Aimé Césaire’s Anticolonial Humanism as Species Autopoiesis

Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022) argues for the theoretical insufficiency of mid-twentieth-century Marxist humanisms in the Caribbean, proposing a value-form theory approach to the relationship between slavery and capitalism. This essay, pace Nesbitt, discusses the political poignancy of Aimé Césaire’s Marxist humanism through a reading of his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism. It asserts the contemporary necessity of revisiting the category of the human and Caribbean anticolonial humanisms in light of the racialized militarism of imperial projects today. Drawing on links between Césaire and Sylvia Wynter, the essay suggests that the autopoietic transformation of our species relations requires the elaboration of an ethical matrix derived from past revolutionary experience and designates anticolonial Marxist humanism as the space for that elaboration.