Reclaiming Claudia Jones: When a Black Feminist Marxist Defies McCarthyism

Connie Johnson

Doctoral Student

University of Texas at Austin

Department of Communication Studies

Abstract

In this essay, I examine, from a postmodern feminist perspective, the exile of Claudia Jones as the deportation of the black radical female subject. Although Jones is credited with being one of the most vocal black feminist Marxists during the 1940s, very little has been said or written about her in either scholarly journals or textbooks. This, in part, is probably due to the subversion of Communist activities during the era of McCarthyism, in addition to the conventions of institutionalized racism that make news and records pertaining to blacks who were active in Communist movements ephemeral and elusive. Jones goes beyond postmodern feminism in several respects: (1) Not only was she a feminist, but she was an African-American Marxist feminist and (2) she left an indelible imprint regarding her activism in not one, but two countries—the U.S. and Great Britain. Specifically, I examine the correlation between Jones’ definition of superexploitation of the black woman worker vis-à-vis Althusser and Hegel’s notion of the “irrational” and the concept of “alienated labor.” I discuss how both Althusser and Hegel may explain the notion of a black feminist Marxist, as well as counter an argument that questions the tenability of the black Marxist in spite of U.S. white supremacy.

Introduction

Should one happen to research the life of Karl Marx, one will note that although he was born in Prussia, he was buried in London, England. This is probably quite logical, given that he spent the last 34 years of his life in London before his death in 1883. Marx is buried in the, now famous, Highgate Cemetery located at the top of Highgate Hill in North London. Highgate Cemetery serves as the final resting place of luminaries, including Michael Faraday, Henry Moore, and George Eliot. [1] Internet websites and newspapers proudly announce the names of the dozen or more rich-and-famous writers who are also prominent occupants. But there is one name you probably will not find on most websites or travel brochures advertising the cemetery. And this is somewhat odd given that the deceased is buried so closely to the grave of Karl Marx, to his left-hand side. Her name is Claudia Jones.

Little fanfare or interest in Claudia Jones may be expected given that she was not a famous actress, writer or novelist. But from the perspective of someone who is keenly interested in the history of the Communist Movement during the 1940s in the United States, the mere fact that Claudia Jones is buried to the left of one of our greatest socialist icons of all times speaks to an ideology—a left-wing ideology or politics better known as Marxism. Ironically, though Claudia Jones would prove to be one of Karl Marx’s greatest allies and the Communist Party’s (CP) most passionate supporters, the Jim Crow and segregationist laws in both the U.S. and Great Britain derailed almost all of her efforts. In this essay, I briefly outline the life of Claudia Jones and I ascribe some meaning to her efforts to become part of a movement that wanted nothing to do with her by looking at the theories and concepts of Louis Althusser and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as those of her intellectual godfather, Karl Marx.

Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1915, Jones and her family migrated to New York City’s Harlem borough in 1922. Though Jones was well-educated and won scholastic honors as a high school student, she chose to work in menial, blue-collar jobs (e.g., laundry, factory) and became active in the community’s National Urban League chapter (West 2007). A key event that may have sparked Jones’ interest and commitment to civil rights was the Scottsboro Nine Case of 1931. The case involved nine black youths who were accused of raping two white prostitutes and had been tried without an attorney or adequate counsel. The false accusations and notoriety surrounding the case certainly were not new; racism and hate crimes against African-Americans were nearly routine at the turn of the century. Whites responded with such fury and violence to the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 which freed slaves that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) matter-of-factly published summaries about routine lynchings of black men and women. One representative publication asks, “Do you know that the United States is the only land on Earth where human beings are burned at the stake?” (Corpis & Fletcher 2003: 283). Mob lynchings, torture and vigilante mobs of whites who resented blacks that operated competing stores and businesses regularly ransacked towns and homes and lynched African-Americans [2] on a regular basis (Moses 1997; McDermott 1999). As such, the trial of the Scottsboro boys was simply a marker that was reflective of the virulent racism that overshadowed the era. However, the trial was critical in that it exposed Jones to the CP through its legal defense of the Scottsboro Nine. The International Labor Defense group, a civil rights defense association formed by the CP, was key in the representation of the young men during the repeated trials, all of which found the men guilty with their convictions and death penalty sentences overturned in 1932 and 1935 (DeWitt 2008: 89). After many years of ongoing trials, the men were eventually found not guilty and freed. And though, of course, there is no clear evidence that the trial was the impetus for Jones’ involvement with the CP, she joined the Young Communist League in 1936 (West 2007). Even prior to her joining and becoming active in the CP, Jones’ interest and desire to work in a series of blue-collar positions, instead of attending college, may have played an even greater role in setting the course for her activism in the CP.

