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20 August 2025

It is blatantly clear that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. The imperialist powers, our own government included, are fully complicit, through arms supplies, intelligence sharing and failure to apply any meaningful sanctions. 

Western liberal thought ignores the fact that genocide did not start with the Nazis. It went hand in glove with colonial conquest – in Hispaniola, Tasmania, North America and Belgian-occupied Congo, to name just a few examples. A number of scholars internationally have established a relation between settler colonialism and genocide. The perpetrators have generally been of European origin.

What is happening in Gaza (and less blatantly in the West Bank) is essentially a European settler-colonialist genocide. The Israeli government is in thrall to far-right settler colonialists – of European or US origin – who have made clear their ambition to clear out the Palestinian people. 

But it’s not ethnicity, the Israeli lobby, or its secret service Mossad, which is responsible for the imperialist powers’ failure to apply the brake to the genocide. They won’t do it because Israel is an essential part of the their strategy of dividing up the Middle East, in order for transnational corporations to control its main resource – oil. Keir Starmer has said more than once that Israel is our “ally”.

Western imperialism represents a terrible danger to humanity. But that danger goes much further than Gaza, to include the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the military encirclement of People’s China and the continued possession of nuclear weapons, as well as much more.

Here in Britain, the working class and progressive movement has a responsibility to deal with our own country’s imperialism. The trade union movement is however weak on this, wedded as the TUC is to supporting increased expenditure on so-called ‘defence’. It is therefore very timely that, in response to the government’s Strategic Defence Review 2025, CND has produced an Alternative Defence Review. Here, on page 29, we reproduce an introduction to it.

Hand in hand with this weakness, the labour movement’s priorities and concerns are Eurocentric, as Nigel Flanagan points out here in his review of Roger McKenzie’s new book, The Rebirth of the African Phoenix. Fundamental changes are taking place in Africa, Roger says; and if the movement here is to progress, it needs to make more room than ever for the leadership and experiences of Africans themselves.

That is a major theme of our lead article by Dennis de Oliveira on Martinican Marxist Aimé Césaire. Well known in France, and in the African diaspora, Césaire deserves to be much better known in Britain. In his work he “vehemently addressed the wounds of European racism and colonial oppression of Black people”, while at the same time “advocating a radical transformation through Blackness as the only way to save the world from barbarism.” For Césaire, Blackness was a revolutionary consciousness, and “his criticism of the Eurocentric perspective of the communist movement [at that time –Ed] claimed that the Black population should play a leading role in the construction of revolutionary experiences in their territories.” 

Eurocentricity is also a feature of so-called Western Marxism, as Domenico Losurdo pointed out in his book of that title, reviewed by Nick Wright in CR116. A discussion on the book took place at the Marx Memorial Library on 5 July, and we print here Alex Gordon’s contribution, where he argues that the past role of the labour aristocracy has perhaps been substituted today by “Western academia responsible for the social and ideological reproduction of the ruling ideas in our own times.”

The battle of ideas is the main theme of William Dry’s article on the necessity of Communist electoral work. He goes back to Marx, Engels and Lenin for the theoretical basis for contesting elections, and then shows how a successful electoral strategy was developed in Stepney. He concludes with seven points for successful electoral work in practice.

The battle of ideas takes many forms. There is a widespread perception on the left that Venezuela is socialist-oriented and is at the forefront of the struggle with US imperialism. But leading Venezuelan Communist Pedro Eusse argues here that President Maduro’s government has been moving to the right, shifting to neoliberal (and anti-communist) policies, and that the coercive measures by the US and the EU are not about Venezuela “having a ‘socialist’ government but about seeking to prevent Chinese and Russian capital from taking exclusive control of the country’s strategic resources.”

