Tag: Richard Wright

The “point” of what, exactly? What “matters”? The groundless ethical imperative of Marxist revolutionaries.

The autograph of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophen haben bisher nur die Welt anders interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern”

Marx and Engels’s oft-cited 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, penned in 1844 but not published until 1888, is perhaps the closest thing we have to words that function as holy scripture for communists: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”[1] Changing the world is allegedly what “matters,” but it’s dogmatically assumed, never argued for. It’s as de fide, as much a matter of faith, as, for example, the Immaculate Conception is for Catholics, and just as ungrounded in Scripture.

The aim of this series is to expose Marxism as an instance of the “foolishness of the wisdom of this world” (1 Corinthians 1:20) from the Bible’s standpoint. No Marxist as such has warrant for pontificating that “the point” is to change the world. The point of what? What can be “the point” in an ultimately pointless world, as distinct from the world in which God works all things according to the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11)?

My focal points, as you know by now, are C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, and Herbert Aptheker, men who understandably (only because they lived in God’s world and were created in His image) raged against the indignities of racial subjugation, colonialism, and imperialism that they experienced, witnessed, or studied. (That’s an inclusive “or,” by the way.) For several decades of their lives, they believed that they found in Marxism the conceptual tools they needed for addressing those evils.

Their biographies make for stimulating reading, but how does Marxist revolution answer the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, especially since we know that it has only added to the history of moral outrage? How can Marxist theory articulate any ethical complaint without borrowing from the Christian worldview they thought was beneath their notice? Continue reading “The “point” of what, exactly? What “matters”? The groundless ethical imperative of Marxist revolutionaries.”

“They will kill you”: Stalinists and the implicit threat of violence. Four retrospections.

This continues the study I began here and here.

This, to me, was a spectacle of glory; and yet, because it had condemned me, because it was blind and ignorant, I felt that it was a spectacle of horror. The blindness of their [Communists’] limited lives—lives truncated and impoverished by the oppression they had suffered long before they had ever heard of Communism—made them think that I was with their enemies. American life had so corrupted their consciousness that they were unable to recognize their friends when they saw them. I knew that if they had held state power, I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed.—Richard Wright, 1944[1]

Forty-seven years later, another Stalinist uttered those three words:

Had that leadership [of the Communist Party] held state power, past history suggests that those signers [of “An Initiative to Unite and Renew the Party”] would now be dead.—Herbert Aptheker, 1991[2]

About a year after Wright arrived in New York, an anti-Stalinist revolutionary was also New York-bound from England, but a Stalinist graciously but firmly warned him:

There was a black man who had joined the CP [Communist Party of Great Britain]. He said to me that you could do that in Britain and keep breaking up their meetings, but in America, if you carry on like that, they will kill you. As far as the police were concerned, if a Stalinist killed a Trotskyist, they would have no part of that, so just take it easy. The difference between British democracy and democracy in the United States is that there you have to be aware, not of the government, but of the Stalinists.—C. L. R. James, circa 1938.[3]

In 1978, on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Manhattan’s financial district,  where I would listen to Gabe Monheim expound the Scriptures and soon come to Christ, an older Stalinist I had known a few years earlier—his face contorted in hatred and words dripping in bile—volubly branded me a “counterrevolutionary traitor.” I have no doubt that had “tough Tony from Da Bronx” taken the bait, he would have met the fate that James’s Stalinist acquaintance predicted.

Notes

[1] Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1944, 54; italics mine. This was the second part of a two-part series that became a chapter of The God That Failed, Richard Crossman, ed., Columbia University Press, 2001; originally, The God That Failed: A Confession, Harper & Brothers, 1949.

[2] Herbert Aptheker, December 14, 1991, cited in Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 2015, 335; italics mine. For an account of that “initiative” and its denouement, see Jaiveer Kohli, “The Last American Communists: The Story of the Fall of the Communist Party USA,” The Journalist as Historian, May 22, 2019.

