Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió’s Politically Red is a book with many beginnings. Layered intellectually with a book review of Fredric Jameson’s The Benjamin Files, politically in the riots that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, and visually through a frontispiece of Friedrich Engels’s doodles on a draft page of what became The German Ideology, such beginnings activate the authors’ critical relay between reading and politics. Together, reading, writing, and politics mediate one another, produced through and productive of collaborative, if uneven and indeterminate, modes of community making. “Every scene of reading and writing involves a crowd,” they write, for “we never read or write alone” (9). On the page, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió endeavor to enact and intensify this crowd through what they call a “red common-wealth” (27), drawing readers elliptically into a “reading loop” of authors and contexts that cut across chapters and notes, requiring agility “to move backward and forward, to return to pages already read and to read them differently after having read other parts of the book” (26). Quite unlike Marx with his logical method of presentation in Capital (which, while not entirely hermetic, is meant to dialectically stage one’s starting position as immanent to a totality), Cadava and Nadal-Melsió swim more leisurely in the streams of fragmentary, heretical, and open interpretations of Marxism, along with those interested in his later ethnographic notebooks, his processes of revision, and his collaborative intellectual spirit. If asked to choose between Marx’s logic (often posed as essentialist and limiting) and his historical materialism, between the abstract and the concrete, necessity and contingency, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió would side with concrete, historical contingency. This does not mean, however, that their version of historical contingency does not embed within it its own internal structuring logic, one I demarcate here through the problem of antiblackness.

Politically Red positions itself as open precisely as a response to limits in twentieth-century configurations of Marxism, particularly around the question of race. Cadava and Nadal-Melsió identify the germ of the book in their “first divergence” from Jameson while reviewing his The Benjamin Files (24), the place where Jameson invokes “race” as a dismissive and unpursued answer to the question of “why socialism has never flourished in the United States” (23). In between readings of The German Ideology and Marx’s Ethnographic Notebooks, and concurrent with the movement for black lives, the book experiments with what it would mean to activate “antiracist” work in the present through the archive of communist thought (25). Cadava and Nadal-Melsió are in good company with a swath of contemporary readers who, against the grain of positioning England as the “locus classicus” of the capitalist mode of production (Marx, Capital 90), have recovered in Marx “multilinear” (Anderson 54–95) resources for tracking capitalism’s historical emergence and for elucidating what the authors call, following Raya Dunayevskaya, the “Black Dimension” (27). For Cadava and Nadal-Melsió, this recovery process invites “collaborating” with a given text to “maximize its creative and political potential,” potential that can “become activated differently at different moments” (25). Alongside reading for emerging resources, texts also have to be “supplemented,” Cadava and Nadal-Melsió argue, because “they are never sufficient by themselves” (327).

While Jameson “almost silenced” race (23), Cadava and Nadal-Melsió’s double movement, where potentials and limits become recursively reread and rewritten, insists that “only a Marxism that is antiracist can be true to its critical force” (27). But their insistence on this point raises the question not only of what collaboration between antiracist and anticapitalist politics would be—a collaboration Cadava and Nadal-Melsió argue has always been a foot—but also of what the standard of being “true” to Marx’s critical force actually entails. For Politically Red, antiracist work is part of the transformative process of a crowd as it accumulates and concentrates in force; the resources of reading are shared in collective spirit, not in order to unify the revolutionary subject (the book attends, through W. E. B. Du Bois, to the organizing limits of the Marxist inheritance of the “white worker” [177–92]). As they write in closing, “there is no subject—there is only a multilayered process of encounters, coalitions, alliances, with unforeseeable shapes and outcomes, and even these are always moving in relation to the openness that comes with a relation to the future, that comes, that is, with a relation to others” (330). But even inside this version of openness, one can detect presuppositions—relationality for one—that may continue to secret away modes of repression and violence. I argue that Cadava and Nadal-Melsió’s identification of “racial capitalism” determines their crowd in ways that imply a substantial account of subjectivity beyond their own reflexive aims. Reading the crowd as politically red, I argue, crowds out an analysis of the politically black.