This edition of CR includes five discussion articles. Three of them relate to building socialism: a short contribution by Martin Graham on the theme of markets and socialism, raised by Jerry Jones in CR116 and Oliver Coxhead in CR118; Ruth Pitman’s political education column, which tackles the topic of workers’ co-operatives, also discussed by Jerry and Oliver; and a considered piece by David Grove showing how societies embarking on the construction of socialism, such as the Soviet Union and China, are heavily influenced by the birthmarks of the past revolutionary struggle and the geopolitical situation they face. The other two articles, on the sex and gender issue, are part of the Communist Party’s discussion leading up to the 57^th Congress in November; they represent two sides to the debate, and we shall not be able to publish more on this topic in future as our next edition will mostly cover the post-Congress period. 

Finally, Nick Moss’s ‘Soul Food’ column looks at two recent poetry anthologies from Culture Matters, Michael Rosen’s Words United and Alan Maguire’s The Last Days of Alicante. Nick points to engaged poetry having the role of exposing the truth – and uniting people.

Notes and References

Purchase the COMMUNIST REVIEW SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 Edition

Life and political praxis

Aimé Fernand David Césaire (1913-2008) was born into a poor and large family in Martinique, an island that is still a colony dominated by France. He was the second of six children of Fernand Césaire, a civil servant, and Éléonore Hermine, a seamstress.

From an early age, he excelled in his studies. In order that he and his siblings could have access to a better-quality education, the family moved to Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique. There, Césaire studied at the Schoelcher High School until he was 18; during this period, when he was 11, he met Léon Gontram Damas – who would become one of the leaders of the Négritude (Blackness) political and cultural movement, composed of Black students from countries colonised by France, within the colonial metropolis itself.

Césaire excelled as a student and in 1931 won a scholarship from the French government to study at the Lycée Louis le Grand, in Paris. There, together with Leopold Senghor, he founded in 1934 the newspaper L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). The initiative to publish this periodical was the starting-point for the creation of the Négritude movement – an ethnic identity movement whose underpinning was the feeling of belonging to the African diaspora in a white, colonising country. In its first texts, the publication carried strong criticisms of the system of cultural oppression to which France subjected its colonies.

In 1935 – the same year that Aimé Césaire was admitted to one of the most elite institutions in France, the École Normal Superior of the Sorbonne University, in Paris – his poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Country) became known for being the first text to use the French word négritude. Influenced by surrealism, this text of more than 50 pages was published in the magazine Volontés (Wishes) in 1939. Later, the writer André Breton, one of the main exponents of French surrealism, published the poem on its own, considering it a great lyrical monument of the period. 

In 1937 Aimé married the writer Suzanne Roussi, a compatriot he had met during his stay in Paris. She adopted the surname Césaire, and together they returned to Martinique in 1939, when Aimé was 25 years old. Over the course of their marriage, they had four sons and two daughters.

Aimé Césaire’s studies in Paris had included Latin, Greek and French literature.  He spoke several languages and was a profound connoisseur of French literature, especially the work of Victor Hugo.  Upon returning to the Caribbean, with a degree in literature, he taught the subject at Schoelcher High School. What he did there was precisely to express his erudition and to present himself as a Black man, speaking to his students about African civilisations. During this teaching period, one of his students was the Martinican Frantz Fanon, later a psychiatrist and an anti-colonialist Marxist philosopher, who is noteworthy for his works on racism and his involvement in the struggle for Algerian independence. Another student who had classes with Aimé was the writer Édouard Glissant.

The year 1939 marked the beginning of the Second World War, and France was occupied by the Nazis in 1940. The French collaborationist Vichy regime then allowed Martinique to be administered directly by the Nazis – who intensified repression and racism, banning any kind of cultural expression on the Caribbean island. Some years before the German invasion, France had been governed by a centre-left alliance, and these distinct experiences of Aimé Césaire – under a progressive regime when he was studying in the metropolis, and later under the fascist yoke – formed the backdrop against which he directed his political references to discuss colonialism.

In 1944, Aimé travelled to Haiti as a diplomatic cultural attaché. The experience, in the only country that had gained independence through a revolution led by enslaved Black people, impacted his thinking in terms of understanding the power of the Black population in the fight against colonialism and racism. His political praxis was also expressed in his work as a poet, writer and journalist.

