5 - Representing the Negro as proletarian

Summary

The Negro problem is basically a labor problem. The labor problem is organically bound up with the Negro problem. The Negro problem cannot be solved save through the solution of the labor problem. The labor problem cannot be solved unless the race problem is solved.

Richard B. Moore

The trouble is that between them and the Revolution … there is no idealogic distance which would secure artistic perspective. The want of both desire and capacity on the part of the literary “fellow-travelers” to grasp with Revolution by merging with it, and yet not to dissolve in it … is a social and not an individual trait.

Leon Trotsky

He was constrained by logic to accept Marxism as an intellectual instrument whose absence from the human mind would reduce the picture of the processes of modern industry to a meaningless antheap … Above all he loathed the Communist attempt to destroy human subjectivity; for him, his subjectivity was the essence of his life.

Richard Wright

It is not the act of positing which is the subject … it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective.

Karl Marx

Mediating black studies, the history of the Communist Party USA, and contemporary marxist theory: an outline of issues

I have been arguing that the claim that historical marxism is inadequate to the theorization of race and gender – which, broadly speaking, I agree with – cannot entail the trashing of the marxist critique of political economy, which remains correct in its essentials. I have further suggested that the methods of historical marxism have been effective, if not fully adequate, in helping us to frame certain kinds of questions about race and gender.