The place a book begins—its determinations, or lack thereof—shapes the conceptuality of the crowd. Drawing from Hegel’s own crisis over grounding immanent critique (Hegel 45–55), Marx lamented that “beginnings are always difficult in all sciences” (Capital 89)—any beginning will involve conditions transcendent to critique.Footnote ¹ Through its “historical distinction between ideology and science” (Althusser 17), Capital attempts to map not the identity of a working-class subject but the terrain in which revolutionary movements could become something more than shadowboxing imaginary opponents in capital’s inverted world. In his methodological notes, Marx cautions against beginning critique with aggregates like “population,” or even class, for these remain “empty” phrases if one is “not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc.” (Grundrisse 100). Instead, Marx advocates for a process of inquiry that analytically remixes empirical entities usually taken as self-evident, breaking them up to reveal their “inner determinations,” which then can be re-represented through a method he calls the “reproduction of the concrete by way of thought” (Grundrisse 101). Marx thus begins Capital with what might, from an ideological vantage, seem to be pure immediacy, with the way capitalist wealth “appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities” (125), but the commodity in question is not identical to the everyday commodity with which most people are familiar. Instead of appearing on the shelves with a designated price, which already presupposes the money form, Marx’s most “elemental form” of the commodity (Capital 125) gives him the tools to derive exchange value and, from there, the entire complex of the capitalist mode of production, from money to labor to, eventually, concrete working-class struggles, like those over the working day (Capital 340–416).

Marx identifies this dialectical method of presentation as “scientifically correct” (Grundrisse 101)—that is, appropriate for a critical grasp of its historical surroundings, precisely because capitalism generates a strange amalgamation of appearances and essences as part of its process of mystification. Politically Red positions itself as a record of what can be done downstream of Marx’s methodological innovation, opening, in yet another beginning, with an epigraph from Louis Althusser: “Only since Marx have we begun to suspect what, in theory at least, reading and hence writing means” (Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 7; see Althusser 16). For Althusser, the disjuncture between appearance and essence requires a method of reading opacities, as opposed to religious readings of the world as transparent and revelatory. Cadava and Nadal-Melsió do not, however, begin with what Marx might deem the scientifically correct method, nor do they explicitly worry about how the problem of race might be caught up in its own dialectic of appearances and essences. Rather, their focus on the openness of the crowd leads them to multiply their beginnings, their methodological emphasis on “mobility and plurality” seemingly desirous to get rid of the residues of Eurocentrism and Hegelianism that haunt the Marxist project once and for all (26–27). Here they rely most for support on Marx’s late Ethnographic Notebooks: in the “glimpses of ‘unconscious’ socialist tendencies in the truncated potentials of the communal forms he studies,” Cadava and Nadal-Melsió find Marx activating a “paratactic logic” that allows him to “gather, massify, and mobilize a different kind of wealth—a common-wealth on the page” (318). Implied, in other words, in their fragmentary revolutionary mass is that the analytic “capitalism” can be “stretched” (in Frantz Fanon’s term) to include forms exterior to Capital’s restricted focus, but without needing to do the work of science to reconstitute its terms.Footnote ²

Though Cadava and Nadal-Melsió consider their common-wealth as fighting against “all the different manifestations that violence can take—among others, femicide, genocide, slavery, racial violence, environmental violence, carceral violence, enforced poverty, and the denial of the right to education,” they also admit that because these different violences “appear under the same name, they often prove difficult to disentangle” (17). Marx disentangles violence through his conceptual focus on the violence of the wage form. Paradigmatically, “[t]he Roman slave was held by chains; the wage laborer is bound to his owner by invisible threads” (Capital 719). By “invisible” Marx means not that violence disappears (much ink has been spilled on the continuity of direct violence in capitalism) but that a certain form of “silent compulsion” characteristic of capitalism necessitates a new standard of critique (Capital 899).Footnote ³ As a “general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity” (Grundrisse 107), labor has a centrality to the capitalist mode of production that is comprehended only through Marx’s concerted act of reading the distinction between ideology and science.

Today, the Marx of Capital might say that by not investigating race more rigorously Politically Red retains and recirculates its own series of presuppositions, that by abandoning science in Hegelian terms, something like ideology is smuggled in all the more. Though taking their lead from Althusser’s “guilty reading,” what Cadava and Nadal-Melsió miss is that if for Althusser all readings are guilty (ideological), what sets science apart is that it takes responsibility for its culpability and “defends it by proving its necessity” (Althusser 15). Marx’s reading necessarily proceeds on logical terms in order to get inside of why capitalist social forms appear the way they do. Politically Red does not, however, adjudicate the evergreen question of the relationship between race and class through necessity, instead enfolding race into the story of capitalism in a rather seamless way. From the beginning, “the abolition of slavery, serfdom, and poverty” are each made to bear “reference to the world of racial capitalism,” without questioning by the authors of what this conjunction might mean (Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 16). Their theorization of race only begins, that is, with their understanding of capitalism and their assertion that “only a Marxism that is antiracist can be true to its critical force” is defended not by logical necessity but by political, even moral, urgency.Footnote ⁴

