Harry R. Targ
A revised version of a
paper originally presented at a Conference:
“Paul Robeson: His
History and Development as an Intellectual”\
Lafayette College,
Easton, Pennsylvania
April 7-9, 2005
Several key concepts in
the Marxian tradition influenced the consciousness and political practice of
Paul Robeson. First, as to method, Robeson was a materialist in that he saw the
socio-economic condition of people’s lives as shaping their activities and consciousness.
He was an historical materialist in that he understood that the material
conditions of their lives changed as the economic system in which they lived
changed. And he was a dialectician in that he was sensitive to the
contradictory character of human existence.
Second, class as a primary
conceptual tool for examining society
shaped his thinking. Increasingly he saw class struggle as a force for social
change. And, for him, class and race were inextricably interconnected.
Third, for Robeson, the
theory of imperialism was critical for understanding international relations.
Living in an age of colonialism and inspired by those resisting the yoke of
foreign domination, Robeson saw imperialism as a structural feature of
relations among nation-states, ruling classes, and peoples in general.
Fourth, Robeson saw
socialism as the next stage of societal development and a system that had the
potential for improving the quality of life of humankind. His experience of an
existing socialist state free of the kind of racism endemic to the United
States gave him hope for the possibility of uplifting all peoples.
Finally, and perhaps
most importantly, Robeson saw a connection between theory and practice. The
artist (i.e., the intellectual) must act in the context of a world of
exploitation. One was either on the side of the ongoing oppressive order or on
the side of change.
Armed with these
insights, Robeson committed himself to action; action grounded in the struggles
of his time. He, in Gramsci’s terms, was an organic intellectual. He joined
anti-racist, anti-colonial, labor and peace struggles. He walked picket lines,
entertained Spanish Civil War loyalists, striking workers and other protesters,
and he sought to lend his support to international socialist solidarity. Being
an organic intellectual in the 1930s and 40s meant participating in what
Michael Denning called “the cultural front.” The ambience of the CIO, the
Communist movement, civil rights and antiwar struggles, and building the New
Deal provided the social forces out of which Robeson could thrive and grow.
Robeson the artist and activist, therefore, was an agent and product of Marxist
ideas engaging in practical political work as an organic intellectual and a
player in a broad cultural front.
Lastly, Robeson’s
consciousness was shaped by the vision of a common pentagonal chord structure
in the world's folk music; a metaphor that privileges unity while
appreciating difference. Here again, Robeson’s consciousness was shaped by the
material world he loved, the world of song.
In sum, Paul Robeson was
a giant of a man driven by a passion for social and economic justice. His
thinking and political activism was shaped by a particular theoretical lens on
the world, one which was influenced by concrete labor, civil rights, and
socialist mass organizations. To understand Robeson as a political theorist and as
a political activist his ideas must be examined in the context of the concrete
struggles of his day. This paper suggests connections between Robeson’s Marxist
theory and existent mass movements and how each was informed by the other.
Robeson’s Marxism
Robeson’s commentaries
on contemporary affairs from the mid-1930s reflect a growing theoretical
sophistication and a consciousness informed by the concepts described above. In
speeches, newspaper articles, and interviews, Robeson relied on history, on a
sense of the materiality of peoples’ lives, and on the growing resistance to
oppression as the driving force of history. By the 1940s, his texts refer more
frequently to Marxian categories about the capitalist system. While he was a
person of action and an artist, not a political theorist, his commentaries were
increasingly historical, materialist, and dialectical.
Speaking to an
enthusiastic audience of workers at the 1948 convention of the International
Fur and Leather Workers Union for example, Robeson articulated the view that
the vast majority of humankind had a history of struggle against the
expropriation by tiny minorities of the wealth they produced. He remembered
that his father ran away from slavery and that his cousins in North
Carolina, sharecroppers and tenant farmers, struggled to make a living. He
referred to miners in West Virginia and Latino workers “living practically
under the ground in holes” in Colorado, and to workers in the Midwest as well
as field hands in California “living at the edge of subsistence.”
