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

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.