THE LIMITATIONS OF BLACK NATIONALISM: GARVEYISM AND THE INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT IN THE WEST INDIAN DIASPORA. By Renaldo McKenzie

West Indian and Caribbean nationalists, including Garveyites, contributed to the anti-imperialist and decolonization movements and struggles.  However, West Indian nationalists broadly did not question capitalism and the class relations of exploitation on which it has rested.  In the end, the nationalist movement left the struggle for independence with major deficits, including those nationalist narratives that sought to produce “national literatures based on working class and peasant culture” (Rosenberg 1). When nationalists speak in the name of the working class, they leave the impression of espousing a working class political agenda.  However, their project does not break with bourgeois consciousness and they never manage to see a way beyond capitalism. They may imagine ways to reduce foreign penetration, domination and what passes for ‘cultural imperialism,’ however this stance reinforces capitalist class relations and bourgeois ideology while it fails to benefit the working class in any fundamental way. 

The Black Nationalists and the Independent Movements earlier leaders such as Garvey Muhammad et al  embarked on a “myth-making” mission in attempt to lift themselves up from the ashes of society. However, the mistake they made is to align themselves with white-identity to achieve freedom. But this is not a bad criticism, as this was a necessary step in the process of achieving universal freedom for all humanity. To limit the fright to its racial ethnicities and components is to give power to those who “divide and conquer”, But Black people needed to feel good about themselves first before they universalize the struggle. These are some of the issues we must engage to arrive at whether black nationalism is relevant or even limited in its ability to realize its goals.

Leah Rosenberg says exile helped to  shape the “joint emergence of Caribbean nationalism and literature” (4)  within an anti-imperialist context that gave rise to a cultural nationalist consciousness that left a strong and often damaging imprint on the character of the working class and labor struggles around decolonization and independence. There is no doubt that among the nationalists, Garveyites did much to awaken the ideological and political consciousness of masses of West Indians at home and in the African Diaspora.  Frank Furedi has shown, in The Silent War: Imperialism and the Silent Discourse of Race (1998), that British and American diplomats in the West Indies and in Africa were very concerned about what they reported on as a high degree of race consciousness among Caribbean blacks with respect to the meaning and implications of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, as well as about the racialized class domination and exploitation and racist oppression in the Caribbean.

Garveyism therefore contributed to the development of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-racism among ‘African Diaspora’ populations. However, it is necessary to make distinctions between Garveyism as articulated by Marcus Garvey, especially his emphasis on the racial nationalist and the ‘Fascist’ basis of his ideology and political aspirations, and the ways Diaspora blacks appropriated his ideas and applied them to their concrete situations in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles.  In fact, the political significance of Garvey’s contribution transcended his way of trying to invert white supremacy to promote a form of racial black supremacy around his notion of ‘Africa for Africans.’  Garvey gave the mistaken impression that there was or could be a racial essence to blackness that transcended the horrible experience of enslavement, racial and gender oppression, the racialization of class differences and the horrors of colonialism and imperialism.

Rosenberg’s observations on the pitfalls of nationalist consciousness in the Caribbean are equally applicable to the contributions by labor leaders and political and cultural nationalists.  George Lamming has been one of the most astute observers and critics of West Indian political and cultural nationalism.  Lamming understands race as a social construction but he shares with nationalists certain romantic conceptions about the nation that have conditioned how he looks at decolonization, self-determination and independence.  Lamming contributes to an impression that the crafters of the independence movements did not get nationalism right, a perspective that seems to target the symptoms of the problem rather than the substantive problems with nationalism which bring us back to epistemological questions about the nature of nations and culture (see Clarke passim).  These are issues that sooner or later turn on methodological and theoretical questions about the nature of history, human nature, culture and matters of space and time. When we make the state of nature our starting

point for theorizing about history we invariably end up historicizing and objectifying nature and naturalizing history, culture and time-space with the effect of immobilizing theory by superimposing on it a teleological interpretation of events (see Jahn).