Robeson told the
assembled trade unionists that he had witnessed and heard reports of police
violence against striking workers in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, and in
Iowa, and in South Carolina. To him, the arms of the state were used by and for
the minority ruling class to crush the drive for change. The power of the
state, he claimed, was designed to keep working people in a kind of industrial
servitude.
Robeson then made the
historical point that “these things, unfortunately, are not new in the struggle
of mankind.” Further, “…the people, the great majority of the people,
struggling as we have for generation after generation forward to some better
life, how can it happen that everywhere in history a few seem to take the power
in their hands, confuse the people themselves and there they remain?” And,
he pointed out, the development of the United States (and presumably of the
world) was built upon the labor of these same masses of people from
the British Isles, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Robeson linked worldwide
development and exploitation to that of the Black experience in the United
States. He said that “the ‘Negro people’ …must have knowledge that
the very primary wealth of America is cotton, built on the backs of
our fathers; that cotton taken to the textile mills of New
England; and that we don’t have to ask for crumbs to be
dropped from the few up top, but we have the right and the
responsibility to demand in a militant way a better
life for ourselves and for the rest of those Americans
and the peoples of the world who still suffer and are oppressed.”
In a 1949 interview,
Robeson linked the struggles of African Americans to all workers and spoke, in
colloquial language, of the ruling class that exploited everyone. This ruling
class uses race and ethnicity to divide these workers so that the masses are
divided into …”warring factions that produces nothing for them but discord and
misery while a scant, privileged few take all the wealth, hold the
power and dictate the terms. This concentration of power in the hands of less
than a hundred men is so strong that it can decide who shall eat and who shall
not, who shall have decent homes and who shall be doomed to crowded tenements
that are firetraps and rat-infested holes where children must be reared and the
occupants live and die in despair.” Robeson related imperialism, class
exploitation, and racism when he declared in London that:
“…the fight of my Negro people in America and the fight of the
oppressed workers everywhere was the same struggle.”
In an illuminating
preface to a book by Luis Taruc, Born of the People, Robeson
reflects on the historic resistance of the people of the Philippines to Spanish
and U. S. colonialism. Recalling the apocryphal decision of U.S.
President William McKinley to invade the Philippines to replace Spanish
occupation, Robeson likened it to the history of colonialism practiced by the
British and other imperial powers. Most importantly, Robeson declared
that the history of colonialism generally was similar to the history of
imperialism to the then contemporary U.S. policies in Korea, in West Germany,
and in the construction of a capitalist Japan.
And while the history of
the world, Robeson seems to be suggesting, is of domination and exploitation,
the imperial system ultimately creates resistance and the forces that will
overthrow it. Ever the “dialectician,” Robeson refers to the Philippine
struggle for freedom as an object lesson. “Here in Taruc’s searching and moving
story, the whole struggle is laid bare--the terrible suffering and oppression,
the slow torturous seeking for the ‘basic reasons’ and for the ‘right methods
of action,’ the tremendous wisdom and perseverance in carrying through, the
endless courage, understanding, determination of the people, of all sections of
the people, for national liberation and dignity.” He concluded with
reference to other struggles that in his mind represented the dialectical
opposite of imperial domination; in the Soviet Union, in China, and in the
Eastern European regimes (“Peoples Democracies”). Resistance will in the end
yield a new kind of humanity, he claimed.
When Robeson first
became a visible artistic presence and was called upon to answer questions
about the world of politics, he demurred from involving himself in political
discourse. He spoke more of the special qualities of the African American
people and those of their African ancestors, particularly in comparison with
Europeans and Americans. He drew upon simplistic anthropological comparisons of
cultures which privileged analytical thinking, such as the European, and those,
to the contrary, which were more emotive, such as the African. However, by the
1930s, Robeson’s thinking was transformed by exposure to the class struggles of
the Welsh miners, his visits to the Soviet Union, his tour of the front in the
Spanish civil war and his growing familiarity with the works of Marxists.
