 So, Black Marxism, is the book I brought with me here today as a prop to prove to you that I have read it, as Cal said this was recommended and is on the top of a lot of BLM anti-racist reading lists. The purpose of this book is to turn people away from Marxism, and I would say specifically young black people who are interested in revolutionary politics in their political journey, The forward to the book is written by an academic called Robin D. G. Kelly, in which he says that before he read the book, he was a young person feeling very revolutionary, he actually says that he wanted to become a full-time communist and help people of colour lead a successful revolution. Sounds good, something I'm interested in as well. But then he says he read this book and this book changed his life and he became an academic instead. And he proudly states this at the start, which I think really sets the tone for the ideas that really are in this book and the way we should approach it. This book is an attack on Marxism, but it's subtle. It's called Black Marxism, which is a very confusing title in my opinion. It uses a lot of Marxist terminology and even makes nods towards Marx in his economic analysis at the start, but this is all extremely superficial. When preparing this lead-off, there were many, many different arguments that are presented in the book that I wanted to tackle and that felt necessary to answer from a Marxist perspective. But that is often the way with academic writing. It's very confusing and there's almost too much for you to address. Part of the method of Marxism is stripping away the superficial form of something and looking at what it truly represents. We aren't interested in debating the wrong ideas of one academic just to prove that they're wrong so that we can feel good about ourselves. What we are concerned with is what are the wrong ideas that permeate the left and what is the theoretical and philosophical basis for those ideas. And it is with that in mind that we look at books such as Black Marxism. So despite everything that's in there and it's an extremely long book, there are two main arguments that it presents that I want to focus on in its essence. The first one is that race comes before class. That means that black workers are black before they are workers and it also means that white workers are white before they are workers, which is bad. The second main argument that the book makes is that in essence black people are more revolutionary than white people. And I would say that everything else flows from those two main points. I'm just going to stand back. I feel like I was too loud. Is this better? Yes. Okay. One nod. It will be good for you then. Okay. So everything else flows from those two main points. And it essentially concludes that capitalism can't be overthrown by the working class, but rather by the liberation movement of the black masses, which he identifies that is Cedric Robinson, the man on the screen, very broadly with something he describes as the black radical tradition. And I'm using quotation marks because I don't really think that that exists, but we'll come on to that later on. So you will have heard before that Marxism on its own cannot explain the development of racism sufficiently. It cannot explain why racism has remained an enduring aspect of life under capitalism, and therefore it cannot show the way forward. And in the very early chapters of the book, Robinson raises this argument and he explicitly attacks historical materialism, which is the Marxist method of analysing history and society. Robinson says that historical materialism does not recognise the role of culture, which he deems to be extremely important. Now the Marxist method is based in materialism. We have a scientific understanding of the world. And a basic tenet of this is that ideas do not drop from the sky. Our ideas, our thoughts and our culture are not random products of our minds. They have a root source, and that source is the economic basis and the prevailing social relations of any given society. On top of this, we understand that the most dominant ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class. And Marx explains this in the German ideology, which I'll quote. It says the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas. That is our starting point as Marxists. Now that is not to say that culture or ideas play no role in society, or that they just passively reflect economics. In fact, we ourselves emphasise the importance of Marxist ideas in the struggle, in the class struggle. We talk about the importance of Marxism for the emancipation of the working class. But the point is you cannot understand racism by looking at the development and movement of culture on its own. And I would say this is the first mistake of Cedric Robinson, and not just Robinson but many others on the left, focusing on racism as a cultural phenomenon, independent of the material relations from which it springs. And this is like trying to understand combustion or fire by looking at smoke and the smoke that it produces. The smoke can choke us, it's still dangerous, but it isn't the source of the problem. This oppression arises out of class society itself and the need for the ruling class in any given class society to divide and conquer. That is the most basic understanding we need to begin with. Racism is an extremely powerful idea, but it is a powerful idea that expresses real material relations and material oppression. It is not innate to any culture or any human being. It is only innate to an economic system. And we can prove this using historical materialism, the Marxist method of analysing history. Firstly, what is race? Race itself is a very malleable category. In fact, biologically there is no such thing as race. Looking around the room socially, we will all identify different people and ourselves as belonging to different races. We have phenotype, melanin, different indicators that might say, okay, you're black, you're white. But scientifically this isn't actually, isn't based in much. The bourgeois in the past did try to scientifically justify their racism using genetics and various