James pushed Marxian philosophy to its postwar limit while staying disciplined within the tradition.

Evidence

But there had to be limits within which the Johnson-Forest tendency was to remain. They had realized almost too late that as Trotskyists, without knowing it, they had flirted with the disintegration of Marxism: “[T]rotskyist thinking, persisted in, led the posing of the question of the disintegration of marxist theory, questioning whether we might not have to ask ourselves if it were valid” (p. 56). Their need to do things differently was to be a disciplined need. And in his consideration of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Marx, James made good use of his predecessors, holding strictly to the lights of the tradition. His critique, notwithstanding his fundamental deference, was true to form: internally consistent, devastatingly powerful, erudite, and logically near-flawless. Within its own terms James would take the philosophic discourse of the Marxian tradition to its most complete realization in the postwar years. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1303

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the depth of Robinson’s analysis of James within the arc of the Black radical tradition this chapter is tracing.