The way Negroes were transported to this country and sold into slavery, then stripped of their tribal culture and held in bondage; and then allowed so teasingly and over so long a period of time, to be sucked into our way of life is something which resembles the rise of all men. . . .

They are outsiders and ... [t]hey are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time... . Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews... . They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak. . . . The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous.

Wright believed that racism, the very character of the system by which Black workers had been exploited, had mediated their internalization of the ruling ideas of American society. He went on to assert that, unlike the dominant sectors of European and Euro- American proletariats, the Black proletariat—historically from the legal and political disciplines of slavery to its peculiar condition as free wage labor—had developed a psychic and cultural identity independent from bourgeois ideology. This construction of Wright’s pushed the insights of Du Bois and others far beyond the critique of Black-white labor solidarity. What Wright was suggesting went even beyond the most extreme position in the 1930s of American radicals that Blacks were the vanguard of the American working class.

Wright was asserting that the Black revolutionary movement, in the process of transcending a chauvinistic nationalism, was emerging as a historical force that would challenge the very foundation of Western civilization:

Reduced to its simplest terms, theme for Negro writers will rise from understanding the meaning of their being transplanted from a “savage” to a “civilized” culture in implications. It means that Negro writers must have in their consciousness the fore- shortened picture of the whole, nourishing culture from which they were torn in Africa, and of the long, complex (and for the most part, unconscious) struggle to regain in some

form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again.

For Wright, it was at precisely this point, in the culture’s ideational, conceptual, and ideological extension, that the writer and other intellectuals are required. In the construction of myths and symbols emergent from the experience of Black people, the responsibility of the intellectuals was “to create values by which [their] race is to struggle, live and die.”

I maintain that the ultimate effect of white Europe upon Asia and Africa was to cast millions into a kind of spiritual void; I maintain that it suffused their lives with a sense of meaninglessness. I argue that it was not merely physical suffering or economic deprivation that has set over a billion and a half colored people in violent political motion. . . . The dynamic concept of the void that must be filled, a void created by a thoughtless and brutal impact of the West upon a billion and a half people, is more powerful than the concept of class conflict, and more universal.

Without myths, that is, without meaning, consciousness is set adrift into terror. The desperation that is the condition of this degree of alienation (or Max Scheler’s ressentiment, or Husserl’s “crisis”) inevitably requires violence. Violence is the final, the last possible form that social action may assume.

Moreover, Wright was demonstrating both the necessity and inevitability of ideology and its arbitrariness. No matter what meanings ideologies systematize, they are always subject to the abuses of power. When ideology is used for the purpose of domination, it must be opposed, not by a counterideology but by the negation of ideology: theory. In short, he was making the case for the necessity for a critical commitment, the sort of commitment that achieves its purpose by extraction from the historical legacy: the culture of a people. Such a commitment is made possible only through a consciousness capable of recreating meaning.

In The Outsider, Wright sought to subvert the two ideological and philosophic traditions at the heart of modern Western culture. First, he ridiculed the Judeo-Christian tradition by creating a protagonist whose very name is contradiction: Cross Damon—the demon Christ. Cross Damon has escaped Judeo-Christian morality through the recognition of its operative psychic force: a destructive, debilitating dread-guilt. Just as Marx earlier had recognized that religion (that is Judaism) “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions,” Wright had perceived the truer historical significance of Christianity among Blacks as not an instrument of domination but as a philosophic adaptation to oppression.

Moreover, he understood the resignation of Black Christianity as only one element in the culture of Blacks. In Black music, another more strident voice existed opposing that guilt:

[T]his music was the rhythmic flauntings of guilty feelings, the syncopated outpourings of frightened joy existing in guises forbidden and despised by others... . Negroes had been made to live in but not of the land of their birth. . . . [T]he injunctions of an alien Christianity and the strictures of white laws had evoked in them the very longings and desires that that religion and law had been designed to stifle. . . . [B]lue-jazz was a rebel art blooming seditiously under the condemnations of a Protestant ethic. . . . Blue-jazz was the scornful gesture of men turned ecstatic in their state of rejection . . . the recreations of

the innocently criminal.

The forces of science and technology and the processes of the proletarianization of Black workers were orchestrating the supercession of Black Christian resignation by this second, derisively angry, consciousness.

Marxism as an ideology and theory of history, Wright argued, was a product of a petit bourgeoisie, in particular, the intellectuals:

You must assume that I know what this is all about. Don’t tell me about the nobility of labor, the glorious future. You don’t believe in that. That’s for others, and you damn well know it. . . . You Jealous Rebels are intellectuals who know your history and you are anxious not to make the mistakes of your predecessors in rebellious undertakings.

He was no longer convinced that Marxism as a theory, as a theory of history or social revolution, was correct but he did understand its seductiveness. He would write in 1960: “Marxist ideology in particular is but a transitory make-shift pending a more accurate diagnosis... . Communism may be but a painful compromise containing a definition of man by sheer default.” He suspected that Marxism, alike with Christianity as an ideology, masked “complexities of history and social experience.” Its truer function was the social and intellectual cohesion of the petit bourgeoisie—a class very different from the proletariat:

[O]ne minority section of the white society in or under which he lives will offer the educated elite of Asia and Africa or black America an interpretation of the world which impels to action, thereby assuaging his feelings of inferiority. Nine times out of ten it can be easily pointed out that the ideology offered has no relation to the plight of the educated black, brown, or yellow elite But that ideology does solve something. . . . [I]t enabled the Negro or Asian or African to meet revolutionary fragments of the hostile race on a plane of equality.

Still, in this his most devastating criticism of Communism, Wright was relying on a notion of class struggle:

These men who rise to challenge the rulers are jealous men. They feel that they are just as good as the men who rule; indeed, they suspect that they are better. They see the countless mistakes that are being made by the men who rule and they think that they could do a more honest, a much cleaner job, a more efficient job.

Wright recognized Black nationalism as a product, in part, of both the objective necessities of capitalist development and accumulation, and its system of exploitation. As he turned toward the ideology of Black nationalism, he sought to comprehend its emergence in the contradictions of day-to-day experience:

[E]very day in this land some white man is cussing out some defenseless Negro. But that white bastard is too stupid to realise that his actions are being duplicated a million times in a million other spots by other whites who feel hatred for Negroes just like he does. He’s too blind to see that this daily wave of a million tiny assaults builds up a vast reservoir of resentment in Negroes.

But where Wright differed most with others who could employ a Marxist approach was in his characterization of the historical forces of ideology. Ideology was the special political instrument of the petit bourgeoisie. Wright was arguing that the renegades of this class that had served historically to produce the dominant ideas of the bourgeoisie, had themselves become contemptuous of the ruling class. The Jealous Rebels had declared, as Marx himself had written: “the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is

unfit to rule because it is incompetent.”

In his criticisms of Marxism, then, Wright was not entirely rejecting it but was attempting to locate it, to provide a sense of the boundaries of its authority. As a theory of society, he found it dissatisfying, indeed, reductionist. By itself it was insufficiently prescient of the several levels of collective consciousness. As an ideology, he recognized that it had never transcended its origins. It remained an ideology for the working classes rather than an ideology of the working classes. However, as a method of social analysis he found it compelling.

“[A]t the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.”

When the investigation into the conflicts extant between Western radicalism and the struggle for Black liberation was initiated, it was with the gnawing intuition that something known to be fundamental to the Western experience was being trivialized by the American radical tradition. Among my colleagues there was the sense that something so important as to challenge the very foundations of progressive politics and thought lay beyond the conceptualizations that admittedly had inspired formidable displays of progressive work and activity. Some knowledge, some aspect of Black consciousness was unaccounted for in the Marxist explication of the historical processes and source of the motives to which were attributed the social formations of the modern world. In its conceptually formidable reaction against irresponsible power, calculated social destruction, and the systematic exploitation of human beings, there seemed to us to be a discernible reluctance in Western radicalism, or to put it more strongly, a flight from the recognition that something more than objective material forces were responsible for “the nastiness” as Peter Blackman puts it. There was the sense that something of a more profound nature than the obsession with property was askew in a civilization that could organize and celebrate—on a scale beyond previous human experience—the brutal degradations of life and the most acute violations of human destiny. It seemed a certainty that the system of capitalism was part of it, but as well symptomatic of it. It needed a name as the philosopher Hobbes might say. It was not simply a question of outrage or concern for Black survival. It was a matter of comprehension.

The outrage, I believe, was most certainly informed by the Africanity of our consciousness—some epistemological measure culturally embedded in our minds that deemed that the racial capitalism we have been witness to was an unacceptable standard of human conduct. It was also the case that the source of our outrage characterized that conduct as inexplicable. The depths to which racialist behavior has fouled Western agencies transgressed against a world-consciousness rooted in our African past. Nevertheless, the sense of deep sadness at the spectacle of Western racial oppression is shared with other non-Western peoples. In these circumstances and in a certain sense only, Black survival must of course be taken as problematical. But its truer significance has been determined by received tradition.

I have said that the inquiry into what lay behind the sense of the inadequacies of the Marxian critique was compelled by the question of understanding. The encounter between African and European had been abrupt, not so much in historical terms as in philosophical ones. The Western civilization that burst forth from its medieval quarantine prosecuted its racial sense of social order, its feudal habits of domination, with a vengeance. By the ending of the Middle Ages, racialism was a routine manifestation, finding expression even in the more exotic mental recesses of the maniac and hysterical. For 400 years, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the capitalist mode of production in Europe engulfed agrarian and artisanal workers, transforming them over the generations into expropriated, dependent fodder for concentration in factories, disciplined to the rhythms and turbulences of the manufacturing process, the organizers of the capitalist world system appropriated Black labor power as constant capital. Blacks were extracted from their social formations through mechanisms that, by design and historical coincidence, minimized the disruption of the production of labor. While vast reserves of labor were amassed in the Poor Houses and slums of Europe’s cities and manufacturing towns and villages, in the African hinterland some semblance of traditional life continued to reproduce itself, sharing its social product—human beings—with the Atlantic slave system. For those African men and women whose lives were interrupted by enslavement and transportation, it was reasonable to expect that they would attempt, and in some ways realize, the recreation of their lives. It was not, however, an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans in the grasp of slavers, planters, merchants, and colonizers. Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, the values, ideas, conceptions, and constructions of reality from which resistance was manufactured. And in each instance of resistance, the social and psychological dynamics that are shared by human communities in long-term crises resolved for the rebels the particular moment, the collective and personal chemistries that congealed into social movement. But it was the materials constructed from a shared philosophy developed in the African past and transmitted as culture, from which revolutionary consciousness was realized and the ideology of struggle formed.

