SOURCE: LeSeur, Geta. “Claude McKay's Marxism.” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, by Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin, pp. 219-31. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989.

[In the following essay, LeSeur explores the impact of Marxism on the works of Claude McKay.]

Claude McKay remains today part of the acknowledged literary triumvirate of the Harlem Renaissance. He shares this prestigious position with Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. Each in his own way made a lasting contribution to Afro-American literature and politics because of the uniqueness each possessed. McKay, however, was perhaps the most controversial of the three, because of his involvement with Marxism early in his career. The two primary dilemmas of McKay's life were as follows: the first was to resolve for himself whether socialism indeed was the answer to the “Negro question”; the second, the role of the black artist in a society that gives judgmental statements on both. The years 1922-1923, when he visited Russia to assess the workings and values of Marxism, were crucial for McKay. It took a lifetime to resolve these dilemmas and yet they were never satisfactorily resolved for him or his public. It was only during his final years that he found peace in the spiritual world of Catholicism.

In his study Roots of Negro Racial Consciousness, Stephen H. Bronz regards McKay's early understanding of socialism as having been “rooted in … racial equality and a return to the soil.”¹ Bronz claims that McKay had not really seen Marxist doctrine in relation to the reform of industrialism. This view is difficult to comprehend since McKay's knowledge and early experience of Jamaican communal life is evident in such works as Banana Bottom (1933) and “Boyhood in Jamaica.” The emphasis on beauty and peace in an agrarian setting should explain his initial view of Marxism as applicable to racial prejudice and agrarianism, but it does not. McKay's 1921 description of himself as a “peasant” by birth and upbringing, i.e., one possessed by “the peasant's passion for the soil,” is highly reminiscent of the mood and language of his autobiography. It is also peculiar, but true, that his peasant identity explains both McKay's appreciation of English Romantic poetry and his initial devotion to Marxism. Such a limited vision of a highly complex social and economic theory was “romantic,” and foreshadowed an inevitable disillusionment.

McKay was strongly committed to international socialism, which in itself is far-reaching and utopian. His poetic outlook precluded objectivity, which most persons with political aspirations for uniting mankind should have. Men like McKay often fail because their romantic vision clouds the logical procedural tactics necessary to socialist goals. Even though McKay considered himself a poet first, the roles he had envisioned for himself posed a conflict in his soul or “rebel heart.” The idea of being international, like most of McKay's other traits, was carried over into almost everything he did, including his letters to Max Eastman.² He mentions to Eastman that he would like to write a study about Russia, but adds, “I am paying for the penalty of being too naively internationally-minded … all that, in a subtle way, works against … me.”³

In 1922 McKay left for Russia after having had a disagreement with his friend and editor, Max Eastman, over an edition of The Liberator, a socialist magazine devoted to art and literature. As an editor on the magazine and the only black there, McKay saw the feasibility of writing a chapter about the race question in America. Eastman and another editor, Mike Gold, thought the objective of the magazine would be lost if McKay emphasized this kind of issue; consequently, no gains would be made for the blacks. McKay obviously disagreed, and in extended correspondence between him and Eastman, there were charges and countercharges about where each specifically stood on the race question. Eastman wrote to McKay that

… there was never any disagreement between you and the editors of the Liberator, so as far as I am aware, about the proper Communist policy toward the race question in the United States. … The disagreement which arose after I left was a disagreement about how to further those policies, along with the others for which the Liberator stood, in that particular magazine.⁴

Eastman insists that the effect of publishing McKay's article on the race question in The Liberator would be the “opposite” of the one desired. He goes on in this very lengthy letter to dissect McKay's capability as a writer of such a chapter. He continues,

You cannot take two opposite positions with the same lofty and condescending tone of voice in the same chapter. … [It] will irritate and tend to alienate from you every one of them, and if they have, as you say they have, the “broadcast sympathetic social and artistic understanding of the Negro” of any white group in America, your chapter is a poor beginning of an effort to extend that understanding.⁵

The reader of this lengthy cryptic letter can assume that Eastman was not only angry but was indicating to McKay that there was also something wrong with his journalistic sense. Interestingly, a few years later while writing pieces for Pravda and Izvestia, McKay admitted that he had not quite mastered the knack of “journalese.” His closeness to the subject matter in these cases resulted in the natural poetizing that got in the way of the objective perspective needed. To feel strongly about a subject is one thing, but to present it effectively is another. Paradoxically, however, one observes an acute sense of audience awareness throughout McKay's writing, even more so in the pieces he wrote during his Russian visit.

