Du Bois confronted Marx unmediated by Leninist doctrine, forging Black radical theory

Evidence

From the vantage point of a Black radical historiography, Du Bois was one of the first American theorists to sympathetically confront Marxist thought in critical and independent terms. Undaunted by the political and personal concerns of Blacks in the American Communist Party, which frequently manifested themselves as a search for ideological orthodoxy in their work and writings, Du Bois had little reason or awareness for cautiously threading an ideological position between Ruthenberg, Lovestone, and Foster in the CPUSA or Trotsky, Bukharin, and Stalin in the Communist International. As such, he could attempt to come to terms with Marx himself unmediated by Lenin or the emerging doctrines to be known as Marxist-Leninism. And in so doing, he was articulating in theoretical terms the intersections between the Black radical tradition and historical materialism only vaguely hinted at in the formal organizations of the time. It was in those then irreconcilable roles—as a Black radical thinker and as a sympathetic critic of Marx—that Du Bois was to make some of his most important contributions concerning Black social movements. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 977

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Frankfurt School reading: Robinson situates Du Bois against CPUSA/Comintern factionalism much as the Institute’s Marxist theory had to thread between Moscow factions.