A Long Way From Home.pdf - Site de Thomas - Free

introduction • xxvii
grasp why intellectuals and politicians of the early twentieth century
had found Marx so appealing.
According to William J. Maxwell, McKay’s indoctrination into
Marxism initiated his thinking on the development of class consciousness
in black political action and racial consciousness in international
Communism. 17 In due time, he attempted to modify Marxist theory
with his 1923 book published in Russia, Negry v Amerike (The Negroes
in America). Arguably the first ever black-authored monograph theorizing
the relationship between race and class, The Negroes in America
indicted the Marxist and Communist neglect of race in transnational
political organization.
Yet reading Marx did not teach McKay how to be a political activist.
Marx “belonged even more to the institutions of learning than to the
street corners from which [he] had so often heard his gospel preached”
(chapter 6). In the cold, snow-laden streets of Moscow in 1922, the distinction
between intellectual thought and daily life struck him as he
interacted with many Russians who knew more about poverty and
hunger than about “the true nature of Communism,” except that
“Lenin was in the place of the Czar and that he was a greater Little
Father” (chapter 14). McKay did not figure out how to overcome the
disconnection between formal intellection and the practical world
until he met Comrade Vie, a multilingual, foreign revolutionary of
unknown national origin. It was Vie who critiqued McKay’s radical
perspectives and helped him to figure out where and how to focus his
political energy while abroad. Vie’s advice, coupled with the experience
of reciting “If We Must Die,” taught McKay how to amplify and direct
his political voice.
“As a Writer, Not an Agitator”: McKay’s Radicalism
Paradoxically, McKay embodied the unity and tension between the red
and the black, between commitments to class-based and race-based
strategies of political mobilization. Such red and black approaches to
culture and politics not only tinted McKay’s vision of human difference
in the world, they inflected his rhetoric as well. “If We Must Die”
arose from a political sympathy that he shared with radical causes
around the world and that determined his activities as a writer of
polemical literature, beginning with his days in Jamaica. But he always
held the Communist Party at arm’s length; he never admitted to being