The re-publication of Cedric Robinson’s 2001 An Anthropology of Marxism arrives at a specific historical moment in which misery, exploitation, and the death of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized and poor communities are becoming more visible. Yet, like Robinson’s previous work, Anthropology is a rigorous critique of the terms of order justified from the fabrications and myths of and by a bourgeois strata as much as it is also about the actions of ordinary people (as in our present) who recreate their worlds amid oppression and exploitation. Similar to his other work, whether in stateless societies like that of the Ill-Tonga people in Zambia or in the Black maroon communities of the Americas, Robinson’s commitment that domination is only one part of our condition is unwavering; we have always been more than just these conditions. Thus, Anthropology’s argument is straightforward: Robinson rejects the claim by Marx and Engels (historical...
University of California Press