Revolutionary consciousness formed through anti-imperialist struggles by peasant bases, not urban proletariats

Evidence

However, Du Bois came to perceive that they were not limited to the contradictions discerned by the radical Western intelligentsia. In the long run, that is, by the beginnings of the twentieth century, the vision of the destruction of bourgeois society entertained by Western socialists had been shown to be of only partial relevance. The working classes of Europe and America had indeed mounted militant assaults on their ruling classes. But in defeat they had also displayed their vulnerabilities to bourgeois nationalism and racialist sentiment. Elsewhere other realities had too come to the fore. The shocks to Western imperialism, which in the previous century had appeared to European radicals to be at the margins of the world revolution, were by the 1930s occupying center stage. The Indian Mutiny, the Boxer Rebellion, the nationalist struggles that had erupted in the Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Somalia, Abyssinia, West and southern Africa, and carried over into the twentieth century—the “people’s wars”—had achieved major historical significance in the revolutions in Mexico, China, and Russia. And in every instance, peasants and agrarian workers had been the primary social bases of rebellion and revolution. Nowhere, not even in Russia, where a rebellious urban proletariat was a fraction of the mobilized working classes, had a bourgeois social order formed a precondition for revolutionary struggle. Revolutionary consciousness had formed in the process of anti-imperialist and nationalist struggles, and the beginnings of resistance had often been initiated by ideological constructions remote from the proletarian consciousness that was a presumption of Marx’s theory of revolution. The idiom of revolutionary consciousness had been historical and cultural rather than the “mirror of production.” The oppositions that had struck most deeply at capitalist domination and imperialism had been those formed outside the logic of bourgeois hegemony. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1130

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and debates over whether Marxist proletarian models fit non-Western revolutionary movements; links to the Frankfurt School critique of orthodox Marxism.