Capitalism never achieved coherence because racial-national particularism resisted it

Evidence

The feudal state, an instrument of signal importance to the bourgeoisie, was to prove to be as consistently antithetical to the commercial integration represented by a world system as it had to the idea of Christendom. Neither the state nor later the nation could slough off the particularistic psychologies and interests that served as contradictions to a global community. A primary consequence of the conflict between those two social tendencies was that capitalists, as the architects of this system, never achieved the coherence of structure and organization that had been the promise of capitalism as an objective system. On the contrary, the history of capitalism has in no way distinguished itself from earlier eras with respect to wars, material crises, and social conflicts. A secondary consequence is that the critique of capitalism, to the extent that its protagonists have based their analyses upon the presumption of a determinant economic rationality in the development and expansion of capitalism, has been characterized by an incapacity to come to terms with the world system’s direction of developments. Marxism, the dominant form that the critique of capitalism has assumed in Western thought, incorporated theoretical and ideological weaknesses that stemmed from the same social forces that provided the bases of capitalist formation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 123

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason and to Wallerstein’s world-systems theory these passages implicitly argue against.
• DEEPTHINKING: The two-tiered argument — capitalism never realizing its objective promise and Marxism inheriting the weakness of presuming economic rationality — is the paradigmatic core of the book.