Political Economy and the Tradition of Radical Black Study

Introduction

One central concern of the Black Intellectual Tradition (BIT) since the close of the nineteenth century has been the explicit connection between the historical and structural development of the world capitalist economy on the one hand, and on the other, freedom struggles forged by African descendants. This dynamic, interwoven relationship, according to some critical observers of history, illuminates a key dimension of the modern Black experience Indeed, in the long struggle for Black freedom, some scholar-activists have identified the limits of solely or exclusively pursuing legal, cultural, and political reforms, particularly in the face of vast and intractable economic inequality This led to their engagement and study of political economy—a field and methodology dedicated to illuminating the political, social, and economic relations that dominate particular historical eras and thus shape social conditions and lived experiences. Applying this lens to the Black experience, a distinguished, and radical cadre of scholar-activists have concluded that Black liberation – both at home and abroad – was directly and irrefutably tied to the abolition of capitalism. While Black Studies has inherited a political economic tradition uniquely equipped to expose the violence of racial capitalism, its status in the field has remained marginal. This marginalization, intentionally or unintentionally, of political economy within the discipline weakens the analytical capacity and critical training of Black Studies students and practitioners, and unnecessarily hampers the discipline’s ability to understand, analyze, discuss, and challenge the complex institutional structures and historical dynamics that principally shape Black social conditions past and present. If Black Studies is to fulfill its transformational mission, then radical Black political economy methods and theories must assume a more central role in student training and disciplinary structure.

This call to center a political economy framework in Black Studies proceeds as follows: I first define what radical Black political economy is, distinguishing it from other Black political economy approaches. I then review several key concepts, theories, and debates that have animated the radical Black political economy tradition through the twentieth century, and consider how these ideas can serve the transformationalist vision of Black Studies envisioned by the discipline’s founders and intellectual forerunners. To accomplish this, I draw on the lives, work, and politics of Black scholar-activists from within the U.S. and beyond, in order to make the case that, out of necessity, study and struggle, Black communities have produced a unique political economy tradition that must occupy a greater role in the work and practice of Black Studies than it does today.

A Brief Overview of Black Political Economic Thought

We can use Michael C. Dawson’s Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (2001) to broadly illuminate four distinct Black political economy traditions: liberal, conservative, nationalist, and radical While this essay focuses primarily on the radical Black political economy tradition, it is important to distinguish it from other tendencies within Black political economic thought, especially given political economy’s overall marginalization in disciplinary structure and training.

Of course, as is true of all ideological taxonomies, these four traditions are not self-contained, operating independently of one another. Indeed, there are some principles, perspectives, and strategies that these traditions share. In fact, all the Black political economy ideologies are similar “to the degree that self-definition and rejection of external definitions of the political, social, and economic self are central to their visions. In other words, all of these traditions believe in the right to Black self-determination, a pursuit that has often been at odds with the theory and practice of American liberalism, which cherishes and defends individual rights. It should also be added that individuals may subscribe to one or more of these particular ideologies at one time, or hold different ideological positions at various historical moments Still, Dawson’s work on the origins and development of Black political ideologies in the U.S. demonstrates that the Black community is characterized by distinct, competing visions and projects of freedom, and it is these ideological divisions which inform the Black political economic traditions explored here.

Black liberalism is the oldest political ideology of Black Americans, and though critical of the historical practice of American liberal democracy, its proponents believe that the framework offers “the best philosophical and pragmatic system for achieving justice for blacks,” but only if the nation redeems “itself by finally becoming a society where blacks have gained justice and equality. For Black liberals, while the fundamental political economy of the U.S. is deeply racist, its fundamental structure need not be abolished; in other words, through struggle, liberal capitalist democracy can be reformed to realize Black people’s visions of freedom Despite its historically marginal role, Black conservatism has been a longstanding ideological current within Black political economic thought. Conservative Black political economists emphasize self-help as the solution to the conditions of Black inequality, and are critical of calls for government intervention into markets or any aspect of Black life, instead placing their faith in the “anti-discriminatory aspects of markets. Black nationalists, on the other hand, represent the oldest ideological challenge to the liberal strain of Black political economic thought and see American liberalism as an inherently racist political-economic project hostile to the existence of Black people A key solution to the amelioration of Black oppression, according to nationalists, is self-determination and for some, cultural, political, economic, and social separation from whites Now I will turn to the fourth tradition, that of radical Black political economic thought.

