Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) was ignored for over a decade, then became orthodoxy after its 2000 reissue with an introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley. August Nimtz reviewed it in 1984 — the first detailed appraisal it got — and has now collected four decades of criticism into Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique. He talks to Constantin Berlin about why the argument mattered then and matters more now.

Robinson’s core claim is that Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright had to break with Marxism to find something more liberatory, a “black radical tradition.” Nimtz says the record contradicts it:

  • He attended a talk by C. L. R. James in St. Paul in 1976 praising founders of the Socialist Workers Party — a place and party whose credentials ran through the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, the high-water mark of 1930s US workers’ radicalisation.
  • Marx and Engels were not the Eurocentrics of Robinson’s charge. Nimtz points to their attention to the Russian question, to “North America,” and to Marx dropping nearly everything — including finishing Capital — to work for Union victory in the Civil War.
  • Marx, he argues, treated the abolition of chattel slavery as a means to an end: creating for the first time in America a hereditary proletariat, the only class with both an interest in real democracy and the capacity to win it.

What the book leaves out is Nimtz’s strongest evidence. Robinson published in 1983 and reissued in 2000, and the missing names are the Marxist ones:

  • Maurice Bishop and the Grenada Revolution (1979–83) — a Marxist-led revolution in the black world, unfolding while Robinson wrote, and absent from the book.
  • Malcolm X, who in his last year was converging with the SWP; Robinson had hosted him at Berkeley in 1963 and must have known.
  • Robert F. Williams, who also worked with the SWP and influenced Malcolm.
  • Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, missing even from the 2000 introduction.

Nimtz reads these omissions as structural rather than accidental: each was an unapologetically Marxist black revolutionary, and thus ineligible for a pantheon built to prove that Marxism and black liberation diverge. The convergence is the inconvenient fact. Nimtz points out, too, that it is the SWP that has kept Bishop’s, Malcolm X’s and Sankara’s speeches in print since.

The stakes Nimtz claims are not academic. His frame is that the US working class is the only force capable of stopping what he calls capital’s march to World War III, and that a theory which dismisses the proletariat in favour of skin colour as the axis of politics is a political liability — “a project that claims to be revolutionary, more revolutionary than what Marx had to offer, but is really a chimera.”

His own biography is part of the argument. He and Robinson were age cohorts, both African American, both political science PhDs publishing first books in 1980 — but New Orleans’ tangled colour-and-class hierarchy taught Nimtz that the white/black binary was insufficient, and a year and a half doing dissertation research in Tanzania in 1969–70 (with Walter Rodney as a neighbour) taught him that independence alone did not deliver social equality. “I went to Africa as a black nationalist/Pan-Africanist and left in search of communism.”

That is the debate in one line. It is a fight over whether the black radical tradition runs through Marxism or around it.