[Some folks asked me where to start if they wanted to started reading CLR James. I was composing an email for them, but this actually seems easier. So here it is!]
Okay, so there is probably
no good way of developing an overview of CLR James’ work. He wrote a lot, for a
period of over forty years, and from and about a lot of places. The public
archive of his writing is unstable, too. He wrote under multiple pen/party
names for many publications, so it’s probable that occasional work in socialist
or black radical papers are floating out there and we don’t know about it.
Moreover, more and more stuff is being republished (or functionally published
for the first time) as part of the CLR James Archive series at Duke. Finally,
James himself is something of an authorial catachresis: many of his texts were
co-written. The mass of writings, coupled with the heterogeneity of his
concerns, means that any number of CLR Jameses are possible: James the Marxist
historian, James the pan-African anticolonialist, James the cultural critic,
even James the fiction writer. On and on.
The list of James assembled here reflects my own interests in James as someone whose work a)
attempted articulating Marxism to black radical traditions and b) theorized key
features of capitalism that align neatly with various forms of workerism and
autonomism. (They align so neatly, I argue here,
because the work of James and his coterie was actually read by those who would
give us the sexy European post-marxisms we know and love; the black radical
tradition is the denegated center of much Marxism today.) My aim is also,
really simply, to keep reading manageable. I know y’all don’t have oodles of
time, comrades.
These aren’t presented in
any particular order. Publication dates can indeed matter a lot with James. A
great deal of his work in the 40s was occasioned by sectarian squabbles in the
world of U.S. Trotskyism, and so the immediate occasion for any writing might
be localizable to the need to respond to Shachtman or Cannon. Moreover, James’
break with Trotsky—in terms of party affiliations, yes, but also
intellectually—decisively impacted his work in the 50s and 60s. That said, all
of this material has implications that exceed the polemics that occasioned them
(e.g., party disputes on the status of the Soviet Union, debates over the Negro
question, and so on).
On with the show.
* The Black Jacobins (1938/1963). I probably don’t need to say much about
this one at all. If you can find it, I highly recommend reading James’
“Lectures on The Black Jacobins,” published in Small Axe. I say “if” because I’ve just gone through the journal
online and haven’t been able to locate it; it’s supposed to be in Small Axe 8. It is worth finding,
though, because James reads The Black
Jacobins alongside Du Bois’ Black
Reconstruction and it is pretty much amazing. I also highly recommend David
Scott’s Conscripts
of Modernity for a reading of the significant reorientation of the
text’s political horizons in the second edition (which is the edition you would
read anyhow). This could also be paired with (the somewhat sloppy) The History of Negro Revolt (1938),
later republished as The History of
Pan-African Revolt.
* “The
Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society” (1943). (This is
included in CLR
James on the ‘Negro Question’, and I recommend the entire volume.) This
is a crucial text for understanding the practical relationship that should
obtain between black struggle and Marxist political organizing. He begins by
sketching the dialectical tension of racial capitalism: “side by side with his
increasing integration into
production which becomes more and more a social process, the Negro becomes more
than ever conscious of his exclusion from
democratic privileges as a separate social group in the community.” For James,
this dynamic means that black organizations and mass movements agitating for
inclusion in the polity would necessarily bring it into a confrontation with
capitalism itself. Indeed, “such today is their proletarian composition and
such is the interrelation with the American proletariat itself that their
independent struggles form perhaps the most powerful stimulus in American
society” toward revolutionary socialism. James would argue, basically, that
Marxist parties should trust to the intensity of this dialectic. Instead of
trying to steer black democratic movements or subsume them into Marxist
organizations, “the party, with the fullest
consciousness of the significance of the mass independent struggles of the
Negroes, considers that its main agitational work among Negroes is the
stimulation and encouragement of these mass struggles.” Put simply, “[The
party] sharply condemns that distortion of Marxist truth which states or implies
that the Negroes by their independent struggles cannot get to first base
without the leadership of organized labor.” To be sure, there is residual vanguard-y Party-talk in
here; it was, after all, a party document. But it operates in tension with the
analysis provided. So one thing to take away is that James’ ultimate break with
the Party-form is very much an effect of his engagement with black activism—not
simply a result of his interpretation of the emergent political economy of
post-Fordism, as we’ll shortly see. Another thing to take away: I think that
this is a crucial analysis for any leftist or left organization trying to map
the potentialities of, and its own relation to, the ongoing revolt.
