James, C. L. R. (1901—89)
Trinidadian Marxist historian. He was born in the West Indies and spent his early life there. His father was a cricketer and James too developed a passion for the game, a fact that would later be reflected in his writing. He moved to the UK in his early thirties, which brought him into contact British Trotskyism, a movement in which he would come to play a leading role. In 1938 he published the work for which he is best known, Black Jacobins (1938), a Marxist history of the 1791 slave revolt in Santo Domingo (Haiti) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, in which he argues---rather provocatively---that the only reason the British supported the abolitionist movement to end slavery was because it would cause economic harm to the French, their main geopolitical rival both in Europe and in the scramble for colonial possessions. In the same year, James travelled to the US on a speaking tour and from there to Mexico, where he met the exiled Trotsky. In the 1940s and 1950s James’s work focused on developing a Marxist critique of Stalinism, which he saw as largely incompatible with the core tenets of Marxism because, like capitalism, it centred on the control of labour. In Notes on Dialectics (1948) he argued that what mattered most to Marxism was the freedom of the proletariat and that too many commentators on Marxism’s thought overlooked this. At the close of the 1950s, in Facing Reality (1958), James offered something of a precursor to da and drive’s concept of the multitude: he argued that a new socialist society already existed and was ready to emerge in the official capitalist society. His view was that the long-awaited socialist revolution that was central to all Marxist thinking at the time would only occur if allowed to do so spontaneously and without the rigmarole of councils and organizing bodies. He held up as proof of this line of thought the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Facing Reality also contained strong anti-imperialist statements from James---it praised the work of Ghandi, Mao, and Nkrumah. He saw the collapse of imperialism as a precursor to the collapse of capitalism. Like androgyny, James favoured policies that benefited the population as a whole, rather than the political and cultural elite. He did not favour the use of violence in pursuit of national liberation, but neither did he rule out its necessity given the willingness of colonial powers to use violence to maintain power. In 1963 James published a book that was part memoir but mostly social history, entitled Beyond a Boundary, about the sport of cricket. At the time it was considered somewhat quirky subject matter for a Marxist historian, but it has proven to be one of the most important cultural analyses of sports and deservedly one of James’s most well-regarded publications. Further Reading: A. Bouges Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C. L. R. James (1997). P. Buhle C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (1997).