Ethnic organizing logic structurally undermined American socialist unity.

Evidence

This, then, was one critical contradiction in early American socialist development. The organizing principle was ethnicity while at the same time nationalism—a logical conclusion of ethnicity—endangered and frustrated socialist unity. Ethnicity dominated the movement organizationally, ideologically, conceptually, and theoretically. This objective contradiction was a persistent character of the socialist and labor movements and would reach critical proportions in response to both European and American events (i.e., the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s; World War I; and ethnic competition for jobs and its subsequent violence). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 995

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates about why US socialism failed to unify across race and ethnicity, echoing the Black radical critique of Marxist parties grounded in white ethnic labor.