broad social accord. Built environments are not neutral, but political, and Monte Albán’s footprint with a large, relatively open central space and little display of hierarchical leaders points to a collective arrangement.
The city’s concentrated residential precincts comprised strings of artificially flattened terraces that shared long retaining walls. Construction of the terraces required allotments of domestic labor to clear trees, flatten steep inclinations, erect stone walls to retain flat spaces where houses would be built, and construct drainage channels to divert rainwater from living spaces. The construction, sharing, and maintenance of front retaining walls involved high degrees of interhousehold cooperation between neighbors.
Additionally, commoners adopted construction techniques and basic ceramic wares that previously were the domain of high-status families. In the early city, most houses included contiguous rooms with plaster floors, often constructed around a patio; they were built with adobe bricks on stone foundations instead of the mud and thatch typical of earlier commoner houses. The pottery wares that previously were largely used by higher-status families or as ceremonial vessels became more broadly distributed in the centuries after Monte Albán was established. This level of cooperation and coordination is evidence of a social charter or norms, in which a wider array of residents had access to what previously had been higher-status materials and goods.
No large-scale production has been uncovered, and there is no indication of central-governmental food storage at Monte Albán, as one might expect with top-down economic control or redistribution.
Economic production at Monte Albán was situated in domestic contexts. Instead of being coerced to move to Monte Albán, people were attracted to the city. Monte Albán was settled by a sizable group, possibly as large as 1,000 people, and rapidly grew to about 5,000 people within a few hundred years. Populations also increased in the rural areas around Monte Albán, and the annual rate of population growth in the valley exceeded what could have been maintained by natural increase alone. Populations expanded again in and around Monte Albán after c. 300 BCE. The threefold growth was too large to be accounted for by local, “natural growth,” so that people must have been drawn to Monte Albán and the valley from more distant, extra-regional locations.
Evidence indicates that the agricultural catchment for feeding Monte Albán likely extended 20 kilometers from the city. The market and exchange networks that moved food to the city created a high degree of interconnection among small settlements and Monte Albán. This interdependence required cooperation, infrastructure, and institutions that together provided the means of moving food and distributing seasonal surpluses.
Prior to Monte Albán, early “head towns” were generally positioned adjacent to good farmland. But the new city was located in an area of the valley where agriculture was riskier and largely dependent on unpredictable rainfall. Why would people move to a place where they faced a high risk of crop failure, where they could have been taxed more highly, and where, if governance were coercive, they had little voice? Such a scenario seems improbable, and it is far more likely that people moved to Monte Albán to take advantage of economic opportunities, a parallel to most migrants in the world today.
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Each people has its own history. Those without a past have no present. Mesopotamia has a long and thriving history. It can be considered the cradle of civilizations. For thousands of years, people lived on these lands, organized in tribes. It is said that the neolithic revolution, which can be seen as the mother of all revolutions, took place here. Before the Sumerian civilization emerged, the people organized themselves in tribes and lived in a communal way. These groups were living their lives in an organized and collective manner, with little individualism. That is, the system at the time was based on communalism and cooperation, and these societies lived with each other in a democratic and freed way, until the formation of the authoritarian system represented by the Sumerian class. That society, which was based on morality and cooperation, was transformed into an authoritarian class society by Sumerian civilization. At the same time, the old traditions of a more communal life survived alongside that new class-society, especially in the villages. In North and East Syria, a communal spirit and cooperation survived in one way or the other, despite 5000 years of authoritarian regimes since the advent of the Sumerian civilization.
Since the revolution on the 19th of July 2012, the peoples in the North and East Syria were able to build up an alternative. An alternative to the BAAS system, which ignored the rights of all peoples living in this area, and an alternative to ISIS which oppressed the people in the name of religion. Both of those systems have in common that they leave no space for peoples of other religions and ethnicities or other ways of thinking. The alternative in North and East Syria stresses communal values, the strength of the society, the importance of the freedom of women, and a strong cooperation with all religions and ethnicities. Without freedom of women and without a strong cooperation with all people living in the area, a real democracy won’t be possible.
A state is seen as a contradiction to democracy, therefore instead of building a state, the goal is to fight for a political system which embraces the cultural and political rights of all people. This approach aims to avoid the danger of reproducing the oppression of one people by another through the system of the nation-state. The shared values and principles of a society are seen as more important than the ethnicity of the people living in it. Rather than dissolving identity, culture and language, this ideology promotes the idea of a ‘democratic nation,’ which proposes that all identities should be given space to organize themselves and be represented. Practically speaking, this means that through a quota system, the presence of all groups and religions is guaranteed in the decision-making bodies like councils. As well as that, in the drafting of the social contract (which will be the main document in which the peoples in the North and East of Syria will arrange their living together) a quota system is used to ensure the presence of men, women and all religions and ethnicities.
In the North and East Syria three languages are the official languages: Kurdish, Arabic and Syriac-Aramaic. Children in school learn their own language as well as, at a certain age, the language of the others. All peoples can organize themselves according to their culture and religion, but at the same time the people celebrate each other’s special religious days and on all special religious holidays there are official holidays. Children in school learn their own religion as well as all other religions. Not merely tolerance, but living together, is the principle. This is hard work. Coming from a history based on exclusion and oppression, learning to live together and be a part of each other is not that easy.
A system of communes and councils was built up since the beginning of the revolution to overcome the model of a nation state and enable a real democracy based on the freedom of women, ecology, and plurality. Democracy means the people can govern themselves, therefore a real democracy is built up based on how strong society is, when a state has little influence. Democracy is inherent in an open and free society, where individuals and groups are political subjects and govern themselves on the basis of collective consensus. It is the strength of the community to organize itself. The society we strive for, is an ethical-political society, which means a society in which all people are involved and organized, and the ethical values of the society are being protected. We see this as a main mechanism against power regimes like capitalism and patriarchy which work to dissolve society and create a system of individuals without the glue of societal values. The stronger a society is, the less chance systems of power have to rule. Therefore, in a real democracy we see that the first need is for the people to organize themselves in all spheres of life.
A system of communes and councils enables the society to manage itself and organize the society in all its fields and aspects. This cannot be considered a new invention, but must be seen as deeply rooted, although maybe a little bit weakened because of the years of power-regimes. It can be seen as a revival of the lifestyle of the ancestors in the former societies; the word commune means a group of people living in one area, and coming together to protect themselves, manage their lives, and solve the problems and difficulties in their area. The autonomous administration defines the commune as the smallest unit that organizes the neighborhood, village or city and takes care of all its needs. It is the cornerstone of democratic self-administration and its central force. The democracy in North and East Syria is organized in a bottom-up way. Communes, which are the smallest units, come together in councils. It is the collective democratic way of life and directly the basic organization of democracy, which are the units of the ethical and political society. When the societal-democratic system is built on the commune, the society can solve its problems, make its decisions, and organize all its fields like security, education, economy, social life, health and more, in a true democratic way.
The commune in the concept of a democratic nation is one of the most important pillars on which the Autonomous Administration was built in North and East Syria. Another key thing is that the individual is perceived as communal, that is, an active participant in the areas of community life. The individual as a social being, is being seen as having the wish to be a part of an ethical political society and to take an active role in the community. Everyone constitutes a unified and complementary cell within the community.
