No consideration of Baraka the Marxist would be complete without a discussion of his Marxist-influenced art. Shortly after his 1974 conversion to Marxism, Baraka began to write a series of Marxist-influenced plays, the best known of which are The Motion of History, S-1, and What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production.
In the William Morrow edition of his collection of plays, The Motion of History and Other Plays, is an epigraph from the Peking Review which serves as an ideological preview of the plays:
The emergence of Marxism brought to light for the first time the objective laws governing the development of mankind’s history; it scientifically proved the great truth that history is made by the slaves. Reversing the history the exploiting classes have reversed, Marxism thus brought about the utter bankruptcy of the idealist conception of history and uprooted the theoretical basis of thousands of years of reactionary rule by exploiting classes. Chairman Mao in leading the Chinese revolution has from time to time educated all Party members and cadres, the proletariat and other working people in the basic viewpoint of historical materialism, i.e., the masses are the makers of history.1
Baraka’s belief that “the masses are the makers of history” meant that his Marxist plays would focus on the lives of the exploited, particularly the working class. No longer would he write plays about the identity crises of bourgeois black Americans, as he had done with Clay in Dutchman and Walker Vessels in The Slave. In accordance with his belief in the scientific nature of Marxism, all significant human dilemmas were collapsed into a teleological struggle between capitalists and workers that would inevitably result in the workers’ victory. Baraka’s understanding of Marxism prevented him from exploring the interior lives of the working classes except in relationship to economic exploitation. Instead, Baraka’s Marxist drama tried both to affirm the workers’ recognition of their own exploitation and to inspire them to realize their human destiny by joining the class struggle. Much like a black preacher who instilled hope in his congregation by asserting that God was on their side, Baraka marketed a secularized form of divine intervention.2 In this instance, Baraka’s gospel was scientific Marxism.
The Motion of History is composed of thirty scenes, each of which depicts a certain historical event in which blacks and/or whites are involved in political actions opposing different forms of repression. The events are not chronological.
The play’s first scene begins with a dialogue between a bourgeois Negro man and a 1960s white male hippie. While they talk, a screen behind them shows film clips of the political repression of liberation struggles. White American police are seen beating black civil rights demonstrators; Third World people are being beaten by the police and military forces of repressive regimes; and striking white European workers are being clobbered by their own policemen. Commenting on the events in the film, the white fellow appears to be slightly sexually aroused by the intense energy of the clashes. The black guy, somewhat disengaged or perhaps even jaded, appears not to feel any direct connection to the struggles on the screen. In the next scene, the same black character is seated at his desk in a posh office. He has a look and demeanor indicating that he is, as he claims, a professional Negro on his way “to the top.” The white fellow is now seen sharing a joint with a counterculture white woman. His comments repeatedly reinforce his attraction to the energy on the screen. Quite excited by the scenes of white police clubbing black and white demonstrators, the white fellow refers to them as a choreographed dance.
Several scenes later, we are situated in Rev. Chaney’s house or church. He is obviously a southern black minister living in a town gripped by Civil Rights movement activities. He is praying to God and asking why it is that heathens run the world. A younger man, the minister’s son (played by the same actor who was the “bourgeois Negro”), questions his dad’s belief in God’s justice. Opposed to metaphysical invocations of God, the son advocates a materialist understanding of social change.
A white male figure (played by the same actor that previously played the hippie) enters and volunteers to help Rev. Chaney and the other blacks in their struggle. He claims that he was drawn to the struggle because it gives vitality and purpose to his life. Accompanying him is another white fellow. Both the white men decide to accompany Rev. Chaney’s son to a local civil rights meeting where political strategies will be discussed. While riding in a car to the meeting, the three young men are intercepted by the Klansmen and brutally murdered. The final scene of the act shows Rev. Chaney and other church activists at the riverside where the mutilated bodies of the three young men have been found.
The second act begins with our overhearing a conversation between a white executive of Man River Textile Mills (supposedly Dan River Mills), his wealthy lawyer friend, and two local, economically marginal, white laborers. The laborers have been invited to the rich lawyer’s house. It immediately becomes evident that the white laborers have never been to the lawyer’s house before, even though they have known him for a very long time. The executive and his lawyer have invited the two poor men to the house in hopes of convincing them that whites need to band together against the struggle for black civil rights. The poor white men have always worked hard in cotton fields overseeing blacks picking cotton. The business executive and his lawyer friend try to convince the white workers that all whites share the same pre-dicament and thus have a similar interests in repressing the blacks. Although the impoverished white workers are impressed by the grandeur of the lawyer’s house, it makes them suspicious of the men’s claims. If they were really in the same boat, how is it that the lawyer lives “high on the hill” while they have remained poor? One of the poor whites points out that it is highly unlikely he’ll ever live in a big house, since the lawyer inherited both it and a great deal of money. Reese, one of the poor whites states, “You got all this from your father before ye, and him from his father. You all had a thousand niggers humpin their ass off for all this, huh.” The wealthy lawyer responds, “What the hell are niggers for . . . or fathers either for that matter?” The poor men are not convinced.
