James broke with orthodox Marxism over its blindness to culture and popular life

Evidence

But when he declared that he could “no longer accept the system of values which could not find in these books a place for W. G. Grace” (ibid., p. 157), he was also, it would appear, coming to terms with a species of Marxism that possessed neither imagination or political relevance. He had come to terms with the relationship between culture, class power, and economic dominance that had reduced even Marx to a somewhat mumbled admission of perplexity (see Marx on the Western ideal in Greek art in his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2399

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Robinson’s broader argument in earlier chapters about Marxism’s failure to account for racial and cultural dimensions of the Black radical tradition.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that James abandoned Marxism’s value system because it couldn’t account for W.G. Grace — culture as the proving ground of theory — is a paradigm-level insight about the limits of economic determinism.