The Autonomous Administration was formed from the communes located within the regions of North and East Syria. The communes form the basis of the autonomous administration. It is the goal that each village and neighborhood organize itself in communes. The social contract which has been written in 2016, and now is being rewritten, forms the basis on which the people in North East Syria live together and organize their society. In this social contract the commune occupies a large and influential space. There are several articles in the social contract concerning the commune, including: “The commune is the basic, grass-roots form of direct democracy, the place in which an ethical-political society develops and which produces social life. It is the decision-making and management organ within the administrative and organizational sphere and the commune acts as a stand-alone council at all stages of decision-making. A citizen within the democratic self-administration has the right to voluntarily participate in the commune. Every administrative unit (village – district – town – city or district) has the right to decide on matters and affairs that concerns it, provided that this does not conflict with the essence of the social contract. The Autonomous Administration organizes its democratic and free community life based on the formation of communes, councils, academies, cooperatives, community economic units and institutions that complement the societal system. which organize themselves in the form of a confederation. The democratic system develops and consolidates depending on these institutions”
Communes and councils
The communes are the basis of the democracy. The democracy we are striving for is a bottom-up democracy. The co-leadership of the commune, a man and are woman, are elected. The members of the committees are elected as well. Besides communes, there are councils. At a higher level, with bigger neighborhoods or small towns, again the communes come together in a council. In the council 60 percent of the members are directly elected and 40 percent are representatives of social institutions, religions and minorities. The council is elected for two years. Again, these councils form another council of a higher level like town or canton (which means many towns together). In order to really ensure that the democracy is a democracy from the bottom-up, and that all people are involved, some measures are taken. The communes elect their co-leadership once and the members of the committees once every two years. These co-leaders represent the commune at the level of council. Besides that, each month the council organizes a meeting with the commune. In the councils at a higher level the co-leadership of the councils are represented. Also, at the level of committees this same system from bottom to top is being realized. For example, HPC is responsible for the protection of the communes, and the representatives of the protection committee of the commune again come together at a higher level to discuss the issue of protection with representatives of other communes. In this way, it is been guaranteed that there is a real grassroots process and a real democracy in which all people are represented and, most importantly, take an active part. The elections take place in a meeting. The candidates announce their names and the elections take place. The nomination process takes into account the participation and inclusion of all groups and religions so that everyone is represented and each group has rights with full transparency and fairness.
There are 4,464 communes in North and East Syria. The communes are distributed among cities, counties and villages. Al Jazeera: 2,296 communes, Tebqa: 172 communes, Manbij: 363 communes. Raqqa: 297 communes, Afrin: 147 communes, Kobane: 537 communes, Deir ez-Zor: 652 communes.
The mechanism of work of the councils: the council takes the members of the commune as its basis. On this basis, the council is formed, and so on to reach the highest joint presidency within the administration. After the elections are completed and the commission announces the results, each council holds its first meeting, where the joint presidency is elected and committees are formed.
Committees
To organize the work, each commune can establish committees. In most communes there are at least 6 committees: Service Committee – Protection – Justice (Reconciliation) – Women – Education – Economy. In addition, is it up to each commune to establish other committees according their needs, such as agriculture. For example, the commune of a village should have a committee for agriculture in contrast to the commune of a city which probably doesn’t need one. We will briefly explain the work of each committee within the commune.
1-Service Committee: The members of this committee are elected by the members of the commune as a whole. This committee requires patience and social skills with its members and this work is of great importance for the community. This committee is the one that supervises all service work within the municipality and its members are considered the link between the families and the service bodies in the Autonomous Administration to be able to fulfill needs like water, gas, electricity and others. Given the conditions in the North and East of Syria such as the embargo and attacks of Turkey, there is a lack of water, gas and electricity. Turkey uses water as a weapon and occupies the regions with the highest availability of water. Also, the embargo influences the economy in a negative way. However, the Autonomous Administration tries hard and uses all its possibilities to meet all the requirements of the region and the Service Committee has a major role in providing citizens with what they need. There is a lot of work that falls on the shoulders of this committee, for example, the committee coordinates with the municipalities to maintain the cleanliness of the neighborhood, as well as in coordination with the Hydrocarbons Authority providing domestic gas at very reasonable prices compared to other areas of Syria where these services are lacking.
2-Self-defense Committee: The tasks of this committee are to conduct night and day shifts to protect the neighborhood from any terrorist acts that violates its security. Its work is not limited to that, but its duties are to participate in repelling all internal and external attacks that affect the security of the people and the region, in cooperation and coordination with the security institutions. At the beginning of the revolution, the Community Self-defense Forces (HPC) took the work of protecting neighborhoods day and night and maintained the security of all areas because of the situation at that time and to prevent chaos from breaking out so that thieves and saboteurs could not take their chance. This continues until today: the Community Self-defense Forces organize at the level of communes. There are many security threats: Terrorism like ISIS and other jihadist groups, attacks of the Turkish state, plus Turkey and the regime trying to destabilize the region by using agents, thieves and others. So, especially at the level of communes, the people who know their neighborhood closely are able to protect it. When there is a need, these unit cooperate with the internal security forces (asayish) or SDF (military forces). The HPC exists of people of the commune who work voluntarily, but the other forces are professional. The women who do this work organize themselves autonomously as well, as HPC-jin (Women Community Self-defense Forces). A very good example of the importance of the Community Self-defense Forces can be seen in the attack of ISIS in January 2022. ISIS attacked a prison in which its members are being held in a coordinated attack from inside and outside the prison. This could have ended in a revival of ISIS, but all the self-defense forces, including the Community Self-Defense forces did not let this happen. Especially the Community Self-Defense Forces played an important role in not letting panic win and helping to catch the attackers. Another example of the importance of the Community Self-Defense Forces can be seen in their role in protecting the fields. Each year, Mercenaries and ISIS put the wheat fields on fire, to make the people starve. HPC- men and women protect the fields. This means whole villages as well as people from the towns come together to protect the fields. When fires occur, everybody helped to extinguish the fire.
3-The Justice (Reconciliation) Committee: According to the social contract, the commune is at the heart of the work of the judiciary. The social contract states the following: “The social justice system is based on the organization of society, whereby social issues in the communes of villages, neighborhoods, towns, and cities are addressed in a fair manner, and takes the principle of reconciliation as a basis for solving problems. The organs of the judiciary start from the commune in the form of reconciliation committees”. The reconciliation committee works to resolve differences, achieve peace and promote social harmony. This committee comprises of members of the commune who are accepted by the society; the committee brings together the different parties of a conflict, dispute or crime (including crimes like violence and theft), listens to everybody involved and tries to find a solution outside court which is accepted by all people involved.
The North East of Syria has seen many things: an oppressive regime of BAAS which was based on ‘divide and conquer’ principles and building mistrust among the peoples; a feature that we can see in most power systems including capitalism. Then ISIS ruled through a system without any space for thinking aside from that of the Salafists, with very strict rules. As well that, wars have a big impact: first ISIS, later Turkey and NATO using airplanes, drones and mercenaries, continuing until the present day. The economic embargo and the cutting off of water also influences the economy in a negative sense. So, like all societies, the North East Syria has its share of social problems. In the communes, the committee of reconciliation or problems-solving aims to solve social problems, like disputes including theft and violence without going to the court. There are courts, but if it is possible the aim is to solve problems without going to court. Women particularly play a very important role in these committees and only about 20 % of the social problems can’t be solved or are too complex or hard such that there is a need of going to court.
The social justice system is an independent apparatus based on the ethical, political and cultural principles of society, and has as its principle that the freedom of the people and of women are protected. It pursues its goals to protects the rights of the individual in the community through the participation of all in the organization of local units. The articles of the judicial system were drawn up by specialists and jurists from all groups, parties, and political competencies to establish a justice system in line with the nature and reality of society in North and East Syria. The justice system is the essence of the social contract to achieve social justice. From the beginning, the Reconciliation Committee was concerned with the principle of living together, tolerance and non-discrimination between races and beliefs. Disagreements were resolved through the Reconciliation Committee, in addition to the participation of religious figures and dignitaries from the region. The latter would sit with the litigants to listen to their opinions and resolve them in a way that satisfies both parties. The Reconciliation Committee greatly helped to unite the components of society and create friendship, respect, trust and love between them.
