Marxism’s explanatory power made it irresistible to Black radical intellectuals

Evidence

Still subject to what James had described as the inherent “political vices” associated with their social origins, their seduction by those aspects of Marxism that were owed to the sources of its genesis is understandable. Marxism’s intellectual power and pedigree, its promise of a hidden truth, its open opposition to an insidious social order, its alternative mapping of the historical origins of the ruling classes, which they had come to despise, and its identification with the underclasses, made it an almost irresistible companion. … Marxism was (and remains) a superior grammar for synthesizing the degradation of labor with the growing destabilization of capitalist production and accelerating technological development; the increasing resort to state coercion mediated by bureaucratic rationalism; and the strangulation of whole regions (most of them formerly colonies) through pricing mechanisms, market manipulation, monopolization of advanced technology, the international organization of production, international banking, military assistance, and the stultifying dependencies of monocultural economics. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1324