According to Renault in Toward a Counter-Genealogy of Race: On CLR James, it is argued that James always stressed the fundamental importance of the notion of class struggle, and closely followed developments in revolutionary working-class struggles in Europe and the United States.
“This did not prevent him, however, from analyzing and taking part in movements for decolonization: In 1938, he authored the famous history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins; in the 1940s, he was seen as a specialist on the “Negro Question” within North American Trotskyist movements; he also had ties to African independence leaders – Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and later, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania – and he became involved in “party politics” himself during the time leading up to Trinidadian independence. James strove to reposition Pan-Africanist struggles within a global revolutionary history, by interpreting them in light of Marxist theory and historiography; the latter, in turn, was reshaped through the lens of the experience of (de)colonization. He foregrounded and thematized the relations between class oppression and racial oppression as well as the connections between struggles for emancipation waged by subaltern groups with their own autonomous demands.”
But does this necessarily mean that as a Marxist, James thinks of race in the same way he thinks class? Does a concept of race exist in his writings, one invested with a specific theoretical and/or political function, beyond the attention he pays to actual instances of racial domination?
In Observing Properly Changing Forms of Spontaneity and Organization: Creative Conflicts in C. L. R. James' Hegelian Dialectics and Political Philosophy, Matthew Quest writes that C. L. R. James argued philosophy must become proletarian, not, importantly, that philosophy must be brought to the proletariat (James, Dunayevskaya and Lee, 1986, 128-132). James suggested he had no interest in teaching, and thought it not productive to teach, popular audiences’ pure epistemology [a theory of history … put other way, what makes up the ways we produce knowledge] or the function of categories of cognition.
For James, one can think correctly without knowing dialectics (James, 1971a, 27). His Notes on Dialectics are instead grounded in political concerns. James asserted that we must be careful not to be stuck in our principles. Politics, or "the organic life of thought forms," must come "out" of contradictions or one's thought is "no good" (1971a, 20, 40). James tried to use his study of dialectics to figure out the relationship between the spontaneity of ordinary people's self-organization and the tasks of a political party or revolutionary organization whose intention was to "propagate” the destruction of bureaucracy" (1971a, 243). Opposed to further inculcating it or expanding it.
we present Pt. II of the three-part series where we are unpacking CLR James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation/management, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest.
Matthew Quest has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities including Georgia State University in Atlanta, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.