By 1974 it had become generally accepted by all but his most devout black nationalist followers that Baraka had renounced black nationalism in favor of “scientific socialism.”1 No longer committed to Kawaida, Baraka had become a disciple of what he called “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong” thought. What may have appeared to be a rather sudden move to the left was actually a change of heart that had been developing for several years. Baraka’s disappointment with Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson and the National Black Convention led to his conclusion that black nationalism served primarily the black bourgeoisie and thus the white elite. He was stunned by the establishmentarian policies of Newark’s first black mayor, who had been elected in part through a black nationalist appeal that Baraka himself had fashioned.
Although to his credit Gibson had never identified himself as a black nationalist, the black nationalist sentiments then sweeping throughout black urban America, including Newark, created the political climate for his initial electoral success. By using his organization to register and transport voters to the polls, Baraka had played a critical role in Gibson’s first election. But Baraka had naively assumed that once in office, a black mayor would run city hall for Newark’s black and Puerto Rican residents. Then, when he discovered that Gibson intended to govern the largest city in New Jersey according to liberal pragmatic political strategies—which meant not alienating those corporate interests left in Newark—Baraka realized the limitations of his nationalist analytical framework. That is, his adherence to black nationalism had blinded him to the significance of class differences in the black community as well as the different political interests arising from these class distinctions.2 Baraka’s black nationalist thought did not take account of the prevailing economic and social structures that limited the political options confronting blacks like Mayor Gibson who had entered establishmentarian power circles. Black cultural nationalism, including Kawaida, had no theory of the state.
Baraka had assumed that the United States was governed by a power elite that had unlimited powers over the whole range of social policies. His black nationalist political involvement in Newark was based on the idea that a change in the skin color of the person occupying the mayor’s seat would necessarily result in radically revamped city policies. Any understanding of the structural constraints on Mayor Gibson or any other black mayor was lost in Baraka’s accusations of race betrayal.
Baraka’s experiences with the National Black Convention allowed him to see at first hand the opportunism governing so much of the political behavior of established black elected officials. The rush of some black elected officials to renege on their commitment to the Gary convention taught Baraka that Mayor Gibson was not an aberration. Rather, the problem lay in the logic of electoral politics in which candidates sought personal gain and influence through compromise. Compromises meant engineered consensus, and consensus in American politics consistently excluded the protection of those concerns most dear to impoverished black Americans. Gibson’s unwillingness to try to expand the boundaries of Newark’s governing consensus ultimately rendered his mayoralty of little benefit to the city’s poor.
During this period of disillusionment with black electoral politics, Baraka was increasingly exposed to theories of African socialism, particularly those of Nkrumah, Toure, Nyerere, and Cabral.3 The writings of these African thinkers convinced him that there was nothing racially demeaning in appropriating the ideas of Karl Marx. In response to his new fondness for Marxist thought, Baraka repudiated the political ideology of Raise Race Rays Raze in which he had labeled Marx as just another racist white man.4 He was particularly drawn to Cabral who, unlike Toure, Nyerere, and Nkrumah, was an avowed Marxist.
Baraka’s former black nationalist colleagues were furious with his ideological reversal.5 Realizing that any changes in his ideology would mean a modification in the ideology of the Congress of African Peoples, many black nationalists resigned from the organization. In an extraordinarily insightful article, Kalamu Ya Salaam warned black activists about the long-run danger inherent in an organization run by an autocratic leader:
The ideology of the leader is the ideology of the organization which works as long as the leader is strong and positive; but what usually happens is that ideological development is resultantly tied to the personal development of the individual leader rather than to the collective development of the entire organization.6
One would have hoped in vain for Baraka to understand the truth of this essay, which had been prominently published in Black World. Former confreres of Baraka, who were closely acquainted with his leadership style, should not have been surprised by his autocratic desires to mold the organization in his own image. Baraka might well have told them “CAP, c’est moi!” Indeed, he conveyed such sentiments in his autobiography: “We were going to the Left, I was reading Nkrumah and Cabral and Mao . . . it was clear now where CAP was going, at least to me7 [my emphasis]. It was evident that Baraka was not functioning in a democratic political structure or a democratic organizational subculture. In 1975, Baraka changed the name of the Congress of African Peoples to the Revolutionary Communist League. No longer an “Imamu,” Baraka became a “chairman”! Autocracy still reigned.
Why did Baraka, who had previously been so antagonistic to white Marxists, now claim to be a devout follower of Marx? His autobiography does not adequately explore the reasons for the abrupt turnabout. Baraka could have simply reformed his black nationalistic outlook to include a sensitivity to class distinctions. Perhaps the reasons for the reversal had a psychological origin as much as a political one, given Baraka’s history of revoking ideologies when faced with psychopolitical dilemmas. According to Gerald Early,
Baraka does not seek to make any sort of peace with any part of the world as it is; hence his rebellion is not only against governments, oppressive political ideologies, false prophets, and bad artists but against the present itself. . . . It is obvious to anyone even slightly familiar with Baraka’s writings that he needed and continues to need these sleight-of-hand identity swaps in order to create the psychological tension he must have to write.8
Early’s comments are not entirely accurate. Baraka has not made as many identity swaps as Early insinuates. He has now been committed to a rather orthodox Marxist position for more than a quarter of a century. Early does not consider the possibility that some “identity swaps” were more intellectually fruitful than others. Baraka may have thought that he needed to create new “psychological tensions” in order to write, but it is not apparent that such changes were beneficial to his artistic creativity. Indeed, Baraka’s art may have been consistently undermined by his constant quest for engagement and the resulting feelings of estrangement. It would not be surprising if his embrace of Marxism stemmed primarily from a desire to escape his claustrophobic black nationalist world and only secondarily from an attraction to Marxism. At some point, he must have recognized the mediocrity of many of the black nationalist intellectual and artistic undertakings, including much of what he had written during this period.9 This latter point is mere speculation, for Baraka has never issued a critical aesthetic appraisal of the Black Arts movement. Rather, most of his post–black nationalist commentaries on the Black Arts movement have been concerned with the ideological presuppositions of the art created during this period. Yet to argue, as Baraka the Marxist often does, that the principal problem of the Black Arts movement was its erroneous ideological focus is to sidestep a serious intellectual engagement with the movement. It was precisely Baraka’s inability or unwillingness to engage in rigorous aesthetic and artistic self-criticism that rendered him irresponsible in the eyes of many.
