Racism, not production relations, blocked the rise of a US labor movement.

Evidence

But rather than seeing this process as inevitable due to the contradiction between the modes of production and the relations of production, Du Bois argued that it was made possible by the ideologies of racism, and, to a lesser extent, individualism. It was these ideologies as historical forces that had precluded the emergence of a powerful labor movement in the United States—a movement whose nucleus would have consisted of the nine million ex-slave and white peasant workers of the South. The force of these ideologies manifested itself after the war when these workers did not move to the next logical step: the institutionalization of their historical convergence in order to dominate the Reconstruction’s “dictatorship of labor.” Without this movement, the revolution begun in 1855 with John Brown’s Kansas raids could not continue. The failure to achieve a consciousness of themselves as a class was not a consequence of the absence of the concentration of production in agriculture, as some Marxists might presume, for in the North workers had had this experience, yet their labor movement was predominantly trade-unionist. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1082

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s Frankfurt School work on ideology as historical force and on why class consciousness fails to form.
• DEEPTHINKING: Du Bois’s inversion of orthodox Marxist causality — ideology over material contradiction — is a paradigm-level claim about how racial capitalism actually operates.