by GERALD HORNE
Cyril Lionel Robert James was a man of paradox. The Trinidadian-born revolutionary was a lanky 6-foot-3—“lean as a pole,” with “long pianist fingers” that one could easily imagine flying across a typewriter keyboard as well. However, as we learn in John Williams’s new biography, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries, he “never learned to type and relied on women to type up his handwritten articles and manuscripts,” of which there was a veritable tsunami. Likewise, while James cared little for money and possessions—other than books and albums—he was a connoisseur of exquisite wine and tasty meals. A fierce “anti-Stalinist,” he still collaborated fruitfully in 1930s London with the decidedly Russophilic Paul Robeson, widely suspected of being a member of the Communist Party, and he recommended the writings of US Communist historian Herbert Aptheker and hailed the later work of W.E.B. Du Bois, even after he joined the US Communist Party in 1961.
Although James is associated in the popular imagination with Trotskyism, when he met with Trotsky during the latter’s exile in Mexico before his 1940 assassination, the defrocked Soviet leader was unimpressed, dismissing James as a “freelance bohemian.” James’s erstwhile Trotskyist comrade, James Cannon, referred to him similarly as an “irresponsible adventurer.”
Whatever his fellow Trotskyists thought of him, the fact remains that James was one of the most brilliant thinkers and writers among them, a man whose books, including The Black Jacobins, proved to be of staggering profundity. Although for generations, revolutionaries and thinkers of various sorts had championed movements of the dispossessed, James was one of the first to point out the world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution—a precedent-shattering development spearheaded by unpaid workers. The Black Jacobins alone guaranteed James a slot in the Pan-African—and revolutionary—pantheon. As a playwright, he stirred London audiences in the 1930s with his dramatization of the life of Toussaint Louverture. His only novel, Minty Alley, published after he arrived in Britain, is a sensitive depiction of the poor—especially poor women—and an adroit evocation of the trickster, with echoes of Shakespeare’s Puck and Twain’s Tom Sawyer. His fecund Beyond a Boundary is not just a memoir of his Caribbean boyhood, a celebration of cricket, and an indictment of colonialism; it also served to inspire the thriving academic field that is cultural studies. As a philosopher, while he was in a self-imposed exile in Nevada in the late 1940s, James grappled adroitly with Hegel and his reverberations in the work of Marx and Lenin. As a literary critic, his excavation of Melville continues to repay attention. Assuredly, James was one of the 20th century’s foremost radical intellectuals.
C.L.R. James was born in 1901, as Queen Victoria’s life was coming to an end, and died in 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time of his birth, his homeland—the archipelago of Trinidad and Tobago—was still an uneasy component of the British Empire. James’s melanin content represented a legacy of the African slave trade: Apparently, he was partly of French ancestry, which may shed light on why he studied the language of Robespierre and Toussaint, even though English was his native tongue. As a young athlete, James set the high-jump record in Trinidad and Tobago, and would hold it for years after he left the islands—a harbinger of the heights to which he would soar.
James was also a voracious reader from an early age, and it proved to be a lifelong habit: The lengthy list of his frequently consulted journals included The Nation, which he pored over in the public library.
By 1932, at the age of 31, James had arrived in Britain. He had left the Caribbean partly to escape an unfulfilling marriage and partly to seek his fortune in a land that offered more opportunities for the budding writer that he had become. In Britain, he was deeply influenced by the atmosphere of intellectual and political ferment generated by a bevy of exiles there, including Robeson and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. It was in Britain that James encountered Trotsky’s newly published History of the Russian Revolution, which inspired his own work on Haiti. By 1933 and ‘34, he was spending months at a time in France working on his magnum opus. His research assistant was Eric Williams, a former pupil during James’s brief time teaching in Trinidad, whose own book Capitalism and Slavery would later have an importance comparable to that of The Black Jacobins in recovering the history of exploitation and revolutionary resistance in the Caribbean. While in France, James also consulted with Alfred Auguste Nemours, the legendary Haitian general, diplomat, and military historian, and with Léon-Gontran Damas, the poet, politician, and cofounder of the “Negritude” movement.