Jones’ affinity for contextualizing her own identity within the space of workers and the labor movement may be seen as integral to her motivation to become active with the CP. Jones understood that the crisis of the black working class was based on a capitalism that could only “raise itself above black labor in a legalized caste system which cut-off competition” if it were to succeed (DuBois 1992: 93). Jones’ efforts to correct that disparity began at the early age of 25 when she became the National Director of the Young Communist League in 1941. Though Jones would go on to become one of the CP’s most prolific and vocal activists for the next 20 years, both in the United States and Great Britain, very little has been published on her work as a CP activist. Though Brent Hayes Edwards (2001) admits a growing body of scholarship has emerged that takes into consideration black participation in Marxism, signifying an orientation that has shifted “from unraveling the intricacies of organized communism to elucidating the complex parameters of African diasporic radicalism in all its varieties” (Edwards 2001: 1), the fact remains that the literature scarcely touches the surface in relation to Jones’ work.

Reclaiming Claudia Jones

Efforts in recovering and reclaiming the artifacts that detail the life of Claudia Jones are difficult, given the U.S. government’s intent to subvert and erase Jones from both the mainstream media and public memory. To illustrate the paucity of literature on Jones’ life and her contributions to the CP, existing texts include a doctoral thesis, a master’s thesis, and several websites, some of which are noted in both the footnotes and final bibliography of this paper.

Kate Weigand’s Red Feminism (2001) is an exception, given that she generously cites Jones more than a dozen times throughout her text regarding women’s activism in the CP from 1935 to 1960. Weigand is very careful in documenting Jones’ efforts to eradicate the pervasive sense of male supremacy that haunted the CP, in spite of remonstrations in the forms of regular articles and memos, written by Claudia Jones, Eleanor Flexner, and other key women in the organization. If Jones endured any covert or overt hostilities or reactions from other Party members, Weigand makes it abundantly clear that Jones was also one of the most valued members of the CP and was treated as such (Weigand 2001: 91). In devoting an entire chapter to Jones’ work (Chapter 5, “Claudia Jones and the Synthesis of Gender, Race, and Class”), Weigand freely admits the dilemma that faced black women who struggled to become active in the CP, in spite of the racial tensions and chauvinist attitudes that hindered them. Predictably, white male chauvinism and racism existed within the CP, but one of Jones’ primary missions was to make sure the Party was well aware of the “triple oppression status” that shackled black women during the McCarthy era (Weigand 2001: 100-101).

Another notable exception to the dearth of research on Jones is the text compiled by Carole Boyce Davies. A professor of English at Florida International University, Davies’ Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2007) is probably one of the few in-depth analyses of Jones’ life which also provides theoretical and epistemological insight on her work. In her text, Davies emphasizes Jones’ focus on worker’s rights outside the Party and the rights of women workers within it. When Jones was appointed as editor of the “Negro Affairs” unit of the Daily Worker in 1945, Davies refers to an article in which Jones is “clearly speaking back to the Communist Party as well as clarifying her own position” regarding the economic dependence of women on men under conditions of male domination and women’s inability to work actively on the production side of labor (51-52).

Despite her position as one of the few African-American women in a leadership position within the CP, Jones did not have tremendous success in converting large numbers of black men or women to Communism. This, in part, may have had more to do with fear of Jim Crow brutality and retaliation if caught engaged with the CP than an unwillingness to consider the merits of social change or equality. Segregation was almost de rigueur in the U.S. between 1940-50. As such, one can only marvel at Jones’ accomplishments, both in the number of speaking engagements that she held as well as her contributions as editor of the Negro affairs unit at the Daily Worker.

