PAUL ROBESON’S MARXISM: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Harry R. Targ

Department of Political Science Purdue University

West Lafayette, Indiana

Conference Presentation prepared for: “Conversations of National Importance: Civil Rights, Civil Liberties”

“Paul Robeson: His History and Development as an Intellectual”

Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania April 7-9, 2005

Introduction

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 the fundamental conceptual tool for examining a society shaped his thinking. Increasingly he saw class struggle as a fundamental force for social change. And, for him, class and race were inextricably interconnected.

Third, for Robeson, the theory of imperialism was central 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 central structural feature of relations among nation-states, ruling classes, and peoples in general.

Fourth, Robeson believed socialism could be 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 embraced 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 political activism 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 gave 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, anti-colonialism, the Communist movement, civil rights and anti-war 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 and 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 difference and unity. 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.

Marxist Ideas:

Historical and Dialectical Materialism

Marxist analysis begins with the presupposition that humans create the conditions for the production and reproduction of life. These involve the satisfaction of basic needs. To do so requires the organization of production: of human labor, technology, science, and society. “This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a ‘history’ independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition may hold men together.”

Labor in the Marxist schema is the ultimate human activity as it is the basis from which life is sustained. The kinds of productive activities humans engage in determine their existence and who they are. ”What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”

With this as a beginning, Marx described the historic transformation from one ‘mode of production’ to another. Capitalism and socialism were the prevailing modes of production in Robeson’s time. Capitalism is a mode of production in which one class owns and/or controls the means of production (factories, technologies, scientific expertise) and the other class, the workers, exchange their ability to do work for a wage which will be used to reproduce life. In the capitalist mode of production, the ruling class appropriates the value of goods and services produced by workers, which translates into profit, in exchange for which workers receive enough money to survive.

The capitalist mode of production is dynamic. The root of its existence is exploitation, the ability of capitalists to expropriate the value of goods and services produced by workers, and expansion, continued capital accumulation. As to the latter, capitalist units, banks and corporations, need to expand in the face of competition with adversaries. The watchwords of the system are “grow or die.” It is this expansion that takes capitalists all across the face of the globe with slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism as the result. And, since expanding capitalist enterprises and wealthier ruling classes increasingly dominate the political lives of their governments, capitalism was a system that bred competition and war between states.

Marx’s historical materialist method was not linear, it was not mechanistic. The rise of capitalism out of feudalism and the growth of monopoly capitalism out of its industrial capitalist precursor occurred in a world of conflict and turmoil; in a world of contradictory social, political, and societal forces, history was shaped. Dialectical materialism assumes that material reality is contradictory. All processes, all things, all objects, are and are not what they appear to be. Within each social process are embedded contradictory tendencies. The dialectical method rejects thinking in terms of fixed conceptual categories and notions of mutual exclusivity (a thing is either this or that). History was complex; complex to understand and complex to judge.

Class and Class Struggle

Exploitation in the Marxist tradition is the system by which the surplus produced by the worker is appropriated by the capitalist. When capitalists hire workers to labor for a given period of time, much of the value of the products that are produced are appropriated by them and become the basis for profit. Since capitalists own or control the means of production and wish to hire workers at the lowest possible wages, under the least favorable conditions, to be as productive as possible, and workers, to the contrary, have interests in appropriating more of the value of what they produce, class struggle is embedded at the point of production in the capitalist system.

During periods of intense struggle between capitalists and workers, capitalists utilize various strategies and governmental tools to weaken the resolve and organization of workers. Capitalism needs an industrial reserve army of un- and underemployed workers available to work for less and to drive down the price of work. In addition, capitalists use strategies such as production speedups and lengthening the work day to get more value out of their work forces. Historically, capitalists have used the importation of pools of workers from other countries to challenge the leverage of those already in the work force. And, significantly, capitalism has historically used racism and ethnic discrimination as tools to divide the workforce. Ultimately, Marx and Engels argued, capitalism was a historical system driven by class struggle.

Imperialism

Lenin drew upon Marxist theory to development an outlook on twentieth century imperialism that shaped progressive thinking throughout the years of Robeson’s activism. The Marxist-Leninist view of imperialism was that it was synonymous with capitalism during its monopoly stage.

