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
After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.
Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.
First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle.
All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca.
As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.
Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.
I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.
An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.
I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense.
I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.
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.
The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known.
The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.
There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.