The claim that C. L. R. James isa major contributor to revolutionarythought, not only as regardsPan-Africanism but every majoraspect of the Marxist legacy, mayseem even now exaggerated ormistaken. He has been nodemigod of the youngergenerations like Herbert Marcuse,has no European intellectualreputation on the scale of a Sartre,his books do not even sell sobriskly as those of his bete noirfrom decades ago, BelgianTrotskyist Ernest Mandel. When Iapproached a leading AmericanLeft book publisher in 1970 witha proposal for a C. L. R. Jamesanthology, the editor politelysuggested to me that the author'swork could gain attention "onBlack subjects only." That hasbeen an all-too-characteristicresponse. Yet I am persuaded thatif civilization survives the threatof nuclear annihilation anotherquarter century, James will beconsidered one of the few trulycreative Marxists from the 1930'sto the 1950's, perhaps alone in hismasterful synthesis of worldhistory, philosophy, government,mass life and popular culture. Theretrenchment of revolutionaryforces through much of the era,the growth of new conditionswhich caught Party leaders andtheoreticians confused and wrongheaded,partly accounts forJames's current obscurity. Theproblem of an emergentalternative beyond Stalinism andTrotskyism, beyond Welfare Stateand One-Party State in every partof the globe, offers the rest of theexplanation. The sometimesrecondite vocabulary andsecluded political context ofJames's American writings mustno longer blind us to the largersignificance of what heundertook.

James has, first, been almostentirely outside what PerryAnderson has called "WesternMarxism," the drift of Marxisttheory from the revolutionaryparties to the academies betweenthe 1920's and today. Anderson'sConsiderations on WesternMarxism names Lukacs, Korsch,Gramsci, Benjamin, Horkheimer,Della Volpe, Lefebvre, Adorno,Sartre, Goldmann, Althusser andColletti as those key thinkers whohave reshaped the conception ofwhat Marxism is and what it cando. Only Gramsci and Korschmight be remotely consideredactivists, and their theoretical workmostly took place after they hadbeen removed by prison or exilefrom the center of the fray.Anderson might have included E.P. Thompson or RaymondWilliams; he certainly should haveincluded W. E. B. DuBois. But hisschema has a certain logic as theinternalization of political defeat,the return to exegetics, to philosophicand aesthetic mediationsupon Marxist theory as an end initself.1 Missing is an aggressivestatement of politics, the workingclass and its allies as they movethrough these largely disastrousdecades, and of their interrelationswith the movements ofthe Third World. That was quitebeyond most such thinkers, as ithas been beyond the functionarieshigh and low of the Socialist,Communist and Anarchistmovements in Europe and Americawho piled formula upon formulawithout adding greatly to what thegenerations of Marx and Lenin hadset out.

Secondly, James has beenoutside the dialogue among thepolitical Left's power-brokers fornearly all these years because ofhis insistence upon two points: thecontinuing revolutionarypotentiality of the working class,and the historic obsolescence of theVanguard Party as known inLenin's time. Had he declinedeither half of this proposition, hemight have garnered interest in aNew Left which repudiated classalong with Party, or in a post-NewLeft Leninism which returned tothe Vanguard out of pessimismabout the self-organizing capacityof its intended constituency. As farback as the mid-1940's, one ofJames's sharpest critics complainedthat he could not comprehend theorganizing role of the Vanguardand therefore exaggerated "theutter collapse of capitalism" inorder to promote "the spontaneouscharacter of the rise of workingclass consciousness and theworking class struggle, not merelyagainst capitalism as such, butabove all, for such a conscious goalas Socialism."2 Between James'sviews and those of neo-Vanguardism, or James's views andSocial Democratic reformism therecan be no final reconciliation, anymore than the political movementspresuming working classdisintegration and obsolescencecould have any comfortableagreement with James.

The misapprehension of James'position, the sincere but mistakenreference to it as "Syndicalist" or"Anarchist" in its treatment of Partyand State, throws into relief thethird and greatest problem. For theessential question of politics assuch has been, for James, notmerely the form of intervention butthe content inevitably replete withthe heritage of Western thought andworld culture, the full range of talentsand energies that ordinary peoplebring to the revolutionary struggle,and the corruption that traditionalpolitical institutions (including thoseof the Left) have suffered. In an ageof pessimism, even the statement of ateleology which brings forward theproletariat as outcome of a vasthistorical process seems anarchistic— so far has "Western Marxism"fallen. Socialism has been forJames concretely, personally andtheoretically what it has been onlyin general or rhetorical terms forthe rest of formal Marxist thought:a question of civilization.

This inestimable contribution canbe analyzed in a number of ways.Here I will stress the revolutionaryproblematic most puzzling in theworld, for a number of reasons, toMarxist thought: the Americanscene. Most highly developed ofindustrial capitalist nations,behemoth of the twentieth century,it has never (and contrary to allorthodox Marxist anticipations)rendered up a European-style massworkers' party, never a Third Worldvariety of all-encompassingpolitical organization, remainedimpervious for the most part to thevery texture of formal Marxism. Yetit has — in all modesty for anynational claims — produced againand again political, social andcultural movements that surprisedrevolutionaries and others the worldover, supplied heroic personalities,slogans and songs carried to everysection of struggling humanity.Sometimes its labor insurgencies,most recently the CIO, have showedthe way forward. The distancebetween Marxist politicalexpectation and reality has surelybeen one of unprecedentedproportions. James's contributionhas spanned that gap imperfectly, tobe sure, but with so much energyand insight that we have yet tomeasure his work's significance. Heaccomplished this by comparingEuropean Marxism and West IndianNationalism to the Americansituation, hardly satisfying thosewho carried the familiar banners orsuccessfully reaching that massivemajority outside the Left politicaldiscussion altogether. But the tracesare there, and the impact hasalready been felt in subtle ways.