This does not mean there could not be logical analyses of race that bring capitalism into their orbit, instead of the inverse; it only means that despite the endless dossiers, special issues, and edited collections on “racial capitalism,” there has been no general theory of race that does not comprehend it as a concentrated name for class division. When Cadava and Nadal-Melsió begin to answer Jameson’s question, they answer in kind: “If American capitalism is defined by its generalized racism and, in particular, its anti-Blackness—as race, class, and capital are entirely intertwined on every front—it is because the history of race relations is the direct social product of a system based on profit” (155). Though the intertwining of race, class, and capital are descriptive of a certain form of social history, other forms of inscribing surplus populations and the hyperexploited have been and continue to be used; the fact that “American workers of almost all ethnic backgrounds fare better economically and socially when compared with disfranchised Black Americans” (179) points to a problem that may exceed the descriptive (and the authors’ US focus, for that matter).Footnote ⁵ Is it simply enough, in other words, to say that “[a]fter Black Marxism, Marx must be read differently, and more deeply—which means, among other things, with an acknowledgment of his force within Black Liberation movements, including today’s” (27), or is another reading necessary? Is it that “Black radicalism belongs to the history of communism,” or might it be the reverse? Does such priority matter?

Let me take yet another introduction: Politically Red’s introductory chapter draws its title, “The Red What Reading Did,” from a line in Amiri Baraka’s famous essay “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic.’” The weight of this line, which Cadava and Nadal-Melsió later reproduce in part (“The Red what reading did re adding reproducing revolution”), is given such significance that “[o]ur entire book, in all its movements, could even be said to be condensed in this single line, which carries the weight of the ‘red common-wealth’” (27). The “massification” that ensues under the heading “red” indicates that red is meant to include all who might find themselves in the common-wealth. This determinacy, however, makes opaque alternative readings—namely, what Cadava and Nadal-Melsió leave out of the Baraka fragment, which expanded reads thusly: “The Blues is the first come from Black—Red, the last, going out to re-come. The cycle the circle. The Red what reading did re-adding re-producing revolution, red, old going out into black and coming black through blue Mood Indigo” (Baraka 107). Here are cycles and a different sort of determinacy, one in which black grounds blue and red. The red common-wealth’s subsumption of black into red, by contrast, echoes the way pleas for plurality undercut what many in critical black studies have referred to as the “singularity” of blackness (Sexton). The authors do recognize the difficulty of grappling with the question of blackness, articulated in their understanding of Du Bois’s own “relentless effort to find a form that can match the experiential, temporal, and ontological complexity of Black life in America” (Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 183–84). But by circumscribing this effort to a reading of forms of life and resistance, instead of the structure of antiblack violence, they suppress emerging possibilities for finding this new form, possibilities that have called into question the sufficiency of the Marxist analysis and the determination of black by red.

Cadava and Nadal-Melsió’s minimal determinacy of the crowd dismisses a certain flavor of black studies interested in nonrelation—and here I mean more directly Afropessimism, which Politically Red relegates to an endnote. The authors themselves invite readings of the relay between “the main body of the text and our footnotes—a necessary supplement that, invisible to the reader as he or she reads, deepens and intensifies the initial reading and calls for a second one” (26), but whereas with other trajectories they activate supplemental, crisscrossing engagement with authors and texts, Afropessimism is understood with a single reference to Frank B. Wilderson III and in a single endnote. This endnote, part of the authors’ working through of Du Bois’s Darkwater, acknowledges apparent overlaps between Du Bois’s tragic key and Afropessimism, invoking Saidiya Hartman to subsume the Afropessimist call for the “end of the world” to Walter Benjamin’s “messianic without messianism.” With Benjamin as the interpretive key for Du Bois, Afropessimism is charged with misunderstanding as a “point of arrival” what should instead be considered a “point of departure” (370). The end of the world that Cadava and Nadal-Melsió’s reading of Du Bois through Benjamin offers can be redemptive, not in that it reinscribes some narrative form but in that it implies “the death of any certitude but also of any claim to temporal order and cohesion” (370). It is not clear why, however, the Afropessimist call for the “end of the world” (Wilderson 337–41) could not also be considered a point of departure, given that Afropessimism is thoroughly agnostic about what this end might herald. Nor is it clear why Afropessimism’s challenge to Marxism through the human-slave antagonism is any less essentialist (“essentialism” being Cadava and Nadal-Melsió’s cursory charge against Wilderson [370]) than the other determinacies that go uninterrogated as a consequence of Politically Red’s own strategic sidestepping of logical analysis (class, the worker, relationality, and racial blackness, for that matter).

