All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

By Cedric J. Robinson

Race & Class, Vol. 21, No. 4,

… at the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed

Richard Wright

The significance of Richard Wright as a black writer, as an intellectual and social activist has yet to be firmly established in the minds of most us. Certainly he was a most powerful writer, but was his literature art or propaganda? Was his work the product of a creative, imaginative and undoctrinaire mind, or the anguished thrust of ideology? And if his writing was essentially propaganda, what were its particular purposes? to whom was it directed? and for whom? These are the sorts of questions which haunt Wright’s image.
The ambiguity surrounding Wright is, in part, a consequence of his own intellectual odyssey. More precisely it is a consequence of his public honesty about the voyage. It was a journey which took him from marxism, and through existentialism, and finally to black nationalism - a journey which could be retraced biographically from his membership in the American Communist Party in the early 1930s to his death in France in 1960.

But another and equally important source for the undefined character of Wright’s legacy is the several and remarkably extensive campaigns of vilification launched against him by the American left, the American liberal intelligentsia and American bureaucrats. These ranged from the literary attacks on Wright by writers such as James Baldwin, to the political assaults of figures like James Ford, the black communist Ben Burns, the then editor of Ebony, the deliberately distorted reports in Time magazine on Wright and others, the machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency, and threats from once-powerful, but now almost forgotten anti-communists like David Schine. It appears to be a fair statement that though these distinct and, in some instances, opposing political factions had rather different interests in the destruction of Wright’s influence on American politics and literature, they did concur on the desirability of the suppression of his work
and ideas.

In any case, the result was the same: Wright’s self-imposed geographical exile was transformed into an intellectual and political isolation. Moreover, some of these same forces sought further retribution from Wright by filling his life in Europe and Great Britain with harassments of both petty and terrifying dimensions. It was intended that Wright realise the full consequence of criticising American domestic racial policies and attacking American foreign policy in the Third World.

Yet despite his detractors and their sponsors, despite the established and powerful political and cultural authorities of American society, some of Wright’s work and ideas survived. The re-emergence of Wright’s importance in American thought may appear at first ironical. So many of his critics are now rather thin shadows in history. But, more accurately, it is the result of the social and historical contradictions of American capitalism and its particular social order.

In the midst of the black consciousness and nationalist movements of the 1960s, the seemingly irresistible dictates of the market compelled the republishing of the Outsider (1965), Native Son (1966), Black Boy
(1966), Eight Men (1969) and later, American Hunger (1977).They were works which spoke to a generation which Wright did not live to see but had anticipated. Significant, too, was the emergence of younger and equally militant black writers and playwrights (among them John A. Williams, Leroi Jones, Ed Bullins, Melvin Van Peebles and Ishmael Reed). Much of their work would have fallen quite easily into what one American critic, Robert Bone, had called ’the Wright School’ (’For the Wright School, literature is an emotional catharsis - a means of dispelling the inner tensions of race. Their novels often amount to a prolonged cry of anguish and despair. Too close to their material, feeling it too intensely, these novelists lack a sense of form and of thematic line.), except for the fact that Bone had already announced that the death of that school had occurred twenty years earlier: `By the late 1940’s the vein of literary material unearthed by Richard Wright had been all but worked out. The market for protest had become saturated`. It does appear that Bone was a bit premature.

More remarkable, however, than the sheer survival of Wright’s work, is the theoretical and analytical power of his ideas. This achievement of Wright’s, with the stimulus of historical materialism and psychoanalysis, fell much closer to an emergent European literature (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Koestler, Lukacs, Marcuse, Kolakowski) in the post Second World War period than to any American fashion. Like many European left intellectuals, Wright was moving beyond classical marxism and the marxism inspired by Lenin in order to come to terms with a world constituted of material and spiritual forces historically unique. Wright’s reach, consequently, can be said to be much longer than that implied by the terms employed by many of his American critics. He was never merely a ’racial novelist’, a ’protest writer’, or a ’literary rebel’. Indeed, much of his work was a direct confrontation with the leading ideas and ideational systems of contemporary western political and social thought. His arena was the totality of western civilisation and its constitutive elements: industrialisation, urbanisation, alienation, class, racism, exploitation and the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. His work thus constituted an inquiry.