Understanding Superexploitation and Triple Oppression

Jones articulated the oppression of racism that denied black women full participation in the labor force because of their skin color. Jones also “believed that white Communist workers had a special responsibility to support the black women’s [own] autonomous struggles because they inevitably resisted race, class, and gender exploitation and thereby took aim against the whole capitalist system” (Weigand 2001: 106). What Davies’ documents in her text as the exploitation of black women workers, Marx further defines in Capital (1867) when he outlines the paradox of capitalistic profits that are extracted from the labor of an exploited proletariat. [3] Although Vladimir Lenin speaks “of the enslavement of women within the social and economic structures that restrict them to domestic labor,” certainly neither Marx nor Lenin had “the historical context [in which] to argue for the gendered black subject” (Davies 2007: 3). Here, one must consider the dilemma of the gendered black worker who, though not a slave, must operate and perform the same tasks as her white counterpart, but at a lesser wage. Jones took Marx’s hypothesis one step further in respect to women of color: not only were they exploited, but they were doubly exploited. Even when they were allowed to participate in the work force, the type of work they were allotted was usually inferior to that of whites and the wages always substantially lower (Greenberg 1997: 23).

The concept of superexploitation regarding black, working-class women is based upon Jones’ observation that black women “were the most oppressed stratum of the whole population” (41). As Davies suggests, during the Jim Crow era of the 1950s, black women were not only doubly but triply oppressed if one considers the role of labor unions. Primarily relegated to low-paying jobs as domestic servants, black women were not allowed to join trade unions or participate in the organized labor movement. Labor organizations eschewed the domestic worker from participation and thus “consigned these women—usually black women—to victimhood and exclusion from the normal social networks and labor legislation that benefited other workers; thus continuing their superexploitation” (Davies 2001: 44). Though the value and necessity of the African-American worker took on greater value within the context of the U.S. labor force following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the onset of World War II, black women were restricted by the types of work they could engage in even during the war (Cobble 2005). Jones addresses this dilemma in an issue of Political Affairs:

It is incumbent on the trade unions to assist the Domestic Workers Union in every possible way to accomplish the task of organizing the exploited domestic workers, the majority of whom are Negro women. Simultaneously, a legislative fight for the inclusion of domestic workers under the benefits of the Social Security Law is vitally urgent and necessary (Jones 1949: 34-35). [4]

It was much more difficult to confront inequalities within the Communist Party than outside it. For example, though Maida Kemp, another Caribbean or Afro-Panamanian, would rise to power by confronting the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) for not admitting blacks and Puerto Ricans into the Italian Dress and Waistmakers’ Union Local 89 in 1947, this same sense of rage did not manifest itself in a similar fashion within the Communist Party (Hapke 2004: 89), however, when one considers Claudia Jones fate. Though both Kemp and Jones were women of color, fighting for women’s rights in New York during roughly the same time period, each experienced acutely different results. While Kemp would become a board member of the ILGWU and run for political office during the 1950s, Jones would be exiled to Britain in 1955, reviled and forgotten by the American and British governments. This reaction may have as much to do with the fact that while Kemp’s actions embraced efforts that improved or enhanced capitalism (e.g., raising wages for garment workers, thus, theoretically, streamlining and enhancing production of goods for management and the owners), Jones’ efforts did not. Jones’ deportation may instead be interpreted as American capitalism’s final act to eliminate to the negative surplus labor (e.g., removing Claudia Jones from the workforce itself) that threatened the existing socioeconomic system. By virtue of deportation to another country, Jones was being removed and subtracted from the labor pool, not only as a potential worker, but from the U.S. economy as well. As an outspoken Marxist who challenged capitalism, Jones became a liability. She was no longer useful and thus had to be eliminated.

Jones’ criticisms and opinions, both in reference to the Communist Party and the roles of women, which were voiced well before both the civil rights and feminist movements of Betty Friedan’s [5] era, signifies a sense of postmodern thought that was clearly antithetical to the expectations of women during her era. Though not in complete agreement with all of his views, Jones’ impassioned obsession with the rights of workers is reminiscent of Louis Althusser’s own critique of Marx’s Capital. Jones was cognizant of the interdependency that existed between social capital and labor or the workers themselves. In his text, For Marx (1965), Althusser speaks of the “contradiction” and subsequent allowances that must be made to maintain the fluid relationship between the worker and the capitalist. Given that For Marx was first published in France in 1965 [6] amidst the political turmoil of the civil rights movement in the U.S., Althusser’s discussion of “contradictions” might be seen as the antagonism that existed between workers, plus the added antagonism or friction between workers of different genders and then racial groups. Mark Poster (1974) emphasizes Althusser’s critique of Marx as failing to address the alienated labor factor in his text (393). More importantly, though, as it relates to our discussion of Jones’ interpretation of the triple oppression that black women suffered in the United States as victims of racial segregation, Althusser also takes into consideration the economic politics inherent in labor while Marx did not. According to Althusser “the fact that Marx accepts political economy precisely as it presents itself without questioning the content of its concepts or their systematicity as he was to do later on” (Althusser 1969: 159) speaks to his failure to separate economic ideology from economic reality. Marx’s abstractions of the political economy and the working class did not take into account race and gender. One wonders if Althusser’s “alienated labor” might be a reference to marginalized workers or those denied participation in the production cycle of the working class—citizens like Claudia Jones and millions like her who desperately wanted to be a part of and contribute to that working class. The first volume of Capital was published in 1867; almost one hundred years later, Althusser’s On Marx was written. The irony, here, is that though both texts address the plight of the working class, they leave a void as to the true identity of that working class. Trying to fill that void during the 1940s in a segregated United States might seem illogical for a black woman, but for Jones, it was not.

In analyzing Jones as a black feminist Marxist, using a Hegelian lens to interpret her activism may be particularly effective, given Hegel’s discussion of the inequality that existed between workers and the production or labor that the capitalists demanded. Though Marx’s Capital tells us that the worker must operate under the tyranny of the capitalist, he does not take into account that an even greater threat to the working class is not poverty but, more crucially, alienation. Paul Ashton reflects on Hegel’s ability to discern this inviolable relationship between labor and the society in which one must operate:

This is because he recognizes that when '[c]ivil society is in a state of unimpeded activity,' not in a state of chaos or some unusual situation that poverty arises. The labourer is likely to be thrown into a state of poverty of both mind and body when all is well in civil society. The problem for Hegel is obviously that he has envisaged a necessary stage of self-conscious development that has a natural disposition towards poverty, and 'that the modern state cannot within itself provide the answer to one of its own self-generated problems.' [7]

During the pre-civil rights era of the 1960s, both of poverty and alienation were particularly acute for African-Americans who lived in a “civil” society that refused them entry into the working class for even the most contemptible jobs. Given that blacks were not encouraged to be active in the mainstream labor force during the 1940s in the United States and lived in a society where Jim Crow segregation was the norm, the inequalities that Hegel identifies become acutely more salient. In his Philosophy of Right (1820), Hegel also describes production and labor within the framework of wealth and civic engagement and the inherent inequality that it creates. If the spirit and talents of the worker are stymied or restricted by a particularly onerous capitalistic system where the owner does not allow the worker to perform or engage in the production itself, an imbalance will exist: “On the contrary, it produces inequality out of spirit and exalts it to an inequality of talents, wealth, and intellectual and moral education” (Hegel 1820: 164). In many ways, one might consider Jones’ efforts and activism in the Communist Party during the 1940s as a tactic or method for restoring this equality, or sense of balance in the system. Hegel argues that man seeks to balance that inequality of “co-operation involved in labour” by “seeking satisfaction of the wants of all others (ibid.). Though Jones’ own efforts were met with FBI surveillance, imprisonment and indifference, she strove to achieve this “balance” that Hegel describes by striving, albeit unsuccessfully, to “fit” into both capitalism’s hegemony and the CP itself.

In weighing the merits of Althusser’s and Hegel’s premise of “irrationality” or alienated labor, one should also consider the precarious location of Jones within a political context. Jones’ failure to obtain citizenship and thus gain a real identity in either Trinidad, the U.S., or Great Britain could be interpreted as reflective of a surplus labor construct where the labor, or work, is neither accounted for nor welcome. Though an unwanted or unwelcome labor that is dismissed both within a capitalistic framework as well as a Communistic framework is certainly grounds for the hypothesis of “irrationality” or an alienated labor, it also brings into question whether or not blacks should have been a part of the Marxist equation at all. As social constructs, both race and racism complicate Marxism in the sense that not only is there an oppressor (the capitalist or owner) and an oppressed (the working class), but there is also the impediment of race added to the equation. If the working class is comprised of two different racial groups who have been socialized or taught to believe that one group is superior to the other, an antagonism develops. The owner or capitalist can take advantage of this antagonism by pitting one group against the other. Certainly, Karl Marx never took into account Jim Crow segregation in his writings on Marxism, given that he assumed a homogeneous population in Eastern Europe. But as a black woman, Jones probably saw Marxism as the great equalizer; a socialist framework that could level the playing field for both blacks and whites alike. Unfortunately, Jones could not foresee or predict that racism would prevail, sidelining all her attempts to enlighten or instill any tangible social change among blacks or whites during her lifetime.

