Born in 1908, Richard Wright is by far one of the most
important working-class writers of the 20th century. His major works, Black Boy,
Native Son, and his essays are not merely literary achievements; they are
social documents that analyse how material conditions, class relations,
and racial domination shape consciousness and behaviour. Wright’s development
from a Southern sharecropper’s son to a writer who engaged with Communist and
socialist circles in the 1930s exemplifies the dialectical relation between
objective social conditions and subjective formation: economic precarity, social
exclusion and how the violence of Jim Crow produced a political sensibility
that sought collective, systemic remedies rather than individualised responses.
Wright’s method is fundamentally Marxist in orientation,
even if he did not always fully self-identify as an orthodox Marxist. This is
evident in his attitude toward Leon Trotsky. Wright was strongly attracted to
Marxist analysis and to anti‑Stalinist critiques. Many
intellectuals of Wright’s generation viewed Trotsky, who combined a searching analysis of the Soviet
degeneration with a firm commitment to working‑class internationalism, as a compelling theoretical
and moral reference. Trotsky’s
dialectical materialist method and his insistence that the proletariat must be
politically independent of bourgeois and bureaucratic forces resonated with
anti‑racist
writers who refused to subordinate the struggle of Black people to existing
parties and state apparatuses.
Wright was not a Trotskyist in the doctrinal sense of an allegiance
to the Fourth International; rather, his attraction to Trotskyist ideas was of
the intellectual and moral kind: Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism, his emphasis
on world revolution, and his analysis of how class relations shape
consciousness offered resources for Wright’s own attempts to understand the
racial question within world capitalism.
His characters in Uncle Tom’s Children show that racism is
not a metaphysical or cultural “essence” but a social relation rooted in
property, labour markets and the political organisation of capitalist society.
Bigger Thomas in Native Son is comprehensible not as an expression of immutable
racial pathology, but as the product of exclusion, proletarianization, and the
social powerlessness imposed by capitalist and racial rule. Wright adopts a
materialist conception of history to understand the social, economic, and
political problems facing both black and white populations. The black working
class holds that ideas and racial ideologies arise from and reflect class
structures and economic imperatives, not the other way around.
Like many intellectuals and workers, Wright’s formative
years and his political maturation occurred amid the Great Depression, the
growth of industrial labour militancy, the rise of the Communist movement in
the United States, and the international polarisations of the 1930s and 1940s.
These were years in which the boundaries between cultural expression and
political struggle blurred: literature became a form of social investigation
and a weapon for political education.
Wright’s involvement with left-wing circles, his brushes
with Communist Party orthodoxy, and his eventual break illustrate the complex
interplay among revolutionary aspiration, the bureaucratic limitations of
existing organisations, and the need for a revolutionary strategy rooted in the
working class. His later travels and expatriation in Paris also reflect the
international character of his struggle.
Richard Wright’s literature—from Black Boy to Native
Son—remains an essential starting point for any serious discussion of race,
class and the social psychology of oppression in the United States. Wright
wrote as a proletarian intellectual: his fiction and essays insist that the
oppression of Black people is rooted not in a metaphysical “racial DNA” but in
specific social relations—segregated labour markets, violent property relations
and the structural violence of capitalism.
Wright’s work traces how poverty, wage labour,
discrimination and the threat of racial violence shape individual psychology
and mass politics. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas’s crimes are not metaphysical
expressions of an immutable racial pathology; they are the social consequences
of exclusion, desperate material conditions and systemic dehumanisation.
Wright’s political development—his engagement with communist and socialist
circles in the 1930s—further grounded his view that the fight against racism must
be situated within the struggle against capitalism and private property.
It is a testament to his political foresight and integrity
that his books are still widely read today and remain relevant. Wright’s
insistence that liberation requires systemic change remains crucial as workers
today confront mass poverty, racist policing, mass incarceration and an economy
reorganised around austerity and profit. The ruling class weaponises racism to
prevent working-class unity; Wright’s work shows the political cost of
accepting explanations that dissociate race from class and capitalism.
Wright’s political insights have even greater resonance in
today's debates, such as the controversy surrounding the New York Times’ 1619
Project, which presented a racialist view of historical developments. The Socialist
Equality Party (SEP) critiqued the 1619 Project. Extensive documentation of
this struggle can be found on the World Socialist Website.[1]
The SEP argued that the 1619 Project substituted racialist
narratives for class analysis and treated racism as an immutable feature
of American “DNA” rather than a historically specific product of capitalist
development. Wright was not mentioned in the 1619 Project. For good reason, his
materialist orientation not only cuts across the 1619 Project's racialist
interpretation of history, but also offers an antidote: it compels us to
analyse how slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, migration, and proletarianization
transformed social relations and created class potentialities for solidarity, unionism,
and revolutionary politics.
To summarise from the standpoint of contemporary political
life, Wright’s life and work underscore the necessity of connecting literary
and intellectual inquiry to an independent working-class political
struggle. Richard Wright remains a living challenge to the politics of identity
that divorces race from class. His materialist, proletarian humanism points the
way: the liberation of Black people is bound to the emancipation of the working
class as a whole. Only through a united, politically independent working‑class
struggle can the social relations that produce racism be abolished. Richard
Wright’s legacy is both cultural and political: he challenges fatalism, rejects
racial essentialism, and insists that emancipation requires transforming the
social relations of production. His work remains a vital resource as a class-based
alternative to capitalism.
[1]
The New York Timesâ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History
David North; Thomas Mackaman-Mehring Books
