It is characteristic of twentieth-century black radical intellectual culture that, moving toward Marxism, it comes to discover its difference from Marxism. Canonically, this was stated by the Martiniquan poet and thinker Aimé Césaire in his Lettre à Maurice Thorez, his letter of resignation from the Parti Communiste français in 1956. Césaire does not dismiss the revolutionary project to which he had devoted his life since his student days at the Ecole Normale in Paris, his encounters with Surrealism and André Breton, his formative friendship with Léopold Sédar Senghor and the collective formation of Negritude, rather he asserts an issue of singularity, what he terms a “fact of capital importance”:

There are variations on this position and Cedric J. Robinson's important book on Black Marxism (1983) is a study motivated by the way in which the encounter with and difference from Marxism by black radical thought has been a means of self-definition.