Gramsci’s Black Marxist According to Wilderson

That a decisive antagonism existed between blacks and whites within the realm of Marxism gains real currency in Frank Wilderson’s essay if one is willing to consider Marxism from a Gramscian perspective. In “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society” (2003) Wilderson posits that the black subject threatens conventional Marxism in several ways. First of all, Marxism assumes a subaltern that operates within a framework of pure capitalism and not the white supremacy that was prevalent both in the U.S. and Great Britain at the time (ibid.: 225). Wilderson goes so far as to say that the black worker’s participation from a Gramscian point-of-view “imposes a radical incoherence” in the discourse leading to a “kind of conceptual anxiety” (ibid.: 226). This “anxiety” might very well be analogous to Althusser’s notion of an alienated labor or Hegel’s “irrationality.” After reading Wilderson’s essay, one is forced to consider the seeming futility of Jones’ own struggle to “fit-in” and gain acceptance within the Communist Party in both countries. Does Wilderson’s argument bear fruit?

In an earlier essay, Wilderson posits that “there is something organic to Black positionality which makes it essential to the destruction of [a] civil society” and therefore inconsistent to black participation in social movements like Marxism (Wilderson 2002: 1). He further adds that social movements (e.g., the Prison Abolition Movement and perhaps even the feminist movement of Betty Friedan’s generation) were able to accommodate only those demands which a “civil” society deemed tolerable or within reason. In this case, Wilderson implies that (European) immigrants, white women, and the working class, in general, are the only acceptable “junior partners” for hegemonic intervention. As Wilderson argues, “Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligations, are oxymorons” (ibid.: 1). This argument is reasonable enough, but I disagree with Wilderson’s conclusion that social movements contain inherent “rhetorical structures and political desires [that] are underwritten by a supplemental anti-Blackness” (ibid.). I cannot agree that any social movement is necessarily “anti-Black” for an obvious reason: how can a social movement be “anti-black” if blacks were never a part of the equation?

Where Wilderson and Jones negotiate a similar praxis is Marxism’s inability to account for a classless society that, in Claudia Jones’ case, was complicated by race and gender. Though Wilderson does not specifically address the “gendered black female” in his essay, the inclusion of the “black subject” in the revolution was problematic. Blacks and black women, in particular, were automatically handicapped by a “variable capital” that had historically paid them less for years. How was the Communist Party to reconcile this?

Finally, we begin to see how marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety: a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis—a society which does away not with the category of worker, but with the imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital: in other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratise work and thus help keep in place, ensure the coherence of the Reformation and Enlightenment ‘foundational’ values of productivity and progress (Wilderson 2003: 226).

Though Jones earned and won almost unilateral support within the Communist Party, in reality, it was white America’s failure to visualize and recognize African-Americans as equals versus invisible subordinates that was, in reality, Jones’ greatest problem. One of the greatest examples of this support occurred during the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of Rosa Ingram. A widow and mother of fourteen, Ingram was sentenced for life imprisonment on false murder charges in 1959. Jones not only rallied to her support but convinced all CP members to also rally and support her cause. Jones’ orchestrated a campaign to gather one million signatures and send the petition to President Truman (Weigand 2001: 106). African-American participation in the CP forced members to address the “Negro question” (Trotsky 1933), a question that was never fully answered, due to the segregation of the United States in the 1950s. Wilderson’s assumption that blacks were wasting their time in trying to assimilate and contribute to the CP runs counter to Weigand’s text where she provides ample evidence of the CP’s desire to “grow” the Party with greater black participation.