other things. But actually the development of genetic studies showed that racism is anti-scientific. It proved beyond doubt that the genetic differences between human races are so limited and so secondary that the classification of race itself was scientifically redundant. Despite that, the ideology of racism does live amongst us and is very powerful because it has been socially established over a very long period of time. Nevertheless, our understanding has to begin there that modern race relations, the way all of us think about race in this room, is very new. It's a very new idea and it's very modern. As I said, race has always been a malleable category. For thousands of years you could say the concept didn't really exist. Whiteness in particular is a new feature. And there's a few different examples we can look at that show this kind of malleable category that race is. For example, in the last Spanish census of Cuba, Mexican Indians and Chinese people were classified as white in that census. In South Africa under apartheid, you had something called honorary whites. So apartheid had three main categories, you had whites, coloureds and black. But that system became changeable depending on the interests of the ruling class. When you had countries such as Korea and Japan suddenly growing economically, this provided an opportunity for South African capitalism. And bourgeois from East Asia wanted and did move to South Africa in order to invest. However, according to the apartheid system, they would have been classed as coloured in this kind of second middle rank. So in order to facilitate the investment that they were going to bring, the government would simply give them certificates as honorary whites. And that would mean that they could enter the white spaces and be given access to the same stuff that whites were able to gain in that society. They wouldn't be discriminated against. Now, why is this important? And there's lots of other examples we can look at. I think it's important because Robinson and many others connect racism first and foremost specifically to Europe, to European culture. But beyond that, they connect it to whiteness, which they present in this vague amorphous kind of cloud that hangs in society. But obviously it's sources in Europe. And you'll see this all the time on the left, even in memes and culture. If you, as far back as you go, if there's white people there, you're going to find problems. You're going to find some kind of violence and you're going to find racism more specifically. And there's two levels on which this is wrong. Firstly, I would say what we call racism today, what we identify as racism under capitalism, cannot be imprinted onto previous class societies. Now, when you study history and you look at the rise and fall of empires and civilisations, you will find discrimination and you will find prejudice. That is a fact. That is a feature of every single form of class society. Oppression and class society go completely hand in hand. But is this all racism? In previous societies where you had knights and lords, the knights and lords genuinely thought that they were from a different breed, that they were from a different blood than that of the peasants that they overlooked. Is it useful to call that racism? I don't think so. Well, actually, I say no. It wasn't about what they looked like. In fact, in many of these societies, they probably looked exactly the same. They were from the same genetic race, but they believed they were different. That's because the most important relationship there was the class relationship. It was their class position that informed how the knights looked upon the peasants or the serfs or whatever it was. Sometimes they looked the same and maybe sometimes they didn't. But they weren't thinking about race at all. Race has always been malleable, but class is not. If you're a slave, you're a slave. If you're a serf, you're a serf. If you're a worker, you're a worker. Now, your race can and has historically overlapped with this. But concretely speaking, race does not define your class relation. But there are some who try to argue it does. They say, race is class. You are a worker because you are black. But actually, even Marx understands this or understood it in his economic writings in wage labour and capital. Marx writes, what is a negro slave? In response to that, he answers, a man of the black race. The one explanation is worthy of the other. A negro is a negro only under certain conditions does he become a slave. And that's the most important thing that we need to highlight. It's the conditions. But let's look at other forms of oppression as well. This idea of racism has always existed in the same way as it does under capitalism. The Burukumin are the largest discriminated against population in Japan. And this descends from the Japanese caste system that existed up until feudalism. Now they don't look different in terms of skin tone or features from other Japanese people. But their position in the class system produced a very specific real material form of oppression. The legacy of which remains all the way up until today. The Indian caste system, which is probably the most famous caste system, perhaps because it appears to have survived the longest, is something to consider. In India, obviously colorism is a very significant aspect of the caste system. The color of your skin will literally correspond to your rank in that sense. So on the one hand, on the surface when you look at this, you have what seems like an obvious clear racism. But if you look deeper at this, I actually think it's the perfect example of how racism in its content is about class. Racism, therefore, should be described, I would say, as the ideological reflection of a class relation. It is simply the outer shell. Now if we tallied up, if we looked at all the different caste systems that have existed, and there have been many all over the world in China and the Philippines and Mexico and in many different places caste systems have existed, all under class society, in some of them you would have had race or a different cultural difference that could have been