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…. [T]hey had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses.”22 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 toward 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…. [T]he 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.23

In 1944, upon his formal declaration of leave from the American Communist Party (the break occurred in 1942), Wright made a number of his other concerns quite clear. Some of them had to do with the reasons he first became a part of American radicalism.

It was not the economics of Communism, nor the great power of trade unions, nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by the similarity of the experience of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred people into a whole…. [H]ere at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression, Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role.30

Marxist propaganda suggested to him that Blacks need not be alone in their struggle for liberation and dignity. The specter of a world proletariat, united and strong, Black and white fascinated Wright.

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.”55 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, that is, presuming the primacy of economic forces and structures.56 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.57 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.

In his criticisms of Marxism, then, Wright was not entirely rejecting it but was 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 recognized 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 organizer, 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 organize.”79

From his experience in the American Communist 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.

Meanwhile the clock of “modern times” is running down. Within Western culture, that is the very civilization that in recent centuries has dominated a quarter of the world and acquired so little consciousness in its experience with the rest, what once were but faint signs of breakdown are now in bold evidence. Not even the brilliant wizardry of high technological achievement can mute the rumblings from the degenerating mechanism. It is the occasion of opposition and contradiction and the moment of opportunity. That is because the times that mark the dissolutions of civilizations compound the maturations of both internal and external processes.