4-Education and Awareness Committee: The members of this committee have good capabilities in the field of education. Their work is dedicated to giving educational courses to the people of the neighborhood of different age groups. This includes different themes in the field of ethics and democracy, as well as societal organization and administration to form a sound and conscious democratic society. This committee helps in building up a resilient society that knows its rights and fulfills them and understands its duties and respects the rights and freedoms of others. For the young age group, especially for primary school students, the committee follows up their affairs and the obstacles they face and discusses them with the school administration to solve them with the participation of parents. Among the distinguished work carried out by the Education Committee is teaching older age groups to write and read, as well as giving lessons in students’ mother tongues within the commune.
5- Committee of Economy: The commune also plays a role in the development of the societal economy and it was stated in the social contract that “the self-administration adopts the principle of a community economy that establishes self-sufficiency and sustainable and balanced development.” Given the difficult conditions experienced by the regions of North and East Syria, the communes have not really been able to activate the communal economy the way it should function. Rather, its work was limited to the possibilities available to the commune, like opening sewing workshops, for example. The economic committee tries to implement cooperatives at the level of commune, so the people are able to provide for themselves and become less dependent on a capitalist market. The system of economy we are striving for is a social economy based on cooperatives. At present, we have not managed to be as independent of capitalism as needed. Besides practical conditions, also capitalist ways of thinking need to be overcome. There is the need to believe that a social economy can work and that this revolution is long standing. Because of the many changes in short time periods and the continuing attacks, strengthening this belief is an ongoing struggle.
6-The Women’s Committee: Since the beginning of the formation of the communes, Kongra Star has prepared, trained and supervised the Women’s Committee to take its place and protect women’s rights in the communal society. The Women’s Committee of the Commune is independent in its work and the men of the Commune do not interfere in their decisions. On the contrary, they provide all the assistance required of them to crown the work of women with success and progress. The work of the committee is dedicated to everything related to women and this committee bears a great responsibility, given the previous circumstances under the previous regime and clan customs that marginalized women and denied their rights. Women were not seen as persons under ISIS. As well that under the BAAS-regime many problems were prevalent, like being denied rights, discrimination in the constitution, violence from men, forced marriages and so on. The Women’s Committee formed to deal with all these issues. In addition, the committee holds periodic meetings for women of all ages, provides them with advice and discussions related to their rights, listens to their problems, if any, and addresses them in cooperation and coordination with the bodies and committees concerned with women within the self-management bodies. The Women’s Committee has been and still is an advocate for preventing underage girls being married, and by repeating continuous training, and raising awareness, we can see that this phenomenon has greatly decreased in society.
Besides these committees, there are committees which only exist at the level of council like the committee of municipalities and environment, the committee of health, the committee of culture and art, the committee of diplomacy, the committee of politics, the committee of the families of Martyrs and the committee of religion and beliefs.
Summarizing, we can say that in a short time a lot has been achieved. Maybe the revolution started in 2012, but some areas only got liberated from ISIS in 2017. The communes have been especially important in strengthening the community, strengthening friendship and cooperation between people of all beliefs and ethnicities, and creating stability. War, and poverty created by war and embargo, could have devastating social effects, like growing of mafia, prostitution, and the creation of a situation in which nobody can trust another. With the establishment of communes and councils the opposite happened: a stronger belief in the self and others.
The heritage and identity of each ethnicity and belief are preserved, according to the concept of the democratic nation. The Autonomous Administration greatly emphasizes the convergence of religions and beliefs and steers away from intolerance and sectarian racial discrimination that lead society to destruction.
Autonomous Administration and communes
Communes are the bases of the Autonomous administration. The smallest units to ensure a real democracy from the bottom to top. To ensure this, the Autonomous Administration has developed some foundations and rules around the work and responsibility of the commune. All groups in North and East Syria have free will, the final say and the final decision, and make their own decisions. They are the ones who set the program for managing their affairs, such as gender equality, building youth councils, and the responsibility of the communes to develop plans and projects for children (children’s gardens, cultural and sports activities for them). Representing all beliefs and cultures within the councils, taking into account the needs of each group and the number of its members. The project of self-management has met with great success and resonance in all countries as a pioneering experience in the Middle East. The main reason for its success is the reliance on the people of all groups and making them the main reference for the self-management.
We present two examples of how communes and councils can cooperate, especially when there are people at the level of the commune who do not agree with the decision made by the council. In May 2021, trying to find solutions to the economic problems caused by external power politics, the General Council of the Autonomous Administration decided to increase the prices of fuel and gas. This decision was met with immediate public protests. People made the criticism that the communes had not been sufficiently included in the decision-making process, and that the people’s economic situation could not cope with the increase of fuel and gas prices at present. Against this background, the General Council reconsidered and canceled its former decision 3 days later. Now, in line with the people’s demand, discussions and counseling meetings are organized in all communes to ensure the best possible solution in the interest of the people. This recent example ensured people’s confidence. It shows that the awareness and strength of society to shape politics can defend the people’s will and interests.
The same could be seen in Minbij in 2021. The Syrian regime tried to organize its people against the Autonomous Administration and organized violent protests. ISIS supported these protests with mines and some members of the security forces of the Autonomous Administration were killed. Despite being attacked the security forces, did not let themselves be provoked. In just a couple of days, through discussions with the tribe leaders, the problems were solved and the involvement, belief and acceptance by the tribes in Minbij became stronger.
Autonomous Administration under fire
From the beginning, the Autonomous Administration was subjected to a special war by the Turkish and Syrian regimes, which tried to distort the image of the administration and incite people against it. In particular, they tried to create a situation of aggression between Kurds and Arabs, but because of the system of communes and the hard work of the committees, especially the committee of reconciliation, these states failed. The wisdom of the people from all groups of the region who believed in the principle of democratic self-management, made the planning of these saboteurs fail. We can see in the North and East Syria that the mechanism of its work is going well in most areas of life and in other areas there is still a need for more progress and work.
We can conclude that implementing democracy is hard work on a daily basis. It is a struggle in itself. Authoritarian regimes, including capitalism, affect people’s ability to organize themselves and their society and the ability to believe in themselves and others. Therefore, a lot of learning, awareness and discussions are needed on a daily basis. But at the same time, the project in North East Syria, despite its difficult conditions, shows that it can work. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria is still not recognized by the international community, although it can be a model for bringing peace and people’s democracy to the whole of Syria and the Middle East as a whole, only the Catalan parliament has recognized and approved it. North and East Syria still faces daily war, and civilian employees of independent departments are daily targeted by drones by Turkey, with compliance of Russia and NATO.
In fact, what we really need for real democracy is the firm belief and self-confidence that the democratic project can succeed, and that society can organize and protect itself without a state. In a time of profound despair and human and ecological crisis, we have learned that the democratic confederal organization of a society can satisfy many of a society’s spiritual and material needs. We have learned that democratization is an ongoing process that requires constant and self-reflection. None of our gains will be guaranteed and preserved if we don’t protect them and take them forward. What will help stabilize North and East Syria, especially at a time when Turkey, ISIS and international powers continue to threaten this project, is that people all over the world are starting to organize themselves away from the state and capitalism.
It has been over four decades since Cedric Robinson published his widely-acclaimed study, Black Marxism.[1] In recent years the work has enjoyed a celebratory renaissance. It has become increasingly influential among the liberal and race-centric academic establishment and beyond, with a second edition published in 2000, followed by a third edition released in 2020. It is not surprising that the work has gained so much acclaim among academics. After all, Robinson provides these liberal academics with an outstanding affirmation of their hostility towards class analysis.[2] What is surprising is the seeming embrace of Black Marxism by much of the socialist left, given that the book is above all a broadside attack on Marxism.[3] In the 40 plus years since its publication, there has been a remarkable dearth of critical reviews of the book.[4] The notion of “racial capitalism” that Robinson advances as the underlying scaffolding of his historical and theoretical edifice has become a sort of master narrative held as common sense among much of the left. The text, it seems, has come to achieve a virtual cult status, its core assumptions defended as sacrosanct on U.S. university campuses, while its critics are shunned as heretics. This is all the more remarkable, as we shall argue, given that behind a seemingly radical critique – indeed, the book’s subtitle is The Making of the Black Radical Tradition – is an essentially conservative political essence.
