Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer.
Birth and early career
Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown
colony, James attended Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the
young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de
Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was
a member of the anti-colonialist 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, led by his childhood friend
George Padmore, to whom he later introduced 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 he became a Trotskyist. By
1934, James was a member of an entrist Trotskyist group inside the Independent Labour Party.
In this period, amid his frantic political activity, James wrote a play about Toussaint
Louverture, which was staged in the West End in 1936 and starred
Paul Robeson and Robert Adams. That same year
saw the publication in London of James's only novel, Minty Alley, which he had brought with
him in manuscript from Trinidad; it was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean
author in the UK. 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 USA 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 organization, News and Letters Committees. 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 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, though he himself saw his life's work as developing the theory and practice
of Leninism.
Return to Trinidad and final years
In 1953, James was forced to leave the US under threat of deportation for having overstayed his
visa by over ten years. In his attempt to remain in the USA, James wrote a study of
Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and
the World We Live In, and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of the Senate. He wrote the book
whilst being detained on Ellis Island. He returned back to England and then, in
1958 returned to Trinidad, where he edited The Nation newspaper for the pro-independence
People's National Movement (PNM) party. He also had become involved again in
the Pan-African movement, believing that the Ghana
revolution showed that decolonisation 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 USA 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. In the 1970s and 1980s, a
number of books by James were republished or reissued by Allison and Busby, including four volumes of selected writings: The
Future In the Present, Spheres of Existence, At the Rendezvous of Victory and Cricket.
In 1983, a short British film featuring James in dialogue with the famous historian E.P.
Thompson was made.
A public library in Hackney, London is named in his honor; in 2005 a reception there to mark its
20th anniversary was attended by his widow, Selma James.
Writings on Cricket
CLR James is widely known as a writer on cricket, especially for his autobiographical 1963 book,
Beyond a Boundary. This is considered a seminal work of cricket writing, and is often
named as the best single book on cricket (or even the best book on any sport) ever written. [1]
The book's key question, which is frequently quoted by modern journalists and essayists, is inspired by Rudyard Kipling and asks: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? James uses this
challenge as the basis for describing cricket in an historical and social context, 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. The literary quality of the
writing attracts cricketers of all political views.
While editor of The Nation, he led the successful campaign in 1960 to have Frank
Worrell appointed as the first black captain of the West Indies cricket
team.
Bibliography
External links
Further reading
- Buhle, Paul. CLR James. The Artist as Revolutionary. 1989.
- Buhle, Paul. (ed.) CLR James: His Life and Work. 1986.
- Glaberman, Martin. "C.L.R. James: A Recollection" New Politics #8 (Winter 1990), pp. 78-84.
- Glaberman, Martin, Marxism for our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organisation.
- 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.
- Bogues, Anthony. " The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James " 1997.
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