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Review of African Political Economy

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The Africana paradigm in Capital: the

debts of Karl Marx to people of African
descent
a
Biko Agozino
a
Africana Studies Program, Department of Sociology, Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University, Virginia Tech,
Blacksburg, VA, USA
Published online: 29 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Biko Agozino (2014) The Africana paradigm in Capital: the debts of Karl
Marx to people of African descent, Review of African Political Economy, 41:140, 172-184, DOI:
10.1080/03056244.2013.872613

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 Review of African Political Economy, 2014
Vol. 41, No. 140, 172 –184, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.872613

The Africana paradigm in Capital: the debts of Karl Marx to people

of African descent
∗
Biko Agozino

Africana Studies Program, Department of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

This article will attempt an original interpretation of Capital (Marx, K. 1867. Capital: A
Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1995, 1999. http://
Downloaded by [Virginia Tech Libraries] at 10:39 21 May 2014

www.marxists.org/archive/marx) and other major works of Karl Marx to demonstrate

that people of African descent are central to the discourse of Marx, contrary to
widespread misconceptions by critics who attribute a Eurocentric orientation to Marx
because of the accident of his birth in Europe and by allies because of his scholarly
activism in European working-class politics. The paper argues that the earlier work of
Marx and Engels ([1847] 1969. The Manifesto of the Communist Party in Marx/
Engels Selected Works, Vol. One, pp. 98 –137. Moscow: Progress Publishers),
especially the Manifesto of the Communist Party, may have misled critics into
believing that the history of all hitherto existing society alluded to by Marx and
Engels was exclusively European history. On the contrary, there are hundreds of
references to the ‘Negro’ in Capital, not as part of a peripheral or superficial concern
relating to the issue of class exploitation in Europe, but as a foundational model for
explaining and predicting the ending of the exploitation of the working class globally.
The paper concludes that this reading adds credence to Africana Studies paradigms
that privilege critical, Africa-centred scholar-activism as an important contribution to
original theoretical, methodological and policy innovations.
Keywords: Marx; Capital; Africa; Africana Studies; slavery; colonialism

[Le paradigme africain dans Le capital.] Cet article va tenter une interprétation originale
du Capital ((Marx, K. 1867. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Marx/
Engels Internet Archive, 1995, 1999. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx) et
d’autres travaux majeurs de Marx pour montrer que les populations d’origine
africaine sont très importantes dans le discours de Karl Marx, contrairement aux idées
fausses largement répandues par les détracteurs de Marx, qui lui attribuent une
orientation euro-centrée en raison du hasard de sa naissance en Europe et, par
extension, en raison de son activisme intellectuel dans les politiques des classes
ouvrières européennes. L’article soutient que le travail antérieur de Marx et d’Engels
([1847] 1969. The Manifesto of the Communist Party in Marx/Engels Selected Works,
Vol. One, pp. 98 –137. Moscow: Progress Publishers), en particulier le Manifeste du
parti communiste, pourrait avoir induit en erreur les détracteurs de Marx et leur avoir
fait croire que l’histoire de la société existante jusqu’à présent, à laquelle font allusion
Marx et Engels, était exclusivement européenne. Au contraire, il y a plusieurs
centaines de références au « nègre » dans Le Capital, non dans le cadre d’un intérêt
mineur ou superficiel lié à la question de l’exploitation des classes en Europe, mais
dans le cadre d’un modèle fondamental pour expliquer et prévoir la fin de
l’exploitation de la classe ouvrière au niveau mondial. L’article conclut que cette
lecture ajoute du crédit aux paradigmes des Études africaines qui privilégient

∗
Email: agozino@vt.edu

# 2014 ROAPE Publications Ltd

 Review of African Political Economy 173

l’activisme intellectuel critique, centré sur l’Afrique dans les bourses d’étude, comme
une contribution importante aux innovations originales théoriques, méthodologiques
et politiques.
Mots-clés : Marx ; Capital ; Afrique ; Études africaines ; esclavage ; colonialisme

Marxism is a Western construction – a conceptualization of human affairs and historical devel-

opment that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn,
through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures. Certainly its philosophical
origins are decidedly Western. But the same must be said of its analytical assumptions, its his-
torical perspective, its points of view. (Robinson, 1983, 2)