In an interview for a
British film magazine, The Cine-Technician, in 1938, Robeson
recalls how he years earlier had become aware that “the most genuine and
enthusiastic applause always came from the gallery.” He realized
that it was the working people who most responded to his work and that his own
background and artistic sensibilities connected to that segment of the
population.
By the time of the interview, Robeson was identifying world history with exploitation of peoples, articulating the just cause of the militant organizing drives of industrial unionism in the United States and Great Britain, and was connecting the struggles of people of color to the class struggles of workers. Also, he was insisting that workers’ struggles must include those of minorities. Opposition to lynchings in the U.S. South and the poll tax to limit Black voting were working class issues relevant to the entire class, he said. The connections he was making in the late 1930s would continue to deepen in the subsequent twenty years of his political activism.
In a 1948 speech before a caucus meeting of the Longshoremen’s Union (and on behalf of third-party presidential candidate Henry Wallace), Robeson identified the broader struggle for workers’ rights. “…the struggle for economic rights, the struggle for higher wages, the struggle for bread, the struggle for housing, has become a part of a wider political struggle. They have moved into high places in government, and today the enemies of labor control the working apparatus of the state. They have to be removed. There has to be a basic change.”
And in an article
referred to above, Robeson clearly identifies what constitutes the working
class in his thinking: “To be completely free from the chains that bind him,
the Negro must be part of the progressive forces which are fighting the overall
battle of the little guy-the share cropper, the drugstore clerk, the auto
mechanic, the porter and the maid, the owner of the corner diner, the truck
driver, the garment, mill and steel workers. The progressive section sees no
color line and views the whole problem of race and color prejudices and
discrimination as a divisional tactic of those pitting class against class,
dividing the masses into tint, warring factions that produces nothing for them
but discord and misery…”
Robeson’s awareness of
the global character of the struggle for liberation was sharpened by his interactions
with and participation in the rising anti-colonial movements of the 1930s and
1940s. As his focus on Africa grew he articulated the connections between
African misery and the extraction of vital natural resources by colonial and
neo-colonial powers. During a speech delivered before the National Labor
Conference for Negro Rights in 1950, Robeson referred to the important
connections between the exploitation of Africa and the United States. The
latter benefited from uranium mined in the Belgian Congo, and several African
countries provided gold, chrome, cobalt, manganese, tin, palm oil, and other
basic resources for industrial societies.
Further, he argued that
U.S. workers’ tax dollars, through the Marshall Plan, and the formation of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, were being used to prop up European
colonial powers to exploit Black Africa. In addition President Truman’s Point
Four program was designed to finance opening the door for U.S.
“banker-imperialists” to invest in natural resources and cheap labor in Africa.
To maintain stability for foreign investors, Robeson claimed, the United States
was building military bases on the African continent.
And in the context of
the Cold War, Robeson’s world vision was clearly framed by a theory of imperialism.
“With the Soviet Union out of their grasp-one sixth of the earth’s surface-and
Eastern Europe established on a new basis of independence, American big
business sought desperately to extend their holdings in the rest of the world.
For they need the sources of cheap labor, the easy markets and the fields of
investments in which to multiply the idle profits they have already wrung out
of the toil-broken bodies of American workers, black and white.”
In this speech and many
others after World War II, Robeson referred to the socialist alternatives
existing at that time. He mentioned the Russian revolution and the efforts of
European, U.S., and Japanese armies to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime. He
acknowledged the recently concluded Chinese revolution. And he referred
positively to the new socialist regimes under construction in Eastern Europe.
His attachment to socialism as an alternative to western capitalism was kindled
by early trips to the Soviet Union, where he noticed the paucity of racism in Russian
life. Coming from a society fundamentally shaped by racism, in social
interaction, culture, and distribution of wealth and power, the Soviet Union
Robeson saw was radically different.