Wright’s persistence in his investigation of western society was an important factor contributing to the achievement of a certain consistency in his work. As artist, as essayist, as critic, as political activist, it is clear that he arranged and re-arranged many times the elements making up the phenomenological display of western development. He knew the names of western experience but was less certain of what he knew of their nature and their systemic and historical relationships. There were questions to which he still had to find answers: Was the working class a social reality? Could class consciousness supercede racism as an ideology? Was the Party the vanguard of the proletariat? Was marxism more than a critique of capitalism? These were some of the issues to which Wright had not found satisfactory answers in organised and organisational politics. Ultimately, it would be because of his particular skill for transforming theoretical abstractions and constructs into recognisably human experience that it became possible for him to make those distinctions between dogma and reality so important to his development.

Theoretically and ideologically, Wright came to terms with western thought and life through black nationalism. However, the basis for his critique of western society was his experience of the historical formation of black peoples in Africa and the diaspora, from the Gold Coast to the Mississippi Delta. Psychically and intellectually he was drawn to attend those same forces which produced the critical inspections of W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore and C.L.R. James. As Michel Fabre puts it:

Wright’s originality, then, is that he completely understood and often reiterated … that the situation of the Black in the twentieth century, and in particular during the crucial period from the Depression to the advent of Black Power, was exceptional. These years saw the awakening of the Third World and with it the enormous mutation of our civilisation. ’The liberation of the colored peoples of the world is the most important event of our century,’ is a refrain that runs throughout Wright’s work. The same message, delivered half a century before by W.E.B. DuBois, did not have the same existentialist dimension.’

Wright had not created these forces which were transforming western society, but it was his intention to give these events a meaning independent of those interpretations bounded by the interests of western civilisation as articulated by its intellectuals and ideologues.

Still there are some who have argued that Wright fulfilled little of his promise. Harold Cruse, among them, has written that Wright ’was so ideologically blinded by the smog of Jewish-Marxist nationalism that he was unable to see his own clearly’; that Wright had not understood ’that the classics of Marx and Engels were written not for the proletariat but for the intelligentsia’, and, finally, that ’He could not gather into himself all the ingredients of nationalism; to create values and mould concepts by which his race was to ’struggle, live and die’.

Here, then, are two of the several interpretations which attach to Wright’s significance. The first places him within a tradition of radical black thinkers. The second expels him from that same legacy. In the following pages we shall examine which of these two summaries of Wright’s work is more appropriate.

The novel as politics

Richard Wright was by his work primarily a novelist. But as a novelist involved in social action, his novels were more than a complaint against or an observation of the human condition. Wright intended that his writing engage and confront a political reality of movement. He was a novelist who recognised that a part of his task was to come to terms with the character of social change and the agencies that emerged as attempts to direct that change. His early development consciously reflected this concern beginning with his 1937 essay, ’Blueprint for Negro Writing’. In this essay we see the first suggestions of a critical independence of thought in Wright.

Perspective … is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people … Of all the problems faced by writers who as a whole have never allied themselves with world movements, perspective is the most difficult of achievement.’

Wright is quite openly declaring that he means his work to reflect a committed intellect, one informed by a political intention and the process of historical movement. He is also dedicating himself to the task which would occupy him for the remaining twenty-three years of his life: the location of his ’perspective’ in the complex of struggles for liberation in the Third World. As we shall see, what Wright ultimately discovered was a psychological and intellectual locus unlike anything his experience of western radicalism and activism could encompass. Fortunately, a great part of his preparation for that discovery can be found in his novels.