During the Black Arts period, Baraka had been a proponent of ethnic cheerleading black art, provided that it helped “liberate” black people. This rationalization for even mediocre art was based on the belief that the only black art of value was black nationalist propaganda. The litmus test for the value of propaganda was political efficacy, not aesthetics. When it became apparent to Baraka that there would be no black nationalist revolution in the foreseeable future, his political rationalization for tolerating black artistic mediocrity was severely undermined. He thus might have concluded that until the revolution appeared on the horizon, he might as well be a serious artist, or he might as well “just be.”
Similarly, the failure of the Black Arts movement to create and/or sustain a black nationalist political front brought before Baraka and other black artists the question of the usefulness of their propaganda. What tangible benefits had accrued to blacks as the result of poetry that sent the tongues of cops back to Ireland? Had Irish American cops stopped beating black heads? The Black Arts movement was a movement of and for intellectuals, and like most political formations dominated by intellectuals, Black Arts intellectuals never admitted to having insular self-interests.
In leaving black nationalism for Marxism, Baraka claimed to have intensified his commitment to the emancipation of black America, arguing that Marxism was the logical next step for any sound thinking, revolutionary, black nationalist. That is, instead of depicting his adoption of Marxism as a rejection of black nationalism, Baraka publicly marketed the alterations in his ideology as a “natural” progression. The same love of black people that inspired him to become a black nationalist ultimately led him to adopt Marxism.
By adopting Marxism and declaring it superior to black nationalism, Baraka was able to abandon his nationalist disciples without ever having to offer critical statements concerning their work. Mired too deeply in ethnic insularity to escape by gradual means, Baraka converted. Conversion allowed Baraka to leave “the past” behind and become, in effect, a new person. The “born again” aspects of Baraka’s conversion to Marxism help explain why he never felt the need to apologize to former associates whom he had helped “lead astray” into the depths of black nationalism. Baraka had made a similar conversion when he left Beat bohemia for Harlem. Like his earlier conversion, Baraka’s adoption of Marxism was accompanied by vicious and unfair personal attacks on his former associates. That is, Baraka became ultra-Marxist and intensely antinationalist, treating his former nationalist peers as if they had become the vanguard of the enemy camp. Indeed, his defection dealt black cultural nationalism a devastating blow from which it never recovered.
Baraka was not able to persuade many blacks to follow him into the ranks of the Stalinist left.10 Quite the contrary: Baraka’s influence in Afro-American political and intellectual circles quickly subsided when he became a Marxist. In Baraka’s mind, however, the weakness of his Marxist appeal to his former nationalist comrades did not signify his growing political irrelevance but testified to the revolutionary authenticity of his new ideological home. Once again, he had become too radical for his peers.
Baraka explained his shift to the left in a series of essays that he began to publish in late 1973. Some of these essays were position papers for CAP members, and others were directed to his broader Afro-American intellectual and political audiences. These essays allow us to see not only his growing disillusionment with black cultural nationalism as expressed in Kawaida but also his creeping attachment to Marxism. Creeping is the key word here, for Baraka’s initial flirtation with scientific socialism contained numerous quotations from international heroes of the black freedom struggle, as if by mentioning them he was legitimizing his right to appropriate the ideas of “white Europeans.” Baraka had supported a form of socialism long before he became a Marxist. However, his pre-Marxist socialism was based on a romantic depiction of traditional African society, as if one could create a postcapitalist society in the United States modeled on African feudalism. This “back-to-the-future” character of Kawaidan socialism was unadulterated romanticism.
In March 1974, Baraka delivered a short speech at a CAP regional meeting in Chicago.11 Little did he know that this speech, “National Liberation and Politics,” would be received as a bombshell by some of the black nationalists in the audience.12 Today, the speech does not seem to substantively redefine CAP’s mission. Instead, it appears to have been a call to arms, a speech of encouragement. The speech begins with three quotations from Amilcar Cabral, followed by a quotation from Lenin and one from Mao. The essay includes the requisite deferential references to the thought of Karenga. Baraka concludes with his often-repeated ideas that the revolutionary black movement must consist of (1) revolutionary nationalism, (2) Pan-Africanism, and (3) socialism (ujamaa). Given the utter predictability of the speech, Baraka could only assume that his mere mention of Lenin and Mao was what threw the doctrinaire CAP members into a state of disarray.
Soon after the Chicago speech, Baraka delivered another, “Revolutionary Party: Revolutionary Ideology,” at the Midwestern Conference of the Congress of Afrikan People. This speech/position paper was one of the most explicit transition statements in Baraka’s writing of that period. First, as was the case in Chicago, Baraka still identified himself as the “Imamu.” The essay begins by stating that “our ideology” is revolutionary Kawaida, an ideology built on an African cultural base based on empirical facts and not mythology, idealism, or metaphysics. This essay is principally a critique of black nationalism rather than a positive assertion of Marxism. Baraka observes that the nationalism that he championed, Karenga’s Kawaida, was a revolutionary nationalism, as opposed to a bourgeois black nationalism. He criticizes those “who would celebrate the old Afrikan feudalistic culture while refusing to struggle to create a new revolutionary socialist one.”13
Baraka calls for the creation of a united black front, modeled perhaps after the left’s popular front of the 1930s. Even though they are participants in this united black front coalition, advocates of revolutionary Kawaida must recognize that they are in the advance of the black struggle and must therefore assume the responsibilities of the vanguard. Here, Baraka confuses the role of the vanguard party with the role of the working class as the agent of universal human emancipation. Because blacks are at the “bottom of the American heap,” Baraka contends that their liberation would necessarily lead to the emancipation of everyone. But he mistakenly thinks that the centrality of their struggle to all others means that blacks are the vanguard of the revolutionary movement. This is a misreading of Marx and Lenin. Baraka must have known that Marx assigned to the working class the role of universal emancipator, despite the existence of people who were lower in economic and social status than the proletariat. Conspicuously, he sidesteps Marx’s discussion of the lumpenproletariat but believes that many of the blacks who would participate in and benefit from a socialist revolution are members of the lumpen. Instead of grappling with this troubling aspect of Marx’s thought, he simply ignores it. He also must have known that Lenin was not among the most subjugated of Russian citizens before the revolution. So if the vanguard must come out of the lowest of the low, on what grounds could Lenin have been the leader of the vanguard movement? More pertinent, by what justification could the bourgeois Baraka lead a contemporary revolutionary movement?