Evidently, it was James’s French sojourn that led him ever closer to the ideas of Trotsky, though in a glaring omission in this otherwise relatively well researched biography, Williams doesn’t offer us a clear explanation of why, among the luminous coterie of Black intellectuals and activists in this period—not just Robeson and Kenyatta but James’s fellow Trinidadian Claudia Jones; Langston Hughes; W.E.B. Du Bois and his spouse, Shirley Graham; Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana; Nelson Mandela of South Africa; and others—only James failed to be attracted by the then-hegemonic Communist parties and instead remained a Trotskyist for years. Perhaps this is a result of Williams’s own highly skeptical views on Trotskyism, which he calls a “marginal faith” involving “endless splits over points of genuine principle, leading to an array of tiny parties….largely impotent in the face of the great events around them.” But if Williams had dug a bit deeper, he might have ascertained that Trotsky had resided in France as early as 1902 and had returned there while James was in the country for his research. The Socialist Party, which has intermittently been a ruling party in France, was also influenced by this Ukrainian’s ideas and presence as a united front against fascism developed. (Indeed, the former Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin, who narrowly lost a race for the French presidency in 1995, had his own Trotskyist ties, and even today, the former Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon has mounted a credible challenge during the recent presidential elections for the Élysée Palace.)
James’s embrace of Trotskyism was paired with an intense survey of European philosophy and social thought. He studied Hegel in these years. He was also drawn to the larger canon of European thinkers interested in the concept of “freedom.” Marx in particular captured his imagination; it was in Marx that Hegel’s ideas of freedom became a sturdy theory of revolution based on the organization and self-assertion of workers, and it also led James to consider the plight of Black workers in particular.
The unifying thread that runs through James’s vast body of work was a focus on this proletarianized “race” and racialized working class whose objective position, he argued, made it the potential locomotive for revolutionary socialism, just as the unpaid workers of Haiti were the true engine of the overthrow of slavery. Adapting Lenin’s byword, James concurred that “Every cook can govern,” those of African ancestry not least.
Reading these European thinkers, however, James was also struck by the fact that, despite their interest in the political and moral progress of freedom, they had little to say about a deeper expression of this idea as embodied in the Haitian Revolution. This was true not only of Marx but of that icon of the American left, Thomas Paine. As the late Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes in his trailblazing Silencing the Past, this muzzling of the profundity of the Haitian Revolution was an important chapter in a larger narrative of global domination.
The Black Jacobins set out to correct this elision. In its riveting pages, James sought to make Africans active subjects of their own history rather than passive objects of others’ history. Building on James’s pathbreaking book, a new generation of scholars have argued that the Haitian Revolution precipitated a general crisis of the entire slave system in the Western Hemisphere—including in the United States—that could end only in its collapse, which I addressed in my book Confronting Black Jacobins. Not coincidentally, the struggle for the eight-hour workday and the drive to organize labor unions both accelerated in the United States post-abolition, suggesting the importance of the victory of unpaid workers in the Caribbean.
The Black Jacobins established James’s bona fides as an important Marxist and historian, but it also demonstrated the magnitude of this revolution in the Caribbean and departed to a considerable extent from the “orthodox” Marxist evaluations of Haiti that did not engage with its significance. The Black Jacobins’ account of revolution may also have further solidified its author’s Trotskyism in that, just as the Ukrainian Trotsky diverged from the “orthodox” Communist parties, the Trinidadian James diverged from the “orthodox” downplaying of the Haitian Revolution. Trotskyists famously disputed the notion that socialism could be built in one nation and thus posited the idea of “permanent revolution,” forever extending its boundaries in order to extend the reach of socialism. Ironically, the debilitated state of Haiti after the revolution—surrounded by enslaving regimes, just as the Soviet Union was encircled, and suffering grievously as a result—arguably served to fortify James’s initial embrace of Trotsky’s foundational idea.
Like his fellow Trinidadian Eric Williams, James sought to deflate the still-prevalent notion that the abolition of slavery represented a triumph of activism in the metropole rather than a triumph of activism by the oppressed. John Williams observes further that James “intended his account of the Haitian Revolution to be both a history and a blueprint for revolutions of the future.”
After spending six years in Britain barely making a living as a writer, James moved to the United States in 1938—specifically to Harlem in New York City—and stayed in the country for the next 15 years. There he was a popular campus speaker, a tireless writer, and a dedicated (though not altogether successful) organizer.
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