McKay's response to Eastman's attack was no less harsh and analytical. Max Eastman has a memo in the manuscripts that reads, “Claude's Brain Storm in Moscow.” It is not clear why he calls it that, but McKay goes through the origin of the argument or disagreement with Eastman and The Liberator staff, and writes, “… The Liberator group, revealed to me that [it] did not have a class-conscious attitude on the problem of the American Negro.” McKay appears to contradict himself because, in fact, he had not discussed the labor movement seriously with The Liberator staff; rather, he tells us that “I discussed [it] seriously only with the radical Negro group in New York.”⁶ This last comment by McKay to Eastman could have been one of the sensitive points that made Eastman not wish to print the chapter. Perhaps he sensed that groups sympathetic to McKay's view would reflect an ideological perspective contrary to the socialist position already established by The Liberator. It is obvious, too, that McKay and Eastman were at odds regarding their views on the right of a free press. McKay goes further to say that Eastman did not even want to discuss Irish and Indian questions, because they were “national issues.” McKay felt, however, that Eastman had said nothing at all on any pertinent racial issues, including the Negro in the Revolution. This is hardly a credit to a magazine's chief editor. By way of supporting his argument for the publication of the chapter in The Liberator on his experience, McKay said that the article “He Who Gets Slapped,” which appeared in the May 1922 issue, got practical results. The most personal attack on Eastman, though, is a response to the Tom Paine/Lenin analogy in an earlier Eastman letter. He says:

… Tom Paine was of his time and so is Lenin. To me there is no comparison. During the age of the French Revolution, Paine performed herculean tasks in England, France and America, and if you had in your whole body an ounce of the vitality that Paine had in his little finger, you, with your wonderful opportunities, would not have missed the chances for great leadership in the class struggle that were yours in America.⁷

Despite such “brainstorms,” the two men remained lifelong friends, and their correspondence regarding all kinds of problems, literary, political, and personal, continued.

There had been many rumors and assumptions regarding Claude McKay's trip to Russia and they persisted for a long time. McKay had to live with not only rumors about how and why he went, but also whether he was Communist, Socialist, Marxist, or his own brand of any of these. It is no wonder, then, that critics have called his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), unbalanced.⁸

Like Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, McKay's Long Way is a peculiar autobiography. The reader discovers very little about the innermost depths of McKay, the essential human being. The book is aimed mostly at clearing the air and setting the record straight about the annoying things in his life, from his first arrival in Harlem to his journeys to Europe and Africa. Three segments are devoted to his experiences, good and bad. Perhaps one of the most interesting is the section, “The Magic Pilgrimage,” which consists of seven chapters dealing with the Russian Revolution, “Blackness” as an asset, the hostility of American Communists toward McKay, and the gossip that had been written about him.

Certain aspects of Communism excited McKay, and others repelled him. He had always felt the importance of belonging to a group because the group afforded strength, distinction, and assurance. Yet, one's individual identity can be lost in the group, and this was a dilemma he never quite resolved. The forsaking of Communism on these same grounds came about with time and experience in Russia. He had been to England in 1920-1921, had worked with the Pankhurst group there, and thought at that time that Marxism indeed was the answer to the race issue. It is interesting that McKay thought of England as the place of his first real active indoctrination. As a child of colonialism, with its class distinctions, McKay returned to the Mother Land to find that Englishmen were as much into socialism as colonialism. Perhaps that was a reinforcement for his subsequent leanings and European initiation. What was to haunt McKay and make him think of Communism as “dry rot” was that it, like the white patrons and the black bourgeoisie, attempted to exercise control over black writers and artists.

The Communist “killing off” of creativity was one of the experiences in Russia that he abhorred, and he saw it happening as he milled around with the “intelligentsia” transformed into “comrade workers.” So, to set the record straight, McKay recorded in detail his entire Russian sojourn in “The Magic Pilgrimage.” He became the darling of Russia, the first black to receive that honor even though he was not in 1923 an official candidate to the Fourth Congress of the Third Internationale. The mulatto officially appointed as a delegate to the Congress faded into the background as the dark McKay became the symbol of the Communist cause, an American prize who appeared like a miracle to the Russians. The timing for both him and the Russians was right.

In A Long Way from Home, he cites the fact that a cartoon had appeared in the American papers depicting him on a magic carpet sailing over the clouds from Africa (not the U.S.) into Moscow, and that his visit was much like that. In that “Moscow Brain Storm” letter can be found the clearest parallel to what McKay's real presence indicated for the Russians. He relates an earlier experience in New Hampshire about a black man in a white environment who is “down” on life, but eager to know the identity of both himself and his oppressor. He says:

… I went into that hotel with the full knowledge that I was not merely an ordinary worker, but that I was also a Negro, that I would not be judged on my merits as a worker alone, but on my behavior as a Negro. Up there … the Negro (as in thousands of other places in America) was on trial not as a worker but as a strange species. And I went into that hotel to work for my bread and bed, and also for my race. This situation is forced upon every intelligent Negro in America. …⁹

