Homogenizing experiences of capitalism acts as an erasure of historical racist principles of Marxism. Acts of discourse perpetrate normative errors that are incompatible with dealienating social racialism

Differing emphases upon racism’s moral valences and economic function have similarly shaped different strategic and political conceptions of “race” and “community” versus “labor” and “class” organization. Emigrating to the United States in the s, James agreed with those who thought Black self-organization was “backward,” even “reactionary,” in a context of industrial working-class struggle. The politics of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor upsurge, and communist party influence led a rising cohort of Black activists and intellectuals to reject middle-class presumptions of older race leadership. To them, Du Bois’s politics, even as he grew more radical during the s, continued to rest on an outmoded racial premise. Abram Harris summed up their views: “[Du Bois] is a racialist whose discovery of Marxism as a critical instrument has been too recent and sudden for it to discipline his mental processes or basically to change his social outlook” (quoted in Singh, Black Is a Country, ). E. Franklin Frazier argued “the status of the Negro is losing its purely racial character and becoming tied up with the struggle of white and Black workers against the white landlords and capitalists” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Black socialist George Streator was unsparing: defense of “Negro racialism” was “reactionary,” obscuring the fact that “the Negro is nine-tenths a laborer” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Du Bois was unyielding: “So long as we are fighting a color-line, we must strive by color organization.” “Science alone could not settle this matter;” nor would the “color bar ... be broken by a series of brilliant, immediate assaults.” Rather, a “long siege was indicated,” with “organization in boycott, propaganda and mob frenzy,” alongside “careful planning and subtle campaign with the education of coming generations” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Independent Black political activity, in this view, was intrinsically valuable and as important as labor organization. “[We] thought it was, the day of Internationalism, Humanity and the disappearance of ‘race’ from our vocabulary,” Du Bois admitted (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). But he was skeptical Black incorporation into workingclass politics would eliminate racial antagonism as a dimension of national life and international relations and saw movements of the racially excluded as the cutting edge of democratic politics: a means to reorganizing the state, through legal reform and normative influence. These debates at the onset of the long civil rights movement and the birth of the Keynesian welfare state seem distant, but they illuminate puzzles that have been central to the problematic of racial capitalism going forward. Robinson aligns with Du Bois, emphasizing the precedence of racial ordering as an inheritance of European feudalism presaging the rise of capitalism in the English countryside in the sixteenth century. “Capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relationships,” Robinson writes. “[F]rom its very beginnings, European civilization ... was constructed on antagonistic differences.” The conquests and uneven development of European peoples, exemplified by the colonization of Ireland, seeded the “uneven development of national capitalisms” and secreted racialism as “an enduring principle of European social order” and its settler colonial offshoots (Black Marxism, ). “The universality of capitalism is less an historical reality, than the construct of this language of error,” Robinson concludes (). The “error” has led to consequential erasures, but also, it should be added, to stabilizing reforms, in which overcoming capitalism’s particularistic, violent precedents, and ascriptive hierarchies associated with them, became a means by which bourgeois discourse represented capitalism’s historical progress and purported moral development. Focusing on demystifying this ideological procedure, Western Marxists have tended to redouble the progressive error by emphasizing economically determined stages of history and derogating democratic rights and struggles. What Robinson calls Black Marxism, by contrast, pursues a recursive, iterative path, delineating persistent (racial/national) exclusions of Western emancipatory discourses, while at the same time laying claim to an insurgent universality deriving from a stubborn resistance and failure to incorporate Black life into legal and normative capitalist circuitries of wage and contract