C. L. R. James
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Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was a journalist, socialist theorist and writer.
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Birth and early career
Born in Trinidad and Tobago, on the island of Trinidad, he attended the Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist and also writing fiction. Together with Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, he was a member of the Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine. In 1932, he moved to Nelson in Lancashire, England in the hope of furthering his literary career. There, he worked for the Manchester Guardian and helped the cricketer Learie Constantine write his autobiography.
London years
In 1933, James moved to London. James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad, and his Life of Captain Cipriani and the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government were his first important published works, but now he became a leading champion of Pan-African agitation and the Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, formed in 1935 in response to Fascist Italy's invasion of what is now Ethiopia. He then became a leading figure in the International African Service Bureau, through which he later met Kwame Nkrumah. In Britain, he also became a leading Marxist theorist. He had joined the Labour Party, but in the midst of the Great Depression became convinced of Trotskyism and in 1934 joined an entrist Trotskyist group inside the Independent Labour Party.
In this period, amid his frantic political activity, James wrote a play about Toussaint L'Ouverture, which was staged in the West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson. He also wrote what are perhaps his best-known works of non-fiction: World Revolution (1937), a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky, and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), a widely acclaimed history of the Haitian revolution which would later be seen as a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora.
In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the Independent Labour Party to form an open party. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League. The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation and when James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party, then the US section of the Fourth International, in order to facilitate its work among black workers, he was encouraged to leave by one such factional opponent, John Archer, in the hope of removing a rival.
US career and the Johnson-Forest Tendency
James moved to the US in late 1938 and after a tour sponsored by the SWP stayed on for over twenty years. But by 1940 he had developed severe doubts about Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state and left the SWP along with Max Shachtman, who formed the Workers' Party. Within the WP he formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya (his pseudonym being Johnson and Dunayevskaya's Forest) and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs) in order to spread their views within the new party.
While within the WP the views of the J-F tendency underwent considerable development and by the end of the Second World War they had definitively rejected Trotsky's theory of Russia as a degenerated workers state, instead analysing it as being state capitalist. They were increasingly looking towards the autonomous movements of oppressed minorities, a theoretical development already visible in James' thought in his discussions with Leon Trotsky which took place in 1939. An interest in such autonomous struggles came to take centre stage for the tendency.
After 1945 the WP saw the prospects for a revolutionary upsurge as receding. The J-F Tendency, by contrast, were more enthused by prospects for mass struggles and came to the conclusion that the SWP, which they considered more proletarian than the WP, thought similarly to themselves about such prospects. Therefore, after a short few months as an independent group when they published a great deal of material for a small group, the J-F tendency joined the SWP in 1947.
James would still describe himself as a Leninist, despite his rejection of Lenin's conception of the vanguard role of the revolutionary party, and argue for socialists to support the emerging black nationalist movements. By 1949, he came to reject the idea of a vanguard party. This led his tendency to leave the Trotskyist movement and rename itself the Correspondence Publishing Committee. In 1955, nearly half the membership of Committee would leave under the leadership of Raya Dunayevskaya to form a separate tendency of Marxist-humanism and found the newspaper, News and Letters. Whether Raya Dunayevskaya's faction constituted a majority or minority seems to be a matter of dispute. Historian Kent Worcester claims that Dunayevskaya's supporters formed a majority of the pre-split Correspondence Publishing Committee but Martin Glaberman has claimed in New Politics (magazine) that the faction loyal to James had a majority. The Committee split again in 1962 as Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, two key activists, left to pursue a more Third Worldist approach. The remaining Johnsonites, including leading member Martin Glaberman reconstituted themselves as Facing Reality, which James advised from Britain until the group dissolved, against James' advice, in 1970. James' writings were influential in the development of Autonomist marxism as a current within marxist thought.
Return to Trinidad and final years
In 1952, James was deported from the US to England for having overstayed his visa by over ten years. Famously in his attempt to remain in the USA he wrote a study of Herman Melville and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of the Senate. In 1958, he returned to Trinidad, where he edited The Nation newspaper for the pro-independence People's National Movement (PNM) party. He also became involved again in the Pan-African movement, believing that the Ghana revolution showed that Africa was the most important inspiration for international revolutionaries.
James also advocated the West Indies Federation, and it was over this that he fell out with the PNM leadership. He returned to Britain, then to the US in 1968, where he taught at the University of the District of Columbia. Ultimately, he returned to Britain and spent his last years in Brixton, London.
His 1963 book, Beyond a Boundary, discussed the strong influence cricket had on his life, and how it meshed with his role in politics and his understanding of issues of class and race. It is considered by many to be a seminal work of cricket writing, and has gained the status of required reading by serious fans of the sport, being described by some as "the best book on sport ever written." In 1983, a short British film featuring James in dialogue with the famous historian, E.P. Thompson was made.
Bibliography
- The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of the British Government in the West Indies (1932)
- The Case for West-Indian Self Government (1933)
- Minty Alley (1936)
- World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (1937)
- The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)
- Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx and Lenin (1948)
- American Civilisation(1949)
- State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950)
- Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1952)
- Facing Reality (1958)
- Modern Politics (1960)
- Party Politics in the West Indies (1962)
- Beyond a Boundary (1963)
- Kwame Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977)
- Cricket (selected writings) (1986)
- Letters from London (series of essays written in 1932) (2003)
External links
- The C.L.R. James Institute
- C L R James Archive
- CLR James Archive at libcom.org
- On Karl Marx and the 75th Anniversary of the Paris Commune
- A Controversial Caribbean: C.L.R. James
- Revolution as a New Beginning': an Interview with Grace Lee Boggs. Autonomy & Solidarity. Aidan. April 1, 2005 - 7:08pm. Retrieved April 15, 2005. Longtime associate of C.L.R. James discusses their work and her later career.
- Obituary: Constance Webb, Writer wife of CLR James by Caryl Phillips. The Guardian. Friday April 15, 2005. Retrieved April 15, 2005.
Further reading
- Buhle, Paul. CLR James. The Artist as Revolutionary. 1989.
- Glaberman, Martin. "C.L.R. James: A Recollection" New Politics #8 (Winter 1990), pp. 78-84.
- McClendon III, John H. CLR James's Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism?. 2004.
- McLemee, Scott & Paul LeBlanc, eds. C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James 1939-1949. 1994.
- Webb, Constance. Not Without Love. 2003.
- Worcester, Kent. CLR James. A Political Biography. 1996.
- Young, James D. The World of C.L.R. James. The Unfragmented Vision. 1999.