The Radical Black Political Economy Tradition

The writings, activism, and struggles of Blacks in the U.S. and abroad against the global color line offer a rich and important reservoir of intellectual thought from which Black Studies has developed and can draw upon. In the past decade, several superb volumes have been published that have significantly advanced the field’s understanding of the historical diversity and breadth of Black intellectual thought However, I am concerned here with identifying several key analyses, themes, and goals that have come to constitute the core tenets of the radical Black political economy tradition. The characteristics identified are not meant to be exhaustive. Rather, this review makes the case that a radical Black political economy tradition exists, and is of vital significance to the transformationalist mission of Black Studies through the training of scholar-activists committed to academic rigor and social change.

Radical Black political economy constitutes an intellectual tradition that 1) situates Black political, economic, and cultural experience and conditions within distinct historical epochs of global capitalism; 2) critically interrogates inter and intra-racial gender and class dynamics; 3) is expressly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and 4) is principally concerned with the liberation, not just of Black people, but all people. This definition is similar to the tradition of radical Blackness as theorized by Charisse Burden-Stelly, who distinguishes it from the more familiar concept, the Black radical tradition. While the Black radical tradition described by Cedric Robinson, “emphasizes racial-cultural challenges to international racial oppression,” the tradition of radical Blackness, according to Burden-Stelly, seeks to forefront:

Black communist, socialist, and leftist analyses of the structural and material conditions of local, national, and global Blackness and efforts to imagine and bring into being liberating possibilities for all oppressed people. It centers critical political economy analysis, attends to intra-racial class conflict and antagonism, theorizes the international character of Blackness as a special condition of surplus value extraction, and strives for the eventual overthrow of capitalism

A central characteristic, therefore, which differentiates the radical Black political economy tradition I explore from the other aforementioned schools of Black political economic thought is its critical analysis and conceptualization of racial capitalism, as “an institutionalized social order, comprised of the mutually constitutive and intersecting structures of class, race, and gender domination. What further congeals this tradition is an avowed liberatory political agenda, which connects the freedom of all people to the destruction of racial capitalism

While classical Marxism has appropriately been critiqued as a political economic ideology that is both Eurocentric and subordinates issues of race, gender, and sexual oppression to concerns of class exploitation, it has nevertheless played a critical role in the evolution of Black political economic thought, gaining particular currency in the U.S. after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia When consumed, engaged, and practiced in and by Black communities worldwide, Marxism has been refashioned, albeit contentiously, to fit their distinct socio-historical and geographical conditions. Indeed, as Martinican poet, anti-imperial activist, and founding figure of the Negritude Movement, Aime Cesaire proclaimed when he resigned from the Communist Party in 1956, “What I demand of Marxism and Communism is that they serve the black peoples, not that black peoples serve Marxism and Communism. Concerns about racial and colonial oppression moved many African intellectuals, activists, and leaders to embrace Marxism and develop an international political vision and practice which saw “African and Asian liberation as the driving forces of proletarian revolution. Thus, the radical Black political economy tradition emerged out of both political struggle and analytic necessity–against the virulent racism of white Marxists and socialists, to examine “the contradictions of race and class” in order to “build a political movement based on both the racial oppression of African Americans and their concentration at the bottom of [the] economic ladder of American society.

Key Debates and Concepts in Radical Black Political Economy: Toward a Structural Analysis of Race, Gender, and Class

Much like today, Black radicals have fought, sometimes bitterly, over the extent to which race or class consciousness should inform analyses of capitalist relations and political organizing. This tension is sometimes referred to as the “Nationalist/ Marxist” debate An even greater challenge for this tradition has been its engagement with gender and sexuality as concepts of serious analytical and theoretical import. Patricia Hill Collins correctly observed that “moving toward a gendered analysis of Black political economy requires much more diligence than simply reforming preexisting paradigms by adding Black women’s experiences to them. Instead … the very categories of analysis require a more thorough transformation … These debates and tensions, which are explored below, represent but a few that have animated and advanced radical Black political economic thought.

During the early twentieth century, Black radicals like Chandler Owens and A. Philip Randolph were persuaded by the standard Socialist Party line that “[r]acism was merely a feature of capitalism— kill the latter and the former would wither away. This view held that organizing against white supremacy and forging all-Black labor unions was reactionary, and constituted a distraction from the central task of building a global, interracial working-class movement aimed at abolishing the capitalist-laborer relationship. “[T]he history of the labor movement in America,” writes Owens and Randolph in their newspaper the Messenger, “proves that the employing class recognizes no race lines. Class, in this traditional Marxist formulation, was more significant than race. This brand of Marxist thought, which Randolph would eventually jettison, organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, has been viewed with skepticism by many within the radical Black tradition, concerned that calls for class unity are used strategically to defend, if not expand, white racial supremacy. This skepticism, coupled with the Socialist Party’s demonstrated hostility to racial equality and Black workers, would force Randolph and others prominent Black radicals like Hubert Harrison, founder of the first Black political organization during the New Negro Movement, the Liberty League of Negro-Americans and publisher of The Voice, to defect from the party.

