C.L.R. James : Revolutionary Socialist Historian & Thinker ( 4/1/1901 - 31/5/1989) 4 Jan 1901

 

Cyril Lionel Robert James,legendary anti-colonial activist, novelist,  socialist historian, revolutionary thinker, journalist and cricket aficionado, universally known simply as ‘CLR’ was born on the fourth of January 1901, in a small town called Tunapuna, 8 miles along the road from Port of Spain,  the largest city of Trinidad and Tobago then a colony of the British Crown. CLR’s father was a teacher, and his mother a habitual reader who helped to foster her son’s passion for literature. His strict upbringing made sure that CLR won an exhibition to enable him, at the age of nine, to attend Queen’s Royal College, the leading school on the island. 

 James, as a boy growing up in a small colonial society.considered  himself as a black Englishman. He absorbed everything  that European civilization offered to him. He  immersed himself in its history and literature, in its classical foundations, in its art and music, but st the same time he rebelled against his formal schooling, and the authority of Queen's Royal College,

Although he might have been an outstanding scholar CLR, having succumbed to the temptations that the game of  cricket offered, did not achieve all he might have at school. He was a good cricketer, a useful opening bowler and a competent batsman, although he never appeared at First Class level,  he developed a encyclopedic knowledge of the games history and sent as much time on the playing field as possible.

The island had several cricket clubs and membership was restricted based on colour, ethnicity and status. One was reserved for the wealthy whites, another for the impoverished blacks, one for the Asian middle-class, another for their black counterparts, one for the Catholics and finally another for the local police force. This system of division jarred with the  edicts of fair play that James had grown to embrace, and these brushes of white racism and prejudice struck James as a violation of the best qualities of English culture: It  "Just wasn't cricket,!!

 CLR’s first career was as a teacher, for a time at his alma mater where, amongst others, he taught the future Test cricketers Victor and Jeffrey Stollmeyer, and the man who would later lead Trinidad to independence, Eric Williams. During the 1920s CLR pursued his interest in cricket, and became a close friend of the great all-rounder Learie Constantine. He also did some writing in the press, and developed his interest in Marxism and his support for Andre Cipriani, a French Creole who built a strong labour movement in Trinidad. 

 Aside from his growing local reputation as a cricket reporter, James had begun, during the 1920s, to write fiction. It was in the style of the novels and short stories of the metropolitan writers, and yet its subject matter, barrackyard life, was new and authentically Caribbean. James was drawn to the vitality of backstreet life, particularly to the independence and resourcefulness of its women. It became the creative source for his first published pieces. La Divina Pastora (1927) and Triumph (1929) establish James’s potential as a novelist. Moreover they reveal the foundation of James’s imaginative skill in his close observation of the raw material of human life. This closeness to the lives of ordinary men and women was something James consciously developed; but he never shook off his sense of being an outsider, of looking on rather than being a participant in the vibrancy of the barrackyard communities.

James married his first wife, Juanita Young, in Trinidad in 1929, but his move three years later when he was 31 to Britain with the intention of becoming a novelist  led to their estrangement.

Learie Constantine, by now one of the world’s best cricketers, invited CLR to join him in Nelson where he was a huge star in the Lancashire League. Part of the reasoning behind the move was to assist CLR to assist Constantine with writing his autobiography. When he arrived CLR had with him the initial manuscripts of two books, the first was the autobiography which, as Cricket and I, appeared in Constantine’s name in 1933. The other book was a biography of Cipriani. 

Having arrived in Nelson Constantine introduced CLR to Neville Cardus. Cardus was shown a piece written by CLR after catching sight of the then 59 year old Sydney Barnes in a Lancashire League match. Much impressed Cardus made sure the piece appeared in the Manchester Guardian in September of 1932, and CLR was taken on to the newspaper’s staff. 

 His job as a cricket reporter on the Manchester Guardian increased his public profile, helping him, at first, to publicise the case for West Indian independence;he published The Case for West Indian Self-Government in 1933, but soon James was swimming in much stronger political currents. His experience of living in Lancashire had exposed him to the industrial militancy of working people. It was also during this time that James began to study seriously the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky; and the response of his Nelson friends to his developing political ideas acted as a useful reminder of the deeply rooted radicalism in the lives of ordinary men and women. He was made aware, too, of the constant conflict between their pragmatic political sense and developed perspective on the world and the positions taken by their so-called leaders. This division marked James deeply, establishing a creative tension in his own political work for the rest of his life.

James’s move to London in 1933 marked the beginning of his career as a leading figure in the Trrotskyist movement, ferocious in  denouncing Stalin's crimes, and James and his fellow Trotskyites remained opposed to Stalinism and offered virulent critiques of the system throughout the 1930s. 