James could make a uniquetheoretical contribution because ofhis own talents and effort, ofcourse, but also because he arrivedin a key moment and stood in aspecial place among those on theAmerican scene. From the late1930's to the 1950's the politicalforces of the Left exhaustedthemselves, lost their followingas the immigrant generations agedand no group of workers tooktheir place. From the first yearsof the CIO to the post-War strikes to the 1950's wildcats,and from the Black labor activityand Harlem demonstrations of the1930's-40's to the monumental CivilRights outbreak of the 1950's, massmovements had gone beyond theleadership that the Left hadexpected to provide. Meanwhile,and unlike so many other promisingintellectuals from the 1930's, Jameswas not to be overwhelmed byHitler's rampage, Stalin's crimesand the failure of an immediaterevolution after the Second WorldWar. Historian of colonialism,James had seen greater slaughters,even, than the Holocaust of theJews, civilizations exterminated andabolished from memory, peoplessuffering incalculably from povertyand self-hatred pick themselves upand fight to throw off the oppressor.He stepped out of West Indian andBritish political life so confidentabout the colonial revolt and thecharacter of working classsolidarity that he instinctivelylooked beyond the weakness of theLeft to the mobilized forcesthemselves. Having no illusionsabout the Soviet Union orStalinism, moreover, he had nohopes in that quarter to lose. Hesaw the revolutionary process withfresh eyes.

But James's resilience,adaptability and creative energiesare not a matter of race and formalpolitics only. He remarks in BeyondA Boundary that when Trotskyassailed sports as a mere distractionfrom the class struggle, Jamesknew the thesis to be wrong.3 Likethe American Communists of the1930's-40's who, in some of theirfinest moments, fought for theintegration of professionalbaseball, cheered with Harlem tothe profoundly politicalexhilaration of Joe Louis's ringvictories, James recognized theways in which popular life had insome measure displaced orreplaced the literal politicalintensity of Europe. If he turned toHegel and the deepest roots ofMarxian thought — in tune withWhitman's proclamation of thatgiant as the "most Americanphilosopher" — James did sobecause his background andexperiences drove him toreevaluate the revolutionaryprocess as a whole. Here, wherethe roads of race and class,popular life, culture and practicecross, is James’s Americanaccomplishment.

I

We can appreciate this better inlight of the American Marxism thathad existed for some threegenerations when James came ontothe scene. No brief sketch will dojustice to a subject that James notedas utterly unique and whoseanalysis he looked upon as a taskthat should have fallen on othershoulders than his own. A highlightingof some prominent features permits,however, a sense of the crises thatJames alone addressed directly, intheoretical and practical terms, systematicallyas his circumstancesallowed.

Marxism in the U.S. had been inthe first instance an immigrant sensibility.The reason is not mysterious.The internal strength of collectiveclass self-identification, of tenacityacross periods of defeat andisolation, for generations belongedforemost to those who brought withthem a heritage of centuries and aset of beliefs and practices whichbound up daily habits in a coherentunity. The proletariat stood asunifying element, but the success ofthe Left combined smallbusinessmen, professionals, familymembers and all conscientious supportersof the ethnic group and of itshomeland's best interests. Socialists,later Communists offered amediation by which the immigrantcould accept the oppressive, discriminatory,chaotic and frighteningAmerican reality as transitory,international revolution and a commonbrotherhood of working peoplesas immanent truth of real progress.

The same immigrant radicalisms,singly or together, could not bythemselves transform America. Onlyin some industries did their nationalitieshold a commanding position.Outside the industrial Northeast, theMidwest and pockets of strengthelsewhere, they remained alien tothe nation. Many did not or couldnot vote, much less challenge thepower of the two-party system. At astill deeper level, they had to compromisethe internal dynamics oftheir movements with the possibilitiesimposed by the economic systemand the waves of labor radicalism,the objective opportunities foralliance with non-proletarian groups(e.g., farmers) and with the contoursof the international revolutionarymovements. To hold onto theirstrength and to confront widerAmerica required more than skilland tenacity, a real sense of what aminority radical movement can do.1

The clues were many, but ambiguous. How to balance internationalistaims with desire for influencewithin an often racist, xenophobic,exclusive male labor movement?This was not a matter of mereopportunism. Frequently, the verymovements which seemed to catchthe threads of an impulse beyond thatof European labor (like the Knightsof Labor, the Populists, WomanSuffrage and Black movements) hadthe least conscious ideological affinityto Marxism, claimed to organizethemselves on non-class lines andaim at something more "American"than Socialist. The immigrantcommunities repeatedly played adecisive role in the struggle for laboradvance. But they found theirrecruits outside their own ranks onlyin a scattering of intellectuals,political and labor leaders, and shortlivedmass constituencies. At timesand places this combination nearlydominated American intellectual andcultural life, and promised to helplead the labor movement to a NewJerusalem. Still, something had neverconnected in the European sense. AndMarxism as formal doctrine remaineda curious mixture of fumblingexegesis, rote learning, and creativeleaps which never quite found a spotto land.5

There have been instructive exceptions.W. E. B. DuBois's BlackReconstruction, written only twoyears before James's The BlackJacobins, is one of the classic worksof modern revolutionary thought.Perhaps the key methodological truthof the study is that DuBois broughtto Marxism a decisive view ofAmerican history, a sense of theU.S. experience in world terms,that the perspectives of Marx andLenin helped DuBois to clarifyand articulate. DuBois seems notto have been greatly influencedby other American Marxists. Buthe stood in a tradition of thosewho sought to measure the"abstract internationalism" (or ablind eye turned to anydistinctions among theproletariat) against the reality ofrace and ethnic diversity, EuropeanMarxist orthodoxy against amore fluid and adaptive sense ofhistory and practice.6 In a subtle andcomplex way, this alternativeconception had also been a key tothe questions of the State and ofCulture some time before Jamescame onto the scene.