So much for the state of Marx’s and Engels’ historical knowledge. . . . It was . . . thin on pre-
history, on primitive communal societies and on pre-Columbian America, and virtually non-
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existent on Africa. (Hobsbawm 2011, 142)

Introduction
There is a scandal in social thought: namely, the assumption of the primitive accumulation
of social thought from the ‘rest of us’ by the West which proceeds by appropriating some
indigenous thoughts and representing them as part of a universal logocentric Western tra-
dition in hierarchical relationship with the Oriental. The rest of us react to this scandal
either by denying any centricity in our own culture and history and embracing Occidental-
ism wholeheartedly, as Fukuyama did when he declared that only Western cultural ideals
were worthy of longings at ‘the end of history’, only to be debunked by Derrida (1994),
or by rejecting Eurocentrism as ethnocentric and embracing nationalism unapologetically,
as Karenga (1977) did with the philosophy of Kawaida and the celebration of Kwanzaa.
However, many scholars of African descent, such as Du Bois, George Padmore, Cheikh
Anta Diop, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Samir Amin, Walter Rodney,
C.L.R. James, Stuart Hall, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Molefi Asante, Mualenga Karenga, Terry
Kershaw, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Ify Amadiume, Nkiru Nzegwu, Patricia Hill Collins,
Oyeronke Oyewumi and Jacques Derrida (among others) have been able to reclaim some
of the stolen legacies of people of African descent without losing their centredness in Afri-
cology. Despite the contributions of these giants of African descent, the scandal of Euro-
centric claims to African knowledge systems remains hidden in plain view. Even in the
more Eurocentric Manifesto of the Communist Party, slavery was mentioned 31 times,
mainly with reference to ancient Europe, but at least two of the references were to
former slaveholders from America who were found in Paris. One quotation from the
(African-style) call-and-response section of questions and answers in The Draft of a Com-
munist Confession of Faith by Engels that is included in some editions of the Communist
Manifesto would indicate that Marx and Engels were already looking at the emancipation of
the enslaved as the role model for the emancipation of the worker and not vice versa, as
some Marxists and anti-Marxists presume. Thus, they observed:

Question 10: In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave?
Answer: The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell himself by the day and by
the hour. The slave is the property of one master and for that very reason has a guaranteed sub-
sistence, however wretched it may be. The proletarian is, so to speak, the slave of the entire
bourgeois class, not of one master, and therefore has no guaranteed subsistence, since
 174 B. Agozino

nobody buys his labour if he does not need it. The slave is accounted a thing and not a member
of civil society. The proletarian is recognised as a person, as a member of civil society. The
slave may, therefore, have a better subsistence than the proletarian but the latter stands at a
higher stage of development. The slave frees himself by becoming a proletarian, abolishing
from the totality of property relationships only the relationship of slavery. The proletarian
can free himself only by abolishing property in general. (Marx and Engels [1847] 1969, 38)

This article addresses a curious obsession in Africana Studies or Black Studies, specifically:
the frequent reference to Marxism as a theory that must be rejected (Karenga [1977]
excepted) as Eurocentric, even while being identified as a major perspective adopted by
many scholars in the field of Africana Studies. Molefi Kete Asante summarises the objec-
tion to Marxism thus: ‘It was the European concern with industrialism and capitalism that
gave rise to dialectical materialism (2007, 110). Julius Nyerere was quoted by Shivji (2011)
as teaching Tanzanian critics who dismissed him as unscientific that ‘if Marx had been born
in Sumbawanga [ironically known by radical students as the Tanzanian Siberia . . .], he
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would have come up with the Arusha Declaration instead of Das Capital.’ This suggests
that the methodology of historical materialism is dated and cannot be applied beyond the
time and place of its origin without first being critically transformed. Rare exceptions
include Abdul Alkalimat, who continues to advocate the relevance of the Marxist – Leninist
approach to Africana Studies in particular and to the social sciences in general as ideology-
driven endeavours (Alkalimat 1969, 2011). Similar views were held by Manning Marable
from the perspective of democratic socialism (Marable 1983), following the legacies of Du
Bois, C.L.R. James and Nkrumah.
To Asante, ‘Marx was very much Eurocentric in his focus. There was no global idea to
his initial formulation,’ despite the rallying cry ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ So, to him,
when Marx and Engels proclaimed that the history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles, they must have meant the history of Europe, their manifesto
must have been for the European working classes and would prove problematic if
applied outside Europe, more so when applied within Europe itself. The conclusion to
this argument by Asante is that the field of Africana Studies needs to develop its own the-
ories that would be Afrocentric rather than be content with borrowing from Eurocentric
thinkers (Asante 2007, 110).
The rejectionist references to Marx in Africana Studies are also found in Harold Cruse
(1984), who saw The Crisis of The Negro Intellectual as a crisis of the lack of theoretical
originality and a tendency to parrot thinkers from other cultures. In Black Marxism: The
Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson (1983) focused on how
Marxism came to influence the long-standing black radical tradition especially in the
works of Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Richard Wright. However, Robinson cited only a
letter by Marx in which he stated that understanding the enslavement of Africans was of
crucial importance for the explanation of capitalism. But curiously Robinson said that
this was a ‘slight oversimplification’ without reference to the detailed study of this peculiar
history especially in Capital, Volume 1 and in other major works of Marx. Several chapters
in The African American Studies Reader, edited by Norment (2007), maintain this tradition
of rejectionist references and often without specific citation of specific work by Marx or by
leading Marxists even though Norment rightly listed Marxism as a major perspective in
African American Studies. In the past, many prominent scholars of African descent ident-
ified themselves as Marxists even while reflecting on how to transcend Marxism (as Marx
would have insisted) in the historically specific and concrete struggles of people of African
descent. These include activists and academics such as Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, James,
 Review of African Political Economy 175