When we consider Richard Wright’s fictional and explicitly political work, three novels (Native Son, The Outsider and ’Island of Hallucination’) and one collection of short stories (Uncle Tom’s Children) stand out. Together, these works both chronicle and interpret Wright’s experiences with American communism and political action. They also constitute studies of marxism as a theory of history and social revolution, of the social and psychological development of the American working class, and of the historical and ideological development of American blacks. Serious attention to these works should not be deflected by the form through which Wright sought to articulate his ideas. Indeed, it must be recognised that his works are uniquely suited to their tasks. Using this form, Wright could reconstruct and weight the extraordinary complexities and subtleties of radical politics as he and others had experienced it. His characters could live with and struggle through crises he had encountered. They could ’test’ the meanings and significances he had given to those experiences. His novels were consequently much more authentic documents than the conventional forms of history, biography and political tract for they were constructed from lives with which he was intimate. In these novels, Wright could achieve his intention of weaving living consciousness into the impress of social theory and ideology.

Wright had joined the American communist movement in the early 1930s. This was a period which coincided with an intensification of the Party’s work among blacks following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern’s ’resolution on the Negro Question’ in 1928 and the beginnings of the Scottsboro trials in 1931. Wright left the Party a decade later. During those years he worked in the various capacities of organiser, member of a black Party cell in Chicago, officer in the John Reed Clubs and writer for the communist press. At first, his work for the Party was to take place primarily in Chicago; later he was transferred to Harlem. It was, of course, during this time that his writing was most directly influenced by the Party. He proved to be very good at it. By 1937, the year he had published ’Blueprint… ’, he had become, in Daniel Aaron’s words, ’the Party’s most illustrious proletarian author’.

Wright took this responsibility as a proletarian writer quite seriously. He was committed to the task of expressing working-class thought, consciousness and experience. One recollection of this period is his first impression of the Party: ’The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead … they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses … Wright meant to put this right, the proletariat had to be allowed its own voice. It was just as clear to him that he carried a particular, racial responsibility towards the black working classes:

The Negro writer who seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious responsibility … a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.

… the Negro writer … is being called upon to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die. … because his writing possesses the potential cunning to steal into the inmost recesses of the human heart, because he can create myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life …

As a black writer, Wright was presuming that the intelligentsia had the obligation to construct the ideological and symbolic means through which an emerging black movement would be formed. Still, the work of this intelligentsia had to be grounded in the culture of their people.

Working with these conceptions, Wright was clearly reflecting an earlier marxian tradition, one in which Lenin had transformed a ’renegade’ petite-bourgeoisie into a revolutionary vanguards (Wright appears to have always opposed the Stalinist anti-intellectualism which marked the communist movement domestically and internationally in the 1930s.) But Wright was also mindful of a second and separate tradition which had emerged among blacks in the US during the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. At these historical moments, from among the ranks of free blacks, there had emerged an intellectually, economically and politically elite class which had assumed leadership on behalf of the largely enslaved black masses. This nucleus later contributed significantly to the formation of the black middle class. The ethos of this class and its socio-historical traditions had been given its most enduring name by W.E.B. DuBois: the talented tenth. Wright was thus suffusing two distinct and opposing traditions. But more importantly, even here while he was ostensibly addressing black intellectuals, he was also going about the work of recreating his world in his own ideological terms.

Blacks as the negation of capitalism

For Wright, it was not sufficient for black liberation that his people come to terms with the critique of capitalist society. He had observed: ’Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life. As a critique of capitalist society, marxism was necessary, of course, but it was ultimately an internal critique. The epistemological nature of historical materialism took bourgeois society on its own terms, i.e., presuming the primacy of economic forces and structures. As such, the historical development from feudalism of the bourgeoisie as a class served as a logical model for the emergence of the proletariat as a negation of capitalist society. Wright appeared quite early to have understood this thesis as a fundamental error in marxist thought. Even as early as 1937, he had begun to argue that it was necessary that blacks transform the marxist critique into an expression of their own emergence as a negation of western capitalism.

