By Peter Fraser
James’ politics falls into two phases. The first, fairly brief, was his radical, pro-working class West Indian period, the second and much longer was his Marxist period when his chief concerns were the freedom of colonial Africa and the prospects for revolution in the U.S.A and in the world. In this second phase James never entirely neglected the West Indies but remained locked into his initial responses to the politics of the late nineteen twenties and early thirties in Trinidad. He would write comparatively little about the labour movements of the late 1930s in the West Indies. When he returned to Trinidad in the late 1950s this out-dated knowledge would vitiate his political activities.
James’ first foray into Trinidadian politics, ironically published after he left Trinidad, was his biography of Alfred Cipriani, Trinidadian estate owner, army captain and trade union leader. Kent Worcester (C.L.R.James: A Political Biography [1996]) describes the origins of The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies(1932), thus: “Partly as a literary exercise, James drafted a biography of Cipriani in the late 1920s”. The literary exercise must have been a very small part of the origins of the book: James was plainly more interested in politics in Trinidad than he would later admit. The book, for which James had been accused of hero-worshipping Cipriani by his Trinidadian contemporaries, suffers from very little hero-worship compared with his treatment of Toussaint in The Black Jacobins, some of his comments about Nkrumah and most of his writings on Lenin. Only in the very last chapter does he write fairly uncritically of Cipriani. The rest of the book discusses critically and with great insight (1) the role of Cipriani as leader of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association and his relation to its members, (2) the Crown Colony system of government and its effects on Trinidadian, and by extension British West Indian, politics and society-these were published the next year, 1933, as The Case for West Indian Self-Government, and (3) the futility of trying to achieve radical change, illustrated mainly by Cipriani’s efforts, within the Crown Colony system. Interestingly his friends, including Alfred Mendes, thought that he refused to involve himself in the great contemporary controversy over a proposed Divorce Bill because of his admiration for Cipriani. James in The Life explains his non-involvement, though he personally supported legalising divorce, in terms of political analysis and calculation. The Bill had been introduced in an arbitrary fashion typical of the system and could succeed without much support because of the Government dominance of the Crown Colony legislature. This would be corrected by self-government and the consequent political participation of Trinidadians. They would then decide for themselves whether they wanted divorce made legal or not. That was the analysis. The political calculation was that the masses had no great feelings about divorce as Cipriani had discovered and he was therefore allowed to exercise his (Roman Catholic) conscience. To James there seemed no point in attacking the leader of organized labour on a matter that could damage and had already damaged him since that would only hamper the labour movement. He would not always display so clear-sighted a vision of day-to-day politics. The Life and The Case marked the end of James’ purely nationalist politics though nationalism remained important to him. At the end of Beyond A Boundary the reference to the West Indies becoming a nation through cricketing success attests to that.
So too does his involvement in Pan Africanism and his analyses of African American politics in the USA. The first strand can be found in The Black Jacobins but much more explicitly in the first 1938 edition [see below]. It is also the subject of A History of Negro Revolt (1938) which ranges across the countries of the African diaspora to present a picture of popular nationalism striving against colonial rule. His writings on Nkrumah and Ghana, the most important of which were collected in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (original edition 1977, revised edition 1982), confirm this willingness to acknowledge the importance of nationalism in leading to the socialist revolution. But James made grandiose claims for Nkrumah’s world-historical significance and one reviewer of the book pointed out that he had replaced a “sentimental imperialist myth” with a sentimental Pan African one which made Nkrumah the blending of Toussaint, Lenin, and Gandhi. He visited Ghana and advised Nkrumah briefly but James’ only real involvement in Pan African politics had been alongside George Padmore, his fellow Trinidadian, with the International African Service Bureau from 1935 to 1938. The IASB had originally tried to get the Italian invasion of Ethiopia stopped. This was really small pressure group politics of publications with limited circulation and public meetings. The IASB continued to publish works on the African struggle for independence. The failure over Ethiopia accounts for the bitterness (accurately aimed bitterness) of asides in The Black Jacobins about British and French politicians. His last pressure group campaign, backed by a national government, would be successful.
