“I am not being pedantic. In these metaphysical matters you can misplace a comma and be thereby liable to ten thousand words of aesthetic damnation.” (Beyond A Boundary)
What James writes of aesthetic theory is true of Marxism. Sometimes the damnation was physical; often it was accompanied by verbal abuse that simply antagonised like-minded people. All of James’ life as a Marxist was lived while the Soviet Union existed-during that period debates about Marxism were usually debates about the nature of the Soviet Union. In this part I shall outline the context of Marxism in which James operated, James’
engagement with Marxism, attempt an explanation of the development of his ideas and set out what in my estimation were his important contributions to understanding the changes of the twentieth century and the possibilities of revolution. In the final part his anti-colonialism and the Pan Africanist elements of his thought will be linked to his politics. So in this part World Revolution 1917-1936, Notes on Dialectics, American Civilization, State Capitalism and World Revolution, The Invading Socialist Society, and Facing Reality are the main texts, though several articles are also relevant. The discussion of the works after World Revolution will be thematic.
Towards the end of his life Karl Marx wrote with some annoyance that there were people claiming to be Marxists that he did not recognize as such since their ideas differed so much from his. On the other hand the ideas and systems of thinkers are developed by others in the course of time: they are interpreted, reinterpreted, developed, modified, some parts discarded, new areas added. Marx himself had taken Hegel’s philosophy, the French revolutionary socialist tradition and the British classical political economists and combined them to produce Marxism. The first half of the nineteenth century with its profound transformations caused by the industrial revolution produced critics from both the left and the right (themselves of course terms from the French Revolution). Both sets of critics found the destruction of older ways of life profoundly disturbing and searched for remedies. They both sought to humanise the world by overthrowing the contemporary political and economic rulers: the left sought a new society for ordinary people, the right a return to the old order. For an ideology of the left like Marxism what this meant was that it was one of a number of competing socialisms. There was another competitor for change: anarchism. Though anarchism could be of the left or the right (where its appeal was individualistic) as a mass movement it was of the left and very popular in certain European countries, Spain being a particularly good example. So Marxism had to be distinguished from other forms of socialism and keep well away from anarchism. There would be some unpleasant consequences of this.
Marx himself at times used fairly unpleasant language about his opponents; Lenin elevated this to a new art. His attacks, in his own words were “calculated to evoke in the reader hatred, aversion and contempt for [his opponents]. Such wording is calculated not to convince, but to break up the ranks of the opponent; not to correct the mistake of the opponent, but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth. This wording [of the piece he is defending] is indeed of such a nature as to evoke the worst thoughts, the worst suspicions about the opponent, and indeed, as contrasted with the wording that convinces and corrects, it ‘carries confusion into the ranks of the proletariat’.” He never engaged in personal revenge, unlike Stalin, and was prepared to change his mind but this mode of argument when linked to Lenin’s belief that he was always right had serious effects on Marxists’ ability to be Marxist. Reinforced by his prestige as the maker of the October Revolution Lenin’s denunciations meant that Marxist thinkers who disagreed with him, whether the Mensheviks (whom he overcame in Russia), or the Austro-Marxists, or Karl Kautsky (regarded as the successor to Marx and Engels) who had the temerity to disagree with him about the October Revolution, simply became names to be deployed in arguments or associated with positions to be avoided, usually known as time went on only through Lenin’s caricatures. James, for example, might have benefited when examining class and race from reading the interesting work of the Austro-Marxist Karl Renner on nationalism within a multi-ethnic state; James’ own later position on Lenin’s vanguard party and party domination was not far from the criticisms of Kautsky and Rosa Luxembourg. Much had to be slowly and painfully re-invented within Marxism because of this. The situation was exacerbated by Stalin’s crude version of Leninism becoming the centre doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.
James’ career as a Marxist began when he joined a Trotskyite group. These tended to be very small but the membership tended to be intelligent and committed. This was the setting that James found most congenial: his ideological work was done in such small groups and he never belonged to a large party or movement except for his associations in Trinidad with the Peoples’ National Movement in 1958-1960 and a few years later with the Workers and Farmers Party. In many ways these groups functioned like study groups but they were always attempting to organize the working classes. This unity of theory and practice was a Marxist ideal-at times the tension between analysis and revolutionary practice distorted both, for James as it did generally for Marxists. One characteristic, shared with Lenin, of James’ Marxism was his willingness to modify his ideas according to prevailing circumstances. Before Marxism with the success of the October Revolution became Marxism-Leninism a number of people wondered whether Lenin was really a Marxist. He believed in an alliance between the proletariat and the peasants while orthodoxy dictated an alliance with the bourgeoisie to advance the bourgeois revolution which theory dictated Russia had to undergo. He believed that nationalism could be harnessed for the revolution rather than being an impediment as did nearly every other Marxist (ironically the First World War would demonstrate the hold of nationalism over most Marxists). He came up with the idea of the vanguard party to lead the revolution and decided what response the party should adopt towards the workers themselves acting to overthrow their rulers. All this was eminently practical but not orthodox. Lenin was another of James’ heroes: as with Toussaint in The Black Jacobins Lenin in World Revolution 1917-1936 is the wisest of leaders. As with Toussaint and his failures Lenin is suddenly demonstrated to have made a grave mistake-in his case not apparently noticing what Stalin was up to until too late. James was never afraid to say that some of Lenin’s ideas were outmoded but he never really modified his portrayal of Lenin as the supreme theoretician and politician of the modern age set out in World Revolution.
That book was not a history of the period but a Trotskyite “thesis” as James himself describes it. The thesis was that the policy of socialism in one country, the Soviet Union of Stalin, was by its actions destroying the possibility of Marxist revolutions anywhere else in the world. Indeed the Soviet Union itself was really a bureaucratic state than a socialist one. This is not one of James’ better works but it reveals his skill as an historian but more interestingly gives hints of his differences with Trotsky. To understand it and much else that followed for James a little history is necessary.
Marx believed that history had its stages. Each stage of history reached the limits of its capacity and generated the forces that would lead to its replacement. So feudalism gave way to capitalism by means of a bourgeois revolution and capitalism would to socialism by means of a proletarian revolution. The advanced capitalist countries being those that would reach their limits first would be the ones that had proletarian (socialist) revolutions. Russia was not an advanced industrial country in 1917-to most Marxists it appeared to be ripe for a bourgeois revolution. The First World War had created great strains in the Russian Empire and in February 1917 the Tsar was deposed. The government that took over looked as if it was the beginning of the bourgeois revolution in Russia. It, however, had two insuperable problems. It wanted to continue the war on the side of Britain and France; composed of good liberals who believed in the rights of private property it could do little for the peasants who wanted land which they could only be given by expropriating the property of landlords. The peasants not being liberals took matters in their own hands. By October problems created by the peasants’ actions and discontent at the continuation of the war and its effects had grown, the government was failing and Lenin decided that his party, the Bolsheviks, should seize power. This they managed though it would take a civil war and before their power was secure. Lenin’s decision (and it was his alone) to seize power in October 1917 suggested that Russia could skip directly to the socialist revolution. This suggests a great departure from Marxist orthodoxy. It was not.
Marx himself thought that Russia could skip the bourgeois capitalist stage but only if there were proletarian revolutions in the advanced countries. Kautsky who had encouraged Lenin in this belief would later regret his actions. In October 1917 Lenin was therefore engaged in a great gamble: that he could seize power in the name of the workers in Russia and that in a short while with the effects of the war acting on the advanced capitalist countries there would occur socialist revolutions that would allow the Russian one to survive as a socialist revolution. James’ image of the politically astute Lenin has no room for Lenin the gambler (the science of gambling suggests that one should not). Once he had taken the gamble Lenin had no way back. What he did do, however, had serious implications for the future of the Soviet Union. The difficulties of the Civil war justified various harsh measures: to Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Kautsky they did not justify governing by dictatorial measures, not holding elections and destroying democratic discussion and elections (for those of us with long memories this last point about elections might recall the Grenadian Revolution). When Kautsky made his views public Lenin replied in his usual abusive fashion; from that time on for the followers of Lenin Kautsky was transformed from a leading Marxist theorist to an idiot. This judgment was confirmed by Trotsky’s own assault on Kautsky. When the revolutions elsewhere in Europe failed the Soviet Union was left isolated. It is not clear that had Lenin lived he could have solved the difficulties that that isolation posed. When Stalin became leader of the Soviet Union by ousting Trotsky and eventually disposing of his rivals he had no solution either-his massive industrialisation programme came at great cost but did enable the USSR to stand up to the Nazi invaders and defeat them. The situation was made worse by the fact that one of Lenin’s previous pronouncements, that anyone could run a state, had been proven wrong –at the end of his life Lenin was acknowledging his mistake. One of his last pieces was entitled “Better Fewer, But Better” (1923) in which he stated that he thought there were enough skilled administrators to rebuild one ministry.
