English workers’ racialized consciousness gave no objective basis for universal class politics

Evidence

Since the English working classes were the social basis for Engels’s conceptualization of the modern proletariat, and conjoined with the sansculotte of the French Revolution to occupy a similar place in Marx’s thought, their evolving political and ideological character is of signal importance in reckoning the objective basis for Marxist theory. Of particular interest is the extent to which racialism (and subsequently nationalism) both as ideology and actuality affected the class consciousness of workers in England. In the intensely racial social order of England’s industrializing era, the phenomenology of the relations of production bred no objective basis for the extrication of the universality of class from the particularisms of race. Working-class discourse and politics remained marked by the architectonic possibilities previously embedded in the culture. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 115

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages the Marx/Engels historical-materialist framework this study corrects; ties to the reader’s wider interest in Marxist theory’s foundations.