Although modern racism was fully developed by their time, Marx (and Engels) did not engage in a theoretical discussion of its essential features. This analytical silence is investigated in the chapter Marx and Haiti: Notes on a Blank Space. At the same time, the chapters of this volume demonstrate that and why the principles of a historical materialist analysis of society present links for a critical theory of racism. In the chapter Dehumanization and Social Death: Fundamentals of Racism, this is shown concerning the various historical shapes of racisms caused by different forms of class relations. The chapter Racismflq: Birth of a Concept connects the conceptual history of racism with the socio-historical conflicts of differently affected social groups. Finally, the chapter A Historical Materialist Theory of Racism: Introduction addresses basic elements of a Marxist analysis of racism. It elucidates the necessity of a theoretical conjunction of classist and racist discrimination as well as the historical differentiation of racisms.

Although modern racism was fully developed by their time, Marx (and Engels) did not engage in a theoretical discussion of its essential features. This analytical silence is investigated in the chapter Marx and Haiti: Notes on a Blank Space. At the same time, the chapters of this volume demonstrate that and why the principles of a historical materialist analysis of society present links for a critical theory of racism. In the chapter Dehumanization and Social Death: Fundamentals of Racism, this is shown concerning the various historical shapes of racisms caused by different forms of class relations. The chapter Racismflq: Birth of a Concept connects the conceptual history of racism with the socio-historical conflicts of differently affected social groups. Finally, the chapter A Historical Materialist Theory of Racism: Introduction addresses basic elements of a Marxist analysis of racism. It elucidates the necessity of a theoretical conjunction of classist and racist discrimination as well as the historical differentiation of racisms.

It is impossible to understand capitalism without analyzing slavery, an institution that tied together three world regions: Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The exploitation of slave labor led to a form of proto-globalization in which violence was indispensable to the production of wealth. Against the background of this expanding circulation of capital and slave labor, the first revolution in Latin America took place: the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and culminated with Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804. Taking the Haitian Revolution as a paradigmatic case, Grüner shows that modernity is not a linear evolution from the center to the periphery but, rather, a co-production developed in the context of highly unequal power relations, where extreme forms of conquest and exploitation were an indispensable part of capital accumulation. He also shows that the Haitian Revolution opened up a path to a different kind of modernity, or “counter-modernity,” a path along which Latin America and the Caribbean have traveled ever since. A key work of critical theory from a Latin American perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical and cultural theory and of Latin America, as well as anyone concerned with the global impact of capitalism, colonialism, and race.

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.

"Monsters of the Market" investigates modern capitalism through the prism of the body panics it arouses. Examining "Frankenstein," Marx s "Capital" and zombie fables from sub-Saharan Africa, it offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of global capitalism.

Using a variant of structuration theory, what Paul C. Mocombe calls phenomenological structuralism, this work explores and highlights how the African religion of Vodou and its ethic, i.e., syncretism, materialism, communal living or social collectivism, democracy, individuality, cosmopolitanism, spirit of social justice, xenophilia, balance, harmony, and gentleness, gave rise, under the leadership of oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo, and granmoun yo, to the Haitian spirit of communism and the “counter-plantation system” (Jean Casimir’s term) in the provinces and mountains of Haiti. What Mocombe calls the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism of the African people of Haiti would be juxtaposed against the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the white, mulatto, gens de couleur, and petit-bourgeois free black classes of the island. This latter worldview, the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Mocombe goes on to argue, exercised by the free bourgeois blacks and mulatto elites, Affranchis, on the island undermined the revolutionary and independence movement of Haiti commenced by subjects/agents, oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo/dokté fey, and granmoun yo, of the Vodou ethic and the spirit of communism, and made it the poorest, most racist, and tyrannical country in the Western Hemisphere.

In this important book, leading scholar Alex Dupuy provides a critical reinterpretation of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath. Dupuy evaluates the French colonial context of Saint-Domingue and then Haiti, the achievements and limitations of the revolution, and the divisions in the Haitian ruling class that blocked meaningful economic and political development. He reconsiders the link between slavery and modern capitalism; refutes the argument that Hegel derived his master-slave dialectic from the Haitian Revolution; analyzes the consequences of new class and color divisions after independence; and convincingly explains why Haiti chose to pay an indemnity to France in return for its recognition of Haiti’s independence. In his sophisticated analysis of race, class, and slavery, Dupuy provides a robust theoretical framework for conceptualizing and understanding these major themes.

In Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian questions the claims of Western Marxism and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union and bolster the belief that capitalism remained dominant in the contest over progress. This book deprovincializes Marx and the West's cultural turn by returning to the theorist's earlier explanations of capital's origins and development, which followed a trajectory beyond Euro-America to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marx's expansive view shows how local circumstances, time, and culture intervened to reshape capital's system of production in these regions. His outline of a diversified global capitalism was much more robust than was his sketch of the English experience in Capital and helps explain the disparate routes that evolved during the twentieth century. Engaging with the texts of Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and other pivotal theorists, Harootunian strips contemporary Marxism of its cultural preoccupation by reasserting the deep relevance of history.

Long before a devastating earthquake hit in January 2010, Haiti was one of the most impoverished and oppressed countries in the world. However, in the late 1980s a remarkable popular mobilization known as Lavalas ("the flood") sought to liberate the island from decades of US-backed dictatorial rule. Damming the Flood analyzes how and why the Lavalas governments led by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were overthrown, in 1991 and again in 2004, by the enemies of democracy in Haiti and abroad. The elaborate campaign to suppress Lavalas was perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War. It has left the people of Haiti at the mercy of some of the most rapacious political and economic forces on the planet. Updated with a substantial new afterword that addresses the international response to the earthquake, Damming the Flood is both an invaluable account of recent Haitian history and an illuminating analysis of twenty-first-century imperialism.