Wright saw revolutionary violence as capitalism destroying itself through its own brutalized creation

Evidence

Wright had emerged from the Depression with a clear and powerful image of American society and world history. With the writing of Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son he had extracted from the misery of poverty and imminent social collapse an understanding of a systemic integration in which racism was a secondary, residual phenomenon. He had no reason to doubt that the disintegration of the capitalist world was really a promise of liberation—a promise that enveloped the whole of humanity. Yet he possessed few illusions about this process of disintegration. He knew, in social terms, even in human terms, that the immediate costs would be unparalleled violence, brutality, and vengeance. At first he hoped that this historical transformation would be surgical in its order. He believed in a conscious, deliberate, and magnanimous workers’ movement. By the time he was writing Native Son, however, this ordered revolution had been replaced by a chaos consisting of the collective action of a brutalized human force. The destruction of capitalism would come at the hands of the brute social force it had itself created. Still, Wright saw this brutalized mass as the promise of the future. Unlike Marx, Wright anticipated barbarism and socialism. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1382

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Wright anticipating what Fanon later systematized about violence and consciousness; also contrasts with Marx’s expectation of revolution.