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﻿<title﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, CLR James: Socialism from Below - Article﻿</title>﻿

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﻿<b﻿>﻿CLR James: Socialism from Below 

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by David Camfield﻿<br﻿>﻿

﻿<i﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, May - June 1996﻿</i>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

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﻿<font﻿ ﻿size="1"﻿>﻿Anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, Marxist -- C.L.R. James was a life-long socialist who made the most significant contribution of his time to our understanding of the interconnections between racism and class exploitation.﻿</font>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿


Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X have been the subjects of a great deal of attention in the media over the past several years. However, C.L.R. James rarely appears in the lists of names celebrated during Black History Month. 

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James is best known for The Black Jacobins, his classic history of the slave revolt in St. Domingue (now Haiti) in the 1790s. It tells the incredible story of how the slaves of St. Domingue, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, defeated the armed might of three empires and won their freedom. 

﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

But James was not only a historian -- he was, for over 50 years, a Marxist and an opponent of capitalism and imperialism. 

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Born in Trinidad in 1901, in the early 1930s he was inspired by Captain Andre Cipriani and his Trinidad Labour Party to take up the cause of West Indian self-government. James left the Caribbean for Britain in 1932. Reading Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and meeting socialist workers there led him to Marxism. 

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He joined a tiny British Trotskyist group that was trying to keep alive the real Marxist tradition, opposed to both Western capitalism and the Stalinist tyranny that had devoured the Russian Revolution from within. A brilliant public speaker, James became a well-known figure in the movement against the invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) by Italian fascism in 1935. 

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James proved that genuine Marxists, unlike social democrats and pro-Moscow Communists, were consistent internationalists and anti-racists who sided with oppressed nations against imperial domination. 

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He moved to the US in 1938 and remained there until deported in 1953. In 1939 he travelled to Mexico for discussions with Trotsky. These helped him develop a better analysis of how racism and class exploitation interact than had any previous socialist. 

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Years before the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, James recognized the importance of the black struggle to the future of the US. He also rejected the idea that only blacks could fight racism and argued for a multi-racial challenge to the entire system. 

﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

Another of James' political strengths was the sureness with which he grasped that workers' self-activity lies at the heart of Marxism. He had a deep understanding of the important role of the struggles, large and small, that working people are forced to fight to gain control at work and over the rest of their lives. 

﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

He and his cothinkers correctly concluded that the USSR was not progressive. In fact, they argued, it was a particular form of the same capitalist system found in Western Europe and North America. James understood that new and radically democratic organizations created by workers themselves -- like workers' councils -- are the basis of socialist revolution. 

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But James' Marxism also had serious flaws. He vigorously insisted that socialism would inevitably overcome what he saw as a capitalist order on the verge of collapse. He also came to believe that workers no longer needed socialist parties in order to make successful revolutions. These ideas caused him to break with Trotskyism. 

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Another major weakness was his "Third World" politics. He supported anti-colonial movements but advocated national economic development rather than trying to fuse anti-imperialism with the struggle for socialism. As a result, he was embarassingly uncritical of nationalist dictatorships in Ghana, Cuba and other countries. The contradiction between his democratic and revolutionary vision for the "First World" and the elitist strategies he advanced in the "Third World" is glaring. 

﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

Nevertheless, until his death in 1989, James remained a Marxist who insisted that socialism was necessary to liberate humanity. He wrote and spoke not only about politics but also on popular culture, sports, art and philosophy. Always he suggested that in their everyday lives working people express their creativity and shape the society that subjugates them. 

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James' socialist current has all but disappeared, but interest in James in recent years has made his name more famous than when he was alive. It is up to Marxists of the future to critically build on his rich but uneven legacy. 

﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

﻿<b﻿>﻿Sidebar Article: CLR James Speaks

﻿</b>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

"The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental." 

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﻿<i﻿>﻿The Black Jacobins﻿</i>﻿ (1938)

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"... the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own ... it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles ... this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organised labour movement or the Marxist party... it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States ..." 

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"The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA" (1948) 

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"[In the USSR] State-property and total planning are nothing else but the complete subordination of the proletariat to capital ... State property as such and plan as such are metaphysical abstractions. They have a class content... Under capitalism, private or state, all science, knowledge, organization, are developed only at the expense and degradation of the proletariat." 

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﻿<i﻿>﻿State Capitalism and World Revolution﻿</i>﻿ (1950) 

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"There are some short-sighted people who turn a blind eye to all this and claim that the Russian system is progress. To me the argument comes strangely from the mouths of those just emerging from centuries of colonialism." 

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﻿<i﻿>﻿Modern Politics﻿</i>﻿ (1960) 

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"The supreme artists - Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoyevsky - have always been men whose own personal lives, lived in the decisive social milieu of their time, could thus become the source of their most profound conceptions." 

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"Notes on Hamlet" (1953) 

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