exploited to act as a double oppression. But in others this didn't happen. In some of them you would have had foreigners that would have automatically been considered outsiders, dangerous, a threat. But in others it wouldn't have been exactly the same. There are many differences in particularities that correspond to the needs of any specific society at any given time. But the commonality between every single one of those caste systems is class society itself. It is not an irrational, deep-seated hatred or fear of darker skin tones, which is essentially how people try and describe or explain why caste systems have existed for so long in various different places. Marxism tells us that it is conditions that determine consciousness. Therefore you could say, ok, well it was the conditions in India that produced that caste, that the racism or in European civilisation, it was the conditions that just produced racism, which is sort of what Robinson does and other figures, they kind of, you know, they're a bit sneaky in the way they present these things. But we have to go further than that and be very explicit about what those conditions are and for us as Marxists we understand it clearly as class society. Now I think I wanted to start with that to say there is a difference between the racism that has been produced under capitalism very consciously than what some academics try to present as having existed for all of humanity essentially. And the rise of capitalism specifically involved the direct occupation of other countries and indeed practically the whole of Africa if we want to talk about anti-blackness for example. Now the emerging industrial revolution needed more resources and more markets. Materials such as copper, cotton, rubber, palm oil, all of this was extremely important and something which European industry had grown very dependent on. So with the rise of direct colonialism they needed to use native peasants and workers in the colonial world in order to extract these resources that they needed for the industrial revolution. It was the cheapest form of labour. They couldn't ship people over as they had done in slavery during the transatlantic slave trade. That system, that economic system was no longer profitable which is why it came to an end not due to benevolent great leaders in Britain or anything like this. So they had to do this direct colonial rule and brutal violence was maintained. There's a talk tomorrow on the climes of British imperialism which will go into this. Brutal violence was maintained in the colonies to try and facilitate the extraction of resources. And so the rise of colonialism and the rise of capitalism also sees with it the rise of racist ideas. There is a dialectical relationship that exists therefore with the rise of capitalism and racist ideas. The economic drive and necessity to conquer new markets which is imperialism and then the social relations that that produces. Marx explains way back in the communist manifesto that capital, once having saturated its home markets is forced to go beyond its borders due to its own inherent contradictions. The rise of the global economy and world trade is the rise of imperialism and we can identify it as the rise of racism for us today. Marx understood very well the role of colonialism and colonies themselves. He says it is the colonies which have created world trade and world trade is the necessary condition for large scale machine industry. This is the fundamental basis of imperialism and colonialism under capitalism and racism is the political side of this process. We cannot talk about racism as independent to imperialism or colonialism or capitalism. That is the main point that we should take out of, or one of the main points that we should take out of this session. Robinson uses this term, and you will have heard it perhaps, of racial capitalism. But I think using that really confuses the matter. There's no such thing as a non-racial capitalism. You don't need to say that. It would be the same as if we also talked about gendered capitalism and every other specific form of oppression that exists under capitalism. As I said at the start, oppression in class society goes hand in hand. We don't need to have these extra add-ons. But this addition of the word racial is not just accidental. It's because he is again trying to centre it and separate it out from an analysis of capitalism that isn't based in class, essentially. He does this because he's trying to make the point that you, Marxist, you don't really take racism seriously. And Marx never did. And how could he? He was white and a European and so it wasn't even his fault. This is actually kind of how he presents it. Marx is a product of his time and say he was a bit racist and didn't take it seriously. But this is completely false. Marx understood, and I would say Marx even developed his ideas through observing the racism that did exist and does obviously exist amongst workers, amongst the English workers towards the Irish in particular, which was very strong at the time that Marx was writing. And that's where Marx forms this conclusion. He says very clearly, the English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general. That's talking about, yes, the role of colonialism, but also specifically the role of racism in the working class itself. It is a barrier and it holds things back. And that's something that Marx was very clear on and understood. And you all have heard the famous quote by Marx, that labour in the white skin cannot free itself whilst labour in the black skin is branded. He said that because he understood that the role that racism will play, but more broadly than that because racism is just the political side of colonialism and capitalism. He understood the way that holds the whole of a working class back in any given nation. So communists, genuine communists from Marx all the way up to ourselves today, we do understand the role that racism plays, especially in regards to the class struggle. Racism is one of the many types of oppression that capitalism uses, and these ideas, once they are promoted, they do take on a life of their own. And I would