What are the core underlying claims of Black Marxism? In a nutshell, Robinson argues that Marxism or historical materialism is a European ideology that that has proven to be blind to racialism; that the epistemology of historical materialism, along with the political premium it places on proletarian struggle, does not apply to Africans and other non-European peoples. “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.”[5] Robinson’s follow-up work, published in 2001, An Anthropology of Marxism,[6] consummates the diatribe against Marxism. In place of the alleged “grand narrative” of Marxism, Robinson gives us a “grand narrative” of the “Black Radical Tradition.” “Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people,” notes approvingly Robin Kelly in his oft-cited Foreword to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism, “and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilizations in which it was born or mass movements outside of Europe.”[7]
But Robinson never provides evidence of this “shared epistemology among diverse African people.” This notion of Africans as some mega ethno-nation seems to simply be true by fiat, that is, by his assertion that it is true. It is this “truth” that forms the basis for the claim to a pan- “Black Radical Tradition” that compresses hundreds of millions of Africans in and outside of the continent into an undifferentiated category, and conversely collapses hundreds of millions of Europeans. As we will discuss below, this conception of an undifferentiated category of oppressed humanity defined by ahistoric essentialized identities is a hallmark of the identitarian paradigm. This paradigm, which posits some shared interests of a group of people made organic by an essential ascribed identity, generally racial or ethnic, often premised as well on some singular cultural tradition, has come in recent decades to eclipse the language of class – nay, to contrapose class to ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Yet, this view of the African past and present as made up of such an undifferentiated mass that shares a single epistemology and “Black Radical Tradition” misreads the African past as much as it does the present.
While it is easy to become seduced by the literary brilliance of the text, the sheer power of its prose, and the vast sweep of history and literature that it covers, we maintain here that more is at work in explaining the left’s embrace of Black Marxism, namely the conservative retrenchment of the late twentieth century. As world capitalism entered a deep structural crisis in the 1970s, capitalists and bureaucratic elites from around the world strove to beat back the power that organized labor, radical social movements, and Third World liberation struggles had accumulated in the preceding period of mass struggle. Capitalist globalization and the neoliberal counterrevolution brought about a change in the worldwide correlation of class and social forces in favor of emergent transnational capital.[8] As proletarian power eroded and the left and socialist movements lost influence around the world in the fin de siècle, the chronic gap between theory and practice, thought and action, showed up as a degeneration of intellectual criticism as well. Rather than seek renewal, much of the left withdrew into post-modern identity politics and other forms of accommodation with the emerging neoliberal social order. The left intelligentsia retreated into the academy, abandoning the commitment to a universal emancipatory project as it turned to celebrating the fragmented particularisms postulated by post-narratives – post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, and so on. The target of condemnation became Marxism, which it claimed was unable to explain racial inequality.[9] The causal explanation of racism now shifted from the political-economy critique of capitalism to psychology and culture. It was in this context that Black Marxism, an Afrocentric and proto-Afro-pessimistic text par excellence, found such resonance in U.S. academia, and increasingly, beyond.
A Transhistoric Racialism
In his quest to explain racism and subjugation of peoples of African descent, Robinson takes us back to what he sees as its origins in “European” antiquity. For Robinson, capitalism is not the progenitor of racism but its offshoot in a construct that, as Jason W. Moore has noted in a different context, takes flight from world history, from the real movement of capitalism. “The pretext for this flight typically rests on two major claims. One is an empiricist assertion that world history is diverse and therefore cannot be grasped in its combined and uneven patterns. The second is an ideological claim that any attempt to narrate capitalism’s differentiated unity is irremediably Eurocentric.” While both these claims hold for Black Marxism, what concerns us most here is the second. The result, observes Moore, “is a descent into amalgamation of regional particularisms with assertions that the problem of modern world history is Europe – rather than capitalism.”[10]
By “racial capitalism,” Robinson tells us, he means a commitment to racialism among Europeans that first sprung from the slave societies of antiquity – a transhistoric original sin that marks millennia of Western history. Let us put aside that “Europe” didn’t exist before 1492: the same historical forces at work that produced capitalism and propelled it to outward expansion also produced “Europe” that became the core of an expanding world capitalist system understood as a differentiated unity, or totality. This theme of a Greek and allegedly therefore European origin to modern racism is not new; it has become a trope among Afro-pessimists and other “race” scholars.[11] Robinson claims that Greek slavery was an “uncompromising racial construct” that was reiterated and embellished throughout European history: “Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power…. from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular protagonists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus.”[12] Ironically, one of the very authors whom Robinson includes as a case study in Black Marxism, C.L.R. James, insisted that “historically it is pretty well proven now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard – civilized and barbarian – and you could have white skin and be a barbarian and you could be black and civilized.”[13]
At the same time, Robinson asserts that “racialism” is “hardly unique to European peoples” but does not explain what, then, would have separated the European case from civilizations the world over. For Robinson, Greek slavery is the prototype of modern-day racism, some mysterious particularity of “Europe” that wound its way through millennia to the contemporary era. We know that all the ancient empires as class systems also differentiated groups according to cultural or territorial criteria and involved differentiated relationships to the state or political statuses. So, there must have been something else that arose in Europe to explain why this region became the generator of systems of modern-day racial inequality and the colonizer of the world. That something, of course, is capitalism. We have a vast literature showing how systems of race-based slavery, exclusion, and oppression arose as part and parcel of the rise of capitalism as a world system (we cannot explain the antinomy whereby Robinson discusses much of this literature approvingly even though it refutes his thesis).
Racialism, he goes on, “was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of Europeans to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”[14] These internal relations involved ideological conceptions of inferiority and superiority based on cultural (he singles out linguistic) and class distinctions, often adduced to be biological, which organized ancient and feudal domains that later became Europe. Beyond these “ordering ideas” of inferiority and superiority, we can find in Black Marxism no precise explanation of what Robinson understands racism to be, that is, no further conceptual specificity. It is not, in his construct, that these ordering ideas became specified along racialist lines as capitalism evolved, but that they sui generis constituted “racialism.” By conflating these ordering ideas of class rule with “racialism,” Robinson is able to claim that racism originates in “European” antiquity.
Remarkably, Robinson gives no explanation as to why we should conflate slavery with “race.” We have no historical evidence of “race” and racialization prior to the modern era, if by this we mean something other than the “ordering ideas” of inferiority and superiority, or anything resembling the scientific racism that reached its apogee from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Yet, at the same time, to reiterate, he asserts that “racialism” is “hardly unique to European peoples.”[15] If so, it begs the question – unanswered by Robinson – what makes the European case different from civilizations the world over?
Since the dawn of class society, ruling groups have legitimated their rule through ideologies of biological and/or cultural superiority and inferiority and of natural providence and have instituted slavery legitimated by such ideologies. Black Marxism here appears abstracted from world history. Slavery has been a universal class relation, present everywhere from the Chinese to the Aztec, Arab, West African and other civilizations of ancient and pre-capitalist times.[16] This is a case not of the particular masquerading as the universal, but the universal masquerading as the particular. Slavery is known to have existed in China as far back as the Shang Dynasty (18th-12th century BCE). It is estimated to have comprised some five percent of the population in ensuing centuries and continued to exist as an institution down to the twentieth century. In Korea, estimates place the slave population, at up to a third or a half of the entire population during the successive Silla kingdoms. Slavery was also widely practiced elsewhere in Asia, from Thailand to Burma, Philippines, Nepal, Indonesia, Japan, and among the Turkic populations.
