Left of Karl Marx (Part II)

“On the left is a black woman, determined to articulate political and ideological positions that would contest the boundaries of freedom of speech as defined by American bourgeois democracy. These boundaries, while ostensibly ‘real’ rights such as freedom of the press and habeas corpus nonetheless carry limitations, which keep the individual within the structures that define the modern market economy and the definition of the ideal American citizen. On the right are the institutions of the U.S. government such as the FBI, determined to discipline those rights within its historical project of the rise of capitalist freedom. Thus, while American democracy would seek to position itself as the ideal democracy and as the major exponent of international human rights, challenges to this claim continually emerge internally from a range of cultural and political activists, like Claudia Jones, as well as from the global political movements of decolonization.”
So opens “Piece Work/Peace Work: Self-Construction versus State Repression,” Chapter 6 of Carole Boyce Davies’ Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, a chapter that uses Jones’ massive, two-volume (nearly 1,000 page) FBI file “as the finished product for the [textual, legal] framing mechanism” of the U.S. Government to “use its already preconceived conclusions as legitimate judicial premises for the indictment of radical political practices.”

USAmerican poetry has, of course, a well-documented history with FBI files, state repression, McCarthyism/HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), et al. From Muriel Rukeyser to Langston Hughes to Thomas McGrath, the federal dossiers on a generation of writers can often rival in page count their collected works.
In her critical textual reading of Jones’ FBI file, Boyce Davies argues that her prosecution—as well as the prosecutions of countless Communist Party members and left-labor activists (poets among them)—relied decidedly on literary evidence, with literary interpretation “as a methodological device…dangerously applied.” The state sought, Boyce Davies argues, “[t]o link the individual with the incriminating texts” of Marx, Lenin, etc., then enlisting “an assortment of ex-Communists and FBI informants” to support their text-heavy prosecutions. Here Boyce Davies asserts what so many of us literary interpreters know (or should): “That there were opposing narratives and interpretations needs to be taken into account in any reassessment of the case, for the FBI file is little more than the extensive documentation of everything Jones had ever written, published, and spoken, marshaled to make a certain kind of case of ideological criminality. The publication of her ideas was what constituted her criminal offense. Now that the material is available to us [as are the files of many of the writers referred to above], we can see that in its use of ‘literary evidence,’ the state’s case rested on literary misinterpretation, flawed and biased analysis, and deliberately superficial critical reading.”
Later in Chapter 6 Boyce Davies comments that “[i]n the end, her FBI file became, ironically, one of the most significant of her biographical documents. In a strange turn of events, the FBI also becomes the mad bibliographer… The brevity of the purely autobiographical material, compared to the massive compilation of data in the FBI file, is also an obvious recognition of the imbalance between the state’s massive machinery and documenting process and an individual black woman armed with only her intellect and her communication skills…”
The footnote on that “mad bibliographer” came in 1957 (two years after Jones was deported) in Yates vs. United States (354 U.S. 298), when “the Supreme Court limited conviction to direct action to overthrow the government and not to ideas…”
Maybe it’s because I had a chance to spend a few days earlier this year in discussions with Marc Falkoff, editor of Poems from Guantanamo Bay: The Detainees Speak as well as the productive conversations with my class this past spring around our critical reading of Sing A Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, And Communiques Of The Weather Underground 1970-1974 that Left of Karl Marx seems such a timely, important book to me. The issues raised by the documentation and analysis of such a complex, unique individual life in the struggle and the poetry produced during her detention by the U.S government ring contemporary in many—perhaps too many—ways.
***
…those like us
Who, fused by our mold
Became their targets…
from Claudia Jones, “For Consuela—Anti-Fascista”