Cedric Robinson’s anthropology of Marxism

Abstract

In meditating on the significance of Robinson’s body of work, particularly An Anthropology of Marxism, Gordon discusses the profound originality of his enterprise. At its heart lies a rigorous deconstruction of the terms of western civilisation which exposes the philosophical and historical compromises made by Marxism and Liberalism with the tenets of bourgeois rationality. The blindness within Marxian thought to socialist and radical traditions outside its purview, documented and analysed by Robinson, is his starting point for a broader and more generous historical materialism that recuperates a fuller range of human experience.