Death of a Salesman: In life and art, Black capitalism is still capitalism

The all-Black leading actors who are cast in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, now playing on Broadway in New York City, pay tremendous homage to a well-known play by pro-communist writer Arthur Miller. It’s about the deep alienation that results from the commodification of not only human labor but also human ideals and potential. But this production inevitably feeds into the current trend in bourgeois capitalist culture–on television, in media and in film and theater–of presenting Black  workers in fundamentally pro-capitalist spaces as “progressive,” when, in fact, the primary function of such representation feeds the illusion that material conditions for the masses are improved by virtue of some stars “making it.”  Notably, the current Broadway play continues the laudable effort on the part of Arthur Miller to present his “profit is evil, profit is wrong” assertion as a universal predicament for all workers regardless of race or ethnicity.  Still, the fundamental weakness in the play, overall and this rendition, in particular is that the “race blind” critique of capitalist alienation–partially challenged by positioning Black actors at the helm of this current production–continues to undermine the very commitment to portraying the truth about how racism and sexism are pillars of capitalist exploitation.

Make no mistake, Arthur Miller, in spite of his liberal tendencies, was no traitor of the communist movement. In 1956 when he was called into the House  Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the judicial arm of the bosses’ post-World War II vicious anti-communist political attack on the working class, Miller refused to name names–though surely he had many–risking even jail time to uphold his principles of workers’ justice.  

While figures such as Paul Robeson (see page 8) used theater in the twentieth century as a mechanism for invoking the power of internationalist proletarian culture, the general fact is that Broadway culture–on and off Broadway–is in many ways inaccessible for most workers, especially in times of stifling inflation such as exist today.  Just this past summer, young comrades in our Progressive Labor Party staged a short but powerful skit in the community outside of a public housing complex where one of our comrades resides, using this skit to shed light on the substandard conditions inflicted upon workers, inspiring many in the crowd to then participate in a CHALLENGE distribution in that same housing complex. It is this kind of art–theater as practice for workers’ empowerment–that our class must support, create, and use in the effort to overturn capitalist inequality and build a world in which commodity production and the alienation it produces–such as that embodied by the tragic character of Willie Loman–no longer exists.