In London, he was invited to join the Friends of India Society and to lecture on any subject connected with the West Indies at the Indian Students’ Central Association. James also attended several meetings of the India League. He joined the League of Coloured  People and wrote for their journal The  Keys. He associated with other black anti-colonialists of the time, such as George Padmore,, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Ras Makonnen. As a Trotskyist, James attracted the attention of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. A 1937 Special Branch report shows that James was a regular visitor to Balkrishna Gupta, an Indian Trotskyist who was reportedly linked to Nehrhu. In 1938, James was living with Ajit Mookerjie Ajit Roy), a Trotskyist law student at LSE and friend of Gupta, on Boundary Road, London. James and Mookerjee formed the Marxist Group in 1935 and later the Revolutionary Socialist League. 

Thnoughout this time, James became increasingly conscious of black struggles around th world. When the Italian gascists invaded Ethiopia in 1935, he helped organise the International African Friends of Ethiopia,. The Ethiiopian cisis of 1935 was a turning point,  as James was forced to confront the equivocation of the British labour movement, His essay Abyssynnia and the Imperialists (1936) was an early acknowledgment  of  the British labour movement in the face of imperialist aggression in Africas and African descent in the struggle for freedom.

James would go  on  to draw upon his extensive historical research into the 1791 San Domingo slave revolution. led by Toussaint L’Ouverture raised very concretely the question James was seeking to address in his revolutionary politics – not just the nature and course of revolution itself, the changing relationship between leaders and the people; but the dynamic of the struggles situated at the peripheries and those located in the centre.  In 1936 he decided to produce a play, Toussaint L’Ouverture, from his drafted manuscript, casting Paul Robeson in the title role. It was a magnificent part for Robeson, given the severe limits he found as a black man seeking dramatic roles; but there were other political considerations which lay behind James’s decision to stage the play at London’s Westminster Theatre. It was planned as an intervention in the debates surrounding the Ethiopian crisis

James presented to his audience a virtually forgotten example from the past – of slaves, uneducated and yet organised by the mechanism of plantation production itself, who, in the wake of the French revolution, rose against their masters and succeeded not only in winning their freedom; but, in going on to defeat the might of three colonial powers, secured their victory through independence. At the centre of this outstanding struggle in revolutionary history was the figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture. He was the natural focus for a dramatic account of these tumultuous events; and James’s play focused upon his rise and fall as leader of the slaves. Drama was a form for which James had a particular feel. His lifelong interest in Shakespeare was based on the dramatic quality of the work; and James recognised that theatre provided the arena in which to explore “political” ideas as refracted through human character. It was through the juxtaposition of personality and events that James sought to highlight some of the broader historical and political themes raised by the San Domingo revolution. He hoped to make his audience aware that the colonial populations were not dependent upon leadership from Europe in their struggle for freedom, that they already had a revolutionary tradition of their own. 

It  would be a very productive  period for James, In addition to his cricjkt  reporting and political organiising, James began to produce books at a remarkable pace. In 1936 he published Minty Ally. about life in the slums of Trinidad. Then  came World Revolution, am analysis of the Third International and a scathing account of Communist policy under Stalin. And during 1938 , while working with Padmore to launch the journal  International African Opinion , h finished his masterpiece , The Black Jacobins that combined Marxist  ananalysis with a novelists talent and a detailed knowledge to create a mostly critical  portrayal of  L'Oubertture's role in the San Domingo revolt. James revealed gow the French and Haitan revolutions interaxted abd predicted that thee would be similar upriaings i Africa during the years to come. A book that helped transform the writing of history – and history itself. Decades before historians such as Christopher Hill and EP Thompson began producing ‘history from below’, James told of how the slaves of Haiti had not been passive victims of their oppression but active agents in their own emancipation. In telling that story, he inspired a new generation of Toussaint L’Ouvertures, leaders of the new anti-colonial struggles.

Not long adter that book appeared James  was invited to tour the United States by the Socialist Workers' Party to support the cause of Black workers. As he tavelled throughout the country, audiecnces  black and white , crowded to hear him. James could speak for hours without notes, quoting facts and documets from memory . Listeners sat enraptured by his knowledge and skill.  

At a meeting in Califorinia in the spring of 1939,  he. met his second wife Constance Webb, an American model, actress and author, He decided to extend his visit, 

In April 1939 he  went to meet LeonTrotsky, in Coyoacán in Mexico , in preparation for this, he submitted “Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question”suggesting in these that the SWP should help in “the organisation of a Negro movement” to fight for civil and political rights and the opening of those trade unions that still discriminated against back workers. They discussed the conditions for the Socialist Workers Party launching a revolutionary organization for Black workers in the United States . Trotsky and James conducted a series of minuted conversations which together were to form the basis of the revolutionary Fourth International’s policies on the black question and the forms of organisation it required to be a pioneer of black liberation. Trotsky agreed with James’ suggestion of an independent black organisation in principle, but questioned whether it could be a mass movement in existing conditions. He even suggested that if other parties formed such a movement, Trotskyists might enter it as a faction.  James commented in a letter that Trotsky “is the keenest of the keen on the Negro question” and that “He agreed almost entirely with my memo on the Negro question”.