Within the USA his involvement in politics continued the trend he had established in England. Even when he belonged to the main body of Trotskyists in the USA that was a numerically small body. They did engage in interesting activities: helping to organize a share-croppers’ strike in Alabama and attempting to influence industrial workers in factories. This period was notable for their attempts to understand the effects of changing technology on the workers in these factories and the implications of these changes for political action. Of significance, and this would remain constant to the end of his life, was the belief that the African American struggle within the USA had enormous potential for bringing about the American revolution. He also defended it on the grounds that African Americans had to be allowed to organize themselves even if this went against Marxist orthodoxy about nationalism. He could therefore from the late 1960s onwards without contradiction denounce the failings of Black Power theorists while defending their right to express their views and help organize African Americans in any way they chose.
About revolution he would say that since he knew it he did not play with it. He could, however, display the greatest frivolity in discussing it within the Caribbean. He commented on the February 1970 events in Trinidad when student-led protests combined with an army mutiny to shake the Trinidad government that power lay in the streets ready to be picked up and that Eric Williams, the Prime Minister, had fainted and broken his glasses. In fact the demonstrations did not threaten the existence of the government and the army mutiny was ended by local forces without the assistance of US and Venezuelan armed forces that were ready to intervene. Against advice from those who wanted foreign intervention Williams the nationalist held his nerve. James’ desire to see a revolutionary situation and to get back at Williams induced him to substitute knockabout farce for sober analysis. After the murder of Walter Rodney in Guyana James criticised Rodney for not preparing properly for the seizure of power by winning over the Guyanese armed forces. In fact Rodney died believing he had won over at least one member of the army. The Guyanese armed forces and police have since independence proved to be very British institutions by loyally supporting the government of the day. He had, rather bafflingly for those who have read it, recommended that Rodney read his “Lenin and the Problem”-it is mainly about the need for education (in which, James seems to think, only Lenin, and not the leaders of underdeveloped countries, was interested), not about the seizure of power. When James invoked Lenin and revolution it tended to be as in Notes on Dialectic: “Lenin writes in very large writing:
LEAP
LEAP
LEAP
LEAP…
“The socialist movement against imperialism would establish itself…He did not have to wait to see anything. That was there. It would LEAP up…let us sit and write in large print on our notes: LEAP, SPONTANEOUS ACTIVITY, SELF-MOVEMENT…” In “Lenin and the Problem”, mainly about Lenin’s recognition that Russia was not ready for revolution in 1917 and that a great deal of work had to be done, this is put less abstractly. Lenin, like Napoleon, organized and prepared meticulously but “How will it work out? That would be seen. His whole method was summed up in his quotation from Napoleon on War: ‘On s’engage et puis on voit.’ …But after the plan was made: you engage and then you see.” What Walter Rodney made of these words one can guess; Lenin gambled and won; many other revolutionaries would gamble and lose. Gambling is hardly good advice for making a revolution.
His other influence was on the New Jewel Movement in Grenada. Originally very Jamesian in eschewing a Leninist vanguard party it opted for just such a model and that contributed to its downfall. According to a friend when James arrived in Grenada while the revolution was still alive and denounced the Leninist style party he was quickly moved on. The Grenadians might have pointed out that James’ defence of Lenin’s vanguard party, that the conditions of Russia demanded a disciplined vanguard party, applied to Grenada under the regime of Eric Gairy. Oddly enough they might also have used in their defence another passage from James in Modern Politics (1960). After explaining that the Leninist vanguard party had become obsolete in advanced countries-“…today Leninist Bolshevism is dead”- he continued: “ The party adapted to local conditions and basing itself upon a careful examination of both the Second and Third Internationals, is still valid for countries which are underdeveloped, that is to say, where industry and therefore the proletariat is not dominant. One proof of the continuing validity of the party in those areas is the victories that they are winning in country after country.” James was not the most reliable guide to the practice of politics, revolutionary or not.
