Western colonialism’s cultural void, not class conflict, drives colored peoples to violence

Evidence

I maintain that the ultimate effect of white Europe upon Asia and Africa was to cast millions into a kind of spiritual void; I maintain that it suffused their lives with a sense of meaninglessness. I argue that it was not merely physical suffering or economic deprivation that has set over a billion and a half colored people in violent political motion… . The dynamic concept of the void that must be filled, a void created by a thoughtless and brutal impact of the West upon a billion and a half people, is more powerful than the concept of class conflict, and more universal. … Without myths, that is, without meaning, consciousness is set adrift into terror. The desperation that is the condition of this degree of alienation (or Max Scheler’s ressentiment, or Husserl’s “crisis”) inevitably requires violence. Violence is the final, the last possible form that social action may assume. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1398

Categorization

• QUESTION: Wright’s concept of a ‘spiritual void’ more powerful than class conflict directly contests classical Marxist analysis — worth tracing how this claim is received or rebutted across the Black radical tradition.
• XREF: Connects to Frantz Fanon’s writings on violence, alienation, and decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth.