Marxism is a Western construction – a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development 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 historical perspective, its points of view. (Robinson, 1983, 2)
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 tradition 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 Occidentalism 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 Africology. Despite the contributions of these giants of African descent, the scandal of Eurocentric 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 Communist 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:
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 subsistence, 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 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)
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 theories 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 identified 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, 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 contribute 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 social democratic revolution, and by clarifying that what is to be done is to set up a newspaper 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 reference 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 paradigmatic 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 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 understanding 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, 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 population 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 commercial 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 Spaniards 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)
In other words, while the general public was misled into celebrating the oppression of Africans by capitalists, Africans were engaged in the mass resistance to this infamy for centuries. 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 ‘Supplement' 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 interests the European powers divided Africa a few years ago, and the French conquered Tunis 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 sabotage, 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 experience 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 spinning cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, 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 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 pleasure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of malicious 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 posthumous 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 experience. 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.
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 anthropological 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 subscribed 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 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 slaveholder 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 consequences 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 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 philosophy of my life, the science of Marxism-Leninism – that philosophy that not only rejects 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 Scottsborough 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 inequality 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 ‘degenerate’ 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.
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 adopting 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 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 innocent 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 concludes 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 European 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 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 contentious 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 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, capitalism 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 capitalism. 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 paradigm 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.