Chapter 5. - The Transpacific Reworking of Race and Marxist Theory : The Case of Harry Haywood’s Lifework

Summary

Abstract

Why would Harry Haywood's Negro Liberation be translated into Japanese a decade after it was originally published in 1948? What of its reception in Japan, a place rarely seen as the center of the Black historical experience and struggle? Why would Japanese Marxist economists take up the challenge of theoretical inquiry into the dialectic of Black liberation and world revolution that had come to be dismissed as a case of ideological rigidity, utopian or otherwise, and the specter of all things wrong about Stalinism, if not a politics of a bygone era? The essay unpacks the generative potential of Black Communist critique and its reworking in 1950s Japan and highlight advances made by unexpected connection-making across class, race, and Marxism.

Keywords: Harry Haywood, Black Belt, Debate on Japanese Capitalism (nihon shihonshugi ronso), Feudality, Buraku Problem, Racialism

More than other writers, Marx wrote in the conjunction. Such an option did not exclude either the ‘patience of the concept’ of which Hegel spoke, or the rigorous weighing of logical consequences. But it was certainly incompatible with stable conclusions: Marx is a philosopher of new beginnings, leaving behind many uncompleted drafts and projects… The content of his thought is not separable from his shifts of position. That is why, in studying him, one cannot abstractly reconstruct his system. One has to retrace his development, with its breaks and bifurcations.

Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx

The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic arrest of happening, or, to put it differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history; thus he blasts a specific life out of the era, a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the lifework and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but tasteless seed.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses ‘On the Concept of History’”