Max tries to show the jury that the case is not just about one black man and one black woman, but rather, it is about millions of blacks that have been kept down, all the while desperately trying to rise to the class status that white people have. Marx and Engels speculated that literature reflects and sustains the material life of a society. To look at this idea and apply it Wright's use of the novel, we can see that the material conditions of Bigger's life -- what he ate, how he made money, what he did for work, determined his ideas. Furthermore, Mr. Dalton's material conditions determined his ideas too. Both characters cannot see the connection between Dalton's money and Bigger's poverty. The authority of the ruling class is maintained when the working class is kept ignorant. The conscience of the ruling class is soothed when its members address the economic problems of a mass of people with individualistic charity. Wright seems to be using Native Son as a way to show his readers the association between wealth and poverty. This is does clearly with images of the stereotyped blacks, depicted as rather savage, and the urbane whites, and the reality of that unjust gap in wealth.

Wright, using Marxist sentiments, seems to be saying through his novel that social conditions, especially conditions where there is deprivation of certain people or people, motivates people to act "against their nature" (Marx 11) or in anti-social ways.

Annotated Bibliography

Cruse, Harold. & Crouch, Stanley. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical

Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York Review Books Classics).

NYRB Classics, 2005.

Cruse's book was published in 1967 and is blend of cultural history and the analysis of the relationship between African-Americans and society....

He looks at black intellectual life beginning in the Harlem Renaissance all the way through the 1960s. He discusses the legacy of the likes of Paul Robeson, James Baldwin and Richard Wright among others.
Grinnell, George C. "Exchanging Ghost: Haunting, History, and Communism in Native

Son." ESC,30(3), 2004, pp. 145-174.

Grinnell begins his article stating that while Richard Wright might not have said that specter is haunting Communism in the U.S., his novel Native Son is strangely like a ghost, "fictionally visiting and revisiting a particular history of the Party's attempts to understand race in terms functionally equivalent to those of class." "Exchanging Ghosts" examines Wright's life as he was once a part of the Communist Party and asserts that communism marks for Wright a future that cannot be known and cannot be exchanged, except as the possibility of change.

Marx, Karl. & Engels, Frederick. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

and the Communist Manifesto (Great Books in Philosophy). Prometheus Books,

1988.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 serves as the foundation for Marx's indictment of capitalism. Marx offers his theory of human nature as well as an analysis of emerging capitalism's degenerative impact on man's sense of self and his creative potential. Is begs the question, 'what is man's true nature?'

Rampersad, Arnold. "Introduction" in Wright, Richard. Native Son (Bloom's Modern

Critical Interpretations). Chelsea House Publications, 2008.

Rampersad's introduction to Wright's Native Son discusses the book and how it was meant as a wake-up call for Americans to come out of their "self-induced slumber about the reality of race nations in America." He contemplates Wright's belief that Americans were afraid -- whether white or black -- to face the consequences of slavery openly. He states that for black, the centuries of abuse and exploitation created ways of life that were self-deceptive, as well as more lethal.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.