In Trinidad from 1958 to 1960 James would be involved for the only time in his life in high-level large-scale politics. Later in 1965 and 1966 he would be involved there with the formation of a small party, the Workers and Farmers Party, that would fail badly in the 1966 elections-its programme was broadly nationalist and it attempted to bridge the divide between the two main ethnic groups in Trinidad. That ended James’ significant involvement in national politics anywhere. From 1958 to 1960 he had been the editor of the newspaper The Nation of the Trinidadian governing party, the Peoples National Movement. In 1958 the West Indies Federation had been launched and James was also made General Secretary of the West Indies Federal Labour Party-the party in power in the Federation. James had urged British Guiana to join the Federation [speech in October 2008 Guyana Review] with no success. He tried desperately hard to keep it together as it began to fail in 1960, a process ending a year later. Whatever the failings of West Indian politicians, either by not joining or not resolving their difficulties, this failure was typical of British made federations throughout the Empire in this period. One obvious problem was that it was a confederation (a weak centre with strong units) rather than a federation (a strong centre with weak units). The Americans had had to solve this problem between 1781 and 1789-they had the benefit of being independent, correcting their own mistakes and knowing the consequences of not correcting them-Benjamin Franklin had warned Americans that they either hung together or hanged separately. The consequence of failure in the West Indies was independence in 1962 for Jamaica and Trinidad, the two major units within the federation. James and several other people were right about trying to preserve the fed
eration. In 1950 W.A.Lewis, St. Lucian born and later Nobel Prize winner in economics, had argued that a customs union was the pre-requisite for the industrial development of the British West Indies and predicted the cut-throat tactics that would ensue if there were no such union. In the 1970s when oil prices were rising one small independent island accepted a pittance by way of revenue because if it did not an oil refinery would be built in another independent island for the same pittance. (It was fashionable in the 1970s for people who had not read Lewis’ article to denounce it and him). On the question of Federation James was on the side of the angels; simultaneously he found himself in hell with his involvement in Trinidadian politics.
Signalling the end of Crown Colony Government Trinidad had its first election with full adult suffrage in 1956; the party that won would also have a large measure of self-government. A hastily formed party, the Peoples National Movement, led by the distinguished Trinidadian academic and critic of colonialism, Eric Williams, won a large victory. Reminiscent of the victory of the more radical People’s Progressive Party in 1953 in British Guiana this was a triumph for the new democratic politics over the old politics of restricted voting franchises and eminent people who put themselves or their favoured candidates up for election with the near certainty of victory. Both the PNM and the PPP suffered from organizational failings because of their quick development: they were both faced with opponents who had even more minimal organizations. The leaders of these parties played a much more prominent role than they should have. James would fasten on these organizational failings and the unhealthy dominance of the party leader, pointing out that a period in opposition would have sorted them out. It was eerily reminiscent of the problems facing the Bolsheviks after October 1917. Like Lenin in October 1917 neither the PPP in 1953 nor the PNM in 1956 could do other than they had done. Failure to win would have led to oblivion for Lenin; it might well have destroyed the PPP and PNM. In the end the PNM and the PPP, split into two parties, learnt organizational methods even if they have not always practised them well and have all survived to this day; the Bolsheviks survived in power for seventy odd years. James, however, seemed to imply that Williams was wrong while he never would admit that Lenin was, given similar circumstances.