Rodney, Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Manning Marable, Cornel West, Samir Amin, Kwame
Toure, Edwin Madunagu, Eskor Toyo, Ola Oni, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Claudia Jones
and Chris Hani. Defending the Marxist roots of the theory of Kawaida that gave rise to
the cultural revolution known as Kwanzaa, Karenga pointed out the diversity of origin
and eclecticism in Marxism (Karenga 1977, 138).
Surprisingly, no one has written to say how much Marxism itself was influenced by the
struggles of people of African descent, despite hundreds of references by Marx to those
struggles as being central to his theoretical concerns. This article is not asking about
what Marxism could contribute to Africana struggles but what Africana struggles did con-
tribute to the thinking of Marx himself. ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist,’ Marx himself
said repeatedly, especially after some French revolutionaries started using violent means
and calling themselves Marxists whereas Marx and Engels stipulated the preferred strategy
of forming a communist party to fight for power social-democratically. Lenin later validated
this strategy by naming his party the Social Democratic Party, by defending the strategies of
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social democratic revolution, and by clarifying that what is to be done is to set up a news-
paper to lead the education of the oppressed classes (Lenin, 1968). Following Lenin, Joe
Slovo (1988) also defended the strategies of the national democratic revolution with refer-
ence to South Africa, and Madunagu (1982) came to similar conclusions for Nigeria. There
are clear references in Marx’s writings to the Negro in Africa and in the Americas; and that
he saw the liberation of enslaved Africans as the precondition for the liberation of wage
slaves in Europe and not vice versa.
Jacques Derrida (1994) must have seen something in Specters of Marx that led him to
conclude that we should go back and read Marx as we address the intellectual debts owed
by the world. He started by wondering why some people believed in the end of history as a
triumph of Western capitalism following the collapse of the socialist regimes of Eastern
Europe when it was still possible for someone like Chris Hani to be assassinated in
South Africa just because he identified himself as a communist. At a conference to
discuss the futures of Marxism with speakers invited from all over the world, Derrida
(the only person born in Africa who was invited to the University of California Riverside
campus for the conference) was addressing the debts that we owe Marx, but what about the
debts that Marx owes us as people of African descent?
This paper will focus on the debts that Marx owes to people of African descent by
examining his mature works to understand the role played by people of African descent
in the clarification of his thinking at the mature level. I will look at Capital because it
was his last major work; by inference, perhaps the most advanced statement of his
theory, or Marx’s ‘master work’, according to Althusser (1969), who failed to acknowledge
the Africana paradigm in Capital. The paper will show that the Negro, slavery, the struggle
for emancipation and the African featured prominently in that last testament of Marx. It will
also look at some of Marx’s earlier work to show that the use of Africana struggles as para-
digmatic of working-class struggles was no deathbed conversion of his nor the revisionist
inputs of his comrade, Engels, who edited and published much of Capital posthumously.
We shall start by analysing the references to Africa, slave, race, Negro, colonialism,
gender and related issues in Capital and other works of Marx.