The speech/position paper ends with a description of the specific theories that must be taken into account when determining the ideology and strategy of the vanguard revolutionary party. Baraka says that such a party must be influenced by the thought of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Toure, Cabral, and Maulana Karenga. Although Karenga still holds the preeminent position in Baraka’s thought, Marx and Lenin have been added to his pantheon of emancipatory thinkers. This speech was far more explicit than the earlier “National Liberation and Politics” in declaring the usefulness of Marxism to the black struggle. Concerning his thought at this time, Baraka wrote, “By March of 1974 I was now openly including elements of Marxism in this ‘Revolutionary Kawaida,’ but I was still unwilling or unable to cut Karenga’s doctrine, at least the main thrust of it, loose.”14
In April 1974, CAP issued “Black People and Imperialism,” a position paper written by Baraka in which he had now shed most references to Kawaida and Karenga. Although Baraka’s picture continued to appear on the cover of the position papers, he was now referred to as Chairman Amiri Baraka instead of Imamu Amiri Baraka. Like many of his essays of this period, this one begins with an extended quotation from Lenin. The rest of the essay is essentially a paraphrasing of Lenin’s and Mao’s ideas on capitalism, with repeated invocations of Cabral. The essay ends a statement that the black American liberation struggle should be recognized by blacks and whites alike as the vanguard of the forthcoming American revolution. Likewise, Third World countries, including those on the African continent, were the vanguard of the international struggle for socialism. But once again, Baraka offers neither explanation nor substantiation of his assertions.
In the November 1974 issue of Black World is an essay written by Imamu Amiri Baraka entitled “Toward Ideological Clarity: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Socialism.” Originally presented in May 1974 as a CAP position paper, the version published in Black World was quite abbreviated. Interestingly, Baraka still identifies himself by his nationalist title, Imamu, although he had earlier discarded that title in some of his CAP working papers. This inconsistency in his self-identification may have stemmed from his ambivalence about the changes he was making. A more likely possibility is that Baraka viewed the publication of his essay in Black World as different from that of his CAP position papers. Consequently, he might have been trying to use his popularly known black nationalist title as a means of softening the changes that he was introducing. “Toward Ideological Clarity” is essentially an explanation of his reconceptualization of the political problem of Afro-America as one of capitalist oppression and racism. Because Baraka had long identified racism as the main reason for black people’s subjugation, the novel formulation in this essay is his identification of capitalism as an equal if not superior cause. He argued that racism could best be understood as a tool of capitalist oppression, even though sometimes racist oppression conflicted with and superseded market exploitation.15 The slave trade and the subsequent division of the African continent into European-controlled colonies was deemed a result of racism operating in a framework of capitalist profiteering.
As the focal theorist for his reflections, Baraka now placed Lenin in the role he once reserved for Karenga. “Toward Ideological Clarity” begins with an extended quotation from Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.”
Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed. . . . Imperialism as interpreted above, undoubtedly represents a special stage in the development of capitalism.16
For Baraka, imperialism and its first cousin, colonialism, were the dominant forms of capitalist oppression that originally brought Africa and the African diaspora to their knees. The imperial conquest of Africa by Europe is significant not only because Africans were forced to submit to an economic system in which Europe thrived at Africa’s expense but also because colonialism was accompanied by a virulent antiblack racism that morally legitimated the dominance of black Africa by white Europe. Racist colonialism wreaked havoc on African identities as it attacked and distorted the continent’s indigenous cultural traditions.
Baraka’s appropriation of Marxism gave him a framework for understanding the plight of blacks, even though his categories and teleology remained rigid and doctrinaire. In “Toward Ideological Clarity,” Baraka repeatedly quotes from Amilcar Cabral’s writings. This is not surprising, for Baraka was deeply influenced by Cabral before leaving the ranks of black cultural nationalism. Indeed, Cabral may well have been the only Marxist that black cultural nationalists during the 1960s and early 1970s deemed worthy of reading. Because Cabral was a respected African revolutionary and an unabashed Marxist, Baraka may have believed that invoking his name might serve his post–black nationalist quest for ethnic legitimation.17 In addition, Cabral regarded indigenous culture as a major site of conflict between capitalist/European domination and “the people’s” emancipatory resistance. In this sense, Cabral appeared to function for Baraka as a para-Gramscian thinker.18 By invoking the centrality of cultural struggles, Baraka believed that Cabral provided a conceptual schema for situating aspects of his former black nationalist political activities in a revolutionary cloak. Baraka quotes Cabral:
History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it also teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.19
But Baraka misinterpreted Cabral’s thought as applicable to the political-cultural conditions of blacks in the United States. First, Cabral’s unique theoretical contribution to Marxism stemmed from his analyses of colonialism and imperialism.20 Second, it is far too simplistic to claim, as Baraka does, that black Americans were forced to “relinquish” their indigenous culture in the same way that a colonized people did. Rather, Afro-American culture was created simultaneously with and in the history of black subjugation. Except for a few phenomena, the vastness of modern Afro-American culture does not predate Afro-American subjugation. In addition, Afro-American culture has been thoroughly informed by white Americans in much the way that “white American culture” has been informed by blacks. To speak of a “black culture” in the United States is to speak of the cultural beliefs and practices of the majority of black Americans, not a culture that is distinct from that produced by white Americans. In this sense, there is no “white culture.” Land was central to Cabral’s understanding of colonialism. Because black Americans did not own a separate piece of land before white domination, Cabral did not consider the Afro-American struggle to be an anticolonial struggle. Baraka, however, ignored these aspects of Cabral’s formulations, which contributed to the theoretical confusion in Baraka’s nascent Marxism.
We must assume that Baraka was familiar with the informal talk that Cabral held in New York City with a group of black Americans in October 1972, as a transcript of the lecture and discussion was widely disseminated in black nationalist and Pan-Africanist intellectual circles. Baraka may even have been there. During the talk, Cabral mentioned a discussion that he had had with Eldridge Cleaver, who was then living in exile:
We agreed on many things but we disagreed on one thing. He told me your condition is a colonial condition. In certain aspects it seems to be, but it is not really a colonial condition. The colonial condition demands certain factors. One important factor is continuity of territories. There are others which you can see when you analyze.21
Although the majority of black Americans moved out of the South, Baraka continued to insist that the Black Belt South remained the national homeland of black Americans and used this supposedly black land to satisfy Cabral’s requirement of continuity of territory. Cabral contended that black Americans, though subjugated, were not a colonized people. Baraka, he reasoned, was not oppressed by a foreign power.