Twenty years earlier, the rise ofmass strikes on an unprecedentedscale, the aggressive State interventionof Woodrow Wilson's administrationand the prospect of WorldRevolution coming out of the FirstWorld War had inspired a real (ifdiffuse and little-remembered) theoreticalbreakthrough. Translator ofAnti-Dьhring, theorist of the IWWand perhaps the deepest philosophicalthinker of the Socialist movement,Austin Lewis, came to concentratehis attentions upon the fiercestruggle within the working class.The unskilled, foreign-born andunorganized proletariat had until thestrike waves of 1909-13 and 1915-19been under the whip-hand of thenative-born, skilled AFL member.Through mass actions, they assertedtheir own leadership. Now Lewisforesaw the future in the singlemetaphor of the Mexican-Americanworkers in Southern California (forwhom he provided legal counsel):lacking any union emblem for aLabor Day parade banner, theyhad emblazoned the simpleslogan, "WORKERS OF THEWORLD UNITE." Likewise theircounterparts among the EasternEuropean immigrant workers inthe new-built factories of heavy industry,brought together by theconditions of production, signifiedfor Lewis the development of a trulymodern revolutionary movement.Not the battle against feudal remnantsstill carried on in Europe; notthe backstairs resistance of the fadingAmerican petty-bourgeoisie againstmonopolism that had dominatedAmerican reform and Socialistpolitical mentality; but the machineproletariat in Marx's terms, on itsown turf, learning the lessons thatonly mass production could teach.7

Lewis's contemporary, WilliamEnglish Walling — a founder of theNAACP's forerunner, the NiagaraMovement, and for a time also apropagandistic supporter of theIWW — saw the other side of theequation. The State, manipulatingthe heterogeneity of the workforceto draw strength and definition atthe moment of ascending monopolycapital, would increasingly tend topull the petty-bourgeoisie, the newwhite collar worker and thesurviving labor aristocrat into a formationwhich unified behind theimperialistic war effort and continuedruthless exploitation of thebasic industrial worker.8

Intuitively, and without theoreticalelaboration in classic Marxist terms,Lewis, Walling and a handful ofothers had guessed at the leap Leninproposed in Imperialism: to explainboth the basis for opportunism inthe labor movement, and thepossibilities of a revolutionaryoutbreak that began from the bottomof the workforce and sweptaway the accumulating Stateapparatus. Louis Fraina, firstAmerican Communist ideologueand popularizer of the RussianRevolution for an American Leftaudience, added an element thatmight be seen best in the U.S.Drawn to the examination of masscultural life even as the Russianevents unfolded, Fraina proposedthat the dance styles, which grewout of Black music and providedthe immigrant working classyouth measures of freedom in thegreat metropolitan ballrooms,had in themselves an important contributionto make to the revolutionaryprocess. As ordinary workingpeople found the means to expressthemselves creatively, collectivelyacross the Old World boundaries,they emancipated themselves for ahigher level of consciousness. And— he might have added with his bohemiancounterparts in other sectionsof the Left cultural movement— they came to appreciate at somelevels that the Black contributionwould become ever more apparentand essential.9

These few writers, looking totheir own experience and a partialre-evaluation of Marxist basics, hadcome a long way toward the perceptionsthat James broadened intotheoretical understanding. Betweenthemselves and him lay twentyyears of Left retreat to home base inthe immigrant ghettoes, internationalcomplications, and a slow butextraordinarily painful learning processin the complexities of Americanlife. The Garvey Movement(and the directives of the Comintern)clarified the Black experienceas central to the U.S., past and future,industrial, social and political.Trade union work showed the levelsof contradictions by which downgradedcraft workers often led in theunionizing effort, and the industrialunion leadership could actually usethe available governmentmechanisms (as the garment workershad already in the First World War)to gain recognition. Meanwhile thevital, continuing immigrantradicalism demonstrated thetenacious self-identification of militantswho remained firm in theirbasic racial or ethnic differences beyondthe factory gates.

The irony of American Communismis that these lessons soaked in,became mass initiatives rather thanslogans and good intentions, as theCommunists entered the New Dealcoalition. Anti-Fascism, the internationalPopular Front and the atmosphereof progressive democracyenabled sections of the Left to dowhat the revolutionaries wholaunched American Communismcould not have imagined: to helpdevelop "Mass Action" (i.e., the sitdownstrikes), guide radical popularculture (Woody Guthrie, the publicmusic concerts From Spirituals toSwing, a Black showcase in 1937, toSocialism in Swing, a YoungCommunist League spectacle twoyears later), ardent support of themost downtrodden sectors of laborinto mechanisms for advancing Leftinterests within a State Capitalistregime.10

This turnabout, and the steadydisintegration of the strategy from1939, left radicals of all kinds flatfooted.Marxist theory had becomeamong Communists even more thantheir rather casual Socialist predecessorsa system of political selfjustification;strategy a patchworkthing with hardly anything in commonbut general notions of class.The sharp breaks from the SecondInternational parliamentarist expectationsbefore World War I, from theprimitivist Third Internationalinsurrectionism of the early 1920's,had been put aside, repudiated, butnever seen as necessary or logicalstages in the revolutionary process.In short, nothing had preparedMarxists for the crisis of the SecondWorld War and after. The developmentof a dual labor market, theerosion of the first- and second-generationimmigrant base of the Left,the advance of cultural questionstoward the center of the stage in thepost-war working class — thesewere for the Left a catastrophe hiddenonly by the more obvious catastropheof Cold War. Somethinghad come to an end, without theMarxists ever coming to terms withwhat had been in motion. Enter C. L.R. James.

II

James set foot upon the Americanscene just as the old ways reached aclimactic end to their development.From the "Roosevelt Recession" of1937 to "Doctor Win the War" andthe Truman administration, the uglyside of the welfare state revealeditself step-by-step, no transition toSocialism but a more sophisticated(and potentially more vicious) stageof Capitalist hegemony. Althoughthe Communist Party reached itsnumerical peak of 80,000 duringwartime, it had become a virtualagent of State Capitalism in Russiaand America, as its bitter oppositionto A. Philip Randolph's plannedMarch On Washington, its avidsupport of the No Strike Pledge andof the Minneapolis Trotskyists'prosecution by the government allattested. Interlocked with the RedArmy invasion of postwar EasternEurope — "Revolution from theTank Turret" carried out with theimprisonment or murder of opposingradical and democratic forces as ifno other form of liberation were nowimaginable — the Communistdirection showed something morethan "betrayal" had taken place. TheParty's ethnic and race following,which had in a certain sensecompensated for its limited cadreoutside the leadership of industrialunions, drifted away. Whatever itsfuture, American radicalism would besomething very different from what ithad been. James' genius was toperceive this entire political processas a natural and inevitable one, theoutgrowth of newer phases of Capitalism,and to locate from within themass of population its dialecticalopposite, seeds of a new life withinthe shell of the old.11