Africa
Cheikh Anta Diop (1981) has wisely cautioned Africans to be wary of dismissing important
theoretical and scientific discoveries as alien or Eurocentric because if we dig deeper, we
will see that such new discoveries have ancient African roots. Following this wisdom of
 176 B. Agozino

Diop, scholars should attempt re-reading Marx by focusing on references to the word
‘Africa’ in Volume 1 of Capital. Contrary to the claim of Eric Hobsbawm in the epigraph
above that Africa was nonexistent in the works of Marx, there are six instances of the use of
the word in Volume 1 alone! Moreover, each of these instances is fundamental to under-
standing the critique of capitalism by Marx as a system of ‘slavery’. Beginning with a
long quotation on his discussion of the reproduction of labour power, in which it was
stated: ‘It was the agriculture of the West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of
fabulous wealth, that has engulfed millions of the African race,’ Marx quoted Shakespeare’s
Horatio to say that: ‘It is of you that the story is told’ (yet we did not know it all these
years!). To make this clearer, he goes on to say: ‘For slave-trade read labour-market, for
Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland, and
Wales, for Africa, Germany’ (Marx 1867, Vol. 1, 177). In other words, Marx is indicating
that the enslavement of Africans is the paradigm for understanding capitalist exploitation
and not vice versa. One wonders if this observation would divide Afrocentric scholars,
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except for the substitution of enslaved people for slaves.

In Capital, Marx observed again that:

As to raw material, there is not the least doubt that the rapid strides of cotton spinning, not only
pushed on with tropical luxuriance the growth of cotton in the United States, and with it the
African slave trade, but also made the breeding of slaves the chief business of the border
slave-states. When, in 1790, the first census of slaves was taken in the United States, their
number was 697,000; in 1861 it had nearly reached four millions. (Marx 1867, Vol. 1, 292)

He drew attention to the expropriation of farmers in Scotland and Ireland where the popu-
lation was consciously reduced to make the arable land suitable for English sheep farmers
who would supply the woollen factories with raw materials while the surviving local
farmers were driven to the urban slums and turned into factory slaves. None of this was
apparent to Ms Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who was hosted during her visit to
Britain by one such sheep-farming Duchess, according to Marx.
Marx continued:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of East Indies, the
turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. (Marx 1867, Vol. 1, 527)

Here, Marx is providing awareness that Africans were not the only ones oppressed for the
benefit of capitalism, but he again emphasises subtly that African enslavement was the com-
mercial paradigm for rosy capitalism. Although he paid attention to the genocide against
native Americans and to the colonisation of India, he gave the central explanatory power
for capitalism and the inevitability of a revolution to the enslavement of Africans and the
struggle for emancipation, over and over again. On page 532, he recounts how European
public opinion ‘had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged
cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalist accumulation.’ He
cited the British pride over

the triumph of English Statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spa-
niards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then
only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish
America as well. (Marx 1867, Vol. 1, 352)
 Review of African Political Economy 177

In other words, while the general public was misled into celebrating the oppression of Afri-
cans by capitalists, Africans were engaged in the mass resistance to this infamy for centu-
ries. However, given the criminal nature of the hunting of ‘black-skins’ that Marx referred
to as representing the ‘lost . . . last remnant of shame and conscience’ by the European
‘nations [that] bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalist
accumulation’, he should have been more sceptical about the description of the crime as a
‘trade’ because it was plunder and not trade in the real sense as he rightly implied in his
theory of primitive accumulation.
Africa is mentioned four times on one page in Volume 3 of Capital under a ‘Sup-
plement’ in which Engels linked colonisation and the scramble for Africa to the stock
exchange in a way that makes Africa central to the development of imperialism:

Then colonisation. Today this is purely a subsidiary of the stock exchange, in whose inter-
ests the European powers divided Africa a few years ago, and the French conquered Tunis
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and Tonkin. Africa leased directly to companies (Niger, South Africa, German South-West
and German East Africa), and Mashonaland and Natal seized by Rhodes for the stock
exchange. (Marx 1894, Volume III, 622)