My father was there with you. Stride for stride under the same damn hot sun. In fact, we run the niggers for you. We held the bastards down so they’d work steada running off or murderin you. Made em bring that goddamn cotton up out of the ground, and strip the branches bare. And all this time we ain’t said doolysqat to each other, yet we been knowin each other a whole lifetime. Strange world ain’t it?3
The wealthy white men are relentless in their attempts to convince the poor whites that giving civil rights to “niggers” would prevent poor whites from getting to the top. Even the poor white men cannot tolerate the idea of sending white girls to school with black boys. The discussion is not resolved, but it seems likely that the cultural appeal of white supremacy to the white workers will win over their resentment of intraracial class exploitation.
Next is a very short depiction of a ceremony celebrating the opening of school for black youth during Reconstruction. We hear celebratory words of the extension of the franchise to blacks and poor whites as well as commemorations of the importance of free public schools and social legislation. Reconstruction is depicted as a progressive moment in American history.
In scene 3 of act 2, we revisit the Man River Textile Mills, except that this time, it is almost a century earlier, during the latter part of Reconstruction. Poor whites are talking with a former white landowner who is trying to convince them that Reconstruction is bad for all whites. One of the poor whites comments about the quality of his life as a poor white man during the pre-Reconstruction years. “We couldn’t vote before either. . . . Didn’t have no school either till them niggers got to rootin around like they was somebody. Funny how much we seem to be in the same boat. Yet we ain’t . . . I guess not really.”4 Hearing about life for poor whites in the antebellum South, the white former landowner is enraged that any poor white could consider himself as sharing interests with “niggers.” He accuses the poor white man of being a “nigger lover” and screams that the niggers and northerners were responsible for the impoverishment of poor whites. The two men debate their previous fortunes under the old order. The former landowner browbeats them into submission with images of “niggers” strutting around as the master of white folks. As a strategy for changing this insulting new order, he silently displays a Klan hood.
Next we see three well-dressed white men discussing the economic viability of returning the South to white racist domination. The northern banker is not concerned about the plight of blacks; his sole desire is for the southern white elite to establish a social order conducive to profitable investments. In this new partnership, the white southern aristocrats have agreed to rule the South in accordance with the economic interests of white northern capitalists. The final scene shows a discussion among several black southerners when they find out about the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876. This compromise ended the northern occupation of the South and also ended Reconstruction and set the stage for the reemergence of white supremacist rule in the South. The blacks recognize that their interests have been betrayed in the compromise but vow to continue to fight.
The entire play consists of similar dramatic reconstructions of historical events in which racism is used either to divide the common interests of whites and blacks or to resolve them by some kind of unifying, transracial, class appeal. In several scenes, Baraka depicts Bacon’s rebellion, in which black slaves and white bond servants banded together against Virginia’s colonial elite. He also charts the divide-and-conquer response by the colonial elite to the rebellion in which slavery and bond servitude become restricted to blacks only. Other scenes depict the planning of the slave revolts of Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, and Gabriel and their betrayal by slave informers. In the stage directions, Baraka suggests that the intermission be used to discuss the events that have been depicted. An announcer should come out from behind the curtain and ask two questions: “What is the future of the United States?” and “What is the main thing we have learned so far?” Baraka instructs that “at least one plant in the audience must give correct line”:5
The future of America is in the hands of the people. But it’s more and more clear that the only change will come from violent revolution. To end Capitalism and build Socialism. That’s clear. One thing we keep seeing is that it will take all the people together to make any real change, any revolutionary change in this system. Also we keep seeing how the negative ruling-class forces were always very clearly aware that they had to keep working-class people divided along national and racial lines.6
Baraka’s distrust of the discussion that might be generated by his play led him to orchestrate a phony dialogue, as if all that mattered was what the audience heard. Nothing better illustrates Baraka’s disrespect of the mental faculties of the “average American” than his script directions calling for a plant to offer the “correct line.” Once again, in his overvaluing the political importance of rhetoric, Baraka apparently believed that radical ideas, clearly articulated, would persuade those who hear them.
Similar scenes follow the intermission. First we see a member of the American Communist Party call for black self-determination in the Black Belt South. Next we hear him reverse that position in favor of closing ranks with President Franklin Roosevelt and the AFL-CIO. Another scene shows Robert Williams’s advocacy of armed reprisals against Klan violence. Later we see Roy Wilkins receiving a report of Williams’s actions and deciding to suspend him. Another scene is a collage of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech followed shortly by a depiction of the bombing murder of the four black girls in a Birmingham church. In the aftermath of their murder, Malcolm X appears as a denouncer of the “white devil” and a vociferous critic of the false benefits of civil rights legislation. Malcolm’s assassination is depicted in juxtaposition with a robotic-like Elijah Muhammad who seems to be incapable of muttering anything other than “the white man is the devil.”7 Other scenes reveal the police murder of Fred Hampton and the advocacy of Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.
