CLR James, writer
OBITUARY
OBITUARY grouplets in 1938, James was one of the delegates to the Founding Conference of the Fourth International and was elected onto the International Executive Committee. In 1938, James left Britain for the United States and immediately plunged into the work of the American Trotskyist and revolutionary organization, the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), concentrating particularly on issues affecting Blacks. He spent some weeks with Trotsky in Mexico, where they discussed the question of an autonomous Black movement. Within the SWP
WITHIN the space of two months, death has removed from the scene two of the outstanding pioneers of Trotskyism in Britain
— Harry Wicks in April [see p.26] and now CLR James. But while Harry remained a convinced Trotskyist all his life, James developed political and philosophical conceptions of his own which led him away from Trotskyism.
CHARLIE VAN GELDEREN
ORN in Trinidad in 1901,
James' first interest was cricket
— a sport once considered quintessentially English, but which his native Caribbean has long made its own. In the heated political debates that followed the First World War, James was caught up in the mounting criticism of the colonial regime. He was particularly drawn to the popular movement led by the Mayor of Port of Spain, Andre Cipriani. One of his earliest political writings was a biography of Cipriani, later published in a revised version as The Case for West Indian Self-Government.
Lancashire workers were his educators
In 1932 James arrived in England, settling in Nelson, a Lancashire town [in the north of England] with strong radical traditions. The industrial disputes that were going on at the time were to leave a lasting impression. As he was to say later, the Lancashire workers were his educators in the class struggle.
It was in Lancashire that he read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, which led him on to the study of Marx,
Engels and Lenin. From then on, James identified himself with the socialist revolution. He joined the Independent Labour
Party (ILP) in 1934, where he was active
Workers'
Trotskyist
Marxist in the
Group, becoming their foremost polemicist.
Those of us who were around in those days can still remember his tall, striking figure and his fiery denunciations of Stalinism. Only once did the Communist
Party pluck up courage to engage him in debate. In Islington Library in North London, he devastated the CP Speaker, Pat
Sloan, himself no mean orator.
James displayed his qualities as a speaker and writer to particular effect after Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia. His articles in the ILP journal New Leader, cutting through all the cant of the League of Nations, were among the best agitational material that he ever wrote. At the ILP's annual conference in Keighley, he succeeded in winning support for the line of workers' sanctions.
In 1936 his World Revolution 19171934 was published. This was the first comprehensive study of the rise of the Communist (Third) International under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky and its subsequent fall under Stalin. Trotsky commented that it was a good book but that the author did not understand dialectics. This rankled with James and led him to an intense study of Hegelian methodology. The result was his Notes on Dialectics, in which he argues that it was Trotsky who misunderstood the dialectic and that his philosophy of history was
With Harry Wicks, Reg Groves, Henry Sara and others, James played a prominent part in the Trotsky Defence Committee, which was set up to counter the avalanche of falsehoods coming out of the Moscow Trials. Although he continued to play a role in Trotskyist circles he increasingly concentrated on writing and
A classic study of the first slave revolt in history
A novel about West Indian Barrackyard life, Minty Alley, was published in 1936 and he was working on his magnum opus, his study of the first successful slave uprising in history, the Santo Domingo revolt.
The Black Jacobins is now acknowledged as the classic study of that epochmaking event. In 1938 he also published A History of Negro Revolt. After the unification of most of the British Trotskyist he fought for a turn towards Black people.
A living legend in his later
The outbreak of World War II and the crisis in the SWP over its position on the Soviet Union led James to develop his differences with Trotsky. For James, the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact was the conclusive evidence that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers' state which had to be defended. In collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya, he formed the Johnson-Forest tendency, which devpositions that took them further and further away from the positions of Trotsky and the Fourth International. They argued that the Stalinist parties outside the Soviet Union were not the "tools of the Kremlin" but were "an organic product of the mode of capitalism at this stage". The Soviet Union was not a deformed workers' state in which the bureaucracy had usurped state power but state capitalist. His break with Trotskyism was now complete.
James was also active in support of the growing revolt against colonial rule, especially in Africa. Kwame Nkrumah was a protege of his and he was hopeful that Nkrumah would head the fight for a free and socialist Africa. He did not hesitate to break with Nkrumah when he saw where he was going.
In his later years CLR — as he was universally called - became something of a living legend. His room in Brixton in South London became a place of pilgrimage for Black revolutionaries from all over the world. His interests were widespread and cosmopolitan. A passionate love for Shakespeare and Beethoven vied with his devotion to cricket and his continued interest in revolutionary politics.
He remained an optimist all his life. On his 80th birthday, he told a young audience in Chicago:
"I will live to see the South African revolution. I don't think I will live to see the American revolution, but when you make your revolution I will find some way of coming to join you."
That revolutionary optimism, that unshakeable belief in the future of humanity was the characteristic which best sums up CLR James — thinker, writer, revolution- 25 ary. * June 26, 1989 • #166 International Viewpoint