The "Negro Question," conceivedin the broadest terms, can be seen asthe illuminating insight that directedJames to a fresh perspective. It hadbeen the analysis of the Black massesin the West Indies that first gave apolitical focus to his wide-rangingintellectual interests, helped him notonly to write The Case for WestIndian Self-Government and TheBlack Jacobins but also sharpened hiscritique of Stalinism in WorldRevolution. The inextricability of theinternational influence upon anyradical prospects, the ability of Leninto see beyond the Party to thepotentials of mass stirrings and inturn to use the Party for thefulfillment of mass democraticprospects, the Communist perceptionthat masses revolt on slogans and forconcrete ends rather than from someabstract ideal — all these carriedinto James's observations ofAmerican Blacks. Within a year orso of his American residence, he hadoutlined a program whichconfronted not only the Left'shandling of the Black Question perse but also hinted strongly at a verydifferent orientation on a spectrumof strategic matters. Out of these,theoretical ramifications would beseen very soon.12

James's "Preliminary Notes on theNegro Question" struck at the baseof the white Left's previousapproach. He insisted that Trotskyistssupport the "formation of anorganization to rally Negroes, whichwould be reformist at the start, butwhich would develop at once intomilitancy." Not an organization withstrings pulled by the white Left,as even the best of the Communist"front" organizations turned outto be in moments of politicalstress; but rather one outside formal socialist ranks, beyond manipulationas a recruiting ground, demandingno specific socialist politicsas condition for membership. Inshort: an organization with theautonomy that had never beengranted ethnic, racial or other entitieswithin the Left; a fundamentalbreach of Leninist (or even SecondInternational) concepts of disciplinein the name of self-organization.This, and James's opposition to theslogan of Black (territorial) Self-Determination, proved stickingpoints with Trotsky, who engagedJames in dialogue at Coycoyan in1939. James wanted revolutionariesto suggest tactics and specificstruggles, to aid the formation of amovement, but to remove their handfrom the lever and to support theultimate goals Blacks themselvesraised up — including Self-Determination only if they deemedthis desirable to emancipation in amulti-racial American order.Organization versus spontaneity? Inpart, but in larger part, Europe versusAmerica.13

One could draw a straight linefrom James's observations of Garveyismin his 1938 History of theNegro Revolt to the culmination ofhis decade-long wrangling withAmerican Trotskyists in the groundbreaking1947 conference document,"The Revolutionary Answer to theNegro Problem in the U.S." The highestimation of Garvey's impact Jamesbased not on formal Back-to-Africapolitics but rather on the sense ofpride, racial and internationalsolidarity against centuries ofoppression that Garvey aroused.What James called the "social serviceattitude" of the Left could neverstoke the "fires that smolder in theNegro world" and showedthemselves vividly in social life:

Let us not forget that in the Negropeople, there sleep and are nowawakening passions of a violenceexceeding, perhaps, as far as thesethings can be compared, anythingamong the tremendous forces thatcapitalism has created. Anyone whoknows them, who knows their history, is able to talk to them intimately,watches them in theirchurches, reads their press with adiscerning eye, must recognize thatalthough their social force may notbe able to compare with the socialforce of a corresponding number oforganized workers, the hatred ofbourgeois society and the readinessto destroy it when the opportunityshould present itself, rests amongthem to a degree greater than in anyother section of the population inthe United States.14

Through that perception, moreover,James could follow and extendDuBois in turning the concept ofAmerican history around. Blacks had,with their allies the white Abolitionists,forced the bourgeoisie towardCivil War. Only by their emancipationcould that struggle have beenwon, and the South truly reconstructed.Only through theirsuccess could a Populist movementhave restrained an advancing Capitalism.And only by their actual advancecould the CIO come into itsown. With broadening, deepeningrelevance to the revolutionary prospect,the independent Black movementprecipitated the political forcesof Socialism.

No American radical had gone sofar, and none would carry theseideas further until the 1960's. ThatJames's views became gospel for theorthodox Trotskyist movement is aminor (although interesting) concern,with indirect links to white Leftrecognition of Malcolm X and theearly "Black Power" slogans. Moreimportant, James had set himselfagainst Communist fundamentals ina precise fashion, withoutrenouncing revolutionary intention,Leninist legacy, or direct politicalinvolvement.

James's perception of the CIOstruggle in a wholly unique fashion,his analysis of the Communists'support for bureaucratic tendencieswithin the labor movement, extendedthe insight into the process ofrevolutionary transformation and thelimitations of the existing Marxistcomprehension. With a small group ofcollaborators inside the TrotskyistWorkers Party, James began to insistthat — contrary to the perceptionsthat cut across other differencesamong the American Left — theworking class was not backward bytrue Marxist standards. Like the keenobserver of early CIO strikes, LouisAdamic, who pinpointed in themilitant workers the mostdemocratic impulse in the nation,James recognized the instinctualgrasping forthe Universal of Socialism — not achange in the form of property butthe very negation of the dominantsocial relations. "More political partythan trade union," he was to saylater, the CIO embodied the responseto the foremost challenge thatmodern capitalist industry ever setbefore its exploited.15

