Marxism is an internal critique that cannot ground Black liberation by itself

Evidence

For Wright, it was not sufficient for Black liberation that his people come to terms with the critique of capitalist society. He had observed: “Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life.” As a critique of capitalist society, Marxism was necessary, of course, but it was ultimately an internal critique. The epistemological nature of historical materialism took bourgeois society on its own terms, that is, presuming the primacy of economic forces and structures. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1383

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense theoretical claim that Marxism, by accepting bourgeois premises (economic primacy, the feudal-bourgeois-proletarian model), forecloses the distinct path of the Black radical tradition — a foundational argument for the whole book.
• XREF: This is the theoretical core grounding Robinson’s own thesis in Black Marxism — the tradition’s claim to a negation that is not simply the European proletariat’s.