![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
From the 1980s onward, Manning Marable remained one of the most important Marxist theorists in the U.S. This article argues that Marable's notion of “Socialism from Below” encapsulates his vision of democratic socialism as an egalitarian, humanist pursuit with profound relevance for black mass movements and the fight for racial justice in the U.S. and around the world. It identifies some of the important influences upon Marable's conception of Marxism, outlining the major thinkers in Marable's radical “genealogy,” including Lenin, Gramsci, C. L. R. James, and Walter Rodney. It argues that Marable's scholarship-activism and political outlook, based heavily upon Gramsci's theory of the “war of position,” sought to universalize and democratize Marxism-Leninism, shearing the tradition of its elitist, authoritarian, doctrinaire, and vanguardist elements while highlighting the benefits to anti-racist movements of materialist analysis and class struggle led by workers, minorities, poor people, and other exploited groups.
Notes
Manning Marable, Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 13.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 40.
For a discussion of Marable's Marxist politics, see Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 223–226.
See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]).
Marable's “left-nationalist” sensibilities were particularly influenced by Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
Marable Speaking Truth to Power, 9, 252.
For a discussion of black nationalist politics in the 1970s, see Marable, “Through the Prism of Race and Class: Black Nationalism Since the Civil Rights Movement,” in Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class Consciousness and Revolution (Dayton, OH: Black Praxis Press, 1981), 93–128; also see chapter six of Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi).
Marable, Black Liberation in Conservative America (Boston: South End Press, 1997), 9.
See Marable, “Through the Prism of Race and Class.” Marable later wrote of black American politics in the 1970s that, “The Left, broadly defined, was the most fragile and chaotic of all the competing factions.” See Marable, From the Grassroots: Social and Political Essays Towards Afro-American Liberation (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 43; Also see Marable, “On Being Black: The Burden of Race and Class,” in Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader, ed. Russell Rickford (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011), 23.
Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 137.
Marable, African & Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to Maurice Bishop (London: Verso, 1987), 2.
Marable, “Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists,” in Socialist Perspectives, eds. Phyllis and Julius Jacobson (New York: Karz-Cohl Publishing, 1983), 77.
Marble, Speaking Truth to Power, 13.
Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000 [1983]), 14; Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 103–104; Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 8–9. See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); and Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948).
Marable, “A Humane Society is Possible Through Struggle,” in Talking About A Revolution, ed. South End Press Collective (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), 86; Marble, Speaking Truth to Power, 15; Marable, “The Political and Theoretical Contexts of the Changing Racial Terrain,” in Beyond Boundaries, 282.
Marable, Blackwater, 194; Marable, “Introduction: Black Studies and the Racial Mountain,” in Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience, ed. Manning Marable (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000), 19; Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 32–33; Black Liberation, 10.
Marable, Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (London: Verso, 1985), 6–7, 24.
See, for example, Marable, “The Third Reconstruction: Black Nationalism and Race Relations after the Revolution,” in Blackwater.
Marable, Blackwater 125 (notes).
See “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth.
Qtd in Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 107; Also see Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1974), 258.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 14, 16.
Ibid., 253; Marable, “Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists,” 81–82.
Marable, Black American Politics, vii.
Marable, From the Grassroots, 3.
Marable and Leith Mullings, “Introduction: Resistance, Reform and Renewal in the Black Experience,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, eds. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), xx–xxi; Marable, Black Leadership (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998): xii; qtd. in Speaking Truth to Power, 22.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 22.
See Karl Marx, Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1867]).
Ibid., 279; Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 35.
Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 32, 34; Marable, “Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists.”.
Marable, “Socialist Vision and Political Struggle for the 1990s” in Beyond Boundaries, 247–248.
See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1975 [1852]).
Marable, Black Liberation, 9.
Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 137–138.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 250–251.
Qtd in Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 270.
Ibid., 36–37.
Marable, Black American Politics, 55.
Manning Marable, Immanuel Ness, and Joseph Wilson, “Introduction: Race and Labor: The New American Paradigm in a Global Economy,” in Race and Labor Matters in the New U.S. Economy, eds. Manning Marable, Immanuel Ness, and Joseph Wilson (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2006), 5.
See Vladimir Ilich Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1969 [1902]).
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 251.
See Vladimir Ilich Lenin, The State and Revolution (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1978 [1917]).
Marable, “Socialist Vision and Political Struggle for the 1990s,” 248.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 251.
Marable, “Socialist Vision and Political Struggle for the 1990s,” 248, 253; Marable contended that, “Adherence to revolutionary spontaneity, if advanced abstractly, seriously underestimates the contradictions which exist within the political cultures of working people: e.g., the traditional religious hostility to the ‘atheism’ of Marxism, the petty-bourgeois entrepreneurialism and consumerism which is constantly projected by the capitalist-owned media, the materialistic sociocultural values which are antithetical to progressive social change” (African & Caribbean Politics, 269).
Qtd in Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 224.
See Antonio Gramsci, Selections From The Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
Marable, Black Liberation, 31; Marable, Blackwater 194–195; for a thorough exploration of Gramsci's political life, see Carl Boggs, The Two Revolutions: Antonio Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (Boston: South End Press, 1984).
Marable, From the Grassroots, 89.
Ibid., 7.
Qtd in Marable, Blackwater, 171; see also Antonio Gramsci, “Socialism and Culture,” in History, Philosophy and Culture in the Young Gramsci, eds. Pedro Cavalcanti and Paul Piccone (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975).