The play’s final scenes are extensive dialogues between contemporary white and black workers who are trying to determine the ways that racial differences have been used historically to divide them and keep them from struggling together for their common class interests. These scenes are not grounded in historical events but are fictional creations. In all likelihood, Baraka may have viewed these scenes as the most important in the play, for they convey his proposed solution, which is socialist revolution. These scenes are uniformly weak, however, perhaps the weakest in the entire play, as Baraka uses these interracial dialogues to lecture his audience. One character recites the differences between use value and exchange value. Another explains the Marxist interpretation of exploitation in the capitalist production process. Still another offers a recitation of Mao’s thought. As do many of Baraka’s Marxist essays, the play ends with the characters repeatedly chanting “Forward to the Party! Long Live Socialist Revolution.”
The Motion of History is probably Baraka’s most successful Marxist play written before 1980. His use of historical events to dramatize the intersections of race and class are sometimes engaging. Perhaps the best vignettes are those dealing with Bacon’s rebellion and the end of Reconstruction. But even when he successfully captures historical moments, Baraka’s Marxist-Leninism more often than not overwhelms the dramatic form. The play fails miserably when Baraka addresses contemporary race and class politics, as he does in the latter scenes. In those scenes, Baraka advocates a crude scientific Marxism, and character development is nonexistent. Instead, characters are proxies for the articulation of various bits and pieces of a Marxist theory. The plot lines are flimsy, underdeveloped, and far too predictable.
From a Marxist vantage point, the play suffers because it has no understanding of the aesthetic uses of dramatic form. Form is sacrificed for rhetorical dogma. Baraka’s didacticism undermines the dialectal tensions in his drama, for it leads to a linear and predictable narrative. Nonetheless, the historical scenes in The Motion of History might have been informative and engaging to some people, although I suspect that significantly fewer were inspired by Baraka’s attempt to be a political tactician.
S-18 was first performed at the Afro-American Studio in New York City in July 1976, and it was directed by Baraka. The play’s name is from an omnibus crime bill that was being debated by Congress at that time.
The play begins as Red and Lil, a married radical couple, are talking about the bankruptcy of American politics. Both are members of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary People’s Union. Red answers a phone call from a comrade in Cleveland. The Cleveland organizer tells Red about the police murder of a sixteen-year-old girl who was shot in the back during an altercation between her mother and their landlord. Red is heard instructing the Cleveland operative to immediately mobilize a coalition to protest this murder. When discussing their own inability to form a coalition, Red and Lil mention the two main obstacles as being bourgeois nationalists and communist revisionists:
RED: By now everybody should see the go-fer suit you get runnin that devil jive, Rocky be laughin all the way to the oil well and back to the bank, niggers and white folks fightin over who’s the devil, when the real devil is the capitalist beatin both they asses.9
Clearly, this is included as a critique of the Nation of Islam’s ideological line. It also is a self-critique of Baraka’s former allegiance to Manichaean racial categories and their correlated essentialisms.
Scene 2 shifts to the chambers of the Supreme Court, in which the justices are debating the merits of S-1. One conservative justice claims that the bill should be passed because it would discourage anarchy. Carter Dougs (supposedly William Douglas), the most radical of the justices, views the bill as a move toward fascism because it authorizes the imprisonment of communists and anarchists without their being charged. The Negro justice, Thurman Marsh (supposedly Thurgood Marshall) is opposed to the bill but not as adamantly as Justice Dougs is. Dougs announces that if the Court declares the bill to be constitutional, he will be forced to speak directly to the American people about its dangers. When he solicits Justice Marsh to join him in this endeavor, Marsh demurs. Justice Dougs observes that the law in this nation has always served the interests of the rich, including himself. Shaken by the horror of the bill, Dougs suffers a stroke.
Next we go inside the Senate office building where a capitalist is talking with two U.S. senators, one liberal and one conservative. The conservative senator is celebrating Justice Dougs’s stroke. The capitalist reminds the conservative senator that the presence of the liberal justice is important, for he makes people believe that there is balance on the Court. Even the liberal Senator Bay (probably Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts) argues for the necessity of maintaining a “semblance of balance” on the court; otherwise middle-class Americans might get upset. The conservative does not care about the appearance of democracy; he believes in capitalist oligarchy. The liberal believes that the rich should rule but that their rule must be hidden from the masses.