Bringing to Marxism-Leninism their own “history of black radicalism … found in the autonomous efforts of black organizations to analyze and fight black subordination,” radical Black activists and intellectuals drew on and adopted concepts and frameworks from Marxism, but altered them to fit their own historical and contemporary experiences Harrison, for example, had attempted to appeal to white socialists, arguing that the “Negro is the most ruthlessly exploited working class group in America and declared that the duty of the Socialist Party was to “champion his cause is as clear as day Similarly, Cyril V. Briggs, founder of the monthly newspaper, The Crusader, and The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption, also embodied this tradition seeking to unite characteristics of Marxism and Black nationalism during the post-WWI period. Writing in The Crusader, Briggs argues that “the salvation of the Negro” rests upon “the establishment of a strong, stable, independent Negro state … in Africa or elsewhere; and … through the establishment of a universal socialist co-operative commonwealth. Yet, the failure of early socialist parties to effectively address the concerns articulated by Black radicals like Briggs and Harrison by addressing racial oppression head-on would lead Harrison to begin advocating more strongly for “racialism, race-consciousness, racial solidarity.

Harrison, “the leading voice of Harlem radicalism, rejected the traditional socialist line that ending class conflict necessarily meant the abolition of racism. For this intellectual giant, racism might have been a rationalization or justification for capitalist oppression, but it had morphed into a more intractable system that had to be addressed on its own grounds, not indirectly. “The economic subjection is without exception keener and more brutal when the exploited are black, brown, and yellow, than when they are white. Demonstrating an early international analysis combining race and class, Harrison forcefully argued that nonwhite people across the world were found to “exploit each other brutally whenever Capitalism has created the economic classes of plutocrat and proletarian” which “should suffice to put purely economic subjection out of court as the prime cause of racial unrest. In other words, as capitalist institutions took root and matured in colonized regions of the globe, including the U.S., it had consequences for the intraracial social relations of the colonized. Thus, his analysis anticipates the future critiques of “racial custodianship” offered by Adolph Reed almost eighty years later An indispensable contribution to radical Black political economy, though at times neglected, is the theory of “triple oppression,” what today is often called intersectionality. Race and class debates, while passionately focused on “the Negro Question,” have often been silent and at times hostile to “the Woman Question.” Carol Boyce Davies, a leading scholar of the Black radical tradition, attributed this silence “to the masculinist framings of black radicalism, together with the legacy of Cold War anti-Communism. Her work, as well as that of Erik S. McDuffie among others, reveals the important intellectual contributions that radical Black women have made toward a liberatory Black political economic theory. Claudia Jones’s essay, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women!” is one of the most important articles advancing the radical Black political economy tradition during the middle of the twentieth-century.

In this brilliant piece, Jones, a prominent Trinidadian-born Black Communist, organizer, and theorist, describes the unique position and political role Black domestic women occupied during various periods of history. Her account of the “structural condition of Black women-that of triple exploitation represented a rethinking of the Marxist-Leninist concept of super-exploitation, resolving that Black women were the most exploited social class and, as a result, the most revolutionary. She reminds us that, “the Negro woman, who combines in her the status of worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to this heighted political consciousness. It was racial discrimination, which Jones argues is “prior to, and not equal to, the woman question” that accounted for Black women being almost twice as likely as white women to be working in 1940 Thus, one of the central contributions of radical Black women like Jones to Black political economy lies in their uncovering that “to be ‘Black’ and ‘woman’ was to be subjected to structures of domination through technologies of racialization, marginalization, relegation, sexualized oppression, neglect, social exclusion, and super-exploitation.

Black Studies and Social Transformation

… [T]he future programme for black Americans requires the demise of the capitalist form of exploitation of their labor. It also entails the construction of a new social order …

The transformationalist paradigm within Black Studies calls on the discipline to do more than create and disseminate “new knowledge that illuminates the past and present social, economic, political and educational conditions of African Americans and of all peoples of African descent throughout the diaspora. The essence of this paradigm was captured by the prominent Black political scientist, Charles V. Hamilton, who conducted a national survey of Black student opinions in 1968 and 1969 across sixty-six college campuses in the U.S. He recalls that Black students were rethinking the role of universities in society, imagining them not as a place where a “few black students come and graduate and move up and out (to the suburbs), but where new ideas and techniques are developed for the political and economic benefit of the total black community. In other words, they look to the university, naively or not, as a beginning place for social reform or ‘revolution.’ Those of us committed to the vision that Hamilton captures, particularly the view of Black Studies as a site of revolutionary possibility, must develop Black Studies institutions that promote the history and practice of radical Black political economy and prepare students to pursue a liberatory agenda.

