Wright joined communism to give meaning to the party’s abstracted proletariat

Evidence

Wright perceived his task as providing to the movement a language and images that would give meaning to the abstracted proletariat of party ideology. This complex of motives—vision, fraternity, and task—might seem sufficient to explain to the readers of Uncle Tom’s Children, Lawd Today, and Native Son, Wright’s sociological and political preoccupations in his early works. Yet Wright, as we shall see, was to have a very different experience, which provided other and very different themes for the last of these three works. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1356

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies Wright’s self-assigned task within the Marxist movement: supplying concrete language and imagery to the party’s abstract proletariat concept.