The following scene shows striking bus drivers and communist organizers confronting management and the police. This is followed by a short vignette of a judge in seventeenth-century England sentencing poor English folk to the colony of Georgia where they must work to pay off their debts. In another brief scene, we see an undercover federal agent notifying local police authorities about his intention to infiltrate radical political activists. We then move to a meeting of a local unit of the Revolutionary People’s Union. Red and Lil deliver speeches explaining why Marxist-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought is the only viable path to emancipation. The next scene occurs on the floor of the House of Representatives where a liberal representative is condemning S-1 as fascist legislation, and a conservative legislator is ridiculing the liberal’s claims. A black legislator opposes the bill and attacks the character of the racist conservative legislator from Mississippi. The conservative legislator responds by calling the black congressman a phony black militant. Baraka uses his speech to attack his old adversary, Congressman William Clay from Missouri. The conservative legislator announces:
And you, sir, Representative from Missouri, you have a reputation among certain of the people in this body and in Washington as a militant, a man of the people, but that, sir, I submit, is a joke. The black militants say you are a sellout, that you are to, quote them, “A rip-off specialist.” They say you are part of this system you so scathingly denounce, that you represent the narrow interests of the black middle class and upper class.10
Following the passage of the crime bill, we are taken to a rally at which Red delivers another forceful speech in which he calls for the violent destruction of the capitalist state. Using scientific Marxism, he predicts that the United States will soon be at war with the other imperialist superpower, the Soviet Union, for the imperialist intentions of both nations have placed them on a collision course. The undercover policeman is also at the rally, posing as a reporter from a local newspaper. Red is not fooled and convinces an honest but naive reporter from a local radio station that the other so-called reporter is really a police informant. Although the federal authorities are monitoring the demonstration, they do not intervene then but wait until later to arrest Lil and Red at home. Other radicals are seen being arrested in their homes and at public places. After their arrest we hear a news bulletin announcing that NATO forces are fighting with Soviet troops. A courtroom scene follows in which Lil and Red are charged with various offenses, both real and trumped up.. Red is even charged with treason. Despite obvious violations of the couple’s constitutional rights, the presiding judge upholds the prosecutor’s arguments. The courtroom scene conveys a witch-hunt atmosphere, which is now legal, given the passage of S-1. President Gerald Ford delivers a speech to the nation explaining the war. The honest radio reporter tapes a scientific Marxist commentary by the recently released Lil, which accurately predicted and explained this conflict between the imperialist superpowers. To the surprise of the radio station’s owners, the reporter plays Lil’s comments on his news show. Red, in jail, hears Lil’s recorded commentary and is pleased. The play ends with people filing by unsuspecting police and entering a church where they will hold a party congress. The anthem “America” is heard.
Baraka’s play may have struck a chord at the time the S-1 crime bill was being debated. As proposed, the S-1 crime bill terrified civil libertarians and authentic democrats, for it would eliminated numerous civilian legal protections against the police and state authorities. The bill was cosponsored by none other than the liberal Senator Ted Kennedy. Although not all of the proposed bill became law, parts of it passed that did give more authority to the police. I wonder, though, how those audiences reacted who were not familiar with the proposed legislation. To those familiar with the bill, Baraka’s inability to take into account dramatically that the S-1 bill was never passed as proposed may have revealed his inability to address the nuances of oppression under the American capitalist order.
Baraka probably did not convince his audiences that the United States was either fascist or on the verge of becoming a fascist state. Indeed, it is not even clear why he brought up fascism. Evidently, he believed that members of his audience could not see themselves as economically exploited or politically manipulated. But instead of condemning the status quo of monopoly capitalism, Baraka invents a far worse fictitious picture of American fascism and then tries to argue that the only viable opposition to that fictitious moment of fascism is communist revolution. In his bid to create an extremely repressive America, he sacrifices a realistic portrayal of contemporary American society. The proposed bill, S-1, was not sufficient proof for the existence of American fascism. In the real world of American politics, many of the worst aspects of the proposed legislation were defeated or discarded. Worse, Baraka writes as if the only true opponents to fascism were revolutionary communists. He ignores liberals and civil libertarians, even though it was the liberal Supreme Court Justice Dougs who first opposed the bill.
Baraka’s need to condemn both the Soviet Union and the United States leads to his creation of a war between the superpowers. At no point in the play, however, is it made clear why the two superpowers were fighting. How did this supposedly inevitable military conflict enhance the play’s political message? What was scientific about its prediction?
Because the dialogue is either too forced or too plastic, the play is a highly uneven attempt to dramatize the radicals’ opposition to the federal government’s increasing repression. In the era of Reagan-Bush and Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Edward Meese, Antonio Scalia, and William Rehnquist, the play appears quite timely. Liberties have become increasingly restrictive. Nonetheless, one wonders whether Baraka would have been more persuasive had he written a polemical essay instead, for his didacticism overwhelms his ability to create a drama that is both intellectually stimulating and artistically engaging.
The play What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production11 takes place on the shop floor of a large automobile manufacturer, Colonel Motors. The time is now. Workers are busy on the production line when they see a masked man enter the factory and walk toward them. One of the workers laughingly refers to him as the “Lone Ranger.” The masked man begins to address the workers. A press agent for free-market capitalism, the masked man tells the workers that they have entered a new “poststrike, postrevolutionary” era. In appreciation of all who have helped bring about this new age, this spokesman for capitalism offers thanks to “Marcuse, CPUSA, Jesse Jackson, NAACP, all who urge righteous moderation!”12 He informs the workers that they are lucky to be employed at Colonel Motors. The workers still do not know who he is. Humorously, they ask where Tonto is. In a serious tone, he replies that Tonto is dead, a victim of hostile Indians of the Geronimo and Crazy Horse variety. The masked man asks the workers to call him MM. Later, he tells them that his real name is Money Master and admits to being the collective spirit of all owners and capitalists.
