Cedric J. Robinson

This essay takes Engels' The Housing Question as a provocation to (1) apply ground rent theory to housing (something which Engels neglected to do) and (2) investigate Engels' conflation of housing struggles with the concerns of a "backwards" peasantry. I show that applying Marx's ground rent theory to housing illuminates aspects of the housing question heretofore unexamined -- in particular, the significance of the relationship between landowner and capitalist in housing. I then show that Engels' dismissal of housing struggles and land-based struggles more broadly is rooted in the specious belief that proletarianization homogenizes people. Engels' spurious logic nonetheless sets in relief an important connection: I suggest that only through grasping what Cedric Robinson has called racialization or differentiation and what Sylvia Wynter has named nonhomogeneity can we recognize the theoretical and practical centrality of housing and other land-based struggles to revolution and abolition.

I will argue in this paper that the Black radical tradition needs to become fully conscious of it-self in order frame a radical black studies  alterity perspective within the Black radical tradition (King, 2007; Robinson, 1983/2000). First, I will provide a quick historical development of the Black Radical tradition through Robinson’s Black Marxism, where he traces the Black radical tradition from the 16th century to the present. Second, this will take us to the 1960s-1960s of transnationalism, and anti-imperialism of black freedom fighters Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, MLK Jr, and how this time was an opportune  time for both black, natives and the global take advantage of that moment. I will utilize Wynter’s and Weheliye’s work to understand how black studies came to be and the possibilities it presented us and why its essential to a black centric episteme . Third, I will intervene on the debates about Afro-Pessimism and where it stands in the pantheon of black critical thought. Making concessions that the scholarly works of Frank Wilderson III and Jared Sexton rejuvenated younger peoples interest in Africana Studies, Black Studies and Critical social theory, and infused  different interpretation  of Fanon, nonetheless Afro-Pessimism I argue is a misinterpretation, of  Frantz Fanon work in totality, and misrecognition  agency and relationality in his writing. Thereby,  limiting the truly radical possibility of using a pessimist reading of the universe. We should look to Wynter’s and Gordon’s Fanon, rather than the “political ontology” of Agamben reading of  Fanon in Wilkerson’s III, and Sexton work.  Last, but not least, and I will attempt to also undo the abuse of the colonial order that by looking at Wynter’s Black studies alterity perspective pedagogy to understand  do we as black people along with red, Latino and native people of the world bring a closure to the current episteme? To concertize our discussion of Black studies I will use Joyce E. King’s (2007)  work of “Critical Studyin’” which ties together all the critical ideas in this paper into a comprehensive framework from the position of the liminal. How did we get here? Why is fanon and Wynter important to understand the situation we are in currently? Why black studies? These questions and answers are grounded in a black studies perspective. This is grounded in the sociocultural and historical experience of the liminality of African-descent people (King, 2006). As intellectuals, we have a role to play, just as we have done in the past by being on the ground by articulating a order by creating new cultural codes aside of the natural biological ones that exist. Agreeing with Wynter “Black Studies is really in the forefront of the battle against ‘Man’ and for the human, and to begin to put it forward in that re-conception.

Esta dissertação propõe analisar a imaginação histórica de Paul Gilroy, um intelectual afro-britânico integrante da teoria pós-colonial. Submete-se sua obra à seguinte questão: como e por que Paul Gilroy escreve a história? A fim de respondê-la, aplica-se aos seus principais trabalhos instrumentos conceituais e metodológicos comuns ao campo da História da Historiografia, seguindo autores como Michel De Certeau e Hayden White, combinando-os com abordagens críticas que defendem a descolonização do conhecimento em humanidades, como aquelas apresentadas por Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mario Rufer, Achille Mbembe, entre outros. A partir desta combinação, este trabalho defende que uma perspectiva pragmática da narrativa histórica – seguindo a teoria da performatividade da figuração narrativa proposta por Maria Inês La Greca – pode auxiliar em leituras mais produtivas da teoria pós-colonial para a historiografia. Com isto, a imaginação histórica de Gilroy é analisada junto aos seus lugares sociais, onde estão as audiências com as quais ele compartilha as formas narrativas que utiliza para fornecer sentido às experiências históricas da diáspora africana – o tráfico, a escravidão e os regimes de terror racial.