Robeson was interviewed
by the Sunday Worker in 1936 about a recent visit to the
Soviet Union. He was quoted as saying: “While in the Soviet Union I made it a
point to visit some of the workers’ homes-that is some that were not so famous
as Eisenstein. And I saw for myself. They all live in healthful surroundings,
apartments, with nurseries containing the most modern equipment for their
children. Besides they were still building. I certainly wish the workers in
this country-and especially the Negroes in Harlem and the South-had such places
to stay in.” A year later he spoke with praise about verbal commitments
to racial and national equality in the new Soviet constitution. He
referred to the constitution as a manifestation of a new “Soviet humanism.”
Twelve years later, in
the darkening days of the Cold War, Robeson continued his praise of the Soviet
Union at an address at a banquet sponsored by the National Council of
American-Soviet Friendship. After criticizing unemployment and low wages of
black Americans, the specter of lynchings, and the perpetuation of the Jim Crow
system of segregation in the South, he offered the Soviet model as an
alternative. For him “the Soviet Union’s very existence, its example before the
world of abolishing all discrimination based on color or nationality, its fight
in every arena of world conflict for genuine democracy and for peace, this has
given us Negroes the chance of achieving our complete liberation within our own
time, within this generation.” Beyond what he saw as the socialist
“humanism” of the Soviet system, Robeson pointed to the deterrent power of the
Soviet Union against “world imperialism.” For him, the struggle for racial
justice in the United States would be less of a public issue than it is if the
United States were not in global competition with the Soviet Union.
Embedded in the corpus
of Robeson’s public statements and activism was a vision of a society of social
and economic justice and workers’ political empowerment. To him the state
should reflect and serve the interests of the working class. And when a worker’s
state is established, he was suggesting, the drive for conquest and control of
other peoples would end. He was positing a common humankind that was fragmented
and brutalized by imperialism. For Robeson, the existing socialist states of
his day represented the possibility of global change. Central to the socialist
outcome would be an end to racism and exploitation. While subsequent
evaluations of then existing socialism vary, Robeson’s vision of
socialism, a humane liberatory one, remains relevant today.
Robeson’s Theory and
Practice
In practice man must
prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his
thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is
isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
The philosophers have
only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change
it. (Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Lewis S. Feuer, ed. Basic
Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Anchor Books, 1959),
Marx saw a necessary connection between the
development of ideas about the world and engagement in that world to change it.
Contrary to bourgeois systems of thought that evolve in abstract and
intellectual contestation with competing ideas, in the Marxist perspective,
ideas are tested in action. Robeson was a performing artist not a philosopher.
However, he did engage in research about social systems and cultures and at a
certain point in his career he saw the need to relate his research, his ideas
about culture to concrete realities. He had come to the view that he had to
apply his intellectual and artistic powers to action, to social change.
Perhaps Robeson’s most
prominent “political” speech was given before the National Joint Committee for
Spanish Relief at Royal Albert Hall on June 24, 1937. In it he proclaimed
the necessity of the artist to take a stand.” … I have longed to see my talent
contributing in an unmistakably clear manner to the cause of humanity. Every
artist, every scientist, must decide NOW where he stands. He has no
alternative.”
And then he connected
the necessity of action in the struggle to save Spain from fascism with the
longer struggle of Blacks for liberation. He reiterated that the artist must
take sides. “He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my
choice. I had no alternative. The history of the capitalist era is
characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their
culture destroyed, they are in every country save one, denied equal protection
of the law, and deprived of their place in the respect of their
fellows.” He ended his speech with a clarion call for artists to defend
culture from assault; that the legacy of humankind is threatened by the rise of
fascism.
From this dramatic
moment to the end of his active political life in the early 1960s, Robeson
connected his art with his understanding of colonialism, racism, fascism, and
imperialism. His political and artistic choices were carefully crafted to link
theory with practice.
The Organic Intellectual
The mode of being of the
new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and
momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in
practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader,’ and not just
a simple orator… (Antonio Gramsci, Selections From
the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, New York, 1971).
The Italian Marxist,
Antonio Gramsci wrote about the “organic intellectual,” that is the
intellectual who is connected to various social groups or movements and acts in
concert with and stimulates the activities of such groups. The organic
intellectual in class society is linked to the project for historical change of
the working class.
