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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.
Seven per cent of the total population of the South in 1860 owned nearly 3 million of the 3,953,696 slaves. There was nearly as great a concentration of ownership in the best agricultural land. This meant that in a country predominantly agricultural, the ownership of labor, land and capital was extraordinarily concentrated. Such peculiar organization of industry would have to be carefully reconciled with the new industrial and political democracy of the nineteenth century if it were to survive.
Of the five million whites who owned no slaves some were united in interest with the slave owners. These were overseers, drivers and dealers in slaves. Others were hirers of white and black labor, and still others were merchants and professional men, forming a petty bourgeois class, and climbing up to the planter class or falling down from it. The mass of the poor whites, as we have shown, were economic outcasts.
crazy
The South was too ignorant to know that their only chance to establish such economic dictatorship and place themselves in a key economic position was through a national economy, in a large nation where a home market would absorb a large proportion of the production, and where agriculture, led by men of vision, could demand a fair share of profit from industry.
When, therefore, the planters surrendered this chance and went to war with the machine to establish agricultural independence, they lost because of their internal weakness. Their whole labor class, black and white, went into economic revolt. The breach could only have been healed by making the same concessions to labor that France, England, Germany and the North had made. There was no time for such change in the midst of war. Northern industry must, therefore, after the war, make the adjustment with labor which Southern agriculture refused to make. But the loss which agriculture sustained through the stubbornness of the planters led to the degradation of agriculture throughout the modern world.
he really likes the word ignorant lol
Now they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests. It is the first government ever instituted upon principles of strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of certain classes; but the classes thus enslaved, were of the same race, and in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. The Negro, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper materials, the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes He has made one race to differ from another, as He has had “one star to differ from another star in glory.”
quoting alexander h stephens, vice president of the confederacy
The Southern argument had strong backing in the commercial North. Lawyer O’Conner of New York expressed amid applause that calm reasoned estimate of the Negro in 1859, which pervaded the North:
Now, Gentlemen, nature itself has assigned his condition of servitude to the Negro. He has the strength and is fit to work; but nature, which gave him this strength, denied him both the intelligence to rule and the will to work. Both are denied to him. And the same nature which denied him the will to work, gave him a master, who should enforce this will, and make a useful servant of him in a climate to which he is well adapted for his own benefit and that of the master who rules him. I assert that it is no injustice to leave the Negro in the position into which nature placed him; to put a master over him; and he is not robbed of any right, if he is compelled to labor in return for this, and to supply a just compensation for his master in return for the labor and the talents devoted to ruling him and to making him useful to himself and to society.
This whole system and plan of development failed, and failed of its own weakness. Unending effort has gone into painting the claims of the Old South, its idyllic beauty and social charm. But the truth is inexorable. With all its fine men and sacrificing women, its hospitable homes and graceful manners, the South turned the most beautiful section of the nation into a center of poverty and suffering, of drinking, gambling and brawling; an abode of ignorance among black and white more abysmal than in any modern land; and a system of industry so humanly unjust and economically inefficient that if it had not committed suicide in civil war, it would have disintegrated of its own weight.