If the relegation of Afropessimism to the notes represents a difficulty with reading, a difficulty that manifests in the logic of “preemptive strike” (Sexton), where an idea is rejected before any engagement, it is a difficulty I think not unconnected to the impossible, nonrelational form of blackness. At stake, certainly, in Afropessimist thought is the question of the priority of capitalism, whose modalities of “alienation” and “exploitation” Wilderson analytically reconfigures as now internal to antiblackness’s modalities of “fungibility” and “accumulation” (14). To take things further, alienation and exploitation are forms of determinacy that provide the worker a revolutionary vocabulary—they are forms of the appearance of capitalism that can be seized upon to transform the conditions of laboring itself. Fungibility and accumulation, however, have no determinant ground—in Hegelian terms both are forms of “bad infinity” (Hegel 192), rendering the slave an object to be used for an infinite process of quantitative increase that can never reach its goal. If, as Cadava and Nadal-Melsió argue, capitalism “carries within its movement a figure, here the slave, that it can never fully absorb, unless it is as a corpse or a commodity” (208), and if slave resistance (thought of under the banner of the “general strike”) “breaks down the categories and logic that sustain capital and undoes the concepts that would reinforce it” (210), then one is partway to understanding the difficulty with incorporating the corpse and commodity of the slave into the protocols of anticapitalist critique. When apprehending blackness as “incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form” (Wilderson 38), this form of nonappearance necessarily takes worldly shape through modes of reduced capacity external to its foundational incapacity (a problem Wilderson calls “borrowed institutionality” [38])—the “black worker,” let’s say, or the “antiracist revolutionary subject,” or a member of the “red common-wealth.”

The possibility that none of blackness’s borrowed forms of appearance alone can grasp the negativity that antiblackness circulates also poses serious problems for dialectical critique and its politics. As Jared Sexton has it, even the designation of Afropessimists as a “motley crew” may be too much, suggesting “the possibility for the formation of bonds of an impossible collective identity.” This possibility is enacted in the red common-wealth’s anxiety around Afropessimism and the foreclosure of Baraka’s black-red circling. Through a reading of Marx’s Notebooks, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió position the common-wealth as overcoming a negative identity: “it is precisely because no commons can survive on its own that it has to be inscribed within a common-wealth. It must become part of an always fugitive, always transient, always moving international set of coalitions” (327). If negativity has to be inscribed in relational coalition to survive, as when slavery had to be abolished to allow for “the possibility of imagining a socialist movement in America” (179), then the black subject cannot be revolutionary, except when blackness appears in other guises. A live question in critical black studies concerns whether an outside fugitivity that calls antiblackness into being in the first place—in Fred Moten’s reading, a blackness “prior to ontology” (“Blackness and Nothingness” 739)—would, in dispersing freedom as original, unite all subjects as capable of enacting a black (unsubjectifying) politics. In Moten’s other work, this general dispersal of freedom fosters a radically inclusive gesture: “Everyone whom blackness claims, which is to say everyone, can claim blackness” (“Black Op” 1746). If, as Cadava and Nadal-Melsió claim, “there is no subject,” is this the same as saying anyone can choose blackness? If the “red common-wealth” “begins with the excluded and expands in the direction of those who do not even realize they are excluded” (183), then why is this not a black, or “Black-Red,” common-wealth? How might taking seriously the question of fugitivity’s origin (before or after capture) complicate relationality and coalition?

To read Politically Red as politically black is always, simultaneously, to read for violence at every scale and intensity. What would this practice of reading be? If Afropessimism enfolds capitalism into antiblackness, the problem of relation into nonrelation, it is not simply enough to say Politically Red is the sort of ideology that demands a new science of antiblackness. Afropessimism’s abyssal point of departure, for which there can be no anticipated arrival, is the argument that every attempt to immanently critique, however radical, or to spur coalition, however fugitive, reproduces a logic of nonrelation for which antiblackness provides the sustenance. By sidelining Afropessimism and, in turn, underdetermining any theorization of antiblackness, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió’s reading cannot pose questions that substantively (beyond descriptively) theorize the significance of “race” for the way blackness moves in and through the world, nor can they, with their analysis of race confined to the United States, understand why internationalist freedom movements continue to be fugitive and fleeting. For Sexton, writing and reading occur “within a global catastrophe so total that the creation or production of a black poetry, a black art, a stylization of the black body, a black sense of place cannot but be invented wholesale, which is to say made or devised without recourse to a reliable memory or tradition, a law or language or land, a body or kinship or community—no line to follow.” Marx may have taught people what reading and writing were for the first time, but Afropessimism teaches that reading and writing are never enough, that even the most minimal of masses foretells its own destruction and it is thus destruction for which one should aim.