say that dialectically, the oppression that racism produces can actually become an accelerant in the class struggle. I talk a lot about how it holds things back, but in a way it can become an accelerant. Because the movements that are produced off the back of it have revolutionary implications. The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa could have developed into a threat to overthrow South African capitalism. Every single one of the anti-colonial revolutions could have developed into socialist revolutions, and some of those revolutions did overthrow capitalism. Or let's look at a current issue. Let's look at the racism of the Israeli state that they have whipped up towards the Palestinians. This is causing a huge movement, not just in Palestine, but all over the world. Is racism just a battle of ideas where sometimes the anti-racist idea wins out? And if the ruling class holds racist ideas, which we probably all agree they do, then where does the working class gain its anti-racist ideas from? Does the working class just have a better morality sometimes? If you look at it like this, then you could see the end of apartheid in South Africa as it was just a moral victory. And it was a moral victory, but that wasn't the source of how the workers in South Africa eventually were able to overthrow apartheid. And that is how we are taught about racism in general, in school, in history, in education, all about these struggles, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement. We're taught that eventually good one over evil, people finally got their sense back, love one over hate, and if we could just teach love again, then that's how we're going to overcome. That obviously would mean nothing to the Palestinians today or any victims of racism all over the world. The fact is the working class develops anti-racist ideas through the necessity of class struggle itself. We don't prettify or romanticize the working class in any capacity and view it through this moral lens that we can just morally convince them of the way forward. They come to anti-racist conclusions through the process of struggle and through the process of revolution because that is how consciousness changes. At the same time, we do not consider the individuals of the ruling class to be uniquely evil and racist. You cannot understand racism if you think about it as an idea without a base. For example, we understand the reason for anti-Palestinian racism in Israel flows from the imperialist interests of the Israeli ruling class. That is where it comes from. They demonize the Palestinians to justify taking the land. It flows from capitalism. Why does the British ruling class also promote racist ideas about the Palestinians? The British ruling class has common class interests with the Israeli ruling class. If you don't understand the class connection, it doesn't make sense. Unless we call it whiteness. Maybe whiteness is the reason that unites all of these people with their racism. Rishi Sunak isn't white. Rishi Sunak represents a majority white nation, so that's why he's using that whiteness to promote this racism further. Except Modi isn't white and India isn't white, but the Indian state supports Israel quite vocally. Not just that, the President of Kenya, William Ruto, is also a supporter of the Israeli state. Zambia, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo have all come out in support of Israel. Why have they done this? Because supporting Israel at this moment in time aligns with the imperialist powers that they want or need to lean on. Need is a better way to put it, actually. They don't want to, but they're forced to balance between different imperialist powers at different times. A lot of small African countries are in this position. You can call all of that whiteness or white supremacy if you want, which some people do. They just say all of these people are just psychologically enslaved to white supremacist ideology, which is why they follow the coattails of American imperialism and the vicious racism that the Israeli state is whipping out against the Palestinians. But if you call it whiteness, it's not going to help you understand it at all. All it does is reinforce this stupid simplistic idea of white people bad and black people good. That's genuinely what a lot of that boils down to. And it doesn't help you understand it at all, and that's why we emphasise and explain the class connection, because that is where it comes from. In comparison to this abstract idea of whiteness being evil, we have had white workers in Spain, in certain unions, coming out formally to declare that they're not going to ship any arms to Israel. And that's happened in many different countries and different times in Italy as well, the same thing a couple of years ago. I don't know what's happened there to that whiteness. Maybe they're a bit tan, and so that's saved them a bit. But it doesn't make sense, and why have those workers come out and done it? It's not just an abstract better morality. It's the class connection. It's understanding that that takes things forward. But despite this, many on the left, including Robinson, consistently try to explain racism through cultural terms. In doing so, they actually end up falling for the trap laid by the ruling class itself, which is to promote this inherent difference between peoples, which is completely and utterly false. So I want to move on to the second main part of the book, which is about consciousness really, and this idea that black people are just inherently more revolutionary. Now, Robinson poses this in a slightly more sophisticated way than I'm putting it. He states that the consciousness of the working class is racial rather than class-based. And this is due to the enduring nature of racism under feudalism, which is the society that produced the English working class. Those racist ideas, he says, developed capitalism and the consciousness of the working class. And so what he does when he says that is he's pushing towards this idea that class consciousness is somewhat led by the workers themselves rather than formed by their conditions. By presenting racism as this