Reagan-era retrenchment and new imperialist wars coincided with grassroots revolutions worldwide

Evidence

The chaotic international political situation at the time Robinson was completing Black Marxism was enough to dispel the myth of order. It was, after all, the last decade of the Cold War, the era of Reaganism and Thatcherism and new imperialist wars in the Middle East, Grenada, and the Falkland Islands. Yet the late 1970s and early 1980s were also a new age of revolution. Dictatorships in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were being challenged by radical movements from El Salvador to Zaire and Nicaragua to South Africa. Political violence, torture, and assassinations seemed to proliferate in the early 1980s; the casualties included the great Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, an intellectual Robinson would certainly situate squarely within the Black Radical Tradition. Let us not forget that under Reagan, the United States invaded Grenada in 1983 precisely because it had undergone its own socialist revolution four years earlier. Closer to home, deindustrialization, the flight of American corporations to foreign lands, and the displacement of millions of workers across the country created further turmoil in the metropolitan centers of global capital. Permanent unemployment, underemployment, and homelessness became a way of life. And despite the growing presence of African Americans in political office, city services declined, federal spending on cities dried up, and affirmative action programs came under assault. Racism was also on the rise, resulting in urban rebellions from Liberty City, Florida, to the English (and predominantly Black) suburbs of Bristol and Brixton. In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan tripled its membership and waged a campaign of terror and intimidation against African Americans. In Mississippi in 1980 (not 1890), at least twelve African Americans were lynched, and at least forty racially motivated murders occurred in cities as different as Buffalo, New York, Atlanta, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 27

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: War and national crisis have both fueled and sapped the environmental movement’s political force — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 1093