The Hegelian-Marxian Machinery of History: Cedric J. Robinson, Unilinearity and the Dialectic Project of Liberation

Through his life’s work Cedric J. Robinson had developed a historiographic and theoretical critique of Marxism that exposed it as reductive, Eurocentric, and built upon idealistic positions that did not reflect the concrete conditions of reality itself. However, his critical intervention has been largely ignored and where it has been addressed, it was dismissed as having engaged in a misreading or reductive engagement with Marxism which is otherwise signified as a much more dynamic and reflexive philosophy. The basic intention of this dissertation then has been to defend one aspect of Robinson’s critique of Marxism – his characterization of it as Eurocentric– through both drawing on Robinson’s work itself and through supporting his conclusions by way of my own intervention into debates concerning Marx’s Eurocentricity and the limitations that thus spring from this characterization. This supportive aspect has been carried out through two sections: 1.) through a contextualization of Marxian philosophy in its appropriation of the Eurocentric Hegelian philosophical and historical system, and 2.) through critical engagements with contemporary literature that seeks to disprove the claim that Marxism is in fact Eurocentric. The combined sections of this dissertation go beyond the intended defense of Robinson’s criticisms of Marxian philosophy and carry implications for past and ongoing debates concerning the efficacy of Marxism as a theory of liberation for those people and populations that fall outside of its otherwise restrictive parameters. This dissertation encourages the reader to conclude with the sense that: ‘Robinson was indeed right. Marxism really is inherently antagonistic to both an anti-racist and anti-colonial politics. And I would like to read more of what he had to say’.