As in Europe and elsewhere around the world prior to capitalism, slavery in India existed in the interstices of the dominant class relations, although in Malabar slaves constituted up to 15 percent of the population. Slavery also existed in successive Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations as well as in some Amerindian societies in North America, although slavery remained relatively minor, as conquered populations were subjugated generally through the extraction of tribute rather than slave labor. Slavery was practiced throughout Europe during the medieval period, particularly notable in Byzantium and in Russia – indeed, this later country was a creation of Viking slave raiding and trade routes from Scandinavia to Byzantium. If we take the story back further, slavery is recorded for thousands of years in what is today the Middle East, from Babylonia to Egypt. Slaves were owned in Africa throughout recorded history, and in some instances, such as in Ghana from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, involved anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of the entire population.
In most of these pre-capitalist cases, slave populations were drawn from historic “population reservoirs” that could be demarcated culturally, such as the Slavic periphery of the Islamic and European kingdoms and empires. Slavery achieved a prominent role in Islamic societies in the Middle East, where the slave trade happened on a large scale from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries. Robinson suggests of this slavery, the single instance in which he acknowledges the institution outside of Europe, that it was somehow more benign than European slavery, since “Muslim slavery was characteristically associated with unlimited potential for social mobility and much less racialism.”[17] In this tale of more and less benign slaveries, and consistent with his historical idealism, Robinson goes on to quote the Koran to explain what he claims were “great differences between slavery in Western and Christian societies and slavery in Islam.”[18] We do not know why Robinson would so egregiously choose not to discuss the presence of slavery as a class relation around the world throughout much of recorded history apart from its presence in the Islamic societies of the Middle East.
But Robinson does not present any evidence that slavery in Europe prior to capitalism was significantly different from slavery in the Islamic societies – in fact, the historical evidence indicates that slavery was a much more powerful and widespread institution in the Islamic world than it ever was in feudal Europe. Rather, what would later on, from the sixteenth century and onward, distinguish European from Middle Eastern slavery was not mystical cultural, psychological or religious proclivities but the contrast between pre-capitalist and capitalist slavery. Slaves were generated in the pre-capitalist era, from ancient Greece and Rome, to Asia, the Islamic and Amerindian empires and elsewhere, by capture in warfare and slave raiding. An abundance of non-slave labor in tributary and feudal societies meant that slavery never developed into the primary mode of labor exploitation after antiquity. Just as in feudal Europe, the social relations of production were such that the ruling groups could not make use of, nor had the need for, large quantities of slaves. Eric Wolf notes in his classic study, Europe and the People Without History, that a few thousand slaves were brought in to the Iberian Peninsula per year in the fifteenth century,[19] which proved to be the upper limit since the prevailing feudal mode of production had no need for such a distinct mass of laborers. At this time as well, the Islamic world was also importing “white” slaves from Europe under similar relations of production. The relations of production proved to be the determining factor in the ontology of slavery as an institution.[20]
Indeed, in Europe and the Islamic world, as elsewhere in the slave-owning feudal and tributary civilizations outside of the full-blown slave mode of production of ancient Greece and Rome, slaves were for luxury consumption that constituted an economic drain. This would only change under the imperative of capital accumulation, that is, expanded reproduction, and in circumstances in which the most expedient method for securing a tightly controlled mass of labor power for the emerging trans-Atlantic economy became slavery. Surplus would now be extracted on a large scale through the institution of capitalist slavery and its hallmark commodification of the human body (“chattel slavery”). This surplus, in distinction to pre-capitalist slavery, would be pumped back into the emerging circuits of capital in a process of expanded reproduction so that slavery, rather than an economic drain, became a lynchpin of world capitalist development. As Marx observed in this regard:
“Slavery is an economic category like any other…Needless to say we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America. Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”[21]
There is a wealth of historical research that we cannot revisit here on the creation of “race” in the formative years of the world capitalist system. Linebaugh and Rediker, among others, show in The Many Headed Hydra how the American planter classes backed by European capitalists and states created “race” as a mechanism to differentiate the mass of exploited labor drawn into the emerging circuits of global capital. Eric Williams has noted in his classic Capitalism and Slavery that the indentured servitude of hundreds of thousands of Europeans in the early years of the colonial project in the Americas – and in some cases the outright slavery of Europeans, such as the fate suffered by thousands of Irish victims of Cromwell’s 1649 conquest of Ireland, many of whom were shipped out to slave plantations in Barbados – provided the “historic base” upon which American slavery was founded. “Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro,” observed Williams. “A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”[22]
Robinson argues that “[F]rom its very beginning, this European civilization, containing racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities, was constructed on antagonistic differences.”[23] Putting aside “racial” differences – to reiterate, Robinson never specifies exactly what he means by “racial,” although it seems he means it as a stand-in for cultural/ethnic distinctions – there is nothing historically specific to Europe of “tribal, linguistic, and regional [and cultural/ethnic] particularities” being exploited by ruling groups around the world in function of their rule. If “barbarians” was an established component of European ideology to categorize the “other,” as Robinson observes, so too was it established in civilizations around the world. The Aztec rulers referred derogatorily to those groups outside of its urban empire, especially to the less developed tribes and ethnic groups to the north of their realm, as Chichimecas, a Nahuatl term for barbarian (and also for dog), to be enslaved or sacrificed should they be captured. The Han Chinese rulers referred to Mongol tribes and indeed all outside groups, Europeans included, as “barbarians.”
Let us focus on the dialectic of the universal and the particular – without, as Robinson does, collapsing universalism sui generis into bourgeois universalism. The universal is always and only manifest in the particular. We want to focus on how the endless accumulation of capital played out – and still plays out – in a world of concrete differentiation. In this first instance, difference is objectively historical, grounded in the uneven material and cultural development of human societies and civilizations across the globe and their particular histories. The notion that these societies were somehow isolated from one another for the great sweep of world history, however, is a myth. Difference – that is, particular processes of historical development – is always in the larger picture an outcome of historical processes of material and social differentiation within a matrix of interconnections to a larger whole. But key to the discussion of the creation of “race” and modern racism is differentiation as an act, an intentionality of capitalism: the agents of capitalism operating out of its European core appropriated and in fact produced differentiation in function of accumulation and control – in this case, they produced “races” in order to differentiate laboring masses. “Race” and white supremacy were two of capitalism’s world-historic productions vital to the organization of its worldwide circuits of exploitation and accumulation.
While Robinson asserts that Europeans developed a “racial consciousness” as far back as antiquity, Linebaugh and Rediker tell a different story. Africans and Europeans conspired together in numerous plots and uprisings. The multitude of multinational, multiracial sailors and their land-based brethren had no racial consciousness; such a consciousness had to be created, not out of some European Nietzschean will to (racial) power but as a class project of the slavers and the bourgeoisie. Ongoing rebellion throughout the Greater Caribbean Basin by Africans and Europeans who had been forced into labor led the planters and colonial states to create juridical distinctions that would legally and socially differentiate slave from servant, assigning each to a distinct insertion into the division of labor.[24] In this way, the ruling groups responded to class struggles from below by the multiethnic exploited classes with a racialist recomposing of global class relations – that is, the constitution of “race” took place through the world historic process of capitalist class formation. “Race” now became, as Stuart Hall put it, “the modality in which class is lived.”[25]
Racialized class relations and white supremacy would henceforth become a centerpiece of capitalist colonialism and imperialism, a mechanism for producing a more intensive and repressive control over racialized labor, a more complete appropriation of the wealth that labor has produced in the history of the world capitalist system. Racism, as Allen has shown in his exhaustive study, The Invention of the White Race, would have a dual function: as a mechanism of social control over all of the working classes and as a mechanism ensuring the super-exploitation and super (including juridical and extra-legal) control over the racialized portions of the laboring masses.[26] Moreover, this racial division of the working masses involved generating and reproducing a racial consciousness and a “psychological wage” among the mass of exploited whites – a consciousness that had to be constantly recreated by the ruling groups each time the laboring masses came together in multiracial struggles.[27] The New York City waterfront, Linebaugh and Rediker show, became a staging ground for ongoing multiracial uprisings among white and black laborers, enslaved and free, throughout the 1700s:
“The authorities approached the solidarity with trident in hand, each of its points carefully sharpened to puncture the prevailing multiracial practices and bonds of proletarian life in Atlantic New York. First they went after the taverns and other settings where ‘cabals’ of poor whites and blacks could be formed and subversive plans disseminated. Next they self-consciously recomposed the proletariat of New York to make it more difficult for workers along the waterfront to find among themselves sources of unity. And finally, they endeavored to teach racial lessons to New York’s people of European descent, promoting a white identity that would transcend and unify the city’s fractious ethnic divisions.”[28]
Robinson objects in Black Marxism and later on in The Anthropology of Marxism to the Marxist claim that racism is “derivative” of capitalism. For him it is the reverse: capitalism is epiphenomenal to a racialism that originated in “European” antiquity, a moment in the development of European racialism.[29] The current celebratory renaissance of Black Marxism among academics and activists is matched by a parallel nostalgic celebration of the U.S. Black Panther Party.[30] Yet, these acolytes want to have their cake and eat it too. There is a clear tension in how they understand the interrelation of “race” and capitalism that they appear oblivious to.