Unfortunately, these positive developments were cut short. The Trotskyist movement was just about to undergo a damaging split over the Russian Question: what was the class character of Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship in the USSR? Could it still be described as a degenerate workers’ state as Trotsky insisted, that is, a state with post capitalist planned property but a bureaucracy that had politically expropriated the working class? Major leaders of the SWP, Max Shachtman and James Burnham, developed the view that it was a new form of class society, bureaucratic collectivism. James went with them in the split of 1940 though he was to return to the SWP after the second world war, albeit as a proponent with Raya Dunayevskaya of their own  theory of “state capitalism” 

James and Webb married in 1946  and their son , C,L,R Jr , familiarly known as Nobbie was born in 1946,However in time James's activities won the attention of the FBI. Declared a subversive and  undesirable alien, Jame was arrested in 1953 at the time of the McCarthy and jailed for several weeks on Ellis Island. As a result the couple were forced to seperate, hr was subsequently deported, while Webb remained in New York. 

He returned to England for a bit  and began to report on cricket for the Manchester Guardian once more marrying Selma Weinstein in 1955,  who he  remained with until 1980. Then in 1958 at which point he was invited by his former pupil Eric Williams to return to Trinidad as independence beckoned. The job he took was a opportunity to influence events as editor of  the political newspaper The Nation. 

After leaving  The Nation, having fallen out with Williams on questions of the creation of a federation in the West Indies and a US Naval Base in Trinidad. He returned to London in 1962.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s CLR moved between the UK, the US and Caribbean and also spent time in Africa where he was involved in independence movements that swept through that region as well as the Caribbean. As a West Indian deeply-infused with Western culture, he sought to carve out a space of independence while still maintaining his love for what he saw as a series of cross-national ideals.

In 1963 he would publish Beyond a Boundary, a memoir and social commentary, that explored the place of cricket in West Indian and British society and its role in empire, family, masculinity, race, class, national culture, colonization, and decolonization.  The work is widely viewed by critics as one of the best sports books ever written.

As the political climate eased in the 1960's, U.S, authorities, allowed him back into the country to teach. Throughout the 1970's, he lectured on numerous campuses, and for several years he was a professor at the University of the District of Columbia (then called Federal City College). He lectured widely and wrote extensively on a diverse array of topic ranging  from  Black liberation to contemporary philosophy, culture, politics, radicalism, and revolution, and even touched on the anti colonial potential of cricket. 

Revolutionary though he might be, James always remained something of a Victorian gentleman, But however repectable he was in his personal manners, he remained focussed on the creative and disruptive forces st the bottom of society,of society.

"Ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields and offices ," he once wrote. " are rebellling every day in ways of their ow invention...Always the aim is to retin contol over their conditions of life and their relations, with one another. Their strivings have few chroniclers."

James returned to this theme in countless articles and lectures, and many of his books published over the last decades of his life were collections of such work. His approach to the questions of revolutionary politics acquired a distinctive stamp through his attempt to integrate the struggles of the colonial areas into the European revolutionary tradition. 

After  returning to live in Britain, a group of admirers, mostly young and black, gathered around him, heralding him as a sage.In 1981 CLR turned 80 and was invited  by the  London by the Race Today Collective to make a short series of speeches. It was then that he decided to relocate to London, and he rented a small one bedroom flat above the Race Today Collective offices in Brixton. He wrote for the organisation’s journal. The man who The Times dubbed the Black Plato was 88 when he died in Brixton  on the 31st of May 1989.

During his  last years James  had often reflected  upon his life's course, riding the gentle wave of academic fame thrown up for him by the storms of Black power, and surrounding himself with eager young associates. Although his strength had been slowly slipping away, he could in conversation often startle his visitors with the brilliance of his insight, his grasp of the details of history. and with the accuracy of his analysis of contemporary events. He remained a revolutionary to the core, 

His body was returned for burial in Trinidad, the island of his birth. His tombstone is designed as a book, opened to a page from Beyond a  Boundary:

 "Times would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and utility which matters, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going, and the rate at which you are getting there.”

 His death coincided with the explosion of popular forces across China and eastern Europe which shook some of the most oppressive political regimes in human history. These momentous events, calling into question the structure of the modern world order, throw into sharp relief the life and work of one of this century’s most outstanding figures. For James was pre-eminently a man of the twentieth century. His legacy reflects the scope and diversity of his life’s work, the unique conditions of particular times and places; and yet at its core lies a vision of humanity which is universal and integrated, progressive and profound.

 

Further Reading:

 

James, C. L. R. 2005 [1963]. Beyond A Boundary. Yellow Jersey Press, London.
James, C. L. R. 1989 [1963]. The Black Jacobins. Vintage, New York. [First published in 1938]

Henry, Paget, and Buhle, Paul (eds) 1992. C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, Duke University Press, Durham
James, C. L. R. 1992. The C. L. R. James Reader (edited by Anna Grimshaw) Wiley Blackwell, Oxford.

 Online Collections:

C.L.R. James Archive at Marxists.org