FBI Surveillance and the McCarthy Years

Of particular note is the degree and level of intensity of Claudia Jones’ participation in the Communist Party. Her involvement was so great, in fact, that she was seen as a threat to the U.S. government and remained under the surveillance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for years. An excerpt from her 300-plus page dossier vindicating and providing evidence of her “un-American activities” offers insight regarding how far the U.S. government would intrude on its citizens’ private lives if those citizens were thought to threaten the pro-war, pro-reactionary ideology of Joseph McCarthy during the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Dated December 2, 1942, the following is an excerpt from Part 1a of Claudia Jones’ Freedom of Information Act FBI report, documenting her supposedly “criminal” activities: [8]

SYNOPSIS OF FACTS:

CLAUDIA JONES and PHILIP ARRINDELL

Both negroes, operated Club Ashford,

139 West 125 St., NYC, in 1940 as a Harlem

Club in behalf of the YCL. Subject observed on

Speakers platform of mass meeting sponsored by

The Communist Party and YCL at Union Square NYC

on 9/24/42.

Considered one of the ablest young communists in the

United States.

Jones traveled throughout the country, giving speeches on behalf of the Communist Party while provoking the ire of the federal government. She was imprisoned several times on trumped-up charges of supporting government overthrow during the 1950s. Having contracted tuberculosis, probably during her youth in Harlem, New York, Jones’ health also suffered during this time. She was destined to die a premature death at the age of 49 as a result of the disease but not until she had made her last stand. Jones was finally deported to Britain in 1955 and was met with a deeply racist and oppressive British government, as well as a British Communist Party that was equally hostile to the notion of black participation in the movement. Out of desperation, Jones turned to the support of London’s Caribbean community, where she was met with open arms (Bacchra, 2001). And though she would go on to launch her own newspaper, The West Indian Gazette, which provided articles and narratives on civil rights, the refusal of either the United States or Britain to accept and embrace Jones’ fully committed activism to the Party returns us to Hegel’s notion of irrationality or the “imbalance” that existed under Marx’s system of capitalism.

In response to the racial attacks and the tragic murder of a black carpenter during the Notting Hill riots in August of 1958, Jones’ responded by launching the Notting Hill Carnival in 1959 to repair race relations in Britain. Now world-famous and held annually, the Notting Hill Carnival has attracted millions of attendees since its inception. Though it has since disintegrated and become more of a Disney-esque parade, replete with face-painting, side-show girls, and clowns, many of the locals and much of Great Britain’s Caribbean community still remember the carnival’s original purpose. Of note is the fact that the right-wing establishment and the British police were firmly against and fought the carnival from as early as the 1970s (Griffiths 2006). Even then, the carnival was seen as symbolic of black resistance and the unification between black and white Britishers. Locals may remember the infamous Notting Hill race riots of 1976 where black residents fought white police officers, hurling bricks and bottles at each other. According to Chris Mullard, chairman of organizers of London Notting Hill Carnival Ltd., “Carnival was always seen by the state and the establishment as something that they wanted to stop because they saw it for what it was—a form of cultural resistance” (Griffiths 2006).

Conclusion

In the final analysis, if we return to the preface of this essay, what is most intriguing and perhaps paradoxical is the relationship between Jones and Marx, from a physical, spatial perspective which, in the end, becomes an ideological one. The fact that Jones eternally remains to the left of Marx, even in death, is prophetic for a more subtle reason. Can one not also assume that Jones’ location as a black woman and her commitment to Marxism will, theoretically, always be challenged, given her physical location to Marx? By this, I mean the physical proximity of Jones’ grave to that of Marx: to his left. Again, as one of our greatest socialist icons of all times, Marx’s left-wing beliefs immortalized an ideology. His leftist politics challenged the world. As, ostensibly, one of the first African-American women to confront the hostility and government suppression and work as a crusader for that same leftist ideology, Jones burial site to the left of Marx also symbolizes Jones’ own challenge to the world. Claudia Jones stands out because in addition to defying capitalistic oppression, she defied racism as well, and risked her life to do so. Unlike Jones, Marx never had to fear racism or violent retaliation because of his skin color. That, if for no other reason, is why Jones is an exemplar. The fact that her associates saw fit to bury her body immediately adjacent to one of our greatest icons speaks volumes. Thus, in many respects, Jones was an icon, as well.