By using Cabral’s understanding of culture, Baraka was able to recognize some of the conceptual errors in his previous ahistorical, black nationalist concept of culture. He saw that culture could not be understood as simply a repository of what has gone on in the past but had to be viewed as always changing. In an effort at self-critique, he wrote: “The mistake made by so-called cultural nationalists, in their use of culture, a mistake still being made, is to take the concept of culture as a static concept that had only partially . . . to do with the Afrikan in North America as we find ourselves.”22
Baraka was caught in a quandary. He no longer wanted to be linked to the idealistic and romantic conceptions of an African feudal past contained in Karenga’s thought. But he also did not want to give up black nationalism completely. His response, therefore, was a conceptual compromise. He now held capitalism primarily responsible for the subjugation of Afro-Americans, but he continued to view blacks as culturally oppressed. To the extent that black Americans were a distinct cultural group, they constituted a nation. Although black nationalism remained necessary, it was no longer sufficient for emancipating Afro-America. Perhaps the most publicly apparent change in Baraka’s understanding of the plight of black America was that he now acknowledged that blacks could not free themselves without joining forces with emancipatory-minded whites. The natural white allies of blacks were, of course, the white working class, despite the ways in which racism had blinded many white workers to their true self-interests and nonwhite class comrades. In black nationalist circles, the racism of the white working class was legion. Most black political activists, left or antileft, would not stake their political lives on the viability of a class coalition with white workers.
Black nationalism was vulnerable to manipulation and control by the capitalist economic order. Capitalists were quite adept at using black nationalism to establish a “neocolonial”-like black elite whose mission was to keep the masses of blacks subdued by diverting their attention away from the class struggle. In Baraka’s mind, Kenneth Gibson, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, and the Congressional Black Caucus were exemplary members of this black neocolonial elite.
Baraka’s essay “The Congress of Afrikan People: A Position Paper” appeared in the January/February 1975 issue of The Black Scholar. It contains little if anything new. Baraka wades through his favorite themes: monopoly capitalism, the capitalist basis of the African slave trade, the Soviet Union as an imperialist power, the inevitable decline of capital, the need for a revolutionary vanguard party, and the inevitable rise of revolutionary peoples. What is striking about this essay is his expanding pantheon of Marxist heroes: “Nationalism is backward when it says that we cannot utilize the revolutionary experience of the world . . . the theories and experience of men like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung . . . or Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Enver Hoxha of Albania, Kim Il Sung of North Korea.”23
In March 1975, Baraka published a lengthy CAP position paper entitled “Black Nationalism and Socialist Revolution,” a shorter and more widely read version of which was published in the July 1975 issue of Black World under the title “Black Nationalism and Socialist Revolution: Why I Changed My Ideology.” Baraka begins the essay in a manner that foretells his inability to distinguish CAP from himself: “One question to which we must constantly respond is why did we change our ideology. We, meaning the Congress of Afrikan People, but also specifically Amiri Baraka.”24 Baraka’s willingness to publish the essay under the title “Why I Changed My Ideology” belies his usage of the royal “we” throughout the essay. Those familiar with CAP knew that Baraka was its theoretician and autocratic leader. Most CAP members were not included in the decision to alter CAP’s ideology. Yet it is clear that Baraka was under pressure to show that CAP was more than his personal fiefdom. Baraka’s need to explain the change in his politics almost a year after he first embraced Marxism testifies to the continuing problems he was having convincing blacks that he was still politically relevant to the black struggle.
“Why I Changed My Ideology” does not tread on new ground but restates themes that Baraka routinely made in his speeches at this time. He again admitted that the cultural nationalism that he had once admired had been a flawed political program, since it not only was guilty of celebrating African feudalism but also was divorced from the indigenous culture of Afro-Americans. In addition, Baraka admits that it was an error to have acted as if black people could have freed themselves without affecting or being affected by the political status of nonblacks, particularly oppressed whites. But he continued to insist that despite these errors in theory, CAP had remained true to its revolutionary calling.
We changed our views from cultural nationalists because we have always viewed ourselves as revolutionaries, black people struggling for national liberation. We have not ever thought we needed to be fixed at any point or intractable on any view, except the view that we must be totally dedicated to the liberation of black people in North America.25
Baraka distorts the truth here. One could read this and conclude that the black cultural nationalist leader Imamu Baraka had been ecumenical in his politics. But he was as doctrinaire and dogmatic a black nationalist as any figure that emerged from the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Few black political figures spent as much time hurling invectives at other politicized blacks who did not adhere to his cultural nationalist program. It did not matter whether they were bourgeois integrationists or self-professed Marxist-Leninists. Baraka had been a religious nationalist and, worse, a fundamentalist religious nationalist.
Baraka once again declared that CAP changed its ideology because it realized that many blacks in the United States and Africa were functioning as the agents of white capitalist domination. Whether they were neocolonial elites in Africa and the West Indies or black elected officials in the United States, the new Black Power holders were the means by which international capitalism had acquired a softer and ethnically legitimate image.26 The color of the elites had changed, but the masses were still exploited. As long as capitalism existed, racism would thrive. In the final analysis, racism existed to serve the interests of capitalism. For this reason, Baraka proclaimed the Congress of Afrikan People to be a revolutionary communist organization.27
After ushering the reader through a rudimentary rendition of Marx’s notion of capitalist exploitation, Baraka again asserts that blacks in the United States constitute an oppressed and colonized nation. Although he recognizes the nationalist aspects of the “Negro question,” he rejects black nationalism for Marxism because Marxism is scientific. As a science, it is applicable to everyone, anywhere and everywhere.