Negro
The word ‘Negro’ was used in 14 instances, with references starting from page 137 on the
observation that mules were used to replace horses on the farms because the enslaved
worked the horses easily to death just as they wrecked tools as part of their endless sabo-
tage, whereas the mules could survive longer. On page 161, Marx remarks that it is not the
horses that were being worked to death but the Negroes whose lives were being spent in
seven years due to overwork to satisfy the demand for cotton exports. He used this experi-
ence of the enslaved to explain the conditions of workers in the Danube, not the other way
around. He remarked on page 177 that it was in the tropical West Indies where the harshest
overworking of the enslaved took place. On page 183, he observed that while European
children, women and men were still forced to work for 72 hours a week, the Emancipation
Act tried to squeeze out freedom drop by drop by demanding that the enslaved must not be
worked more than 45 hours a week by the planters. He noted, ‘The demand for children’s
labour often resembles in form the inquiries for negro slaves’ (183), not vice versa. Then
on page 541, Marx clarified the paradigmatic importance of the Negro to his theory when
he stated in a footnote as follows:

A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spin-
ning cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circum-
stances, it is no more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar
. . . . Capital is a social relation of production. It is a historical relation of production. (Marx
1867, Vol. I, footnote 4, 541)

The Negro is mentioned five times in Volume 3 of Capital, mainly in a long quotation (page
251) from an American lawyer who was addressing a ‘Justice for the South’ meeting and
who asserted that the Negro was naturally conditioned to be enslaved, contrary to the view
of Marx that there is no such thing as a natural slave. Also on page 541, a British politician
was quoted as comparing the paupers of Britain to the enslaved unfavourably in the sense
that the enslaved believed that a day of jubilee was coming while the poor workers of
England had no such belief. To Marx, what makes a slaveholder assert control over a
Negro was because he bought him or her like a commodity and so the enslaved became
 178 B. Agozino

property to be exploited. This naked form of the exploitation of labour convinced Marx that
the enslaved would continue to seek freedom as a model for the exploited workers of
Europe to adopt when their levels of consciousness were raised to that of a class for itself.
In Grundrisse, which Marx wrote as a preparation for Capital, the Negro is mentioned
six times with telling insights into the paradigmatic role of people of African descent as
leading revolutionaries from whom the workers of Europe should learn. One long quotation
illustrates this very well:

The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-
Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation – as a plea for the
re-introduction of Negro slavery – how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content
themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and,
alongside this ‘use value’, regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good;
how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations,
but rather observe the planters’ impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious plea-
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sure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of mali-
cious glee and indolence. [39] They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become
wage labourers, but, instead, self-sustaining peasants working for their own consumption.
As far as they are concerned, capital does not exist as capital, because autonomous wealth
as such can exist only either on the basis of direct forced labour, slavery, or indirect forced
labour, wage labour. Wealth confronts direct forced labour not as capital, but rather as relation
of domination [Herrschaftsverhältnis]; thus, the relation of domination is the only thing which
is reproduced on this basis, for which wealth itself has value only as gratification, not as wealth
itself, and which can therefore never create general industriousness. (Marx 1857–61, 261)

(We shall return to this relation of slavery and wage labour.) And Marx also returned to it,
especially in Volume 1 of Capital, after making 108 references to it in Grundrisse alone.

Slave
When we search for the word ‘slave’ in Volume 1 of Capital, we find 170 instances in the
text. The very first instance is on page 8 in the Preface to the first German edition of 1867.
Marx cites Mr Wade, a Vice-President of the USA, as asserting that after the abolition of
slavery, next in the line of transformation would be the relationship between capital and
landed property. Engels concludes his preface to the English edition of 1886 by observing
that Marx believed that England had the potential to be ripe for a peaceful legal revolution if
the English ruling class did not embark on a ‘pro-slavery’ rebellion (21). This is an indirect
reference to the fact that people of African descent, mainly through peaceful and legal
means, conducted the resistance against slavery. Next, Marx critiqued Aristotle for his
view that commodities are of equal value without acknowledging that Greek society was
founded on slave labour and that what he was comparing were labours of equal value (31).
There are 72 instances of the word ‘slave’ in Volume 3 of Capital but most of it dealt
with a discussion of ancient slavery as a mode of production compared to feudalism. This
might be indicative of the preference of Engels, who completed the draft based on the post-
humous notes of Marx. Engels may have tilted the discussion slightly to focus on his earlier
theme of the origin of the family, private property and the European state, whereas Marx
focused Volume 1 primarily on the analysis of contemporary slavery and the African experi-
ence. However, Engels added an appendix to Volume 3 of Capital in which he recounted a
heroic battle where the Zulu defeated the British with mere sticks and spears. The Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 also relied heavily on a history of ancient European
slavery with the exception of a passing reference to slavery in the colonies.
 Review of African Political Economy 179