pre-existing phenomena that produced capitalism, he is saying culture determines economics. So when Robinson says that racism actually predated capitalism, capitalism was the product of racism, if we look at this and try and explain it, I think all he's really saying is that relations of domination existed under feudalism. Capitalism arises out of those relations. And in the process, the former ruling class, the former ideas of the ruling class are transformed in accordance with the new ruling class, with the bourgeoisie. If you think about the racism of colonialism and the colonial period and the industrial period versus looking at the antisemitism of the Middle Ages and so on, it's a good example of how these ideas just morph and continue. So he elevates the cultural aspect and he says, look bourgeois ideology is reactionary and racist and it has impacted the workers. The logic is that we need to find a consciousness or a culture that has been formed outside of or in opposition to capitalism or European domination because that which comes from within it is scarred. We can't use it. And in that, he points to the African masses, the black diaspora and this black radical tradition. So let's confront this, this racist bourgeois ideology and the impact that it's had on the working class. Now the creation of the nation state was a big part of the bourgeois revolutions. Nationalism and racism was undoubtedly a byproduct of this. But does nationalism define the experience of a worker in England? We say it is precisely the social and collective nature of capitalist production that brings workers together in common struggle. We say that a worker in Britain has more in common with a worker in Indonesia than they do their own ruling class. Now what do we mean by that? It's not just a nice sentiment that we're trying to get across. We mean that both of those workers, they go to work, they sell their labour power to a capitalist, they go home, they eat dinner, they sleep, they wake up, they have to pay the bills. When you do this, you're not doing this as an English worker, you're not doing English things all day, you're just living your life. And the same is true if you're in Indonesia or any other country in the world. Working class people all over the world do this despite their cultural differences but their conditions are the same. That's what we mean when we say a worker is more in common with a worker of a different country. Of course there are cultural differences, languages and so on. Culture and tradition plays a huge role in people's lives and can even impact a class struggle. In fact the working class of different countries has different traditions, some of which you could say are more open to struggle than others. It's clear that on the surface for example you would say that the French working class has a slightly more radical tradition than the British working class. The French working class have had more strikes probably than the British, even more revolutions but they have not yet overthrown capitalism because it's not a question of their culture. Even the way that people think and feel about themselves is relevant. Another example, less so, but in the past in a lot of different countries people didn't really identify as being working class. I'm not working class, I'm a bit more middle class or whatever it is, right? That's how they felt genuinely about themselves. But that wasn't the deciding factor. At the end of the day it's the conditions in workers' lives that will eventually determine their political expression. Objectively speaking your class position will assert itself eventually despite any cultural baggage or subjective feeling that tells you otherwise. So when Robinson puts this forward his argument it's actually not very new at all, it's the same as the Frankfurt School which is that culture is the defining issue. According to the Frankfurt School Marx and Engels failed to take into consideration the impact of bourgeois culture and ideology which they said it completely overrides class interests in the working class. Essentially it's just constantly promoting this idea that until we overcome cultural barriers we can't have a revolution. So we're going to have to focus on culture and win the cultural war as a way to move things forward. But we say again objectively the conditions of a worker in one country are closer to that of a worker in another than that of their own ruling class. The bourgeois do use the nation state to promote nationalism and racism to blur over class contradictions but that is bourgeois ideology and it is not inherent to the working class and they can and they do overcome it. In fact it is cut across precisely when workers are coming together in a collective struggle and consciousness is rising and Robinson is forced to confront this in his book He describes at length the racism from the English workers towards the Irish but then he says at one point there's this interesting time in history when this racism has overcome a bit and there's suddenly a lot of solidarity shown between Irish and English workers. When was this? It was the peak of the Chartist movement. Now what was the Chartist movement? The Chartist movement was the first national movement of the working class in history. Across Britain you had workers becoming conscious of themselves as a class and a leadership arose at the head of a huge mass movement encompassing millions of people demanding at first key political democratic demands rights around voting which eventually mutated into economic demands and it was at that moment that unity between English workers and Irish workers reached one of its strongest points. In fact Ernest Jones who was a Chartist leader spoke out prominently about the role of empire in India and Ireland and this was quite he was in a bit of a minority I would say for that time in England in the labour movement on the left to speak out against empire and the role of empire. He ended up in prison where he wrote famous poetry about revolutions sweeping across India, Haiti, Africa, South America and so on it's not a coincidence that it was during the peak of the Chartist