There are people, for instance, who tell us that we cannot learn from international revolutionary experience. They tell us we cannot use Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin because they were white. Why is it that Mao Tse-Tung in China, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Kim Il Sung in Korea, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure in Afrika, all could use these theories and practices to advance the struggles and make revolution for their people? It is because scientific truth is universally applicable. Just as gravity and relativity do not just function in Europe, but everywhere, so do the scientific discoveries of men like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.28
According to Baraka, it is necessary for blacks to recognize their collective interests with white workers. But they cannot do so until America develops a truly revolutionary vanguard party. Baraka knows that capitalism cannot be defeated peacefully or through gradual reform. Rather, a violent revolution is needed. In pursuit of that revolution, in 1975 the Congress of Afrikan People became the Revolutionary Communist League M-L-M.29
In 1984, Baraka published Daggers and Javelins, his third major collection of sociopolitical essays. The essays were written from 1974 to 1979, and some had previously been published. The title of the collection is derived from the words of Lu Xun (Lu Hsun), a radical Chinese writer who lived from 1881 to 1936, who wrote: “The living essay must be a dagger, a spear [javelin], something with which it can cut through a blood path to survival with the readers.”30 A primary instigator and influence in prerevolutionary, left-wing Chinese literary circles, Lu Xun supported the developing Communist movement, even though he was always too independent and idiosyncratic to join the party.31 Lu Xun excelled in the writing of short stories, prose poetry, and classical Chinese poetry, but it was his use of the polemical, political essay to which Baraka was first attracted.
Lu Xun’s nonfiction prose, or what he called zawen, consisted of scholarly treatises, prose poetry, reminiscences, and essays. The term zawen comes from the related terms zagan (miscellaneous impressions) and zatan (miscellaneous discussions).32 Lu Xun became a highly stylized and prolific writer of zawen, whose purpose was to incite debate. For polemical purposes, Lu Xun employed vicious satire. According to one critic, his essays were “cutting, pugnacious, devastating, even venomous and directed against real and imagined enemies.” Borrowing from Harriet Mills, Leo Ou-fan Lee, another scholar of Chinese literature, described Xun’s satirical style as
the reductio ad absurdum technique, the use of paradox and argument by analogy or authority, the repetition of key words or phrases, and finally the terse but lethal punch line to finish off his opponent. To this may be added his intentional twisting, often out of context, of quoted statements from his opponents—whose positions he also purposely inflates.33
Baraka does not inform us how he came to admire Lu Xun, but we can hypothesize that the celebration of Lu Xun by Mao Zedong, one of Baraka’s Marxist deities, influenced Baraka’s perceptions of the writer. On one occasion, Mao called Lu Xun “the major leader in the Chinese cultural revolution. He was not only a great writer but a great thinker and a great revolutionist.”34
The significance of Lu Xun for Baraka is that the Chinese writer was explicitly politically engaged. In addition, Baraka has claimed an affinity with Lu Xun because he too had encountered censorship because of his radical political ideas.35 The essay form that Lu Xun mastered may have inspired Baraka’s polemical energies, but it did not significantly influence Baraka’s style. Despite the collection’s title, most of the essays published in Daggers and Javelins were not reminiscent of Lu Xun’s essays. Instead, Baraka included in this volume several attempts at what he thought were informed, semischolarly analyses of significant issues in the contemporary world. The essays that most resemble those of Lu Hsun were published in CAP’s newspaper, Unity and Struggle, and only a few of those were republished in this volume.
The essays in Daggers and Javelins are divided into four themes. One theme is Baraka’s Pan-Africanist sensibilities. The second concerns the political plight of Afro-American intellectuals. The third theme is Baraka’s views of certain international radical intellectuals and artists. Finally, the fourth type is concerned with the general Afro-American political predicament. The essays are highly repetitious and quickly become monotonous. In more than half, Baraka invents a past in which the so-called revisionism of the Communist Party USA prevented it from assuming its role as the guiding vehicle of black political emancipation. Also frequently repeated is the claim that the former Soviet Union practiced social imperialism.
One does not read Baraka in order to understand Marx or a Marxist intellectual tradition. Indeed, it is not clear that he has read much of Marx. His essays do not indicate a familiarity with Marx’s writings. Second, it also is apparent that Baraka has not grappled with the Western Marxist intellectual tradition. Baraka is as removed from sophisticated Marxist thought as Jerry Falwell is from Paul Tillich. Whereas Falwell adheres rather dogmatically to a crude neofundamentalist tradition of Christian thinking, Baraka adheres to an equally dogmatic, neofundamentalist Marxism. Both men are devoutly religious, but Baraka hides his faith in the language of scientific socialism. In Baraka’s mind, Marxism is a set of rules that can be applied to any situation, any place, at any time.
The initial essay in Daggers and Javelins, “Africa, Superpower Contention and the Danger of World War,” offers a glimpse of Baraka’s Marxian view of international politics prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Embracing an ideological line advanced by China, Baraka believed that the Soviet Union was far more dangerous to Third World nations than the United States, for the United States was clearly in decline, as shown by its defeat in Vietnam.
As proof of Soviet imperialism, Baraka cites the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and its behavior during the Angolan civil war. After Portugal’s colonial rule ended, the three major Angolan independence factions that had fought against the Portuguese began to fight among themselves. Baraka considers the Soviet Union’s aid to only one faction in the civil war, the Marxist MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), to have been an unjust attempt to influence the outcome of the war. He contends that the Soviets encouraged the introduction of Cuban mercenaries into the struggle after “agitating a civil war” and that the Soviet Union and Cuba entered Angola “only after the three Angola liberation movements had agreed amongst themselves to administer the post colonial Angola state.”36
Unfortunately, Baraka was not above dishonesty and distortion. All of the groups fighting in Angola were externally funded and armed. UNITA (National Union for Total Liberation of Angola) received arms from the United States and South Africa while FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) received arms from Zaire, the United States, and Communist China. In March 1975, an agreement between the three warring factions was violated when FNLA attacked MPLA. With the aide of Cuban advisers, MPLA repelled the FNLA attack. However, in October 1975 South Africa, in partnership with UNITA, intervened in the civil war. Within one week, five thousand South African soldiers had advanced five hundred miles up the Angolan coast. Fearing defeat, MPLA asked for Cuban troops. During the next six months, Cuba sent approximately twenty-two thousand troops to Angola. The South African invasion was repelled. Because of the intervention of the hated South Africans on the side of UNITA, most African nations became opponents of UNITA, allies of MPLA, and supporters of Cuban intervention. Baraka, however, writes as if South Africa never intervened.
Baraka enters the realm of pure propaganda when he refuses to comment on the irrationality of China’s policy toward Africa. In knee-jerk fashion, China opposed whatever the Soviets did. By 1973, Chariman Mao was hosting right-wing African dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire precisely because Mobutu was opposed by the Soviet Union. Evidently, it did not matter to Mao that Mobutu was despotic with his own people.
