MATERIALISM AND IMAGINATION

Early on in the development of capitalist modernity the bourgeois public sphere imposed itself as the dominant institution for the mediation of social conflict as well as the foundational modality for socialization of individuals and groups. By public sphere is to be understood, on the one hand, the invention of print media technologies, and on the other, the institution of academies – literary and scientific, museums, salons, and later national schooling systems that insured that control over norms of discourse and aesthetic representation was exercised by one particular social class in European society as well as in Europe’s then rapidly developing colonial empires.^² In the process of gaining cultural hegemony, this public sphere stabilized – and was itself stabilized by – a particular and novel form of rule: that of the modern nation state. This complex articulation occurred through a variety of cultural, economic, and political strategies. The establishment of national and imperial markets starting in the sixteenth century, the onset of processes of cultural and linguistic homogenization starting shortly thereafter, the invention of a legal and philosophical human subject were all necessary conditions for the constitution of this public sphere. The normative status which the bourgeois-humanist subject acquired during this period meant that while “all” were assumed to be subjects in the public sphere, only those (white, male, heterosexual, and propertied) who could adhere to the normative strictures of bourgeois subjectivity could participate in its organization and function in it as agents.^³ The bourgeois public sphere thus imposed itself, progressively, as the exclusive space for the legitimate production of knowledge, moral norms, and aesthetic forms. The worlds of desire and vernacular culture – in short: everyday life – were exiled to the private sphere in favor of an exclusive focus on the rational, the universal and the world-historical: witches were burned on the altar of scientific medicine, vagrants were confined to the discipline of work-houses in order to strengthen their moral fiber, and savages were either killed or enslaved for “the greater benefit of mankind.”

Though the establishment of this social order never went uncontested, it is only toward the first decades of the twentieth century that resistance to it would gain enough momentum and a sufficient mass basis to make its unaltered continuation impossible. The birth of the modern workers’ movement in Europe and in the Americas, ever-intensifying anti-colonial revolt in Africa and in Asia (e.g. the Boxer Rebellion, the first Pan African conference in 1900, the Russo-Japanese war of 1904) meant that significant engineering had to occur in the re-organization of world-capitalism, now in its monopoly phase, if the system as a whole was not to collapse. Thus, starting in the early teens of the twentieth century a new system of labor discipline was initiated under the now familiar names of ‘Taylorism’ and ‘ Fordism.’ But because the production of more goods necessitates, under capitalist conditions at least, that more goods be sold (otherwise the system would enter into a classic crisis of overproduction), new means of inciting consumption had to be found. Shortly after the onset of mass production, the strategies of modern consumerism were invented: advertisement, marketing, public relations, and “communications” more generally.

These transformations, however, had an enormously disruptive impact on the modern public sphere’s symbolic and ideological order. Where, before, there had been reason now desire would rule. Or, at least, the two – reason and desire – had to co-exist in much closer proximity than had been the case previously. By introducing the discourse of desire into the public realm, consumerism was contributing to the dissolution of the sharp distinction between public and private spheres that had characterized bourgeois modernity and, simultaneously, to the erosion of the strategies of domination inherited from the early modern world. In short, what might be called the autophagy (i.e. self-cannibalization) of the bourgeois order had begun. In order to maintain itself in existence the system had to begin consuming the structures on which its very existence is predicated. And, as a result, everyday life – the autonomous ways people find to generate their identities, their collective affiliations, their desires – was beginning to appear in between the cracks opening up in the public sphere.

It is to one episode in this relatively sudden transformation in the means of resistance – as well as those of domination – that have characterized historical capitalism that I would like to turn in this essay. Remarkably enough, the birth of mass culture after World War I corresponded to a sudden crystallization of Black Nationalism and of the African Diaspora around the Atlantic basin. It is true that there was a long tradition of Black Nationalist thought and practice going back to the maroon societies of the seventeenth century. But this latest reconstitution of African Diasporic identities took on, with almost no temporal delay, all the novel possibilities proposed by the autophagy that the white bourgeois public was inaugurating during this period – and this is what defines its incredible innovation. The pure potentiality of everyday life in the age of mass consumption first appears as the radically spontaneous constitution of mass movement in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and in the Harlem Renaissance’s implicit critique of the epistemological concept of ‘representation.’ At work in the cultural politics initiated by the Harlem Renaissance is an immanent critique of the epistemological interpretation of representation as a passive mirroring of the real.^⁴ In short, the inter-war period witnesses, directly alongside the autophagy of the white bourgeois public sphere, the construction of a Black counter-public.

The potentialities for future mass movement and social change this Black counter-public delineates are grasped most clearly on a theoretical level in the work of C. L. R. James. It is through an examination of his writings that I will try to grasp it. In the process of outlining his contribution I will have to make a few necessary detours through the works of Karl Marx and W.E.B Du Bois, especially in terms of the latter’s relationship to the Black counter-public to the genesis of which he was so intimately connected.

C. L. R. James and The Original Cheerful Robots

If the great sociologist of the American New Left, C. Wright Mills, theorized the nineteenth century public sphere as the idyll of small-scale producers’ participatory democracy and, consequently, turned it into the historical norm according to which he criticized the present, his contemporary, the Trinidad-born philosopher and historian C. L. R. James, did not.^⁵ A Caribbean nationalist militant and then a Pan Africanist agitator and intellectual, James had not only been born and educated in a British colony -- a colonial subject (of African descent) -- he had made the move to “the metropolis” where he immediately became deeply immersed in Marxist revolutionary politics and theory. Unlike the Texas-born white sociologist Mills, James could not simply assume the near or remote past to conceal a treasure-chest of freedom lost.

Indeed, in 1938, on the eve of the most murderous of all the wars between the great imperialist powers, James had published two studies that would make clear the course he would follow for the rest of his career. The first, The Black Jacobins, was a historical analysis of the 1791 revolution in the French colony of Saint Dominique (the independent republic of Haiti from 1802 on), while the other, A History of Negro Revolt, described past and contemporary political conflict in Africa and in the African Diaspora. With these two books James would begin a systematic exploration of the relationship between the public sphere and its outside. Thus, in The Black Jacobins he told the history of the Haitian revolution and of its relationship first to French revolutionary politics and culture and second, to the capitalist world economy. In the process, he suggested that the public sphere of the European Enlightenment, far from being an abstract space for the rational reconciliation of social conflict, was inextricably bound up with contradictions inherent in the modern capitalist world-economy. At its best, James argued, bourgeois reason – the Enlightenment ideal embodied by revolutionary leader Toussaint L’ Ouverture – could only systematize exploitation along class lines on the basis of wage labor as opposed to slavery.^⁶ Secondly, in A History of Negro Revolt, James demonstrated that anti-capitalist and anti-colonial social subjects in the African Diaspora had generally been produced outside the legitimate boundaries of a bourgeois public. They were constituted on the basis of prophetic religious communities or through the elaboration of socio-cultural networks of resistance performatively materialized in and activated by religious institutions, mystical or even magical practices (predominantly voodoo).^⁷ Thus, for James, it was clear, from the start, not only that the idealizations of the bourgeois public sphere were inadequate models for building a radical politics, but also that any radical politics that might lay a claim to revolutionizing racial capitalism would have to start from historical premises immanent to the material cultures of the various segments of the planetary working class. What James would later call the “spontaneity” of the working class, its autonomy from political bureaucracies (parties and states) and systems of racial subordination was based on a deep theoretical grasp of the ontological productivity of what Henri Lefebvre was calling, at about the same time, “everyday life.”^⁸

In 1939, shortly after writing Black Jacobins and A History of Negro Revolt, James moved to the U.S. Originally here for a six-month speaking tour for the 4th International (Trotskyist) Socialist Workers Party (SWP), he ended up staying for some fifteen years, until 1953, working as an activist, labor organizer, newspaper editor, and Marxist theoretician. James was also one of the founders of what would become one of the most famous factions within the SWP, the “Johnson-Forest tendency.”^⁹ In collaboration with other members of that group (such as philosopher/activists Grace C. Lee and Raya Dunayevskaya as well as industrial workers like Martin Glaberman), James made a number of crucial theoretical contributions to the critical analysis of 20th century capitalism. In his masterwork, American Civilization written in 1949 (but, unfortunately, published only in 1993^¹⁰), James confronted the political, cultural, and social consequences of the transformation of the public sphere in the twentieth century.

Whereas Mills tells the story of the American public sphere as the decline or corruption of the democratic polis, James recasts it in terms of the composition and recomposition of social antagonisms within American society from the War of Independence onward. He argues that there is a fundamental ambiguity in the relationship between the ideology of democratic individuality and the pressures of conformism brought on by frontier culture and maintained on the basis of slavery. Positioning himself against Alexis De Tocqueville’s conservative assessment of American democracy James argued that the geo-political division of U.S. society between slave-owning states and free states and the latter’s reliance on the former for their own economic development meant that a fundamental critique of the social order was relegated beyond the pale of public discussion:

In exchange for racial privilege the white working class relinquishes any hopes of substantially challenging the dominant social order. In fact, for James, American history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represented in practice what had only been achieved in theory by the European Enlightenment. Indeed if Europe had exploded with revolutionary fervor in 1789 it had, within 10 years, terminated its philosophic-political experiment in bloodbath and Napoleonic reaction. The theoretical innovations of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith found, according to James, their most advanced practical achievement in American competitive capitalism and liberal democracy. If that democracy failed, if the economic individualism on which it was based resulted only in a stunted social individuality, manifesting itself most clearly in the racialized allegiances of the white working class, it was precisely because American democracy expressed so well the values of the European Enlightenment. Far from betraying the Enlightenment, democracy in America, for James, embodied it precisely where it failed. For James, in contradistinction to Mills -- who tried to minimize the effects of racism in his idyll -- the bourgeois public sphere was thus “raced” from the very beginning.^¹² James was lucid enough to realize that racism cannot be abstracted from American history for the good reason that without racism there would be no America.

