Western Marxists’ Eurocentric racial metaphysics blinded them to Third World revolutionary forces

Evidence

When Du Bois and James set about the recovery of the history of the revolutionary Black struggle, they were driven from an implied to an explicit critique of Marxism. As Black men grown sensitive to the day-to-day heroism demanded for Black survival, they were particularly troubled by the casual application of preformed categories to Black social movements. It appeared to them that Western Marxists, unconsciously bound by a Eurocentric perspective, could not account for nor correctly assess the revolutionary forces emerging from the Third World. The racial metaphysics of Western consciousness—the legacy of a civilization—shielded their fellow socialists from the recognition of racialism’s influence on the development and structures of the capitalist system, and conceptually pardoned them from a more acute inquiry into the categories of their own thought. Without some form of intervention, the socialist movement would be doomed to disaster. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1437

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘racial metaphysics of Western consciousness’ conceptually pardoned socialists from acute self-inquiry is a dense, paradigm-level point about how an entire theoretical tradition was structurally blinded — sits well above typical well-argued nonfiction.
• XREF: connects to: Global Marxism’s failures stem from imposing Marx’s Eurocentric scenario worldwide. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1148