movement that some of those ideas started to develop. Now to Cedric Robinson this is just an interesting footnote in history not just that but in his own words he describes this as simply an exception to the rule and a response to that I think we should say of course it's an exception to the rule so long as class society exists division will be the rule oppression will be the rule until we have workers power there will be a thousand and one ways in which workers are divided and they absorb those ideas and even enact them and promote them themselves but shouldn't we as people who want to undo oppression study precisely the moments when workers move in a positive direction shouldn't we take the workers at their highest point and say yes this is the way forward rather than see it as an interesting footnote or exception to the rule it's made by the fact that these moments are an exception to the rule we celebrate them the Russian revolution was an exception to the rule we celebrate that and we take the workers at their highest point when they're showing us the path forward and by the way Tsarist Russia had horrific levels of anti-Semitism great Russian shamanism and various other national oppressions and that was overcome through a socialist revolution it was the degeneration later on but that is what we understand about how you fight racism genuinely when you take a serious approach to studying history and not a moralistic one in the way that Robinson and the others do now in the preface to the 2000 edition of this book Robinson begins with a quote from a man called Oliver Cromwell Cox and the quote is and I have to read it out because when I read it I was just a bit annoyed the quote is this the workers in the advanced nations have done all they could or intended to do which was always something short of a revolution and this is another really pervasive idea on the left that needs to be tackled which is that the workers in the west they cannot have a revolution because of their wideness and also because they can't overcome racism Robinson Robinson using the rule says no they can't overcome this racism but he's not the only one who thinks this there's a book which pops up and a lot of university discussions on racism called Settlers the mythology of the white proletariat written by a guy called Jay Sakai and in that book Sakai argues that the white working class in America they have a reformist consciousness the white American working class is privileged and it's actually the colonised people of America the native Americans and so on that constitute the proletariat there are many different variations of different academics or different people on the left essentially saying that the working class is not the way forward in the west or even anywhere Bakunin the anarchist who was writing at the same time as Marx argued that the peasants and the lumpen proletariat were the new revolutionary class Fanon if you were in the session earlier today argues in colonial countries it's the peasantry alone which are the revolutionary class this comes up all the time and it's a very important question for us people who want to change the world who do we base ourselves on Robinson's answer to who is the revolutionary subject is tied up in his ideas around consciousness in comparison to the failure of the workers in Europe he presents the black radical tradition which is the movements of the black masses in Africa and the diaspora and also any black radical figure that he wants to add to it now Robinson published his book in the 80s and you have to think at this time we're off the back of great anti-colonial revolutions millions of poor and oppressed people were thrown into ferocious struggle against imperialist domination you could call that a black radical tradition it is but it's also just class struggle anti-imperialism that exists beyond Africa and blackness but when presenting the black radical tradition Robinson he looks at these movements of the black masses he elevates the spontaneity of them as their main strength this lack of an organized leadership to him was a positive in fact in the book he directly attacks Lenin he directly attacks the notion of a vanguard and he essentially presents Lenin as a dictator in terms of his approach to building a revolutionary party in a Bolshevik party and it's important to draw these things out because the black radical people will be drawn to this book based on the title but we need to say to them this book is full of anti-communist ideas and anti-Leninist ideas as well we can't answer that slander here the point is the colonial revolutions were one of the greatest processes of human history and also an exception to the rule no however we have to ask ourselves what did those revolutions achieve and there's not a blanket approach to be had here the democratic tasks of undoing colonialism they were forced to nationalize key parts of the economy and there were differences some places attempted to overthrow capitalism and tried to plan the economy in a socialist direction and some of those were viciously crushed overthrown in coups, Ghana, Burkina Faso and other places now what are the masses revolutionary yes absolutely because of their conditions and because of their objective needs not because of their culture as Robinson tries to argue let's look at a concrete example the independence of Zimbabwe was achieved by the struggle of the masses but the leaders of the guerrilla movement once getting into power entered into an agreement broken by the British government known as the Lancaster house agreement and that agreement included a 10 year lock on the land issue which meant do what you want but you can't expropriate or touch the land for 10 years or redistribute it this was an abject failure of the revolution by refusing to solve the land question the leadership was refusing to solve a fundamental aspect of the colonial regime which was exploiting and oppressing the masses now the masses had done their bit but the leadership from the exact same culture by the way lost their revolutionary consciousness that they should innately have according to Robinson and others for a