James therefore became increasingly critical of the organization of the PNM. Party Politics in the West Indies (1962) was his long explanation of what had gone wrong and why he had resigned from his posts. He was, as I suggested, more right than wrong about the organizational failings and the power of the leader. What he could not control, however, was his expression of contempt for the West Indian middle classes. He had not expressed this contempt quite so openly in his 1932 work. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the middle classes were now in a position to do something about people who treated them with contempt and time and time again in the politics of the independent Commonwealth Caribbean they would defeat the attempts by radicals who, themselves usually members of the middle class, displayed this Jamesian contempt. Years later one radical would suggest that they needed to be treated with a little more respect but interestingly had to quote an African American radical scholar. (The Jamaican Orlando Patterson had made that point many years before). The second feature of James’ explanation was his stress on how profound his knowledge of party organization was. For those who knew the size of the organizations that he was involved with and that one of his longest serving friends, Raya Dunayevskaya, had finally parted politically from him pointing out that it was one thing to believe that the workers would organize themselves but quite another to act as if the party could dispense with organization itself, this self-aggrandisement is startling. Large parties in democratic polities are not the same as small political groups. The third was that Williams had refused to seize the revolutionary moment created by his demand that the Americans give back all the land belonging to their base at Chaguramas. This base had been one of the famous West Indian bases that the British had given the Americans in exchange for fifty quite old destroyers in 1941.They were needed for convoys and the British need for them was desperate. Neither the then Governor of Trinidad nor Winston Churchill who made the agreement was particularly enthusiastic about it. The West Indies Federation wanted the land for its capital and obviously needed the Americans out. Williams started a great agitation that ultimately resulted, given the disparity in power between the parties, in much the deal that the Americans were always prepared to offer. Some years later Williams would get all that he had asked for. James felt that had the party been better organized the original deal would have been better and Trinidadian politics would have been transformed. This is plainly overestimating the power of small islands: in another context James would denounce West Indian radicals who did not recognize this and talked blithely of the nationalization of foreign companies, provocatively ending by agreeing with General De Gaulle’s assessment of the Caribbean islands being specks of dust. In 1960 in Trinidad he was, approaching his sixties, as unrealistic as any radical decades younger.
Williams’ version was that he had promoted James against the wishes of others who objected “on the ground of his notorious political record.” A previous editor of The Nation had caused trouble; James would create more by his interventions. “Whilst party members generally supported his stand that Frank Worrell should be made captain of the West Indies cricket team, more than one looked askance at his methods…He used the party paper to build up himself and his family, and his personal articles on George Padmore and the James family were widely resented.” Williams quotes the conclusions of the party committee that investigated the paper under James: “The whole question of management during Mr. James’ term of office could be written off quite briefly as one of mismanagement. Given a free hand, he appeared to use it freely without regard for his own or the company’s responsibilities.” James had detailed the dire condition of the paper when he took over and had outlined plans to expand it and put it on a sound financial footing. Given that his knowledge of running a company was less than that of organizing a party it was no wonder that he ran into trouble, however good his plans.
Analysts of the episode have pointed out that people in the PNM were initially worried as much about James’ politics as the deference his ex-pupil Williams had shown him. The differences in political outlook between the two had grown too great to be easily settled; the experience in politics of Williams though brief was of a different order to that of James; and James was right about the dangers of Williams’ dominance of the party (though when two decades later Williams tried to oust old PNM parliamentarians as “dead wood” their constituencies disregarded him and reselected them-the party obviously did continue to have some life beyond Williams’ good pleasure). They had initially worked closely together and James may have written at least one of Williams’ more radical speeches in the period. Williams had described The Nation under James as “the established spearhead of the party militant, the textbook of independence.” In the end Williams would suggest that James could join Fidel Castro in Cuba and Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana because he, like them, believed in violent revolution. Williams had consulted George Padmore, W.A. Lewis and James about the draft programme and constitution of the PNM in London in 1956. So James had some idea before 1958 about the likely structure of the PNM that he would encounter. In his autobiography Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister Williams would contrast himself with Padmore and James: “ West Indians had traditionally deserted the West Indies-Padmore for Africa, James for the absurdities of world revolution, the majority of West Indians for the traditional medicine and law. I would cultivate the West Indian garden, from Cuba to French Guiana.” Neither James nor Williams was prepared to accept second place-they were destined to clash. Williams may have resented James’ portraying himself as still the teacher of Williams; of modern party politics on a national level Williams was now the master and no claims of superiority on James’ part could change that. In one respect, and a very important one, James had much the better of the argument. Williams had spoken crudely about the East Indian population of Trinidad after they had helped inflict a defeat on him in the Federal elections. James continued to insist that relations between the two major ethnic groups could not be allowed to deteriorate because of pique and political calculation. He feared doom for Trinidad; Trinidad would avoid this but British Guiana would not. The campaign to get Worrell made captain of the West Indies cricket team conducted mainly through the pages of the PNM newspaper was the great political achievement of James.
The major problem lay in the fact that James had lost touch after 1938 with the West Indies. He had complained to his American comrades that they, not he, should be analysing US society.