By providing the readers with some context in which Black Arts, Black Power Freedom Movements, and Black Aesthetics matured Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, juxtaposed with Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy :Rationalizing Violence In the New Racial Capitalism,  and Jordan T. Camp’s Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State we can potentially navigate ourselves out of the muck of the class and/or/vs race but asking a different question: how do the authors identify the relationship of race and capitalism, and how does the expressive culture of the Black Radical Tradition produce alternative epistemologies  about different social and economic systems and relations grounded in Black cosmologies ?  I will argue in this paper that the Black Radical Tradition needs to become fully conscious of it-self in order frame addressing the race/class nexus (Fanon, 1967, in Welcome, 2007; Robinson, 1983/2000). Nonetheless, we need to pay attention to the modern movements and the practices on how to exposes the contradictions between race and capitalism.    First, I will provide a quick historical development of the Black Radical Tradition through Robinson’s Black Marxism, where he traces the Black Radical Tradition from the 16th century to the present. Second, this will take us to the 1960s-1960s of transnationalism, and anti-imperialism of black freedom fighters Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, MLK Jr, and how this time was an opportune time for both black, natives and the global take advantage of that moment. Thereby producing a mature black radical formation constituted on the multiple crisis of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I will list what in my view characterizes a modern Black Radical Tradition.

In this unfinished rough powerpoint for a series of lectures I explore why the United States is markedly different from other representative democracies and welfare states.  I trace the tradition of using a combination of bribery and corruption of the Congress and Judiciary, and violence and racist terror as a means of marginalizing organized labour and frustrating democratic control.  I explore how the contemporary crisis of social inequality, political corruption and racist authoritarian government long predates Trump, first emerging after Reconstruction in the Kleptocracy of the Gilded Age, receding somewhat under Roosevelt's leadership and with the Bretton Woods consensus, only to re-emerge with the Reagan revolution and the political triumph of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, and the radicalism of the 1960s.  On the foreign policy side, the resurgent power of the oligarchy within the country and the brutal repression of the poor and marginalization of labour and the voices of the black radical tradition, symbolized by the ruins of Detroit and the South Bronx, would be matched by the consolidation of the policies of the so-called Washington Consensus.  This policy approach, enforced by the IMF, World Bank, and American military force and paramilitary violence, is often sold as Globalization, critiqued as Neo-liberalism, but might more accurately be described as a return to racist colonialism of the filibusters, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.  The talk, which is intended to engage non-academic audiences and avoid jargon and theory, ought to be read in conjunction with Richard Iton's Solidarity Blues, and WIlkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level.

Futures of Black Radicalism establishes the various ways the Black radical tradition remains vital to thinking about and struggling for alternative futures seemingly closed within the current, yet always unstable, racial regime. It incites the reader to maintain what Erica Edwards and Robin D.G. Kelley describe as Cedric Robinson’s “measured optimism” or “notion of the possible,” sustaining our hopes in the promise of liberation, only the promise of liberation!

This "Trends" piece of the special issue of the NATIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW on "Institutional Decolonization: Toward a Comprehensive Black Politics" takes a close aim at the "peculiar institution" that has become U.S. political theory, as the oldest and most foundational feature of the largely unreconstructed political science discipline. (ISBN: 0896-629-X)

This work centres on a specific functional moment in the creation of collective self-defense: a novel reconceptualization of the endurance (and the negotiations around endurance) of forms that protect the conditions for emergence. Thus this thesis seeks to forward and invent theories and techniques of technological-financial-governmental activation that self-dispossess the ‘source code’ in these fields so activated, informed by the black radical tradition, process philosophy, and interaction-as-computation category theory.

It seeks this forwarding by articulating a new role for formality in the world through the perversion of the discourse of the philosophy of engineering (one already happening, partially, within itself). This thesis is interested in the hypothesis that (1) there is nothing proprietary in informality’s production of the social economic conditions associated with it, (2) formality may then play a role in such productions, augmenting key functional aspects, such as the option for endurance, and adding to the field its own expressive inventions, not only without hampering or dislodging what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the poethical, but perhaps revealing how it participates in the poethical, and (3) that an articulation of such a role will reveal new frameworks for organizational design tout court, frames able to ripple through practices and disciplines previously thought to be discrete and siloed.

“The total configuration of human experience requires other forms”

- Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, pg. 167