joy of scholarship


The Joy of Scholarship

It is good that finding joy in scholarship can provide respite from the depression that national insecurity, the death-bound antics of Trump and his tribe, the drift from democracy into neo-fascism,  and a surplus of natural disasters (the revenge of Nature) bring into our daily lives. I have begun to work on a book to be titled Richard Wright: The Unending Hunger for Life.  I need to identify and assess recent commentary on Wright's legacy being produced by non-academic and academic readers.  Curiosity told me to check on what is being said about Wright and Leon Trotsky. I had the "good fortune" of discovering Adrian Chan-Wyles' article "Richard Wright: Black Empowerment and the Delirium of Trotskyism" on a Buddhist-Marxism Alliance (UK) site.  The article inspires cautious skepticism.   



Adrian Chan-Wyles is a writer, translator, founder of the Sangha Kommune, and Spiritual Director of the Chan Buddhism Institute.  The Kommune is a Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) platform for exposing bourgeois lies and Trotskyist deception, and Chan-Wyles uses it with panache to broadcast his disdain for capitalism. Whether he is also broadcasting a truth is open to ideological debate.  He has a degree of respect for Wright as an African American thinker, but he can't stomach Wright's failure to share (and thus affirm) his alleged hatred of capitalism as an oppressive economic phenomenon.  Prior to reading Cornel West's introduction for Black Power (2008), the omnibus edition of Black Power,  The Color Curtain, and White Man, Listen!,  Chan-Wyles had never heard of Wright.  Using the  magic which sprouts when some critics of culture(s) suddenly "discover" Wright, he authorizes himself to have "the distinct impression" from sampling Black Power," that if capitalism wasn't racist, then most Black people would have no problem with it (despite being its mass victims during the era of trans-Atlantic institutional slavery)."  More disturbing is his tortured effort to whitewash Soviet Communism and Chinese Communism in making a case, without sufficient evidence, that Wright   was permanently infected  by Trotskyism.  I would argue that Wright's vernacular existentialism was sufficient  to keep a safe distance between Trotsky and himself.   After sampling a few examples of Chan-Wyles' writing on the internet, I return the favor of his audacity by authorizing my impression that he speaks with a forking Chinese-Irish tongue. Two can play the presumptive game in the 21st century.



Chan-Wyles has the decency to specify that he is criticizing Wright's opinion that capitalism can be reformed from within rather than conducting an ad hominem attack.  I shall be genteel enough, in turn, to say I am strictly criticizing his failure to learn one of the most valuable lessons Wright tried to teach: one must be on top of theory not under it.  Were Chan-Wyles to think a bit more deeply about how Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory has ordained a most excellent  and thriving communist capitalism in mainland China, he might hesitate to suggest that Wright was complicit with Trotsky in harboring anti-China sentiments.  I suspect he could then be more  Buddhist in understanding that Wright and many of his peers  ultimately rejected the  delusions and delirious claims of "isms."  They may have been blinded by the will to freedom, but their humanism was not predicated  on the akineanna (nothingness) and the  sunnattas (emptiness) of theory.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            July 21, 2018






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