Anti-capitalist critique’s true force came from colonized ‘backward’ peoples, not metropolitan workers

Evidence

The critique of the capitalist world system acquired determinant force not from movements of industrial workers in the metropoles but from those of the “backward” peoples of the world. Only an inherited but rationalized racial arrogance and a romanticism stiffened by pseudoscience could manage to legitimate a denial of these occurrences. Western Marxism, in either of its two variants—critical-humanist or scientific—has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of liberation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1444

The critique of the capitalist world system acquired determinant force not from movements of industrial workers in the metropoles but from those of the “backward” peoples of the world. Only an inherited but rationalized racial arrogance and a romanticism stiffened by pseudoscience could manage to legitimate a denial of these occurrences. Western Marxism, in either of its two variants—critical-humanist or scientific—has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of liberation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1444

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the reader’s prior ‘Communication as Culture’ reading on how dominant frameworks obscure counter-hegemonic voices; also extends the Milgrom point that decentralized, periphery actors drive innovation. — connects to: 1989-91 street protesters mostly did not demand capitalism — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 107
• QUESTION: The claim that Western Marxism is ‘not a total theory of liberation’ — worth chasing whether later theorists (e.g. postcolonial studies) have credibly answered this charge.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1444