Richard Wright critiqued Communist class theory through his novel Native Son

Evidence

In Native Son, Wright sought to display a more authentic, more historical, more precise image of the proletariat to which the party had committed itself. He had begun this task in Lawd Today and it came to fruition in the form of Bigger Thomas. Wright, hesitant at wrestling with Marxism on theoretical terms, pursued his critique of American Left ideology in his own terms: the novel. Bigger Thomas’s lack of class consciousness—more precisely the odyssey of his development of consciousness—is deliberate and purposive. This was not simply a literary device, but a means of coming to grips with the abstraction and romanticization of the proletariat that had infected Western Communist ideology. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1364

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how Black writers used fiction to challenge Marxist orthodoxies, bridging toward the broader Black radical tradition arc Robinson is mapping.