In 1941, Aimé and Suzanne had founded the magazine Tropiques (Tropics), a quarterly literary periodical that circulated until 1945, and which brought together works by Martinican and French writers who opposed colonialism and Nazism – especially during this period when France was under the yoke of the occupation and the puppet Vichy government. The main objective of the magazine was to establish a cultural movement in Martinique, giving visibility to its writers. But Aimé Césaire transformed it into the great spokesperson for the Négritude movement.  The magazine was persecuted by the Vichy government, having editions censored and suffering a ban on the supply of printing paper, among other attacks. 

André Breton, who had escaped from Vichy France to Martinique in 1941, discovered the first issue of the journal, met the Césaires, became a collaborator on the magazine, and contributed to its reception in Europe; at the time, he became famous for encouraging Aimé to use surrealism as a political weapon. Since then, the combination of surrealism and Africanism permeated Aimé Césaire’s work. In 1947, he participated in the magazine Présence Africaine (African Presence), created by Alioune Diop, in Paris, which brought together the most prominent intellectuals of the African diaspora with anti-colonial positions; excerpts from his work Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on colonialism, 1950) were published in this journal.

Upon his return to Martinique in 1939, Aimé had also become involved in politics, and he joined the French Communist Party (PCF) shortly after the end of the Second World War. In 1945, at the age of 32, he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France, serving in office from 1945 to 2001. During this period, he was also elected deputy to the French National Assembly, a position he would hold from 1945 to 1993; during his term in office, he prioritised, among other issues, the preservation and development of Martinique’s culture.

In 1946, Césaire supported a bill in the National Assembly that transformed Martinique into an overseas department of France, thus overcoming its status as a “colony”. In 1951, he voted against the Treaty of Paris, which established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC); in the votes, he also opposed the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or EURATOM).

Aimé Césaire broke with the French Communist Party after Khrushchev’s criticism of Josef Stalin at the Soviet Party Congress in 1956, and in 1958 he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (Martinican Progressive Party, PPM), which advocated, among other issues, the autonomy of the Caribbean territory and the exercise of a communism more focused on local thought and action. In its statutes, the party defined itself as “a nationalist, democratic and anti-colonialist party, inspired by the socialist ideal”. In fact, under Aimé Césaire’s leadership, the fight for Martinique’s autonomy was central to the organisation – which called for the transformation of Martinique from an “overseas department” into a “federal region” of France, in addition to the strengthening of the popular economy and the Martinican identity.

Political activity did not keep Aimé Césaire away from literary practice. In 1956, he participated in the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists, hosted by the Sorbonne, an event that was attended by delegations from 24 nations. On that occasion, he presented the text Culture et colonizations (Culture and Colonizations), with reflections on the destruction of the colonised peoples’ cultures due to the impacts of the process of domination.

Throughout the 1960s, Aimé Césaire also produced plays and other literary works, notably La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1964). In his personal life, the period was marked by his divorce from Suzanne in 1963. In that same year, he visited Brazil, where, after his Haitian experience, he had the opportunity to establish greater contact with Afro-American culture.

In the 1970s, the PPM drew closer to the position of the French Socialist Party – one of whose main leaders was François Mitterrand – and would remain so until the end of Aimé Césaire’s parliamentary career. His last political action was in 2005, when he criticised a bill that dealt with curricular content in French schools, claiming that aspects of colonisation were being presented as positive.

In the 1970s, his literary production decreased; but in the 1980s, his poems were published again.

In 2004, he was honoured with the UNESCO Toussaint Louverture Prize in recognition of his work in the anti-racist struggle. On that occasion, unable to travel, he participated in the ceremony remotely.

Until 2005, at the age of 92, Aimé Césaire headed the PPM. That year, his name appeared in the press again, due to his refusal to attend a meeting with the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior of France (and who became president of the country between 2007 and 2012). Césaire’s attitude was a reaction to the fact that Sarkozy had signed a letter that emphasised the “positive role” of colonialism. 