Baraka’s analytical sophistication did not improve in his essays about the United States’ domestic politics. The mechanistic anti-intellectualism of his Marxism can be seen in “Marxism and the Black Community,” in which he denounces various “Marxist” and communist parties in the United States for their failure to proclaim black America a subjugated nation within a nation. By rejecting the position of the “white communists” on the “Negro question,” Baraka believes that they reveal their racial chauvinism.
The essay “Black Liberation / Socialist Revolution” continues with the claim that the most important political policy concerning black Americans is “self-determination for the African-American nation in the black belt South.” Baraka asserts that an autonomous black belt in the American South is the only way to ensure freedom for blacks, “the only guarantee of equality, the only guarantee that the demand for equal rights and democratic rights for the black oppressed nationality scattered throughout the United States will be satisfied.” Astonishingly, Baraka does not explain how or why a separate black nation in the American South would guarantee the rights of blacks living in Philadelphia or Detroit. And why would such a nation necessarily be progressive? He also argues that the possibility of realizing an independent, socialist black belt nation is (in the 1970s) better than at any time since the abandonment of the black masses by the Communist Party of the United States. The vacuum left by the political opportunism of the American communists had allowed the black bourgeoisie to capture the black liberation movement. The dynamic leadership of Malcolm X had rescued the black masses from the black bourgeois leadership. Malcolm, according to Baraka, was not only the spokesperson for the black working class but was, “without a doubt, the most influential black leader of his time.” The Black Liberation movement, we are told, has never recovered from Malcolm’s assassination. Baraka concludes the essay by maintaining that the liberation of black Americans and the creation of a separate black nation can come about only through an armed, violent revolution: “It should be clear that the reason the black rebellions of the 1960’s could not become revolution is that there was no Marxist-Leninist leadership in the form of a revolutionary party.”37
Following in the footsteps of the self-professed “black Bolshevik,” Harry Haywood, Baraka contends that those black Americans who live in that area of the southern United States historically referred to as the “Black Belt” constitute an oppressed nation within the United States.38 Much like his earlier espousal of Kawaidan black cultural nationalism that appropriated reified constructs from an African feudal past and magically transformed them into bulwarks of freedom in a late capitalist society, Baraka’s Marxism brings ideological positions from the past into the present without taking into account historical changes.
Baraka’s attempt to reinvigorate the black nation thesis indicates his continued unwillingness to confront the needs of black Americans at this time. Indeed, the Communist Party’s support of a Negro nation was viewed by most blacks as somewhat ludicrous and unrealistic.39 Today, the concept is beyond silly. Most black Americans no longer live in the Black Belt. Moreover, it would be difficult to substantiate the claim that most blacks are partner to a shared culture distinct from that of whites. When the Communist Party initially issued its call for a black nation, one could have argued that blacks had created a distinct folk culture in the Black Belt South. This shared folk culture was mainly expressive (e.g., music, dance, language cadence). It is one thing to state that blacks created a unique music in America but quite another to insist that all blacks are musical. Even if this latter claim were true, it would still beg the question: How would a black nation contribute to the well-being of the millions of blacks who live outside the Black Belt? How would it benefit those who live within it?
In addition, in Daggers and Javelins, Baraka makes blatantly dishonest claims about the political significance of Marxism in the United States: “What is developing swiftly in the U.S.A., and with growing influence on the masses, is the movement to build a new Marxist-Leninist communist party, an anti revisionist communist movement, which can lead the working class and oppressed masses in making socialist revolution.”40 Why did Baraka distort the significance of Marxism in the United States? Perhaps he could not be honest about its marginality because that would have revealed his own political feebleness.
Baraka’s essays contain the usual imprecisions and unsubstantiated assertions that routinely appear in his political polemics. For example, he erroneously assumes that Martin Luther King Jr. had a smaller working-class following than Malcolm X did. There is no proof of this. Furthermore, the Malcolm that Baraka celebrates is the Malcolm of the Nation of Islam. Whatever one might argue about Malcolm, he spent most of his mature political life advocating the neo–Booker T. Washington bootstrap philosophy of Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm also believed in Elijah Muhammad’s divine descent from God on Earth, Master Fard. Worse, Malcolm endorsed the ridiculous narrative of Yacub, the mad scientist who invented white people. When Malcolm left the Nation of Islam, he continued to practice the Muslim faith. But Baraka condemns only Martin King for harboring metaphysical beliefs, as if Malcolm were a less religious man. Finally, Baraka cannot bring himself to admit that most of the black urban riots/rebellions during the 1960s erupted spontaneously, often in response to some local event. Instead of a realistic analysis, Baraka creates a tautology. Had there been a vanguard party “in control” of the black masses, then the riots would not have occurred spontaneously. That they failed to lead to a revolution indicates that the rioters were not sufficiently disciplined by a revolutionary vanguard. If there had been a revolutionary vanguard with the power to discipline the black masses, the “riots” would not have been riots—which, for me, means that they never would have occurred.
Several of the essays in Daggers and Javelins are attempts at Marxist literary criticism. As if caught in a fifty-year time warp, Baraka’s Marxist criticism resurrects and revalorizes socialist realism.41 But not surprisingly, his Marxist literary criticism is as reductionist as his Marxist political commentaries.42 And given his idolization of Stalin, Baraka can find value in Stalin’s cultural policies regarding the arts. Marxist literary criticism, at least of the Stalinist variety, assumed that the writer’s duty was to use his or her art for the advancement of the proletariat. Stalin thus tried to force Soviet artists/writers to create a purely proletarian culture devoid of bourgeois artistic influences.43
The transition from the revolutionary to the totalitarian phase in Soviet cultural policy was a life-and-death struggle in which physical terror played the decisive role, as is attested to by the murder of men like Meyerhold, Babel, Pilnyak, and Mandelsham, by the restrictions imposed on Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and by the banning of the films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin.44
Stalinistic artistic directives reached their bureaucratic apex in 1934 when the All Union Congress of Soviet Writers adopted the artistic policy of socialist realism. Jointly devised by Stalin and Maxim Gorky, the policy was included in the original statutes of the Union of Soviet Writers:
Socialist realism is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.45
It has long been held by most students of Soviet literature that socialist realism was an unequivocal artistic disaster, not only for Russian writers, but for all artistic supporters of the Communist Party. Commenting on the calamitous impact of this policy on Soviet writers, Terry Eagleton wrote: “There is no space here to recount in full the chilling narrative of how the loss of the Bolshevik revolution under Stalin expressed itself in one of the most devastating assaults on artistic culture ever witnessed in modern history.”46 In Stalin’s eyes, however, socialist realism was a mechanism for maintaining the spirit of the revolution in a postrevolutionary society. Paradoxically, Baraka and many other Stalinist-influenced writers viewed socialist realism as a mechanism for inspiring a revolutionary fervor among workers in a capitalist society.