The system of sweated labor pioneeredby Ford evinced a totalitarianeconomic mentality, scientificallyrationalized production with closerinter-capitalist relations and theintervention of the State as mediator.This marked the culmination ofindustrial and political developmentover the centuries, and unchallenged,would signify the subordination ofevery democratic possibility to thedemands of capital. But intertwinedwith that development, at every step,had been elements of resistance,from the battles of the weavers in themedieval cities to the actions of theranks in Cromwell's Army, to therevolt of the masses in the FrenchRevolution to the rise of the ParisCommune and finally the Soviets inRussia. True to Marx, James hadseen the proletariat as the embodimentof the revolutionary prospect.Even his San Domingo slaves of thenineteenth century, "working andliving together in gangs of hundredson the huge sugar-factories . . . werecloser to a modern proletariat thanany group of workers in existence atthat time, and [their] rising was,therefore, a thoroughly prepared andorganized mass movement."16 (Myemphasis.) Not prepared by someexternal agent, but by theconditions of life and work, with anatural leadership thrown up inself-conscious striving for a betterlife. The modern class strugglepressed home the ultimate proletariangoals, abolition of valueproduction and abolition ofhierarchies invested through thedivision of mental and manuallabor. Like Austin Lewis ageneration earlier observing themass strikes of unskilled foreignbornworkers, James looked at theearly, dynamic stages of CIOindustrial unionism and declaredthe shop-floor struggle to be "Socialism. . . the only Socialism."17

And still, the weight of institutionsloomed heavier than ever upon theproletarian impulse. As Walling hadseen the earliest stages of StateCapitalism taking on craft workers asballast against the unskilledproletariat, James analyzed the nextstage as the decisive unfolding ofState Capitalism. In the U.S., theworking class had moved forward toinstitutionalize its power through theunions. But because circumstanceshad not grown desperate enough orthe progressive forces strong enoughfor revolutionary change, the netresult had been the creation of a newintermediary stratum, the laborbureaucracy. That the functionarieswere often Communists signaled toJames the new level of internalcontractions within the system,generating a political mood whichre-established at the new level theessential dichotomy of rulers andruled.

This symmetry bespoke a weightyanalysis, indeed. James had observedin World Revolution that Stalinintuitively chose to rely upon theParty bureaucracy or even thebourgeoisie to carry out the interestsof the Russian State, as Lenin hadchosen the masses in creativemoments to override both. As Jamesand his collaborators began toperceive through study of theRussian scene, Stalin was a knavebut no fool. He had correctly understoodthe objective formation of anew power base in the State bureaucracyitself, perverse extensionof Lenin's insights in Imperialism.Dramatic change, at least in theWest, no longer served a Third Internationalwhich had, like the SecondInternational before it, beentransformed from revolutionaryagency to the special interest groupof a particular strata. AmericanCommunist union leaders whobanked the fires of resistance throughcrackdowns on wildcats and subtlermeasures like the dues check-off,who thought in terms of industrialrationalization and internationalconsumer marketing alongside their corporate opposite numbers, constituted the "American bureaucracy carried to its ultimateand logical conclusion," State Capitalist functionaries-in-progress.Their willingness to compromisethe integrity of the proletarian impulse indicated no necessary corruption or personal gain, but thehankering after a higher logic. Theyhad repudiated private Capitalismwithout believing that the classicproletariat of Karl Marx could inthe foreseeable future rule itself.18

In later years, James sought topenetrate still further the logic thatruled Communist parties and keptthe unquestionably idealistic ranks ina curious stasis between radical andliberal perspectives. "Stalinism is aconcrete truth . . . a necessary, aninevitable form of development ofthe labor movement," he argued by1951, no distortion of history (in thefinal sense) but the working out of alogic inherent in the uneven pace ofworld revolution.19 The world wasdivided into two camps, the moresoafter the Second World War. And yetdespite the futility of Trotskyistpanegyrics against Communistmisleadership, despite the rubble ofwar and growing fears among non-Communists that revolutionaryoptions had become almostunthinkable, James insisted that apromising stage had been reached.

"The one-party state is the bourgeoisattempt to respond to thecontemporary necessity for thefusion and transcendence ofnation, class, party, state," Jamesargued boldly.20 The increasingconcentration of social andeconomic power in a few hands,even in the once politically diffusedemocracies, pointed in the samedirection. When the society as awhole increasingly perceived theforces of production (the workingclass) to be essentially social andnot merely economic, theworking class stood objectivelycloser than ever to cutting the Gordianknot. The old categories thathad held fast since the beginnings ofCapitalism, the mysterious origin ofthe commodity in workers' labor-poweron the one hand and thesupposed autonomy of party andstate on the other, lost their essentialdefinitions. As Engels had predictedin Anti-Dьhring, the last major textof the Marxian founding fathers,"concealed within" the verycontradictions of this more highlyorganized Capital were "thetechnical conditions that form theelements of the solution." Workingclass elements themselves — and notmerely their Socialist or Communistpolitical representatives — hadbecome (in Engels' words) "the invadingSocialist Society" at thedoorstep of the world order.21

Although hardly more than anoutline of a world-view, this meditationof James compressed an extraordinaryvision of socialism'splace in world history into a currentpolitical position. As Jamesexplained in a 1947 position paper,"Dialectical Materialism and the Fateof Humanity," the philosophicposition of Hegel that stood behindMarxism had been no more than arecognition of the human effort toresolve the contradiction betweenthe "Abstract Universality" (equality,oneness in God's eyes) of theoriginal Christian promise and concretenecessity. Hegel recounted —albeit in idealistic form — the stagesof negation through which thisstruggle had to pass. Marxism gavethis understanding, in turn, a materialbase and a political outlook. NotRationalism, which had served theintermediate classes at every momentof bourgeois revolution, raising upthe education, articulate-ness andsupposed intelligence of thebourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisieagainst the "backwardness," the"irrationality" of the masses. Butthe freed expression "by the proletarian millions of their world-historicaluniversality, no longer empiricalbut completely self-conscious .. . the total mobilization of all forcesin society. That and nothing else canrebuild the vast wreck which is themodern world."22

So, too, was the prospect altered ofwhat Marxism had meant and wouldmean to the prospects for Socialism.When James's little group publishedthe earliest translations from Marx's1844 Economic-PhilosophicalManuscripts, they sought to identifythe sense of alienation, below themore obvious poverty andexploitation, that every modernworking person suffers. "Be hiswages high or low," as Marx wrote,that alienation remained fundamentallyintolerable. Lenin had, in hisfinest moments, recognized the limitationin any change of propertyform as such. Trotskyism, the closestthing to a revolutionary succession,carried over the Party form withoutthat awareness and unwittinglyreturned to what Marx had blasted asthe "Vulgar Communism" ofmistaking transcendence of privateproperty for real socialist socialrelations. Now the Marxist group, ifnot to fall upon the same pointlesscontest to become the "real"Vanguard, had to take up the deeperpurpose of demonstrating to themasses of people the power of theirown creativity, "the socialism thatexists in the population, theresentment, the desire to overturnand get rid of the tremendousburdens by which capitalism iscrushing the people."23 Or therewould be no Marxism, no Socialistor Communist movement, worthy ofconsideration at all. From the youngMarx laboring under Hegelianinfluence to the final Socialistimpetus, the circle would be closedby Marxists who had come to gripswith the world around them. Therevolutionary movement would becomeexplicitly what it had beenimplicitly, the amalgam of everyprogressive impulse in the history ofthe species, the vindication ofhumanity not for any external end(not even "Progress") but for itsown sake.

