Writing about Richard Wright in 1963, Ralph Ellison commented that it was “awful” how Wright had “found the facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms of American Negro humanity.”1 Ellison crystallizes a set of assumptions here that has often guided the ways readers and scholars understand the place of Marxism in African American literary history: an enabling if intellectually and aesthetically limited influence that black writers had to move past in order to achieve both literary excellence and to furnish complex, accurate representations of African American life and culture.
Ellison’s comment also indicates how, in the postwar period, writers who had started out on the Depression left often gravitated toward other sociopolitical sensibilities. His career in particular has been cited as demonstrating the necessity for black writers to transcend Marxism’s “facile answers,” in no small part because he helped construct that narrative of his own trajectory. In a nuanced account of Ellison’s shift away from the left, Lawrence Jackson argues that he switched his literary and political allegiances to the liberal establishment after black leftists read Invisible Man (1952) as “trying to earn bourgeoisie success by way of abstract symbolism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and anticommunism, the coin of the day.” Their attacks on his novel meant that “Ellison had an impossible time convincing fellow black writers of his political credentials.” Such criticisms responded to how Invisible Man “seemed incapable of admitting the value of principled black resistance” and how “the complex novel that contemplated the symbolic structure of individual will could easily be read as anticommunist.” Faced with this situation, Ellison “buried his leftist past” and embarked on a new track defined by Cold War liberalism and apolitical aestheticism.2 As a result, Barbara Foley writes, “Invisible Man is read as testimony to Ellison’s maturation; the novel’s repudiation of leftist authoritarianism and scientism and its embrace of democratic pluralism and epistemological ambivalence exhibit not just its protagonist’s development from ranter to writer, but the increasing sophistication of the text’s creator as well.”3
Margaret Walker would also, in later years, bury her Depression-era investments in the left and Marxism. In 1986 she claimed: “I couldn’t have even had a full flirtation with the Communist Party, because they simply rejected me. . . . I realize I was considered petit bourgeois, Black Nationalist deviationist.” Walker claims this alternative aesthetic and political classification: “I’m very Black Nationalist.”4 Ellison and Walker’s retrospective revisions of their time on the left helped legitimate a consensus described by Anthony Dawahare: “most scholars of black literature and culture remain entrenched in anticommunist and pronationalist theoretical paradigms,” he writes, and as a result, scholarship often assumes that “if blacks were communists, then they simply must have been duped by left-wing political parties that did not have their best interests in mind.”5 Both Ellison and Walker produced narratives that reinforce a common set of assumptions about Marxism: its protocols are not suited for explaining US and African American contexts, and commitment to Marxism produces stunted, simplified renditions of black life. As a result, the ostensibly more authentic political and aesthetic paradigms of cultural nationalism, or the ostensible moral and artistic sophistication of postwar liberalism, are often characterized as superior alternatives for black expression.
Only recently have scholars like Foley and Jackson begun the process of recovering Ellison’s Depression-era leftism from the charge that it was merely facile. I have sought to further that project by delineating the epistemological and literary sophistication of his 1930s Marxism. By exploring Walker’s archive of unpublished writings from the Depression period, Ragged Revolutionaries also reveals her encounter with Communism, an encounter that not only involved a serious manipulation of Marxist concepts, but that synthesized Marxism with modern African American experience and cultural expression. During the Depression, Walker may indeed have been invested in black cultural nationalism, but given her own revolutionary commitments and the ways Communist discourse of the period privileged black culture, it was an investment which, at that time, was shaped by Marxist priorities.
Richard Wright made a more public break with the left than either Ellison or Walker, but this was largely due to his stature as one of the Communist left’s most celebrated authors. He announced his disillusion in his 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay “I Tried to Be a Communist,” citing, among other charges, the party’s failure to live up to its revolutionary ideals and its suppressions of writers and members. Hazel Rowley writes that the essay was an early entry in a genre of “disillusioned voices of ex-Communists” that would become “fashionable” in Cold War America.6 Yet in part because Wright had published successful pro-Communist works in the Depression that continue to be dominant in scholarship on Wright, and in part because writers and critics in later decades attacked or championed Wright as a model of the politically committed black author, the pertinence of Communism and Marxism to Wright’s writing has always been visible.