moment and failed to actually move the revolution forwards in the way that was necessary to solve the class contradictions and actually solve the oppression that colonialism produces now I've deliberately avoided too many quotes from the book but I really want to highlight this one because I think it's the most revealing when talking about anti-colonial revolutions the anti-imperialist movement Robinson says now what this quote is saying is that all Africans because of their African identity alone are moved to fight capitalism and racism but that's not true why is that not true? because all Africans do not have the same consciousness the African bourgeoisie who are pawns of US or Chinese imperialism depending on which you are talking about is not to say that all Africans or Chinese imperialism depending on which way they lean have absolutely no problem with capitalism or racism look at the South African ruling class for example who are happy to preside over the most appalling racial inequality which is a product of the capitalist system that they defend and by the way all African leaders use this concept of culture of pan-Africanism to cover up for their own collaboration with imperialism that removes people to fight capitalism or racism it's class, it's your class position in society and that applies whether you're African or European whether you're white or black or whatever it is if you are oppressed and exploited you will want to fight the system that exploits and divides workers what is his answer to every single one of these countries that did end colonialism but has restored capitalism and maintains horrific levels of inequality and oppression and police brutality we saw the movement in Nigeria a couple of years ago against that police brutality at the same time as Black Lives Matter which was a movement against racism and police brutality in America what is his answer to all of this the fact is if we're honest about it the black masses they have not overthrown imperialism they have not freed themselves from colonial oppression would it be fair to say that they have done all they could which is something short of a revolution no it wouldn't be fair to say that they have been deliberately held back by their own leadership which had a different class outlook and a different class interest the blackness of these leaders was completely cut to shreds when class division became the main point I'm summing up revolutions occur when conditions of life are intolerable this has been the case for the black masses and we have seen their struggle against that but it's not inherent to their blackness it is their conditions of life and the same is true for white workers revolutions happen all over the world in every single society with or without Marxist by the way Robinson says spontaneity is sufficient so let's just sit back and let the black masses do their thing they're more spontaneous than the white workers anyway they will rise up and overthrow all of capitalism he's dressing it up in lots of different ways but all of this is an argument for inaction and actually reformism if theory is a guide to action we have to say what do we want to do about these revolutions that are taking place and will continue to take place we say you need a plan and you need a revolutionary party which is something that Robinson explicitly rejects and he says Lenin and the Bolsheviks were wrong for what they did so to summarise Robinson and others argue that socialist revolution in the west failed because the workers are too caught up in their whiteness and chauvinism to actually realise their class interests whereas in Africa we've seen these powerful movements that were the product of this spontaneousness that's inherent this africanity that's moved people to struggle and the culmination of all of this is the black radical tradition of the revolutionary consciousness that comes out of the black masses but he doesn't talk then about the black capitalist states like South Africa and there's many many others where there is growing xenophobic movements towards other african black migrants never mind that or where's their revolutionary consciousness gone there this obsession with culture he tries to present as unique this distinctive black culture which he calls ontological totality the essence of being essentially it's just idealism we have to say there is not one unifying black consciousness that everyone in Africa and the Caribbean and the diaspora hold because their conditions are not the same and moreover to use his own framework I would add that their culture is not the same at all there's one aspect of the book that I didn't touch on which is the mapping of various black political figures and their relationship to Marxism he tries and fails to present this as on their political journeys they come across Marxism but then they depart from it sorry they depart from it and eventually join the black radical tradition and this black radical tradition is basically anyone black and radical he includes Mugabe Fanon Angela Davis people who had very very different political ideas by the way but he's trying to understand why all of these black political leaders or figures come towards Marxism at some point which is white and Eurocentric it's because the truth is the black struggle and the class struggle are one and the same the only way to make the class struggle succeed is through bold socialist demands and a clear leadership that is what will overthrow capitalism a united working class with a revolutionary party and I'm just going to end on a quote by James Baldwin that I actually think answers a lot of the stuff in this book James Baldwin said you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world but then you read it was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive who had ever been alive so we say that Marxists stand against any form of oppression based on national, religious racist or sexual discrimination we are for the revolutionary unity of the working class that is what will overthrow racism oppression, colonialism but more specifically the system that upholds all of this which is capitalism thank you