Though immersed in the American radical movement with its Eurocentric ideology, it had not taken Wright very long to reach the conclusion that the historic development of black people in the United States constituted the most total contradiction to western capitalist society:

The workers of a minority people, chafing under exploitation, forge organisational forms of struggle … Lacking the handicaps of false ambition and property, they have access to a wide social vision and a deep social consciousness … Their organisations show greater strength, adaptability, and efficiency than any other group or class in society.

Wright assumed that the alienation of black workers from American society was more total than that experienced by the ’white’ working classes formed in Europe and America. This, indeed, was the more profound significance of black nationalism, and one with which the black intellectual had to come to terms:

… the emotional expression of group-feeling which puzzles so many whites and leads them to deplore what they call ’black chauvinism’ is not a morbidly inherent trait of the Negro, but rather the reflex expression of a life whose roots are imbedded deeply in Southern soil. Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives … they must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness. It means a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations, that is aware of the dangers of its position, that knows its ultimate aims are unrealisable within the framework of capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society.

Wright’s argument and its language strongly suggest the elements within the Party with which he was in ideological conflict. In using the phrase ’black chauvinism’ - its second element being a term used most frequently within the Party as a more objective interpretation for what was commonly referred to as nationalism - Wright designated his first target: white marxian ideologues. His second target, deracinated black intellectuals, were addressed as the recipients of a new history. They had to be made to realise that black nationalism was an initial and historically logical stage of a more profoundly universal consciousness.

Wright was arguing that American blacks had been recreated from their African origins by an oppressive system of capitalist exploitation which had at one and the same time integrated them into the emergent organisation of industrial production while suspending them from the full impact of bourgeois ideology. Perhaps Wright put this most succinctly several years later in The Outsider when Ely Houston, one of Wright’s two spokesmen in the novel, observed:

The way Negroes were transported to this country and sold into slavery, then stripped of their tribal culture and held in bondage; and then allowed, so teasingly and over so long a period of time, to be sucked into our way of life is something which resembles the rise of all men …

They are outsiders and … They are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time … Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews … They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak … The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous …

Wright believed that racism, the very character of the system by which black workers had been exploited, had mediated their internalisation of the ruling ideas of American society. He went on to assert that, unlike the dominant sectors of European and Euro-American proletariats, the black proletariat - historically from the legal and political disciplines of slavery to its peculiar condition as free wage labour - had developed a psychic and cultural identity independent from bourgeois ideology.

This construction of Wright’s pushed the insights of DuBois33 and others far beyond the critique of black-white labour solidarity. What Wright was suggesting went even beyond the most extreme position in the 1930s of American radicals that blacks were the vanguard of the American working class.

Wright was asserting that the black revolutionary movement, in the process of transcending a chauvinistic nationalism, was emerging as an historical force which would challenge the very foundation of western
civilisation:

Reduced to its simplest terms, theme for Negro writers will rise from understanding the meaning of their being transplanted from a ’savage’ to a ’civilized’ culture in implications. It means that Negro writers must have in their consciousness the fore-shortened picture of the whole, nourishing culture from which they were torn in Africa, and of the long, complex (and for the most part, unconscious) struggle to regain in some form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again.

For Wright, it was at precisely this point, in the culture’s ideational, conceptual and ideological extension, that the writer and other intellectuals are required. In the construction of myths and symbols emergent from the experience of black people, the responsibility of the intellectuals was ’to create values by which [their] race is to struggle, live and die’. This is precisely the task Wright was assuming sixteen years later in The Outsider.

The Outsider as a critique of Christianity and marxism

The Outsider was completed several years after Wright had left the American communist movement. It was received, however, as a further elaboration of Wright’s reason for his action. Yet the novel’s treatment of the Party was less in the tradition of Chester Himes’ vitriolic Lonely Crusade or Ralph Ellison’s satiric The Invisible Man than in that of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Though Wright did develop in The Outsider a critique of the American left’s race politics and of Stalinism, his intent was much broader, his object much
more far ranging.