The Black Panther Party was an avowedly Marxist organization that explicitly considered racism to be a derivation of capitalism. Here is the party’s Deputy National Chair and Chair of the Chicago chapter, Fred Hampton:
“We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that.”[31]
It is no small irony that of Robinson’s three case studies of black Marxists, two were themselves Marxists (the third, Richard Wright expressed reservations about Marxism after his experience confronting racism among white communists). C.L.R. James was a lifelong Trotskyist active in the Fourth International and W.E.B Dubois identified as a socialist for much of his life and was a member of the Communist Party at the time of his death. Were James and Dubois – along with thousands of African Marxists – perched outside of the purported “Black Radical Tradition” because they were Marxists? How could it be otherwise once Robinson asserts that this tradition is “incommensurate” with Marxism? Remarkably, apart from these three, Robinson simply ignores the Third World Marxists, or otherwise disregards their Marxism as if it did not stand in contradiction with his “Black Radical Tradition” construct premised explicitly on its incommensurability with Marxism. These Third World Marxists – from Che Guevara and Jose Mariátegui in the Americas, to Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Chris Hani, Samir Amin, Claude Ake, and Abdulrahman Babu in Africa, to Mao Zedong and Kamekichi Takahashi in Asia, among countless others – saw in Marxism a theoretical and political tool for liberation from colonialism, from imperialism, and from capitalism. They put forth theoretical contributions, an implacable defense of Marxism, an application of historical materialism to histories and realities distinct from Europe and left rich legacies of Marxist revolutionary praxis.
Marx and Engels, charges Robinson, insisted that the European proletariat was the predilect agent of revolution and underestimated the importance of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. We will not repeat here the work that others have done with extensive reference to Marx and Engel’s writings to belie Robinson’s claim.[32] Marx applauded the Taiping rebellion in China and Indian revolts in the 1850s. Marx speculated that the Chinese uprising might even spark revolutionary upheavals in Europe, and that the European proletariat could learn much from the Indian anti-colonial revolts. And Marx would write in 1860 that “in my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of slaves in America, started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the slaves in Russia.”[33] Contrast this to Robinson’s insistence that Marx saw slaves as an “embarrassing residue” of an old mode of production “which disqualified them from historical agency in the modern world.”[34] It was, let us recall, Marx and Engels, followed by European Marxists, from Lenin to Luxembourg, and Marxists from the Third World, who in the first place gave us the theories of colonialism and imperialism, and who argued that only an alliance of proletarian and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles the world over could liberate the oppressed.
Historical Materialism and Historical Idealism
On the one hand, Robinson conflates historical materialism with the particular application that Marx undertook of historical materialism as method to the reality of his time as he saw it, while simultaneously conflating class and class analysis with capitalism and also, as Moore notes, collapsing “the significant differences between world-historical class analysis and Eurocentric class formalism.”[35] On the other, he conflates Marxism as an epistemology and ontology of human society with how it was applied and practiced in its particular history by Marxists or in the name of Marxism. If the fundamental premises of historical materialism and human universals have appeared in Marxism as dogmatic or Eurocentric, let us fault the Marxists who applied them in their intellectual and political practices. European Marxists may have been Eurocentric. They may have exhibited a blind spot to racism or suppressed the struggle against it in the name of class struggle. Indeed, they may even have been racist and chauvinistic. But none of this invalidates the fundamental tenets of Marxism. Indeed, Marxists have been at the forefront of critiquing Eurocentrism. It is not clear how the Eurocentrism or the racial chauvinism of Europeans who considered themselves Marxists invalidates historical materialism that, along with the dialectical approach, forms the epistemological core of Marxism that Robinson claims is incommensurate with the struggles of African peoples.
The fundamental premise of historical materialism – at once a method, an epistemology, and an ontology – is based on the assumption that human existence along with all other life forms is organized in the first instance around survival, and that this survival depends on complex and structured forms of cooperation and cultural creations that we call society.[36] While Robinson, in a caricatured reading of Marx, claims that historical materialism is limited to nineteenth century Europe, the world historical evidence demonstrates that there are human universals and that these are grounded in the deep history of our species. The quest for survival is universal. That this survival involves a social labor process around which social organization is structured is universal. States and social classes throughout the world did emerge around new forces of production and the surpluses they generated long before capitalism and the rise of Europe. These classes have struggled over the surplus for millennia, in the process generating the social dynamics that are the object of inquiry of Marxist historiography and social science. The basic Marxist categories of analysis – classes and class struggle, surpluses, exploitation, forces and relations of production, and so on – are observed around the world and show to be universally applicable. These fundamental tenets of historical materialism are the core of Marxist epistemology, and all of this applies to the African past as much as it does to the European past.
In his explicitly Marxist essay “The Weapon of Theory,” a veritable primer in historical materialism, Amílcar Cabral analyzes the historical class structure and mode of production in Guinea Bissau and how it was altered by colonialism:
“[W]e refuse to accept that various human groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism… if class struggle is the motor force of history, it is so only in a specific historical period. It is not difficult to see that this factor in the history of each human group is the mode of production – the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership – characteristic of that group…. Classes themselves, class struggle and their subsequent definition, are the result of the development of the productive forces in conjunction with the pattern of ownership of the means of production. It therefore seems correct to conclude that the level of productive forces, the essential determining element in the content and form of class struggle, is the true and permanent motive force of history.”[37]
In Robinson’s essentialist metaphysics, there is something beyond material relations that have led Europeans to practice racial oppression and something beyond real historical experience in the material world that produces a mystical African consciousness. “Some knowledge, some aspect of Black consciousness was unaccounted for in the Marxist explication of the historical processes and sources of the motives in which were attributed the social formation of the modern world.” Robinson goes on to adduce an “Africanity of our consciousness – some epistemological measure culturally embedded in our minds that deemed that racial capitalism we have been witness to was an unacceptable standard of human conduct.”[38]
Africans and Europeans are endowed with distinct metaphysical essences, with innate and presumably inverted cultural sensibilities. Robinson tells us that there is a resistance in Western radicalism (read: Marxism) that leads it to take “flight from the recognition that something more than objective material forces were responsible” for the destruction wrought on African peoples. In a fantastical and romanticized misreading of African history, we are told that a clash of civilizations between Europe and Africa “had always to be an unequal contest, not because of the superiority of weapons or the preponderance of numbers but because such violence did not come naturally to African peoples.”[39] Let us put aside Robinson’s misreading of African history: that state and empire formation in Africa prior to the European arrival in the fifteenth century were violent, often bloody, affairs; that the notion of a European antiquity is a myth as is the notion of an aboriginal and irreducible African antiquity. For Robinson, the violent “mechanisms of self-destruction inherent in Western civilization” were a function not of class struggle and class rule but of Western culture, an expression of an underlying civilizational logic stretching back millennia.[40] Robinson here seems to update Leopold Senghor’s mid-twentieth century Negritude, whereby Africans and Europeans are endowed with distinct metaphysical essences: the African soul, Senghor claimed, is essentially spiritual, whereas the European soul is endowed with a scientific rational essence. Indeed, the linear cultural logic that Robinson claims to discern in Marxism, warts and all, is alive and well in the “Black Radical Tradition,” viz, the ideological notion of an irreducible white European essence has its parallel in a black African essence.