Aimé Césaire died at the age of 94, on 17 April 2008, due to heart complications.

Contributions to Marxism

Aimé Césaire was a poet, essayist, playwright, orator, journalist, anti-colonialist activist and politician. His thought develops a Marxist conception based on the following elements: (a) considering the concept of ethnic-racial belonging (which he calls “négritude”) from a historical perspective based on the singularities of the experiences of Black people; (b) realising that this historical perspective is marked by colonialism, which has as its centre the expansion of European civilisations to dominate other civilisations; (c) realising that this historical process of colonialism imposes on the colonised peoples – in particular on his country, Martinique – a whole order of oppressions and sufferings, which he narrates with poetic verve; and further (d) concluding that these same civilisations, which carry all the artistic and rational enlightenment, consolidate themselves from this order of oppressions, pointing to the need for a dialectical critique of the Modern Project and the concept of reason of the Enlightenment.

In his work, Aimé Césaire vehemently addressed the wounds of racism and colonial oppression, while at the same time advocating a radical transformation through Blackness as the only way to save the world from barbarism. In the mid-20th century, belonging to a Black identity was directly linked to something ‘lesser’. The French word nègre (Negro) had a pejorative tone, which makes us realise that the emergence of the term négritude was a reinterpretation of his own, made in order to highlight a search for Black identity and its respective feelings, revolts and struggles.

For Césaire, Blackness is not only a perception of ethnic belonging, but a revolutionary consciousness, so that the consciousness of Blackness itself is a revolutionary consciousness. Note that the depreciation of Black identity was prevalent in Martinique – to the point that people with slightly lighter skin, or who had studied in France (absorbing the culture of the coloniser), sought to disguise this belonging, ashamed of their origins.

Transiting between a particular artistic perception, expressed in his poetic and literary texts, and a universal academic perception, demonstrated in his texts of a political nature, Aimé Césaire constructed not only a precise diagnosis of what constitutes the construction of thinking on ethnic-racial relations, but also approaches Marxism in this interpretation, mainly by rejecting the limitation of Blackness to a biological vision (which would lead to a supposed essentiality of the category ‘race’).

His thinking is part of the modernisation of Marxist thought, especially regarding the issue of racism, which was considered secondary until the beginning of the 20th century. However, from the end of the 1910s and in the 1920s, during the existence of the Communist International (CI), the discussion on the Black question advanced, particularly with the strengthening and greater impact of Black organisations in the United States and the Caribbean. Linking racism to imperialism and colonialism, the discussion in the Third International urged the communist movement to fight against racism as an essential element for the construction of socialism; and Dmitri Manuilsky, leader of the Communist International in 1924, even made harsh criticisms of European Communist parties (including the French Communist Party) for disregarding the racial issue.

About a decade later, in the article entitled ‘Conscience raciale et révolution sociale’ (‘Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution’), which circulated between May and June 1935, Aimé Césaire harshly criticised the system of cultural oppression that France used in order to subdue its colonies, signalling the central points of his proposal: self-knowledge of the Black condition as a starting point to be able to express to the world what one feels, thinks and demands, instead of limiting oneself to being merely an ‘ethnic curiosity’; the action of Black men and women is directly linked to their self-knowledge as belonging to a certain ethnicity. Also in this text, the author states: 

“Yes, we will work to be Black, in the certainty that this is working for the Revolution, because this will make the Revolution.”

Through literary language, full of metaphors, personifications and other linguistic resources, Césaire built further reflections on Black reality from the context of Martinique: 

“Listen to the white world terribly tired with immense fatigue; its rebellious joints creak under the relentless stars; its shoddy steel rigidity pierces the mystic flesh; hear its treacherous victories announce its defeats.”

Many of the perceptions expressed in Aimé Césaire’s works outline the political perspective of Négritude, indicating the maturation of his political ideas. Being in the lands of the coloniser, he captured reality as a subject coming from a colonised territory and, therefore, placed within a differentiated group. From this placement as a differentiated subject (that is, an identity constructed from the ‘Oppressive Other’), he evoked the need to constitute himself as a specific subject – to express the collective voice of all those who are symbolically ghettoised by the “oppressor”.

