- RSW 02 Page 12-13 -
Previous Article
Next Article
Index
In 1951 an old socialist lent me his copy of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) by C. L R. James. It made a big impact on me, and in 1954 Jim Stocks, another Edinburgh socialist, lent me his copy of James's book World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (1937). Stocks warned me to read it very critically since James, according to Leon Trotsky, did not really understand 'the Marxist dialectic'. However, it was not until 1950 that the ideas of James began to influence my thinking about politics culture and the history of socialism.
I still feel a special intellectual debt to my friend Seymour Papert, who first introduced me to James's less well-known -and indeed almost 'underground' - American writings. It was Papert who in 1956 gave me some of the Samizat books and pamphlets on James. The author of the brilliant best seller Mindstorms (1980) and world authority on computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seymour was the most intellectual, the most critical and open-minded, and the least pretentious person that I encountered in the workers' movement in London.
By the mid-1950s I was somewhat disenchanted with the elitism of large sections of the Left. A white middle-class South African, sensitive to the unique experiences and struggles of blacks in South Africa, Seymour Papert was trying to develop a libertarian Marxist critique of the dominant 'socialist' attitudes in South Africa, Britain and Europe. Because I could not reconcile many left-wing socialist attitudes with my own working-class background and experience as an unskilled worker, I was often seen by Tony Cliff and Gerry Healy as someone who was asking too many critical and heretical questions.
At a time when I was writing for obscure left-wing newspapers in Britain and America, Seymour encouraged me to write about working-class life, experiences and politics from the centre of my own experiences, insights and, as he put it 'artistic vision'. In touch with Cornelius Castoriadis and the 'Socialisme ou Barbarie' group in Paris, with Raya Dunyevskaya and the 'New and Letters' group in Detroit and with C.L.R. James and the 'Corres-pondence' group in London, Seymour stimulated me to read the writings of George Padmore and James.
Until 1960, when Seymour went to work in Paris and a number of us dropped out of the 'Socialist Review; group led by Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron, we got the opportunity to express some of our unorthodox Jamesian ideas in 'Socialist Review' and in Gerry Healy's 'Labour Review'. It was a heady time; but it was James more than anyone else who persuaded us that a comprehensive and multi-dimensional critique of the international world order was a pre-condition for any attempts to change it.
Although we did not belong to James's group in London in the late 1950s, we met and discussed ideas with him. His pamphlets and books have continued to influence my view of the world towards the end of the 20th century; and I still treasure my tattered and torn first editions of 'Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The World of Herman Melville and the World we Live In' (1953) and, above all, 'Facing Reality' (1958).
I discovered that James was reaching back - however tenuously, and without perhaps being fully conscious of what he was doing - to the 'lost world' of the socialism and socialist historiography of the Second international and the earlier world of 'classical marxism'. Providing a new generation of socialists in a world becoming, for those who lacked a socialist compass, increasingly brutal, disoriented and bewildering, James has just begun to come into his own. The militant Left should be on their guard to protect the legacy- of the real James: moves are now underway to incorporate and turn him into a harmless 'icon'.
In the foreword to the late Walter Rodney's book 'A History of the Guyanese Working Class, 1881-1905' (1981), George Lamming made a perceptive point that 'Rodney belongs to the same order of importance as Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore and C. L. R. James. Products of various doctrines of imperialism, they had initiated through their work, as writers and orators of distinction, a profound reversal of values. It is not possible to have a comprehensive view of all the ramifications of Africa's encounters with Europe without reference to these men'. Recognising the impact of James's socialist thinking on Rodney, Lamming understood that, as he put it, 'to grow up [in the Caribbean] was to grow away'. Cultural imperialism was not 'an empty or evasive phrase'. It was 'the process and effect of a tutelage that has clung to the ex-colonial like his skin'.
From the publication of the 'Black Jacobins' onwards, James refused to fragment his social picture of the links between history, politics and peasants and workers' lives. This was the key to understanding his profound suspicion of institutional or institutionalised intellectuals. In 1938 in the 'Black Jacobins' he had indicated his continuing - and passionate - interest in culture, imaginative literature and even surrealism. Then in a remarkably stimulating introduction to the book 'Red Spanish Notebook' (1937) by Mary Low and Brea, he depicted the agitational work of Benjamin Peret, the famous French poet - and of other socialists in Paris and elsewhere - who fought fascism without forgetting the importance of what Ignazio Silone called the 'bread and wine' of the socialists' struggles.
From the beginning of his socialist activities as historian, writer and agitator, James stood in the tradition of the Austrian socialists committed to developing an alternative socialist counter-culture depicted by Joseph Buttinger in his book 'In theTwilight of Socialism' . He independently developed a complex (if still largely unknown) Gramscian analysis of the existing social order and its grave-diggers and their culture as well as communicating all of this to his readers in clear, understandable language. Too many academics have fragmented his unified vision of history and the worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries by focusing on his achievements either as a great historian or a major cultural critic.
In the brutal New World Order of late 20th century multinational capitalism, the Left needs the books and the example of James's lifetime of struggle for the better socialist world to come. However, not only the Left but humankind needs the unfragmented socialist moral vision and critique of the great C. L. R James.
- RSW 02 Page 12-13 -
Previous Article
Next Article
Index