Nonetheless, the complexity of Wright’s efforts in the Depression can be lost in the implications of the “protest” label, which implies the sacrifice of complexity to the exigencies of antiracism and anticapitalism. This sense of Wright as an inadequate writer because of his political commitment informed James Baldwin’s criticisms in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone.” Later, Baldwin would further dismiss Native Son as “afflicted” with “Stalinist garbage” compared with what he saw as the less political and thus more formally inventive and authentic portrait of black life offered in Lawd, Today!.7 Irving Howe, contrasting Wright’s work with the postwar efforts of Baldwin and Ellison in his 1963 essay “Black Boys and Native Sons,” praises Wright for the “clenched militancy” of his writing, for not sacrificing political urgency to “aesthetic distance.” After all, he concludes, “plight and protest are inseparable from [African American] experience” and thus intrinsic to any authentic representation of black life.8 Howe’s and Baldwin’s positions are two sides of a familiar coin. Political commitment or artistic complexity, epistemological curiosity or rigid didacticism, intellectual sophistication or Stalinist garbage—these are the binaries that have inflected discussions of Wright and still often shape conversations about the intersections of politics and black writing. Ragged Revolutionaries complicates this legacy by revealing Wright’s Marxism to be at once politically committed, intellectually and aesthetically sophisticated, and attuned to the social and psychological complexities of black life.
While this study examines the Depression-era work of each of these three writers, the lumpenproletariat continued to assert itself, albeit in more muted ways, in Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s writing following the Depression. While each writer moved away from the institutional Communist left, none of them fully abandoned the spirit of their 1930s Marxism, which involved seeking new resources for revolutionary consciousness and action in the experiences of those on the margins of social and economic structures. The African American leftist poet Frank Marshall Davis’s verdict on Wright’s post-Communist career could apply, to varying extents, to Ellison and Walker as well: “despite his continued Redbaiting during his final years, his writing showed that basically he was still a Marxist. When you get down to the nitty gritty, he had merely quit the organization and dumped his former comrades, not the ideology.”9
Invisible Man’s reputation as an anticommunist novel has been reified by numerous critics who, as Foley states, “accepted the premise that the invisible man’s negative experiences with the Brotherhood faithfully replicate typical features of U.S. Communism.”10 But, as I’ve argued elsewhere, if the novel advances critiques of the institutional failures of the left, it makes those critiques from a vantage point informed in part by Ellison’s earlier interests in Marxist theory and left-wing literary strategies.11 For one, Ellison’s most famous novel is driven by an effort to examine political institutions according to similar criteria he developed as part of his 1930s Marxism. The ability and willingness of self-proclaimed revolutionary institutions to actually enact transformative change, their ability to recognize and implement the resources of African American culture in the name of achieving such change, and the extent to which their theoretical and political methods are free from dogmatic stasis, are all concerns advanced in Invisible Man’s representation of the Brotherhood.
Lumpenproletarian figures continue, in Invisible Man, to inspire political innovation. Before he gives his first speech for the Brotherhood at a rally, invisible man recalls a syphilitic outcast from his youth who lived near a “Hooverville shanty” by the railroad tracks and who, “sprouting rags,” would “beg money for food and disinfectant with which to soak his rags.” The memory of this Depression-era member of the ragged proletariat, whose rags signal his desperation and deprivation, prompts invisible man to reject the doctrinaire formulations of the Brotherhood and, in his speech, rely on African American oral “tradition” to rally the crowd. He does so successfully, but is rebuked by Brotherhood leaders who sense, in his innovation, a threat to their ultimate interest in preserving their organization and the status quo of which it forms a part. In this episode, the major themes of Ellison’s earlier Marxism—the role of the lumpenproletariat in catalyzing pragmatic revolutionary creativity, the need to interrogate the radical commitment of institutions, and a faith in the transformative power of black culture—continue to shape Ellison’s sense of the political. Despite Ellison’s skepticism of the Brotherhood, the group’s leader, Brother Jack, nonetheless at one point acknowledges the proximity of the lumpenproletarian practice of crime to revolution. After invisible man defies the law by helping a crowd break up an eviction in Harlem, Jack tells him: “sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.”12 Back in the 1930s, characters like Hymie, Tillman, and Slick had revealed that proximity in Ellison’s work.
As noted in the introduction to this book, Walker’s major work of her post-Depression career, Jubilee (1966), draws its influences from Marxist historiography: not only Georg Lukács’s efforts to apply historical materialist categories to historical fiction, but also W. E. B. Du Bois’s work, in Black Reconstruction (1935), to tell the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction according to classical Marxist principles of historical change.13 Both Lukács and Du Bois provided rhetorics of historical representation, heavily influenced by Marxist historiography, that enabled Walker to rewrite Southern US history with the African American people as its protagonist. Jubilee may tell the story of the emergence of a black nation endowed with a rich folk culture and collective well of empowering experience, but its narrative of that emergence relies on materialist understandings of historical form. In this synthesis of nationalist and Marxist elements, Jubilee bears a trace of the 1930s Communist left’s combination of black nationalist sensibilities, folk culture, and Marxist theory.
