A Review of Judith Stein’s The World of Marcus Garvey

Judith Stein&rsquo;s 1986 book <em>The World of Marcus Garvey</em> is a comprehensive and critical analysis of Marcus Garvey&rsquo;s ideological development, through a distinctly materialist and class-focused lens. Stein considers Garvey&rsquo;s ideology as rooted in a fundamentally capitalist response to racial inequality, arguing that his version of Pan-Africanism was constructed by a specific class of &ldquo;elite&rdquo; Black people, and thus his coordinated political efforts were tied to the preservation and even expansion of that class (1986, 5). After nearly three hundred pages documenting the various unsuccessful projects that Garvey led, Stein classifies Garveyism as &ldquo;racial&rdquo; in language and &ldquo;bourgeois&rdquo; in ideology (276). In sum, Stein&rsquo;s book is a detailed historical critique of Garvey&rsquo;s various activist projects and enterprises throughout his life, placing his thought in the context of the elite Black politics of the late nineteenth century and the emerging labor politics of the early to mid-twentieth century. Though not outright condemning racial politics, Stein makes a persuasive argument that identifies Garveyism&rsquo;s principal flaw as a focus on race without an analysis of class or capitalism, ultimately creating a fallible path to Black liberation through enterprise. Racial politics without class consciousness, Stein argues, will never be truly radical nor truly address the problems it seeks to resolve.