Working-class consciousness requires spiritual and cultural self-reproduction that Marxian theory overlooked

Evidence

Wright was attempting to come to terms with the psychological consequence of a historical condition of which the leadership in the Communist movement was only vaguely aware. Wright was insisting on the necessity for understanding the working class in their own terms. He was concerned with the ability of proletarian masses to reproduce themselves spiritually and culturally. If they could no longer re-create the social ideologies that had sustained them, it would not be possible for them to fulfill the historical role that Marxian theory assigned them. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1372

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading purpose on the Black radical tradition’s arc: this isolates a key theoretical break where Wright departs from orthodox Marxism, feeding the ‘rise/height/downfall’ causal story. — connects to: Lukács located revolutionary agency in workers’ self-awareness as commodities — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 66; Working-class culture is aspirational and shares radical kinship with aristocratic values, not bourgeois levelling — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 840