As Robeson’s
consciousness was changed by exposure to Marxism, the socialist vision,
anti-colonial struggles, and the working class, his conception of his art as
well as his conception of his connection to his audience changed significantly.
As indicated above, the artist realized that his strongest connections as an
artist were with the working class, the people “in the gallery.” He came to see
his art as a project of and for poor and oppressed peoples.
In response to a
question about what folk music means to Robeson, he described the roots of the
genre and the ways in which he as performer used his talent to give meaning to
the traditions. In this way, he was the interpreter, the organizer, the
intellectual guide to the masses of working people who created the culture that
was basic to their humanity.
First, Robeson defines
folk music. “I mean the songs of people, of farmers, workers, miners,
road-diggers, chain-gang laborers, that come from direct contact with their
work, whatever it is. This folk music is as much a creation of a mass of people
as language.”
Second, Robeson
discusses the sociology of the music and most importantly his connection,
organically, with the creators of the culture. Both folk music and
language “…are derived from social groups which had to communicate with each
other and within each other. One person throws in a phrase. Then another-and
when, as a singer, I walk from among the people, onto the platform, to sing
back to the people the songs they themselves have created, I can feel a great
unity, not only as a person, but as an artist who is one with his audience.”
In this interview,
Robeson grounds his own changing consciousness to the process of connecting
with the “folk” who created the music he sang. “This keeping close to the
feelings and desires of my audiences has a lot to do with shaping my attitude
toward the struggle of the people of the world. It has made me an anti-fascist,
whether the struggle is in Spain, Germany or here.”
His career, Robeson
said, had led him to see through the “pseudo-scientific racial barriers” which
shaped his consciousness growing up in a racist society. The rejection of that
society and the commitment to struggle against it came from “…my travels, from
world events which show that all oppressed people cry out against their
oppressors-these have made my loneliness vanish, have made me come home to sing
my songs so that we will see that our democracy does not vanish. If I can
contribute to this as an artist, I shall be happy”
The Cultural
Front
The heart of this
cultural front was a new generation of plebeian artists and intellectuals who
had grown up in the immigrant and black working-class neighborhoods of the
modernist metropolis… a radical social-democratic movement forged around
anti-fascism, anti-lynching and the unionism of the CIO. (Michael Denning, The Cultural Front,
Verso, London, 1996).
Paul Robeson developed
his worldwide reputation as an artist and as a political activist at the height
of the cultural front. He, along with many other performers, writers, and
painters inspired the mass political mobilizations of the cultural front and at
the same time were stimulated in their work to develop further in conformance
with its vision. A symbiotic relationship developed between performer and
movement.
Among Robeson’s
organizational connections were a variety of unions affiliated with the
Congress of Industrial Organizations. He worked closely with African-American
organizations committed to racial justice. As suggested above, he gave his
energies to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. And he involved himself in the
burgeoning anti-colonial movements, particularly in support of Pan-Africanism.
From World War II until the end of his political activism, he identified with
the Socialist states and as the Cold War deepened became an activist in the
world peace movement.
As Denning suggested
Robeson’s career and political activism paralleled the rise to influence of
progressive forces in the United States and around the world. Artists like
Robeson, stimulated, nourished, and inspired these forces and at the same time
were stimulated and nourished by them. Each depended on the other for
definition and ultimately survival. The growing challenge to Robeson’s politics
in 1950s America was significantly impacted by the decline of the Left.
Repression of Robeson occurred as progressive sectors of labor and the civil
rights movement were subjected to anti-communism. While Robeson
remained an important political figure around the world, as socialism grew and
anti-colonial movements gained victory, the restrictions on his
travel by the United States government cut off his connections with that global
cultural front.