He had, however, chosen to stay in the USA-despite his claims to the contrary he could have easily returned to Britain from the USA before the outbreak of war in 1939. In the USA he had encountered the advanced industrial society still on the upswing; Britain in contrast was a fading power. In the USA if anywhere he believed he would find the conditions for Marxist revolution. He did believe that he had found them as we can see in his American writings and American Civilization. He returned to cricket and the West Indies when reluctantly accepting Britain as his destination on being deported from the USA. He had tried to argue that it was a cruel and unusual punishment to send him there-the State Department official, who had plainly never lived in Britain, refused to believe him. Williams was almost certainly correct in thinking that James thought the West Indies second best to world revolution. Losing touch with the West Indies his only solution for the region remained what it had been in the 1930s a complete scrapping of the old colonial system. The politics of the Grenadian Revolution proved how difficult that was. The travails of the Cuban economy suggest how difficult even with extensive Soviet economic support this still is. Revolution on specks of dust would hardly be the trigger for the world revolution. It was fairly clear that however correct his analyses of various aspects of West Indian politics in the post Crown Colony era he had no coherent political strategy for the new problems posed by the period.
James tended to see political events everywhere as exemplifying his theories. As the present stage of civilization was bankrupt, both in the capitalist countries and in those dominated by the Soviet Union, there had to be a revolution. It would not be led by a Leninist style vanguard party but created by Workers Councils. Thus false dawn followed false dawn-the final one being Solidarity in Poland. Given his contempt for academics it is probably churlish to point out that his main political activities sound remarkably like a university course involving work-experience taught in a large seminar group and attended by intelligent, enthusiastic and hard-working students. Would that most academics could have classes like that.
What assessment can
we make of James?
As an historian he was a pioneer of history from below. In the late 1950s and 1960s historians began more and more to turn their attention to the lives of ordinary people. History had tended to concentrate on the broadly defined political activities of elites. Elites had on the whole created the surviving documentary record and the victors in historical struggles had imposed their interpretations on events. The developing interest in social history and the influence of left-wing radicalism created an interest in trying to recover the lives of the neglected of history. One great surprise to male historians was the fact that women were usually a majority of the population and, unless monarchs, did not have a place in the histories (usually written by men). The other great surprise was how much of the documentary record, previously neglected, contained information about the lives of the overlooked-the archives of the law courts would be one great source of material. In The Black Jacobins James had written of a revolution of slaves and the importance of the Parisian masses in France and their influence on the success of that revolution and the one in France. His main attention was on the efforts, eventually successful, of the enslaved to free themselves. The Black Jacobins, therefore, can be seen as one of the first to embody this new way of interpreting history.
In the literature of the Commonwealth Caribbean he holds an important place.
Plainly incorrect are such descriptions as the late Edward Said’s “father of modern Caribbean writing”. This would have been more accurate had Said applied it to Common-wealth Caribbean literary criticism even though Mariners, Renegades and Castaways was not about a Caribbean writer. It is certainly not true of the wider Caribbean: not even true of the Commonwealth Caribbean. The Jamaican H.G. De Lisser had published Jane’s Career in 1913. Kenneth Ramchand writes: “It is the first West Indian novel in which the central character is Black; Jane is the first full West Indian fictional heroine…” and she is working class. James’ short story “Triumph” of a decade and a half later concentrates on working class women; Minty Alley has as its central character a middle class young man; Alfred Mendes’ Pitch Lake, published two years before Minty Alley, has
as its central character a middle class young man; Alfred Mendes’ Pitch Lake, published two years before Minty Alley, has a similar central character and his Black Fauns published the year before Minty Alley concentrates on women living in a yard. The alienated middle class man of Pitch Lake and Minty Alley would become a central feature of Commonwealth Caribbean literature. James would remain fascinated by the role of middle class intellectuals in his ideological writings.