As we have commented, though rebellion might appear warranted to the Europeans who witnessed the uprisings of African peoples, the forms that Black resistance assumed were incomprehensible. Ultimately many such witnesses fell easily into whatever language was on hand to evoke mystery: the participants in Black resistance were seen as having reverted to savagery; were under the influence of satanic madmen; had passed beyond the threshold of sanity. To the Europeans charged with the responsibilities of preserving the sources of Black labor or control over that labor, the only effective response to Black rebellion was massive, indiscriminate violence and afterward the routine of brutality. More frequently than not, the logic of racial domination that had already endured for centuries invoked no alternatives. On this score it had always to be an unequal contest, not because of the superiority of weapons or the preponderance of numbers but because such violence did not come naturally to African peoples. The civilizations of Europe and Africa in those terms had also been very different. For far longer than a millennium, the history of Europe had amounted to an almost uninterrupted chronology of fratricidal warfare and its celebration. The museums of the civilization are the current testament to that preoccupation, its histories chilling accounts. In Africa, where the incident of state and imperial formations and total warfare were rarer, conflict could and was more frequently resolved by migration and resettlement. Eventually the penetration of Islam into Africa and the organization of the Red Sea and Mediterranean slave systems had made some real difference but it was the scale of the Atlantic slave trade and the racial cacophony of European colonialism that would dictate the more profound adjustment to violence. And this too was misunderstood by the Europeans, translated as might be expected into the discourse of superior and inferior races. While the European ruling classes humbled their own workers by force and cultural hegemony, the points of contact between Europeans and Blacks were enveloped by violence.

The anticolonial struggles that were increasingly mounted from the mid-nineteenth century on were the beginnings of the transformation of Black radicalism into an engaged confrontation with European domination. Indeed, it was as a response to the mass resistances to colonialism that the other human contradictions to which colonial domination was inherently vulnerable were catalyzed. The very nature of colonial dominance required the adaptation or creation of privileged strata among the dominated people. And from the conflict, which was inevitable between the native “bourgeoisie” and their colonial masters, a renegade intelligentsia was induced, one to which the idea of a total opposition, a nationalist confrontation and critique of Western society was necessary and natural. The experience of the Black petit bourgeoisies, their intimacy with European power, culture, society, and racism, and their contradictory relations to them, in time drew from t heir number nationalists and radical nationalists. While t he nationalists generally confined their attentions to the struggles at home where their ambitions could most immediately be realized, the radical nationalists were really internationalists, settling into variants of Pan-Africanism or socialism. Invariably, some of the radicals would be ideologically attracted to the opposition movements gestated within Western society itself. Their ambivalence toward the Black masses, their social and psychological identification with European culture made the analytical and theoretical authority of European socialism an almost irresistible political ideology. For some that proved sufficient. For others, however, the continuing formation of militant nationalist and workers’ movements in the colonial world raised questions about the breadth and acuity of European socialists. And as mass Black radicalism adapted to the instrument of people’s wars as the form of the anti-imperialist struggle, its revolutionary intelligentsia began the critique or relocation of socialist theory. For them, the struggles of the European working classes were linked with the anti-imperialist movements of the nonindustrial world. The gulf between class struggle and anti-imperialist and nationalist activity began to be closed.

In the Caribbean and North America (where a racial politics analogous to that of colonialism had produced a complementary Black radical intelligentsia), when for much of the first half of the twentieth century the crises of monopoly capitalism struck the world system, a generation of these ideologues was already formed and ready to respond to the social upheavals in Europe, America, and the colonial world. Others affixed themselves to socialist movements after the rebellions of European workers had subsided and bourgeois democracy, the liberal representation of monopoly capitalism from its infancy, gave way in Italy, Germany, and Spain to the more openly repressive face of the fascist state. To the colonial and American Black radicals, the objections raised to fascism by liberal and socialist ideologues brought to the fore the parallels between colonialism and fascism and the ambivalence, hypocrisies, and impotence of the intellectuals in the metropoles of the European empires. Many of the leading activists among the Black intelligentsia, having previously committed themselves to drawing their nationalist struggles within the orbit of the socialist movement, found it necessary to move past their European comrades. It was both natural and historically logical that some would resurrect Pan-Africanism as a radical ideology and recognize further its potential as a radical theory of struggle and history. From the early 1930s on, a radical Pan-Africanism emerged. And in the work of Du Bois, James, and Wright, of Oliver Cox, Eric Williams, and George Padmore, the elements of its first phase were discernible.

When Du Bois and James set about the recovery of the history of the revolutionary Black struggle, they were driven from an implied to an explicit critique of Marxism. As Black men grown sensitive to the day-to-day heroism demanded for Black survival, they were particularly troubled by the casual application of preformed categories to Black social movements. It appeared to them that Western Marxists, unconsciously bound by a Eurocentric perspective, could not account for nor correctly assess the revolutionary forces emerging from the Third World. The racial metaphysics of Western consciousness —the legacy of a civilization—shielded their fellow socialists from the recognition of racialism’s influence on the development and structures of the capitalist system, and conceptually pardoned them from a more acute inquiry into the categories of their own thought. Without some form of intervention, the socialist movement would be doomed to disaster.

The first initiative of Du Bois, who himself had been matured by his encounter with American Black nationalism, was to reassess the historical role of the industrial working classes. In the beginning he had intended a modest proposal: without the aid of the Black masses, no American working-class movement could succeed in overturning the capitalist ruling class. However, his investigation of the Black radical tradition of the mid- nineteenth century pushed his analysis further and deeper, beyond the presumptions of the revolutionary theory and politics of his time. Anticipating the more sustained expositions of Eric Williams and Oliver Cox, Du Bois became convinced that capitalism and slavery were related systemically; that monopoly capitalism had extended rather than arrested that relationship; and that the forces implicated in the dissolution of capitalism could emerge from the contradictions of that relationship. History provided his evidence. In the turbulence of the American Civil War and a social revolution carried through by the mobilized slaves and the white agrarian workers, it had been the manufacturing and industrial working classes that had hesitated, drawn to counterrevolution by racism and a short-sighted perception of their class interest. The class struggle had been distorted and a proletarian revolutionary consciousness among nineteenth-century American workers had been effectively interdicted by the ideological power of racism and the seductiveness of the bourgeois myth of social mobility. It was the slaves (in truth an enslaved peasantry) and other agrarian workers who had mounted the attack on capitalism. It was, Du Bois observed, from the periphery and not the center that the most sustained threat to the American capitalist system had materialized. The rebellious slaves, vitalized by a world-consciousness drawn from African lore and composing their American experience into a rebellious art, had constituted one of the crucial social bases in contradiction to bourgeois society. For Du Bois, the recovery of this last fact became as elementary to revolutionary theory as a recognition of the peasant masses whose revolts in Russia, Mexico, and China had rocked the ruling classes of the twentieth century. Just as important for him, however, was the realization that the racism of the American “white” working classes and their general ideological immaturity had abnegated the extent to which the conditions of capitalist production and relations alone could be held responsible for the social development of the American proletariat. The collective and individual identities of American workers had responded as much to race as they had to class. The relations of production were not determinant. Du Bois would pursue this issue politically but not theoretically. Nevertheless, it had become clear to him that in Marxist theory much uncertainty remained with respect to the significance that could be made of the historical appearance of the proletarian class under capitalism and the evolution of working-class consciousness.

For a decade after the appearance of The Black Jacobins, James would wrestle with the social and ideological ambivalence of this “renegade” strata, eventually articulating a critique of it as the source of leadership of the revolutionary masses. In Haiti as well as in Russia, Lenin’s theory of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” had been shown to be insufficient. No revolutionary cadre, divorced from the masses, ensconced in state bureaucracy, and abrogating to itself the determination of the best interests of the masses, could sustain the revolution or itself. James would come to the theoretical position that “in the decisive hour” (as Marx and Engels were wont to say) it was only the consciousness and activity of the revolutionary masses that could preserve the revolution from compromise, betrayal, or the ill-considered usurpation of revolutionary authority. It was his study of the revolutionary masses of Haiti, France, Russia and Africa, and his work in England, America and Trinidad rather than the Bolshevik state that would persuade him of the actual fact of Lenin’s dictum: “every cook can govern.”

But it was Richard Wright who was better placed than either Du Bois, James, Padmore, Williams, or Cox to articulate the revolutionary consciousness of the Black masses and to assess the cultural debilitation of Marxian politics. Wright had as his vantage points his origins in the rural and urban Black working classes and his experience of the American Communist movement. Unlike Du Bois who came to Black cultural life from its margins and would stand at a distance to describe the revolutionary ideas of the American slaves as a mixture of legend, whimsy, and art, and unlike James whose appreciation of Black culture was often cerebral (“the medium” is how James would describe the voodoo ideology of the Haitian revolutionists, and the calypso of the West Indian masses) when not single-minded (about cricket and the novels of his age-mates and peers), Wright evoked in his writings the language and experience of “ordinary” Black men and women. In this way he pressed home the recognition that whatever the objective forces propelling a people toward struggle, resistance, and revolution, they would come to that struggle in their own cultural terms. Among Blacks, a culture of a mass conscious of itself had evolved from African civilization, the centuries of resistance to slavery, and the opposition to a racial social order. In the syncopations and the phrases, the scamp and the beat, the lyric and melody of Black language, Black beliefs, Black music, sexual and social relations and encounters, Wright’s work reconstructed the resonances of Black American consciousness in its contests with reality. The quests pursued in his novels and essays were set to the improvisational possibilities obtained in that Black culture’s collisions with its own parameters and those prescribed by the market forces and labor demands of capitalism and by a racialist culture. From the measured discourse of a Black culture he illustrated the limits of a socialist movement that persisted in too many abstractions, too far removed, and was prey to the arrogance of racial paternalism. Wright made it clear that the objections raised by Du Bois, Padmore, James, Williams, Cox, and other Black radicals were grounded from below in the historical consciousness of the Black masses. In Wright’s time, in part because of the various native and immigrant national and ethnic constituents making it up, the “white” working class had not yet obtained a collective historical and cultural integration of its own. As a class brought into being at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century by racial capitalism, to the extent that it existed, the workers’ collective consciousness remained a racial one subject to the disciplining ideologies of the bourgeois class and responsive to what they had been led to believe was “American culture.” While that was true, only a small fraction of the class was capable of an alliance with the Black liberation struggle. In the meanwhile, it became increasingly clear to Wright and his colleagues that the project of revolutionary change required reassessment and reconceptualization.

