Intellectual Foundations and Revolutionary Optimism C.L.R. James was a product of the African Diaspora. He was the consummate revolutionary and, I believe, by far the most important Marxist for the 21st century. He lived a very long life. James was born in Trinidad in 1901, and he died in 1989. He suffered grievous setbacks. His former pupil Eric Williams, the first prime minister of independent Trinidad, placed him under house arrest and banned his books. In spite of this, James never became cynical. Like the beloved historian Howard Zinn, James was an optimist to the end. Late in life, he would tell younger activists born in the latter part of the 20th century how much he admired their timing. The 21st century, James said, was going to be the century of Revolution. C.L.R. James was part of an intellectual movement of peoples that has produced the most far-reaching radical intellectual tradition of the past several centuries. James understood himself to be part of this lineage which included David Walker, Nanny, Queen of the Maroons, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Paul Robeson, and countless others. James was also a great admirer of the best of the European traditions, and was fond of telling listeners that,“Thackeray, not Marx, bears the greatest responsibility for me.” Indeed, James relates that his movement into socialism was facilitated by reading European literature as a young colonial school child in Trinidad. When James arrived in England in the 1930s, he recognized that the crushing poverty that Charles Dickens wrote about in the 1850s was just as prevalent nearly a century later. Before he ever read Marx, James understood that capitalism was incapable of solving its own contradictions. When C.L.R. said that the 21st century was going to be the century of revolution, he meant that this century would also be the final century of capitalism. James maintained his revolutionary optimism because he believed in the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things. He witnessed farm laborers and oil workers in Trinidad shake the British Empire to its very foundations during the West Indian General Strike of 1937. He preached tirelessly of the ways that workers councils in battered Hungary were bringing forth the new society until Soviet tanks crushed their achievement in 1956. James’ blueprint of revolution was based on people’s ideas expressed through their experiences in struggle. He believed that this process was illustrated in the Hungarian Revolution. Workers used their experiences in production to begin building a democratic society. He states: “The secret of the workers’ councils is this. From the very start of the Hungarian revolution, these shop-floor organizations of the workers demonstrated such conscious mastery of the needs, processes, and inter-relations of production, that they did not have to exercise any domination over people. That mastery is the only basis of political power against the bureaucratic state. It is the very essence of any government which is to be based upon general consent and not on force. The administration of things by the workers’ councils established a basic coherence in society and from this coherence they derived automatically their right to govern.”(3)
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 04:11:46 +0000
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