Racist ideology, not production relations, blocked American class solidarity.

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. On the other hand, in the South, where the character of production with regard to the concentration of labor was more ambiguous, it was these workers, Black and white, who had produced the “General Strike” decisive in ending the Civil War. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1082

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of orthodox Marxist causation — ideology over mode of production — is a core theoretical move for the whole Black radical tradition.
• XREF: Connects to Robinson’s argument throughout Black Marxism that racism is not epiphenomenal but constitutive of capitalism — resonates with the ‘Negroes did not want it’ chapter’s logic and with the de-prioritized industrial-working-class theme throughout.
• DEFINE: Sharpens what revolutionary consciousness is for Du Bois: class solidarity built on ideology, not structural position.