Baraka’s Marxist literary criticism is not truly intent on interpreting texts except to determine whether or not they valorize revolutionary activities and/or the plight of the working class. Much like his aesthetic pronouncements during the Black Arts period, the Marxist Baraka remains trapped in a utilitarian aesthetic. He continues to divide texts into Manichaean moral categories of good (pro-proletariat) versus bad (pro-bourgeois) black art. Only the criteria for making these assessments have changed. Baraka’s Marxist literary criticism describes the ideological intentions of a text rather than its artistic merits. As a result, Baraka’s mode of criticism cannot distinguish between excellent bourgeois art and crude bourgeois propaganda.
Baraka declared that the best Marxist literary theory that he had ever read was in a series of speeches delivered by Mao in 1942 at the Yenan Forum.47 In a 1978 interview, Baraka stated,
The best book of literary criticism that I have ever read is Mao Tse Tung’s book, the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature, in which he says that art has to be not only politically correct but artistically powerful . . . he also says that just because you are a Marxist doesn’t mean that when you write a play it is necessarily going to be great art. . . . Mao says that if the thing is not artistically powerful, no matter how correct its political statement is, it is going to fail.48
We should not be surprised that Baraka would praise literary criticism from the leader of a revolutionary movement of peasants in a preindustrialized nation engaged in a war of national liberation against the Japanese occupation of the Chinese mainland. As stated earlier, Baraka appears to respect the thought of only those Marxists who had engaged in successful revolutionary praxis.49 Nonetheless, we should be surprised that he treats Mao’s cultural pronouncements as if they were timeless and directly applicable to the United States during the 1970s. Mao’s lectures at the Yenan Forum were not literary criticism but a literary call to arms. Although he offers prescriptive statements about the role of revolutionary writers, his lectures contain very little specificity. How could Baraka believe that they were the best literary criticism that he had ever read?50
In “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” Baraka begins with the literary scholar Bruce Franklin. Franklin had written that the term “American literature” as used in American literary studies had historically excluded the writings of Afro-Americans and other subjugated American peoples. He asserted that any concept of “American literature” that excluded Afro-American slave narratives was an ideological distortion and factual error. As part of the ideological superstructure buffering the material realities of American capitalism, the literature celebrated under the rubric “American literature” tended to valorize the status quo in all its sexist and racist glory. Baraka then scans the history of Afro-American literature from the vantage point of his dogmatic materialist Marxist framework and evaluates literary figures according to the political-economic interests purportedly served by their writing.
Baraka states that there are essentially two traditions in Afro-American literature: the reactionary tradition and the revolutionary tradition. Phyllis Wheatley and Juniper Hammon are deemed reactionary because they viewed slavery as beneficial to blacks. Baraka argues that they are celebrated in most literary histories of Afro-American literature as the founders of Afro-American literature because of their reactionary tendencies. Too often ignored are the true progenitors of the Afro-American literary tradition, the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, Moses Roper, Linda Brent, William Wells Brown, the Krafts, Henry “Box” Brown, and numerous others.51
As the Civil War approached, a revolutionary tendency emerged in Afro-American literature. Baraka calls these individuals “pre–Civil War revolutionary black nationalists.” In these ranks he places David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Charles Lenox Remond, C. H. Langston, and William Wells Brown. Unsurprisingly, Baraka places Chestnutt in the reactionary tradition. Dunbar is situated in both camps, and James Weldon Johnson is condemned for his desire to create “high art.”52
High art is by definition slavemaster bourgeois art and that what was and is needed by all artists, or by those artists who intend for their works to serve the exploited and oppressed majority in this country, is that they be artistically powerful and politically revolutionary!53
According to Baraka, Du Bois was the fountainhead of the emerging twentieth-century revolutionary tradition in Afro-American literature. This is a rather confounding assertion, for few black intellectuals were more committed than Du Bois to the pursuit of high art. The Souls of Black Folk is written in aristocratic, arcane language, yet Baraka does not admonish Du Bois’s artistic ambitions in the same way that he denounces James Weldon Johnson. Why did he spare Du Bois? Perhaps Baraka realized that a discussion of Du Bois and high art would have forced him to revise his argument. In any case, the question of Marxism, high art, and its relationship to a capitalist economy is far more complicated than Baraka implies.
Following a perfunctory mention of the Harlem Renaissance and the communist sympathies of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Baraka discusses Richard Wright. He is ambivalent about the later Wright, although he views the early Wright as a hero of revolutionary writing. “His early works, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, Black Boy, including the long-suppressed section of this book called American Hunger, are among the most powerful works written by any American writer of the period.”54 Without explanation, Baraka then declares that Wright’s individualism and idealism finally sabotaged his art. How? Perhaps Baraka meant that Wright’s individualism and idealism were responsible for his rejection of communism and his subsequent embrace of existentialism. Baraka’s inability to construct precise arguments weakens his assessment of Wright.
Predictably, Baraka condemns Ralph Ellison for his Invisible Man, contending that the novel became prominent because the “work puts down both nationalists and Marxists, and opts for individualism.”55 Despite the novel’s elegance, Baraka views Invisible Man as an attempt to devalue the black protest activities of the 1930s and early 1940s. He further claims that Ellison was celebrated by establishmentarian literary circles (i.e., white literary circles) as the most formidable black novelist of his day only after they had rejected James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mr. Charlie. This is a curious assertion given that Ellison won the National Book Award for Invisible Man before Baldwin had published his first novel and certainly before he had published Blues for Mr. Charlie.