Did James delude himself or disguisefor political reasons the extentto which this constituted a breakfrom all that historic Marxism(since, at least, the young Marx) hadbeen? In one specific sense, yes."Trotsky declared that the proletariatdoes not grow under worldcapitalism and declines in culture.This is absolutely false,"24 Jameswrote in 1949. One may find hintsin this or that Marxist literary commentaryabout the existence of a"Cultural Question." Never by theorthodox Marxists of the First, Secondor Third Internationals, noteven during the drive for a "ProletarianCulture" in the U.S.S.R. andabroad from the late 1920's to themid-1930's was the proposition ofculture in itself put forward as abasis for the revolutionary transition.Yet, understood in the broadestsense, it was the glue for James'sphilosophical, economic and politicalperspectives, his observation ofworkers' lives as a whole, their articulatedand ill-expressed subjectivitythe disproof of their supposed"backwardness." When he argued inhis own last major theoretical documentbefore his deportation thatCaptain Ahab of Moby Dick was theconsummate bureaucrat ("abstractintellect, abstract science, abstracttechnology, alive, but blank, servingno human purpose") while the crewconstituted the indestructibleworking class embracing risk,Nature and spontaneity, Jamesplaced the task of the true revolutionaryto understand that culturaldichotomy above all and to chooseLife over the promise of Power.Marxism at its best had implied thisdifference all along; but almost neverhad the cultural logic become groundfor a real Communism.25

In another, quite intimately relatedsense, James had stated thebasic propositions of an AmericanSocialism which had never been thetext of the formal Marxist parties.For James had cracked the nut ofradicalism's relation with the racial,ethnic, social and cultural forceswhich had never fit into the smallerMarxism but nonetheless directedthe potentialities of the revolutionarymovement. The force of Blacks uponAmerican political life seems inretrospect an almost obvious insight,but the implication that they arrivedin politics under their own steam andbrought Socialism upon the centerstagestood outside all conventionalwisdom. The struggle within theclass struggle that this interpretationimplied defied the best of theCommunists' "Black and White,Unite and Fight" perspective. And itwas the logical outcome of theconflict between American andforeign-born, skilled and unskilledwhich, as Austin Lewis hadshrewdly perceived, reflected thefinal vestiges of a small-propertytradition (translated into skill as aform of property) that reached backcenturies against the totality ofmodern manufacture. The resolutionto this conflict stood ultimatelybeyond the adjustments that a stateregulatedCapital could make to thecondition of the wage-earner.

There was much to this Americanradicalism that James did notand could not see from thesecluded corner of the Trotskyistmovement, isolated from othergreat elements of Americanreform. The significance of theethnic strains, which had providedthe immigrant with the taste of theSocialist future in the warmth offamily and class ties, Jamesglimpsed from afar. Not until themid-1940's did he begin to writeabout that force which stood coequalwith Blacks in the Abolitionistmovement, which bolsteredethnic radicalisms and contributedin large part the moral sensibility,the grassroots impetus to native Socialism:the women's movement.That the struggle (as James put it)against "an authority which inculcatedthe authoritarian character ofthe society as a whole" within thefamily circle might have an importancehardly less than that of thestruggle for emancipated labor —this was a leap too far in one direction,too precise in totality forJames's central conceptions.26 Hereas in other areas like the profoundeffect of religious moralisms, or theunfolding of a radical aesthetic, onemust say that the great questions ofAmerican Socialism received onlyan abstract answer at James's hands.But he achieved no small thing. Thepath he illuminated broadens out toa wide road that passes throughvalley and dale of theory andpractice, the high mountain passesof profoundest human hope and thedark cities of toil and trouble. Jameshas made his contribution toAmerican radicalism, as a variant ofthe European experience. Butforemost he has since the onset ofhis career placed internationalresponsibilities upon the agenda,shown them inevitable as the connectionsbetween capitalism and thelabor market worldwide. If he hasreturned Marxist theory from thedarkness of the exegetical lumberrooms, it is because he has seen theworking out of the deepest schemain the lives of ordinary peopleacross the globe.

III

Many of the same themesreached a wide reading public, firstin a pessimistic, then more hopefuland again more pessimistic vein.The rife alienation that James andhis collaborators perceived inAmerican life, if one can believeAlbert Camus, grew out of thedetective novel into the entireExistentialist philosophy. RalphEllison's Invisible Man, buildingupon themes that James's friendRichard Wright had developedearlier, pointed up what James hadwritten about Communists inHarlem — but without proposingany solutions. Slowly, overgenerations, the Hegelianism ofthe Young Marx played a role inthe revival of another Left, as didthe vision of Corporate Liberalism(a general approximation of StateCapitalism and Rationalisttotality). By the late 1960's, theconnection between Culture andRadicalism had become an allpervasivetopic of discussionand not only within the Left,Culture recognized as a powerful agent if not by any means coherentlyperceived. And in the timethat has followed, the congruenceof social history and radical commitmenthas been made abundantlyevident, indeed become the Marxistscholarly commitment of hundredswho emerged with university trainingfrom the 1960's: a vision of ordinarypeople in the U.S. andeverywhere, searching urgently formeans to remake the quality oftheir existence. The New Left, theWomen's Movement, above all theBlack movement seemed at pointsto be expressing in political logicthat insightful kernel James hadopened up in his venture beyondorthodox Leninism. And the turntoward the working class by theearly 1970's carried along hisimperatives, to relocate the bluecollar source of a future soviet.27

James's specific contribution andthe totality of his view, with thepartial exception of that emphasisupon Black initiative and selfactivity,seemed however to havebeen lost on the cutting room floor.Part of the rationale surely residesin the groupuscule character ofJames's earlier efforts, publicationand language so restricted by theTrotskyist context that twentyyears hence the confused FourthInternationalists James singled outfor critique took the aspect ofghosts from some vanishedpolitical dynasty. And his bookswere, aside from the BlackJacobins, for all practicalpurposes physically unobtainable.

