C. L. R. James
C. L. R. James
Cyril Lionel Robert James, who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was an Afro-Trinidadian historian, journalist and socialist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of subaltern studies, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James's writing on the Communist International stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and his history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, is a seminal text...
NationalityTrinidadian
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth4 January 1901
All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market.
If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.
Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.
The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.
The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.
The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism.
I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.
The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage.
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 able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.
My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.
It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany was defeated.
In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital.
Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.