Walker had in fact begun work on Jubilee in the 1930s, recalling decades later that she had put it on hold in order to write Goose Island.14 Her sociological interest in the lumpenproletariat from that period makes it into an episode in Jubilee. In Alabama during Reconstruction, protagonist Vyry and her partner Innis aim to earn enough money to buy a farm and build a house of their own. At one point, Innis proposes working in a sawmill to make money, but Vyry objects: the proletarianization of African Americans after slavery has resulted in the formation of a black lumpenproletariat that Vyry sees as a threat. “You ain’t got no business working with them low-class folks in them sawmills and turpentine camps,” she tells Innis. “Them is the worstest folks, just nothing but roustabouts” who “do nothing but drink and give they money to them bad womens.”15 Vyry refuses to make a sharp distinction between the working class, which Innis hopes to join, and the disreputable, immoral lumpenproletariat. Walker uses Vyry’s moralizing opinion here to enact an ironic revision of Marx’s concept of the lumpenproletariat. If Marx thought the lumpenproletariat was defined by a willed refusal to take part in capitalist production, Vyry here inadvertently suggests capitalism’s role in producing the lumpenproletariat’s material and moral degradation, a suggestion that implies classical Marxism’s scorn toward lumpenproletarian figures is more properly directed towards capitalism itself—a point that, as we’ve seen, runs through much of Walker, Wright, and Ellison’s Depression work.
Innis receives confirmation of the moral danger of laboring from their powerful white landowner. Mr. Jacobson employs Vyry as a cook and Innis for occasional work, pays them well, and doesn’t charge them rent. Jacobson warns Innis of the “prostitutes” that make sites of collective labor “a bad environment.” Wanting to retain the services of both, Jacobson provides Innis and Vyry with their own plot of land, noting that the federal government’s promise of “forty acres of land and a mule” is an empty one that could never be fulfilled in Alabama. Vyry and Innis work on building their own house, but “the work took a long time because Vyry was still cooking for the Jacobsons and Innis did many odd jobs, so that any time Mr. Jacobson needed him he put down his saw and hammer and went to town to finish off another job before working again on his house.” Their subservience to the Jacobsons, cloaked as property-owning autonomy, is made plain when Vyry, following the completion of their house, tells Mrs. Jacobson she’ll be leaving the Jacobsons’ employ in order to work their new farm. Mrs. Jacobson was “almost nasty about it”: “you colored people don’t want to work the way you useta. What’s more you won’t work the way you useta. You expect everything to come dropping in your laps . . . and you want to leave the white people holding the bag. We’ve done everything for you, my husband and I.”16 The Jacobsons have reproduced slavery’s ideologies of paternalism and dependence in a slightly altered form, and Vyry and Innis have mistakenly assumed that the Jacobsons’ intention was to empower them as landowners and private farmers. Not long after this encounter, the Ku Klux Klan burns down Vyry and Innis’s house, an act of repression directed against their challenge to postbellum white supremacy.
This sequence of events reveals how an emerging Jim Crow system can use ideological narratives of moral and familial degradation to keep African Americans from joining the working class and to return them to a quasi-feudal state of servitude. The sawmills and turpentine camps, including all of the lumpenproletarian criminal activity that occurs at the margins of their productive relations, stand as a modern and progressive alternative to the neoslavery of the Jacobsons. Vyry’s moralistic disdain for the lumpenproletariat—which, in tone, is also that of classical Marxism’s—is here appropriated by the white landowning class. It thus blinds Vyry and Innis to both the socioeconomic causation of criminality and the opportunities both proletarian labor and lumpenproletarian practices might provide. In this manner, some of the thematic concerns driving Goose Island’s depiction of the slums and the lumpenproletariat recur decades later in Walker’s most well-known work.