It is now a generation later. In the intervening years the Black radical tradition has matured, assuming new forms in revolutionary movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. In the ideas of revolutionaries, among them Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, Robert Mugabe, Augustinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, Marcelino dos Santos, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Walter Rodney, and Angela Davis, Black radicalism has remained a currency of resistance and revolt. However, the evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition. Doubtlessly there have been advantages to this. There have been no sacred texts to be preserved from the ravages of history. There have been no intellects or leaders whose authority secured ideological and theoretical conformity and protected their ideas from criticism. There has been no theory to inoculate the movements of resistance from change. But it, too, is certain that there have been disadvantages; partial comprehensions that it has now become imperative to transcend. The fractioning of African peoples is dysfunctional.

Meanwhile the clock of “modern times” is running down. Within Western culture, that is the very civilization that in recent centuries has dominated a quarter of the world and acquired so little consciousness in its experience with the rest, what once were but faint signs of breakdown are now in bold evidence. Not even the brilliant wizardry of high technological achievement can mute the rumblings from the degenerating mechanism. It is the occasion of opposition and contradiction and the moment of opportunity. That is because the times that mark the dissolutions of civilizations compound the maturations of both internal and external processes.

Physically and ideologically, and for rather unique historical reasons, African peoples bridge the decline of one world order and the eruption (we may surmise) of another. It is a frightful and uncertain space of being. If we are to survive, we must take nothing that is dead and choose wisely from among the dying.

The industrial nations are self-destructing. Others, too, of course, will be affected. But the racial mythology that accompanied capitalist industrial formation and provided its social structures engendered no truly profound alternatives. The social, ideological, and political oppositions generated within Western societies have proven unequal to the task. They have acquired historical significance only when they received comfort in the consciousness of Third World peoples. There they mingled with other cultures, taking their place among social priorities and historical visions largely alien from their sites of origin. Such instances were the agrarian socialist revolutions among the Indian peasants of Mexico early in this century; the coterminous social revolutions and nationalist upheavals within the Russian Empire; the revolutionary peasant movements of China and India; and in the period following the Second World War, the national liberation movements of Madagascar and Cuba and on the continents of Africa and Central and South America. The critique of the capitalist world system acquired determinant force not from movements of industrial workers in the metropoles but from those of the “backward” peoples of the world. Only an inherited but rationalized racial arrogance and a romanticism stiffened by pseudoscience could manage to legitimate a denial of these occurrences. Western Marxism, in either of its two variants—critical-humanist or scientific—has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of liberation. The ensuing errors have sometimes been horrendous, inducing in their wake dogmas of certainty characterized by desperation.

The Black radical tradition suggests a more complete contradiction. In social and political practice, it has acquired its immediate momentum from the necessity to respond to the persisting threats to African peoples characteristic of the modern world system. Over the many generations, the specificity of resistance—at best securing only a momentary respite—has given way to the imperatives of broader collectivities. Particular languages, cultures, and social sensibilities have evolved into world-historical consciousness. The distinctions of political space and historical time have fallen away so that the making of one Black collective identity suffuses nationalisms. Harbored in the African diaspora there is a single historical identity that is in opposition to the systemic privations of racial capitalism. Ideologically, it cements pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action. It deepens with each disappointment at false mediation and reconciliation, and is crystallized into ever-increasing cores by betrayal and repression. The resoluteness of the Black radical tradition advances as each generation assembles the data of its experience to an ideology of liberation. The experimentation with Western political inventories of change, specifically nationalism and class struggle, is coming to a close. Black radicalism is transcending those traditions in order to adhere to its own authority. It will arrive as points of resistance here, rebellion there, and mass revolutionary movements still elsewhere. But each instance will be formed by the Black radical tradition in an awareness of the others and the consciousness that there remains nothing to which it may return. Molded by a long and brutal experience and rooted in a specifically African development, the tradition will provide for no compromise between liberation and annihilation.

The radical nationalist movements of our time in Africa and the African diaspora have come at a historical moment when substantial numbers of the world’s Black peoples are under the threat of physical annihilation or the promise of prolonged and frightening debilitation. The famines that have always accompanied the capitalist world system’s penetration of societies have increased in intensity and frequency. The appearance of literally millions of Black refugees, drifting helplessly beyond the threshold of human sensibility, their emaciated bodies feeding on their own tissues, have become commonplace. The systematic attack on radical Black polities, and the manipulation of venal political puppets are now routine occurrences. Where Blacks were once assured of some sort of minimal existence as a source of cheap labor, mass unemployment and conditions of housing and health that are of near-genocidal proportions obtain. The charades of neocolonialism and race relations have worn thin. In the metropoles, imprisonment, the stupor of drugs, the use of lethal force by public authorities and private citizens, and the more petty humiliations of racial discrimination have become epidemic. And over the heads of all, but most particularly those of the Third World, hangs the discipline of massive nuclear force. Not one day passes without confirmation of the availability and the willingness to use force in the Third World. It is not the province of one people to be the solution or the problem. But a civilization maddened by its own perverse assumptions and contradictions is loose in the world. A Black radical tradition formed in opposition to that civilization and conscious of itself is one part of the solution. Whether the other oppositions generated from within Western society and without will mature remains problematical. But for now we must be as one.

The lie, the perfect lie, about people whom we know, about the relations that we have had with them, about our motive for some action, a motive which we express in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to the person who loves us and believes that she has fashioned us in her own image because she keeps on kissing us morning, noon and night, that lie is one of the only things in the world that can open a window for us upon what is novel, unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses to the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

But as the poet Saitō Ryokū has said, “elegance is frigid.”

Of course this “sheen of antiquity” of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling—which is to say grime. If indeed “elegance is frigid,” it can as well be described as filthy.

to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.

Not long ago a newspaper reporter came to interview me on the subject of unusual foods, and I described to him the persimmon-leaf sushi made by the people who live deep in the mountains of Yoshino—and which I shall take the opportunity to introduce to you here. To every ten parts of rice one part of sake is added just when the water comes to a boil. When the rice is done it should be cooled thoroughly, after which salt is applied to the hands and the rice molded into bite-size pieces. At this stage the hands must be absolutely free of moisture, the secret being that only salt should touch the rice. Thin slices of lightly salted salmon are placed on the rice, and each piece is wrapped in a persimmon leaf, the surface of the leaf facing inward. Both the persimmon leaves and the salmon should be wiped with a dry cloth to remove any moisture. Then in a rice tub or sushi box, the interior of which is perfectly dry, the pieces are packed standing on end so that no space remains between them, and the lid is put in place and weighted with a heavy stone, as in making pickles. Prepared in the evening, the sushi should be ready to eat the next morning. Though the taste is best on the first day, it remains edible for two or three days. A slight bit of vinegar is sprinkled over each piece with a sprig of bitter nettle just before eating.

I learned of the dish from a friend who had been to Yoshino and found it so exceptionally good that he took the trouble to learn how to make it—but if you have the persimmon leaves and salted salmon it can be made anywhere. You need only remember to keep out every trace of moisture, and to cool the rice completely. I made some myself, and it was very good indeed. The oil of the salmon “as soft as if it were fresh—the flavor is indescribable, and far better than the sushi one gets in Tokyo.

Mrs. Tanizanki tells a story of when her late husband decided, as he frequently did, to build a new house. The architect arrived and announced with pride, “I’ve read your In Praise of Shadows, Mr. Tanizaki, and know exactly what you want.” To which Tanizaki replied, “But no, I could never live in a house like that.”

The way is empty,

used, but not used up.

Deep, yes! ancestral

to the ten thousand things.

Blunting edge,

loosing bond,

dimming light,

the way is the dust of the way.

Quiet,

yes, and likely to endure.

Whose child? born

before the gods.

Tue goodness

is like water.

Water’s good

for everything.

It doesn’t compete.

It goes right

to the low loathsome places,

and so finds the way.

For a house,

the good thing is level ground.

In thinking,

depth is good.

The good of giving is magnanimity;

of speaking, honesty;

of government, order.

The good of work is skill,

and of action, timing.

No competition,

so no blame.

Brim-fill the bowl,

it’ll spill over.

Keep sharpening the blade,

you’ll soon blunt it.

Nobody can protect

a house full of gold and jade.

Wealth, status, pride,

are their own ruin.

To do good, work well, and lie low

is the way of the blessing.

Thirsty spokes

meet in the hub.

Where the wheel isn’t

is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out,

clay makes a pot.

Where the pot’s not

is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows

to make a room.

Where the room isn’t,

there’s room for you.

So the profit in what is

is in the use of what isn’t.

one of those counterintuitive truths that, when the mind can accept them, suddenly double the size of the universe.

To be in favor or disgrace

is to live in fear.

To take the body seriously

is to admit one can suffer.

What does that mean,

to be in favor or disgrace

is to live in fear?

Fear debases:

we fear to lose it,

fear to win it.

So to be in favor or disgrace

is to live in fear.

What does that mean,

to take the body seriously

is to admit one can suffer?

I suffer because I’m a body;

if I weren’t a body,

how could I suffer?