In sum, reflecting
on the Marxian commitment to the transformation of theory into practice, the
Gramscian model of the committed “organic intellectual,” and Denning’s idea of
a time and place, the 1930s, when a working class, anti-lynching, anti-fascist
“cultural front” framed art and politics, we can better understand Paul
Robeson, the activist, and Paul Robeson, the Marxist. Robeson spoke about each
of these elements of his total character: engaged activist, organic
intellectual, and participant in the cultural front.
Robeson’s Relevance
Today
Today, at a time of
growing violence and war, racism, super-exploitation of workers, all on a
global basis, the Robeson model of an engaged artist/intellectual/activist
seems as necessary as ever. In reviewing his life, several critical elements of
thought and action emerge that can serve as an example for artist/intellectuals
today.
First, Robeson developed
a theoretical framework that helped him to understand domestic and
international relations; politics, economics, and culture; and the vital links
between class, race, and gender (although his ideas about gender were only
infrequently articulated). He embraced the Marxist approach which was
historical, materialist, and dialectical.
Second, Robeson realized
by the mid-1930s, that his theoretical understanding of the world must be
matched by practical engagement in that world. Early in his career he believed
that as an artist he was not to be politically engaged. But again, the events
of the 1930s changed his mind: that to be an artist meant to be engaged. He
realized that he had no choice but to join the struggle for the survival of
humankind. Throughout his remaining years, he referred to himself as a fighter
against fascism.
Third, Robeson’s
commitment to the struggle for human liberation and against fascism was to be
manifested in his political activities and in his artistic endeavors. He would
sing for the movement. He would fashion an art that was of the movement. His
commitment to the performance of the “Negro spiritual” was designed to
celebrate the pain and suffering and the very soul of his people. Over the
years, his passion for performing the songs of people from many lands constituted
an expression of his political ideology and international class solidarity.
Fourth, Robeson realized
that his art was an expression of and concretized the vision of the broad
masses of peoples for whom he performed. His realization that he resonated most
to the people “in the balcony’ reflected the connection between him as the
“organic intellectual” and the working class he spoke for. And, in the milieu
of the 1930s, he represented the vision and the hope of workers, Black and
white, colonial peoples, and the broad front of anti-fascist freedom fighters
the world over. His performance represented them and their existence made his
art possible. He was perhaps an early example of a global artist speaking for
and shaped by a global cultural front.
Finally, Robeson’s
Marxism, manifested in theory and practice, in performance and politics, shaped
his thinking about his music. His understanding of the music he sang was shaped
by historical and dialectical materialism and class solidarity. In an appendix
to his autobiography, Here I Stand, he writes about the commonality
of chord structures he found in music from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North
America:
Continued study and research into the origins of
the folk music of various peoples in many parts of the world revealed that
there is a world body-a universal body-of folk music based upon a universal
pentatonic (five-tone) scale. Interested as I am in the universality of
mankind-in the fundamental relationship of all peoples to one another-this idea
of a universal body of music intrigued me, and I pursued it along many
fascinating paths. (Paul Robeson, Here
I Stand, Beacon, Boston, 1988).
Robeson saw a
beautifully diverse world of peoples and cultures sharing a common humanity. To
him human solidarity was possible because of it. Robeson’s articulated vision
of human solidarity in his art and politics was perhaps his most profound
contribution. This as well was the greatest contribution of the cultural front
from which he came. No more important idea is needed today to guide our social
movements, and a blossoming global cultural front, than that of the “universal
body of music” and the “universality of (hu)mankind” which he
proclaimed.
Further Reading
Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front, Verso, London,
1996).
Duberman, Martin. 1995. Paul Robeson: A
Biography, New Press, New York, N.Y.
Foner, Philip, ed. 2002. Paul Robeson Speaks, Citadel,
New York, N.Y.
Ransby, Barbara. 2014. Eslanda, Yale, New Haven,
Connecticut.
Robeson, Paul Here I Stand,
Beacon, Boston, 1988.
Robeson, Paul, Jr. 2001. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson:
An Artist’s Journey, 1898-1939, Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey.
Robeson, Paul Jr. 2010. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson:
Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976, Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey.
(Complete Citations
available on request)