Wright wrote The Outsider (1953) after moving to Paris and immersing himself in the French postwar intellectual milieu. It enacts a shift in the center of gravity of Wright’s thought, from Marxist to more squarely existentialist themes, a shift foreshadowed in Native Son. While Invisible Man may be more associated with literary anticommunism, The Outsider offers a much more scathing depiction of the Communist Party—Wright doesn’t disguise the target of his critique with a euphemism like the “Brotherhood”—as cynical agents who dehumanize and manipulate its members. But like Invisible Man, The Outsider’s criticism of the party is its unwillingness to enact historical transformation. When party leaders order Bob Hunter, a black Trinidadian member, to cease his work organizing a cell in the Dining Car Waiters’ Union, Hunter can’t understand the reason for abandoning a promising political project. He is rebuked for not following the will of the institution: “being a Communist is not easy. It means negating yourself, blotting out your personal life and listening only to the voice of the Party. The Party wants you to obey! . . . If you don’t, then the Party will toss you aside, like a broken hammer, and seek another instrument that will obey.” The protagonist Cross Damon, a murderous antihero who rejects all codes of Western culture in the name of an existential freedom from moral or social responsibility, later observes that the Communist leaders don’t want to change the world. Rather, for them, “the world is perfect just like it is. They just want a chance to rule that world.”17
Wright’s criticism here is not only similar to Ellison’s, that the party’s commitment to revolution is mere rhetoric that it uses to dominate its members, but it also builds on his own concern, in Native Son, with themes of recognition and subject formation. The Outsider’s diagnosis of the Communist Party retains both the political and protoexistential dimensions of the earlier novel. If Wright’s expectation for the party in Native Son was that it recognize the human subject behind the actions performed by black individuals—a recognition nowhere else extended in a racist, capitalist society—then his criticism in The Outsider is that these Communists, unlike Jan and Max, fail to realize the need for the party to serve as a counterpublic space of subjective recognition. Wright’s sense of the potential of the party to live up to this criterion may have shifted, but not the criterion itself.
As its title suggests, The Outsider also preserves some of Wright’s 1930s interest in the political resourcefulness of marginality and exteriority. After he falls in with the Communist Party in New York, Cross Damon watches a violent struggle between one of the Communist leaders and that leader’s racist and fascist neighbor. Marginalized as a subject from both of the institutional and ideological discourses each combatant represents, Cross watches with “glee”: “Which man did he hate more?” Cross enters the fight and kills both men, and the remainder of the novel plays out Cross’s attempts to evade detection and wrestle with the ethical implications of his acts. The murder makes a political point as well. A newspaper dubs it a “DOUBLE TOTALITARIAN MURDER.” The investigating district attorney, Ely Houston, not yet knowing that Cross is the killer, speculates with him. The only motive for the murder must be “ideological,” he concludes. “But, in order to kill the two of them on ideological grounds, this killer would have to have the support of a third set of ideas.” When Cross asks what that third set of ideas might be, Houston answers: “That no ideas are necessary to justify his acts.”18 The novel doesn’t espouse that form of irresponsibility, but the murder plot nonetheless allegorizes a concrete political problem. The racist and Communist locked in struggle suggest the contours of a Cold War globe divided between the totalitarian systems and ideologies of the racist West and the Communist East. The struggle suggests their ultimate equivalence: both refuse to recognize the human subject in order to reduce subjects to “instruments,” and both seek not a better world but mere power over others in the present. Cross, by dramatically negating both East and West, suggests that African Americans and people of color must and can disrupt this Cold War power binary in the name of a new “set of ideas.”
This set of ideas isn’t given a concrete identity in the novel, though connections with global anticolonial liberation struggles and the Cold War Non-Aligned Movement can be drawn. Wright followed the development of the postcolonial Third World in the 1950s, and his The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956) documents the 1955 Bandung Conference, a major meeting of Asian and African nations that refused alignment with either the United States or the Soviet Union.19 The murder plotline echoes Wright’s Depression-era fascination with the ways that socioeconomic marginality in the United States could equip African Americans with revolutionary capacities. What has changed, from 1940 to 1953, is less the structure of Wright’s theories of politics and subjectivity, and more the place of the actual institutional Communist movement within those theories.
One could certainly find other echoes of the 1930s in the postwar work of these three writers, but these examples should indicate how even though Wright, Ellison, and Walker all made breaks with the Communist left following the period of the Great Depression, all three remained influenced, in their new literary and political directions, by the idiosyncratic brand of Marxism they developed in that period. This was a Marxism that, by putting pressure on the concept of the lumpenproletariat, sought to craft materialist diagnoses of the racial, gender, and economic exploitations of Jim Crow and capitalism and to pose new resources for action against those exploitations. These writers realized what Louis Althusser realized in his philosophical engagement with Marxism and what the leaders of the Black Panther Party realized in their activism: if you want to be a Marxist in any effective or meaningful way, you need to identify how Marxist thought can be expanded and situationally applied. You need to find out what still needs to be done, what still needs to be explored, where new paths for revolutionary thought and action could be located. For Wright, Ellison, and Walker, the concept and figures of the lumpenproletariat, precisely because it and they were what mattered least to orthodox Marxism, were central. Their Depression-era work furnishes a valuable indication not only of the ways in which Marxism and the left enabled and empowered black cultural production in the twentieth century, but also of how black writers used the institutions, networks, and discourses of the left to craft their own Marxism: a mode of literary and theoretical practice that stands as a sophisticated and versatile entry in the canons of Western Marxism and black radical expression.