Despite the clear emphasis by many of the discipline’s founding scholars and activists on the significance of political economy training and research as a crucial element of Black Studies, its expansion and orientation over the last fifty years has overwhelmingly privileged the arts and humanities For example, in May 1969, the Institute of the Black World (IBW), which played a central role in the development of Black Studies and often functioned as an “outside evaluator of programs to identify and disseminate the best pedagogy for the field, published a statement titled An Approach to Black Studies In it, the Institute concluded that while “Black Studies is really a field still being born … it has become apparent … that several elements must be a part of any creative, well-structured approach to Black Studies. One of the ten fundamental elements deemed crucial for the development of Black Studies was “continuous research on those contemporary political, economic and social policies which now shape the life of the black community in America and which determine its future. For Council Taylor, A.B. Spellman, Larry Rushing, Abdul Alkalimat, Stephen Henderson, and Vincent Harding – co-founders of the IBW, political economy was essential for Black scholar-activists confronting “racism and colonialism, here and abroad. Yet, thirty-years later, Manning Marable lamented that “too many black studies programs have a tendency to focus too largely on the arts and humanities, and much less on political economy, public policy and urban ethnography.

The marginalization of Black political economy in Black is especially concerning given changes in the world economy during the last half century. In the face of falling profit rates, an oil crisis in 1973, a global recession, increasing radicalism – including anti-colonial struggles across the Third World and social movements within the U.S., rising inflation, and growing debt levels across developing nations, political leaders and the business community searched for solutions to these crises plaguing racial capitalism What slowly emerged was a series of policy decisions, corporate actions and governing approaches guided by an ideology which scholars critical of these developments have characterized as neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is a pervasive ideology which holds that social welfare goals can be maximized through the elimination or privatization of public services, market deregulation, liberalization of trade, debt reduction, cuts in government spending, and increased competition As Darrick Hamilton recently observed in the U.S., the neoliberalization of the U.S. economy has meant that, since 1973, “essentially all of the economic gains from America’s increasing productivity has gone to the elite and upper-middle class, while workers’ real wages have remained roughly flat. These changes, as well as the overall financialization of the global economy, have had devastating consequences for working-class and poor communities, wreaking the greatest havoc on Black communities For example, there is a large body of evidence that shows a principle cause of the Great Recession was predatory lending, and Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s excellent book, Race for Profit, further demonstrates that historical practices of “predatory inclusion” persist to the present

Critical and descriptive analyses of Black life should emphasize the urgent need for a transformationalist Black Studies, a disciplinary project committed to dismantling institutions that perpetuate and bolster racial capitalism and its pernicious outcomes, including mass incarceration and state-sanctioned murders of Black people, predatory inclusion, privatization of public assets and services, and other systematic modes of racial domination that expand white wealth and privilege Given this twenty-first century reality, Black Studies scholars must be equipped with a capacious understanding of economic history and analytic lenses that draw on the contributions and insights of Black scholar-activists, particularly those from the Black Left, for whom political economy was indispensable to their worldview and political practice.

Conclusion

Foundational to the radical Black political economy tradition is the recognition that the world capitalist system that has expanded from Europe since the late fourteenth-century century is marked by a distinct racial and hetero-patriarchal character. The origins of Black radicalism rest upon “a shared epistemology among diverse African people” and “shows that the first waves of African New World revolts were not governed by a critique structured by Western conceptions of freedom but a total rejection of enslavement and racism as it was experienced. Since that time, Black intellectual, activists, and organizers had developed a critical understanding of oppression and resistance through their engagement with Marxist-Leninist thought and organizations, decolonial movements, and recent struggles against the neoliberal structures of global capitalism. Their experience and thought point to the limitations of standard political-economic frameworks that subordinate race, gender, and sexuality to the “real” social issue of class conflict.

Today, basic steps can be taken to more fully incorporate and model this radical tradition of Black political economy within Black Studies. These include the creation of courses, the hiring of faculty in the social sciences – particularly those whose research agenda forefronts Black political economic theories and frameworks, and importantly, cultivating stronger connections with communities outside of the ebony tower. Requiring first-year undergraduate and graduate students to take a Black political economy course will not only expose them to critical Black intellectual thought, but provide an early conceptualization of “the root-the historical, political, social, cultural, ideological, material, economic root-of oppression in order to understand its negation, the prospect of our liberation. Teaching these courses requires faculty whose research is guided by a materialist method, which can be practiced by scholars with a variety of research foci. Finally, Black Studies departments, faculty, and students should clarify their relationship to workers struggles on and off campus, as Barbara Ransby suggested in the midst of Black student uprising in 2016. We need an agenda, she declared, that demands a “radical recalibration of what universities owe-and not only to students and faculty, but also to campus workers and to communities beyond the campus.