REVIEWS
Left
Of Karl Marx
by Dr. Carole Boyce-Davies
Left of Karl Marx is essential reading for students of the broader Caribbean community. -- Linden Lewis
PDF REVIEWS
(Left of Karl Marx: The Political
Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones.
Carole Boyce Davies. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2008 vii+311 pp. Cloth US$ 79.95,
Paper US$22.95)
Linden Lewis - linden.lewis@bucknell.edu At the 33rd Annual
Caribbean Studies Association conference held in San Andres, Columbia last
year, I told Carole Boyce Davies that Claudia Jones is to left of Marx,
depending on where you stand in relation to the latter.
Her quick-witted reply to me was “true, so you have to stand with
Marx”. In her book Left
of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones,
Davies moved beyond the physical location of Jones’ burial site, to
argue that the latter is both located in death, as she was ideologically
in life, to the left of Karl Marx. Admittedly,
this is a clever book title, but to address some lacunae in the work of
Marx does not necessarily place one to his left. To suggest a position to
the left of Marx is to assert a more radical, more extreme position,
perhaps even a dogmatic stance. Davies
is not at her most persuasive in this claim, particularly, when she is at
pains throughout the book to note Claudia Jones’ commitment to
Marxism-Leninism. Davies clearly indicates that the
book is not a work of biography but a study of one of the most important
black radical thinkers of the time. It
was good to see that Davies acknowledged her initial encounter with
Claudia Jones’ contribution to a chance audience with Buzz Johnson, who
at the time was advocating that more work needed be done on this
Trinidadian-born woman. Over
the years, Johnson’s initial effort (see, I Think of My Mother)
to rescue from obscurity, the political work and contribution of Jones has
been essentially vilified as intellectually underdeveloped. Claudia Jones in the opinion of
Carol Boyce-Davies, was a ‘sister outsider’ in the sense in which
Audre Lorde used that term. “The
fact is that she is not well know in the Caribbean, just as she is also
not remembered in the According to the FBI’s files,
Jones was “a member of the National Committee, of CP USA; Secretary of
the Women’s Commission, CP USA, and Negro affairs editor of the “Daily
Worker.” She is one of the
most prominent of the younger leading Negro Communists (cited in Davies,
p. 197). Claudia Jones was no
doubt a very important theoretician for the Communist Party of the United
States of America (CPUSA), but to argue that “if the party made Jones,
she also made it, at this time” (p. 31), is to stretch her contribution
just a bit beyond reason. In addition to her work within the
CPUSA, Jones was also a journalist of long standing not only in the United
States but also later in the United Kingdom where she settled after being
deported from the former. Some
have credited Jones with having established a radical, black, journalism
tradition in the Given Jones’ activism, her
linking of women’s rights and anti-imperialism, her opposition to Jim
Crow segregation, and her explicit communist connections, it was no
surprise that she would merit the attention of a the US government in the
heydays of the McCarthy witch hunts. Claudia
Jones was first arrested in 1948 and threatened with deportation.
She was convicted in 1953 under the Smith and McCarran-Walter Act,
and sentenced to one year and a day and fined $200.
She was imprisoned at Alderson, West Virginia.
By the time she had been released, deportation was already ordered.
She was forced to leave the only country she had know as home since she
was nine years old. Jones was
sent to London, where the according to Davies, the British authorities
felt that it might have been better to control her and her political
ideas, than in her native Trinidad. Unlike her US experience, Jones
received an unenthusiastic reception from the Communist Party of Great
Britain (CPGB). Given her
difficulties with the party, she turned her attention to addressing the
problems of immigration and racism facing the African, Asian and Caribbean
communities. She is generally
credited with establishing the Notting Hill carnival, in response to
“the riots and intimidation of Caribbean people in Notting Hill and
Nottingham and in particular to the murder of Kelso Cochrane*” (p. 178).
Jones believed: “A people’s art is the genesis of their own
freedom” (cited in Davies, p. 125).
She did not separate the political from the aesthetic.
Deportation from the U.S. therefore did not dampen Jones’
political activism; it simply broadened the scope of her work,
reconfiguring it according to the specific cultural peculiarities of
England. Carole Boyce makes an important
contribution to the history of Caribbean, communist, feminist women, such
as Hermie Huiswoud and Grace Campbell, who have tended to figure only at
the margins of their male counterparts’ political profiles.
The work is much more compelling in the chapters where Davies
discusses Claudia Jones’ deportation, carnival and Diaspora activism,
and in her work in the interest of peace.
Claudia Jones died in 1964 of heart failure in London.
There are areas of Claudia Jones’ life still in need of
exploration however. For example, Paul Robeson’s telephone call at
Jones’ funeral was no ordinary intervention, for some, it was one of the
highlights of the entire service. The
confusion surrounding the funeral arrangements and who were asked to speak
on her behalf is an interesting story in its own right. The attempt to
bury her quickly by the CPGB is another story of intrigue.
However the clash between the CPGB’s atheistic orientation to
such matters and the desire to have an appropriate religiously oriented
service, complete with church hymns selected by the Caribbean community of
which she had been a significant part, and who related to her in quite
different political terms, all need to be aired fully in a future
biography of Claudia Jones. Left
of Karl Marx is essential reading for students of the broader Caribbean
community.
Department of Sociology &
Anthropology
Bucknell University, Pennsylvania