By the time James wrote World Revolution Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalin’s Soviet Union were well known. The Soviet Union could not survive on its own as a socialist state (hence Trotsky’s belief in the necessity for permanent revolution initiated by the Soviet Union). A bureaucracy not the workers’ controlled the state-Trotsky still believed that it was a deformed workers’ state. On this point James would disagree with Trotsky and some years after Trotsky’s murder on Stalin’s order in 1940 James would finally break with the American Trotskyites on this difference of analysis. In World Revolution James was sufficiently in tune with Trotsky’s ideas to be regarded as a loyal Trotskyite and be invited to the U.S.A. for a lecture tour. In April 1939 James met Trotsky to discuss among other things the role of African Americans. It was at these meetings that Trotsky criticised James’ proposals stating that they suffered from the same faults as World Revolution, “ a very good book…[but showing] a lack of a dialectical approach, Anglo-Saxon empiricism, and formalism which is only the reverse of empiricism”. James delighted in detail, hence the charge of empiricism; he believed that Marxism was the method that was scientific and explained everything while at the time from the evidence of the book not really knowing much Marxism, either Marx’s writings or those of the other major Marxists; the dialectical approach might be lacking for that reason but is itself a source of formalism. Trotsky also pointed out that James’ analysis of Stalin depended on Stalin’s adoption of “socialism in one country” occurring six months before it had actually happened in 1924. Despite the great reputation of Trotsky a critic has pointed out that “with his dogmatic cast of mind [he] did not contribute to the theoretical elucidation of any point of Marxist doctrine” and that being doctrinaire he adhered to “ a system of interpretation that is impervious to empirical data, or is so nebulous that any and every fact can be used to confirm it.” From this it might appear that Trotsky saw himself in the James of World Revolution. What was different about James was that he thought historically, looking for change in society and closely examining the contemporary world. His prophecies were usually wrong. About this one can make three comments: historians are not prophets; Marxism is not a science; even if it were not all sciences are predictive.
Trotskyism had been important to James: in the 1930s it allowed one to be a Marxist who could criticise the failings of Stalin and Stalin’s Soviet Union while remaining a Marxist; it also allowed one to escape the sterility of much that passed for Marxist analysis in the Soviet Union and in the officially supported Communists parties outside of the Soviet Union. There was an unacknowledged family resemblance between Stalinism, Trotskyism and Leninism. James’ development as a Marxist theorist would depend on his proceeding beyond Leninism. He would, however, never accept that Leninism had a relationship to Stalinism. His article of 1964, “Lenin and the Problem” is a thoroughgoing defence of Lenin an denies any such link. More importantly he did not accept Trotsky’s ideas as the last word especially since Trotsky refused to accept the evidence that the Soviet Union was not a workers’ state, not even a deformed one.
James’ Marxism was, as mentioned already, characterised by its flexibility. In this he was a faithful Leninist. It was also characterised by its lack of interest in how the economy worked; it was interested in what effects the economy had on working people and on the state itself. Recent attempts to describe James as doing more than this are, I think, mistaken. Economics, whether a science or not, James did not know and the difficult work of economic analysis was not one that he or seemingly anyone else in his group could undertake. James himself wrote, “It is a…denial of Marx to believe that there was some science called economics and upon this, for decoration, Marx grafted humanistic sentiments. Every fundamental feature of his economic analysis is based upon the worker in the labour process and holds no perspective of solution except the emancipation of the labourer.” The mundane and often imperfect task of economic analysis is however necessary to understand the world-some economists did predict the likelihood of the current economic crisis. Not being interested in that sort of analysis, James and his group consequently became interested in the early writings of Marx where Marx had attempted to deal with the effects of capitalist industrialisation on the human personality-the famous problem of alienation. In the same passage just quoted James continues, “It is a strange reflection of our times that this conception, that the solution of the economic contradictions of capitalism is the human solution, is opposed nowhere so bitterly as in the movement itself.” The other characteristic of James’ ideology at this time was that living through the turbulent period of the Second World war, the Cold War and the beginning of the end of European empires James imagined that all these crises were the beginnings of revolution both in the capitalist countries and in the USSR. Optimism about the imminence of revolution led to the title The Invading Socialist Society (1947): one close colleague remarked that it was a strange sort of invasion since no one had actually noticed it. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the events of 1968 and the founding of Solidarity in Poland would help to preserve this optimism. In a strange way James seemed to think, perhaps simultaneously, of revolution as a process (the invading socialist society) or an event (1956, 1968). It is perhaps easiest to illustrate this with an anecdote. In the mid 1970s James visited Trinidad and gave a lecture at the university. At one point he asked the audience what had happened in 1784. Silence ensued. Triumphantly James denounced the members of the history department (several of us were there, as puzzled as the rest of the audience) for not teaching the students important subjects. It was, he revealed, the start of the industrial revolution. At that time I was teaching economic history and could not then and cannot now recall any economic historian who thought that the industrial revolution had started in 1784 or at any other specific date. It was around 1784 that a number of inventions in the textile and iron industries and steam power began to be widely used but even Wikipedia does not give a definite date. The final point to make about James’ Marxism was that he believed it to be scientific and the only means of understanding social reality. In this he was as correct, or wrong, as any other Marxist.