This change of perspective on the origins of the public sphere and on the significance of American democracy ends up drawing James into a completely new interpretation of American history and society. Though, as I mentioned earlier, he would not publish the text during his lifetime, he would go on to draw its political and theoretical consequences in other books and articles over the next thirty years.^¹³ The crux of the matter is that James never felt, like many other American and immigrant intellectuals of this period, any nostalgia for the nineteenth century, and especially not for the role that the members of his “profession” had played in it. For James, the nineteenth century American intellectual had encountered his limit in the society’s inability to express or work out social antagonisms. Permeated by a racialized culture “American Civilization” in the nineteenth century could not express the social antagonisms always at work within the capitalist mode of production. The intellectuals thus found themselves in the position of Herman Melville’s Ishmael, the narrator who himself epitomizes the powerlessness of the intellectual in what James considered to be ‘The Great American Novel,’ Moby Dick: “He is the man who sees Ahab’s madness, is swept up by it, is intelligent enough to oppose it but like Melville himself has no substitute, no force with which to oppose the mad captain … He can see nothing but disaster.”^¹⁴

It is thus no surprise if James does not interpret the advent of the society of mass consumption as the final corruption of the West by conformism and anonymity. Indeed, since conformism had been the rule from the beginning of U.S. history it was precisely not what was novel about American society in the post-war world. On the contrary, according to James, Mass Society provides the tools for the emergence of new forms of collective subjectivity. It is the matrix for the pluralization of subjectivity, the humus in which autonomous social subjects can take root. The movie, the comic strip, the detective novel – in short what James calls “the popular arts” – provide semantic fields and material bases upon which the ontologically productive dimension of the imagination can manifest itself. Precisely because they shatter the mystifying unity of the Enlightenment’s rational subject by proposing the discourse of desire as a legitimate dimension of publicity, the popular arts clear the social field for the recomposition of class struggle along axes of race, gender, and sexuality (all three of which James discusses in some detail).^¹⁵ In the process the universality of the class subject as the normative ground for the construction of political solidarities is shattered along with the claims of the bourgeois public. In order to understand fully this political and theoretical trajectory, however, two necessary detours are called for: first through a brief overview of the treatment of the questions of ‘race’ and ‘philosophy’ in Marxist theory, and second, through the recasting, in outline, of the history of the Black counter-public of the 1920s and of its theoretical articulation in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois on which James would build.

Praxis and the Lifeblood of Thought

Marxism, it is well-known by now, has had its share of difficulties with the concept of race and with the status of philosophy, especially as they are theorized under the heading of “ideology.” The problem of ideology surfaces early as the writings of the young Marx (particularly in “On the Jewish Question” and the German Ideology) and has not abated since. It is out of the question for me to retrace this problematic in detail here. Nonetheless, briefly sketching its outlines is necessary to understand the innovative power James brings to Marxism.

To put things bluntly, “classical Marxism” (as Perry Anderson calls it), cannot grasp ideology in its materiality. Marx himself relegates it to the realm of dreams or illusions, pure effect with no causal power of its own, or again, epiphenomenal apparition mounted onto an economic infrastructure but with no reflexive relation to that base. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Marx takes an idealist view of ideas as, somehow, magically separate from matter (if ideas were material realities for Marx then there is no reason why they would not have causal efficiency, even if not quite the same kind as economically productive activity). The results of this idealist contamination of Marxist materialism at its inception are twofold:

1. As has frequently been noted over the last thirty or forty years, one of the consequences of this situation is that Marxism cannot account for the efficiency of culture – understood broadly as the productivity of values, desires, dispositions, identities, and so on in everyday life as well as in formal theoretical and scientific activity -- in the constitution of materially real social formations. Phenomena such as nationalism, religious identification, but also racial solidarities and gender remain impenetrable to materialism except as purely accidental mystifications. Marxism can thus only conceive culture and ideology in purely negative terms, as error or distortion.^¹⁶ More generally, it is the power of the imagination – that is to say, the self-activity of the working class in its full multiplicity – that is short-shifted by this blind spot since the expressive dimension of that self-activity is also discarded (as “false consciousness” for example).

2. There follows from this situation a predictable aporia of Marxist political practice. While, on the one hand, it rejects all ideology as an illusory distortion of the real conditions of existence of the working class, it must reestablish somehow, on the other, the power of its own theoretical intervention. This it does along classically Hegelian lines by ontologizing the categories of modern epistemology and by declaring its representation of the proletariat as the truth of history. Historical materialism thus gains an anchor that protects it from the winds of ideology, but at what cost! Indeed, if Marxist theory is “The Truth,” there can then be only one historical path for the working class: that of the vanguard party. Strangely enough, and completely unaccountably from a theoretical standpoint, the status of ideas has been transformed from pure error or absence of being to the absolute telos of World-History: Marxist theory is the destiny of humanity! The political consequences of this slippage are well-known and need not be rehearsed here. Suffice it to say the Marxist party ends up by reproducing at the level of the working class precisely what it is critical of in Bourgeois philosophy and politics: its claim to resolve all social conflicts. But whereas Bourgeois thought and institutions do this at the level of the nation-state, the Marxist party does it at the level of the multitude, insofar as it is incarnated by the different sectors of the working class (industrial proletariat, peasantry, lumpenproletariat, etc…). In short, by discounting all philosophy as bourgeois (as in Marx’s famous 11^th Thesis on Feurbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”^¹⁷) Marxist theory has rendered its own philosophical status unintelligible to itself.

The Emergence of the Black Counter-Public and An Outline of A Counter-history of Modernity

It is W. E. B. Du Bois who will be the first systematically to think through the difficult task of articulating responses to these problems in Marxist theory and practice. During the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in his debates with the American Communist left and with certain sectors of the African-American community Du Bois articulates the questions of race and philosophy in their constitutive relation to the class struggle. The great paradox, then, is that while Marx, the philosopher, had imagined he could leave philosophy behind with the Theses on Feuerbach, it is Du Bois, the historian, who thinks the philosophical project of Marxism with unflinching determination.

In more than one way, however, Du Bois rides the wave of incredible innovations within the African-American community that were made possible by certain aspects of the structural transformations of the bourgeois public sphere I touched on at the outset of this article. On the one hand, there must be taken into account the early automation of agriculture from 1900 on. Along with the emergence of new modalities of white supremacy (Jim Crow and its military wing, the Ku Klux Klan) in the American South after the Civil War, this process of automation was the ruling class’ answer to the General Strike of Black labor that had determined that war’s outcome.^¹⁸ This repositioning of the lines of force determining the shape of the Southern class struggle, along with the labor shortages in the industrial sector caused by the First World War, creates a massive exodus toward the North of the Black agricultural proletariat.^¹⁹ In turn the geographic and demographic re-composition of the black working class opens new possibilities for the construction and expression of collective subjectivity which, in the context of a Jim Crow apparatus and of the rural organization of community-life in the South, would have been impossible to create.

On the other hand, the emergence of apparatuses of mass consumption (advertising, marketing, massification of the media, but also film, radio, and the musical record) as the necessary collaterals of the rapidly progressing automation of both agricultural and industrial sectors of American capitalist production means that the public – i.e., the preconstituted subject of bourgeois reason – must begin the process of its auto-cannibalization. As the bourgeois subject begins to consume his own rational substance there appears, underneath and against him, the teeming, irrepressible abundance of everyday life. The heterogeneity of desire becomes the sign under which identity is constituted. The universality of rational subjectivity loses its normative hold on the overall regime of symbolic production. In short the logic of marketing (the targeting of a specific audience to be matched with a specific commodity) overtakes the logic of Enlightenment reason (the institutional enforcement of the bourgeoisie’s cultural-political project as normatively or naturally universal). But this enthroning of Desire above the categorical imperative of practical reason has profoundly different repercussions for Blacks than it does for “whites,” even if many of the latter are European immigrants undergoing the process of integration into the lower echelons of the American racial hierarchy.