[3] Interview of C. L. R. James by Al Richardson, Clarence Chrysostom, and Anna Grimshaw in South London, June 8 and November 16, 1986; italics mine.

Three years before that interview, that is, in 1983, James received an honorary degree from Hull University. At the podium is Baron Wilberforce, a great-great-grandson of abolitionist William Wilberforce. For the background, go to https://www.africansinyorkshireproject.com/clr-james.html

Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.

That’s the question underlying my current project. Answering it might explain why I was drawn to revolutionary Marxism (of interest at least to me, if not to you).  Youngsters can be at once hypercritical and credulous. Revolutionary rejecters of the existing order, they fall for one or another “explanation” hook, line, and sinker.

Rummaging through the lives of Marxist intellectuals is no mere romantic, antiquarian interest of mine (although it is partly that). I will draw upon but not add to the biographies already written. I’m trying to understand, to the extent it is intelligible, the demonic madness we see on college campuses, draped in the language of moral outrage. (“F—  finals! Free Palestine!,” announced one savage disrupting  Columbia University students who were trying to use the main library to prepare for final exams, to cite only one example. I find the categories of intelligibility in Christian theology, specifically anthropology.

Created in God’s image and living in His world as (we all are), the miscreants have a sense of moral outrage (however misinformed), but they have nothing in which to ground it. On Monday, they’ll affirm that it’s wrong to starve children; on Tuesday, that an unborn child’s natural protector has the right to procure the services of an abortionist to destroy that child chemically, or cut him or her to pieces, or leave him or her to expire on a metal table. Most of them, if pressed, will say that, strictly speaking, we don’t know that we have more moral dignity than that of “evolved,” i.e., rearranged, pond scum. They merely dogmatize that we do.

I’m stepping back from the news and noise of the day to reflect on more civilized specimens of humanity, however much their careers betrayed the civilizing impulse. I want to explore why they thought Marxist revolution adequately addressed the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, evils that energized them? That it was such an answer is the conclusion at which my three very different intellectuals arrived.  It all starts with outrage at one or another fact in one man’s experience: colonialism, imperialism, slavery, peonage, Jim Crow.

I will also ask whether these men, if they were alive today, would embrace today’s savages. I fear they would have, as counterintuitive as such a conclusion might strike some. Continue reading “Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.”

Richard Wright: Herbert Aptheker’s Other (Almost) Invisible Man

Richard Wright (1908-1960), Lido, Venice, 1950. (Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images)

The subject line is the working title of a projected study of three fascinating writers and their interactions. I will undertake this as an exercise not only in historical exposition but also in Christian apologetics.

That is, as an epistemologically self-conscious Christian individualist living in the dispensation of the grace of God in anticipation of His inauguration of the Manifest Kingdom of God, I will explore the intellectual and personal trajectories of three radical intellectuals—Herbert Aptheker (1915–2003), C. L. R. James (1901–1989), and Richard Wright (1908–1960)—whose materialist epistemologies rendered their political projects not only impossible of realization, but also absurd. Christians can nevertheless learn from them, if only indirectly.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

United by secularism and engagement with black history, they were collectivists philosophically, but individualists in how they lived their lives. But their individualism was not enough to save them. They all failed to discern the true dividing line of their times and ours: not the “color line” that W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) predicted would define the 20th century, but rather the line in the sand drawn by the God-breathed Scriptures (Matthew 4:4).

Their rejection of the latter marks a common, tragic undercurrent. I will examine their shared but divergent paths, focusing on their anti-Christian secularism, Marxist commitments (Stalinism, Trotskyism, non-Communist revolutionary thought), and struggles with racism, ironically and tragically, they could not interpret soundly, let alone condemn, apart from the worldview they rejected. Their second-rate epigones among our contemporaries are no less intellectually bankrupt, but their frank embrace of the horrors to which their plans lead enhances the relevance of this study, which is of more than antiquarian interest.

Continue reading “Richard Wright: Herbert Aptheker’s Other (Almost) Invisible Man”