Communist leadership ignored the psychological fragmentation truncating workers’ historical role

Evidence

Wright was attempting to come to terms with the psychological consequence of a historical condition of which the leadership in the Communist movement was only vaguely aware. Wright was insisting on the necessity for understanding the working class in their own terms. He was concerned with the ability of proletarian masses to reproduce themselves spiritually and culturally. If they could no longer re-create the social ideologies that had sustained them, it would not be possible for them to fulfill the historical role that Marxian theory assigned them. Moreover, the fragmentation of personality, social relations, and ideology that Wright observed and re-created was so total that its political and historical implications seriously challenged the presumptions of the Communist movement: I felt that Bigger, an American product, a native son of this land, carried within him the potentialities of either Communism or Fascism… — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1372

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s work on fascism and authoritarian personality and the psychological dimensions of working-class allegiance.