For African Americans the processes of racialization originate with modernity itself and are determined by the form of exodus -- both physical and cultural -- in a way that is different from all other ethnic or national groups.^²⁰ The experience of racialized slavery, the dispersion over three continents, the radical exclusion from the national community, the consistent pressures of a program of systematic acculturation – all this, accompanied by centuries-long efforts to break down all levels of community, creates a unique context for resistance. From the confrontation with these instrumentalities of domination Black Americans (and other African diasporic peoples) will construct specific institutions of resistance (maroon societies and the Black Church being only the most prominent ones). But these institutions will never really be able to lean on the normative structures of bourgeois publicity (that is, on the imaginary of bourgeois reason) for the simple reason that it is precisely Blackness that defines those structures by being constructed as their exterior. When, as in the period I am now discussing, this situation begins to change it is precisely because the normativity of a unified white bourgeois subject is beginning to lose its structural integrity.^²¹

David Levering Lewis has aptly articulated the consequences of this legacy. Discussing the difference between the projects of the Greenwich Village radicals and the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals he writes:

Indeed it should come as no surprise that Black people, identified as they have been with lasciviousness, sensuality, exoticism – in short with the radical alterity of desire – in the epistemological imagination, should develop new strategies for political discourse and cultural participation once the institutional-symbolic economy of the public sphere begins to function according to criteria that are no longer normatively rational.^²³ The cultural logic of consumerism that is initiated after World War I transforms the very structure of representation within the public sphere. Whereas the subject of the bourgeois public sphere had had to be constructed as an individual property owner founded on a unitary relationship to scientific truth, ethical duty, and aesthetic judgment in order to justify modern capitalist sovereignty, the subjects of the consumerist public must be differentiated in order to identify and intensify their desires.^²⁴ This is, in fact, the logic of marketing: for any given commodity a specific audience must be identified that will be “targeted” intensively until it comes to recognize itself in that commodity.^²⁵ From whisky to hair gel or make up, every commodity must have its desire, its market. In the early 1920s for Black Americans one of the most important ways in which the ground for new forms of identities will be created is through the “race record”. It enabled the circulation of values and forms across the continent that would otherwise have remained local. As LeRoi Jones put it, discussing the history of the Blues:

Before race records, blues form was usually dependent on strictly local tradition. Of course, the coming of the travelling shows changed this somewhat … but the race recordings really began to put forth extra-local models and styles of blues-singing which must have influenced younger Negroes.^²⁶

The result of this circulation of “extra-local models” cannot be simply counted in terms of greater financial benefits for the recording companies, however. As Jones points out, it also creates – in combination with the mass migrations of the period – affinities across traditional geographical and demographic divisions (North-South, rural-urban) by producing new affective and identitary relations, canons of “classics” (such as Mammy Smith, Bessie Smith, Sarah Martin, and later Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, and others).^²⁷ The publication of newspapers, political tracts, magazines, poetry collections, and novels directed to a Black audience on a mass basis during this period will have similar consequences, even if it was not always nearly as broad in its reach.

The upshot of all this, then, is that while with the advent of modern consumerism culture itself appears as a potential field of subordination in a way that it had not before, it also becomes deterritorialized to the extent that it can produce forms of solidarity unimaginable before. In the attempt to subsume culture formally under its apparatuses of rule, capitalism itself opens the way to culture’s politicization. By making desire as such an object of the intimate discourse of the mass media, capital is forced to merge the private sphere of consumption and of desire into the public one of political deliberation and calculation. In doing so, it begins to erase a division it itself had instituted during the seventeenth century. For, as Feminist historians have pointed out, it was then that this division between “private” and “public” had been established.^²⁸ The consequence had been that women, African slaves, and colonized peoples more generally, were cast out into the private sphere (as wives, commodities, or as subalterns) with no political rights. As new forms of what one might call ‘biopolitical’ sovereignty developed over the nineteenth century, however, this original division started losing its functionality. In other words, as the liberal democratic state started to modify the forms of centralized sovereignty inherited from Absolute Monarchy in order to create networks of power that permeate the whole of society, subordination started to rely less and less on exclusion from the formal apparatuses of the state (citizenship, voting rights, etc…). Instead, incorporation into the state’s pervasive bureaucratic structures (welfare programs, prisons, and so on) became the dominant modality of social control.^²⁹ Thus, it may be noted that, by the time 1925 came around, women could be granted the right to vote without, in the short term, significantly altering the political and economic status quo.

It must be said, however, that this blurring of the division between public and private opens new possibilities for collective agency. Among those, one in particular will be crucial in the context of the present discussion: the potential for creating a politics of cultural representation. If ‘culture’ is becoming more and more an immense spectacle of commodities as opposed to the privilege of the elite (the hegemonic connotation that the term had had in the nineteenth century, i.e. “high culture”) that means, conversely, that it can no longer be claimed as the exclusive preserve of the few. In the process of its pluralization ‘culture’ becomes a potential front of contestation in the hands of those who had been excluded from its production previously. (According to this perspective, one might interpret the development of Boasian cultural relativism and its polemic against the ethnocentricity and racism of North American and European imperialist discourses as the symptomatic institutional expression of this transformation: as culture becomes more and more broadly disseminated through the very circulation of commodities it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the rigid hierarchies prevalent in the 19^th century at the level of its theoretical representation.^³⁰)

It is in the context of these economic, cultural, and social transformations that the historical significance of organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and movements such as the Harlem Renaissance (but also organizations like the African Blood Brotherhood, and later the Nation of Islam) should be understood. Both are certainly in part the result of the great migration to the North as historians have noted. But they also signal the crystallization of African Diasporic collective subjectivities that pose themselves in opposition to bourgeois publicity. These social movements manifest themselves, in other words, as a Black counter-public. In the works of intellectuals, politicians, and artists such as Carter G. Woodson, Marcus Garvey, Aaron Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, W.E.B Du Bois, and others there is activated a cultural politics of representation that attempts to both reveal and produce Black subjectivity as an efficient form of agency within but also against the weakening confines of the bourgeois public sphere.

In a way, it might be said that, consciously or not, the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, to take only one example, hijack the forms of high culture (i.e. poetry, painting, theatre, the short story, and the novel) in order to represent what had before been constrained to the caricatures of ‘the savage’ and ‘the ignorant’ (minstrelsy, vaudeville).^³¹ As Alain Locke put it in the introduction to his groundbreaking collection, The New Negro, which appeared in 1925:

The agency of representation changes hands resulting in a transformed representation of collective agency. Indeed, in spite of the elitism that characterized the outlook of many of the leading figures of the Renaissance, including Locke himself, it must not be lost sight of that they participated in the invention of a post-agrarian African-American political and social identity that was cosmopolitan in scope, oriented as it was toward the internationalist horizon of Pan Africanism and the Diaspora as a whole.^³³

The autophagy of the white bourgeois public, then, its tendency to consume the normative ideological and institutional frameworks that had guaranteed its structural integrity from the Enlightenment on, not only contributes to the appearance of everyday life, but it also enables the self-constitution of a Black subject grounded in the humus of everyday life. That subject appears as a counter-publicprecisely because it proposes alternative modalities of subjectivation based not on the formal model of rational universality but on one of ontologically constitutive historical singularity. If Kant had asked the question “What can I know?” the New Negro will retort with Countee Cullen’s: “What is Africa to me: /Copper sun or scarlet sea,/ Jungle star or jungle track, /Strong bronzed men, or regal black/Women from whose loins I sprang/When the birds of Eden sang?”^³⁴ Where, in other words, modern epistemology asks for the limits of representation the Black counter-public asks about its ontological consequences. While the one treats representation as a question of truth the other will tackle it as an issue of praxis – aesthetic praxis as with most of the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, but also political and social praxis as with UNIA and Cyril Briggs’ African Blood Brotherhood. Indeed, with UNIA the Black counter-public appears as a political subject, as the first great mass movement of twentieth century American history, even if for a brief period of time only (Garvey being imprisoned in 1925).^³⁵

Du Bois: The Material Reality of Racial Formations

Du Bois interrogates materialism precisely at this conjuncture and his doing so will radically differentiate his intervention from Marx’s. He begins by asking a question: why is it that while the sensuous reality of racial categories is insignificant their social and political materiality is overwhelming? His answer, which he will elaborate over a period of thirty or forty years, involves first a radical rethinking of the relationship between culture and material life and, subsequently, a reconceptualization of Marxist politics. Du Bois, given his position as a Black radical in white supremacist America, takes his point of departure not with the exploitation of labor in the abstract, but with the racialized exploitation of Black labor and of colonial labor more generally. According to him, this racialized form of exploitation takes its root not simply in the economic subordination of the working class to capital by means of the appropriation of the means of production by the bourgeoisie but also, irreducibly, by the social and cultural exclusion of Black and colonized people from the bourgeois public sphere. Without this latter, added dimension nothing in Marxist politics can make sense to Black people. Not only that, but without the systemic racialization of the working class (both Black and white), capitalism, both in its political and economic moments, cannot function. Thus, according to Du Bois, cultural phenomena can be abstracted from a critical theory of capitalism – even one that purports to be grounded in an abstract mode – only at the cost of rendering that theory politically irrelevant to the vast majority of humanity (i.e. the colonized world). What is needed then is a theory of the capitalist world-economy that systematically links together the exploitation of labor in general and the specific dynamics of its racialization, a theory of “racial capitalism” as Cedric Robinson, one of the theoreticians of Black Marxism, would later put it.^³⁶ As Du Bois himself writes in the concluding essay of Locke’s anthology: “Modern imperialism and modern industrialism are one and the same system; root and branch of the same tree. The race problem is the other side of the labor problem; and the black man’s burden is the white man’s burden.”^³⁷ What Du Bois theorizes is, on the one hand, the historical process through which capital must stratify the working class on a global level in order to maintain its system of rule, and on the other, the way in which that process paradoxically calls forth the radical autonomy of the working class in the symbolic production of its identities.

