Hard facts : Amiri Baraka and Marxism-Leninism in the 1970s

Previous critical discussions of Amiri Baraka have focused almost exclusively on the poetic and political work which predates his ‘conversion’ to Marxism-Leninism in 1974. Yet Baraka’s Marxist period, which lasted the majority of his career, was neither an aberration nor a footnote. Baraka did not simply fade away into obscurity once he became a Marxist; rather, he produced a large body of work that deserves reassessment, looking to the examples of Bolshevism and Maoism in order to build a viable mass politics and mass art. This chapter examines Baraka’s collections Hard Facts and Poetry for the Advanced, published in 1975 and 1979 respectively. While often dismissed as ‘dogmatic’ and ‘sloganeering’, these collections combine the polemic-prosaic with a ‘lyric necessity’ that never left Baraka. Baraka here shows himself to be a mature poet, drawing on the tradition of American socialist poetry – in particular, that of Langston Hughes – illuminating debates on the American left in a decade of increasing political fracture, and writing poems of absolute commitment to the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. In engaging with and reviving a neglected tradition of Soviet-influenced Afro-American Communism – one often forgotten in the wake of McCarthyism and the often explicitly anti-socialist discourses of black nationalism – Baraka’s work illuminates the fraught legacy of the Soviet revolution in black America at a time of divisive Cold War politics, in which the search for a workable mass politics and for a means of poetic expression adequate to this task was as vital as it now is today