The emphasis on the perceptions and unique historical experience of African peoples highlighted by Aimé Césaire provides an important counterpoint to a dialectical view of modernity, often disregarded by certain sectors of Marxist thought. In fact, Marxism is a direct heir to modernity; and Marx’s reflection that capitalism constructs a rationality that can serve to overcome itself is an idea that led certain currents to a simplistic view, considering that the socialist revolution would necessarily involve a ‘civilising process’, defined based on the model of European rationality, so that the colonised countries should ‘fit’ into the model and path of the class struggles that occurred in European countries.

Hence Aimé Césaire is extremely firm in pointing out, in the Discourse on Colonialism, that this civilisation, which inaugurates a ‘rational’ perspective of class relations – thus enabling their overcoming – is also, with its colonial expansion, irrational (or “sick” as he calls it). What is more: this irrationality is even present among Enlightenment and ‘humanist’ thinkers, such as Ernest Renan, a French philosopher popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who considered that the regeneration of inferior races by superior ones is in the nature and order of humanity.

For this reason, Aimé Césaire stated that no-one colonises innocently or with impunity:

“[A] civilisation that justifies colonisation – and therefore force – is already a sick civilisation, a morally damaged civilisation that, irresistibly, from consequence to consequence, from negation to negation, calls upon its Hitler, I mean, its punishment.”

In other words, Nazism is a product of the very evolution of this ‘rationality’, a conclusion close to that reached by the thinkers of Critical Theory (sometimes called the Frankfurt School), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their work Dialectic of Enlightenment: a reason dissociated from any ethical principle and instrumentalised by capital, which leads to barbarism.

The perspective of barbarity in these terms was a major contribution by Aimé Césaire – and far ahead of his time, being a pioneer in the field of Marxist criticism of modernity, capitalism and revolution beyond European borders. His erudition – expressed both in his poetic verve and in the indignation of his writings, in his political activism and in his recognised intellectual quality – made the French periodical Le Nouvel Observateur consider him “a man of words and a man of combat”, in a demonstration that his contribution to knowledge was established in the 20th century as a path for the revolutionary transformation of society.

Still in the Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire wrote that the civilisation considered ‘European’ or ‘Western’ had shown itself incapable of solving the colonial problem and the problem of the proletariat, which led him to the conclusion that “the serious thing is that Europe is morally and spiritually indefensible”. The author then pointed out the ideological meaning of the connection between colonisation and civilisation, stating that the meaning of colonisation is not “evangelisation, nor philanthropic enterprise, nor the desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance”, nor even the “expansion of God or Law”. For him, “colonisation” is a “form” assumed by a given civilisation (in this case, the European one) when it finds itself “internally obliged to extend the competition of its antagonistic economies to a global scale”.

For Aimé Césaire, the discussion on colonialism is of fundamental importance in the construction of the concept he proposes of Blackness, which is defined as follows: 

“Blackness is not essentially biological in nature”, but is a conception that refers to “a sum of lived experiences that ended up defining and characterising one of the forms of humanism created by history” – and is, therefore, “one of the historical forms of the human condition”.

Already his break with the French Communist Party was due to his support for criticism of the Stalinist model (hegemonic in the global communist movement of that period), criticisms that were driven by Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciations, in 1956, against Stalin’s government in the Soviet Union. In his well-known letter of October 1956 to Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the PCF, Aimé Césaire points out his discontent with the party’s support for the French government’s policy in northern Algeria – at a time when this African country was fighting for its independence.

Further on, in this letter that marks his break with the PCF, Aimé Césaire states that he disapproves of the way in which some individuals understand or use the concepts of Marxism and communism: 

“[W]hat I want is for Marxism and communism to be put at the service of Black peoples, and not Black peoples at the service of Marxism and communism … the doctrine and the movement would be made to fit men, and not men to fit the doctrine or the movement.”