The novel is a parable. It is a moral, philosophic and political exercise. Like the myth in phatic groups, the purpose is to demonstrate the terrible consequence to the human spirit as well as to social organisation of a total exorcising of social ideology. In White Man Listen, Wright would declare:

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 which 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.

Moreover, Wright was demonstrating both the necessity and inevitability of ideology and its arbitrariness. No matter what meanings ideologies systematise, they are always subject to the abuses of power. When ideology is used for the purpose of domination, it must be opposed, not by a counter-ideology but by the negation of ideology: theory. In short, he was making the case for the necessity for a critical commitment, the sort of commitment which achieves its purpose by extraction from the historical legacy: the culture of a people. Such a commitment is made possible only through a consciousness capable of recreating meaning.

In The Outsider, Wright sought to subvert the two ideological and philosophic traditions at the heart of modern western culture. Firstly, he ridiculed the Judeo-Christian tradition by creating a protagonist whose very name is contradiction: Cross Damon-the demon Christ. Cross Damon has escaped Judeo-Christian morality through the recognition of its operative psychic force: a destructive, debilitating dread -guilt. Just as Marx earlier had recognised that religion (that is Judaism) ’is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’, Wright had perceived the truer historical significance of Christianity among blacks as not an instrument of domination but as a philosophic adaptation to oppression.

Moreover, he understood the resignation of black Christianity as only one element in the culture of blacks. In black music, another more strident voice existed opposing that guilt:

… this music was the rhythmic flauntings of guilty feelings, the syncopated outpourings of frightened joy existing in guises forbidden and despised by others … Negroes had been made to live in but not of the land of their birth … the injunctions of an alien Christianity and the strictures of white laws had evoked in them the very longings and desires that that religion and law had been designed to stifle … blue-jazz was a rebel art blooming seditiously under the condemnations of a Protestant ethic … Blue-jazz was the scornful gesture of men turned ecstatic in their state of rejection … the recreations of the innocently criminal …

The forces of science and technology and the processes of the proletarianisation of black workers were orchestrating the supercession of black Christian resignation by this second, derisively angry, consciousness.

Yet Wright was also critical of marxism, the second and more modern radical western tradition. It too was profoundly limited theoretically, and subject to the abuses of narrow political interests. Marxism had ultimately failed to come to terms with nationalism, with consciousness, with racism, with western civilisation, with industrialisation and with the history of blacks. Wright had already demonstrated some of its limitations in Native Son. Daniel Aaron, commenting on Bigger Thomas’ communist lawyer, had observed, ’Even Boris Max never really understands Bigger, and is frightened by Bigger’s vision of himself. ’ Wright made this same point even more tellingly in The Outsider. Wright maintained that the purposes of marxism as employed in American communism were less analytical than political. The result was neither theory nor praxis but the achievement of power. Ironically, in the second novel, it was the character of Hilton, also a Party functionary, who spoke for Wright. Hilton, driven to candour by desperation, betrays the crude agreement upon which Party support of black liberation depended: manipulation. Wright (Cross) then reflects
to himself:

Did the average white American suspect that men like Hilton existed, men who could easily rise above the racial hatred of the mob and cynically make use of the defensive attitudes instilled in Negroes as weapons in their own bitter struggle for power.

But Wright would instruct us never to expect to hear such revelations as Hilton’s. He had heard them as a part of his experience, an experience which he would subject to the marxian critique which was now also a part of his way of grappling with reality.

Marxism as an ideology and theory of history, Wright argued, was a product of a petite-bourgeoisie, in particular, the intellectuals:

You must assume that I know what this is all about. Don’t tell me about the nobility of labor, the glorious future. You don’t believe in that. That’s for others, and you damn well know it … You Jealous Rebels are intellectuals who know your history and you are anxious not to make the mistakes of your predecessors in rebellious undertaking.