At the political level this theorization of race as a central dynamic of capitalism means, for Du Bois, that an unmediated expression of class antagonisms is more the exception than the rule: “In this development note if you please the characteristic of all color-line fights – the tearing across of all rational divisions of opinion: here is Liberalism, anti-slavery and cocoa capitalism fighting Toryism, free Negro proprietors and economic independence. Thus with a democratic face at home, modern imperialism turns a visage of stern and unyielding autocracy toward its darker colonies.”^³⁸ From this recasting of the central dynamics of class struggle there would follow, for Du Bois, a reconceptualization of the working class and of radical political strategy.

Indeed, in the 1930s and 40s Du Bois would become more and more deeply involved in mobilizing African diasporic solidarities on the basis of historical and social “identity of passions” (the expression is Ralph Ellison’s). In short the semiotic register of his approach to the Diaspora would shift more and more toward a certain proletarian internationalism – though not without significantly complexifying the Marxist vision. As historian Penny M. Von Eschen has remarked in writing about Du Bois and the other African American activists (Paul Robeson, Max Yeargan, Alpheus Hunton, etc.) who struggled to develop an imagined community that would include all people of African descent, they wanted to speak about an achievement, not something given but something that might be made. Architects of the politics of the African diaspora forged an identity of passions through a powerful cross-fertilization of socialist internationalism and the struggles of colonial peoples for independence. Yet if the anticolonial politics of the 1940s cannot be understood outside the context of 1930s internationalism, neither can it be subsumed under or fully explained by the leftist project. The intellectual and institutional links were tangled and complex as international solidarity movements among the colonized peoples of the globe creatively reshaped the language and ideologies of the 1930s and constructed the politics of the African diaspora.^³⁹

It is in Dusk of Dawn that the best of the mature and of the older Du Bois would meet in order to produce what managed to be at once a brilliant autobiographical essay and a masterful treatise on the relation between race, social location, and political imagination. Du Bois would combine the tools of autobiographical narrative, family genealogy, and historical analysis in order to produce what he suggestively called a “concept of race.” Peering over 50 years of intellectual experience with theories of racial difference (he was already in his 70s when he wrote the book) Du Bois remarked that:

Furthermore, Du Bois points to the geo-cultural variability of definitions and experiences of racial coding he observed throughout his travels as a source of skepticism concerning the imperviousness of the “eternal wall between the races” he had supposed to exist during his youth.^⁴¹ In a rather subtle move, he also brings his own research on his ancestry to bear on the subject. Starting by outlining the various origins of his hybrid identity (German, French, and African) he further erodes the idea that racial characterization could have any other foundations besides social convention when he observes that, “I thus had innumerable cousins up and down the valley. I was brought up with the Burghardt clan and this fact determined largely my life and ‘race.’”^⁴²

So “What,” Du Bois wonders, developing the theoretical dimension of Cullen’s question, “is Africa to me?” Indeed, if the nature of his bond is neither biological nor cultural (he notes that the only thing African he inherited directly was a lullaby his grandmother had taught him as a child), what could possibly make intelligible, his Pan African and African diasporic affiliations? The answer he gives is straightforward but not simple:

Past history and current struggle, then, are for Du Bois the foundations of African diasporic experience. In brilliant pragmatist fashion he reveals the reality of raced subjectivity in terms of its consequences rather than on the basis of any biological, cultural, or psychological essence.^⁴⁴ This is perhaps where Du Bois’s philosophical contribution is revealed at its clearest. He realizes, like few other thinkers in a philosophical tradition that extends back two-and-a-half millennia that appearance is real enough, that becoming is not subordinate to being or, to put the matter in more contemporary terms, that it is not because reality is socially constructed that it can therefore be consigned to the dumping ground of illusion. The reality of a symbolic nexus – such as the African Diaspora – is not simply to be judged on the basis of its correspondence to an actually existing referent but also on its effectivity in terms of registers other than a purely epistemological one (political, historical, cultural, etc…). That the concept of ‘race,’ for instance, is meaningless from a strictly biological standpoint in no way changes the fact that it has real effects quite independently of its epistemic status. Imaginary realities exist quite as surely as material ones, the only difference between the two being in their modalities of effect.

From this principle flows much of Du Bois’s political activism from the thirties to the end of his life in 1963. For it is also true that common history and struggle do not, in and of themselves, mean anything if there is not, added to them, a common structure of affect, an imaginary of social struggle. Du Bois’s work as a journalist and as an activist during the late forties and fifties would be devoted exclusively to the task of constructing such an imaginary, though he was building on previous achievement rather than starting from scratch.^⁴⁵ In his vision of Pan Africanism he would stress, over and over again, anti-colonial and working class solidarities, work with trade-unions, unwaveringly support African labor struggles, and consistently oppose European imperialism as well as the pretensions to global power of his native land.^⁴⁶ So overwhelming was his influence by the time he died that he was considered by many of the leaders and rank-and-file Africans and African Americans struggling against colonialism, as the ‘Father’ of Pan Africanism, overshadowing by far the more conservative constructions of his predecessors, Crummell and Delany.

Du Bois’s theories on the global dynamics of working-class struggle, the racial and geo-cultural stratification operated by capital on an international basis were at the root of his understanding of the need for Pan African and African diasporic solidarities. But unlike Marx and many of the radical political theorists who were his own contemporaries, Du Bois understood that these solidarities have to be built through a complex weaving of political and theoretical praxis, that the historical conjuncture of capitalism itself is not sufficient to raise them up, though its partial determination of their scope and quality is undeniable. In this sense, Du Bois grasped the imagination as an ontological category. He rectified Marxian materialism by radicalizing it, which is to say that he grasped Marx’s concept of ‘ideology’ as a material reality whose signification cannot be reduced to an epistemological content (as, say, the opposite of ‘science’) as the latter was so often wont to do. In the process Du Bois brings both ‘race’ and ‘philosophy’ back into Marxism. By insisting that race is a material reality whose consequences for social struggle cannot be neutralized, by pointing out its scientifically empty content as an empirical concept, and, finally, by suggesting that this state of affairs calls for a radical rethinking of the Western philosophical division between appearance and reality that Marx himself had failed to reject entirely, Du Bois opened the way for a systematic revision of Marxian materialism as a theoretico-practical formation. It could be said that Du Bois reinterpreted Marx’s text according to the exceptional nature of the American labor struggle in order to demonstrate the universality of that “exception.”

C. L. R. James and the Theory of Autonomy – Prologue to the Revolution

It may be easier, given this context, to understand James’s radical innovation. Marx’s failure to think through the consequences of materialism for philosophy, the emergence of a Black counter-public, and Du Bois’s re-articulation of Marxist theory in order to grasp its novelty – all this leads to a question: what forms must revolutionary organization take in the age of the progressive autophagy of the public, whether it be national or world-historical, liberal or Marxist? More than that, this question raises again – but at a new level – the issue of the relationship between theory and practice.

Marx’s own concept of theory had been thoroughly ambiguous, as I suggested in the last section: on the one hand, when embodied by philosophy it was dismissed as the ideology of the ruling class, the dream-life of the bourgeoisie. On the other, as science, i.e. as the critique of political economy -- what Marx had called his “dialectical method” in the postface to the second German edition of Capital -- it was transformed into the opposite of philosophy. Both practically and theoretically, philosophy (i.e. Hegelianism) “must be inverted to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”^⁴⁷ As such it became all-powerful in piercing through the mists of fetishized reality. But if philosophy was the pervasive dream of the ruling class that the order it defends (capitalism) is natural or eternal, dialectical materialism had to be the theoretical representation of the movement of History, the delineation of its “laws of motion,” demonstrating, on the contrary, the finitude of capitalism, its essential historicity. And it would be this demonstration, in turn, that would determine (or dictate) the interests of the proletariat. The ambivalence between these conceptions of theory as philosophical impotence and as critical omniscience would lead to contradictory conclusions for the political organizations of the working class. On the one hand ‘culture’ (i.e., everything that is not strictly grasped as economic relation) would frequently be dismissed as ideology, as smokescreens thrown over the hard, material interests of the proletariat. But, on the other, “revolutionary theory” (Marxism) would become the conditio sine qua non of revolutionary practice.^⁴⁸

However, after Du Bois’s demonstration that the representation of race, no matter what its empirical status might be -- whether it has a “scientific” content or is simply an ideological mystification – is an historically constitutive element of working class politics, both aspects of Marx’s originally ambivalent concept of ‘theory’ come into crisis. More than that, in the aftermath of the emergence of the Black counter-public in the inter-war period and of its initiation of a cultural politics of representation, it becomes more urgent than ever for Marxism to theorize the politics of class-struggle at the level of cultural representation.

