[...] “The general opinion seems to have been that the negroes were worked too hard, and … that this was often deliberately done, as many masters considered it cheaper to buy slaves than to breed them.”166 As a consequence, the colony was forced to import Africans at a rate, which, by the time of the revolution, had grown to at least 40,000 each year. In turn, Stoddard recognized, “One of the most important considerations for the history of the Revolution in San Domingo is the fact that a majority of the negro population was African-born.”

In other words, those peoples who had in the most early era of the colony’s development as a plantation and mining economy served as the source of labor were seen as pliable and naturally agrarian; those whose recruitment coincided with the region’s beginning of urbanization and secondary manufacturing were also naturally inclined to those niches to which they were disposed. And, as we have already suggested, the collective myth denied the possibility of African resistance to slavery through its reliance on manageable characteristics: “docility” and “enterprising.” [...]

[...] Most significant, however, were the attitudes colonial administrators developed toward the activities of the missions. The construction of Black Europeans was overly ambitious in their eyes. In 1938, Arthur Mayhew would advise an Oxford University summer session for colonial administrators that “Before the Great War education was undoubtedly too ‘literary. ’” And he then reported, with satisfaction, that “[f]rom 1925 onwards great emphasis was laid on vocational training.”14 Forty years later, Penelope Hetherington would penetrate Mayhew’s objections:

In the past missionaries had counted themselves successful if their work in the field of education had produced black Englishmen, Africans who seemed to have assimilated Western culture. But these missionary-educated Africans were anathema to many administrators and others. They were “cheeky” and demanded social equality and political rights.15

he was able to make this ferocious attack upon Western civilization because he knew it inside out…. He had spent some twenty years studying it

As it had been for Cesaire, so it was for all of them. They would all pass through the prepossessing claims of bourgeois ideology for Western cultural superiority with their only modestly disguised racialism. But eventually they would emerge convinced that a larger and different achievement was required. At first they would believe that the answer lay in the vision of class struggle, the war between brothers, as Julius Nyerere would later characterize Marxist socialist theory.31 That conception, too, would prove to be insufficient. As Cox would write in his own summary considerations of Marx and Engels, their conceptualization of capitalism was only a partial realization of the historical forces that had created the Black ideologues and that they sought to comprehend and defeat.32 Ineluctably, as we shall see, the events that did most to shape their era—the crises of world capitalism, the destructive dialectic of imperialism, and the historical and ideological revelations of the naivety of Western socialism—drove them into a deeper consciousness. Appropriately, what Padmore found it necessary to do in the mid-1930s, Wright in the early 1940s, and James at the end of that decade, was later echoed by Cesaire’s declaration in 1956:

What I demand of Marxism and Communism is that they serve the black peoples, not that the black peoples serve Marxism and Communism. Philosophies and movements must serve the people, not the people the doctrine and the movement…. A doctrine is of value only if it is conceived by us and for us, and revised through us…. We consider it our duty to make common cause with all who cherish truth and justice, in order to form organizations able to support effectively the black peoples in their present and future struggle—their struggle for justice, for culture, for dignity, for liberty…. Because of this, please accept my resignation from the Party.33

The terms of his analysis were quite important to Du Bois. They were a part of his beginning of the transformation of the historiography of American civilization—the naming of things. In the changing of the names of things, he sought to provide the basis for a new conceptualization of their relationship. In the first three chapters of his work, Du Bois established the rules of his analysis. The institution of American slave labor could not be effectively conceptualized as a thing in and of itself. Rather, it was a particular historical development for world capitalism that expropriated the labor of African workers as primitive accumulation. American slavery was a subsystem of world capitalism.

Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America. (p. 5)

