Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy. In spite of all prohibitions, the slaves traveled miles to sing and dance and practice the rites and talk; and now, since the revolution, to hear the political news and make their plans. (p. 86) This was a complete departure from the way in which Marx and Engels had conceptualized the transformative and rationalizing significance of the bourgeoisie. It implied (and James did not see this) that bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third World peoples. It broke with the evolutionist chain in, the closed dialectic of, historical materialism. But where James was to hesitate, Cabral, as we have noted before, would strike boldly forward: [N]ational liberation is the phenomenon in which a given socioeconomic whole rejects the negation of its historical process. In other words, the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, its return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected. But James’s effort to level Marxist theory to the requirements of Black radical historiography was not finished. Though he bore a great respect for the work and thought of Lenin, there too he suggested a more imaginative treatment. With Lenin’s notion of a cadre of professional revolutionists, the beginnings of the vanguard party in mind, James went so far as to designate an entire stratum, describing in precise terms how it was formed: “The leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by the cultural advantages of the system they are attacking” (p. 190. This was an admission of class pride that neither Lenin nor Marx or Engels had been prepared to make. though surely it was an inadvertent admission, one that revealed James’s own class origins, it also reflected a certain historical clarity. The petit bourgeois intelligentsia had played dominant roles in Marxist thought as well as in the Bolshevik victory in Russia. The theory and the ideology of revolution was theirs, and unarguably too, the Russian state. They had brought to the working-class movement their “superior knowledge and the political vices which usually accompany it,” as James would say of Toussaint (p.95). James finished the work, harvesting all these materials. He culled them in order to present one of the most exciting historical constructions to be produced by a Marxist thinker. Patiently, deliberately, systematically, but always mediated by his lyrical and sometimes mischievous literary “voice,” he distilled from 300 years of European history the processes and lineages of the contending forces within the proletarian movement: the revolutionary petit bourgeoisie and the working masses. The former, he maintained, made its first appearance in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century as radical democrats; the latter were the social basis for the revolutionary masses behind the French Revolution. However, each had undergone transformations through the long years between their appearances and the present (that is, 1948). These changes were the results not of years, but of capitalism. These two opposing historical forces had at last reached their final articulation in Stalinism and Fascism. In Stalinism, the petit bourgeoisie had organized the attempted destruction of the revolutionary proletariat. The petit bourgeoisie began by using the workers to destroy the bourgeoisie and then the suppression of the workers’ movement had followed. In Fascism, the petit bourgeoisie had become the social instrument of the increasingly desperate bourgeoisie in the effort to destroy the same historical subject: the workers’ movement. Together Fascism and Stalinism constituted the objective movement (centralization) of capitalist organization (p. 201). The continuing development of the organization of capitalist production and the bureaucratic administration of state capitalism had called forth a petit bourgeois class of enormous skill, responsibility, and ambitions. Within those same centuries, then, though it was possible to trace the maturation of the bourgeoisie and the working classes, it was also necessary to recognize the transformation of the petit bourgeoisie. It was necessary because this strata had presumed the leadership of the proletarian movement and then betrayed it. Now the radical intelligentsia at the service of the proletarian revolution—activists like those in the Johnson-Forest tendency—had to respond to these events. First it had to comprehend them, ceasing to identify the perversion of petit bourgeois leadership with the authentic forces of the revolution. Second, the “vanguard of the vanguard” had to assist the proletariat in the destruction of the “revolutionary proletarian” bureaucracy. The direction of the world was in the hands of the workers: “The proletariat will decide. The thing is to tell the proletariat to decide” (p. 181). In one sense the first systemization of Black radical historiography was constructed by figures such as G. W. Williams, J. J. Thomas, Du Bois, James, and Padmore for precisely the complex reasons suggested by James when he wrote on revolutionary leaders: they had directly profited from the “cultural advantages” of the system upon which they mounted their ideographic attack. As the heirs of Black petit bourgeoisies, they enjoyed in the order of things the intellectual beneficence of the ruling order from which they posited their critique. A less obvious process fueled their rebellion. Ambitious and accomplished in the very skills that were understood to qualify them for leading roles in bourgeois society—which “naturally” demarcated extraordinary individuals (dominators) from