What are we to make of Robinson’s culturalist explanations for how Europe rose up to constitute the core of world capitalism while Africa and Africans were pushed to the peripheral margins? If only Africans had a cultural repertoire that involved the practice of violence, they could have resisted the European onslaught. If only Europeans had a different cultural makeup, they would not have undertaken that onslaught. If we accept that there is something intrinsic in European culture prior to capitalism that led Europeans to conquer and enslave, then we fall back on the very assumptions of modernization and cultural deficit theory, according to which it was not capitalism but culture (“modern” over “traditional”) that caused the development of some peoples and backwardness of others. In the logic of this account, the vanquishing of the world’s colonized peoples is the result of their cultural deficit. Africans were averse to violence. Not so Europeans. A clash of civilizations, of cultures: the one facilitating conquest, the other leading to enslavement.
For Robinson, the European conquest of Africa lies not in superior material capabilities made possible by capitalism but in cultures rendered essentialist, in antagonistic cultural drives. Yet, the conquest of Africa was very much a matter of material superiority. In one bloody afternoon on September 2, 1898, one British regiment lined up on the Eastern shore of the Nile River, not far from Khartoum. They faced 100,000 Nubian soldiers on the other side defending the Mahdist State, the one side armed with machine guns, invented just a decade earlier and not at the disposal of the Sudanese soldiers, who were armed with an earlier generation of weapons. By the end of the battle, 27 British soldiers had died, while every Sudanese soldier perished. The battle was won, opening the way for British colonization and control of the Nile, not by cultural proclivities, but precisely by superior material force. West Africans fought British colonial forces bitterly for decades before they were finally subdued, not because they were averse to violence or had other cultural proclivities that prohibited resistance, but because they simply did not have the same material means, including the military hardware, at the disposal of the invaders (the existence of these material means is explained, in turn, by the productive powers of capitalism in its European core).[41] The contradiction in Robinson’s construct should not go unnoticed. On the one hand, we are told explicitly that Africans were conquered not because of “objective material forces” but because “violence did not come naturally” to them. On the other hand, one of Robinson’s core claims is a history of resistance as part of the “Black Radical Tradition” that involved quite decidedly violent slave uprisings.
But let us assume Robinson is correct – that Africa was conquered because the conquerors exhibited a violent racist culture, while the vanquished exhibited a culture averse to violence. Where does that leave us theoretically and politically? Robinson’s account ultimately boils down to the antagonism between two fundamentally opposed psyches. Racism is in the first instance a state of European consciousness, while Africans, averse to violence, exhibited an “epistemology [that] granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.”[42] An “Africanity of our consciousness” allowed African peoples “to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion.”[43] Haider aptly calls this approach a “Black Hegelianism”:
“Hegel explains world history as the succession of particular national spirits, the spirit of a people as it is built up objectively by the state, and which depends on the cultural formation of its self-consciousness…Robinson presents a relativist philosophy of history, in the sense that there are different spiritual principles of different peoples, whose relations to one another are not progressive. However, Robinson seeks not to correct Hegel’s false universalism with a real universalism, but rather to oppose the White Absolute Spirit with a unitary Black Radical Tradition, which aspires not to Universal History but to the internal consistency of its own community.”[44]
The Political Implications of the Black Marxism Thesis
What kind of a political project comes out of Black Marxism? We do not know what vision Robinson has of an emancipatory program for African peoples beyond an ahistorical “Black Radical Tradition,” as Black Marxism does not provide any clues. However, there is no ambiguity in Robinson’s view that Marxism is not just insufficient, but antagonistic to black liberation: “Marxism and Black radicalism [are] two programs for revolutionary change” that “may be so distinct as to be incommensurable” (our emphasis).[45] “Black radicalism,” we have seen, is predicated on a radically distinct African metaphysic. Beyond the history of slave revolts in the diaspora, what is the particularity of African resistance compared to that of other peoples’ resistance in both pre-capitalist and capitalist settings? Should we posit a Brown Radical Tradition, an Asian Radical Tradition, and so on? Even if we accept Robinson’s claim at face value, a “Black Radical Tradition” is not an emancipatory program for the reorganization of society.
The idea of “racial capitalism” may appear as a critique of capitalism. But Robinson makes clear from the start that racism “anticipated capitalism in time” and that racialism as a psychic phenomenon of Europeans, not the laws of capital accumulation, drive its dynamics.[46] Racial capitalism, notes Haider, is a category “specifically articulated from the vantage point of the ‘Black Radical Tradition.” Even “the most superficial interpretation of the term implies the existence of a non-racial capitalism – that is, a capitalism which did not emerge and develop within a world market that incorporated racial slavery. There is no such capitalism, except as a fictitious a posteriori construct.”[47] Robinson did not coin the phrase racial capitalism. It dates to at least the 1970s, when South African Marxists told a very different story in applying the concept in reference to the particular racialized form of capitalism that developed during the apartheid era. In his classic study, The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa, Bernard Magubane referred to racial capitalism as a form of capitalist organization that facilitated the transfer to wealth from black workers to white capitalists. “An economic system must not only produce and transfer wealth,” he said, “but must produce political and ideological systems that facilitate this transfer.”[48]
Robinson’s notion of some cohesive worldwide black community unitarily engaged in the “Black Radical Tradition” insinuates its opposite, some cohesive and unitary white/European community that shares an interest in the reproduction of a racialism etched into its psyche over millennia. Again, Robinson is unambiguous: racism runs so “deep in the bowels of Western thought” that Europeans are “unprepared for anything else.”[49] At best, then, proletarian struggle is replaced by ethnonational struggle; a civilizational conflict among meta-ethnonations or meta- identity groups that obliterates the class antagonisms within each ethnonation and the shared class interests among the exploited across each ethnonation. There can be no possibility of a universal emancipatory program, a class project of the exploited against the exploiters, as that would require, in Meyerson’s words, “abandoning the racial architectonic paradigm for class struggle paradigm.”[50]
The appeal of Black Marxism in academia must be placed in the historical moment of its publication in the 1980s, namely the worldwide defeat of proletarian forces and revolutionary struggles of the preceding two decades and capital’s globalizing and neoliberal offensive, which would culminate in the late twentieth century “There Is No Alternative” and “End of History” theses. In was in the context of a radical shift in the worldwide correlation of class and social forces in favor of emergent transnational capital that an era of cynical post-Marxism flourished. As we noted in the introduction, the triumph of neoliberalism found its philosophical alter-ego in a post-modernism/post-structuralism that undermined ideas of broad solidarity, working class struggle, and socialist projects. In place of a universalism of the oppressed was a universe of particulars and the celebration of “differences” and fragmentation, so that there was no underlying principle of human social existence, no collective subject capable of social transformation, indeed no emancipatory project that could unite a majority of humanity. In the face of the attack on Marxism and radical politics, many intellectuals who previously identified with anti-capitalist movements and emancipatory projects withdrew into an identitarian politics of reform and inclusion, a set of political and cultural practices, radical only in appearance, that are at best liberal and that end up shoring up the hegemony of capital.