James’ group was known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Johnson was James. Forest was Raya Dunayevskaya, who though born in the Ukraine had grown up in the USA. She had left the Communist Party in 1928 to help found the first US Trotskyite group and had been Trotsky’s secretary for a while. Her intelligence, knowledge of the USA and of Russian were invaluable in the group. The other important member was Grace Lee Boggs, who with her knowledge of German and doctorate in philosophy would be crucial for the group when it came to rethink Marxism by the means of understanding Hegel. Philosophy was another area of knowledge that James was not intimately acquainted with. From the late 1930s on to the mid-1950s this was the nucleus of the group and James’ work in developing Marxism was done as a collaborative enterprise mainly with these two women.
Their most fundamental enterprise was the attempt to rethink Marxism by going back to Hegel in Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin (1948). As with so many of their writings this had limited circulation. It is an interesting attempt, seemingly validated by an appeal to the authority of Lenin. He had decided that no one understood Marxism because they had not understood Hegel and then started to study Hegel closely. Presumably he did not mean himself, in which case the argument collapses. Hegel is an exceptionally difficult philosopher. If, however, we accept Lenin’s and James’ argument that Hegel on the dialectic is indispensable for understanding Marx another sort of problem arises. There had been Left and Right Hegelians and Hegel himself had definitely belonged to the latter group. If therefore the method could be used to come to very different political conclusions was it more indispensable to understanding Marx than French socialism or British political economy? More interesting for us is the object of this study of Hegel for the Johnson-Forest Tendency: it enabled them to move beyond Lenin while invoking his authority.
Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin is a difficult work to read or understand and therefore to recommend to anyone. If philosophically trained one might get irritated; if not one tends to get lost. A long quotation from Raya Dunayevskaya notes some of its problems (keep in mind that this was written after they had split politically):
“I typed James’ “Notes on the Dialectic” back in 1948. At that time I thought it was “great,” but to think that some who claim to write “not explanations” of the dialectic, but “directly the dialectic itself” would consider that out of the past two critical decades, nothing had emerged that would demand he rewrite it, is surely stagnant thinking… “
“The structure of these 226 pages is very lopsided, indeed. Thus, no less than 65 pages are devoted to the Prefaces of Hegel’s Science of Logic, but the whole Doctrine of Being rates a mere 7 1/2 pages. The Doctrine of Essence (pp. 74-118) would seem to have gotten a more serious treatment, except that a reading of it shows that James began skipping as soon as he reached Ground (which is barely Section One, much less Sections Two and Three). Nevertheless, since we do here have the advantage that the references are to historic periods—not only 1948, USA, but roaming throughout the world from the English Revolution of 1640-48 through the Great French Revolution, and down to “today,” at which point the author sends us on a “Leninist Interlude” (p.98) which is followed as soon as he ends with Essence (p.118) by continuing into “Leninism and the Notion” (p.134)—we can at least get to know what James thinks.
“OK, that is a great number of pages and contains a serious study of Lenin. But that analysis is strictly political. The author obviously did not know Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks [in which Lenin had written his notes on his studies of Hegel]. Here is how he refers to them. (p.99) “I remember on my journeys between Missouri and New York, stopping at Washington and R[aya] calling out an at-sight translation from Lenin’s Russian notes, and my scribbling them down. I still have the notebook. I got plenty, but not nearly enough.”
The book does sound like CLR James in even its most abstruse sections. As Dunayevskaya points out the study of Lenin is worth reading; as is usual with James a number of the predictions-she herself points to the one that the Soviet Union will take China and move on to other areas of Asia- proved wrong.