Two of the workers, Donna and Reg, are quite politically aware of their exploitation as workers, whereas Clark, another worker, is completely naive and ignorant. Donna reads MM’s appearance as just another capitalist attempt to allay the workers’ discontent by offering them escapist films of monsters and spectacles of sex, nostalgia, and metaphysics. MM agrees with Donna and tells her and the others that if they looked closely, they would see MM in all the scenes of Hollywood movies, including the furniture. This is Baraka’s use of a standard economics symbol for capital. In simple economic analyses, M-M means money that is used to make money, which is otherwise known as capital. MM, Money Master, is the symbol of capital.
MM claims responsibility for the workers’ livelihood as if their employment were a gift from him and his kind. He tells the workers that strikes don’t really accomplish anything. In fact, he is there to give them a raise—a raise in spirit. The workers protest that they want a raise in salary. MM informs them that money isn’t everything. Instead, they should take pride in their accomplishments as workers. They have a stake in the system. Moreover, he even denies that there are any socioeconomic classes in the United States. When Donna inspects his hands, it becomes clear to all that he has never done any manual labor.
Tuffy, the compromised union representative, appears. An accomplice of MM, he urges the workers to listen to the masked man. He is pushing a wheelbarrow holding the dead body of one of the workers. The workers are stunned and perplexed by the dead body. Tuffy tells them that they are lucky to be Americans and lucky to have jobs. He is crude and uses overtly racist and sexist language. MM calls Tuffy aside and tells him that such language should be used only in private meetings with him. Tuffy tells the workers that they should love MM because MM loves them. Like MM, Tuffy announces that the day of strikes is over. Workers should be concerned only with working.
MM interrupts, proclaiming that without strikes, a new era of peace has emerged. The only thing the workers need to do is sign the “New Agrees,” a new contract between laborers and management. Reg and Donna laugh when they hear the stipulations in the New Agrees: MM is always right; women must become redomesticated; there can be no complaining, bitching, or striking; coloreds, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans will get slightly less money than the cheap wages paid to the white workers; fascism needs to be “momentarily” implemented; and commies are poison. MM tells them that they either must sign the New Agrees or join the unemployment line. Cops enter the factory. MM reminds the workers that there are more than enough unemployed workers to take their places. Jobs are scarce and most of their former coworkers have already been fired and sent home. They can work or die impoverished. Their wages will be reduced. Hearing this, Clark, the naive worker, finally realizes that MM is not his ally but his enemy. More cops enter the factory.
Donna and Reg walk over to the dead body in the wheelbarrow and discover that it is Felipe, a fellow worker and union organizer. He has been shot in the head. The masked man suddenly becomes the Lone Ranger, and the dead body of Felipe momentarily comes to life as Tonto. Tonto tells the Lone Ranger that his days as the ranger’s flunky are over. He predicts the death and destruction of the Lone Ranger and all that he represents, whereupon MM, now the Lone Ranger, shoots and kills Tonto. The surreal scene ends and the dialogue and characters return to “reality.” MM threatens to kill all of them in the same way that he killed Tonto. The police surround the workers, but in the background we hear the voices of the recently fired workers who have gathered outside the factory doors. The workers, many of whom are armed with clubs, pistols, and rifles, crash through the factory door while chanting “Strike, Strike, Strike.” They rescue the three captive workers. Realizing their vulnerability, MM, Tuffy, and their police flunkies retreat. The play ends with the workers chanting in unison, “Strike, Strike, Strike.”
Even though the dialogue is not subtle, the play has less of a sledgehammer quality than the scenes depicting the contemporary workers in The Motion of History. It is not clear what the interplay between The Lone Ranger and Tonto has to do with the play’s overall theme. Although Tonto is depicted as racially obsequious to the white supremacist Lone Ranger, the interplay between the two has little to do with capitalist-worker relations except perhaps to insinuate that workers who passively accept the dictates of capitalism are metaphorical Tontos.
The play might have been more provocative had Baraka presented a more comprehensive discussion of the plight of American workers in regard to the globalization of the workforce and the international fluidity of capitalism. Instead of confronting the new relationship between labor and capital, however, Baraka romanticizes the efficacy of the strike as if we were living in the 1930s.
