Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies
Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies
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Left of Karl Marx
The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones

Author: Carole Boyce Davies

Narrator: L. Malaika Cooper

Unabridged: 11 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/26/2021


Synopsis

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, "Half the World," for the Daily Worker. As the US government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a US prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955.

Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones's own narration of her life with the federal government's. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black US feminism, and the history of communism.

About Carole Boyce Davies

Carole Boyce Davies is a distinguished Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning classic Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones and the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kevin on January 17, 2024

“The only Black woman among communists tried in the United States, sentenced for crimes against the state, incarcerated, and then deported, Claudia Jones seems to have simply disappeared from major consideration in a range of histories… How could someone who had lived in the United States from the a......more

Goodreads review by Sara on August 10, 2015

While this was definitely an interesting book because of the subject matter, I feel it was lacking a bit in terms of context. The focus is so heavily on Claudia Jones and her actions that it misses the broader context that prompted Claudia to identify as a feminist, a Marxist and an anti-imperialist......more

Goodreads review by hashoun on March 10, 2022

Claudia Jones is truly such an inspiring person in how her actions directly reflected her politics and she did so seemingly flawlessly, one of the first to recognize some of the major talking points regarding black women, communism, feminism, imperialism, white feminism, etc, but the last brought up......more

Goodreads review by Iejones on December 22, 2008

“Claudia Jones was a black woman and a communist, clear about her ideological orientation, as she was about her identity as a black woman writing and doing political work simultaneously.” Those are the opening words to Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, by Carole......more

Goodreads review by M. on February 04, 2020

Second reading. An articulate theoretical and political assessment of the life of Claudia Jones from her involvement in communist leagues to her steady advocacy for black women's rights via her situation as a transnational, pan-African feminist. She deserved to live longer than she did but her work......more