In the arguments I discuss briefly below, but more fully  in a longer article, I address issues surrounding Garveyism and Black Nationalism as a consequence of the racialization of power and class relations. I explore Black Nationalism and the Independence Movement and tracing significant events in their history that shows the enormity of the task to succeed against the system, and the limitations of the movements. I treat the concept of race as a social construct, rather than a matter of phenotype (see Mills).  I discuss the conceptual and logical problem with using something which does not exist — biological race — as the starting point for proving its existence which pertains to raciology and raciological thinking within Garveyism as a sub sector of Black Nationalism (see Watson). I will  argue that mainstream or ‘moderate  Enlightenment’ discourses, which were associated with certain major thinkers such as Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Montesquieu, Turgot, and Smith, among others, tended toward a monist conception of universal humanity (see Israel, Kedourie, et al); however, those individuals contradicted themselves by attributing the causes of inequality to  racial differences (see Malik).  In effect, the moderate (mainstream) Enlightenment contributed to the racialization of history and helped to lay the foundations of the ideological and political domination that has been used to justify racialization and global white supremacy, which catalyzed an accidental version of Black Nationalism and “Power” within the diaspora.

I identify a contrasting ‘radical Enlightenment’ which insisted on the equal worth of all humans without respect to differences in culture, geography, language, ethnicity, or level of material development and social consciousness.  Theorists of the ‘radical Enlightenment’ adopted an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist perspective and insisted that Europe did not have a monopoly on progressive ideas (see Israel).  In The Theft of History (2006), Jack Goody condemns the teleological reasoning that locates Europe at the center of the universe and insists that the habit of tracing European progress to the ancient Greeks and Romans, while denying the contributions of other societies, contradicts reliable historical evidence.  I argue that naturalistic materialism impeded the development of theoretical consciousness and knowledge partly by superimposing religious ideas on reason and science, a tendency that was evident among a range of Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Turgot (see Israel).蜉 Philosophy is about what is, what ought to be, that which is normative. However, My paper will not only explore the philosophical underpinnings of the black idea of nationalism, but also the anthropological considerations, what follows from that within a current and practical social issue of Race and the limitations of Garveyism as a foundational black nationalist movement and philosophical school of thought. Where is the movement, How is the nationalism perceived through people’s interpretations of the events.  

The challenges and struggles that separatist groups face are not purely political, but also often puts them in great physical and even mortal danger, as exemplified in the bombing of the predominantly African American separatist group MOVE. The Philadelphia based group, whose members all took the last name Africa, had a long, tumultuous history with the local police as well as the surrounding communities. On 13 May 1985, the police dropped a bomb on the group's home on Ossage Avenue in West Philadelphia. The police then allowed the fire to burn and it spread rapidly to neighboring buildings and blocks destroying sixty-one homes. Eleven MOVE members died in the fire including five children. Only two members survived the inferno dered to leave Mexico City immediately. Garvey’s project was a bourgeois class project that eschewed revolution and insurgent liberation as a way of resolving underlying social contradictions.  His pessimistic view of history (see Watson) leaves many issues unresolved as to the future of Africa in the epoch of modern imperialism. Garvey did not offer any insights into the possibility of a dialectical ontology that opens up the possibility of transcending the modern state in the direction of post national subjectivity.  Substantively, “Nationalist modes of political regulation are the form of appearance of the terror that the world market society of capital entails.  In short, nationalist displacements of anti-capitalist struggles replicate what they denounce” (Bonefeld 169), reinforcing false inside/outside dichotomies of ‘them’ versus ‘us’ and with the effect of neutralizing “anti-capitalist  struggles for the democratic organization of socially necessary labor time by the associated producers themselves” (Bonefeld 169).  Historically, nationalist movements have been impervious to the fact that sovereign autonomy is not equitable with self-determination under capitalism.  Our human destiny does not rest on racial struggle; rather we must pursue it as part of the quest for our universal humanity.