Political Economy and the Tradition of Radical Black Study

Abstract

A 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.¹ While Black Studies inherited this distinct political economic tradition, the status of political economy frameworks in the field is marginal. Because Black communities have produced a unique political economy tradition borne from necessity, study, and an incessant will toward freedom, this tradition must occupy a greater role in the work and practice of Black Studies. As a contribution toward that vital goal, I will introduce and analyze several key concepts, theories, and debates that have animated the radical Black political economy tradition. Based on my brief reflections on the lives, work, and politics of several radical Black scholar-activists within and beyond the U.S., I conclude by discussing how their ideas can serve the transformationalist vision of Black Studies.

Keywords:

• Black political economy
• Black radicalism
• racial capitalism
• Black Studies
• Black political thought

Notes

Notes

1 Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999), 1–2.

2 Ibid.

3 See Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003), 102–3, which details Amiri Baraka’s infusion of Marxist-Leninst thought with his cultural nationalism and the education he received by William Watkins regarding Marx’s theory of surplus value.

4 Dawson, however, recognizes six distinct “African American political ideologies”: radical egalitarianism, disillusioned liberalism, Black Marxism, Black conservatism, Black feminism, and Black Nationalism. Like Dawson, I combine radical egalitarianism and disillusioned liberalism as various “shades” of Black liberalism, Despite their tensions, I also collapse Black feminism and Black Marxism under the banner of a “radical” strain of Black political economic thought, and maintain the autonomy of Black Nationalism, despite its distinct influence on all forms of Black political economic thought, especially its obvious influences on the radical Black tradition.

5 Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 14.

6 W.E.B. DuBois is an example of a scholar-activist whose thought evolved over time and occupied multiple ideological traditions, at times simultaneously. See Robert Gooding-Williams, “W.E.B. Du Bois,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/dubois/

7 Dawson, Black Visions, 240.

8 The “shades” or types of Black liberals vary considerably, but are broadly united by their belief that liberal democratic capitalism can be reformed to fully incorporate Black people. Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Ralph Bunche (post-1940s), Martin Luther King, Jr., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), William Julius Wilson, Julianne Malveaux, Barack Obama, and others are examples of this political economic tradition.

9 Ibid., 20. Examples of Black Conservatives: Booker T. Washington, Thomas Sowell, Paris Dennard, and Shelby Steele.

10 Ibid., 85.

11 Ibid., 87; Examples of Black nationalists: Martin Delaney, Malcolm X, Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), Molefi Asante.

12 Mia E. Bay et al., eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Adolph Reed and Kenneth W. Warren, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, 1st ed. (Boulder, CO: Routledge, 2009); Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer, eds., New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018).

13 Charisse Burden-Stelly, “W.E.B. DuBois in the Tradition of Radical Blackness: Radicalism, Repression, and Mutual Comradeship, 1930–1960,” Socialism and Democracy 32, no. 3 (2018): 190.

14 Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” New Left Review 86 (March 2014): 67.

15 The National Race and Capitalism Project has been doing very important work in this tradition: https://www.raceandcapitalism.com/

16 Kelley, “‘The Negro Question’: Red Dreams of Black Liberation,” Freedom Dreams, 44.

17 Lucius T. Outlaw, Critical Social Theory in the Interests of Black Folks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2005), 65.

18 Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 4.

19 Dawson, 173; Also see, Kelley, ‘The Negro Question’, 36–59.

20 Abdul Alkalimat, “Black Marxism in the White Academy: The Contours and Contradictions of an Emerging School of Black Thought,” in Paradigms in Black Studies: Intellectual History, Cultural Meaning and Political Ideology (Chicago, IL: Twenty-First Century Books and Publications, 1990), 205.

21 Patricia Hill Collins, “Gender, Black Feminism, and Black Political Economy,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568, (2000): 52.

22 Kelley, ‘The Negro Question’, 41.

23 Randolph quote in Dawson, 2001, 179.

24 Ibid., 174.

25 Hubert Harrison, “Socialism and the Negro,” In A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 73.

26 Ibid., 73.

27 Curtis Stokes, “Malcolm X and the Struggle for Socialism in the United States,” Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015), 233.

28 Harrison, “Two Negro Radicalisms,” A Hubert Harrison Reader, 102.

29 Jeffrey B. Perry Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 394.

30 Ibid., 103.

31 Ibid., 104.

32 Adolph Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era, 1st ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 18.

33 Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 14.

34 Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Cold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 19, no. 2 (2017): 218.

35 Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women!” “I Think of My Mother: Notes on the Life and Times of Claudia Jones” (London: Karia Press, 1985), 115.

36 Ibid., 115, 105.

37 Burden-Stelly, “Cold War Culturalism,” 219.

38 Lloyd Hogan, Principles of Black Political Economy (Abingdon: Routledge, 1984), 166.

39 Darlene Clark Hine, “The Black Studies Movement: Afrocentric-Traditionalist-Feminist Paradigms for the Next Stage,” The Black Scholar 22, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 11.

40 Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 22.

41 Patrick L. Mason and Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji, “Excavating for Economics in Africana Studies,” Journal of Black Studies 38, no. 5 (May 1, 2008): 731–57, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934707310293.

42 Derrick E. White, “An Independent Approach to Black Studies: The Institute of the Black World (IBW) and its Evaluation and Support of Black Studies,” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 1 (March 2012), 71.

43 Statement of the Planning Staff, An Approach to Black Studies (May 1969), http://alkalimat.org/062%201969%20an%20approach%20to%20black%20studies.pdf

44 Ibid., 2–3.

45 Ibid., 4.

46 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review (March 7, 2016), http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle.

47 Ibid., Manning Marable, “A Debate on Activism in Black Studies; A Plea That Scholars Act Upon, Not Just Interpret, Events,” New York Times, April 4, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/04/arts/a-debate-on-activism-in-black-studies-a-plea-that-scholars-act-upon-not.html.

48 Charisse Burden-Stelly, “The Absence of Political Economy in African Diaspora Studies,” Black Perspectives, March 20, 2018. https://www.aaihs.org/the-absence-of-political-economy-in-african-diaspora-studies/

49 Dawson, 35–7; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalsim (Oxford Press, 2005).

50 See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).

51 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalsim, 160–5.

52 Darrick Hamilton, “Neoliberalism and Race,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, no. 53, (Summer 2019).

53 Jamie Peck, “Financializing Detroit,” Economic Geography 92, no. 3, (2016).

54 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 17.

55 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010); Michael C. Dawson and Megan Ming Francis, “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order,” Public Culture 28, no. 1 78 (January 1, 2016): 23–62, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-3325004; Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2011).

56 Robin D. G. Kelley, foreword to Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, by Cedric J. Robinson (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xiv.

57 Kelly, “Black Study”.

58 Barbara Ransby, “Forum Response: Black Study, Black Struggle,” (March 7, 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

AJ Rice

AJ Rice received his PhD in African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. He is currently a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of California Los Angeles. His research interests include Black politics, global urban studies, Black Studies, racial capitalism, and the political economy of Black dispossession.