James, CLR

JAMES, C. L. R. (1901–1989). The West Indian historian and social critic Cyril Lionel Robert James is perhaps best remembered as an anticolonial writer and activist. Another critical dimension to his life and work was his longstanding interest in the politics and culture of the United States. In recent years there have been a flurry of studies and biographies addressing different aspects of James’s remarkable career.

Born and raised in colonial Trinidad, C. L. R. James received an outstanding secondary education at the Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain and went on to become an early advocate of self-government for the West Indies. James relocated to Britain in 1932 to fulfill his early ambition of becoming a literary figure. Within months he found employment as a sports reporter covering cricket matches. He also became active in the radical political milieu of 1930s London. Along with George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, and other expatriated blacks, he helped establish the International African Service Bureau (1937-1945), a militant anticolonial organization. In addition, he immersed himself in far-left politics and lectured widely on the need for a new form of revolutionary socialist politics to supplant the fallacies of orthodox Communism.

James’s involvement in Pan-African and socialist politics helped inspire his best-known work of comparative historical research, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), which examined the relationship between the French and Haitian revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The Black Jacobins is concerned not only with the complex relationship between colonialism and the emergence of the modern Caribbean, but also with the lessons of Haiti’s origins for anti-colonialists and Pan-Africanists in the twentieth century. While residing in Britain James also published a novel, Minty Alley (1936), and World Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, 1917–1936 (1937), a well-researched history of the international Communist movement.

In 1938, at the prompting of Leon Trotsky, he traveled to the United States to attract black Americans to the revolutionary cause. In conversations with Trotsky, held in Mexico in 1939, he made the case for providing support to independent black organizations on the grounds that movements for civil rights had their own legitimacy and autonomy and would serve as a stimulus for labor-based mobilizations. His interest in the condition of black people in the U.S. deepened as a result of his travels through the American South and his close observation of a sharecroppers’ strike in southeast Missouri in 1941. His position on the relationship between the civil rights struggle and radical politics was summarized in a 1948 essay, “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S.A.,” which has been widely reprinted.

In addition to writing on black politics in this period, James worked with a small number of collaborators to rethink the theoretical foundations of leftist political practice. With his co-thinkers, most especially Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee, and Martin Glaberman, he formed a small political group and intellectual circle known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency. (“Johnson” was the pen name of James and “Forest” that of Dunayevskaya.) The group translated sections of Karl Marx’s 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, promoted the discussion of Hegel’s political philosophy among radical activists, and championed the independent activity of industrial workers and other subaltern groups. It was in the context of his collaborations with Dunayevskaya, Lee, and other Tendency members that James produced the document that would become Notes on Dialectics (1980). Dunayevskaya also worked with James in developing a “state capitalist” analysis of the Soviet Union that rejected the Trotskyist interpretation of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. By the early 1950s the group had severed its ties with Trotskyism and had abandoned the approach of building a revolutionary vanguard party that would lead the working class to socialism.

Whereas the Johnson-Forest Tendency mostly confined its theoretical investigations to the sphere of politics and economics, James sought to apply its perspective to American society and culture. His interest in, and affection for, the political culture of the United States grew out of his commitment to revolutionary politics and was most notably evident in the unpublished 1950 manuscript “Notes on American Civilization,” which eventually appeared under the title American Civilization (1993). The book’s central argument was that America’s distinctive contribution to world affairs was the value her people placed on the pursuit of personal fulfillment. James maintained that the “struggle for happiness” had been thwarted by a combination of the assembly line and the bottom line. The deepening contradiction between liberal values and socioeconomic realities would, he suggested, gnaw at the society’s foundations until the day that a broad social coalition rose up in democratic revolt.

Along with James’s Manners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953), American Civilization underscores the distinctive nature of James’s perspective and the importance he attached to autonomous movements of blacks, women, young people, and industrial workers in laying the basis for a sweeping transformation of U.S. society. In retrospect, James’s analysis anticipated the rejection of political conservatism in the late 1950s and 1960s that eventually engendered the counterculture and new social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s.

James’s involvement in black issues, his investigations into America’s political culture, and his political work on behalf of the Johnson-Forest Tendency were cut short in 1952 when he was arrested and interned on Ellis Island on the grounds of “passport irregularities.” His application for U.S. citizenship was denied the following year, and he was forced to leave the country. He moved first to London (where he prepared his major study of cricket, Beyond a Boundary) and then to Trinidad in 1958, where he became a leading figure in the country’s national independence movement. For nearly two years he edited the Nation, the weekly newspaper of the Peoples’ National Movement, but he broke with the movement in 1960 and left the country just prior to the arrival of independence in 1962. His critique of the People’s National Movement, Party Politics in the West Indies, appeared in 1962; his public lectures on the relationship of the West Indies to world civilization were published in 1960 under the title Modern Politics.

During the 1970s and 1980s, James taught at several U.S. colleges and universities and lectured widely to audiences of young radicals. His Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, a sympathetic study of the postwar campaign for political independence in West Africa, appeared in 1977. His final years were spent in the Brixton section of London, where he spoke with numerous visitors and kept abreast of contemporary events. During his lifetime, three volumes of selected writings appeared; he also worked with his assistant Anna Grimshaw to prepare what would become The C. L. R. James Reader. This single volume provides an exceptionally useful introduction to his multifaceted intellectual legacy.

Buhle, Paul. C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. New York: Verso, 1989.

Cudjoe, Selwyn, and William Cain, eds. C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

Dworkin, Dennis. “C.L.R. James in Nevada.” History Workshop Journal 63.1 (Spring 2007): 90-112.
Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C. L. R. James Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Høgsberg, Christian. C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

McLemee, Scott, ed. C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question.” Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

Nielson, Aldon Lynn. C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1997.

Rosengarten, Frank. Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Taylor, Christopher. “Sharing Time: C.L.R. James and Southern Agrarian Movements.” Social Text 30.2 (Summer 2012): 75-98.

Worcester, Kent. C. L. R. James: A Political Biography. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.