The essay could have been more engaging had Baraka been less formulaic, as it suffers from the use of an overly simplistic moralistic categorization of “good art versus bad art.” The broad sweep of the essay also hides numerous other weaknesses. Black women are conspicuously ignored. Who could have been more central to the black revolutionary literary tradition than Ida Wells-Barnett? And where is Anna Julia Cooper or even Lorraine Hansberry? Once again, Baraka’s condemnation of high art is hollow. Are we to believe that a black person concerned about the plight of Afro-Americans cannot aspire to play Debussy? The essay reads like an introductory lecture delivered at the beginning of the semester, announcing the subjects to be discussed. But he never discusses them. Worse, the essay does not define what he means by a “revolutionary literature.” Much like the misnomer “revolutionary theater” that he earlier attached to the plays Dutchman, The Toilet and The Slave, Baraka’s claim that he is discussing a revolutionary tradition in Afro-American literature serves to mask the fact that he is actually discussing black protest literature.
Baraka revisits the politics of black writing in his essay “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle,” which is, in most respects, a restatement of “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature.” No longer satisfied by the two-tier bracketing of black literature that structured his analysis in “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” Baraka argues that most black writers “fall somewhere between those two poles.” Nonetheless, he states that most of the major black writers have been revolutionary and, once again, that the Afro-American slave narrative constitutes the beginning of Afro-American literature as a distinct tradition. Du Bois is granted a centrality insofar as he supposedly bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
His Souls of Black Folk, and indeed Du Bois’s constant forward movement ideologically, from isolated democrat to black capitalist and yea-sayer for the “talented tenth” and the emerging black bourgeoisie (its militant national wing as opposed to the comprador wing of Booker T. Washington) to Pan-Africanism and socialist and finally to Marxist communist, is the underlying dynamic of all of our intellectual and political journey.56
Although Du Bois was an immense figure and chronicled many of the political struggles of black Americans in his life’s narrative, Baraka cannot bring himself to acknowledge that Du Bois’s politics were filtered through an elite veneer. On what grounds, therefore, can Baraka pretend that Du Bois’s life is representative of “our” journey? Certainly, Baraka’s political journey does not mirror Du Bois’s, even though Baraka may want the reader to see Du Bois’s repeated ideological changes as similar to his own. Rather, the real question concerns the quality of the political engagement generated by Du Bois and Baraka in any given ideological position.
According to Baraka, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay were the premier talents of the Harlem Renaissance. But this assessment is all too predictable given Baraka’s valorization of any black writer who held leftist political positions. Toomer and Hurston are accordingly less important not because of their Harlem Renaissance writings but because of their subsequent political postures. Toomer, we are told, later repudiated blackness and Hurston succumbed to writing against voting rights for blacks in the South during the 1950s. Whatever one thinks of Toomer or Hurston, it is inappropriate to criticize their writing of the 1920s and 1930s by invoking their later political lives. After all, in later life, McKay became a devoutly conservative Catholic, and in the 1950s, Langston Hughes repudiated his progressive writings during the McCarthy hearings.
Richard Wright is celebrated for Uncle Tom’s Children, which Baraka considered to be a depiction of the “national oppression of the Afro-American nation.”57 Once again, he denounces Ellison and Baldwin as agents of the white literati’s desire to enfeeble Wright during the McCarthy era. Baraka lists Ellison’s essay “Richard’s Blues” as one example of these anti-Wright put-downs. Perhaps Ellison did write an essay by that title, but I have never found any reference to it. In 1945, years before the onslaught of McCarthyism, Ellison published an essay, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in which he offered an unbridled defense and celebration of Richard Wright, author of Black Boy.58 It is perplexing to find in Baraka’s essay a complete misreading, if not outright invention, of a text.
Baraka then rehashes his usual fare concerning the Black Arts movement and how it was on the right track but just not far enough to the left. Unfortunately, he continues his ad hominem attacks on those black writers who chose not to embrace the Black Arts movement or not to endorse Marxism-Leninism. And he criticizes black feminist writers Michelle Wallace and Ntozake Shange for not realizing that the only solution to the sexist oppression of black women is socialist revolution.59 Here Baraka’s economistic Marxism rears its dogmatic head. As if engaged in self-parody, Baraka ends one essay with the chant: “Long live revolutionary artists and writers! People of the world unite against United States Imperialism and Soviet Social Imperialism! Marxist-Leninists unite, win the advanced to communism! Liberation of the black nation! Socialist revolution! Victory to all oppressed people!” (Baraka, Daggers and Javelins, p. 52).
It would be an understatement to conclude that Daggers and Javelins was not an impressive essay collection. In actuality, it was extraordinarily pedestrian on matters of Marxist theorizing and sophomoric on issues of praxis. Baraka’s belief that he had mastered the science of Marxism—in the way that one understands the rules of algebra—undoubtedly led him to forget that he still needed to argue on its behalf. Instead, Baraka’s collection is composed of highly repetitious essays that are themselves assemblages of linked assertions. Perhaps Baraka’s failure to write sophisticated Marxist polemics stems from his frustration at having to show incrementally what he knows to be universally true. If one thinks that God (i.e., timeless truth / laws of nature) has revealed itself in the disguise of a Vladimir Lenin, a Joseph Stalin, and a Mao Zedong, then there is no need for rational or logical argument. The truth, at least in the eyes of the believer, is obvious and irrefutable. In such minds, sophisticated arguments are essentially admissions of doubt.
The essays in Daggers and Javelins show Baraka to be a ceaseless conveyor of unsophisticated “Marxist” claptrap. The “Marxism” espoused by Baraka is not informed by the work of any major twentieth-century Marxist thinkers except for Lenin, Mao, and Cabral. It was as if Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, or Lucien Goldmann never existed.60 Their work does not inform his “Marxism.” Accordingly, Baraka does not address most of the problems of twentieth-century Marxism that were central to the intellectual agendas and theoretical reformulations of the post–World War II Western Marxists, including the more humane alterations in modern capitalism and the antiemancipatory nature of socialism in existent socialist countries.
There is little of intellectual or political value to be acquired from reading Baraka’s “Marxist” essays in Daggers and Javelins. Instead, this collection of essays shows the extent to which a once serious and creative artist deteriorated intellectually after attempting to become a political thinker and activist. Baraka, the former advocate of a dogmatic black nationalism, was now a dogmatic exhorter of left-wing ditties. His style was more reminiscent of mimeographed leaflets announcing forthcoming demonstrations than serious, Marx-influenced reflections on important issues.