the ordinary populace—their loyalties to the existing order were contingent only on its consistency. Inevitably, when racial order subverted their experience of the “universals” of Western civilization, they were confronted with but two alternatives: to bitterly endure the cynically indulged illusion or to attempt its realization. Obviously when these figures chose the latter it was not a choice characteristic of their class. Still subject to what James had described as the inherent “political vices” associated with their social origins, their seduction by those aspects of Marxism that were owed to the sources of its genesis is understandable. Marxism’s intellectual power and pedigree, its promise of a hidden truth, its open opposition to an insidious social order, its alternative mapping of the historical origins of the ruling classes, which they had come to despise, and its identification with the underclasses, made it an almost irresistible companion. Marxist propaganda suggested to him that Blacks need not be alone in their struggle for liberation and dignity. The specter of a world proletariat, united and strong, Black and white fascinated Wright. Before that evening of his intellectual conversion he had looked upon the party as a white man’s organization and therefore something to be distrusted, especially in its pretensions concerning Blacks. More important, until that moment he had dismissed as a personal fantasy, as a painful, frustrating dream, the organization of the poor and oppressed. Again, on that same evening—his first visit to a John Reed Club—Wright commented, “I was meeting men and women whom I should know for decades to come, who were to form the first sustained friendships in my life.” He had discovered not merely an important, historical vista but someone with whom to share it. Still, beyond the social vision of Marxism and the fraternity of American communism, Wright’s decision to become a part of this movement was motivated by one other element: the opportunity to transform himself from “passive” victim to active advocate. Here, then, was something that I could do, reveal, say. The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead. In their efforts to recruit masses, they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses, had conceived of people in too abstract a manner. I would try to put some of that meaning back, I would tell Communists how common people felt, and I would tell common people of the self- sacrifice of the Communists who strove for unity among them. At the time of Wright’s sojourn in the party (1934–42), the primary focus of the movement in Western Europe and the United States was the defeat of fascism. It was a fundamental tenet of party work that fascism was an instrument of the ruling class designed to meet the crisis of world capitalism embodied in the Depression. As such, fascism as an ideology was presumed to be alien to the working class. Earl Browder, as general secretary of the American Communist Party, had made this position abundantly clear in reports, speeches, and articles during the late 1930s. As the official voice of the American Communist Party Browder had argued that the struggle of the movement was preeminently a political one: What is the message that this powerful voice of the Communist Party is giving to America? First of all, it is the message of the need for the great mass of the people, the workers and farmers, to organize for their own protection. Browder’s strategy was a simple one: “The growth of the Communist Party is the greatest guarantee against reaction and fascism.” Browder’s leadership had positioned the party in support of the New Deal and Roosevelt’s administration under the presumption that American workers were not ready to confront the issue of socialism. In effect, the party pursued the contradictory aims of reform and revolution. This was in part a consequence, as Wilhelm Reich had pointed out with respect to the German Communist movement during the Weimar Republic, of failing to distinguish between the abstraction of class consciousness and its specific, historical form. Just as critically, however, the party was committed by the instructions of the Comintern to a united front with its class enemies. For Wright the question of the consciousness of workers and consequently that of political organization was more complex. It involved—as he was to write in defense of Native Son—”the dark and hidden places of the human personality.” In the essay, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright had been more explicit: the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded, a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses. . . . I was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of Bigger in America and Bigger in Nazi Germany and Bigger in Old Russia. All Bigger Thomases, white and black, felt tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical, and restless . . . . [C]ertain modern experiences were creating types of personalities whose existence ignored racial and national lines of demarcation. Wright was attempting to come to terms with the psychological consequence of a historical condition of which the leadership in the Communist movement was only vaguely aware. Wright was insisting on the necessity for understanding the working class in their own terms. He was concerned with the ability of proletarian masses to reproduce themselves spiritually and culturally. If they could no longer re-create the social ideologies that had sustained them, it would not be possible for them to fulfill the historical role that Marxian theory assigned