He also declares his desire to see an African version of communism flourish, although he believes that this perspective will not be realised due to the actions of the PCF, whose role towards the colonial peoples was that of teaching, in a contradictory anti-colonialism with many colonial marks. He states that: 

“[T]here will be no communism unique to each of the colonial countries subject to France as long as … the offices of the French Communist Party’s colonial branch … persist in thinking of our countries as mission fields or as countries under mandate.”

His criticism of the Eurocentric perspective of the communist movement claimed that the Black population should play a leading role in the construction of revolutionary experiences in their territories, stating that the field of Marxism should be dialogic enough to incorporate these various experiences; a vision close to that of Suzanne Césaire, his wife, who in the texts produced for Tropiques pointed to the need for a universality of humanism, which also incorporated Black experiences.

By synthesising Négritude based on three elements – identity (pride in racial belonging), loyalty (to ancestral African traditions) and solidarity (union of all Black men and women) – Césaire enabled the movement to become a rebellious force against colonialism. During the resistance to Nazism and in the post-World War II period, the movement developed a strong connection with the international communist movement. However, as the anti-colonial agenda was diluted within part of the communist movement, particularly in European countries, separation was imminent.

From then on, at times the ideology of Négritude – its perspective on the concept of “Blackness” – would show itself to be ambiguous, moving towards a “racial essentialism”. This would distance the movement from a revolutionary perspective – although at other times it would strengthen the struggles for autonomy of peoples of the African diaspora in colonies in the Caribbean and Africa.

Thus, it is considered that, more than criticising certain positions of Négritude and Aimé Césaire’s thought, the important thing is to understand it within its complexity and, mainly, to point out challenges that need to be reflected by Marxism – because the struggle for a new, socialist society also implies a transformation of relationships and the human condition. That is, it involves settling accounts, from a dialectical perspective, regarding which conception of humanity was constructed throughout the project of modernity. To this end, it is essential to understand the meanings constructed from this European idea of modernity, in order to be able to give a new meaning to colonialism, understanding how to articulate these particularities and rebellious singularities with the constitution of a universality that connects with the construction of a society without oppression.

Aimé Césaire, with his poetry, activism and reflections, is a thought-provoking thinker. His reading shows that Marxism is a living theory and practice.

Comments on the works

Aimé Césaire was the author of numerous political and poetic works, and is considered one of the ideologists of the Négritude movement. His literary production is distributed mainly between essays, poems and plays, with texts translated into several languages.

Between the 1930s and 1980s, he published more than 15 books. His first texts were poems with an analytical tone and lyrical reflections on the meaning of Blackness, as well as some essays. At around 20 years old, he published the essay ‘Conscience raciale et révolution sociale’ (‘Racial consciousness and social revolution’⁵) in the ‘Nègreries’ section of the newspaper L’Étudiant Noir, from the Association of Martinican Students in France. In this text he began to develop the concept of négritude, which would become fundamental for the political-cultural Négritude current. The article poses the question: “What revolution was made by a people without curiosities?”. He states that it is insufficient to call on Black people to revolt “against the capitalism that oppresses them”, before Black people have an understanding of their own identity and condition. Only after “Blackness” is established in the consciousness of Black people “like a beautiful tree” can a “true revolution” be made: only then can “all slavery, born of ‘civilisation’, be triumphed over”.

In the long poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, (Volontés, Paris, 1939; first English translation as Return to my Native Land^,) the writer poetically distils throughout the text the harsh reality of the Black people of Martinique, highlighting the wounds of racism and colonial oppression. At the same time, he points out that the only way to save the world from barbarity is radical transformation from the perspective of Blackness.

Et les chiens se taisaient, a three-act play about Toussaint Louverture, was written in Martinique in 1943.  The original French text was discovered in 2008, and has been translated by A Gil and published as And the Dogs Were Silent by Duke University Press in 2024.