Race
The race-specific variable used reflects the usage of the concept at that time. Often Marx
was citing a writer who, for instance, talked about the English race as if there is any
such race of human beings in fact. He would frequently counter such bourgeois snobbery
by re-emphasising that the important question is always how the greedy chase after profit
and more profit would affect the ‘human race’. There is reference to colonial anthropologi-
cal travel stories about how the Kaffirs (a derogatory term used by the bourgeoisie to refer to
black South Africans) valued a man with a big stomach as a sign of wealth, at a time when a
British government medical report was complaining about the degeneration of the race of
poor workers who were becoming lazy and too weak to be relied upon to defend the empire
while the rich needed to go on diets to shed excess fat.
For those who might complain that some of these confirm the feeling that Marx sub-
scribed to the hierarchies of race according to dominant European views of the day, note
the irony with which Marx ended Volume 1 of Capital by citing references to the fact
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that the so-called civilised ‘Christian race’ of Europe was guilty of the most oppressive
and exploitative relations with others more than any other race. Here the example cited
was that of Holland as a human-stealing nation with trained human thieves that went on
to decimate whole populations in the hunt for people to be enslaved, just as he called
out the very Christian Puritans in America for offering blood money for the scalping of
American Indian Native children, women and men. When he referred to the ‘nigger’
twice (414), he was referring to the treatment of the enslaved African by the Georgian sla-
veholder who faced the dilemma of whether to squander the surplus beaten out of the
enslaved in champagne bottles or to turn the surplus into more enslaved people in order
to reap more surpluses. Marx said that the best solution was to save the slaveholder from
this dilemma by abolishing slavery.
Marx clarified further in the discussion of primitive accumulation that his focus is on the
human race as a whole. Marx said that the concept of primitive accumulation is analogical
to the story of Adam and Eve, according to which Adam ate the apple and sin fell on the
human race. According to the fable, there were two types of people: those who worked
hard, invested wisely and were highly educated are the ones who are wealthy; and those
lazy rascals who waste their time and seek to rob or beg for a living or work but waste
their wages rather than invest and save are the ones who are poor. Marx dismisses this
fable as nonsensical childishness and explained that in actual history, primary accumulation
or primitive accumulation of capital is not a mystery but a reality documented in the forms
of tremendous force, robbery, murder and slavery as the root causes and not just the con-
sequences of capitalist accumulation (Agozino 2003).

Colonialism
Much of Marx’s writings on colonialism dealt with the USA, India and the Caribbean. In
Marx on Colonialism (Padover 1972), Africa and Africans are mentioned only in eight
pages. Emancipation of the enslaved is analysed over 13 pages before the emancipation
of labour was mentioned in four pages as a process modelled on slavery emancipation.
Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation is also mentioned in seven pages to show
that Lincoln only made the proclamation when he realised that he could not win the war
and keep the country united without the energetic arms, blood and sweat of hundreds of
thousands of enslaved Africans. Negroes were mentioned on 47 pages while slaveholders
were chastised in more than 60 pages. The slave trade was critiqued in 16 pages while
 180 B. Agozino

slaves and slavery were deeply analysed in 99 pages. The Confederate states in the southern
USA came under close analysis. Lenin followed Marx directly by theorising imperialism as
the highest stage of capitalism and he cited the case of the racial divisions among workers in
South Africa as one of the obstacles to socialist revolution as Marx observed in the USA
during slavery (Lenin 1968). Samir Amin (2001), however, cautions against reading
imperialism as a stage or even the highest stage of capitalism because it was always an
essential part of the globalising tendency of capitalism from its very beginning in
African slavery.