* Facing
Reality: The New Society: Where to look for it & How to bring it closer
(1958), written with Grace Lee (soon Grace Lee Boggs) and Cornelius
Castoriadis. “The whole world today lives in the shadow of the state power.
This state power is an ever-present self-perpetuating body over and above
society…Against this monster, people all over the world, and particularly
ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling
every day in ways of their own invention.” Facing
Reality marks James’ starkest break with vanguardism, and it makes sense:
the text was published in the wake of the Hungarian workers revolution of 1956,
which exemplified for James the ordinariness of the desire for freedom and the extreme level of political sophistication
possessed by “ordinary working people” everywhere. For James et al., this event
signaled the definitive end of the Party-form, whose logic of organization was
as monstrous as that of the state. In a Negrian idiom, Party and State
organizations were functionally apparatuses of transcendence that blocked or
appropriated the immanent functioning of the social. (He and his crew articulate
this wonderfully in State Capitalism and
World Revolution [1950].) We also get a sense in this text of why it was
that James became so preoccupied with the cultural fabric of U.S. life, as
shown in texts like American Civilization
and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways.
For James, culture isn’t just a repository of prolie dreaming, although it is
that. It is more importantly a primary place at which the cognitive, affective,
and social competencies of people are enhanced—an inchoate articulation of the
social factory thesis. What remained
for radical organizations? Aside from showing up—at the demo, at the strike, at
the barricades—nothing more than publishing a newspaper, elucidating the global
state of things and the tendential drift of the world.
* “Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
and the Caribbean,” “Marx’s Capital,
the Working-Day, and Capitalist Production” (late 1960s) in You Don’t Play
with Revolution. These are lectures that James gave to some Caribbean
students in Montreal in the late 60s, and whoa:
they are amazing. I mean, the entire collection is just fantastic, but James is
actually a wonderful reader of Marx. The Brumaire
essay is in many ways an attempt to read the current political scene of
Trinidad (and Eric Williams in particular) through Marx. For James, it doesn’t
quite translate: the political and social composition of Trinidad scrambles the
operative analytic categories of Marx’s text. It’s James at his best, putting
two things together in order to transform our understanding of both of them.
His reading of the “Working Day” section of Capital
is equally brilliant, and tracks the theoretical developments of workerism and
autonomism neatly. Basically, the scene of production is constituted by
political antagonism, and capital is reactive to the self-activity of workers.
Rad stuff.
* Selma James, “A Woman’s
Place” (1952) and The Power of Women & the Subversion of
the Community (1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, should
include “A Woman’s Place”). A few things to say here. First, I think that it is
impossible to understand CLR’s theoretical trajectory through the 50s without
considering the impact of Selma James’ work on his thinking. Selma published “A
Woman’s Place” in Correspondence in
1952, three years before she married CLR. Selma’s exploration of the doubly
worked working-class woman, the way that a particular form of subjectivity is
shaped in the unendingness of labor, not only shaped CLR’s thinking about
gender and capital; it also attuned him more concretely, I think, to the
necessity of recovering the concrete particularity of workers’ subjectivity. As
for The Power of Women: I’m never
sure how to understand the authorial relationship that obtained between James
and Dalla Costa. Some versions do not cite James as a co-author. I also think I
recall encountering James saying she doesn’t care to talk about disputes over
the text’s authorship. (But see here.)
Whatever the case, it is a brilliant extension and concretization of some of
the concepts that were only incipient in CLR’s work. That is to say, in
addition to all of its billion merits, The
Power of Women allowed me to re-read CLR in a more productive fashion.
So, that’s it! Like I said,
I wanted to reduce the reading load. Some of my favs aren’t on here: his book
on Nkrumah (which has the best dedication ever), “Dialectical Materialism and the
Fate of Humanity,” and on and on. But if you find this useful and trust my
taste, I’m totally willing to do another. Or feel free to yell at me for my omissions.