It is difficult to view Baraka’s Marxist drama as other than dismal. These plays are basically propaganda. As was the case in his Black-Arts-era agitprop plays, Baraka seems not to believe that his audience can understand a more thoughtful and aesthetically rich drama. Once again, his strict didacticism reveals his distance from them. Baraka is less interested in stimulating their minds than in telling them how to view the world and act politically. As was the case during his Kawaida days, Baraka wants followers, not independent thinkers. Instead of stimulation, his dramas offer instructions.13
Concerning Baraka’s Marxist drama, critic C. W. E. Bigsby wrote:
Baraka’s is a sensibility that apparently craves submission to ideology. Confronted with the ambiguities that are the birthright of the black American and the natural inheritance of the writer who wishes to transform the world which he inhabits by reinventing it, he has always been tempted to resolve this by opting for a single interpretation, by being drawn to one pole of experiences. It remains true, however, that his most impressive and honest work remains that which he wrote when poised in hesitation, when he could still acknowledge not merely the strength but also the legitimacy of the competing demands on his mind and imagination . . . he has laid aside a talent which might have made him one of America’s leading writers and which had already established his command of theatrical form and idiom . . . he has replaced metaphor with statement, ambiguity with simple assertion, character with role and a painful attempt to sift an authentic language from inherited forms with mere rhetoric and party slogans.14
In 1975, Baraka published a small book of poetry, Hard Facts. The introduction is a short explanation of Baraka’s Marxist aesthetics, including many of the ideas that he explores in the essays on art contained in Daggers and Javelins. He contends that the American academy valorizes middle-class poetry, which he defines somewhat tautologically as poetry that reflects not only middle-class life and interests but also “bourgeois social and production relations”:
The poetry, art or writing reveals the class stand, and attitude of the writer, reveals the audience to whom the writer and artist addresses themselves, it also reveals what work they have been active in and what studies they are involved in. There is no art that is above the views or needs or ideology of one particular class or another, though the rulers pretend that art is classless and beyond political definition. That is why we aim at an art that serves the great majority of people, the working masses of people. That is why we make an art that praises what helps the people and puts down mercilessly what oppresses or exploits them.15
The goal of the revolutionary poet is to write poems that educate and intensify the class consciousness of the working class. To do this, the revolutionary poet must develop a writing style that is accessible to the masses. Such a poet is the creator of a popular mass art. Writers who write for other writers and intellectuals are bourgeois. According to Baraka, any bourgeois writer who writes with and for the working class can attain a working-class artistic identity. Revolutionary writers recognize that “the people” do not need ambiguity or pessimism but “odes of strength, attack pieces, bomb, machine gun and rocket poems. Poems describing reality and methods of changing it.”16 Baraka regurgitates images from his poem “Black Art” his Black Arts manifesto in which he calls for “poems that kill, assassin poems, poems that shoot guns.”
Although Baraka’s Marxist writing borrows extensively from his writings during the Black Arts / Black Power era, he uses his new Marxist framework to assess his black nationalist activities.
Earlier our poems came from an enraptured patriotism that screamed against whites as the eternal enemies of Black People. . . . The same subjective mystification led to mysticism, metaphysics, spookism, & c., rather than dealing with reality, as well as an ultimately reactionary nationalism that served no interests but our newly emerging Black bureaucratic elite and petit bourgeois, so that they would have control over their Black market.17
The poem “Revolutionary Love” is a tribute to the idealized character of his wife, Amina. Given the absolute centrality of his wife to his political involvements since returning to Newark, Baraka repeatedly praised her as his foremost political companion and life partner.
Black Revolutionary Woman
In love w/ Revolution
Your man better be a revolution
for you to love him . . .
. . . Black Revolutionary Woman
were you my woman, and even in the pit
of raging struggle, we need what we love,
we need what we desire to create, were you
my woman, I’d call you companion, comrade,
sister, black lady, Afrikan faith, I’d call you
house, black Revolutionary woman
I’d call you wife18
Even though it is included in Hard Facts, this testimony to Amina Baraka could have been written or published during the Black Arts era, as it does not contain the trademarks of Baraka’s Marxist poetry. There is neither mention nor hint of communism or scientific Marxism.
In the poem “When We’ll Worship Jesus,” Baraka maintains his scathing denunciation of black religious beliefs, particularly Christianity, that had been present in his work during his Black Arts days. But now, as a Marxist, Baraka does not urge an alternative black cosmology. Furthermore, he is less concerned about the complicity of Christianity in white domination, even though he condemns that as well. Mainly he emphasizes that Jesus should be understood as a repository of hopes and energies that could better be directed to engaging the real, material world. Only by acknowledging the existing world can believers in Jesus realize what they pray for. Praying to Jesus is a waste of time.19
We’ll worship Jesus
When jesus do
Somethin
When jesus blow up
the white house . . .
. . . we’ll worship Jesus when
he get bad enough to at least scare
somebody—cops not afraid
of jesus
pushers not afraid
of jesus, capitalist racist
imperialist not afraid
of jesus shit they making money
off jesus20
In his post–black nationalist era, Baraka now feels free to criticize Islam, something he never would have done five years earlier. Allah, too, is a metaphysical fantasy.
jesus need to be busted
jesus need to be thrown down and whipped
till something better happen
jesus aint did nothin for us
but kept us turned toward the
sky (him and his boy allah
too, need to be checkd
out!)21
Given the black community’s pervasive belief in Jesus (or respect for those who hold such beliefs), it is hard to imagine Baraka reading this before a rank-and-file black audience unless, of course, he wants to shock them.