And it is precisely this task and the theoretical (and practical) crisis that throws it up as a challenge that James will tackle. Thus, in his discussion of mass culture in American Civilization he argues that the “popular arts,” far from being simple ideological mystifications produced by bourgeois consciousness, are an expression of class struggle at the level of culture:

‘Culture,’ in James’s thought, becomes one of the stages on which social antagonisms work themselves out. Through the medium of consumption itself, class conflict gets reproposed or represented, as opposed to being erased or miraculously resolving itself into “cultural democracy” as the early theoreticians of advertising had claimed it would from the 1920s on.^⁵⁰ As such, culture appears not as the ethereal dream of a bourgeois paradise but as the quite palpable battlefield of class war. And it is precisely this conflict at the level of cultural representation -- which is both ‘conflict represented’ as well as ‘conflict over the means of representation’ – that gives mass culture its particular flavor:

Especially after the intensification of class struggle that occurs with the crash of 1929 -- which leaves most middle class and working people in dire circumstances --James argues that mass cultural representation will turn more and more towards violence as an expression of accumulated frustration with social conditions, though interpreted strictly at the level of the individual consumer. (As an illustration, one may think of the contrast between a Charlie Chaplin comic drama of the 20s and King Kong, appearing in 1933.)

Representation and Production

For James, then, the politics of cultural representation do not limit themselves to the Black counter-public. Implicitly, they permeate the whole of American society, including the struggle of workers against management. Though the organizations of the working class (unions and socialist parties) neither lead nor participate in the struggle at the level of cultural representation, this struggle still occurs. It is this class struggle in everyday life that James identifies as revealing the autonomous self-activity of the working class, its spontaneous self-organization. Entertainment, “the popular arts,” are for him only half of the story. They are a vitally important half because they provide a powerful medium – even if a distorted one – for the creation of collective identities, i.e. for the expression of the multitude in motion.^⁵² More than anything, the popular arts mark the potential for a free expression of collective subjectivity on a scale unheard of prior to the 20^th century. That they also open the possibility for totalitarian control of all aspects of peoples’ lives is, of course, the inevitable dilemma that comes with their development in a capitalist society.

But the culture of mass consumption does not simply raise the specter of total dystopia. It also produces new subjects with incredible potentialities to constitute themselves politically as such, that is to represent themselves:

In short, if the new audiences that the emergent mass media have produced express only a desire for violence, destruction, and murder it is because of the limitation in the organization of those media rather than one in human nature. Under a capitalist system the mass media do not foster free expression but free trade. Characteristically bold in his argumentation, James proceeds to defend the thesis that only a study of Ancient Greek drama could give an inkling, however imperfect, of what a genuinely democratic mass culture might look like, one in which the means of cultural representation were not monopolized by one social class to the exclusion of all others. Indeed, only in such a society would “the actual deepest desires of the mass” find expression. Only thus would they not be perverted by frustration and anger.

Though James readily agrees that ancient Athenian society was not perfect – noting that women and slaves were excluded from the citizenry – still, he believes that the way it was organized gives an inkling of the potentialities of participatory democracy, especially at the level of cultural production. Observing that participatory principles organized the structures of aesthetic representation as well as those of political decision-making -- from the manner in which winners of the drama contests were decided (by popular vote) to the way political offices were assigned (by rotation) -- James suggests that it is precisely this context that accounts for the incredible cultural fruitfulness of Ancient Greek democracy. The unlimited freedom of expression that was the rule of all the dramatic performances, and more generally, the assumption that all citizens were equally capable of performing all political tasks explains the incredible creative production achieved in barely a century. From Aeschilius to Euripides and Aristophanes – including even the democracy’s enemies: Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle – all found their conditions of expression, so to speak, in the participatory nature of Greek life during this period. Thus, against the Romantic historiographical tradition running from Hegel to Leo Strauss and beyond, it is not Greek civilization that accounts for Greek democracy according to James, but the other way around. In fact, Ancient Greece is defined throughout James’s work not so much as the origin of modern society but as its exact antithesis.^⁵⁴ Where the latter, in its totalitarian form, holds mass trials the former held tragedy contests. Similarly, whereas the liberal welfare state breeds crushing conformism and submission to rigid bureaucratic hierarchies, Greek democracy produced an incredibly developed level of socially expressive individuality. Surprisingly, however, both Greek democracy and the consumer society start from the same basic social process: the integration of the individual personality into a broader social horizon:

Whereas, in the Greek democratic state, integration was a manifestation of self-expression carried to both political and cultural levels, in the modern state – and in this respect James does not make the distinction between the American welfare state and the Stalinist totalitarian one – integration is enforced from above by means of ruthless violence and cynical manipulation.

What does permit comparison between ancient Greek democracy and the modern state, however, is the relationship between subjectivity and representation that is involved. In both cases the situation is such that there can be an attempt to “integrate” completely subjectivity with representation and representation with subjectivity. In other words, in both instances representation can become a tool for the production of collective subjectivity and for the construction of “universality.” Simultaneously subjectivity finds the possibility of socializing itself autonomously, i.e. desire can construct its own object. In both instances, the multitude, what James calls “the mass,” has the tools at its disposal to construct itself as collective subject(s). In modern societies, however, the necessity that the elite is under to enforce a particular regime of subjectivation that will insure allegiance to the status quo of the capitalist order, completely perverts that possibility, turning it into its opposite. Discussing the mock trials of dissidents and of non-Stalinist communist leaders that had been going on in the Soviet Union since before the Second World War, James writes:

If there are mock trials, and more generally mass propaganda to begin with, according to James, it is not because people want to be fed lies at every turn of the screw, but rather because there is a “mass audience” there in the first place, one that, incipiently, wants to constitute itself as its own social subject, bypassing the formally political instrumentalities of the totalitarian and of the liberal state. If there is propaganda on a mass scale, in other words, it is precisely because there is resistance on a mass scale. Otherwise bureaucrats would not bother with having show trials or news broadcasts to begin with.^⁵⁷

For James representation at the aesthetic, political, but also at the epistemological level becomes a productive force to be reckoned with. He abandons definitively the model of ideology as reflection of the relations of production that had, underneath all appearances, fundamentally contaminated Marx’s dialectical materialism with deeply idealistic and epistemologistic tendencies. Instead, following and extending Du Bois’s insight, he theorizes symbolic reality as fundamentally expressive and performative, which is to say as an irreducibly material phenomenon. In the process James grasps the imagination as an ontologically constitutive category. Instead of either treating it as a faculty of the subject to represent the sensible world to itself or as a reflex of the interests of the ruling class, James is arguing that the imagination permeates social life at every level. It is nothing else than the self-activity of the multitude pressing blindly forth, not so much in order to actualize some predetermined but still abstract essence, as to construct its own potentialities of being. The imagination is Hegelian desire in reverse: instead of being a desire for nothing it is the something that constantly is born from nothing.^⁵⁸ Only thus can the productive element of representation have any sort of efficiency. Only thus can representation ever be more than the mundane re-presentation of an actual object in another medium.

But if that is the case – if symbolic reality is expressive rather than reflexive, if the imagination is an ontological rather than a subjective category – then the task of elucidating the function of representation, and especially of theoretical representation, arises anew within Marxist politics and philosophy, as I suggested earlier in this section. Indeed, if philosophy itself, as a form of theoretical representation, can no longer be said to represent the truth of the Real in a contemplative mode, nor to passively reflect the materiality of social relations; if instead it always already participates in the constitution of reality; if, in other words, “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (Spinoza), then how is its – philosophy’s – relation to social and political practice to be articulated?

The Working Class and the Imagination

It is in a remarkable book, composed in the mid-1950s with Grace Lee-Boggs and Cornelius Castoriadis (who would become one of the theoretical figureheads of the French New Left shortly thereafter), entitled Facing Reality, that James attempts to tackle this question most systematically. There, he and his colleagues attempt to draw out the obverse side of the argument he had started developing in American Civilization. If, in other words, American Civilization identified the multitude’s incipient desire to constitute itself as collective subjectivity, Facing Reality will attempt to unearth the immanent construction of collective subjectivity at work in the self-activity embodied by the appearance of everyday life in the modern world:

Right from the beginning James et al. identify the enemy quite generally as “state power” (which they will also call “official society” later on). This concept encompasses more, however, than one might be led to believe from the traditional theoretical definition of the state. State power, in the sense that they use it, includes not only the apparatuses of formal governance but all institutions fundamentally concerned with the representation of society: mass media, but also social scientific institutes, marketing and advertising agencies, and universities. Much in the same way that Louis Althusser would later speak of “Ideological State Apparatuses” James, Lee-Boggs, and Castoriadis are identifying the bourgeois public sphere as the locus of a widespread attempt to produce desiring subjects reducible to “a mass of economic needs,” i.e. to mechanisms of consumption to be satisfied by wage increases and purchasing “power.” Unlike Althusser, however, James and his co-writers always keep in mind that the work of the state power permanently encounters resistance, overtly or incipiently.