So people who set their bodily good

before the public good

could be entrusted with the commonwealth,

and people who treated the body politic

as gently as their own body

would be worthy to govern the commonwealth.

In the degradation of the great way

come benevolence and righteousness.

With the exaltation of learning and prudence

comes immense hypocrisy.

The disordered family

is full of dutiful children and parents.

The disordered society

is full of loyal patriots.

Nature doesn’t make long speeches.

A whirlwind doesn’t last all morning.

A cloudburst doesn’t last all day.

Who makes the wind and rain?

Heaven and earth do.

If heaven and earth don’t go on and on,

certainly people don’t need to.

The people who work with Tao

are Tao people,

they belong to the Way.

People who work with power

belong to power.

People who work with loss

belong to what’s lost.

Give yourself to the Way

and you’ll be at home on the Way.

Give yourself to power

and you’ll be at home in power

Give yourself to loss

and when you’re lost you’ll be at home.

To give no trust

is it get no trust.

Even the best weapon

is an unhappy tool,

hateful to living things.

So the follower of the Way

stays away from it.

Weapons are unhappy tools,

not chosen by thoughtful people,

to be used only when there is no choice,

and with a calm, still mind,

without enjoyment.

To enjoy using weapons

is to enjoy killing people,

and to enjoy killing people

is to lose your share in the common good.

It is right that the murder of many people

be mourned and lamented.

It is right that a victor in war

be received with funeral ceremonies.

Knowing other people in intelligence,

knowing yourself is wisdom.

Overcoming others takes strength,

overcoming yourself takes greatness.

Contentment is wealth.

Boldly pushing forward takes resolution.

Staying put keeps you in position.

To live till you die

is to live long enough.

Holding fast to the great thought

and all the world will come to you,

harmless, peaceable, serene.

Walking around, we stop

for music, for food.

But if you taste the Way

it’s flat, insipid.

It looks like nothing much,

it sounds like nothing much.

And yet you can’t get enough of it.

Great power, not clinging to power,

has true power.

Lesser power, clinging to power,

lacks true power.

Great power, doing nothing,

has nothing to do.

Lesser power, doing nothing,

has an end in view.

The good the truly good do

has no end in view.

The right the very righteous do

has an end in view.

And those who act in true obedience to law

roll up their sleeves

and make the disobedient obey.

So: when we lose the Way we find power;

losing power we find goodness;

losing goodness we find righteousness;

losing righteousness we’re left with obedience.

Obedience to law is the dry husk

of loyalty and good faith.

pinion is the barren flower of the Way,

the beginning of ignorance.

So great-minded people

abide in the kernel not the husk,

in the fruit not the flower,

letting the one go, keeping the other.

A multiplicity of riches

is poverty.

Jade is praised as precious,

but its strength is being stone.

Thoughtful people hear about the Way

and try hard to follow it.

Ordinary people hear about the Way

and wander onto it and off it.

Thoughtless people hear about the Way

and make jokes about it.

It wouldn’t be the Way

if there weren’t jokes about it.

So they say:

The Way’s brightness looks like darkness;

advancing on the Way feels like retreating;

the palin Way seems hard going.

The height of power seems a valley;

the amplest power seems not enough;

the firmest power seems feeble.

Perfect whiteness looks dirty.

The pure and simple looks chaotic.

The great square has no corners.

The great vessel is never finished.

The great tone is barely heard.

The great thought can’t be thought.

The Way is hidden

in its namelessness.

But only the Way

begins, sustains, fulfills.

What’s softest in the world

rushes and runs

over what’s hardest in the world.

The immaterial

enters

the impenetrable.

So I know the good in not doing.

The wordless teaching,

the profit in not doing—

not many people understand it.

What’s perfectly whole seems flawed,

but you can use it forever.

What’s perfectly full seems empty,

but you can’t use it up.

True straightness looks crooked.

Great skill looks clumsy.

Real eloquence seems to stammer.

To be comfortable in the cold, keep moving;

to be comfortable in the heat, hold still;

to be comfortable in the world, stay calm and clear.

When the world’s on the Way,

they use horses to haul manure.

When the world gets off the Way,

they breed warhorses on the common.

The greatest evil: wanting more.

The worst luck: discontent.

Greed’s the curse of life.

To know enough’s enough

is enough to know.

The wise have no mind of their own,

finding it in the minds

of ordinary people.

They’re good to good people

and they’re good to bad people.

Power is goodness.

They trust people of good faith

and they trust people of bad faith.

Power is trust.

They mingle their life with the world,

they mix their mind up with the world.

Ordinary people look after them.

Wise souls are children.

Who knows

doesn’t talk.

Who talks

doesn’t know.

Closing the openings,

shutting doors,

blunting edge,

loosing bond,

dimming light,

be one with the dust of the way.

So you come to the deep sameness.

Then you can’t be controlled by love

or by rejection.

You can’t be controlled by profit

or by loss.

You can’t be controlled by praise or by humiliation.

Then you have honor under heaven.

Run the country by doing what’s expected.

Win the war by doing the unexpected.

Control the world by doing nothing.

How do I know that?

By this.

The more restrictions and prohibitions in the world,

the poorer people get.

The more experts the country has

the more of a mess it’s in.

The more ingenious the skillful are,

the more monstrous their inventions.

The louder the call for law and order,

the more the thieves and con men multiply.

So a wise leader might say:

I practice inaction, and the people look after themselves.

I love to be quiet, and the people themselves find justice.

I don’t do business, and the people prosper on their own.

I don’t have wants, and the people themselves are uncut wood.

Do without doing.

Act without action.

Savor the flavorless.

Treat the small as large,

the few as many.

Meet injury

with the power of goodness.

Study the hard while it’s easy.

Do big things while they’re small.

The hardest jobs in the world start out easy,

the great affairs of the world start small.

So the wise soul, by never dealing with great things,

gets great things done.

Now, since taking things too lightly makes them worthless,

and taking things too easy makes them hard,

the wise soul,

by treating the easy as hard,

doesn’t find anything.

It’s easy to keep hold of what hasn’t stirred,

easy to plan what hasn’t occurred.

It’s easy to shatter delicate things,

easy to scatter little things.

Do things before they happen.

Get them straight before they get mixed up.

The tree you can’t reach your arms around

grew from a tiny seedling.

The nine-story tower rises

from a heap of clay.

The ten-thousand-mile journey

begins beneath your foot.

Do, and do wrong;

Hold on, and lose.

Not doing, the wise soul

doesn’t do it wrong

and not holding on,

doesn’t lose it.

(In all their undertakings,

it’s just as they’re almost finished

that people go wrong.

Mind the end as the beginning,

then it won’t go wrong.)

That’s why the wise

want not to want,

care nothing for hard-won treasures,

learn not to be learned,

turn back to what people overlooked.

They go along with things as they are,

but don’t presume to act.

Once upon a time

those who ruled according to the Way

didn’t use it to make people knowing

but to keep them unknowing.

People get hard to manage

when they know too much.

Whoever rules by intellect

is a curse upon the land.

Whoever rules by ignorance

is a blessing on it.

To understand these things

is to have a pattern and a model,

and to understand the pattern and the model

is mysterious power.

Mysterious power

goes deep.

It reaches far.

It follows things back,

clear back to the great oneness.

This is a mystical statement about government—and in our minds those two realms are worlds apart. I cannot make the leap between them. I can only ponder it.

Lakes and rivers are lords of the hundred valleys.

Why? Because they’ll go lower.

So they’re the lords of the hundred valleys.

Just so, a wise soul,

wanting to be above other people,

talks to them from below

and to guide them

follows them.

And so the wise soul

predominates without dominating,

and leads without misleading.

And people don’t get tired

of enjoying and praising

one who, not competing,

has in all the world

no competitor.

The expert in warfare says:

Rather than dare make the attack

I’d take the attack;

rather than dare advance an inch

I’d retreat a foot.

It’s called marching without marching,

rolling up your sleeves without flexing your muscles,

being armed without weapons,

giving the attacker no opponent.

Nothing’s worse than attacking what yields.

To attack what yields is to throw away the prize.

So, when matched armies meet,

the one who comes to grief

is the true victor.

In my obscurity

is my value.

That’s why the wise

wear their jade under common clothes.

To know without knowing is best.

Not knowing without knowing it is sick.

To be sick of sickness

is the only cure.

The wise aren’t sick.

They’re sick of sickness,

so they’re well.

People are starving.

The rich gobble taxes,

that’s why people are starving.

People rebel.

The rich oppress them,

that’s why people rebel.

People hold life cheap.

The rich make it too costly,

that’s why people hold it cheap.

But those who don’t live for the sake of living

are worth more than the wealth-seekers.

Living people

are soft and tender.

Corpses are hard and stiff.

The ten thousand things,

the living grass, the trees,

are soft, pliant.

Dead, they’re dry and brittle.

So hardness and stiffness

go with death;

tenderness, softness,

go with life.

And the hard sword fails,

the stiff tree’s felled.

The hard and great go under.

The soft and weak stay up.

Nothing in the world

is as soft, as weak, as water;

nothing else can wear away

the hard, the strong,

and remain unaltered.

Soft overcomes hard,

weak overcomes strong.

Everybody knows it,

nobody uses the knowledge.

So the wise say:

by bearing common defilements

you become a sacrificer at the altar of earth;

by bearing common evils

you become a lord of the world.

Right words sound wrong.

Let there be a little country without many people.

Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,

and never use them.

Let them be mindful of death

and disinclined to long journeys.

They’d have ships and carriages,

but no place to go.

They’d have armor and weapons, but no parades.

Instead of writing,

they might go back to using knotted cords.

They’d enjoy eating,

take pleasure in clothes,

be happy with their houses,

devoted to their customs.

The next little country might be so close

the people could hear cocks crowing

and dogs barking there,

but they’d get old and die

without ever having been there.

Seaton reminded me that “doing without doing is doing, not not doing.”

The words I translate “experts” literally mean “sharp weapons,” but the term implies “pundits, know-it-alls.” I was tempted to say “smart bombs,” which is too cute and topical, but which would certainly lead nearly to the next lines.