Many of the poems in Hard Facts are personal attacks on prominent black entertainers and political figures. But instead of accusing them of being white-like, as Baraka had once done, he now depicts them as flunkies of the capitalist order. One poem, “At the National Black Assembly,” is an assault on Hannah Atkins, the Oklahoma state official who resigned her position in the National Black Convention because of the demagogic behavior of the Marxist Baraka. Baraka, of course, feels the need to humiliate her. Baraka disparages Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson in several of the poems. Another poem criticizes Congressman William Clay, Baraka’s antagonist in the Gary convention. Niggy the Ho, the most vicious poem in the entire collection, was reserved for the poet Nikki Giovanni. Evidently, Baraka was enraged by her growing political moderation. He writes,
. . . a mediocre flunky, now she say she really dig President Ford.
Yahoo, what else is new, . . . Hi Ho, her butt for sale everywhere, Hi Ho, ugly
American, sell out bitch scribbler, athletic supporter of imperialism
all the perfume in the world cant cover the farts
of the maggots
in your soul.22
After reading Hard Facts, one can easily understand why Baraka’s early Marxist poetry has often been dismissed or ignored. The poetry is embarrassing.
Besides the viciousness and artlessness of the poetry in Hard Facts, Baraka seems to have run out of ideas when he composed the collection. The themes are so repetitious and insipid that one could easily read the collection as a parody of political poetry. Or perhaps he thought that scandalous and offensive statements would be sufficiently shocking to give artistic life to this shoddy work. Baraka’s next venture into Marxist poetry, Poetry for the Advanced, was equally banal.23
Concerning Baraka’s Marxist poetry, Werner Sollors wrote,
Baraka’s poems have not regained the strength of his early work. Although Baraka has renounced the reactionary anti-Semitic and antifeminist excesses of the nationalist poems, his postnationalist, Maoist work admits only occasional flashes of poetry, which are often overshadowed by hammering political slogans. What Baraka perceives as a political strength in his new commitment may well be a crucial poetic weakness; he knows exactly what he wants to say at all times.24
Baraka is not the typical vulgar Marxist, for his Marxism does not seem to be informed by any desire to engage Marx’s writing. Rather, it is a Marxism that respects and draws on only those Marxists who were, except for Stalin, successful political revolutionaries—Lenin, Mao, and Cabral. Baraka mistakenly believes that he is appealing to a tradition of Marxism that is vehemently anti-intellectual and interested solely in seizing power for the proletariat.25 But even within the confines of American Marxism and its traditionally antitheoretical bent, Baraka’s “Marxism” is pedestrian. He has appropriated Marx—and, worse, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao—in much the way that he appropriated Karenga, by memorizing key phrases and reciting them where applicable. Baraka, the secular religious fanatic, left the confines of black nationalism for the security of a more omnipotent God, “scientific socialism.”26 In a 1978 interview, Baraka made the following “religious” statement concerning his Marxism:
Now, as I came more and more in contract with dialectical materialism and Marxism, I began to understand very clearly that change is constant and also that reality moves from a lower to a higher level—that ultimately the motion of society and humanity is always onward and upward, from ignorance to knowledge, from the superficial to the in-depth and the detailed. Once you understand clearly that this is the nature of reality you will see that your own development has to be in that direction.27
It is this quasi-religious element in his appropriation of Marx that makes Baraka incapable of functioning creatively in the Marxist intellectual tradition—of subverting while reinforcing.
Baraka’s move to Marxism is fundamentally different from that of Richard Wright during the 1930s. Wright became a communist primarily because of the intellectual community in the American Communist Party. Wright, a black novice writer from Mississippi with less than a high school education, found that he could apprentice as a writer in the Communist Party. Membership in the party gave him access to the guidance of many notable American literary figures. The party functioned for Wright in much the same way that Beat bohemia functioned for Baraka, as a marginality facilitator. Baraka’s conversion to Marxism was not linked to any attempt to broaden his intellectual community. He has not been a participant in any significant leftist intellectual dialogue or community. Unlike Wright, Baraka views himself as a potential American Lenin or Mao, a dream reflected in his decision to establish his own vanguard party.28
Baraka’s Marxist-influenced plays are as disappointing as the essays in Daggers and Javelins. They do not indicate that he has studied any masters of the Marxist dramatic form. Instead, he erroneously believes that he is and has long been a master of politically engaged drama. All that he needs to do with his Marxist plays is change the ideology. Unfortunately, the Marxist plays are often as disastrous as those abominable agitprop plays that he wrote during the height of the Black Arts movement.