He was no longer convinced that marxism as a theory, as a theory of history or social revolution, was correct but he did understand its seductiveness. He would write in 1960: ’Marxist ideology in particular is but a transitory make-shift pending a more accurate diagnosis … Communism may be but a painful compromise containing a definition of man by sheer default. He suspected that marxism, alike with Christianity as an ideology, masked the complexities of history and social experience. Its truer function was the social and intellectual cohesion of the petite-bourgeoisie - a class very different from the proletariat:

… one minority section of the white society in or under which he lives will offer the educated elite of Asia and Africa or black America an interpretation of the world which impels to action, thereby assuaging his feelings of inferiority. Nine times out of ten it can be easily pointed out that the ideology offered has no relation to the plight of the educated black, brown, or yellow elite … But that ideology does solve something …
… it enabled the Negro or Asian or African to meet revolutionary fragments of the hostile race on a plane of equality.

Still, in this his most devasting criticism of communism, Wright was relying on a notion of class struggle:

These men who rise to challenge the rulers are jealous men. They feel that they are just as good as the men who rule; indeed, they suspect that they are better. They see the countless mistakes that are being made by the men who rule and they think that they could do a more honest, a much cleaner job, a more efficient job.

Such was Wright’s thesis on the development of marxism as a classspecific ideology. And in some ways, he was echoing Marx’s own but more mystical explanation of marxism:

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hand … so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

By the early 1950s, Wright had come to his similar conclusion - one which we have seen he retained for the rest of his life - but with a different meaning: marxist theory was an expression of petite-bourgeois consciousness and its critique of bourgeois society and capitalism was most fundamentally addressed to that class’ suffocation by the authority of the bourgeois ruling class.

Yet the opposition of marxist theory to capitalist society was useful to Wright, theoretically. Indeed, the historical and revolutionary role which Wright assigned to blacks had at its base a materialist dialectic. As previously indicated, Wright recognised black nationalism as a product, in part, of both the objective necessities of capitalist development and accumulation, and its system of exploitation. As he turned towards the ideology of black nationalism, he sought to comprehend its emergence in the contradictions of day-to-day experience:

… every day in this land some white man is cussing out some defenseless Negro. But that white bastard is too stupid to realise that his actions are being duplicated a million times in a million other spots by other whites who feel hatred for Negroes just like he does. He’s too blind to see that this daily wave of a million tiny assaults builds up a vast reservoir of resentment in Negroes.

Thus Wright echoed another powerful contribution to the development of marxism: Hegel’s the Cunning of Reason.

But where Wright differed most with others who could employ a marxist approach was in his characterisation of the historical forces of ideology. Ideology was the special political instrument of the petitebourgeoisie. Wright was arguing that the renegades of this class which had served historically to produce the dominant ideas of the bourgeoisie, had themselves become contemptuous of the ruling class. The Jealous Rebels had declared, as Marx himself had written: ’the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent’.

In his criticisms of marxism, then, Wright was not entirely rejecting marxism but attempting to locate it, to provide a sense of the boundaries of its authority. As a theory of society, he found it dissatisfying, indeed, reductionist. By itself it was insufficiently prescient of the several levels of collective consciousness. As an ideology, he recognised that it had never transcended its origins. It remained an ideology for the working classes rather than an ideology of the working classes. However, as a method of social analysis he found it compelling. He had not abandoned the conception of the relations of production as a basis for the critique of capitalist society nor the importance of the class relations of production. Still, the critique of capitalism was only the beginning of the struggle for liberation.

It is from this critical perspective that Wright joins with one of the few black women he has sympathetically drawn, Sarah Hunter. When she cajoles her husband, Bob, the frightened and Party-subservient black organiser, she is speaking for Wright: ’everywhere I’ve looked … I’ve seen nothing but white folks kicking niggers who are kneeling down’. ’I want to be one of them who tells the others to obey, see? Read your Marx and organise. ’

From his experience in the American Party, and from his reading of Marx, Wright had come to the conclusion that no people’s liberation is the result of their abject surrender of critical judgment. Certainly it was not the prerogative of black intellectuals to surrender the cultural heritage of their people: the emergent revolutionary consciousness of black nationalism.