To dismiss this Utopia as simply regressivist or anti-technological to miss an interesting point. These people have labor-saving machinery, ships and land vehicles, weapons of offense and defense. They “have them and don’t use them.” I interpret: they aren’t used by them. We’re used, our lives shaped and controlled, by our machines, cars, planes, weaponry, bulldozers, computers. These Taoists don’t surrender their power to their creations.

The eleventh line, however, is certainly regressive if it says knotted cords are to replace written literature, history, mathematics, and so on. It might be read as saying it’s best not to externalize all our thinking and remember (as we do in writing and reading), but to keep it embodied, to think and remember with our bodies as well as our verbalizing brains.

Wright was arguing that American Blacks had been re-created from their African origins by an oppressive system of capitalist exploitation that had at one and the same time integrated them into the emergent organization of industrial production while suspending them from the full impact of bourgeois ideology. Perhaps Wright put this most succinctly several years later in The Outsider when Ely Houston, one of Wright’s two spokesmen in the novel, observed: The way Negroes were transported to this country and sold into slavery, then stripped of their tribal culture and held in bondage; and then allowed so teasingly and over so long a period of time, to be sucked into our way of life is something which resembles the rise of all men. . . . They are outsiders and ... [t]hey are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time... . Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews... . They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak. . . . The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous. Wright believed that racism, the very character of the system by which Black workers had been exploited, had mediated their internalization of the ruling ideas of American society. He went on to assert that, unlike the dominant sectors of European and Euro- American proletariats, the Black proletariat—historically from the legal and political disciplines of slavery to its peculiar condition as free wage labor—had developed a psychic and cultural identity independent from bourgeois ideology. This construction of Wright’s pushed the insights of Du Bois and others far beyond the critique of Black-white labor solidarity. What Wright was suggesting went even beyond the most extreme position in the 1930s of American radicals that Blacks were the vanguard of the American working class. Wright was asserting that the Black revolutionary movement, in the process of transcending a chauvinistic nationalism, was emerging as a historical force that would challenge the very foundation of Western civilization: Reduced to its simplest terms, theme for Negro writers will rise from understanding the meaning of their being transplanted from a “savage” to a “civilized” culture in implications. It means that Negro writers must have in their consciousness the fore- shortened picture of the whole, nourishing culture from which they were torn in Africa, and of the long, complex (and for the most part, unconscious) struggle to regain in some form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again. For Wright, it was at precisely this point, in the culture’s ideational, conceptual, and ideological extension, that the writer and other intellectuals are required. In the construction of myths and symbols emergent from the experience of Black people, the responsibility of the intellectuals was “to create values by which [their] race is to struggle, live and die.” I maintain that the ultimate effect of white Europe upon Asia and Africa was to cast millions into a kind of spiritual void; I maintain that it suffused their lives with a sense of meaninglessness. I argue that it was not merely physical suffering or economic deprivation that has set over a billion and a half colored people in violent political motion. . . . The dynamic concept of the void that must be filled, a void created by a thoughtless and brutal impact of the West upon a billion and a half people, is more powerful than the concept of class conflict, and more universal. Without myths, that is, without meaning, consciousness is set adrift into terror. The desperation that is the condition of this degree of alienation (or Max Scheler’s ressentiment, or Husserl’s “crisis”) inevitably requires violence. Violence is the final, the last possible form that social action may assume. Moreover, Wright was demonstrating both the necessity and inevitability of ideology and its arbitrariness. No matter what meanings ideologies systematize, they are always subject to the abuses of power. When ideology is used for the purpose of domination, it must be opposed, not by a counterideology but by the negation of ideology: theory. In short, he was making the case for the necessity for a critical commitment, the sort of commitment that achieves its purpose by extraction from the historical legacy: the culture of a people. Such a commitment is made possible only through a consciousness capable of recreating meaning. In The Outsider, Wright sought to subvert the two ideological and philosophic traditions at the heart of modern Western culture. First, he ridiculed the Judeo-Christian tradition by creating a protagonist whose very name is contradiction: Cross Damon—the demon Christ. Cross Damon has escaped Judeo-Christian morality through the recognition of its operative psychic force: a destructive, debilitating dread-guilt. Just as Marx earlier had recognized that religion (that is Judaism) “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions,” Wright had perceived the truer historical significance of Christianity among Blacks as not an instrument of domination but as a philosophic adaptation to oppression. Moreover, he understood the resignation of Black Christianity as only one element in the culture of Blacks. In Black music, another more strident voice existed opposing that guilt: [T]his music was the rhythmic flauntings of guilty feelings, the syncopated outpourings of frightened joy existing in guises forbidden and despised by others... . Negroes had been made to live in but not of the land of their birth. . . . [T]he injunctions of an alien Christianity and the strictures of white laws had evoked in them the very longings and desires that that religion and law had been designed to stifle. . . . [B]lue-jazz was a rebel art blooming seditiously under the condemnations of a Protestant ethic. . . . Blue-jazz was the scornful gesture of men turned ecstatic in their state of rejection . . . the recreations of the innocently criminal. The forces of science and technology and the processes of the proletarianization of Black workers were orchestrating the supercession of Black Christian resignation by this second, derisively angry, consciousness. Marxism as an ideology and theory of history, Wright argued, was a product of a petit bourgeoisie, in particular, the intellectuals: You must assume that I know what this is all about. Don’t tell me about the nobility of labor, the glorious future. You don’t believe in that. That’s for others, and you damn well know it. . . . You Jealous Rebels are intellectuals who know your history and you are anxious not to make the mistakes of your predecessors in rebellious undertakings. He was no longer convinced that Marxism as a theory, as a theory of history or social revolution, was correct but he did understand its seductiveness. He would write in 1960: “Marxist ideology in particular is but a transitory make-shift pending a more accurate diagnosis... . Communism may be but a painful compromise containing a definition of man by sheer default.” He suspected that Marxism, alike with Christianity as an ideology, masked “complexities of history and social experience.” Its truer function was the social and intellectual cohesion of the petit bourgeoisie—a class very different from the proletariat: [O]ne minority section of the white society in or under which he lives will offer the educated elite of Asia and Africa or black America an interpretation of the world which impels to action, thereby assuaging his feelings of inferiority. Nine times out of ten it can be easily pointed out that the ideology offered has no relation to the plight of the educated black, brown, or yellow elite But that ideology does solve something. . . . [I]t enabled the Negro or Asian or African to meet revolutionary fragments of the hostile race on a plane of equality. Still, in this his most devastating criticism of Communism, Wright was relying on a notion of class struggle: These men who rise to challenge the rulers are jealous men. They feel that they are just as good as the men who rule; indeed, they suspect that they are better. They see the countless mistakes that are being made by the men who rule and they think that they could do a more honest, a much cleaner job, a more efficient job. Wright recognized Black nationalism as a product, in part, of both the objective necessities of capitalist development and accumulation, and its system of exploitation. As he turned toward the ideology of Black nationalism, he sought to comprehend its emergence in the contradictions of day-to-day experience: [E]very day in this land some white man is cussing out some defenseless Negro. But that white bastard is too stupid to realise that his actions are being duplicated a million times in a million other spots by other whites who feel hatred for Negroes just like he does. He’s too blind to see that this daily wave of a million tiny assaults builds up a vast reservoir of resentment in Negroes. But where Wright differed most with others who could employ a Marxist approach was in his characterization of the historical forces of ideology. Ideology was the special political instrument of the petit bourgeoisie. Wright was arguing that the renegades of this class that had served historically to produce the dominant ideas of the bourgeoisie, had themselves become contemptuous of the ruling class. The Jealous Rebels had declared, as Marx himself had written: “the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent.” In his criticisms of Marxism, then, Wright was not entirely rejecting it but was attempting to locate it, to provide a sense of the boundaries of its authority. As a theory of society, he found it dissatisfying, indeed, reductionist. By itself it was insufficiently prescient of the several levels of collective consciousness. As an ideology, he recognized that it had never transcended its origins. It remained an ideology for the working classes rather than an ideology of the working classes. However, as a method of social analysis he found it compelling. “[A]t the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.” When the investigation into the conflicts extant between Western radicalism and the struggle for Black liberation was initiated, it was with the gnawing intuition that something known to be fundamental to the Western experience was being trivialized by the American radical tradition. Among my colleagues there was the sense that something so important as to challenge the very foundations of progressive politics and thought lay beyond the conceptualizations that admittedly had inspired formidable displays of progressive work and activity. Some knowledge, some aspect of Black consciousness was unaccounted for in the Marxist explication of the historical processes and source of the motives to which were attributed the social formations of the modern world. In its conceptually formidable reaction against irresponsible power, calculated social destruction, and the systematic exploitation of human beings, there seemed to us to be a discernible reluctance in Western radicalism, or to put it more strongly, a flight from the recognition that something more than objective material forces were responsible for “the nastiness” as Peter Blackman puts it. There was the sense that something of a more profound nature than the obsession with property was askew in a civilization that could organize and celebrate—on a scale beyond previous human experience—the brutal degradations of life and the most acute violations of human destiny. It seemed a certainty that the system of capitalism was part of it, but as well symptomatic of it. It needed a name as the philosopher Hobbes might say. It was not simply a question of outrage or concern for Black survival. It was a matter of comprehension. The outrage, I believe, was most certainly informed by the Africanity of our consciousness—some epistemological measure culturally embedded in our minds that deemed that the racial capitalism we have been witness to was an unacceptable standard of human conduct. It was also the case that the source of our outrage characterized that conduct as inexplicable. The depths to which racialist behavior has fouled Western agencies transgressed against a world-consciousness rooted in our African past. Nevertheless, the sense of deep sadness at the spectacle of Western racial oppression is shared with other non-Western peoples. In these circumstances and in a certain sense only, Black survival must of course be taken as problematical. But its truer significance has been determined by received tradition. I have said that the inquiry into what lay behind the sense of the inadequacies of the Marxian critique was compelled by the question of understanding. The encounter between African and European had been abrupt, not so much in historical terms as in philosophical ones. The Western civilization that burst forth from its medieval quarantine prosecuted its racial sense of social order, its feudal habits of domination, with a vengeance. By the ending of the Middle Ages, racialism was a routine manifestation, finding expression even in the more exotic mental recesses of the maniac and hysterical. For 400 years, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the capitalist mode of production in Europe engulfed agrarian and artisanal workers, transforming them over the generations into expropriated, dependent fodder for concentration in factories, disciplined to the rhythms and turbulences of the manufacturing process, the organizers of the capitalist world system appropriated Black labor power as constant capital. Blacks were extracted from their social formations through mechanisms that, by design and historical coincidence, minimized the disruption of the production of labor. While vast reserves of labor were amassed in the Poor Houses and slums of Europe’s cities and manufacturing towns and villages, in the African hinterland some semblance of traditional life continued to reproduce itself, sharing its social product—human beings—with the Atlantic slave system. For those African men and women whose lives were interrupted by enslavement and transportation, it was reasonable to expect that they would attempt, and in some ways realize, the recreation of their lives. It was not, however, an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans in the grasp of slavers, planters, merchants, and colonizers. Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, the values, ideas, conceptions, and constructions of reality from which resistance was manufactured. And in each instance of resistance, the social and psychological dynamics that are shared by human communities in long-term crises resolved for the rebels the particular moment, the collective and personal chemistries that congealed into social movement. But it was the materials constructed from a shared philosophy developed in the African past and transmitted as culture, from which revolutionary consciousness was realized and the ideology of struggle formed. As we have commented, though rebellion might appear warranted to the Europeans who witnessed the uprisings of African peoples, the forms that Black resistance assumed were incomprehensible. Ultimately many such witnesses fell easily into whatever language was on hand to evoke mystery: the participants in Black resistance were seen as having reverted to savagery; were under the influence of satanic madmen; had passed beyond the threshold of sanity. To the Europeans charged with the responsibilities of preserving the sources of Black labor or control over that labor, the only effective response to Black rebellion was massive, indiscriminate violence and afterward the routine of brutality. More frequently than not, the logic of racial domination that had already endured for centuries invoked no alternatives. On this score it had always to be an unequal contest, not because of the superiority of weapons or the preponderance of numbers but because such violence did not come naturally to African peoples. The civilizations of Europe and Africa in those terms had also been very different. For far longer than a millennium, the history of Europe had amounted to an almost uninterrupted chronology of fratricidal warfare and its celebration. The museums of the civilization are the current testament to that preoccupation, its histories chilling accounts. In Africa, where the incident of state and imperial formations and total warfare were rarer, conflict could and was more frequently resolved by migration and resettlement. Eventually the penetration of Islam into Africa and the organization of the Red Sea and Mediterranean slave systems had made some real difference but it was the scale of the Atlantic slave trade and the racial cacophony of European colonialism that would dictate the more profound adjustment to violence. And this too was misunderstood by the Europeans, translated as might be expected into the discourse of superior and inferior races. While the European ruling classes humbled their own workers by force and cultural hegemony, the points of contact between Europeans and Blacks were enveloped by violence. The anticolonial struggles that were increasingly mounted from the mid-nineteenth century on were the beginnings of the transformation of Black radicalism into an engaged confrontation with European domination. Indeed, it was as a response to the mass resistances to colonialism that the other human contradictions to which colonial domination was inherently vulnerable were catalyzed. The very nature of colonial dominance required the adaptation or creation of privileged strata among the dominated people. And from the conflict, which was inevitable between the native “bourgeoisie” and their colonial masters, a renegade intelligentsia was induced, one to which the idea of a total opposition, a nationalist confrontation and critique of Western society was necessary and natural. The experience of the Black petit bourgeoisies, their intimacy with European power, culture, society, and racism, and their contradictory relations to them, in time drew from t heir number nationalists and radical nationalists. While t he nationalists generally confined their attentions to the struggles at home where their ambitions could most immediately be realized, the radical nationalists were really internationalists, settling into variants of Pan-Africanism or socialism. Invariably, some of the radicals would be ideologically attracted to the opposition movements gestated within Western society itself. Their ambivalence toward the Black masses, their social and psychological identification with European culture made the analytical and theoretical authority of European socialism an almost irresistible political ideology. For some that proved sufficient. For others, however, the continuing formation of militant nationalist and workers’ movements in the colonial world raised questions about the breadth and acuity of European socialists. And as mass Black radicalism adapted to the instrument of people’s wars as the form of the anti-imperialist struggle, its revolutionary intelligentsia began the critique or relocation of socialist theory. For them, the struggles of the European working classes were linked with the anti-imperialist movements of the nonindustrial world. The gulf between class struggle and anti-imperialist and nationalist activity began to be closed. In the Caribbean and North America (where a racial politics analogous to that of colonialism had produced a complementary Black radical intelligentsia), when for much of the first half of the twentieth century the crises of monopoly capitalism struck the world system, a generation of these ideologues was already formed and ready to respond to the social upheavals in Europe, America, and the colonial world. Others affixed themselves to socialist movements after the rebellions of European workers had subsided and bourgeois democracy, the liberal representation of monopoly capitalism from its infancy, gave way in Italy, Germany, and Spain to the more openly repressive face of the fascist state. To the colonial and American Black radicals, the objections raised to fascism by liberal and socialist ideologues brought to the fore the parallels between colonialism and fascism and the ambivalence, hypocrisies, and impotence of the intellectuals in the metropoles of the European empires. Many of the leading activists among the Black intelligentsia, having previously committed themselves to drawing their nationalist struggles within the orbit of the socialist movement, found it necessary to move past their European comrades. It was both natural and historically logical that some would resurrect Pan-Africanism as a radical ideology and recognize further its potential as a radical theory of struggle and history. From the early 1930s on, a radical Pan-Africanism emerged. And in the work of Du Bois, James, and Wright, of Oliver Cox, Eric Williams, and George Padmore, the elements of its first phase were discernible. When Du Bois and James set about the recovery of the history of the revolutionary Black struggle, they were driven from an implied to an explicit critique of Marxism. As Black men grown sensitive to the day-to-day heroism demanded for Black survival, they were particularly troubled by the casual application of preformed categories to Black social movements. It appeared to them that Western Marxists, unconsciously bound by a Eurocentric perspective, could not account for nor correctly assess the revolutionary forces emerging from the Third World. The racial metaphysics of Western consciousness —the legacy of a civilization—shielded their fellow socialists from the recognition of racialism’s influence on the development and structures of the capitalist system, and conceptually pardoned them from a more acute inquiry into the categories of their own thought. Without some form of intervention, the socialist movement would be doomed to disaster. The first initiative of Du Bois, who himself had been matured by his encounter with American Black nationalism, was to reassess the historical role of the industrial working classes. In the beginning he had intended a modest proposal: without the aid of the Black masses, no American working-class movement could succeed in overturning the capitalist ruling class. However, his investigation of the Black radical tradition of the mid- nineteenth century pushed his analysis further and deeper, beyond the presumptions of the revolutionary theory and politics of his time. Anticipating the more sustained expositions of Eric Williams and Oliver Cox, Du Bois became convinced that capitalism and slavery were related systemically; that monopoly capitalism had extended rather than arrested that relationship; and that the forces implicated in the dissolution of capitalism could emerge from the contradictions of that relationship. History provided his evidence. In the turbulence of the American Civil War and a social revolution carried through by the mobilized slaves and the white agrarian workers, it had been the manufacturing and industrial working classes that had hesitated, drawn to counterrevolution by racism and a short-sighted perception of their class interest. The class struggle had been distorted and a proletarian revolutionary consciousness among nineteenth-century American workers had been effectively interdicted by the ideological power of racism and the seductiveness of the bourgeois myth of social mobility. It was the slaves (in truth an enslaved peasantry) and other agrarian workers who had mounted the attack on capitalism. It was, Du Bois observed, from the periphery and not the center that the most sustained threat to the American capitalist system had materialized. The rebellious slaves, vitalized by a world-consciousness drawn from African lore and composing their American experience into a rebellious art, had constituted one of the crucial social bases in contradiction to bourgeois society. For Du Bois, the recovery of this last fact became as elementary to revolutionary theory as a recognition of the peasant masses whose revolts in Russia, Mexico, and China had rocked the ruling classes of the twentieth century. Just as important for him, however, was the realization that the racism of the American “white” working classes and their general ideological immaturity had abnegated the extent to which the conditions of capitalist production and relations alone could be held responsible for the social development of the American proletariat. The collective and individual identities of American workers had responded as much to race as they had to class. The relations of production were not determinant. Du Bois would pursue this issue politically but not theoretically. Nevertheless, it had become clear to him that in Marxist theory much uncertainty remained with respect to the significance that could be made of the historical appearance of the proletarian class under capitalism and the evolution of working-class consciousness. For a decade after the appearance of The Black Jacobins, James would wrestle with the social and ideological ambivalence of this “renegade” strata, eventually articulating a critique of it as the source of leadership of the revolutionary masses. In Haiti as well as in Russia, Lenin’s theory of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” had been shown to be insufficient. No revolutionary cadre, divorced from the masses, ensconced in state bureaucracy, and abrogating to itself the determination of the best interests of the masses, could sustain the revolution or itself. James would come to the theoretical position that “in the decisive hour” (as Marx and Engels were wont to say) it was only the consciousness and activity of the revolutionary masses that could preserve the revolution from compromise, betrayal, or the ill-considered usurpation of revolutionary authority. It was his study of the revolutionary masses of Haiti, France, Russia and Africa, and his work in England, America and Trinidad rather than the Bolshevik state that would persuade him of the actual fact of Lenin’s dictum: “every cook can govern.” But it was Richard Wright who was better placed than either Du Bois, James, Padmore, Williams, or Cox to articulate the revolutionary consciousness of the Black masses and to assess the cultural debilitation of Marxian politics. Wright had as