However flawed this allowed the group to present their discarding of the Leninist idea of a vanguard party as soundly grounded as Lenin’s own creation of it had been. This was necessary to remain Marxist-Leninist, rather than becoming people who had renounced Marxism. The numbers of these were increasing among refugees from the Stalinist variety; even Trotskyites were doing so. By this means James was able to maintain his links with Leninism and his admiration for Lenin without ever confronting the continuities from Leninism to Stalinism. Thus the flexibility came at a price. What James concluded was that in revolutions the workers invent new forms of organizations: in 1905 they had invented the Soviet form that was used in 1917. Lenin’s vanguard party that had made the October Revolution was now obsolete; not being able to discover the new forms in any successful revolution this remained the vaguest part of James’ Marxism. It carried with it a belief that non-organization was best and Dunayevskaya would break with James’ on this issue. Meetings of the small group tended to become disorganized-as she complained there is a difference between not organizing the workers and having no organization oneself. In this unwillingness to organize James was getting close to stepping into anarchist waters so much so that one obituarist called him an “anarcho-Bolshevik”. That description is wrong: anarchists believe that human nature is such that without the constraints of society our real nature is revealed. James in Facing Reality (1956) wrote, “the only way out is to give people new visions of themselves, so that they will find new ways to express them and to create new ties, new bonds and new understanding between those who are now so divided”. Note here the lingering echoes of the vanguard party that has to direct people to finding these new ways. So James came close to anarcho-Bolshevism but was really a new sort of Bolshevik.
Less innovative was the group’s characterisation of what was happening in the world as the movement towards state capitalism. State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950) set out these ideas. Other Trotskyites had come up with this analysis before 1940. The Johnson-Forest Tendency seems to have re-invented this for themselves some years later as they became increasingly dissatisfied with their earlier characterisation of the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic state. This new term applied not merely to what was happening in the Soviet Union but also to what was happening in the capitalist countries where big corporations with diffuse ownership and close links to the state dominated (what President Eisenhower would describe, significantly in his farewell address to the nation, as the “military-industrial complex). They were interested in the effect this was having on workers’ lives: American Civilization was James’ attempt to produce a popular analysis demonstrating this and the capacity of American workers to make a revolution. Despite Lenin’s experience James felt that American workers had a high enough level of civilization so that the title of his pamphlet was accurate-Every Cook can Govern (subtitled A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece, and Negro Americans and American Politics published in1956). Revolution remained necessary because without it barbarism would reign.
Marx had notoriously left his followers in the dark as to what the new society would be like. James tried to fill that gap by describing the pursuit of happiness as the end at which the revolution aimed. To James it meant people being able to fulfil themselves in their working lives and living in societies that supported them in living such lives. His work on this appears in American Civilization, his great unfinished book. Like Marx he left the full statement of what this new society would be like incomplete-perhaps because only the revolution would bring it about and it would be new. In the end scientific Marxism could not provide a prophecy but James in his views of what the new society would be like relied less on Marxism and more on his reading of great literature. His grounding in literature before he approached Marxism had probably not as he declared enabled him to understand Marxism easily; what it had done was to ensure that he kept human beings at the centre of his analysis. In an age when revolutions have led to the most inhuman treatment of people, witness the Cambodian attempt to create a new human being, this was a remarkable achievement.
There was one other area that might be said to have been James’ alone. That was to do with the role of African Americans in the revolutionary process. He had come to the USA to try to connect the Trotskyites there with African Americans. The meeting with Trotsky in Mexico in 1939 had spent more time discussing this issue than any other and James had presented his thoughts on this to Trotsky. One important feature of James’ approach to African Americans can be seen even in these early discussions. As we have seen James’ emphasis on workers organizing themselves would become a central theme: even in 1939 he was arguing that African Americans would know what sort of organization they wanted and if they failed to find the Marxism of the US Communist Party or of the Trotskyites congenial this was a product of their historical experience and the failings of both Stalinists and Trotskyites. African Americans James would later argue were not the shock troops for the revolution. Drawing on their experiences, both historical and contemporary they would be an integral part of the revolution. The struggles of African Americans for their rights in the USA, like the struggle of women for equality, were what the US revolution would be. In paradoxical fashion the long struggle for Civil Rights and the result of the 2008 Presidential election suggest that James was right but it has certainly not been the Marxist revolution that he wished for.
James’ ideology was shaped by his artistic bent-the formalism that Trotsky once accused him of was an artistic desire to shape his material. James the Romantic artist became James the Romantic Marxist theorist, understood by only a few. This had implications for his political practice. In the final part we shall turn to this.