It was the mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s themselves that helped representatives from the oppressed groups to join the ranks of the professional strata and of the elite. In academia, it opened up space for a new intellectual petty-bourgeoisie, whose class aspirations became expressed in post-modern narratives and the race reductionism of identitarian politics, while in the larger society it found resonance among aspiring middle-class and professional/managerial elements that sprung from the mass movements. The identitarian approach eschews class and the critique of capitalism at the level of theory and analysis, notwithstanding its often radical-sounding language, while advancing the class politics of the petty bourgeoisie, especially the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. If radical ideas only become an historical force when they are channeled into political organization, into a vision of a new world and a revolutionary project to bring it about, the same is true for all ideas, revolutionary or otherwise; they become material forces when they influence mass consciousness and action. As identitarian narratives became hegemonic in the academy and in the broader society, they shaped the commonsense understanding of racial, gender and other forms of oppression. Ethnic, racial, gender and sexual oppression are not tangential, but constitutive of capitalism. There can be no general emancipation without liberation from these forms of oppression. But the inverse is just as critical: all the particular forms of oppression are grounded in the larger social order of global capitalism that perpetually regenerates these oppressions. Considering that culture is porous and is therefore migratory, dynamic, dialectical in construction and process, our challenge is to discover our universal humanity in the context of the cultural differences that are not given but produced, a production that can never have an end point.
If Robinson’s treatise were a mere academic broadside against Marxism, we would not deem it necessary to engage in this critique, limited as it has been. But as we noted at the onset, Black Marxism has evolved into something akin to a cult, in which its adherents are prepared to jettison history and critical inquiry in reverent defense of the cult orthodoxy. As its influence grows, so do does its political significance in undermining the type of global class analysis and politics necessary to advance the proletarian internationalism – or transnationalism – that is more urgent than ever as global capitalism spirals into intractable crisis and as far-right and neofascist forces gain ground.[51]Black Marxism has become a favored text with which to badger radical intellectuals and activists who place a premium on proletarian struggle. This has led some among left organizers to fear they may be condemned as Eurocentric, as “class reductionists,” and as “ignoring race” should they place a premium on class analysis, should they insist that racism is an outcome of class exploitation and that its eradication involves a transnational and pan-ethnic proletarian struggle against capitalism. No struggle of the oppressed can be without its organic intellectuals, and the battles to come are as much theoretical and ideological as they are political. At a time when global capital is on an all-out rampage against the global working and popular classes and when our very survival is under threat, we need more than ever a transnational revolutionary proletarian politics. We won’t find that in Black Marxism.
Notes:
[1] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), henceforth cited as BM. The original publisher is Zed Press, 1983. All references here are from the 2000 edition.
[2] On race reductionism, see Toure Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (London: Verso, 2020).
[3] In 2017, for instance, the socialist publishing house Verso Press published Futures of Black Radicalism as a tribute to Black Marxism. The contributors include Angela Davis, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, among others. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (eds), Futures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017).
[4] We could only find a handful of critical reviews, among them: August H. Nimtz, Jr., “Marxism and the Black Struggle: The ‘Class v. Race’ Debate Revisited,” Journal of African Studies, No. 7, 1985; Bill V. Mullen, “Notes on Black Marxism,” Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice, Vol. 8, 2001, available at https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/download/191958/188903/218923; Asad Haider, “The Shadow of the Plantation,” Viewpoint Magazine, 17 February 2017, available at https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/m6D9XU; Joseph G. Ramsey, “Sifting the ‘Stony Soil’ of Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson, Richard Right, and Ellipses of the Black Radical Tradition,” Socialism and Democracy, 34(2-3), 2020; Ken Olende, “Cedric Robinson, Racial Capitalism and the Return of Black Radicalism,” International Socialism, No. 169, 6 January 2021, available at http://isj.org.uk/cedric-robinson-racial-capitalism/#footnote-10080-66-backlink. The most exhaustive critical review we are aware of is Gregory Meyerson, “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others,” Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice, Vol. 6, 2000, available at https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/192628/189186
[10] Jason W. Moore, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene & the Flight from World History: Dialectical Universalism & the Geographies of Class Power in the Capitalist World-Ecology,” Nordia Geographic Publications, 51:2, pp. 123, available at https://nordia.journal.fi/article/view/116148/69298
[11] See, e.g., Michael G. Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
[16] Unless otherwise specified, references to instances of pre-capitalist slavery around the world is from Craig Perry, David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, and David Richardson (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420 (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2021, new edition).
[19] Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
[20] Karl Marx writes: “[I]n any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value but the use-value set of the product predominates, surplus-labor will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus-labor arises from the nature of the production itself….But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labor, etc., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc.” Capital, Vol. I (New York: International Publishers, 1967[1867]), pp, 226.
[21] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter Two, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy.” This chapter is reproduced in Marxist.org archives here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm. Marx goes on: “Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.” Robinson sets up a series of strawmen to support his claims. One of these is that Marx (and Marxists) relegated slavery to “primitive accumulation” (BM, pp. 4). This is simply untrue, as these quotes – and an abundant of writings by Marx and Marxists, make clear.
[22] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966).
[24] Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
[25] As Moore notes, the disconnection of capitalism from colonialism and imperialism “tends to present any account foregrounding class and capital as ‘reductionist’ – a view that collapses the significant differences between world-historical class analysis and Eurocentric class formalism.” Moore, pp. 4.
[26] Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, Vol. I, 1994, Vol I, 1997I).
[27] As Allen put it, “it was only because ‘race’ consciousness superceded class consciousness that the continental plantation bourgeoisie was able to achieve and maintain the degree of social control necessary to proceeding with capital accumulation on the basis of chattel bond-labor.” Allen, Vol. II, pp. 240.
[29] Meyerson notes in his critique of Black Marxism that “the ‘relative autonomy’ of ‘race’ has been enabled by a reduction and distortion of class analysis. The essence of the reduction and distortion involves equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism.”, pp. 1.
[30] Noteworthy here is Cedric Johnson’s critical discussion of this nostalgia, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” Catalyst, 1(1), 2017.
[36] Let us recall that for Laclau and Mouffe “society” is not a valid object of discourse, as Munck notes (approvingly?…it is not clear). Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).
[37] Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source (New York: Monthly Review, 1973), pp. 95.
[41] There is a vast historiography we cannot reference here on Africa’s pre-modern and modern past, including the violence of state and empire building over millennia prior to the modern capitalist era, and the fierce resistance Africans wages against colonialism in their face of the superior material power of the colonialists. The eminent historian of Africa, Basil Davidson, who could hardly be accused of racism or Eurocentrism, popularized this history in his prolific late twentieth century publications, among them: Africa in History (New York: Touchstone Books, 1995); Modern Africa: A Social and Political History (New York: Routledge, 3rd edition, 1994).
[46] BM, pp. 9. While Robinson does not ever give us a precise definition of “racial capitalism,” Magubane cites the definition put forth by one prominent racial capitalism scholar: “the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person.” Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review, as cited by Magubane.
[50] Meyerson, pp. 11. Meanwhile, even if we reduce class analysis to a quantitative measure of wealth distribution, the very idea of racial wealth, a favorite trope of liberals and anti-racists in the United States, observe Michaels and Reed, “is an empty one”: “If you look at how white and black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10 percent of white people have 75 percent of white wealth; the top 20 percent have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10 percent of black households hold 75 percent of black wealth….97 percent of the racial wealth gap exists among the wealthiest half of each population. And more tellingly, more than three-fourths of it is concentrated in the top 10 percent of each. If you say to those white people in the bottom 50 percent (people who have basically no wealth at all) that the basic inequality in the U.S. is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the black people in the bottom 50 percent (people who have even less than no wealth at all), they also know you are wrong. The wealth gap among all but the wealthiest blacks and whites is dwarfed by the class gap, the difference between the wealthiest and everyone else across the board.” Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr, “The Trouble with Disparity,” NonSite, Issue 32, 10 September 2020, available at https://nonsite.org/the-trouble-with-disparity/
[51] On this crisis, see inter-alia, William I. Robinson, Can Global Capitalism Endure? (Atlanta: Clarity, 2022).
This article will be released in full online October 3, 2022.
In the past and in his own time, Marx has been portrayed as endorsing the enclosure of the commons as a necessary historical stage on the path to socialism. However, a more accurate account, one that is critical of the enclosure movement, can be found in his response to the destruction of commons-based peasant communities in Russia—while it was actually happening. | more…