Against this monster, people all over the world and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention. Sometimes their struggles are on a small personal scale. More effectively they are the actions of groups, formal or informal, but always unofficial, organized around their work and their place of work. Always the aim is to regain control over their own conditions of life and their relations with one another.^⁶⁰

Everyday life, “at the place of work” but also in the home as James et. al. point out in a later discussion of women’s struggles after World War II,^⁶¹ is the continuous striving of the multitude to compose itself politically and socially. Taking the Hungarian revolution of 1956 as exemplar, they argue that it is a direct expression of the potentialities at work in everyday life. The brief emergence of workers’ councils there as well as in Poland during the uprisings of 1951 signal the presence of a constituent power organizing itself in opposition to the enormous centralizing bureaucratic apparatuses of modern state-power. But James et. al. never assume that workers’ councils are the only means of self-organization that are available. Quite the contrary: “Workers’ councils in every department of the national activity, a government of workers’ councils are not an end in themselves. The are merely a means to an end. They will result in one procedure in one country, and other procedures in other countries.”^⁶² Once again, then, James implicitly re-proposes the imagination as an ontologically productive category. Not simply is it irrecuperable by the Hegelian dialectic because it pluralizes World-History by canceling its telos (‘Freedom’ in ‘The State’) without preserving it but, as self-activity of the multitude, it is ontologically productive.

Not surprisingly, in this context James and his collaborators declare “the end of a philosophy,” i.e. of the modern philosophy of Enlightenment as such, what they call “rationalism.” From Descartes onward it had articulated a theory of technological progress, of the control of nature as the only means of satisfying human need. But Official Society and state-power have been bankrupted by those very technological achievements rationalism had advocated as the foundation of capitalist humanism: after 300 years of scientific progress the supreme result is the threat of universal destruction. In the mid-1950s nuclear war cannot be far from anybody’s mind and James and his co-writers point to it as a symptom of precisely what is wrong with the social order on either side of the iron curtain, and more generally, with the philosophy of Enlightenment that sustains its legitimacy. Paradoxically then, technological-scientific progress would be precisely what undermines that legitimacy, a process that appears most obviously at the level of everyday life. In fact, James et. al. go so far as to argue that the modern technology of mass production is being invented precisely to bypass the social antagonisms to which it gives birth: “Unable to control the workers, either in its own name or through the union, management in the United States has embarked on a huge program of automation. As if driven by devils, the large corporations have begun to invest billions in new equipment, frantically scrapping still useful machinery, headlining each new expansion with speeches about progress.”^⁶³ In short, as the offensive of the industrial mass workers becomes more and more intransigent, less and less co-optable by corporate managers and/or union bureaucrats, the elites expand their investments in constant capital (technology) in order to decrease their reliance on those same workers. The historical point of reference here is the movement of wildcat strikes that increased in tempo throughout World War II and climaxed in 1946, only to be crushed, first politically by the Cold War purges of radicals starting in 1947, and then by the progressively more intense automation of American heavy industry throughout the 50s, i.e. Fordism at its height.^⁶⁴

But modern philosophy is more than the medium through which the technological aspirations of capitalist modernity have been articulated. At the epistemological level it is the discourse that orders the division of society into classes of “experts” responsible for the organization of production on the one hand, and of masses performing that production on the other. Its time has passed, argue James, Lee-Boggs, and Castoriadis:

Over its four centuries of existence, then, modern philosophy has developed a fundamental contradiction between experts and lay (epistemology), elite and mass (politics), mind and body (ontology) that the structures of the society (mass society) that enabled it can no longer sustain: “Fascism, Corporate State, One-Party State, Welfare State, Totalitarianism, all of these are ways in which rationalism attempts to adapt itself to the modern community. Thereby it not only obstructs the new society. It destroys all the achievements of rationalism itself.”^⁶⁶

James, Lee-Boggs, and Castoriadis have now laid out before their readers both aspects of the problem that must be confronted: on the one hand, a “new society” is emerging from the shell of the old. In the very pores of the public sphere are being born new subjects, new experiences of life, new forms of self-activity, new institutions that are directly compromising the ideological state apparatuses of the dominant order. In American Civilization, it was the forms of mass communication and mass consumption of twentieth century capitalism that were described as calling forth new desires and new aspirations for self-representation, ones that remained present in the very attempt to mystify them. In Facing Reality, it is the regimes of everyday life in mass society meant to be instruments of containment of active subjectivity that turn out to be breeding grounds for it. Contrasted to this incredible potential of post-war capitalism, on the other hand, the development – for the first time in human history – of technologies of mass destruction makes the total destruction of life an actual possibility. The system itself is threatening to annihilate everything, all human society, thereby turning its own “success” (nearly total domination) into the ultimate failure.

Toward a Marxist Politics of Representation

In this context several questions arise. Given the reworking of the relationship between symbolic and material realities from a reflexive to an expressive model that James performs within Marxist theory with his study of “American Civilization” and the shifting of the Marxist understanding of the central contradictions of capitalism from a strictly economic one (wage earners vs. owners of the means of production) to a multi-layered one that includes epistemological, ontological, and political dimensions, how is Marxist theory, Marxist philosophy to account for itself? For, if the contradictions of capitalist society implicate the symbolic plane in precisely the same way that they do the material one, then it is no longer sufficient for theory to have a revolutionary content, to be a theory of revolution without being a revolutionary theory. If, in other words, epistemology and ontology can no longer claim immunity from the social contradictions of capitalism by taking refuge in either “World History” or “science” and casting off their compromised shadows to the realms of ideology and idealism, then how are they to become, in form as well as in content, revolutionary? To put things more prosaically: how are the intellectuals of the working class to take into account their status as intellectual workers. How are they to avoid the pitfalls of rationalism – of modern philosophy, as such – and criticize in their practice its naturalization of the divisions between expert and mass, mind and body, thought and extension? What form can Marxist theory take, in short, if it is to take into account its own praxical dimension?

The answer of the Johnson-Forest tendency – James, Lee-Boggs, and Castoriadis, but also Dunayevskaya, Glaberman, and others – will be to turn both Hegel and Marx on their heads. Their answer will be to call for a Marxist politics of representation that will also be an autonomist politics of the working class. For in debunking theoretically the epistemological division of labor between the expert and the multitude they also attempt to debunk practically the political division between vanguard party and working class. The concrete result, as it is articulated in Facing Reality, is to theorize the possibility of a medium and of an organization that will facilitate the self-representation of the working class's activity. This new medium, a newspaper James et. al. argue, should have as its purpose the communication of experiences and of struggles of the working class as a whole and not simply of the industrial proletariat (though James and his cowriters still have a marked tendency for giving the latter pride of place). The organization supporting that newspaper should have as its function “to learn and not to teach.”^⁶⁷ Its structure should imitate the forms of the new society birthing at the level of everyday life in the factory councils, in the shop stewards movement in England (which James and his collaborators spend a great deal of time discussing), in the office, in the colonized world. In short, spontaneity and participatory democracy should be its hallmarks.

Specifically – though James, Lee-Boggs, and Castoriadis are quick to add that this is only one way of doing things, and not a panacea – they propose to organize themselves in independent editorial committees composed of as many layers of the working class as will be interested, drawn from different geographical locales. These committees would contribute to the newspaper whatever materials they could gather or write about the local struggles, experiences, or grievances that potential or actual subjects of struggle are willing to voice in their area. In fact, the function of this newspaper would be to function as an autonomous working-class counter-public:

James et al’s answer to the challenge of the end of rationalism, which they diagnose as the direct consequence of the emergence of mass society is not simply to declare philosophy as such dead but rather to outline for it another function. Indeed, if modern philosophy had been the project to “conquer nature,” that is “to control, order, and reduce to human usefulness the mass of wealth and knowledge which has accumulated over the last four centuries,” in the époque of the emergence of mass society it must become “something entirely different.” It is thus neither to evaporate into thin air nor to be interpreted as another romanticism or irrationalism, i.e. as an abstract opposition to rationalism. More subtly, the role of a new philosophical practice would be to record the emergence of the new society, to provide it with the theoretical and empirical medium for its autonomous self-representation. In other words, a Marxist philosophy of autonomy would take up the task of exploring the various dimensions of the autonomous subjectivity of the working class.

For, according to James, Lee-Boggs, and Castoriadis the meaning of the autonomy of the working class is not simply exhausted by noting the tendency of the new society to express itself in the world of everyday life independently of the official society and of its ideological state apparatuses (which include the official organizations of the working class, the Marxist Party and the labor union). Rather, this autonomy, which is to say the self-movement of the working class that prompts it to define its own purposes, also permeates the class itself. Thus office workers, African Americans, women, industrial workers elaborate their own forms of organization, their own critiques of the status quo, their own cultural identities in ways that are specific to their contextually shaped concerns. For instance, African American workers will inevitably have quite different agendas from white workers. And this should be no surprise since both the types of exploitation they must confront (i.e. outside the factory as well as within its walls) and the cultural resources and intellectual traditions that they can draw on to articulate their struggles, will be different from those of white American industrial workers. Similarly, women workers will have to articulate their own agendas autonomously since their own circumstances differ from those of other segments of the working class in terms of racial composition, class relation (relation to middle-class women), and forms of surplus labor extraction (occurring both at work and inside the home). One could go on with these sorts of examples indefinitely. One thing, however, should be clear by this point: in the époque of mass society subjectivity has been radically pluralized. Thus, if the old rationalism functioned as the representation of the theoretical faculty of a unified subject ('Reason' with a capital 'R'), the new form of philosophy James et. al. are proposing must explode its own representational unity in order to play a new role, that of theoretico-practical self-representation of the working class's imagination. Furthermore, this moment of reflexivity that is the representation of the working class' self-activity must be expressively immanent to that self-activity. In other words, only if the labor of theoretical representation is radically democratized, only if the division of labor between manual workers and intellectual workers is cancelled in theory and in practice in the sphere of revolutionary praxis can a revolutionary Marxist politics of representation be constructed.