There is also a deeper reasonthat goes back to the conflicts ofthe 1940's. When James redressedTrotsky's estimation of proletarianphysical diminution and spiritualdecline under later Capitalism, hemilitantly defended the "thesis ofMarx that in the very crisis ofcapitalism the proletariat is ... prepared socially for its tasks, by thevery mechanisms of capitalist productionitself."28 A few years afterWorld War II, every avowed radicalmovement, whatever its formalideology, shared Trotsky's pessimism.Stalinism and Social Democracyin particular had gone over tothe belief that armies, bombs, politicalmaneuver and foreign policyrather than the working class wouldrule the fate of the world. In James'sown Workers' Party, the thesis of"Retrogression," as one key writerput it, placed "a question mark overthe ability of the proletariat toreassemble a revolutionaryleadership to take power before itis overtaken and destroyed by thedisintegrative tendency ofcapitalist civilization of whichthreatening atomic war is the mostpotent force."29 Against this defeatism every instinct of James rebelled.But his voice cried into thewind.

By and large — with the exceptionof some rather brief politicalperiods and some groups — thefundamental pessimism as regardsthe working class has never lifted.Indeed, one can say that it has permeatedthe best as well as theworst of political writing on theLeft, from the philosophy ofHerbert Marcuse to the socialeconomics of Michael Harringtonto the cultural ruminations ofIshmael Reed. When today anoticeably undoctrinaire Socialistwriter looks to the possible futuresof "a semi-corporatist liberalism,""a technocratic, authoritarian,neo-conservatism," or (in the bestcase) a "radical-democraticliberalism with populist elements,"he cites as his future-looking guidethe same Daniel Bell who Jamesleveled against in 1949 forsubstituting technical for humansolutions, and for excluding thethe proletariat is prepared sociallyfor its tasks by the very mechanismsof capitalist production itself.Socialist possibility altogether.30Even at the mundane level of tactics,many of James's complaints— that Marxist response to a widespreadstrike vacillated betweencomplaints against labor's backwardnessand assertions that it wasnot backward but needed the leadershipof a (still unformed) Vanguard— have not been essentiallyoutdated in thirty years.

The obscurity of James's contributions,beyond the problems ofverbiage and context, can be summarizedin the proposition thatMarxists have not yet reconciledthemselves with the subjectivity ofthe revolutionary subject. Whetherthis be the locus classicus proletariatis not even the essential matter.James has often glimpsed momentswhen the peasantry, entering into atransition to the modern order, cantake the leadership of the wholesocial matrix. And he stressed thatin the outbreaks of the future inthe industrialized nations,students, women and other selfdefinedgroups will representthemselves in the councils oftransformation. Meanwhile,among the Marxist politicalgroups, hardly even the most"spontaneist" have becomeseriously interested in popular lifeas a whole, beyond the factorygates, save to deploreconsumerism, to place "real" (i.e.,economic) class struggle againstsuch delusions, to cite a Leftwing(generally Socialist Realist) artisthere and there who hassupposedly captured the palpitatingdynamics of contemporaryconflict. Only among the smallestminority have the (once) widelyaccepted notions of Blackproletarian combativity beenlinked with a concept of that aslever for the rest of the workingclass and broader society, meansfor insight about the culturalparticularities and possibilitiesacross the demographic map.James, be it recalled, neverelicited guilt from white workers;he made it clear that for them (andthe rest of the nation) to acceptBlack equality in the fullest sensemeant an acceptance of dramaticchange in the whole social order.Meanwhile, as the world revolutionaryprocess has continued toaccelerate, things have remained ina stasis for two generations:Socialists committed to oneversion or another of the State,with its perpetuation of mentalversus manual labor; andCommunists waiting for theworking class to join some kind ofCommunist Party en masse. Bypassedor in the future, James'scontributions have never seemedquite timely.

James's perspective defiesempirical proof, in the sense thatnothing but Barbarism orSocialism can finally demonstratesuch political conclusions. DuringWorld War II, James prescientlyreferred to "Socialism andBarbarism," alive at the samemoment, battling toward a finishthat has only been postponed theseforty years. But there is somethingmore that James wrote from a deepsense of history and which theLeft, the intelligentsia as a whole,has been unable or unwilling toabsorb:

We do not idealize the workers. . .But the very bourgeois societywhich has produced its most giftedbody of thinkers and artists hasalso given birth to a proletariatwhich instinctively demanded theapplication to itself of every valuewhich the philosophers and thevarious classes they representedhad demanded throughout theages. . . . Spinoza and Kant wouldstand aghast at what the averageworker takes for granted today.But he does not demand them asan individual or in the primitivemanner as the early Christian did.... These are the values of moderncivilization. They are embodied inthe very web and texture of thelives of the masses of the people.Never were such precious valuesso resolutely held as necessary tocomplete living by so substantialand so powerful a section ofsociety. Socialism means simplythe complete extension andfulfillment of these values in thelife of the individual.31

This is even more than the prophetshad foreseen, since the continuationof class society nourished a varietyof liberational forces that mighthave been anticipated on the morrowof the Revolution. Yet it isalso the ancient dream of Utopiarealized.

