The CLR James Journal

Volume 23, Issue 1/2, Fall 2017

“The Brutal Dialectics of Underdevelopment”
Thinking Politically with Walter Rodney

This essay surveys the writings of Walter Rodney, the late Guyanese scholar-activist, in an effort to elicit a distinctive way of thinking politically about underdevelopment. Focusing on a range of primary sources, including a series of unpublished notes and lectures on Marxism and development theory, I consider how Rodney’s engagement with the concrete struggles of Black people informed his appropriation of historical materialism. An avowed “Black Marxist” working at the onset of the neocolonial order, Rodney suggested that collective human development, the historical expansion of productive and social capacity, had become routinely delimited by racially charged political blockages, the effects of a kind of zero-sum game in which development for some was secured only through the active underdevelopment of others. Ultimately I suggest that Rodney’s work invites serious reconsideration of the enduring explanatory power of the Black radical and Marxist legacies, in this case by providing a rich theoretical framework that can help to orient and sustain critical engagement with the elusive racial politics of persistent underdevelopment.