Cedric Robinson, born on this day in 1940, was the author of “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition” and a professor of Black Studies and Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

Robinson’s areas of interest included political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, and the relationships between and among media and politics.

According to Professor Robin D.G. Kelley, “[Robinson’s] monumental Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) takes Karl Marx to task for failing to comprehend radical movements outside of Europe. He rewrites the history of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, scrutinizing the idea that Marx’s categories of class can be universally applied outside of Europe. Instead he characterized black rebellions as expressions of what he called the ‘Black Radical Tradition’, movements whose objectives and aspirations confounded Western social analysis. Marxism also failed to account for the racial character of capitalism.”

In a critical review of the work, authors William I. Robinson, Salvador Rangel and Hilbourne A. Watson state “Black Marxism has become a favored text with which to badger radical intellectuals and activists who place a premium on proletarian struggle. This has led some among left organizers to fear they may be condemned as Eurocentric, as ‘class reductionists’, and as ‘ignoring race’ should they place a premium on class analysis, should they insist that racism is an outcome of class exploitation, and that its eradication involves a transnational and pan-ethnic proletarian struggle against capitalism…At a time when global capital is on an all-out rampage against the global working and popular classes and when our very survival is under threat, we need more than ever a transnational revolutionary proletarian politics. We won’t find that in Black Marxism.”

“Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”

• Cedric Robinson

What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism? https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/

Black Marxism https://files.libcom.org/files/Black Marxism-Cedric J. Robinson.pdf

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Werewolfs Werewolfs - Novo General Thread for the 21st-31st of October 2026 thelastaxolotl [he/him]M to Chapotraphouse •

In folklore, a werewolf[a] (from Old English werwulf ‘man-wolf’), or occasionally lycanthrope[b] (from Ancient Greek λυκάνθρωπος ‘wolf-human’), is an individual who can shapeshift into a wolf or therianthropic hybrid wolf–humanlike creature, either voluntarily or involuntarily due to a curse or other affliction. In modern fiction, especially film, transformations are often depicted as triggered by the full moon and transmitted by a bite or scratch from another werewolf. Early sources for belief in this ability or affliction, called lycanthropy, are Petronius (27–66) and Gervase of Tilbury (1150–1228).

The werewolf is a widespread concept in European folklore, existing in many variants, which are related by a common development of a Christian interpretation of underlying European folklore developed during the Middle Ages. From the early modern period, werewolf beliefs spread to the Western Hemisphere with colonialism. Belief in werewolves developed in parallel with the belief in witches during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Like the witchcraft trials as a whole, the trial of supposed werewolves emerged in what is now Switzerland, especially the Valais and Vaud, in the early 15th century and spread throughout Europe in the 16th, peaking in the 17th and subsiding by the 18th century.

The persecution of werewolves and the associated folklore is an integral part of the “witch-hunt” phenomenon, albeit a marginal one, with accusations of lycanthropy being involved in only a small fraction of witchcraft trials. During the early period, accusations of lycanthropy (transformation into a wolf) were mixed with accusations of wolf-riding or wolf-charming. The case of Peter Stumpp (1589) led to a significant peak in both interest in and persecution of supposed werewolves, primarily in French-speaking and German-speaking Europe. The phenomenon persisted longest in Bavaria and Austria, with the persecution of wolf-charmers recorded until well after 1650, the final cases taking place in the early 18th century in Carinthia and Styria.

After the end of the witch trials, the werewolf became of interest in folklore studies and in the emerging Gothic horror genre. Werewolf fiction as a genre has premodern precedents in medieval romances (e.g., Bisclavret and Guillaume de Palerme) and developed in the 18th century out of the “semi-fictional” chapbook tradition. The trappings of horror literature in the 20th century became part of the horror and fantasy genre of modern popular culture.

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