To James, who early saw thehuman truth behind the civilizedfalsehoods about his West Indianpeople's capacities, this promisehas never been a matter of dogmaor blind faith. "We live our dailylives in the upper reaches andderivative superstructures ofMarxism," he wrote in 1943. "Weare not academicians and mustperforce spend most of our timethere. But the foundations andlower floors are huge unexploredbuildings which we enter if at allin solitude and leave in silence.They have been shrines too long.We need to throw them open, toourselves and to the public. . . ,"32Perhaps no Marxist has dugdeeper into the subsoil of theSocialist heritage, from its distantorigins to the philosophicfoundation stones to the fructifyingcolumns and arches whichhave been considered the holiestof holy additions. From thecolonial background of the WestIndies, from metropolitan London,from Harlem to Detroit to Africa,James has felt the confidence inthe basic capacities and desires ofplain people justified. "Theunending murders, the destructionof peoples, the bestial passions,the sadism, the cruelties and thelusts, all the manifestations ofbarbarism . . . are unparalleled inhistory. But this barbarism existsonly because nothing else cansuppress the readiness forsacrifice, the democratic instinctsand creative power of the greatmasses of people,"33 James haswritten. The task ofrevolutionaries, to build uponthose perceptions, those desires,has been often and sadlydisappointed. But nothing short ofnuclear holocaust encompassingthe whole planet can obliterate therevolutionary option.

Paul Buhle was a founding editor ofRadical America and is director ofthe Oral History of the AmericanLeft at the Tamiment Institute, NewYork University.

Footnotes

1. Perry Anderson, Considerations onWestern Marxism (London, 1976).[return to text]

2. Albert Gates, "Politics in the Stratosphere,"New International, IX (November1943), page 311.[return to text]

3. C. L. R. James, Beyond A Boundary(London, 1963 ed.), page 151.[return to text]

4. See my essay, "Jews and AmericanCommunism: The Cultural Question,"Radical History Review No. 23(Spring 1980).[return to text]

5. I have explored this in my dissertation,"Marxism in the U.S., 1900-1940," University of Wisconsin, 1975,now being revised for publication.[return to text]

6. See Paul Richards, "W. E. B. DuBoisand American Social History: Evolutionof a Marxist," Radical America,IV (November 1970).[return to text]

7. Lewis's writings are scattered throughThe New Review and other publications.His most incisive single text isThe Militant Proletariat (Chicago,1911).[return to text]

8. Waiting's major works were SocialismAs It Is (New York, 1912), The LargerAspects of Socialism (New York,1913), and Progressivism — And After(New York, 1914).[return to text]

9. This "Cultural Question" is exploredat length in my forthcoming Literatureand the Multitude (New York,1981). See the collage of Fraina'sessays from Modern Dance magazinein Cultural Correspondence, Nos. 6-7(Spring 1978).[return to text]

10. See my essay, "Jews and AmericanCommunism."[return to text]

11. This view of the 1940's CP is arguedbest in a special number of RadicalAmerica on the 1940's, IX (July-August 1975), and most especially inStan Weir's reminiscence, "AmericanLabor on the Defensive: A 1940'sOdyssey."[return to text]

12. My thinking has been influenced byan unpublished paper, David N. Lyon,"C. L. R. James and the NegroQuestion in American Marxism,"whose author we have been unableto locate to request permission forthe essay's publication. James explainedthe origins of his historicalanalysis in Letters on Organization(Detroit, mimeographed, 1962), page12.[return to text]

13. The discussion has been reprinted inLeon Trotsky on Black Nationalismand Self-Determination (New York,1970 ed.).[return to text]

14. James's resolution is now most accessiblein The Future in the Present(Westport, 1977), quotation frompages 126-27.[return to text]

15. Louis Adamic, My America (NewYork, 1938). James's quotation fromNotes on Dialectics (Detroit, 1971ed.), page 188.[return to text]

16. C. L. R. James, History of the Pan-African Revolt (Washington, 1969ed.), pages 5-6.[return to text]

17. A separate essay would be requiredto trace James's evolution from theearly 1940's; the evidence is abundantin The New International and inthe Bulletin of the Johnson-ForrestTendency (available in the RayaDunayevskaya Papers).[return to text]

18. C. L. R. James, State Capitalism andWorld Revolution (Detroit, 1969 ed.from original 1950 publication), page42. Like a number of otherdocuments from the time, this workwas in fact a collaboration withGrace Lee (now Grace Boggs) andRaya Dunayevskaya. See also C. L. R.James, The Invading Socialist Society(Detroit, 1972, from 1947 ed.), coauthoredby Lee and Dunayevskaya.[return to text]

19. Notes On Dialectics, page 22.[return to text]

20. Ibid., page 192.[return to text]

21. The Invading Socialist Society, page62; see Frederick Engels, Anti-Dьhring (Moscow, 1969), pages 328, 331.[return to text]

22. Reprinted as C. L. R. James, Dialecticand History: An Introduction(Cambridge, 1972).[return to text]

23. Best articulated in C. L. R. James,Perspectives and Proposals (Detroit,mimeographed, 1966), page 39.[return to text]

24. State Capitalism and World Revolution,page 34.[return to text]

25. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegadesand Castaways (New York, 1953),page 14.[return to text]

26. Reprinted (from an unfinished workon women) in Selma James, "TheAmerican Family: Decay and Rebirth,"Radical America, IV (February 1970).[return to text]

27. Expressed in Radical America of theearly 1970's: see, e.g., my essays borrowingupon James, "Marxism in theU.S.: 39 Propositions," V (September-October 1971) and "The Eclipseof the New Left: Some Notes," VI(July-August 1972).[return to text]

28. State Capitalism and World Revolution,page 34.[return to text]

29. Ernest Erber, "The Class Nature ofthe Polish State," New International,XI (August 1947), page 178.[return to text]

30. David Plotke, "The United States inTransition: Toward a New Order?"Socialist Review, No. 54 (November-December 1980).[return to text]

31. C. L. R. James, "Laski, St. Paul andStalin," reprinted into The Future inthe Present, page 100.[return to text]

32. C. L. R. James, "Production for theSake of Production — A Reply toCarter," Workers' Party Bulletin, No.2 (April 1943) in Raya DunayevskayaPapers.[return to text]

33. The Invading Socialist Society, page14.[return to text]