The letter is important because it shows that despite the excitement, exposure and speeches, McKay didn't lose sight of who and what he represented. That portion of the letter to Max Eastman illustrated that he was clearly knowledgeable of his position. If the letters or words were transported from New Hampshire to Moscow, they would become equally meaningful in his understanding of his Russian experience and his role there. While enjoying the luxury of a “roaring good time,” McKay was not naive, but took in all he saw, listened eagerly, and observed all facets of Russian life. To him, the Russian people and their politics were one. While McKay found many discrepancies in the socialism of Max Eastman, his co-workers at The Liberator, the black radicals, and American Communists in general, he admitted readily that his “senses were stormed by Moscow before the intellect was touched by the forces of Revolution.”¹⁰

He had already observed that many Russians were “raggedy” and lived in poor housing, and in mingling with them he found that the majority did not understand the true nature of Communism. Some knew only that Lenin had replaced the Czar and that he was a “greater little father.” Then, at the Fourth Congress McKay noticed that the American Communists were split on the direction the party should take. The more McKay became aware of what was going on with the American Communist delegation, the more he perceived their actions as affecting party unity negatively. The tension there was so great that they contemplated moving the party headquarters to another country. For the Russian Communists, however, McKay was an omen of good luck and while he was in Russia, only the actions and behavior of the American Communists who lied about the progress of the party takeover in America disturbed him.

There were obvious differences between the Russian and American labor organizations also. McKay admired the organization and platform of the Finnish delegation and saw a possible application of their tactics as a redemption for blacks. The Finns voted as a bloc, were never unprepared, and controlled their delegation because they had proper organization and money. As McKay says in A Long Way from Home, “every other racial group in America is organized except Negroes. What Negroes need is political union for strength like the Finns.”¹¹ He also concluded that the only place where illegal and secret radical propaganda was necessary was among the Negroes of the South.¹² These thoughts and ideas were to find their way into some short stories he wrote in Russia for Izvestia. In Russia, Eastman, the pure American Marxist, was “shrugged off” at the Congress while McKay was asked to address the group, a fact McKay does not reveal in his autobiography although it is recorded elsewhere. The omission seems to be a deliberate one on McKay's part, in order to highlight the honors and attention accorded him in Russia.

McKay had many other concerns regarding the radical left, one of which was the explosive issue of the so-called “Jewish question.” From his days on The Liberator, he had become aware of it much as he recognized the problems of the Irish, the blacks, and the American Indians. Jews, like Negroes, posed a problem for society, and he saw them as an oppressed, “lynched” people, among the masses of classless men. In a letter to Max Eastman, he asks:

… Do you think the Communist leaders and the rank and file could by a single stroke change the minds of humanity that have been warped by hundreds of years of bourgeois traditions and education?¹³

He realized that the Communist regime had not swept away the deep-rooted prejudice against Russian Jewry. Max Eastman was also aware of similar problems in the U.S. and prior to McKay's observation had written:

… The situation of the Jew in Russia before the revolution is the one thing in the world comparable to the situation of the Negro in the United States. A proletarian Revolution has occurred, or is occurring here. The persecution of Jews had ceased. The two most powerful men in the government at this moment are Jews. The race problem in its basic outlines has disappeared. For you, the leading revolutionary figure in the Negro world … to imagine that the race problem will be solved by the proletarian revolution (the triumph of labor) is really a tragedy.¹⁴

[emphasis added]

Eastman calls McKay “the leading revolutionary figure in the Negro World,” an honor and recognition that McKay did not assume for himself. McKay, however, responded to Eastman's description in giving more serious thought to his subsequent statements on race and revolution.

McKay goes on to tell Eastman that his revolutionary acts started back in 1920 in London when he sold “Red” literature on the street corners of London and also when he did propaganda work among the colonial soldiers. When he discussed political and race problems with fellow workers on The Liberator in 1921, McKay was not play-acting, but was very seriously committed despite the Justice Department's persecution. Eastman, like most people, had been deceived by him due to his “everlastingly infectious smile.” This guise of a relaxed attitude might have endeared McKay to the Russian people, too. He did not have the intensity and brooding attitude of a typical dedicated Communist. His was the image they expected and wanted, naive and primitive, and they used his “innocence” to further their aims. It is no wonder, then, that they found his early poetry, that with which they were familiar, proletarian—although his fascination was with the past, not the future, and his point of view romantic.

When McKay finally left Russia in 1923 after seeing much of the country and its political and social workings, he was leaving at the height of his popularity. He had read his poem, “If We Must Die,” in the spirit in which he wrote it. The poem evokes the ethos of radicalism and comradeship the Russians admired:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though
Oh kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!(15)

He had written a summary of these ideas for Trotsky, whom he had met there, and published them in Pravda. Russia had gotten a few poems out of him and some short stories. Though still puzzled by Trotsky's famous phrase, “Permanent Revolution,” he moved on to view his Russian experience in retrospect. Although Russia had already “had her revolution,” he found that Trotsky's statement, “one must be Right against the Party,” contained practical wisdom of the highest order.

