Ethnic-nationalist tensions prevented Marxism from being Americanized

Evidence

Cruse argues that in the first three decades of the movement, the party’s most successful period, ethnic nationalism defeated the attempt at Americanization: “It evidently never occurred to Negro revolutionaries that there was no one in America who possessed the remotest potential for Americanizing Marxism but themselves. Certainly the Jews could not with their nationalistic aggressiveness, emerging out of Eastside ghettos to demonstrate through Marxism their intellectual superiority over the Anglo-Saxon goyim. The Jews failed to make Marxism applicable to anything in America but their own national-group social ambitions or individual self-elevation. As a result, the great brain-washing of Negro radical intellectuals was not achieved by capitalism or the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by Jewish intellectuals in the American Communist Party” (p. 158). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2251

Categorization

• XREF: Cruse’s argument that Jewish intellectuals in the CP failed to Americanize Marxism anticipates later debates about race and class in the American Left. — connects to: In Europe Marxism was an unavoidable philosophical presence, unlike in America — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 4817; American capitalism’s appeal made ethnocentric fascist ideology less necessary there — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1802; Western Marxism reached English readers only decades after its creation — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 10
• QUESTION: This is a contested and provocative claim — Cruse blaming Jewish CP intellectuals for ‘brain-washing’ Negro radicals. How does Robinson weigh in?