Black intellectuals separated Marxist theory from the Communist movement within a quarter century

Evidence

In the minds of Black intellectuals, within a quarter of a century, the significance of the Third International had substantially degenerated. For some, like Padmore, and later Cox, international Communism (Stalinism) was simply another deceitful Western invention; for others like James it was its own perversion; finally, for those who were to share Du Bois’s experience, it seemed merely a convenient means of protest. However, detached from the Communist movement, Marxist theory could retain important capacities. Notwithstanding its weaknesses, there was in Marxism a critical discourse to which no bourgeois ideology adequately responded. Capitalism’s global regularities of war, expanding poverty and exploitation, the concentration of wealth, and the extension of repression persisted. Bourgeois thinkers displaced these endemic phenomena with the notion of termed, resolvable dysfunctions. Marxists correctly declared they were no such things. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1325

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the earlier chapters on Padmore, Cox, James, and Du Bois turning against Stalinism toward the movement’s ‘downfall’ arc the reader is tracking.