Letters from Tomis

My Socialist Hall of Fame

During this chaotic era of vile rhetoric and manipulative tactics from our so-called bourgeois leaders, I am invigorated by the opportunity to reflect on Socialists, Revolutionaries, Philosophers, Guerrilla Leaders, Partisans, and Critical Theory titans, champions, and martyrs who paved the way for us—my own audacious “Socialism’s Hall of Fame.” These are my heroes and fore-bearers. Not all are perfect, or even fully admirable, but all contributed in some way to our future–either as icons to emulate, or as warnings to avoid in the future.

Introduction

Cedric James Robinson (1940–2016) was a radical political theorist, historian, and Black Studies scholar whose work revolutionized the study of race, capitalism, and Western political thought. A central figure in the development of Black Marxism and a founding intellectual of the Black Radical Tradition, Robinson challenged dominant historical narratives and theoretical paradigms by foregrounding the epistemologies, cultures, and resistance practices of African peoples globally. His scholarship remains foundational across a range of disciplines including political theory, African American studies, sociology, and postcolonial thought.

Early Life and Education

Born in Oakland, California, as Cedric James Hill in 1940 to working-class African American parents, Robinson grew up immersed in the social and political struggles of mid-20th century Black life in the United States. His parents were politically conscious and introduced him to labor organizing, Black internationalism, and anticolonial thought. He attended the University of California, Berkeley during the height of the civil rights movement, where he was active in campus politics and earned a B.A. in social anthropology. He later pursued graduate studies at Stanford University before completing his doctorate in political theory at the University of Sussex in England.

Robinson’s time in the United Kingdom shaped his early intellectual development and exposed him to European leftist debates and anti-imperialist struggles in Africa and the Caribbean. His doctoral work focused on African politics and the crisis of postcolonial sovereignty, which led to his first book, The Terms of Order (1980).

Theoretical Contributions

The Terms of Order (1980)

Robinson’s first major work, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, was a critical intervention in political science. In it, he challenged the Eurocentric and formalist assumptions of liberal political theory, particularly its emphasis on hierarchy, rationalism, and individualism. Drawing on a broad array of African political and cultural traditions, Robinson proposed a theory of political life that recognized diverse ontologies and collective forms of authority. The book laid the groundwork for his later critiques of Western modernity and rationality, and it offered a rigorous philosophical deconstruction of the Western political canon.

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983)

Robinson’s magnum opus, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, remains one of the most influential and debated works in critical race theory and Marxist historiography. In this groundbreaking study, Robinson argued that the development of European capitalism was not a progressive break from feudalism but a continuation of a racialized order of domination rooted in “racialism.” Robinson introduced the concept of racial capitalism, contending that capitalism did not become racial later but was racial from its inception, structured by European notions of hierarchy and civilizational difference.

The second, and perhaps most influential, part of Black Marxism traced the genealogy of a distinct Black radical tradition—one that emerged not from proletarian class struggle alone but from African and African diasporic cultural and political practices of resistance. Focusing on figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright, Robinson argued that Black radicalism was grounded in collective historical memory, spiritual worldviews, and modes of opposition that predated and exceeded European Marxist frameworks.

Robinson did not reject Marxism wholesale; rather, he interrogated its Eurocentric foundations and called for a more expansive, culturally rooted analysis of revolutionary struggle. His work created space for the articulation of anti-capitalist critique that accounted for racial slavery, colonialism, and the epistemic violence of Eurocentrism.

Racial Capitalism

Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism has since become a touchstone for scholars analyzing the intertwined logics of race and class. The concept has been influential across disciplines, serving as a foundation for understanding the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism, labor exploitation, and global inequality through a lens that sees racial differentiation as essential, not incidental, to capital accumulation. His work anticipated many of the debates now central to intersectionality, decolonial theory, and contemporary critiques of neoliberalism.

Black Radical Tradition

Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition constituted a major epistemological shift in the study of political resistance. This tradition, he argued, was not a derivative of Western political thought but a unique historical formation grounded in African diasporic resistance to enslavement, colonialism, and white supremacy. He emphasized its moral and metaphysical dimensions—its emphasis on justice, collective dignity, and human liberation—as forms of radical consciousness developed in struggle.

Rather than locating revolutionary agency solely in the proletariat, Robinson insisted on the centrality of cultural memory, spirituality, and indigenous knowledge systems. He positioned the Black Radical Tradition as both a site of historical continuity and a living practice that could animate contemporary liberation movements. His insistence on the dignity and autonomy of African diasporic knowledge profoundly influenced Black Studies, cultural theory, and historiography.

Later Work and Public Intellectualism

In subsequent works, Robinson extended his critiques of Eurocentrism, violence, and empire. An Anthropology of Marxism (2001) offered a withering assessment of Marxism as a European intellectual tradition that failed to account for non-Western epistemologies. In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007), he turned his attention to media, film, and public memory, analyzing how cultural institutions erase or distort Black political resistance.

Robinson was also a prolific essayist and mentor. He helped build the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he taught from 1978 until his death. He co-founded the Third World News Review, a public affairs program that aired for decades, and worked closely with activists and students. His pedagogy emphasized intellectual humility, ethical responsibility, and radical curiosity.

Legacy and Influence

Cedric J. Robinson’s work continues to resonate across political and intellectual movements. His ideas are cited by scholars and organizers in movements ranging from Black Lives Matter to anti-imperialist and decolonial struggles worldwide. Racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition have become central frameworks for analyzing historical and contemporary injustices.

Robinson’s work has inspired a new generation of scholars—Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Y. Davis, and others—who carry forward his vision of critical scholarship and emancipatory politics. In the wake of renewed global struggles against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation, his insistence on grounding political theory in the lived experiences and epistemologies of oppressed peoples feels more urgent than ever.

Robinson’s work stands not just as critique, but as an invitation: to recover submerged traditions of resistance, to think outside imperial frames of knowledge, and to build new worlds from the ashes of the old.

Select Bibliography

Major Works by Cedric J. Robinson

• Robinson, Cedric J. The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership. SUNY Press, 1980.

• ———. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Zed Press, 1983; Revised ed., University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

• ———. An Anthropology of Marxism. Ashgate, 2001.

• ———. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Selected Secondary Sources

• Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press, 2002.

• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Race and Globalization.” Antipode 40.1 (2008): 1–2.

• Kelley, Robin D.G. “Introduction.” In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Revised Ed., University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

• Ferguson, Roderick A. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

• Campt, Tina, et al. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. MIT Press, 2021.

• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, and Jordan T. Camp. “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.” Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Verso, 2017.