Spitting Hegel, Spited by Marx

Much could be criticized about Facing Reality in particular and about James’s overall project more generally. For instance, in spite of its struggle against Hegelianism the book is still steeped in Hegelian concepts and categories, appealing to the Hegelian philosophy of history in the process of trying to escape from it. What is amazing, however, is how much James can work against the Hegelian categories by working through them, how much he can squeeze them for concepts that it would be impossible to suppose were available in them otherwise. For instance, by introducing the categories of ‘spontaneity’ and autonomous ‘self-activity’ of the working-class James is attacking two of the main assumptions of Hegelian thought: first, that history unfolds necessarily and dialectically from a potential to an actual state (i.e. every stage of history is contained in potential form in the ones that precede it); and second, that history is driven forward by a pre-constituted and pre-ordained purpose which 'World-Spirit' (the universal subject of history) must necessarily fulfill.

But, rather than simply posing the categories of spontaneity and autonomy in opposition to the Hegelian ones of necessitarian ontological development and rational teleology, James argues that they are the logical consequences of Hegelianism. Thus, the ‘spontaneity’ of the working-class emerges in his thought first in a study of Hegelian logic, Notes on Dialectics, in which he argues that understood from the point of view of dialectical logic the history of working-class organization leads to the logical and historical conclusion that it must become spontaneous, thereby negating Hegel's necessitarianism by postulating a stage of world history in which the potentialities of the working-class’ power merge into its actuality, one in which its organization can no longer occur hierarchically, either ontologically or politically.^⁶⁹ On the other hand, the category of ‘self-activity’ makes mincemeat of Hegelian teleology by simply reversing Hegel’s methodological order. While the latter deduced the purpose of History from the logical forms of Nature and of thought (i.e. the dialectic), James suggests that it can be nothing more than what is produced (or: invented) immanently in peoples' social practices, but arrives at that conclusion by means of dialectical thought!

Notwithstanding James’s destruction of Hegelian concepts from the inside, it is true that he remains caught, in significant respects, in the logic of Hegelian thought. For instance, there is an undeniable tendency in his thinking to favor the Western industrial proletariat in his various accounts of the revolutionary aspirations of the multitude. The immediate result is a reduction of collective subjectivities to a unity even while he is pointing out their multiplicity by gesturing to African-American experience, women’s resistance, or anti-colonial struggles. The ultimate consequence is that there is carried over in James’s proposal for rethinking Marxist politics a certain theoretical unity of the counter-public in contradiction to its practical multiplicity. Hence, the project of a newspaper he proposes along with Lee-Boggs and Castoriadis flounders in its very attempt to provide a unitary forum for all the autonomous social subjects that constitute the multitude. It fails precisely insofar as it attempts to mimic the public sphere in its project of establishing the material and organizational basis for the self-expression of the counter-public. In short, James cannot take the crucial step from the small Marxist organization to the mass movement.^⁷⁰

James & Mills: The Prophecy of the Intellectuals

The most immediate consequence of the privileging of the industrial proletariat in what may be called James’s theory of social autonomy is that he failed to see the historical ascendancy of the white collar class, so richly described in Mills’ sociological study of it. Paradoxically, then, if Mills retained the Jeffersonian concept of public sphere as the transcendent norm that oriented his criticism of their contemporary reality – the very one James sought to debunk as I noted at the beginning of this chapter – James himself retained the classical Marxist concept of proletariat that Mills was busy undermining. In a way then, there is a deep complementarity between their work, not simply in terms of what each sees and fails to see, but also – and more fundamentally, I would argue – in terms of how they theorize the imagination. While James demonstrates its inexorable emergence as a grounding category of social activity that gains in power as the public sphere undermines its own stability by producing desire in the society of mass consumption, Mills, on the other hand, would begin theorizing the epistemological and methodological consequences of that transformation in a brilliant systematization of his own approach entitled The Sociological Imagination.^⁷¹

Published in 1959, only a few years before his untimely death, that book was a bold manifesto that did not hesitate to spit in the face of the reigning institutional and ideological hegemony of positivism, logical or otherwise. In it, Mills did not hesitate to pose the imagination in direct opposition to the isolated empirical datum that positivism took to be the only basis for “meaningful propositions.”^⁷² Mills, on the contrary, would celebrate the imagination – even if he grasped it only as a category of thought – as the medium through which all data must circulate in order to enter into a meaningful relationship to each other. Only thus, Mills argued, could a critical knowledge be produced that would bring into relation different levels of reality, from macro-sociological structures to individual idiosyncrasies, thereby bringing various standpoints immanent to social reality in communication with each other.^⁷³

Once again, what is most amazing about Mills is that, like James, he can press inimical categories to the point that they produce their exact opposite. In his case, it is the Enlightenment concept of ‘reason’ that ends up producing the imagination, no longer as its other but as its successor. Few other American social scientists of any magnitude during the twentieth century can claim the respect Mills’ work demands for its use of the canons of scientific rationality and clarity of logical exposition, his unyielding insistence on empirical verification of the relation between cause and effect. And it is precisely this inflexible exigency for empirical verification that leads Mills to abandon the core principle of Enlightenment thought, that true knowledge leads to good action: “The ideological mark of the Fourth Epoch [i.e. the present] – that which sets it off from the modern age – is that the ideas of freedom and of reason have become moot; that increased rationality may not be assumed to make for increased freedom.”^⁷⁴ For Mills, increased rationality leads only to the further rationalization of the world, its incorporation into more and more pervasive bureaucratic systems that tend toward the mass production of “cheerful robots.” Rather than grandly mourning the “disenchantment of the world,” however, Mills notes that modernity seems to have come to an end. The “Fourth Epoch” that he mentions in the passage cited just now, is nothing else than a “post-modern period,” defined, most generally, by the decline of the dominant political creeds of modernity, namely liberalism and socialism. Neither is able to mediate the antagonism between social rationality (bureaucratization) and individual reason. The latter Mills implicitly equates with freedom and argues that it can only flourish in a participatory democracy that includes the capacity of social actors to actively politicize different aspects of social life.^⁷⁵ The paradox in all this is that the only force that can reveal this contradiction between social and individual reason, that can produce it phenomenally as a political problem, is the social scientist. More than that, it is precisely the imagination as a theoretical faculty that qualifies him or her for this task by producing the necessary relationships between various levels of reality and between different social standpoints that will allow a view of a given society in its totality.^⁷⁶

As it turns out then, Mills was incapable of conceptualizing mass intellectuality – the imagination as the self-activity of the multitude – with precisely the inverse effect that James was unable to rethink the emergent mass basis for the imagination. Having worked through the other categories of the Enlightenment Mills failed to interrogate the idea that subjectivity is normatively seated in the individual so that mass intellectuality can become in his eyes only crowd behavior, conformism, in short bondage rather than freedom. Thus, though he grasped the transformation of relations of production in post-war American society he was unable to understand its potential consequences on the levels of politics and culture. James on the other hand, though he starts from the assumption that subjectivity can only be a social phenomenon and grasps quite well the incredible potential that consumerism opens for revolutionary politics, fails to see the fact that the very forms of class agency are thereby transformed. What James fails to see, in short, is that the industrial proletariat will lose whatever centrality it might have had in the past in working class struggles and cede its place to other social formations, such as the white-collar class.

Whereas Mills fails to conceptualize the imagination as the self-activity of the multitude rooted in the experience of everyday life then, James is unable to understand the emergent social relations that will produce radically new forms of self-activity in the years to come. If both are prophets of great things to come, of the explosion of creativity that will characterize the two decades spanning from 1955 to the mid-1970s they do not, like Moses himself, cross the Jordan to the Promised Land. Nor is their prophetic role to reveal a new table of commandments. What their imaginations reveal, instead, is the power of the imagination itself. Indeed, James and Mills are prophets precisely in the sense in which Spinoza had defined prophecy so long ago: they have “a more vivid imagination” than common mortals. What that imagination uncovers is thus not divine will but its own power, i.e. the imagination as an ontological power to produce the world, to transform it, to revolutionize it.

Notes and References

2 The following studies have been useful in elaborating the following account of the concept of public sphere: Gabriel Tarde, “Le public et la foule,” in L’opinion et la foule (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1904), 1-62; Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, trs. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (Salem, N.H.: Marion Boyars, inc., 1981).

4 In Europe parallel movements can be detected in the stirrings of Dadaism, Surrealism and the Negritude movement at exactly the same time, but none of those will attain the mass base of UNIA and (though to a lesser extent) of the Renaissance. See Ferdinand Alquie, The Philosophy of Surrealism, trs. Bernard Waldrop (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969) and Franklin Rosemont, “Surrealists on Whiteness from 1925 to the Present,” in Rosemont (ed.), Race Traitor, Special Issue, Surrealism: Revolution against Whiteness (Summer 1998, 1:9), 5-18 as well as the issue as a whole.

