Unfolding and Challenging the Legacy of Walter Rodney

With the publication of Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution by Verso books in 2022, the legacy of Guyanese writer Walter Rodney continues to resound among the causes and slogans of radicals over 40 years after his assassination in 1980. To more fully contextualize Rodney’s renewed popularity and scrutinize the relevancy and limitations of his thought in today’s world, The Caravel sat down with Shozab Raza, an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Social Justice Education.

Professor Raza, by dissecting Rodney’s writings on Marxism and Blackness, offers a novel approach to radical thought. He describes the intersections between national, racial, colonial, and ideological identities in an enlightening conversation around social justice.

Interviewer: To begin with our interview, how has Walter Rodney inspired your own intellectual thought and political practices?

Shozab Raza: First of all, there's Walter Rodney’s analysis that sees the Marxist tradition as an evolving process. I think Walter Rodney developed Marxism in two key ways. One was centering the question of imperialism and underdevelopment in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Any scholar who is studying the Global South, or any scholar who's studying a place impacted by American, British, Dutch, or French imperialism, has a lot to gain from Rodney’s analysis of imperialism. 

His second key analysis brought race and class together far before Cedric Robinson's book Black Marxism. He approached this from the African context but also from the Guyanese one, where we had the descendants of slaves from Africa, and also the descendants of indentured laborers from India. That kind of racial division was used to perpetuate capitalist forms of exploitation, but race could also, Rodney argued, be a mechanism for combating capitalism. Race, as Rodney once put it, was a “double-edged blade.” In Guyana, he theorized race and Blackness in a broader way to unite both the descendants of slaves and the descendants of indentured laborers.

The second inspirational aspect about Rodney was that he was more than an intellectual or an academic. He was a political activist, an organizer, and a socialist. People call him a “guerrilla intellectual:” he was not content with just doing academic writing in the university, but also wanted to take those ideas to ordinary people and learn from ordinary people, too. He called this engagement with everyday people “groundings,” a method he first practiced and developed in Tanzania. Rodney also practiced it in Jamaica, where he taught, debated, and discussed ideas in Rastafarian communities. 

Another exciting part of his politics is how he saw decolonization as a process that should ultimately be about socialism. He wasn’t content with simply replacing white colonizers with brown or black elites. He said that the recent post-colonial independence in Africa and Asia was not enough. We needed a fundamental redistribution of resources, a radical rearrangement of the economy, and socialism. For him, that was ultimately what decolonization was about. And so, that's another thing that's really exciting about his politics. 

Finally, what’s also inspiring about Rodney is his internationalism. Rodney was born in Guyana, spent time in Jamaica, did his PhD in the United Kingdom, and then went to Tanzania. He was a person of the world who prioritized internationalist working-class politics, which he believed he could be part of anywhere. At the same time, whether he was in Tanzania, where the question of the peasant’s role in the revolution was important, or Guyana, where the question of racial relations came up, Rodney was also always sensitive to regional particularity. His was an internationalism grounded in local conditions.

Interviewer: Rodney’s essays in Decolonial Marxism were published in 2022, over forty years after his assassination. Furthermore, Verso books republished editions of Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 2018 and The Groundings With My Brothers in 2019. Do you believe that there has been overall greater conversation with Rodney’s writings and activism in recent years, and if so, what do you believe caused this phenomenon? 

Shozab Raza: There is definitely a big interest in Rodney now. A bunch of his books have been published and his essays have been compiled into edited collections. People are now describing themselves as “Rodney-ian.” I think the interest in Rodney comes from two phenomena. One is this interest and conversation in race after Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd. People are turning to Rodney because he provides an international and transnational perspective on the question of race. I think after George Floyd’s murder, much of the discussions around race were very U.S.-centered, influenced as these discussions were—whether participants knew it or not—by “Afropessimism,” the theory that anti-Blackness is the organizing principle of the world, both trans-geographically and trans-historically. 

