The C.L.R. James Institute

by Jim Murray

You know, history does move. The thing is to see it. ¹

So, however far I may seem to leave politics, I am really on that subject, i.e., an understanding of society. ²

--C.L.R. James

In April, 1983 I was watching the news with James in his room in Brixton, London. A mass meeting of five thousand British Leyland workers in the north of England voted to continue their walkout over management's abolition of the three minute wash-up time between shifts. The wash-up time was a forty-year tradition at the plant, but it had never been mentioned in a contract. During the report, James pointed to the telly: "Look! Look! Look at that!" I looked, there were the workers massed in the courtyard of the plant, there was the female reporter in the foreground, explaining the vote.

I thought: Ah ah! A perfect Jamesian story, industrial workers self-organizing, the issue being not money but quality of life, the story coming to us live from a different part of the country, ordinary people taking everyday history into their own hands. But James continued: "Jim, look! Look at that!" He impatiently leaned forward, touched the upper left corner of the screen. "Look: the steeple, the hills in the distance, the sky." He was referring to the depth of the camera's view, the undivided totality of the picture coming to us on such a small box. He said nothing about the story. ³

James used to carry around a postcard of Picasso's Guernica, so he could study it on the train or whenever he got the chance. ⁴ James was a man who thought visually. In Chapter One, called "The Window," of Beyond A Boundary, James sets one of his most striking visual scenes. As a boy he lived half the year, the rainy season, with his grandmother and two aunts in a house by the cricket ground in Tunapuna. The bedroom window had a chair on which "a small boy of six" could stand and watch play. James was about fifty-six when he wrote:

On an awful rainy day I was confined to my window, Tunapuna C.C. was batting and Jones was in his best form, that is to say, in nearly every over he was getting up on his toes and cutting away. But the wicket was wet and the visitors were canny. The off-side boundary at one end was only forty yards away, a barbed-wire fence which separated the ground from the police station. Down came a short ball, up went Jones and lashed at it, there was the usual shout, a sudden silence and another shout, not so loud this time. Then from my window I saw Jones walking out and people began to walk away. He had been caught by point standing with his back to the barbed wire. I could not see it from my window and I asked and asked until I was told what had happened. I knew that something out of the ordinary had happened to us who were watching. We had been lifted to the heights and cast down into the depths in much less than a fraction of a second. Countless as are the times that this experience has been repeated, most often in the company of tens of thousands of people, I have never lost the zest of wondering at it and pondering over it. ⁵

James starts with the rain, the conditions keeping him indoors, nature and aunts defining his limits. They close the door but give him the window. Alone and confined, the young James still found plenty to do. Why should he be excluded just because he was restricted? Why should unfavorable weather conditions thwart him? When the world seems to be against you, indeed, when the world is against you, that just does not have to mean that you are finished. You still have a mind, you can still imagine. The boy, in James's story, did something very specific with his.

A player whose name and exact style the boy knows well is batting for an extended period, which in cricket can be all day. One of the fences is relatively close, and the bowler, who you can think of as the pitcher if necessary, induces Arthur Jones to hit the ball to the fence where it is caught by a player whoe position is named point. In cricket the bowled ball usually strikes the ground in front of the batsman, making him hit it on the short hop, or not-so-short hop, which accounts for the wetness of the ground and the canniness of the opponent being mentioned.

My tale, however, is not about cricket, it is not even about sports. It is about C.L.R. James, the boy at the window. It mattered to him that it was cricket outside his window, but for our purposes it could have been any other activity in which people engaged. What was it about cricket itself that mattered to the boy at the window? Beyond A Boundary addresses that question, but what matters here is that it provided the boy with an ideal, a sense of what was possible, what was whole.

The boy saw Jones hit it, using his own special version of a stroke called "the cut," then from his window he followed the crowd noise: a loud shout for the well-hit ball, a silence as the ball flew toward the fence, a lesser shout as it was caught. Jones and the other players walked away, the cricket match itself was over. The story, however, doesn't end there. What we are observing is a writer structuring his own outlook, developing his own method, and telling us about it in his own words.

I could not see it from my window and I asked and asked until I was told what happened.

The boy knew the result, but he wanted to know what had happened. There is a score to be reported, a result to be made official, but for the boy "what happened" is what the people actually did. He asked and asked to get many separate individual eyewitness accounts. He sought physical re-enactments, concrete evidence. The bodies in motion that he could not see: what did they actually do? He needed the visuals beyond his window. (The sequel James planned for Boundary was to be all photos of the grace of cricketers in motion. ⁶ ) I doubt that any two of those tellers told the story the exact same way, or that the boy expected them to. By rejecting the hegemony of the score, the boy was opening up the narrative process. And he did so by analyzing the process step by step, identifying each of them as he went along.

I knew that something out of the ordinary had happened to us who were watching.

For James, this is cruising along in the middle of a paragraph. He thought writing should never call attention to itself as writing, it should always flow evenly. ⁷ In dissecting him here I am creating a different story out of his. For me, I knew is an outburst, an insight, an understanding that produces its own questions and inquiries. I knew explodes with a spontaneous enthusiasm and resonates with a fundamental commitment, well beyond the monomaniacal dedication the boy demonstrated in pestering many fans about what happened. Now he is proclaiming something new. The mass yielded its individual accounts, but the boy also needs to join the mass as a mass in the action despite the window separating him from it. The boy uses the window as a frame, he decides how much the window will confine him.

He decides that what "happened to us" in that sequence of events is extraordinary: we were acting as one, we were in motion together, rising and falling with the hometown batsman, rising and falling with that ball in the air. Up to now the story was one of separation. By combining concrete (oral history) research with his own imagination, the boy is now talking about we and us. The stories of the fans provide the foundation from which he tells his own story, and that story is about joining a process defined by himself.

