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Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Carole Boyce Davies. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008. vii + 311 pp. (Cloth US$ 79.95, Paper US$ 22.95)
At the 2007 Caribbean Studies Association meetings in San Andres, Colombia, I asked Carole Boyce Davies about the title of her new book, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, and suggested that situating Jones to the left of Marx depended on where you stood. Her quick-witted reply was, "True! So you have to stand with Marx."
In the book Davies moves beyond merely pointing to the fact that Jones was buried to the left of Karl Marx, to arguing that she was also ideologically to Marx's left in her politics. Situating Jones in this way implies a particularly radical, extreme position, perhaps even a dogmatic stance. Davies is not at her most persuasive in this claim, especially since she is at pains throughout the book to note Jones's commitment to Marxism-Leninism.
Davies indicates clearly that the book is not a work of biography but a study of one of the most important black radical thinkers of the mid-twentieth century. She acknowledged that her initial encounter with Claudia Jones's contribution came from a chance audience with Buzz Johnson, who at the time was advocating the need for more work to be done on this Trinidadian-born woman. Over the years, Johnson's effort to rescue Jones's political contribution from obscurity (see, for example, Johnson 1985) has been essentially vilified as intellectually underdeveloped.
Davies sees Claudia Jones as a "sister outsider" in the sense in which Audre...