I think that Afropessimism is fundamentally anti-revolutionary and anti-political, even. Rodney offers a different vantage point to think about race and Blackness. He shows how race takes on different forms in different places and times, and how it is not only anchored to structures like capitalism and imperialism, but can also be part of their undoing.

In Guyana, Rodney tried to tie race and Blackness to questions of political economy, and to the political project of building unity rather than dividing people. There's a famous incident where Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) went to Guyana in 1970 with a very U.S.-centered conception of Blackness. There he gave a speech saying, “Black Power!” The folks in the crowd consisted of Indian descendants of indentured laborers and African descendants of slaves, and both of those groups were cheering. Stokely Carmichael said, “Oh, no, no, black power doesn't apply to you,” and then Rodney and Carmichael got into a dispute about what Blackness means in Guyana—or how Rodney and his comrades were to trying to politically construct this identity,  which was very different to how Blackness was being discussed in the United States.

One of Rodney’s key political programs was also creating this party called the Working People’s Alliance, which tried to bring South Asians and black folks in Guyana together under the banner of Blackness to bring about socialist transformation. For Rodney, this wasn't simply an intellectual exercise. He was actually organizing through political parties to put into practice this radical, anti-capitalist conception of race and Blackness.

The second key element driving this turn to Rodney is the reignited interest in decolonization. In Canada, where I'm based, there was the discovery of unmarked mass graves of indigenous children forced into Church-run residential schools while, in the US, there were the #NoDAPL protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the United Kingdom, and in South Africa, there was also the toppling of statues. So this whole question about colonial legacies and decolonization became somewhat of a global conversation. 

Different perspectives circulated in that conversation. One kind of perspective was Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh’s epistemic focus from Latin America, which was very influential in academic circles and says we need to decenter Western knowledge, change our languages, our thinking, and so forth. This kind of perspective can lead some people to see cultural decolonization—the land acknowledgments, the renaming of streets and buildings and so forth—as sufficient. Then there is also Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s argument that decolonization is not simply about language, but that it's also a material process; it's ultimately about getting land back.

And then there is Walter Rodney, who offers a new position that is at once both epistemological, cultural, and material. He also took the materialist perspective on decolonization further. He demanded not just land back, but socialism. He showed that, despite the success of formal decolonization and land back in Africa and the Global South, the land went to local comprador elites, who ended up exploiting their own brown and black folks. From this, Rodney draws the conclusion that decolonization is also about redistributing that land, collectivizing it, and putting it under some socialist arrangement. That's another reason Rodney is taken up. He offers a new way to think about decolonization.

Interviewer: In what ways might the application of Rodney’s theories and analysis be unsuitable for contemporary movements and politics?

Shozab Raza: Especially after #MeToo, there has been a bigger critique of patriarchy across public, activist spaces, and progressive movements. That was long overdue. The confrontation against patriarchy is central to any kind of radical politics, and that was a key limitation of Walter Rodney. Keisha-Khan Y. Perry pointed out in her article “Groundings with My Sisters” that even the very title “Groundings With My Brothers” has a certain machismo to it, as does Rodney’s theory of guerilla intellectualism.

Another big limitation is the ecological question in the context of the climate crisis. Rodney sometimes slipped into the idea that we need socialist industrialization and that the Global South needs to develop along those lines. Many people have argued that this framework could exacerbate the climate crisis and ecological decline, not to mention further dispossess communities, including indigenous communities, from land. We’re seeing some of this in Latin America, in places like Bolivia, where even left leaders justify the dispossession of indigenous groups on the basis that it’s necessary for development, for production, and ultimately for socialism. 

Rodney sometimes thought in that vein and that's a limitation of his theory. The question is how do you produce socialism now, produce and redistribute surplus, without harmful consequences to ecologies and to indigenous groups? Ultimately, this is a question of how to avoid the traps of 20th-century socialism, a trap that not just Rodney but other socialists of that era fell into, too.

This interview has been edited slightly for grammar and clarity.