Du Bois deemed Marx’s philosophy valid only for mid-nineteenth-century Europe

Evidence

This left a monumental gap in the analysis of capitalism and its developments, assigning Marx’s own work to a specific historical period. Du Bois would conclude, while working on Black Reconstruction, that “we can only say, as it seems to me, that the Marxian philosophy is a true diagnosis of the situation in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century despite some of its logical difficulties.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1119

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Core to the reader’s arc question: this historicization of Marx is one of the philosophical foundations of the Black radical tradition — that Marxism alone could not account for racial capitalism.

Related

• Du Bois confined Marxism’s validity to mid-nineteenth-century Europe. (similarity 0.95)
• Du Bois confronted Marx unmediated by Leninist doctrine, forging Black radical theory (similarity 0.87)
• Du Bois first reassessed Marxian revolution theory within American Marxism (similarity 0.86)
• Black Reconstruction marked Du Bois’s turn to Marxist-inflected theoretical history. (similarity 0.85)
• Du Bois revised Marx’s theory by foregrounding mass action over class vanguard. (similarity 0.85)
• Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction advanced a mass-action theory of history diverging from Marx. (similarity 0.85)
• Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction revised capitalism, consciousness, and organization theory. (similarity 0.85)
• Du Bois recognized Marx had not anticipated imperialism’s transformations of capitalism (similarity 0.84)
• Du Bois located America’s revolutionary failures in its founding contradictions. (similarity 0.84)
• Du Bois held that Marx’s analysis required modification for the American race problem (similarity 0.84)
• Black Reconstruction marked Du Bois’s first break with the Black elite he belonged to (similarity 0.84)
• Du Bois insisted Black people’s historical significance lay in their labor, not enslaved status. (similarity 0.83)
• Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction revised Marx’s theory of revolution around mass action (similarity 0.83)
• Black radicals rejected Marxism for its Eurocentric blindness to racialism’s role in capitalism (similarity 0.83)
• Du Bois shifted from race to class analysis of black oppression by 1911 (similarity 0.82)