Gender
It was out of my Jim Crow experiences as a young Negro woman, experiences likewise born of
working-class poverty that led me to join the Young Communist League and to choose the phil-
osophy of my life, the science of Marxism-Leninism – that philosophy that not only rejects
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racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them. (Jones 1954, cited in Rule 2009)

Claudia Jones made this statement in 1954 as part of her campaign in defence of the Scotts-
borough Boys, who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for the false accusation
of rape of two white girls. Trinidad and Tobago-born Jones was pointing to the fact that
Marxism rejects racism, as well as class exploitation. Like others belonging to the tradition
of Black Marxism (Robinson 1983), Claudia Jones was simply a follower of Karl Marx.
However, in this paper I am suggesting that in fact Karl Marx followed the Black radical
tradition that predated him by centuries.
John Stuart Mill (1969), writing about the same time that Marx was writing Capital,
opined that the conditions of women were worse than the conditions of enslaved Africans,
thereby neglecting the fact that many enslaved Africans were women too, or, as Sojourner
Truth queried, Ain’t I A Woman? (hooks 1982). Mill traced the history of the condition of
women back to ancient Rome, where both men and women were considered slaves until the
right to citizenship was gradually extended to men who had property, but not to women,
who continued to be treated as dependants all their lives. Mill argued that the enslaved
was in a better position because he (sic) was not expected to love the enslaver, while the
women were expected to fake love for a brute just because he was the patriarch. For
Marx, Mill’s bourgeois liberalism was superficial, because he saw the cause of the inequal-
ity of men and women as the epiphenomenon of law, while, in Marx’s view, the root cause
of inequality lay in the economic infrastructure of production relations that relied on labour
exploitation for the benefit of private property. The emancipation of women, therefore,
depended on the abolition of slavery and could not be otherwise. Mill, by contrast,
wailed that slavery had been abolished for a few years by the time he was writing, while
women still languished in sex slavery and civil rights discrimination under the law. For
Marx, not only did workers remain in wage slavery, but all other forms of slavery could
not be abolished until the actual enslavement of Africans was abolished. The emancipation
of women following the abolition of slavery appears to bear Marx out.
Contrary to the claim by Western feminists that Marx focused exclusively on the male
working class (MacKinnon 1982, 515), there are 140 references to women in volume one of
Capital alone where Marx repeatedly critiqued the wage slavery of women and children
along with labouring men who were collectively regarded by the bourgeoisie as ‘degener-
ate’ classes. Consistently, Marx observed that the oppressive practice of forcing workers to
labour all night long in close contact, irrespective of gender, before the 40-hour week was
won following the abolition of slavery, affected children, women and men.
 Review of African Political Economy 181

Critical race theorists, such as Oyewumi (1997), Nzegwu (2006), Davis (1981) and
Crenshaw (1991) have cautioned against the importation of Western gender concepts
into Africana studies, as well as the failure to recognise the intersectionality of race –
class – gender in both social action and social outcomes. In other words, scholars of
African descent have helped to rescue Marxism from crude economism by advancing the
race – class – gender perspective that is almost universally accepted as the proper way to
analyse what Stuart Hall (1980) termed societies structured in dominance, instead of adopt-
ing the unitary models of social relations with exclusive focus on only race (Black Studies),
gender (Western Feminism), or class (crude Marxism), according to Agozino (1997).

Africana collectors of debts from Marx

W.E.B. Du Bois (1935) recognised the importance of the work of Marx for Africana Studies
when he used the model as a framework for the analysis of Black Reconstruction in
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America. White workers, black workers and the white planters were locked in struggles
of different kinds and varying intensity, but the white proletariat was often recruited by
the white bourgeoisie to facilitate the oppression of the black proletariat. Even among
labour union members, there were attempts to exclude black workers and refusal to fight
against racism or join hands to fight the exploitation of all workers. The result was that
the white planters introduced a new form of slavery for all the workers but used poor
white workers to make it worse for poor black workers in the form of Jim Crow (Du
Bois 1935).
C.L.R. James (1938) in The Black Jacobins, acknowledged that voodoo was used for
recruitment of fighters in San Domingo, but in the end, what doomed the struggle was
the emergence of individualist leadership that committed errors which the masses could
have avoided. Such errors, James argued, had nothing to do with religion (James 1938),
contrary to the religious determinism of bourgeois sociologists, as we shall see shortly.
Eric Williams in his work Capitalism and Slavery argued that capitalism was built on
slavery and that slavery was abolished because of the resistance of the enslaved and the
revolutionisation of productive forces under industrial capitalism which rendered slavery
antiquated or obsolete as a mode of production (Williams 1944).
Oliver Cox (1948) in his contribution rejected the Weberian approach to the analysis
of racism through the concept of caste. In a Marxist and Du Boisian approach, Cox argued
that racism, as an aspect of the dominant ideology in capitalist societies, was also the
ideology of the ruling class, which is imposed even on the working class for the
purpose of exercising capitalist hegemony and weakening the opposition to capitalism.
Similarly, Edwin Madunagu (1982) has pointed out the way the quest for national
unity in the Nigerian-Biafra war led to the emergence of a dominant ideology, which
called for national unity, rallying progressives and reactionary forces, as millions of inno-
cent civilians were killed and maimed.