The 1946 work Les Armes miraculeuses (Miraculous Weapons⁹; Ed Gallimard, Paris) is composed of 26 poems, many of which had already been published in Tropiques. Written during World War II, the poems faced up to the censorship of the Vichy regime through surrealism, opacity, subjectivity and polysemy, to portray scenes, analyses and criticisms about Martinique. The preface was written by André Breton. A later edition was illustrated by Pablo Picasso.

In 1948, Césaire wrote the preface to the republished book by Victor Schoelcher, De l’esclavage des Noirs et de la législation coloniale (Slavery and colonisation; Presses Universitaires de France, Paris), historically detailing the harsh conditions under which the abolition of slavery was achieved.

His work in this period also includes the poetry collections Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed; Ed K, Paris, 1948) and Corps perdu (Lost Body; Ed Fragrance, Paris, 1949).

The 1950s and 1960s were dedicated to essays and drama, including one of his most famous works, the Discours sur le Colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism; Réclame, linked to French Communist Party, 1950, then Présence Africaine, 1955). The work pioneered the relationship between colonialism, the domination of power and the hierarchy of knowledge, and was notable for its blunt criticism of colonial oppression. To this end, the author emphasised the modus operandi of colonisation and the violence intrinsic to this process.

The essay Toussaint Louverture: la Révolution française et le problème colonial (Toussaint Louverture: the French Revolution and the colonial problem) was first published in 1960 by Club Français du Livre, Paris, then republished in 1962 by Presence Africaine).

His further dramatic texts deserve to be highlighted. La Tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe; Présence Africaine, 1963) is a play about Henry Christophe (1767-1820), the self-proclaimed monarch of Haiti. In addition to the scenic elements common to the genre, Césaire uses the chronological time of the nineteenth century and the abundance of dialogues, so characteristic of the story, to bring to the fore debates about identity, colonial domination and African resistance. Popular traditions and the constant concern for audience participation are present in the dramatic text. The work reinforces the relevance of the experiences and studies of Haiti for the writer’s trajectory and literary production.

Another dramatic production is Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo; Ed du Seuil, Paris, 1965), a story in three acts that uses lyrical and dramatic characteristics to portray the tragic trajectory of Patrice Emery Lumumba, anti-colonial leader and late prime minister of the then newly-liberated Belgian Congo, assassinated in 1961. He is a character recognised for his optimistic, emotional and incisive actions in favour of his nation.

During this period Césaire also found space for publication of two works of poetry: Ferrements (Hardware; Ed du Seuil, 1960) and Cadastre (Survey;  du Seuil, 1961).

After a hiatus from literary publications for much of the 1970s, in the 1980s Aimé Césaire continued to write poems and give speeches. His last collection of poems, Moi, laminaire … (I, Laminary …), was published by Seuil in 1982. This work is recognised for its less explosive and more reflective lyricism. The texts address themes such as friendship, poetic creation and tributes (posthumous or otherwise) to work colleagues and intellectuals, in an exercise of literary maturity and richness of linguistic resources. Martinique is also portrayed through polysemy and the abundant use of figures of speech.

Césaire’s Discours sur la négritude (Discourse on Blackness; Présence Africaine, 1987) was delivered in 1987, at Florida International University in Miami, on the occasion of the First Hemispheric Conference of Black Peoples and the Diaspora in Homage to Aimé Césaire, ‘Negritude, Ethnicity and African Cultures in the Americas’.  The reflections in his paper updated the concept of Blackness, rendering it more complex; from everyday examples to metaphors, he highlighted the importance of identity, the right to difference and respect for the collective personality. The Brazilian edition has a preface by Carlos Moore, who traces a timeline of the development of the ‘Négritude’ perspective, considered as “consciousness-positioning against racism”.

In 2004, Aimé Césaire gave an interview to François Vergès, which was published under the title Negre je suis, negre je resterai (Resolutely Black; Albin Michel, Paris, 2005), a work that presents an overview of his Marxist thought and trajectory.