Very little remains then of the Wright which Harold Cruse presents to us. Perhaps, like Baldwin, Cruse had also felt the need ’to kill the father’. Doubtless, too, the explanation for Cruse’s error is much more complex. But irrespective of the origins of Cruse’s portrait of Wright, a closer reading of the central works written by Wright over a span of more than two decades reveals a most powerful and self-possessed black thinker. Wright struggled towards a synthesis of marxism and black nationalist thought to match those of his colleagues, George Padmore (PanAfricanism or Communism) and C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins and Notes on Dialectics, to name two). And together, their several works - along with those of DuBois - are an extraordinary legacy to blacks in the western hemisphere and elsewhere. In them, one can discover an independent and richly suggestive critique of the modern world - a critique whose voice is the most authentic sounding of the brutal depths of western civilisation and its history. There lies, in those works, the beginnings of black revolutionary theory.

*This article is an attempt to extend the analysis of Cedric Robinson’s previous piece, ’The emergent marxism of Richard Wright’s ideology’, Race & Class (Vol. XIX, no. 3,

References

• Richard Wright , ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’, New Challenge (Fall 1937), p. 57.
• For an example of the continuing confusion surrounding Wright, see Tone Mwenifumbo, ‘Richard Wright: Revolutionary or Cynic?’, in Africa, An International Business, Economic and Political Monthly, (London , No. 82, June 1978), pp. 107 and 109.
• See James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (New York, 1952 ),
• and Nobody Knows My Name (New York, 1961 ).
• See also Ellen Wright’s accounts of Baldwin and Wright in Faith Berry, ‘Portrait of a Man as Outsider’, Negro Digest (December 1968), pp. 27-37.
• See James Ford , ‘The Case of Richard Wright’, Daily Worker (5 September 1944).
• See Ben Burns , ‘They’re Not Uncle Tom’s Children’, The Reporter (Vol. 14, 8 March 1956), pp. 21-3.
• See ‘Amid the Alien Corn’, unidentified author, Time (17 November 1958), p. 28.
• Wright dealt with the CIA’s activities in the American black movement and in the black expatriate community in France in two works: his unpublished manuscript, ‘Island of Hallucination’, and his speech to students and members of the American Church in Paris (8 November 1960), entitled ‘The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States’. With respect to the CIA, Wright’s comments in his speech have been summarised by Michel Fabre in The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York, 1973), p. 518. For more on Wright and the C1A see Constance Webb, Richard Wright (New York, 1968), pp. 375-7 and 396; and Berry, op. cit.
• See Hoyt Fuller’s interview with Chester Himes in Black World (Vol. 21, March 1972), p. 93;
• Webb, op. cit., pp. 417and 312.
• See Berry, op. cit., pp. 34f.
• Fabre has included in his biography the following letter which Wright wrote to Margit de Sabloniere on 30 March 1960: ‘You must not worry about my being in danger … I am not exactly unknown here and I have personal friends in the de Gaulle cabinet itself. Of course, I don’t want anything to happen to me, but if it does, my friends will know exactly where it comes from. If I tell you these things, it is to let you know what happens. So far as the Americans are concerned, I’m worse than a Communist, for my work falls like a shadow across their policy in Asia and Africa. That’s the problem; they’ve asked me time and again to work for them: but I’d die first … But they try to divert me with all kinds of foolish tricks.’ Fabre op. cit., p. 509.
• American Hunger is the title Wright originally suggested (among others) for his unpublished manuscript ‘Island of Hallucination’. The material published under the former title is in large measure the parts of Black Boy which Harper expunged from its 1945 edition. Darryl Pinckney would appear to be wrong when he suggests in his review of American Hunger that Wright himself was responsible for the deletion (see ‘Richard Wright: the Unnatural History of a Native Son’, Village Voice (4 July 1977), p. 80) since Wright had published much of the material in the Atlantic Monthly (September and August, 1944), under the title ‘I Tried to be a Communist’.
