Early American Marxists dismissed abolition as a bourgeois distraction

Evidence

Even when the Marxian ideas arrived, there was a split; the earlier representatives of the Marxian philosophy in America agreed with the older Union movement in deprecating any entanglement with the abolition controversy. After all, abolition represented capital. The whole movement was based on mawkish sentimentality, and not on the demands of the workers, at least of the white workers. And so the early American Marxists simply gave up the idea of intruding the black worker into the socialist commonwealth at that time. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 948

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s question about the Black radical tradition’s origins — Marxists’ rejection of abolition shaped why the tradition developed independently of Marxism.