his vantage points his origins in the rural and urban Black working classes and his experience of the American Communist movement. Unlike Du Bois who came to Black cultural life from its margins and would stand at a distance to describe the revolutionary ideas of the American slaves as a mixture of legend, whimsy, and art, and unlike James whose appreciation of Black culture was often cerebral (“the medium” is how James would describe the voodoo ideology of the Haitian revolutionists, and the calypso of the West Indian masses) when not single-minded (about cricket and the novels of his age-mates and peers), Wright evoked in his writings the language and experience of “ordinary” Black men and women. In this way he pressed home the recognition that whatever the objective forces propelling a people toward struggle, resistance, and revolution, they would come to that struggle in their own cultural terms. Among Blacks, a culture of a mass conscious of itself had evolved from African civilization, the centuries of resistance to slavery, and the opposition to a racial social order. In the syncopations and the phrases, the scamp and the beat, the lyric and melody of Black language, Black beliefs, Black music, sexual and social relations and encounters, Wright’s work reconstructed the resonances of Black American consciousness in its contests with reality. The quests pursued in his novels and essays were set to the improvisational possibilities obtained in that Black culture’s collisions with its own parameters and those prescribed by the market forces and labor demands of capitalism and by a racialist culture. From the measured discourse of a Black culture he illustrated the limits of a socialist movement that persisted in too many abstractions, too far removed, and was prey to the arrogance of racial paternalism. Wright made it clear that the objections raised by Du Bois, Padmore, James, Williams, Cox, and other Black radicals were grounded from below in the historical consciousness of the Black masses. In Wright’s time, in part because of the various native and immigrant national and ethnic constituents making it up, the “white” working class had not yet obtained a collective historical and cultural integration of its own. As a class brought into being at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century by racial capitalism, to the extent that it existed, the workers’ collective consciousness remained a racial one subject to the disciplining ideologies of the bourgeois class and responsive to what they had been led to believe was “American culture.” While that was true, only a small fraction of the class was capable of an alliance with the Black liberation struggle. In the meanwhile, it became increasingly clear to Wright and his colleagues that the project of revolutionary change required reassessment and reconceptualization. It is now a generation later. In the intervening years the Black radical tradition has matured, assuming new forms in revolutionary movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. In the ideas of revolutionaries, among them Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, Robert Mugabe, Augustinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, Marcelino dos Santos, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Walter Rodney, and Angela Davis, Black radicalism has remained a currency of resistance and revolt. However, the evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition. Doubtlessly there have been advantages to this. There have been no sacred texts to be preserved from the ravages of history. There have been no intellects or leaders whose authority secured ideological and theoretical conformity and protected their ideas from criticism. There has been no theory to inoculate the movements of resistance from change. But it, too, is certain that there have been disadvantages; partial comprehensions that it has now become imperative to transcend. The fractioning of African peoples is dysfunctional. Meanwhile the clock of “modern times” is running down. Within Western culture, that is the very civilization that in recent centuries has dominated a quarter of the world and acquired so little consciousness in its experience with the rest, what once were but faint signs of breakdown are now in bold evidence. Not even the brilliant wizardry of high technological achievement can mute the rumblings from the degenerating mechanism. It is the occasion of opposition and contradiction and the moment of opportunity. That is because the times that mark the dissolutions of civilizations compound the maturations of both internal and external processes. Physically and ideologically, and for rather unique historical reasons, African peoples bridge the decline of one world order and the eruption (we may surmise) of another. It is a frightful and uncertain space of being. If we are to survive, we must take nothing that is dead and choose wisely from among the dying. The industrial nations are self-destructing. Others, too, of course, will be affected. But the racial mythology that accompanied capitalist industrial formation and provided its social structures engendered no truly profound alternatives. The social, ideological, and political oppositions generated within Western societies have proven unequal to the task. They have acquired historical significance only when they received comfort in the consciousness of Third World peoples. There they mingled with other cultures, taking their place among social priorities and historical visions largely alien from their sites of origin. Such instances were the agrarian socialist revolutions among the Indian peasants of Mexico early in this century; the coterminous social revolutions and nationalist upheavals within the Russian Empire; the revolutionary peasant movements of China and India; and in the period following the Second World War, the national liberation movements of Madagascar and Cuba and on the continents of Africa and Central and South America. The critique of the capitalist world system acquired determinant force not from movements of industrial workers in the metropoles but from those of the “backward” peoples of the world. Only an inherited but rationalized racial arrogance and a romanticism stiffened by pseudoscience could manage to legitimate a denial of these occurrences. Western Marxism, in either of its two variants—critical-humanist or scientific—has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of liberation. The ensuing errors have sometimes been horrendous, inducing in their wake dogmas of certainty characterized by desperation. The Black radical tradition suggests a more complete contradiction. In social and political practice, it has acquired its immediate momentum from the necessity to respond to the persisting threats to African peoples characteristic of the modern world system. Over the many generations, the specificity of resistance—at best securing only a momentary respite—has given way to the imperatives of broader collectivities. Particular languages, cultures, and social sensibilities have evolved into world-historical consciousness. The distinctions of political space and historical time have fallen away so that the making of one Black collective identity suffuses nationalisms. Harbored in the African diaspora there is a single historical identity that is in opposition to the systemic privations of racial capitalism. Ideologically, it cements pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action. It deepens with each disappointment at false mediation and reconciliation, and is crystallized into ever-increasing cores by betrayal and repression. The resoluteness of the Black radical tradition advances as each generation assembles the data of its experience to an ideology of liberation. The experimentation with Western political inventories of change, specifically nationalism and class struggle, is coming to a close. Black radicalism is transcending those traditions in order to adhere to its own authority. It will arrive as points of resistance here, rebellion there, and mass revolutionary movements still elsewhere. But each instance will be formed by the Black radical tradition in an awareness of the others and the consciousness that there remains nothing to which it may return. Molded by a long and brutal experience and rooted in a specifically African development, the tradition will provide for no compromise between liberation and annihilation. The radical nationalist movements of our time in Africa and the African diaspora have come at a historical moment when substantial numbers of the world’s Black peoples are under the threat of physical annihilation or the promise of prolonged and frightening debilitation. The famines that have always accompanied the capitalist world system’s penetration of societies have increased in intensity and frequency. The appearance of literally millions of Black refugees, drifting helplessly beyond the threshold of human sensibility, their emaciated bodies feeding on their own tissues, have become commonplace. The systematic attack on radical Black polities, and the manipulation of venal political puppets are now routine occurrences. Where Blacks were once assured of some sort of minimal existence as a source of cheap labor, mass unemployment and conditions of housing and health that are of near-genocidal proportions obtain. The charades of neocolonialism and race relations have worn thin. In the metropoles, imprisonment, the stupor of drugs, the use of lethal force by public authorities and private citizens, and the more petty humiliations of racial discrimination have become epidemic. And over the heads of all, but most particularly those of the Third World, hangs the discipline of massive nuclear force. Not one day passes without confirmation of the availability and the willingness to use force in the Third World. It is not the province of one people to be the solution or the problem. But a civilization maddened by its own perverse assumptions and contradictions is loose in the world. A Black radical tradition formed in opposition to that civilization and conscious of itself is one part of the solution. Whether the other oppositions generated from within Western society and without will mature remains problematical. But for now we must be as one. The lie, the perfect lie, about people whom we know, about the relations that we have had with them, about our motive for some action, a motive which we express in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to the person who loves us and believes that she has fashioned us in her own image because she keeps on kissing us morning, noon and night, that lie is one of the only things in the world that can open a window for us upon what is novel, unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses to the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known. But as the poet Saitō Ryokū has said, “elegance is frigid.” Of course this “sheen of antiquity” of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling—which is to say grime. If indeed “elegance is frigid,” it can as well be described as filthy. to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. Not long ago a newspaper reporter came to interview me on the subject of unusual foods, and I described to him the persimmon-leaf sushi made by the people who live deep in the mountains of Yoshino—and which I shall take the opportunity to introduce to you here. To every ten parts of rice one part of sake is added just when the water comes to a boil. When the rice is done it should be cooled thoroughly, after which salt is applied to the hands and the rice molded into bite-size pieces. At this stage the hands must be absolutely free of moisture, the secret being that only salt should touch the rice. Thin slices of lightly salted salmon are placed on the rice, and each piece is wrapped in a persimmon leaf, the surface of the leaf facing inward. Both the persimmon leaves and the salmon should be wiped with a dry cloth to remove any moisture. Then in a rice tub or sushi box, the interior of which is perfectly dry, the pieces are packed standing on end so that no space remains between them, and the lid is put in place and weighted with a heavy stone, as in making pickles. Prepared in the evening, the sushi should be ready to eat the next morning. Though the taste is best on the first day, it remains edible for two or three days. A slight bit of vinegar is sprinkled over each piece with a sprig of bitter nettle just before eating. I learned of the dish from a friend who had been to Yoshino and found it so exceptionally good that he took the trouble to learn how to make it—but if you have the persimmon leaves and salted salmon it can be made anywhere. You need only remember to keep out every trace of moisture, and to cool the rice completely. I made some myself, and it was very good indeed. The oil of the salmon “as soft as if it were fresh—the flavor is indescribable, and far better than the sushi one gets in Tokyo. Mrs. Tanizanki tells a story of when her late husband decided, as he frequently did, to build a new house. The architect arrived and announced with pride, “I’ve read your In Praise of Shadows, Mr. Tanizaki, and know exactly what you want.” To which Tanizaki replied, “But no, I could never live in a house like that.” 4 The way is empty, used, but not used up. Deep, yes! ancestral to the ten thousand things. Blunting edge, loosing bond, dimming light, the way is the dust of the way. Quiet, yes, and likely to endure. Whose child? born before the gods. 8 Tue goodness is like water. Water’s good for everything. It doesn’t compete. It goes right to the low loathsome places, and so finds the way. For a house, the good thing is level ground. In thinking, depth is good. The good of giving is magnanimity; of speaking, honesty; of government, order. The good of work is skill, and of action, timing. 