Conclusion
Given careful lessons that Karl Marx drew from the struggles of people of African
descent, which he saw as a paradigm for the struggles of the working class, this paper con-
cludes that Africana scholars at home and abroad can ill afford to be hostile to the Marxist
tradition. Africana Studies should not reject the work of Marx simply because of its Euro-
pean origin, but should embrace it as one of the legacies of the Black radical tradition.
Texts like Capital should be on the essential reading lists of the discipline of Africana
 182 B. Agozino

Studies. This is not simply to follow Marx but to demonstrate how much Marx himself
owes to people of African descent. Similarly, Marxists in general should be aware of
the diversity of influences that constitute the theory and practice of historical materialism,
in particular its African influences. Other influences which have been readily accepted by
Marxists include East Indian, Native American and Australian influences. These conten-
tious influences in the eyes of non-pluriversal Marxists are those from Africa, which is
what this paper has sought to address. It is in these influences that we can also locate
its relevance for Africana studies and Africa’s own liberation from the stranglehold of
imperialism.
Of all the European founding fathers of modern sociology, Karl Marx is distinguished
by the amount and quality of attention that he paid to people of African descent as a source
of historical materialist lessons essential for understanding the class – race – gender struggles
going on in the world. For this reason, Marx should not be lumped together with Durkheim
and Weber in the way that Rabaka (2010) did routinely when he repeatedly grouped the
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three together as Eurocentric authors in contrast to Du Bois. The attention that Marx
paid to the struggles of people of African descent is part of the reason his theory is more
robust than those of Durkheim and Weber.
Weber (1930) continued what Salomon (1945) dubbed a debate with the ghost of Karl
Marx by supporting the view of Durkheim on the importance of religion. To Weber, capit-
alism was caused by the Protestant ethic of hard work and thrift to prove in this world that
you have divine blessings. He suggested that other religions regarded money as the root of
all evil but Protestantism preached a gospel of prosperity and that supposedly led to capit-
alism. Weber forgot to mention something that Marx discovered and repeated like a chorus
throughout Capital; that it was the exploitation of the unpaid labour of millions of Africans
for hundreds of years that led to the accumulation of capital by Europeans, nothing to do
with their spirituality or presumptuous notions of white superiority.
This journal article is limited by time and space and so a detailed discussion of the issues
and themes raised here will have to wait for a book-length manuscript. Meanwhile, readers
are invited to join the debate and challenge this original interpretation of the Africana para-
digm in the thoughts of Karl Marx. When the book manuscript is completed, it will reflect
my responses to the challenges and support from colleagues regarding the interpretation
offered in this tentative and deliberately tantalising outline offered here.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to members of the Association of Black Sociologists and the National Council for Black
Studies who commented on earlier versions of the essay when first presented at their meetings and to
my colleagues at Virginia Tech, especially to Karl Precoda (who provoked this intervention with a
remark that Marx dwelt on American slavery extensively), Christian Matheis, Zac Zimmer and Fran-
cois Debrix whose generous comments at the Alliance for Social, Political, Economic and Cultural
Studies (ASPECT) Program Working Paper Series helped immensely in improving this paper.
Thanks also to the editors at ROAPE.

Note on contributor
Dr Onwubiko (Biko) Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech. Prior
to this he was Professor of Sociology at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and
Tobago. His books include Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason, 2003,
and his videos include 2010: Writer-Producer-Director, ‘Shouters and the Control Freak Empire’, pre-
miered in Trinidad and Tobago. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the African Journal of Criminology and
Justice Studies; and Series Editor of Ashgate’s Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and
Class Relations.
 Review of African Political Economy 183

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