As capitalism evolved from competition among numerous economic actors to concentration and centralization, and as state power became more concentrated, small numbers of corporations and banks acquired enormous amounts of wealth and power. To sustain the monopolistic nature of capitalism as it evolved in Europe and North America, the need for vital raw materials, cheap sources of labor, markets, and more investment opportunities became critical. Capitalism was a global system from its emergence out of feudalism in the sixteenth century but the breadth of its reach had increased ever since. And expansion to non-western regions of the globe and ultimately the establishment of a worldwide system of colonies controlled by Europe and North America became vital to the survival of capitalism as a global system. Capitalism needed slave, then cheap labor, agricultural commodities, and raw materials. Also customers for the goods produced in the capitalist centers that workers could not afford to purchase made non-western markets critical as well.

In addition to these reasons for the globalization of capitalism, Lenin argued that manufacturing and banking capital had become increasingly integrated and that the ever expanding accumulation of money capital required the growth of investment opportunities beyond national boundaries. Consequently, he warned, countries and territories of the Global South were becoming absorbed into the capitalist world system by way of investments in joint stock companies, loans, investments for overseas sale of goods, and the construction of production facilities. Imperialism, as domination and control of the economic life of oppressed peoples, became an intrinsic part of the process of capital accumulation and hence capitalism itself. In the modern world, capitalism and imperialism had become one and the same system.

Socialism

For Marx and later Lenin a socialist state represented the interests of the working class. The socialist state is a transitional stage of society which will some day be transformed to communism. Under socialism classes still survive; under communism they would disappear.

The socialist vision that has animated mass movements since the rise of capitalism is based on the proposition that the interests of the working class will be served in a socialist state in a way that they are not under capitalism. Thus, under socialism human needs will be fulfilled for all as best the society can afford, equality will be a value maximized along with freedom, and the state will engage in sustained efforts to eliminate historic patterns of discrimination based on race, gender, and ethnicity. In other words, under socialism, the state serves the interests of the entire working class instead of the capitalist class. Under socialism, Robeson believed, it was possible to envision the elimination of racism and sexism.

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 of the wealth they produced by tiny minorities. 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.”

Addressing the modern world, Robeson condemned United States support for the perpetuation of the British Empire which imposed “serfdom” in Asia and Africa and the apartheid regime in South Africa. He also argued that the United States thinks“… more of the profits of a few people of Standard Oil of this very state, than of the lives of one of the great peoples of the world.” Robeson said the directors of Standard Oil care nothing about working people; their sole motivation is profit. In summing up, Robeson claimed, millions of people throughout history have aspired and struggled so that the many can secure “some kind of real share of their labor, that the few shall not keep on controlling our land, that there must be an extension of this democracy to those who do not have it.”

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 likens it to the history of colonialism practiced by the British and other imperial powers. Most importantly, Robeson said the history of U.S. imperialism resembled 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 a history of domination and exploitation, the imperial system creates resistance and ultimately the forces that will overthrow it. Ever the “dialectician,” Robeson referred 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 recalled 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 in to 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 tiny, 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.

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.

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…

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. He 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 an illuminating interview in 1939, Robeson discussed the historic meaning of the folk songs he was singing and the ways in which his performances concretized the historic struggles of common people. His performances linked the historical context in which the songs of freedom originated and the contemporary struggles against racism and fascism. For example, the cry to “let my people go” had meaning for those fighting fascism in the 1930s as well as those chanting against slavery and feeling “like a motherless child” describes the pain and suffering of emigration in the face of fascist military expansion.

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 defined 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 discussed 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 grounded 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 portrays the “cultural front” of the 1930s as a broad network of organizational connections constituting a mass movement. The Communist Party of the United States was a significant element of this network, but it expanded well beyond the orbit of the party to encompass networks of performance artists, labor activists, civil rights workers, and varying anti-fascists forces in the United States. The cultural front was a mass movement, it was a cultural moment, it was an ambience or atmosphere that attracted millions of people. For Denning its most visible manifestation was the massive mobilization of workers to demand the right to form unions. The Congress of Industrial Organizations or CIO was its organizing vehicle.

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.

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)man kind” which he proclaimed.