9 No competition, so no blame. Brim-fill the bowl, it’ll spill over. Keep sharpening the blade, you’ll soon blunt it. Nobody can protect a house full of gold and jade. Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing. 11 Thirsty spokes meet in the hub. Where the wheel isn’t is where it’s useful. Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful. Cut doors and windows to make a room. Where the room isn’t, there’s room for you. So the profit in what is is in the use of what isn’t. one of those counterintuitive truths that, when the mind can accept them, suddenly double the size of the universe. 13 To be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear. To take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer. What does that mean, to be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear? Fear debases: we fear to lose it, fear to win it. So to be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear. What does that mean, to take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer? I suffer because I’m a body; if I weren’t a body, how could I suffer? So people who set their bodily good before the public good could be entrusted with the commonwealth, and people who treated the body politic as gently as their own body would be worthy to govern the commonwealth. 18 In the degradation of the great way come benevolence and righteousness. With the exaltation of learning and prudence comes immense hypocrisy. The disordered family is full of dutiful children and parents. The disordered society is full of loyal patriots. 23 Nature doesn’t make long speeches. A whirlwind doesn’t last all morning. A cloudburst doesn’t last all day. Who makes the wind and rain? Heaven and earth do. If heaven and earth don’t go on and on, certainly people don’t need to. The people who work with Tao are Tao people, they belong to the Way. People who work with power belong to power. People who work with loss belong to what’s lost. Give yourself to the Way and you’ll be at home on the Way. Give yourself to power and you’ll be at home in power Give yourself to loss and when you’re lost you’ll be at home. To give no trust is it get no trust. 31 Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool, hateful to living things. So the follower of the Way stays away from it. Weapons are unhappy tools, not chosen by thoughtful people, to be used only when there is no choice, and with a calm, still mind, without enjoyment. To enjoy using weapons is to enjoy killing people, and to enjoy killing people is to lose your share in the common good. It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented. It is right that a victor in war be received with funeral ceremonies. 33 Knowing other people in intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom. Overcoming others takes strength, overcoming yourself takes greatness. Contentment is wealth. Boldly pushing forward takes resolution. Staying put keeps you in position. To live till you die is to live long enough. 35 Holding fast to the great thought and all the world will come to you, harmless, peaceable, serene. Walking around, we stop for music, for food. But if you taste the Way it’s flat, insipid. It looks like nothing much, it sounds like nothing much. And yet you can’t get enough of it. 38 Great power, not clinging to power, has true power. Lesser power, clinging to power, lacks true power. Great power, doing nothing, has nothing to do. Lesser power, doing nothing, has an end in view. The good the truly good do has no end in view. The right the very righteous do has an end in view. And those who act in true obedience to law roll up their sleeves and make the disobedient obey. So: when we lose the Way we find power; losing power we find goodness; losing goodness we find righteousness; losing righteousness we’re left with obedience. Obedience to law is the dry husk of loyalty and good faith. pinion is the barren flower of the Way, the beginning of ignorance. So great-minded people abide in the kernel not the husk, in the fruit not the flower, letting the one go, keeping the other. A multiplicity of riches is poverty. Jade is praised as precious, but its strength is being stone. 41 Thoughtful people hear about the Way and try hard to follow it. Ordinary people hear about the Way and wander onto it and off it. Thoughtless people hear about the Way and make jokes about it. It wouldn’t be the Way if there weren’t jokes about it. So they say: The Way’s brightness looks like darkness; advancing on the Way feels like retreating; the palin Way seems hard going. The height of power seems a valley; the amplest power seems not enough; the firmest power seems feeble. Perfect whiteness looks dirty. The pure and simple looks chaotic. The great square has no corners. The great vessel is never finished. The great tone is barely heard. The great thought can’t be thought. The Way is hidden in its namelessness. But only the Way begins, sustains, fulfills. 43 What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world. The immaterial enters the impenetrable. So I know the good in not doing. The wordless teaching, the profit in not doing— not many people understand it. 45 What’s perfectly whole seems flawed, but you can use it forever. What’s perfectly full seems empty, but you can’t use it up. True straightness looks crooked. Great skill looks clumsy. Real eloquence seems to stammer. To be comfortable in the cold, keep moving; to be comfortable in the heat, hold still; to be comfortable in the world, stay calm and clear. 46 When the world’s on the Way, they use horses to haul manure. When the world gets off the Way, they breed warhorses on the common. The greatest evil: wanting more. The worst luck: discontent. Greed’s the curse of life. To know enough’s enough is enough to know. 49 The wise have no mind of their own, finding it in the minds of ordinary people. They’re good to good people and they’re good to bad people. Power is goodness. They trust people of good faith and they trust people of bad faith. Power is trust. They mingle their life with the world, they mix their mind up with the world. Ordinary people look after them. Wise souls are children. 56 Who knows doesn’t talk. Who talks doesn’t know. Closing the openings, shutting doors, blunting edge, loosing bond, dimming light, be one with the dust of the way. So you come to the deep sameness. Then you can’t be controlled by love or by rejection. You can’t be controlled by profit or by loss. You can’t be controlled by praise or by humiliation. Then you have honor under heaven. 57 Run the country by doing what’s expected. Win the war by doing the unexpected. Control the world by doing nothing. How do I know that? By this. The more restrictions and prohibitions in the world, the poorer people get. The more experts the country has the more of a mess it’s in. The more ingenious the skillful are, the more monstrous their inventions. The louder the call for law and order, the more the thieves and con men multiply. So a wise leader might say: I practice inaction, and the people look after themselves. I love to be quiet, and the people themselves find justice. I don’t do business, and the people prosper on their own. I don’t have wants, and the people themselves are uncut wood. 63 Do without doing. Act without action. Savor the flavorless. Treat the small as large, the few as many. Meet injury with the power of goodness. Study the hard while it’s easy. Do big things while they’re small. The hardest jobs in the world start out easy, the great affairs of the world start small. So the wise soul, by never dealing with great things, gets great things done. Now, since taking things too lightly makes them worthless, and taking things too easy makes them hard, the wise soul, by treating the easy as hard, doesn’t find anything. 64 It’s easy to keep hold of what hasn’t stirred, easy to plan what hasn’t occurred. It’s easy to shatter delicate things, easy to scatter little things. Do things before they happen. Get them straight before they get mixed up. The tree you can’t reach your arms around grew from a tiny seedling. The nine-story tower rises from a heap of clay. The ten-thousand-mile journey begins beneath your foot. Do, and do wrong; Hold on, and lose. Not doing, the wise soul doesn’t do it wrong and not holding on, doesn’t lose it. (In all their undertakings, it’s just as they’re almost finished that people go wrong. Mind the end as the beginning, then it won’t go wrong.) That’s why the wise want not to want, care nothing for hard-won treasures, learn not to be learned, turn back to what people overlooked. They go along with things as they are, but don’t presume to act. 65 Once upon a time those who ruled according to the Way didn’t use it to make people knowing but to keep them unknowing. People get hard to manage when they know too much. Whoever rules by intellect is a curse upon the land. Whoever rules by ignorance is a blessing on it. To understand these things is to have a pattern and a model, and to understand the pattern and the model is mysterious power. Mysterious power goes deep. It reaches far. It follows things back, clear back to the great oneness. This is a mystical statement about government—and in our minds those two realms are worlds apart. I cannot make the leap between them. I can only ponder it. 66 Lakes and rivers are lords of the hundred valleys. Why? Because they’ll go lower. So they’re the lords of the hundred valleys. Just so, a wise soul, wanting to be above other people, talks to them from below and to guide them follows them. And so the wise soul predominates without dominating, and leads without misleading. And people don’t get tired of enjoying and praising one who, not competing, has in all the world no competitor. 69 The expert in warfare says: Rather than dare make the attack I’d take the attack; rather than dare advance an inch I’d retreat a foot. It’s called marching without marching, rolling up your sleeves without flexing your muscles, being armed without weapons, giving the attacker no opponent. Nothing’s worse than attacking what yields. To attack what yields is to throw away the prize. So, when matched armies meet, the one who comes to grief is the true victor. In my obscurity is my value. That’s why the wise wear their jade under common clothes. 71 To know without knowing is best. Not knowing without knowing it is sick. To be sick of sickness is the only cure. The wise aren’t sick. They’re sick of sickness, so they’re well. 75 People are starving. The rich gobble taxes, that’s why people are starving. People rebel. The rich oppress them, that’s why people rebel. People hold life cheap. The rich make it too costly, that’s why people hold it cheap. But those who don’t live for the sake of living are worth more than the wealth-seekers. 76 Living people are soft and tender. Corpses are hard and stiff. The ten thousand things, the living grass, the trees, are soft, pliant. Dead, they’re dry and brittle. So hardness and stiffness go with death; tenderness, softness, go with life. And the hard sword fails, the stiff tree’s felled. The hard and great go under. The soft and weak stay up. 78 Nothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water; nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered. Soft overcomes hard, weak overcomes strong. Everybody knows it, nobody uses the knowledge. So the wise say: by bearing common defilements you become a sacrificer at the altar of earth; by bearing common evils you become a lord of the world. Right words sound wrong. 80 Let there be a little country without many people. Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred, and never use them. Let them be mindful of death and disinclined to long journeys. They’d have ships and carriages, but no place to go. They’d have armor and weapons, but no parades. Instead of writing, they might go back to using knotted cords. They’d enjoy eating, take pleasure in clothes, be happy with their houses, devoted to their customs. The next little country might be so close the people could hear cocks crowing and dogs barking there, but they’d get old and die without ever having been there. Seaton reminded me that “doing without doing is doing, not not doing.” The words I translate “experts” literally mean “sharp weapons,” but the term implies “pundits, know-it-alls.” I was tempted to say “smart bombs,” which is too cute and topical, but which would certainly lead nearly to the next lines. To dismiss this Utopia as simply regressivist or anti-technological to miss an interesting point. These people have labor-saving machinery, ships and land vehicles, weapons of offense and defense. They “have them and don’t use them.” I interpret: they aren’t used by them. We’re used, our lives shaped and controlled, by our machines, cars, planes, weaponry, bulldozers, computers. These Taoists don’t surrender their power to their creations. The eleventh line, however, is certainly regressive if it says knotted cords are to replace written literature, history, mathematics, and so on. It might be read as saying it’s best not to externalize all our thinking and remember (as we do in writing and reading), but to keep it embodied, to think and remember with our bodies as well as our verbalizing brains.