Though Davies offers her own definition of the radical black subject as “one that constitutes itself as resisting the particular dominating disciplines, systems, and logics of a given context” (5), one cannot help but notice the obvious parallel to Marx and Engel’s own purpose in writing the Communist Manifesto (1848): to resist the existing dominating discipline (the bourgeoisie or capitalism) and to establish a classless society. Marx’s philosophy and treatise had no explanation for the “gendered black female,” according to Davies. Since African-Americans were not part of the social fabric in Europe or Russia during the 19th century, one cannot assume that blacks would not have been welcome within the Party, especially since Marx himself argued that capitalism would end through the organized actions of an international working class, led by the Communist Party. Jones obviously felt that African-Americans were members of an oppressed group whose salvation was firmly rooted in Marx’s Communism. That Jones would be forced to fight for support and approval within the Communist Party itself is certainly painful and ironic. Although Jones’ efforts and commitment to the Party would prove to be a bittersweet victory during her lifetime, one can only hope that she found some consolation in the final pay-off at death: a gravesite next to that of Karl Marx.

In referencing both Hegel and Althusser, I posit in this essay that a space exists within Marx’s ideology for African-American participation. Though both Hegel and Althusser offer substantive theories which might explain the notion of the radical black feminist Marxist, an argument can also be made as to the futility of African-American involvement in the movement. Though Wilderson argues that blacks were never factored into the Marxist paradigm based on U.S. white supremacy, I hope to have provided ample evidence to the contrary. By documenting Claudia Jones’ activism in the CPUSA during the McCarthy era, scholarly evidence not only valorizes Jones but serves to diminish any suspicion of essentialism one might have regarding the black voice in the Communist movement. As an African-American woman, Claudia Jones passionately demonstrated her understanding of capitalistic oppression and how it functioned to triply oppress black women. In spite of a segregated, racist Jim Crow America, Claudia Jones not only flourished but thrived as a member of the CPUSA, in spite of harassment and oppression. It was largely of government oppression—not racism—that denied her success as a Marxist and obfuscated her from both memory and history.

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BIOGRAPHY

Connie Johnson is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies and the Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include the rhetoric of power and identity in marginalized communities.

NOTE: please mail any correspondence to home address

1. “Destinations UK – Highgate Cemetery London, England,” ” http://www.historic-uk.com/DestinationsUK/HighgateCemetery.htm .’ (Accessed April 2, 2009).

2. The term “African-American” and “black” will be used interchangeably in this essay to describe a person of African-American descent.

3. Richard Hooks offers a more comprehensive discussion of the supply-and-labor paradigm that the capitalist uses to manipulate the worker. He also discusses the notion of “alienated labor,” a concept that is defined later in this paper. See Hooks’ own essay at ” http://www.historic-uk.com/DestinationsUK/HighgateCemetery.htm .’ (Accessed April 10, 2009).

4. Davies cites a reference to Eugene Gordon and Cyril Briggs’ work, The Position of Negro Women. Both authors refer to a 1930 Women’s Bureau and U.S. Department of Labor statistic that shows that “the largest group of Negro women workers are still to be found in domestic and personal service” and that the “wages of these workers are as low as ten dollars a month. Darby comments that the average U.S. annual salary for white workers was approx. $1,368 in 1930.

5. Betty Friedan is commonly identified as being one of the leading crusaders of the women’s rights movement in the 1960s. With the publication of her flagship bestseller, The Feminine Mystique,Friedan ignited the contemporary women's movement in 1963 and transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world. See New York Times writer Fox’s article, “Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in ‘Feminine Mystique,’ Dies at 85 at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/national/05friedan.html.

6. “For Marx: Louis Althusser,” Translated by Ben Brewster (Accessed on 10/29/2008 at http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/FM65NB.html )

7. Paul Ashton’s lecture on the “Legacy of Hegel” was given at the University of Melbourne on February 5, 1999. This citation also references Raymond Plant’s interpretation of Hegel’s discussion on an impoverished labor that must operate and exist within an uncivil or hostile society. Again, perhaps analogous to the racial segregation of the U.S.during the 1950s. The reader can access and read his essay in its entirety at http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/ashton.htm

8. Federal Bureau of Investigation: Claudia Jones,” Part 1 of 4, File Number: 100-72390, (Accessed on 11/7/2008 at http://foia.fbi.gov/cjones/cjones1a.pdf )