In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had striven to enrich the critique of capitalism and bourgeois society that had merged into the dominant strains of Western radicalism. He had no choice if he was to comprehend the crises of war and depression that devastated the world system in his lifetime, and the rebellion and revolution in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the New World that were their concomitants. Du Bois came to believe that the preservation of the capitalist world system, its very expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had involved the absorption of new sources of labor power, not by their conversion into wage labor but by coercion. Characteristically, capitalist imperialism had magnified the capacity for capital accumulation by force variously disguised as state nationalism, benevolent colonialism, race destiny, or the civilizing mission. Except in scattered instances, the peasantries of the Third World had become neither urban nor rural proletariats but near-slaves. For most, their social development had been effectively arrested. The result, relative to their own recent pasts and the situation of European workers, was retardation. Indeed, whole populations had been eliminated either during “pacification” or through forced labor. The belief that capitalism would advance African and Asian and other peasantries had for the most part proved to be misplaced. Beyond western Europe, the capitalist world system had produced social and economic chaos. No theory of history that conceptualized capitalism as a progressive historical force, qualitatively increasing the mastery of human beings over the material bases of their existence, was adequate to the task of making the experiences of the modern world comprehensible. For Du Bois, America in the first half of the nineteenth century, a society in which manufacturing and industrial capitalism had been married to slave production, had been a microcosm of the world system. The advanced sectors of the world economy could expand just so long as they could dominate and rationalize by brute force the exploitation of essentially nonindustrial and agrarian labor. The expansion of American slavery in the nineteenth century was not an anachronism but a forewarning. But so too, he believed, was its defeat.

In one sense the first systemization of Black radical historiography was constructed by figures such as G. W. Williams, J. J. Thomas, Du Bois, James, and Padmore for precisely the complex reasons suggested by James when he wrote on revolutionary leaders: they had directly profited from the “cultural advantages” of the system upon which they mounted their ideographic attack. As the heirs of Black petit bourgeoisies, they enjoyed in the order of things the intellectual beneficence of the ruling order from which they posited their critique. A less obvious process fueled their rebellion. Ambitious and accomplished in the very skills that were understood to qualify them for leading roles in bourgeois society—which “naturally” demarcated extraordinary individuals (dominators) from the ordinary populace—their loyalties to the existing order were contingent only on its consistency. Inevitably, when racial order subverted their experience of the “universals” of Western civilization, they were confronted with but two alternatives: to bitterly endure the cynically indulged illusion or to attempt its realization. Obviously when these figures chose the latter it was not a choice characteristic of their class. Still subject to what James had described as the inherent “political vices” associated with their social origins, their seduction by those aspects of Marxism that were owed to the sources of its genesis is understandable. Marxism’s intellectual power and pedigree, its promise of a hidden truth, its open opposition to an insidious social order, its alternative mapping of the historical origins of the ruling classes, which they had come to despise, and its identification with the underclasses, made it an almost irresistible companion. Moreover, Marxists were under no obligation to minimize what the total thrust of bourgeois thought was orchestrated to deny: that the “natural” social order tended toward instability and chaos. On the contrary, Marxian logic composed a historical order from the anarchic, wrenching social forces within the capitalist world system. Marxism was (and remains) a superior grammar for synthesizing the degradation of labor with the growing destabilization of capitalist production and accelerating technological development; the increasing resort to state coercion mediated by bureaucratic rationalism; and the strangulation of whole regions (most of them formerly colonies) through pricing mechanisms, market manipulation, monopolization of advanced technology, the international organization of production, international banking, military assistance, and the stultifying dependencies of monocultural economics. Marxism, too, implied that it was the particular privilege of the revolutionary intellectual to comprehend this deeper, extra-existential order. And in the generation of these Black intellectuals, with apparent finality, Marxism was confirmed in its historical authority by the Russian Revolution.

This last identification, though, was to prove to be an ambiguous one. In the minds of Black intellectuals, within a quarter of a century, the significance of the Third International had substantially degenerated. For some, like Padmore, and later Cox, international Communism (Stalinism) was simply another deceitful Western invention; for others like James it was its own perversion; finally, for those who were to share Du Bois’s experience, it seemed merely a convenient means of protest. However, detached from the Communist movement, Marxist theory could retain important capacities. Notwithstanding its weaknesses, there was in Marxism a critical discourse to which no bourgeois ideology adequately responded. Capitalism’s global regularities of war, expanding poverty and exploitation, the concentration of wealth, and the extension of repression persisted. Bourgeois thinkers displaced these endemic phenomena with the notion of termed, resolvable dysfunctions. Marxists correctly declared they were no such things.

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, Lukács, 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.”13 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 civilization and its constitutive elements: industrialization, urbanization, alienation, class, racism, exploitation, and the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. His work thus constituted an inquiry.

When we consider Richard Wright’s fictional and explicitly political work, three novels (Native Son, The Outsider, and “Island of Hallucination” this latter eventually published under the title American Hunger) 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 recognized 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.19