Abolition Is Another Name for Communism

Contemporary scholarship on racial capitalism is deeply indebted to Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism; in fact, the term racial capitalism is nearly synonymous with Robinson's work. The most common distillation of Robinson's argument is something along the lines of, "race preceded capitalism, thus capitalism has always been racial." While this pithy reading is a useful rejoinder to deracinated Marxist histories, it does not do justice to the range of Black Marxist (let alone Black Marxist) thinking on the topic. Robinson was participating in a long tradition of Black theorizing on how race could rewrite Marxist origin stories.

This paper will examine the ways that Black socialists, Communists, and Marxists framed the relationship between race and capitalism between the 1880s and 1980s, beginning with newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune and ending with Robinson. My claim is that this work offers at once more complex and more useful accounts of how race operates in Marxist histories than the shorthand for racial capitalism ("capitalism has always been racial"). Fortune, for example, wrote in 1884, "We are with the people. Nihilism in Russia, Communism in Germany and in France, Irish contention in Great Britain, and Abolitionism (another term for Communism) in the United States, are only synonyms for resistance by the people to the tyranny and corruption of the Government,—whether it be imperial, monarchical, or constitutional government.” In Fortune's formulation, the idea that the struggle to abolish slavery was another term for Communism is richly suggestive in ways that exceed the more familiar race first / class first questions. His words invite readers to imagine what the possibilities such a juxtaposition holds, not unlike W.E.B. Du Bois' more well-known description of enslaved people fleeing plantations as a "general strike."