European socialist theory diverged from actual working-class movements for decades.

Evidence

It would be another thirty years before a working-class movement gave evidence of its influence, and much longer than that before the principles of a socialist society became dominant in European social movements. … Following the execution of Babeuf and his co-conspirators, it is not until almost mid-century, the years noted for the appearance of Marx and Engels, that thinkers in the socialist tradition became actively engaged in working-class politics. The historians of socialist thought take this period for what it was, in relationship to their subject, and unanimously commit themselves to exegeses. The literary, pamphleteering, and historical works of forgotten and dimly remembered writers, with the rare interruptions of a Buonarroti, Blanqui, or Blanc, are sequenced to form the tapestry of socialist thought. It is a period dominated by eccentrics, visionaries, and didacts. The wistful trails of Godwin, Paine, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Pecquer, lesser and grander lights, preoccupy the historians, along with the most often short-lived utopian communities associated with some of them. The agitations, rebellions, riots, and struggles of artisans, wage laborers, peasants, and slave laborers are largely irrelevant to the tradition in the early nineteenth century and mostly constitute a background “noise” in this the era of the socialist writer. The “historical” issues that arise are each writer’s contribution to socialist theory, and whether or not the “systems” that were constructed should properly be categorized as “socialist.” This is a particularly telling historical project since so many of the historians, the Coles, Lichtheims, Beers, are themselves sympathetic to the tradition they reconstruct. Their work becomes a demonstration of the independence of socialist theory and social movements from one another. When once again they collide, in the 1840s, 1870s, and early 1900s, each had assumed forms and prerogatives only slightly tolerable to those of the other. While the movements of the working classes tended toward an accommodation with capitalism in the form of trade unionist demands, abandoning revolutionary initiatives to those whose social origins were, most often, the peasant and petit bourgeois classes, socialist theory became more and more dominated by the figure of the revolutionary proletariat. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 312

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the book’s central argument that socialist historiography erased actual slave and peasant struggles, connecting to Robinson’s later account of how Black radicalism recovered submerged histories.