Qtd in Marable, Blackwater, 183; for another Marable reference to “war of position,” see Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002), xv.
Marable, Black Leadership, 98–99.
Marable, “A Humane Society is Possible Through Struggle,” 94.
Marable, Black Marxism, 68; Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (New York: Verso, 1991 [1987]), 141.
Anthony Bogues, Caliban's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997): 168; Marable, Black Marxism, xiv, xix.
Dawson, Black Visions, 7; for a discussion of the shift in the direction of revolutionary influence from west to east, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Preface to Black Marxism, xiii.
Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets (London: Routledge, 2003), 13; Robin D. G. Kelley, “The World the Diaspora Made: C.L.R. James and the Politics of History,” in Rethinking C.L.R. James, ed. Grant Farred (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 104–105; Dawson, Black Visions, 5.
For an overview of black Marxist politics in the U.S. during the 1970s, see Dawson, Black Visions, 229; Qtd in Marable, Black Marxism, 184.
Marable, Black Leadership, 42–43.
For Du Bois as sympathetic critic of Marx, see Marable, How Capitalism, 15; and Dawson, Black Visions, 229. For a glimpse of Marable and Du Bois's commitment to an independent vision of Marxism, see Marable, “Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists,” 75; and Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), 108–109.
Qtd in Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, 112; see also Marable, Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006), 67; Marable, Black Marxism, 236.
Marable, Black Leadership, 44.
See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1903]); and Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 1992 [1935]).
Marable, Black Reconstruction, 16.
Marable, Living Black History, 115.
Marable, Blackwater, 193; Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 104; Marable, How Capitalism, 11.
Qtd in Marable, “Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists,” 77; see also Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, ix.
Marable, Black American Politics, x, 7; Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 199; Marable, Living Black History, xv.
Marable, “A Humane Society is Possible Through Struggle,” 82.S.
See James and Grace Lee Boggs, “A Critical Reminiscence,” in C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, 177.
Qtd in Basil Wilson, “The Caribbean Revolution,” in C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, 128.
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1938]); also see Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996): 37; and Brett St. Louis, Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics: C. L. R. James' Critique of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 33.
Qtd in Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), 99.
Marable, “Socialist Vision and Political Struggle for the 1990s,” 249.
Also see, Amílcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); and Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).
See, for example, Marable, Black American Politics, 22. For a discussion of the concept of “class suicide,” see Kelley, “The World the Diaspora Made,” 110.
Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 240.
Qtd in Patrick Chabal, Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People's War (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003 [1983]), 182; for another discussion of Cabral's politics, see Jock McCulloch, In the Twilight of Revolution: The Political Theory of Amilcar Cabral (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
See the dedication of Marable, How Capitalism, xx–xxi; for a discussion of Rodney and Black Power, see Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (New York: Verso, 1988), 150.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 11; Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 177; for Rodney's lectures to working-class audiences, see Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1975).
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 9.
See Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982 [1972]).
Qtd in Dawson, Black Visions, 215.
For Rodney's outlook on Pan Africanism, see Walter Rodney, “The African Revolution,” in C. L. R. James: His Life and Work, ed. Paul Buhle (New York: Allison & Busby, 1986), 37; for evidence of Rodney's influence on Marable, see Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 210; and Marable, Black American Politics, 61–62, 73; for more on Rodney, see Walter Rodney, Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990).
Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, viii–ix; Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 18–20; Marable, Immanuel Ness, and Joseph Wilson, “Introduction: Race and Labor: The New American Paradigm in a Global Economy,” 5.
Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, “Introduction: Blackness Beyond Boundaries: Navigating the Political Economy of Global Inequities,” in Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line, eds. Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 5–6; Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 15–16; How Capitalism, xxiii–xxiv; Marable, Beyond Black and White, 25; Marable, Black Liberation, 3–5.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 252.
Marable, Beyond Black and White, 213.
Marable, Blackwater, 179–180.
Marable, How Capitalism, xxxiv; Marable, Living Black History, xv.
Worcester, C.L.R. Jones, 203; for more on James's influence on the young radicals of Marable's generation, see Marable, Black Marxism, 285; and Buhle, The Artist as Revolutionary, 155.
Marable, Black Liberation, 9.
Qtd in Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 181; for a discussion of James's critiques of Rodney, see Worcester, C.L.R. James, 203.
Qtd in Marable, African & Caribbean Politics, 149.
Marable, From the Grassroots, 50; Marable, “Through the Prism of Race and Class.”.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 250, 271.
Marable, Black American Politics, 70.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 278; Marable, Blackwater 179–183.
Marable, Blackwater, 184.
Paul Buhle made this observation about James's mission. See Buhle, “Marxism in the U.S.A.,” in Marable, C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, 83.
Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, 279.
See, for example, Marable, From the Grassroots, 90.
Marable, Blackwater, 9.
Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (London: Verso, 1996), ix.
Marable, How Capitalism, 262; Marable insisted that, “Each revolution, like each human being, is original and unique” (From the Grassroots, 17); Walter Rodney took a similar position, arguing that “one has to be very careful that what comes out of the last most successful revolution doesn't become the dictum for everybody else,” and urging radicals to “make your own revolution” (Walter Rodney Speaks, 84); Anthony Bogues cautions us against the common error of regarding the thought of black intellectuals as primarily derivative. See Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, 2.
Marable, How Capitalism, xv.
Marable, Blackwater, 192.