• Robert Bone , The Negro Novel in America ( New Haven, 1965), p. 158.
• Ibid., p. 160.
• See Bone, op. cit., and Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the New World (Garden City, 1976) for these characterisations of Wright’s work.
• For the Gold Coast (now Ghana) see Wright’s essay Black Power (New York, 1954).
• Fabre, op. cit., p. xviii.
• Harold Cruse , The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York), p. 182.
• Ibid., p. 188.
• Wright, ‘Blueprint … ‘ op. cit., p. 61.
• Wright, quite early on in his Party experience while reflecting on his mother’s reaction of horror to communist propaganda, had come to the conclusion that: ‘They had a program, an ideal, but they had not yet found a language.’ Richard Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed ( New York, 1965), p. 107.
• See Michel Fabre, op. cit., pp. 89-200;
• and Webb, op. cit., pp. 114-66.
• Daniel Aaron , ‘Richard Wright and the Communist Party’, New Letters (Winter 1971). p. 178.
• Crossman, op. cit., pp. 107-8. For some other attempts to deal with the development of thought specific to the working class,
• see E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (New York , 1966);
• Stanley Feldstein and Lawrence Costello (eds.), The Ordeal of Assimilation (Garden City, 1974); and the special issue,
• ‘The Origins of Left Culture in the US: 1880-1940′, Cultural Correspondence/Green Mountain Irregulars (6-7, Spring 1978 ).
• Wright, `Blueprint’, op. cit., p. 59.
• See Alfred Meyer , Leninism (New York , 1971), pp. 40-1;
• and Leonard Shapiro, ‘Two Years that Shook the World’, New York Review of Books (31 March 1977), pp. 3-4.
• See Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement ( London, 1974), pp. 163-75, and p. 213.
• Wright, ` Blueprint …’ op. cit., p. 60.
• Jean Baudrillard , The Mirror of Production ( St. Louis, 1975).
• See Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘On the History of the Workers’ Movement’ , Telos (Winter, 1976-7), pp. 3-42.
• Wright, ` Blueprint’, op. cit., p. 54.
• Ibid., p. 58.
• Richard Wright , The Outsider (New York, 1953), pp. 118-9.
• See W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in American 1860-1880 (New York, 1971).
• See Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia ( New York, 1960);
• Dan Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (New York, 1969);
• and Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (New York, 1971).
• Wright, ‘Blueprint … ‘, op. cit., pp. 62-3.
• See Fabre, op. cit., pp. 365f;
• and Webb, op. cit., p. 312.
• See Cedric Robinson , ‘The Emergent Marxism of Richard Wright’s Ideology’ Race & Class (Spring 1978), pp. 221-37.
• Richard Wright, White Man Listen! (Garden City, 1957), pp. 34-5. For the function of myth,
• see Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘The Myth of Asdiwal’, in Edmund Leach (ed.), The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (London , 1969).
• See Giovanni Piana, ‘History and Existence in Husserl’s Manuscripts’ , Telos (No. 13, Fall 1972), pp. 86-164;
• Georg Lukacs, ‘On the Responsibility of Intellectuals’, Telos (Vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1969), pp. 123-31;
• William Leiss’ review essay on Husserl and Paul Piccone’s ‘Reading the Crisis’ , in Telos (No. 8, Summer 1971), pp.110-21 and pp. 121-9, respectively.
• Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’ , in Robert Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, 1972), p. 12.
• Wright, The Outsider, op. cit., p. 129.
• Aaron, op. cit., p. 180.
• Wright, The Outsider, op. cit., p. 227.
• Ibid., p. 334.
• Richard Wright , ‘The Voiceless Ones’, Saturday Review (16 April 1960), p. 22.
• Wright, White Man op. cit., pp. 19-20.
• Wright, The Outsider, op. cit., p. 334.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , The Communist Manifesto, in Tucker, op. cit., p. 343.
• Wright, The Outsider, op. cit., p. 227.
• Marx, The Communist , op. cit., p. 345.
• Wright, The Outsider, op. cit., pp. 176-7.