McKay did not meet Lenin or Stalin, but found Trotsky to be a magnetic personality. “Trotsky,” he said, “wanted to know about Negroes, organization, political position, schooling, religion, grievances, and social aspirations.” Trotsky told him that Negroes needed to be “lifted up” equal to whites and they must have education through all phases of their life. When Eastman wrote the book When Lenin Died, McKay thought highly of it and praised Eastman by saying that he [Eastman] was:

… mountain high above any American leader. You occupy on your own ground as sure and important a place as did Lenin & Trotsky themselves. … It seems to me that you've given us one of the finest and most balanced political treatises of these times, a crystal-clear analytic study of the cooperative work of Lenin & Trotsky—their faults—their weakness—their greatness. And whatever happens to Trotsky this little book of yours will live and interest the world so long as it remembers Lenin & Trotsky. …¹⁶

While in Russia, McKay was supposed to write a book on the Russian Revolution for Negroes, but this never materialized. He had managed to write several articles, not all of which were “adulatory.” The book commissioned to be written was Negry v Amerike (The Negroes in America) (1923) and had as its epigraph Walt Whitman's straightforward lines:

My call is the call of Battle
I nourish active Rebellion.(17)

The Russian experience stayed with McKay all his life. It left its great imprint on him. It is apparent not only from the content of the autobiography, but also from the letters written after 1930 upon returning to New York. In New York, he wrote to Max Eastman that he had eaten with a group of colored Communists whom he couldn't convince that he was not a Trotskyite, so, “some of them were sorry they had eaten with me. …” Also,

… The Third Communist Internationale seems to me by far a greater tragedy than Trotsky. … [It] looks like a stuffed carcass and it seems to me it will be so as long as its siege remains in Russia. …¹⁸

From 1939 to 1944, when McKay joined the Catholic Church, his reflections became more somber and philosophical. He was asked to work with the CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) and advise them on the development of Communism, but he admitted that he had not followed the party's development or Russia “since Lenin died.” Upon his conversion to Catholicism, he states that the Communists had no need to “gloat” over his conversion:

Although I was once sympathetic to their cause I was never a Communist. I had a romantic hope that Communism would usher in a classless society and make human beings happier. All I saw in Russia was that Communism was using one class to destroy the other. … Besides, communism is quite a primitive ideal and I don't see how modern society could go back to it.¹⁹

McKay went to Russia to view a great social experiment which, in reality, was not an answer to his own problems. He had argued with his friend, editor, and former boss Max Eastman about the positive effect of writing a chapter in The Liberator about the Negro question. Eastman saw it as negative and destructive to the magazine and the black masses. McKay, on the other hand, bound by duty, felt that this was positive and constructive. He felt that blacks needed to organize themselves into a power group and the closest thing he saw as a model was an international Communism separate from whites.

The real source of McKay's discontent was the beginning of his realization that the concept of a universal proletariat was not the solution to the black man's struggle. The Russian experience was enriching and confusing, as he did not see there the utopian solidarity he had envisioned. However, he used the experience, enjoyed the lionizing, managed to further a writing career (in prose), and came out of it still a “poet,” not a politician.

For a few years McKay clung to the illusion that Marxism was the answer for the black man, and even when that illusion was shattered, he still wrote about the trip to Russia with a degree of nostalgia. The fact that he spent a large portion of his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, on this two-year phase of his life is evidence enough that Russia had made a lasting impact on him. Until his conversion to Catholicism, in the last few years of his life, the concept of a proletarian revolution was the strongest of all his temptations to desert his belief in a pure black identity.

Notes

1. Stephen H. Bronz, Roots of Negro Racial Consciousness (New York: Libra Publishers, 1964), pp. 76-77.

2. McKay's unpublished letters are in the Lily Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. The references and excerpts are from the McKay Mss. there.

3. McKay letter to Eastman, 25 November 1934.

4. Eastman letter to McKay, March 1923.

5. Ibid., pp. 3-5.

6. McKay letter from Moscow, 3 April 1923.

7. Ibid.

8. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1937).

9. McKay letter from Moscow, 3 April 1923.

10. McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 138.

11. Ibid., p. 174.

12. Ibid., pp. 177-178.

13. McKay letter to Eastman, 18 May 1923.

14. Eastman letter to McKay, 12 April 1923.

15. Claude McKay, Selected Poems (New York: Bookman, 1953), p. 36.

16. McKay letter to Eastman, Avignon, May 1925.

17. Claude McKay, The Negroes in America, trans. from the Russian by Robert J. Winter (New York: Kennikat Press, 1979).

18. McKay letter to Eastman, 9 May 1934.

19. McKay letter to Eastman, 30 June 1944.