them. Moreover, the fragmentation of personality, social relations, and ideology that Wright observed and re-created was so total that its political and historical implications seriously challenged the presumptions of the Communist movement: I felt that Bigger, an American product, a native son of this land, carried within him the potentialities of either Communism or Fascism... . Whether he’ll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who’ll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he’ll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-unions or revolutionary guidance depends upon the future drift of events in America. But... Bigger Thomas, conditioned as his organism is, will not become an ardent, or even a Luke-warm, supporter of the status quo. He realized that no political movement that, for ideological reasons, presumed the progressive character of the working class would succeed. Wright’s novel, subsequently, was a refutation of radical dogma from the vantage point of Black experience. He sought first to re-create that experience, and in so doing to force a confrontation between it and socialist ideology. Bigger Thomas’s character was specific to the historical experience of Blacks in the United States, but his nature was proletarian, that is world-historical. When Wright gave the consciousness of Bigger Thomas a nationalist character, he was addressing himself to both those aspects of his creation. He wrote that he was “confronted with that part of him that was dual in aspect . . . a part of all Negroes and all whites.” If the American revolutionary movement could not come to terms with the appeals of fascism, then it could not begin to understand the immediate nature of the working class. He agreed with Marx that capitalism as a form of organization led to the destruction of social consciousness founded on noncapitalist social orders. He did not accept, however, the notion that this process led to a new ideological synthesis. The truer result, the observed result, was “a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone.” The Nazi movement succeeded because it offered in the stead of an existential terror, a new, unambiguous social order, “the implicit, almost unconscious, or preconscious assumptions and ideals upon which whole nations and races act and live.” Yet Wright’s analysis did not end there. He had something more to say about the nature of revolutionary action. His analysis both underscored the absolute character of revolutionary commitment and also spoke to Marxian class analysis. I remember reading a passage in a book dealing with old Russia which said: “We must be ready to make endless sacrifices if we are to be able to overthrow the Czar.” ... Actions and feelings of men ten thousand miles from home helped me to understand the moods and impulses of those walking the streets of Chicago and Dixie. Wright recognized in his Bigger Thomases the desperation that was the precondition for the making of total and violent revolutionary commitments. He understood those commitments to be less ones of choice than of compulsion. The more total the degradation of the human being, the more total the reaction—“the need for a whole life and acted out of that need.” He also refused to dismiss the Bigger Thomases as lumpen-proletariat or to distinguish them from the proletariat. In Native Son he actually anticipated a thesis on violence and the lumper-proletariat that would become better known later through the work of Frantz Fanon. For Wright, the violence of the lumper-proletariat was not only an objective force of revolution; violence could not be separated out from the formation of consciousness. “I didn’t want to kill” Bigger shouted. “But what I killed for, I am.” What, precisely, the Bigger Thomases would kill for, Wright could not answer. He had stated his thesis and it was now left to the “future drift of events” to make that determination, that is, the capacity of the American radical movement to develop a critical political theory. This, of course, was not to be the case. For Wright, it was not sufficient for Black liberation that his people come to terms with the critique of capitalist society. He had observed: “Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life.” As a critique of capitalist society, Marxism was necessary, of course, but it was ultimately an internal critique. The epistemological nature of historical materialism took bourgeois society on its own terms, that is, presuming the primacy of economic forces and structures. As such, the historical development from feudalism of the bourgeoisie as a class served as a logical model for the emergence of the proletariat as a negation of capitalist society. Wright appeared quite early to have understood this thesis as a fundamental error in Marxist thought. Even as early as 1937, he had begun to argue that it was necessary that Blacks transform the Marxist critique into an expression of their own emergence as a negation of Western capitalism. Though immersed in the American radical movement with its Eurocentric ideology, it had not taken Wright very long to reach the conclusion that the historic development of Black people in the United States constituted the most total contradiction to Western capitalist society: The workers of a minority people, chafing under exploitation, forge organisational forms of struggle . . . . Lacking the handicaps of false ambition and property, they have access to a wide social vision and a deep social consciousness . . . . Their organizations show greater strength, adaptability, and efficiency than any other group or class in society.