Perhaps critic Lloyd W. Brown said it best:
As a scientific socialist he is in the least imaginative phase of his life as a political writer. This relative lack of creativity is not really the fault of the ideology itself. It seems, more likely, to be the reflection of a certain intellectual flabbiness on Baraka’s part. Not only in the forgettable poems of Hard Facts but also in the plays and essays of the later years, Baraka seems to find it increasingly difficult to go beyond the accepted clichés of political dogma. It has appeared progressively easier for him to offer hackneyed and literal statements in lieu of artistic forms that are both imaginative and sociopolitically significant.29
What happens to a charismatic figure when he loses his charisma? In Baraka’s case, the loss of his intellectual clarity—which was both the cause and effect of his charismatic authority in black nationalism—left him unprepared to confront a new historical situation. Those outside the nexus between the charismatic Baraka and his nationalist followers have long viewed his political beliefs as a mixture of sense and nonsense. Yet the scope of the black nationalist appeal and the legitimacy of some of the issues it raised gave the movement a degree of rationality that in turn was granted to the movement’s leaders. But because Marxist-Leninist politicizations do not currently have a popular presence or legitimacy that demands explanation and discussion, the thoughts of Baraka, America’s would-be Lenin, are viewed without the cover of rationality invested in a social movement. In reading the now-naked Baraka, one might easily conclude that he is writing to and for himself. This conclusion may not be absurd as it sounds, for Baraka could be less interested in influencing a reading audience than in proclaiming a new political identity. Such an interpretation would be consistent with Baraka’s repeated efforts to purchase a new identity by projecting a new image. Reification has run amok, once in black face, now in red.
Baraka’s shift from the black nationalism of Raise Race Rays Raze and Madheart to the “Marxism” of Daggers and Javelins and The Motion of History was not accompanied by greater political, analytical, or aesthetic sophistication. The fundamental shortcomings in Baraka’s “Marxism” are its profound anti-intellectual and antitheoretical currents, problems that were present as well in Raise Race Rays Raze. The anti-intellectualism of Baraka’s “Marxism” allows him to dodge explanations of why the thought of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao hold the keys to black emancipation. Simply put, he never clarified why black nationalism was no longer the correct strategy, except for asserting that he had been duped by black politicians who used nationalistic appeals in order to win black votes and then pursued policies that were not in the interest of the broader black community. One could rebut my criticism by pointing out that Baraka had never convincingly argued why blacks ever should have adopted black cultural nationalism. Why, then, should I expect him now to tell us why we should now reject it?
In calling for the rise of the working class, Baraka neglects to acknowledge the changes that have occurred in the American capitalist economy (consumerism, mass culture, globilization) that make it far more difficult to define the working class and equally difficult to isolate and politicize a non-hybrid, working-class consciousness. Why does he overlook the long-standing racial parochialism of the white American working class? Likewise, he ignores the historical collusion of the American working class in U.S. neocolonialism toward the Third World. He also does not address the intense American jingoism of large numbers of black Americans. In addition, Baraka overlooks the large percentage of black Americans who would be labeled members of the lumpenproletariat, which, according to his strict application of “scientific socialism,” might ultimately necessitate their destruction.
On what grounds does Baraka assume that Stalin could inspire a revolutionary movement in the United States? Stalin, the fanatical tyrant, killed and imprisoned millions of people. When asked during a 1977 interview, “Is rightist rule any worse than Stalinism?” Baraka responded, “Yes, absolutely. Stalin upheld the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin upheld the dictatorship of the majority. Capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union in the late’ 50s, so obviously Stalin’s purges didn’t reach far enough.”30 Nearly two decades after Khrushchev’s revelations, Baraka’s willingness to consider Stalin an ally of working-class emancipation is dumbfounding. His claim that Stalin did not murder a sufficient number of people is despicable and morally vulgar. But dogmatic scientific socialists like Baraka do not believe in morality. And what about China’s increasing drift into monetary alliances with the Rockefellers of the world? These and many more questions are not addressed in Baraka’s “Marxism.”
Once again, Baraka has willingly diluted his artistic ambitions in order to serve the right side of history. It is sad to witness the decline of an artist of Baraka’s talents. Once a creative dramatist, he is now content to place polemical essays into the mouths of his characters. A former artistic innovator, he is now trying to revitalize the dreaded aesthetic uniformities of socialist realism. Baraka’s commitment to political art has undermined his creativity, but not because political art is intrinsically weak. The problem with Baraka’s political art is Baraka. Whenever Baraka has imagined himself as politically engaged, it has always been as a self-anointed leader of the masses. In his case, the masses are always figments of his imagination, figments that are far more simplified, pacified, and dim-witted than the real living people. Baraka, the politically engaged artist, has always written for his “idea of the people,” an idea that often had little relationship to actual Afro-Americans (or whites) of any economic class.
The results have been travesties. In the name of black nationalism and later Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought, Baraka has created intellectual styles that allow him to appear “at home” at precisely those moments that he is most estranged. No matter how he dresses, walks, or speaks, the clue to Baraka’s alienation from poor blacks and the working class is his inability to imagine them as intelligent as himself.