Marxism and/as Black Theology: From Cone to West and Back Again

ABSTRACT

This paper argues three primary points. First, that James Cone analytically relied on and supported Marxist political economy, especially as concerns its use as an explanation of anti-Black racism. Second, that this Marxist dimension of Cone’s work should be supported, because Marxism remains the most effective political and analytical tool for improving the material conditions of the exploited. Third, that despite his analytical adherence to Marxism as an explanatory theory for understanding and overcoming racism, Cone did not analytically clarify the structural relationship between race and class. This conflation becomes problematic for Cone’s project when class differences and wealth inequality within the Black community – and every “community” – are exacerbated. This shortcoming can be redressed by Cone’s interlocutor Cornel West, who offers a Marxist understanding of the relationship between race and class that allows him to pursue an emancipatory politics that is committed to both anti-racism and anti-capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• James Cone
• Cornel West
• anti-capitalism
• race and class

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Andrew Prevot, Joerg Rieger, Deniz Uyan, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Timothy Murphy presents an overview of these critiques in his “The Influence of Socialism in Black and Womanist Theologies: Capitalism's Relationship as Source, Sin, and Salvation,” Black Theology: An International Journal 10.1 (2015), 28–48. Murphy ultimately reinscribes the misleading and unhelpful trope that Cone (and others, such as Albert Cleage, Kelly Brown Douglass, and Jacquelyn Grant) “do not offer analyses of capitalism.” As I demonstrate with respect to Cone, this claim is empirically false. Yet, Murphy is correct when he demonstrates that the academic reception of Cone has not generally accepted Cone’s Marxist dimensions. When I write of the “liberalizing” or “ontologizing” reception of Cone, it is to the objects of Murphy’s critique that I refer.

2 See Cone, Black Theology and Black Power.

3 Ibid., 15.

4 Ibid., 18.

5 God of the Oppressed, 74,82.

6 Ibid., 127.

7 Ibid., 135.

8 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 36.

9 Ibid., 45.

10 Ibid., 46.

11 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 107, 121.

12 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 137.

13 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 108.

14 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 148.

15 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 67.

16 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 8.

17 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 151.

18 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 123.

19 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 150.

20 Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology, 84–100.

21 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 201.

22 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 16.

23 See: Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness.

24 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 69.

25 Reed, Toward Freedom, 124.

26 Ibid., 139.

27 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 15.

28 Ibid., 26.

29 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 18.

30 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 126.

31 Against (white) Redemption, 547.

32 See also: “White Christians see little contradiction between wealth and the Christian gospel” (Black Theology of Liberation, 123) and “White western Christianity with its emphasis on individualism and capitalism as expressed in American Protestantism is unreal for blacks” (Black Theology and Black Power, 33).

33 As Cone’s context was primarily American, the following statistical analysis focuses on the political economy of Black America. This is not to deny the international dynamics of racial logics. Far from it: by showing the extent to which the early Cone was dependent on his particularly American context, we become more able to disaggregate Cone’s project from the social conditions of 1960s and ‘70s America and use his work for more current and more internationalist problematics.

34 PEW, 2016.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Economic Policy Institute, “Fifty Years After the Kerner Commission.”

38 Black Demographics, “African American Earnings.”

39 Census Bureau.

40 Washington Center for Equitable Growth, “How rising US Income Inequality”.

41 None of this, of course, is to deny the persisting wealth gap between White and Black Americans, but it is to point out that this inter-racial wealth gap in large part obfuscates the predominance of the cross-racial wealth gap: indeed, 80% of the White/Black wealth gap is caused by disparities between the top 10% of White and Black earners. See: Brookings, 2020. Again, that racism persists despite the class character of the racial wealth gap is evidence not of class reductionism, but its opposite.

42 Cone, The Black Church and Marxism.

43 Ibid., 4.

44 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 36–42.

45 Ibid., 39.

46 Ibid., 41.

47 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 76.

48 Ibid., 104.

49 Ibid., 36.

50 “And as long as Black labor was needed, slavery was regarded as the only appropriate ‘solution’ to the ‘Black problem.’ But when Black labor was no longer needed, Blacks were issued their ‘freedom,’ the freedom to live in a society which attempted to destroy them physically and spiritually” (14).

51 See: Fields and Fields, Racecraft; Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave.

52 Cone, Black Church and Marxism, 6.

53 Ibid., 5.

54 Ibid., 8.

55 Cone’s history could be better here, as American Black Marxism has always been a lively and active tradition.

56 Of course, Cone writes of an “alternative vision of social existence” and not more directly of an alternative social existence. This retreat from axiomatic commitments to a plea for imagination, so common in Cone’s idealist reception but typically uncommon in Cone’s texts, indicates that Cone himself, despite intellectually acknowledging that anti-racism is ultimately impossible without anti-capitalism, is perhaps one of the “Black churchpeople” whose understandable preoccupation with “the most pressing contradiction” in their existence has prevented a complete acceptance of the necessity of socialism. That is, Cone never speaks of the need for a vision of Black humanity. He accepts and forcefully declares Black humanity, and the rest follows suit. Here, though, Cone shows a slight hesitation, introduces the trope of vision, and so does not quite make socialism an axiomatic commitment on the level of anti-racism.

57 Ibid., 9. The Hampton citation is as follows: “We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.”

58 See Jones’s, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” for more on this.

59 Cone, Black Church and Marxism.

60 The Cross and The Lynching Tree, 46.

61 Genovese, In Red and Black, 321.

62 Marx, “The Civil War,” 51.

63 See: On the Political and For a Left Populism.

64 Letter to Annenkov, 101–2.

65 Marx, “Address of the International.”

66 Marx, Marx and Engels 19, 264.

67 Marx, “To the People.”

68 West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 47–48.

69 West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 225.

70 West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 48.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid., 49.

73 Ibid., 65.

74 Ibid., 49.

75 West, Reader, 224.

76 Ibid., 284.

77 Ibid., 370.

78 Ibid., 220.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid., 504.

81 As critiqued by Murphy above.

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Derek Brown

Derek Brown’s research contributes to contemporary political theology. Specifically, he is interested in contributing to the development of a political theology responsive to the related problems of capitalism, racism, and fascism. His writing has been published in Black Theology, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Philosophy and Theology, and elsewhere.