■ Article originally published in Portuguese in the online Dictionary of Marxism in America at the web site of the Praxis Centre for Research, Popular Education and Politics of the University of São Paulo, https://nucleopraxisusp.org/2025/03/21/o-marxismo-de-aime-cesaire/; also published at https://aterraeredonda.com.br/o-marxismo-de-aime-cesaire/.  Text directly translated at the web sites, but the last section (‘Comments’) has been reworked here by the CR editor to replace Brazilian texts with English ones, listed in the end-notes, all added by the editor.  The list of Brazilian sources cited by Professor Oliveira has not been included.

Aimé Césaire/ Arte de Marcelo Guimarães Lima

Notes and References

¹ Named after Victor Schoelcher (22.07.1804-25.12.1893), a writer, journalist and politician, best known for his leading role in the abolition of slavery in France in 1848, during the Second Republic.

² Édouard Glissant (21.09.1928-03.02.2011) became a writer, poet, philosopher and literary critic, and is an influential figure in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.

³ Alioune Diop (1910-1980) was a Senegalese writer and editor and a key figure in the Négritude movement.

⁴ Downloadable at https://www.scribd.com/document/94251336/Aime-Cesaire-Culture-and-Colonization.

⁵ English translation in Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology, A Moody and SJ Ross, eds, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2020.

⁶ A Césaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez, C Jeffers transl, in Social Text 103, Vol 28, No 2, Summer 2010, pp 145-152; online at https://abahlali.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/153945859-Aime-Cesaire-Letter-to-Maurice-Thorez-1956.pdf. 

⁷ L’Étudiant Noir, No 3, May 1935; republished in Les Temps Modernes, 2013/5 No 676, pp 249-251, see https://shs.cairn.info/revue-les-temps-modernes-2013-5-page-249?lang=fr.

⁸ A Césaire, Return to my Native Land, J Berger and A Bostock, transl, Penguin, 1969, available at https://archive.org/details/returntomynative0000cesa/mode/2up; later published as Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, M Rosello and A Pritchard, transl, Bloodaxe, 1995.

⁹ See also A Césaire, The Collected Poetry, C Eshleman and A Smith, transl, University of California Press, 1983, and The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire, C Eshleman and AJ Arnold, transl, Wesleyan University Press, 2017; both bilingual editions

¹0 Solar Throat Slashed, AJ Arnold, transl, Wesleyan University Press, 2011; bilingual edition, poems also at ibid.

¹1 Lost Body, C Eshleman and A Smith, transl, George Braziller, New York, 1986, including 32 etchings by Picasso; poems also at Note 8.

¹2 Discourse on Colonialism, first published in English by Monthly Review Press, 1972, republished 2000; also available on Kindle.

¹3 Toussaint Louverture: the French Revolution and the colonial problem, K Nash, transl, Polity, 2024.

¹4 The Tragedy of King Christophe, Grove Press, 1970; Northwestern University Press, 2015.

¹5 A Season in the Congo, GK Spivak, transl, Seagull Books, London/New York/Calcutta, 2010; online at https://archive.org/details/seasonincongo0000csai/mode/2up.

¹6 Online at https://archive.org/details/ferrements0000unse/mode/2up.

¹7 Online at https://archive.org/details/cadastrepoemes0000cesa/mode/2up?q=Cadastre.

¹8 Online at https://archive.org/details/moilaminairepoem0000cesa/page/96/mode/2up.  For an English translation see EHS Osborne at https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/7m01bn39g.  The title appears to refer to laminaria, or kelp.

¹9 The original text is also at http://blog.ac-versailles.fr/lelu/public/ALTERITE/DISCOURS_NEGRITUDE.pdf (not secure).  A printed English translation has not been found, but a spoken translation of part is at https://youtu.be/whBMXpceX2I.

²0 Discurso sobre a negritude, Nandyala, Belo Horizonte, 2010.

²1 A Césaire, Resolutely Black: Conversations with Francoise Verges, M Smith, transl, Polity, Oxford, 2019.

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