Ironically given this fascination with intellectuals James has little to say of importance. On the whole he tends to be dismissive of their efforts and to claim that their only means of becoming relevant to society is to embrace Marxism. Despite his own interest in high art, it was in his examination of the cultural interests of ordinary Americans, chiefly conducted in his correspondence with Constance Webb and in American Civilization, both published only posthumously, that his great contribution to understanding popular culture begins. Beyond A Boundary would bring this way of understanding to a wider audience and help open up the serious study of sports and games. This was the development of his interest in history from below applied to contemporary society.
James the Marxist ideologist must rank fairly high among the successors to Lenin. A great deal of that must be due to the influence of Trotsky. Trotsky may not have been in the first rank of Marxist thinkers but as leader of the anti-Stalin Marxists he attracted a number of people who either while remaining Marxists or even after they had ceased to be Marxists addressed the problems of the twentieth century world in significant and creative ways. A number of these were more interesting theorists than Trotsky. To cite just three and all too briefly: Tony Cliff (Y’gal Gluckstein-1917-2000) independently developed the idea of Stalinist Russia being state capitalist; Cornelius Castoriadis (also known as Pierre Chaulieu-1922-1997) would end up stressing the radical discontinuities in social change and the central importance of autonomy; James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution would analyse the ways in which bureaucracy had taken over capitalist enterprises, arguing that the economies of the capitalist West and the Soviet Union were converging at the level of control. James is plainly one of these. His stress on the importance of workers’ self-organization, the role of women’s and African Americans’ struggles in the revolutionary transformation of American society even though not purely class struggles, and his attempt as early as The Black Jacobins to relate struggles against racism to class struggles and the ways in which race relations could be independent of class relations indicate this clearly. His attempt to re-read and reclaim Hegel for Marxism is paralleled by Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941): Marcuse’s is by far the better exposition of Hegel’s ideas both in understanding and clarity. James was, however, using Hegel to move beyond certain aspects of Lenin without ceasing to be a Leninist.
James as a Pan Africanist has a mixed reputation. Some see him as too Eurocentric to deserve the title; others make extravagant claims. The history of Pan-Africanism long pre-dates James: restricting oneself to Caribbean people we have Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in St.Thomas in the Danish (now American) Virgin Islands in 1832, Henry Sylvester Williams of Trinidad who organized the first Pan African Conference in London in 1900, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey whose movement was more influential in Trinidad than anywhere else in the Eastern Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s and of course George Padmore. Padmore was from the 1930s to his death in 1959 much more influential than James. We need to remember, however, that The Black Jacobins was written with Africa in mind. This is clearer in the first edition in passages cut from the later editions. “From the people learning in action will come the leaders; not from the isolated blacks at Guy’s Hospital or the Sorbonne, the dabblers in surréalisme or the lawyers, but the quiet recruits in a black police force, the sergeant in the French native army or British police, familiarising himself with military tactics and strategy, reading a stray pamphlet of Lenin or Trotsky as Toussaint read the Abbé Raynal.
“The African Revolution will be as merciless as that of Dessalines’.” (p. 315 of first edition). He was pleased to note in the second edition that The Black Jacobins had for some South Africans been the equivalent of Abbé Raynal’s writings.
This part has noted his contribution to the understanding of West Indian politics and his almost non-existent contribution to its practice.
Descriptions such as the black Plato or Hegel are wide of the mark They fail to judge his philosophical knowledge and expertise correctly and must rest on a low opinion or an ignorance of West Indian philosophers (of whom there are and have been a few). A more useful way of providing an overall assessment is to compare him with his contemporaries. This I have tried to do. In his combination of interests and achievements he stands almost alone- in the African diaspora the only comparable figure is W.E. B. Du Bois. He was a trained historian who published distinguished and still valuable work in that field (Black Reconstruction is also a pioneering work in history from below), pioneered the sociological study of African American communities, wrote interpretations of African American culture emphasising the spirituals, wrote novels, was a Pan Africanist-he attended the 1900 conference and organized the next in 1919, wrote about Africa and in fact ended his days in Nkrumah’s Ghana still editing the great project of his life the Pan African Encyclopaedia, taught at universities and worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the most important pressure group organization for African American civil rights in the USA until the Civil Rights Movement, edited and wrote for its journal Crisis, and was a Marxist. The comparison with Jame