5 On Mills’ influence on the New Left and, in particular, on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) see James Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets,” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 78-91. For Mills’ Jeffersonian interpretation of 19^th century U.S. history see White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 3-12.

7 C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1995) originally published as A History of Negro Revolt. For the historico-biographical context to the publication of both texts as well as for an historical overview of the political impact they were to have afterwards see Robin D.G. Kelley’s masterful introduction to the latter (pp. 1-33).

8 These themes are richly developed throughout James’s corpus of published works. For his most systematic theoretical treatment of the spontaneous self-activity of the working class see Notes on Dialectics (London: Allison & Busby ltd, 1980), esp. 113-119. On the question of autonomy from state bureaucracies and political parties, respectively, see C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee, State Capitalism & World Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986) and C. L. R. James, Grace Lee and Pierre Chaulieu (a pseudonym for the French leftist theoretician Cornelius Castoriadis), Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1974). Finally, on the autonomy of the black working class see the essays “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA” and “Black Power” in Anna Grimshaw (ed.), C. L. R. James Reader (Cambridge [Mass]: Blackwell, 1993) 182-189 and 362-374. I will return to these issues in section 3 of this article. Lefebvre started conceptualizing the concept of “everyday life” thematically in his 1947 Introduction to the Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I, trs. John Moore (New York: Verso, 1992). But his reflection on this question can be traced back to the early 30s. For a brief overview of this question see Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle (New York, Routledge: 1999), 65-74

9 J. R. Johnson was the prinicipal pen-name James used within the SWP. Freddy Forest was that of one of his main collaborators, Raya Dunayevskaya, who would later found the still running Marxistnewspaper, News & Letters. For background on Trotskyism in the U.S. see Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Since the mid-80s there has finally grown an excellent body of historical and exegetical work around James himself, especially in the last few years. Some of the more helpful sources are: Paul Buhle (ed.), C. L. R. James: His Life and Work (London: Alison & Busby Ltd., 1986), Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain, C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). James’s old colleague, Martin Glaberman, a marxist theoretician in his own right, in the introduction to a collection he has recently edited of his friend’s unpublished writings, Marxism for Our Times (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1999), provides some enlightening historical information about James’s relation to French and Italian Marxists such as the members of Socialisme ou Barbarie and of Autonomia. Scott McLemee’s introduction to his collection of James’s writings, On The ‘Negro Question’ (Jackson University Press of Mississippi, 1996), is not to be missed either for its discussion of his relationship to African-American politics and culture. Finally, Grace Lee Boggs’ autobiography, Living for Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 45-74, is a vital source for critical recollections of the dynamics within Johnson-Forrest and of James himself. Her book reveals rather starkly his limits as an intellectual and as a political leader.

12 Mills, White Collar, op. cit., 6: “yet slavery, the glaring exception to the more generous ideals of the American Revolution, did not loom so large as is often assumed. It was confined to one section, did not move very far west, and was abolished in mid-century.” With this high-handed gesture Mills not only dispatches half of U.S. history but would like to have us pretend that what happened (minimally) in the South of the the U.S. did not affect in the least the rest of the country!

13 There are many reasons for James’s inability to finish the project: they had nothing to do with reaching a theoretical dead-end as academics are so quick to assume when they discover an unfinished book. After being exiled from the U.S. as an illegal alien and as a radical (in the midst of the McCarthyist repression) he would never be able to work as closely again with his collaborators in the Johnson-Forrest tendency and would lose his momentum for American Civilization. This is no doubt, in large part, because it was so anchored in his everyday life, in his ability to read American comic strips, discuss the impact of movies, etc... Back in the Old World (he returned to London) he would lose that crucial connection to American culture and radical politics that had been such an important cause of the surge in vitality he had experienced during his 15 years here. See Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart’s introduction to American Civilization for an interesting interpretation.

14 James, American Civilization, op., cit. 84. James had a passion for Melville’s Moby Dick, an obsession perhaps, that would result in his writing and publishing a complete study on it, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (Detroit: Bewick,1978). This, the last book he would write in this country during his two year imprisonment at Ellis Island in the early 1950s, he sent a copy of to all the members of the U.S. Congress as an argument for why he should not be expelled. It is important to note that James did see one exception to this rule of the weakness of American intellectuals, however, in Abolitionist intellectuals such as Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglas whom he argues were the19th century U.S. “advocates of mass revolution.” See James, American Civilization, op. cit., 98.

16 One should not over generalize this critique, however. Marx himself continues to struggles with this problem up to, and including, Capital where he introduces the concept of “the fetishism of the commodities” which, even if it fails to accomplish its purpose, marks his discomfort with the solutions of the German Ideology and of the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. Lenin comes back to it incessantly in later life, though not sufficiently or systematically enough to fully tackle the problem (see Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism [Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995]). When as for Gramsci, he comes closest to confronting it but again, in a theoretically unsystematic manner – though through no fault of his own since he was in prison almost the entire time he was dealing with this problem! – which limits the effects of his reflection.

18 Mills, op. cit., 15-20, discusses the industrialization and consolidation of American agriculture. The thesis of the General Strike of the slaves during the Civil War is developed by Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 67; see also Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed Books, 1983), 311-324.

20 Different even from the Jewish diasporic experience. At the very least that difference can be summed up by saying two things: 1) that the Jewish diaspora is not tied up with the emergence of capitalist modernity since it occurred 1500 years before, and 2) that perhaps for that reason it does not involve the project of reconstructing an erased cultural memory that figures so prominently in African diasporic subjectivity. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1993), 205-217 explores the cultural connections between both diasporas. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) attempts to systematize a way of thinking that grasps the singularity of Jewish, African, and other diasporas by developing a typology that could encapsulate them all. Stuart Hall captures quite well the relationship between racialization and modernity in “The West and the Rest,” included in Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, & Kenneth Thompson, Modernity (Malden [Mass]: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 184-228. On the specificity of Jews’ relationship to racial domination in the U.S. see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks (New Brunswick [N.J.]: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

21 There are obviously exceptions to this description, especially insofar as the efforts of the Black U.S. middle class is concerned. Nonetheless, I think that, tendentially speaking, the description remains largely valid. It is the reason why, for instance, David Walker relies on Biblical narrative to develop his philosophy of liberation rather than on Enlightenment political philosophy or German historicism. C.f. David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965 [1829]). For some historical background on this discussion see especially Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 3-29; Richard Price, Maroon Societies (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, op. cit., 173-241 and Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1-20 and 45-66, as well as Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora (New York: The Noonday Press, 1995), 161-288.

23 On the construction of the modern imaginary of Blackness and of race in the U.S. see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black (Williamsburg: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1991).

25 John Bellamy Foster gives an enlightening economic analysis of the tendency within 20^th century monopoly capital to devote more and more energy to marketing, to the point that nowdays many multinational corporations devote more resources to this task than they do to actual production of the commodities they are selling. See his “Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millenium,” Monthly Review (April 2000, 51:11) 1-18.

30 The history of the word ‘culture’ is obviously far more complicated than the notion offered here can encompass, going much farther back than the 19^th century. But this is at least one of the dimensions a fuller account would have to encompass. See Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87-93, as well as Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, v. 1., The History of Manners, trs. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). On the history of cultural anthropology see George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986) 7-44 and Claude Levi-Strauss’s first-hand account of his encounters with Boas in his interviews with Didier Eribon, De pres et de loin (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1988). One may also, more simply, think of the work by Boas’s two star-students at the time, Margaret Mead and Zora Neal Hurston, the former on the cultural variability of gender (e.g. her books Coming of Age in Samoa and also Sex and Temperament) and the latter on African-American folk-culture in the context of the Harlem Renaissance (cf. Her collections Mules and Men and Tell my Horse).

31 It is important to point out that these caricatures were produced and disseminated in 19^th century U.S. society as much to constitute and reinforce a white racial identity as to convince black people of their native inferiority. The two processes are inseparable. See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, op. cit., esp. 115-132.

34 Countee Cullen, “Heritage,” in David Levering Lewis (ed.), The Harlem Renaissance Reader, op. cit., 244. More directly, on a strictly literary level, Cullen is masterfully highjacking the metrical form of English poetry to turn it against its original users’ habit of exoticizing alterity. Compare “Heritage,” to take only one example, with Blake’s “The Tyger:” “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright/ In the forests of the night,/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” (in Blake’s Poetry and Design, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979]), 179. What for Blake had been the epistemological – or even theological – question of alterity (how is the Other to be “framed”?), becomes, for Cullen a political and an ontological question, that of identity (“how am I to constitute my being on the basis of this alterity which is me?”). I must thank my friend, the poet Thomas Schramm, for pointing out this relationship to me.

35 All this is not to say that UNIA was the only mass movement of the early 20^th century. However, the other two, the labor movement and the feminist movement, were born respectively after the Civil War and during the 1840s. On Garvey and UNIA see John Henrick Clarke and Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus Garvey (New York: Vintage, 1974).