Who's Afraid of Black Marxism? The Crises of Capitalism and Futures of Solidarity

3 units

It was the right book at the right time. In 2020, during the uprisings triggered by the murder of George Floyd and the COVID pandemic, UNC Press released the third edition of Cederic Robinson’s Black Marxism. From its title to its content, this once obscure text gave name to many debates among activists and scholars who were grappling with the relationship between anti-Black violence, state revanchism, and market-driven racism. Today, the provocations in Robinson’s work — the thinkers and activists who influenced it and those it influenced — offer insight into the interconnected crises of climate, politics, and capitalism while showing how the impact of these crises are unequally distributed across race, class, gender, and geographies. What is the relationship between race, labor, and the accumulation of capital? By what processes do the relational and chemical toxicity of environmental injustices get unequally distributed? Is capitalism inherently and always racial? This course offers a critical introduction to the origins, methods, and debates among the international cohorts of scholars and activists who bring Global Black Studies and Marxism together. We will read scholars and activists who incorporate and challenge key Marxian ideas in struggles for self-determination, emancipation, and abolition. And we will learn together how these debates speak to the most pressing issues today. We will interrogate debates around racial capitalism, intersectionality, The Black International, and heterodox Black Marxism from 20th-century Black Power and anti-colonial movements to 21st-century prison abolition and the climate crisis.