Advanced Workers: Amiri Baraka in the Seventies

This chapter explores the figure of ‘the worker’ in the post-1960s economic slump, as conceived by Amiri Baraka following his turn to Leninism. It explores, that is, how the decline in the power and prestige of the worker was registered and resisted, and in turn how a Black Nationalist became an anti-revisionary Marxist–Leninist. In this, it charts the racial nature of the decade’s economic depredations, describing how it was that Baraka’s address moved from the black vanguard to the ‘advanced worker’ amid work’s increasing importance as an enforcer of black oppression. I also place much-needed attention on the neglected later work of the most important American political artist of the post-war period.