Socialist View of the Worker as Presented in Harvest Song

Moran briefly touches upon the concept of “scientific socialism” in the fifth chapter of his book (Moran, 138). The Marx and Engels  brand of socialism is sometimes referred to as a science because they both took pride in the fact that they developed their thesis by looking at the rise and fall of different socioeconomic trends throughout history, and developed what is commonly called as the “dialectic” of socialism. Not necessarily “empirical” evidence because there was no experiment that had been done, but still not “utopian” because it was based on actual analysis of human history. 

Marx and Engels discuss the workers alienation from his or her work as a symptom of the problem with capitalist industrialized society. The Marxist Theory of the worker’s alienation is the idea that in Industrialized society, the worker is laboring for the bourgeois class rather than him or herself – typically as an easily replaceable cog in a factory – and thus dehumanized through his or her alienation from his or her work. Wikipedia describes the theory of alienation as “the types of human relations which are not controlled by their participants and the ensuing results thereof” (“Marx’s Theory of Alienation,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia). Part II of Toomer’s Cane is largely about moving to the Industrialized north. And while the south does not escape the Marxist dialectic of the proletariat – the share cropper – pitted against the bourgeois – the plantation owner – the North is where Marx and Engels would envision the gaining of “class consciousness” to happen.

Toomer invites the discussion of the worker’s alienation throughout several pieces in Part II, and I am thus, considering it as an essay topic. But what sticks out to me the most was the conversation regarding Marx’s alienation theory in “Harvest Song.”

Throughout the poem Toomer evokes imagery and allusions to the toils of a southern sharecropper. An example of which would be the repetition of the sentence”I have been in the fields all day,” as well as the seemingly constant mentions of different grain (Toomer, 69). This makes the reader feel as if the poem perhaps belongs in part I, which is about life for the African American in the south.

However, unlike the pieces in Part I which have a sense of shared suffering among the people, “Harvest Song” maintains the sense of isolation, or rather, alienation, present throughout Part II. This isolation is attributed to the repetition of “I,” most notably in “I hunger,” without any mention of any sort of interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, lines like “I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose/ throats are also dry” increase the sense of isolation for the narrator by suggesting that he or she desires interpersonal relationships with the people who are doing what he or she is doing. This concept of loneliness is even further developed in the next stanza:

It would be good to hear their songs…reapers of the sweet-stalk’d/ cane, cutters of the corn…even though their throats/cracked and the strangeness of their voices deafened me.

Here Toomer evokes the difference between part I and II through the sharecropper’s alienation and loneliness. In Part I songs, such as “Deep River” were sung, and the workers worked together to give each other support and a sense of community (9). In Part II, the worker desires, not just companionship, but companionship from those who are like him or her and suffering under the hardships that he or she is suffering under (69).

Such isolation, however, is not characteristic of farm work, but rather, factory work in the industrialized north where workers did not communicate with one another because they had no reason to. This idea brings about the idea that maybe this poem is not just about the south but the north too.

Like a factory worker in the north, the speaker is alienated from the product he or she is making. “I hunger” is repeated over and over again even though the speaker is harvesting crops intended for food (69). This is similar to how a factory worker labors to make a product he or she is too poor to afford for his or herself.

I believe the reason why Toomer evokes such a discussion between “Harvest Song” and Marx’s theory of the worker’s alienation is to show how the southern African American moved out of slavery in the south only to enter the realm of wage-slavery in the north.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.