After I knew come different levels of seemingly passive construction: people who were already watchers (passive) are being molded into a mass (passive) in order further to be acted upon by the flight of a ball. ⁸ What enables James to distinguish ordinary from special is the formation of that mass, joining itself into common activity.

The boy is rather intensely building a community for himself. By joining that mass (through storytelling) himself, he has a vision of what is special to him. The joining of the boy and the crowd is not a unilateral individual action, it is a reciprocal process which creates something that wasn't there before. It comes alive in the naming, community, only James does not name it, he's moving so fast. He is doing it, not advocating it or reflecting on its absence. He joins the community on his terms, the community includes him on its terms. And notice: he does not use the word special, he does not use the word extraordinary, he does not use the word vision. He tells us it was "something out of the ordinary," an extremely understated way of putting it. But make no mistake, we are discussing the intense, dynamic, reciprocal, complex relationship between an individual and a community.

The us in the sentence is active, alive, assertive, as big a leap as I knew. It is the same leap, really: us gives I knew a place to land. The leap is not just a leap of imagination, an interesting daydream, a momentary insight. It is a step James takes us through by describing the specifics of what he needs to know, how he empirically researches it, and what he is then able to conclude based on the authority of his own method as he practiced it.

The boy at the window is a subject in the story: because he has a mind, and is willing to do the legwork of research, to listen to people, and then make his own meaning out of what they say, the window cannot keep him from the action. Having gotten to "us who were watching," he is ready for

We had been lifted to the heights and cast down into the depths in much less than a fraction of a second.

Is it possible for so much to happen to so many people in so little time? Definitely. James is not referring to the real-time duration of the flight of the ball, he is referring to a qualitative change the crowd experiences. The lift and fall, though stated metaphorically, is referring to the specifics of the action in which the crowd is actively participating. The rise and fall of the crowd's expectations happened without the boy's participation; it could see what was happening and he could not. But the boy used his imagination to join the crowd, so that when James uses "we" in this sentence he is making a substantial claim, not stating a fact. He is situating himself in the crowd, the local cricketing community, positioning himself within the common experience.

"We" places the boy where he was not placed, doing what others were doing without him. The boy at the window had to think himself into the crowd from the window. We have already seen how the precocious boy would not settle for the result, he would not settle for the personal accounts of many spectators, and, now, he will not even settle for (imaginatively) joining the crowd in the action he had missed. His goal is to make something whole out of the experience by connecting not just events or people but relationships. He is creating and practicing his own particular working method.

Countless as are the times that this experience has been repeated, most often in the company of tens of thousands of people, I have never lost the zest of wondering at it and pondering over it.

In this single step, James is taking us from cricket to society, from a game to history. Cricket is not a symbol of society, not some kind of metaphor, cricket is society. The boy assumes that what he sees outside his window is part of the world beyond the game's boundaries; indeed, cricket is an intimate part of that society. ⁹

Society is coming back in to interact with the boy reaching out. What the boy belongs to has become a process, a series of relationships, among people organized in different ways, through storytelling and through their own commitment to belonging, with the constant theme of the individual relating to the group and both relating to what happens next. Once we open the window of relating, of social exchange, we start a series of processes. Once we settle for the official result, we close the window on those exchanges. At every point the boy is finding another way to say and feel and know that what he thinks matters, that he belongs to society: he imagines himself in history. ¹⁰

Consider his zest: The zest that he associates with the tension of the expectant crowd, the crowd which he both watches and joins, is not only to be found in this final sentence. There is the knowledgeable, engaged zest with which he watched Jones batting. There is the yearning, demanding zest with which he found out what happened. There is the zest of the artist in distinguishing special from ordinary, (and doing something with it), and let's not forget the zest of the intellectual in declaring "I knew".

Being lifted up and cast down is immediately what James is writing about, but I think he is suggesting here that even when he is a part of the crowd at the game, he imagines himself to be the boy at the window. Building community, getting out into the crowd, is not his only goal. Another story he tells, about Matthew Bondman, makes this point more clearly.

Watching Arthur Jones make his stroke was an experience which James describes as "the second landmark" of his childhood at the window. The first was "one of my strongest early impressions of personality in society," Matthew Bondman, who lived next door.

He was a young man already when I first remember him, medium height and size, and an awful character. He was generally dirty. He would not work. His eyes were fierce, his language was violent and his voice was loud. His lips curled back naturally and he intensified it by an almost perpetual snarl. My grandmother and my aunts detested him. . . . The whole Bondman family, except for the father, was unsatisfactory. . . . [T]heir irregularity of life exercised its fascination for my puritanical aunts. But that is not why I remember Matthew. For ne'er-do-well, in fact vicious character that he was, Matthew had one saving grace--Matthew could bat. More than that, Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with a bat in his hand was all grace and style. When he practiced on an afternoon with the local club people stayed to watch and walked away when he was finished. He had one particular stroke that he played by going down on one knee. It may have been a slash through covers or a sweep to leg. But, whatever it was, whenever Matthew sank down and made it, a long, low "Ah!" came from many a spectator, and my own little soul thrilled with recognition and delight.

But that delight in Matthew's stroke was not the reason Bondman became a landmark in James's own development. In the next paragraph he tells us:

The contrast between Matthew's pitiable existence as an individual and the attitude people had towards him filled my growing mind and has occupied me to this day. ¹¹ (Emphasis mine)

The contrast James identifies is an abstraction in the boy's mind, the relationship between an individual and a crowd. The individual is doing something and the crowd is doing something, but what the boy at the window recognized was the relationship between the two. In doing so he was functioning as a creative thinker, not just as someone fascinated by a batsman's talent or a crowd's engagement. James is seeing not just what people do, he is responding to human actions in relation to each other, defining them as social forces which are part of a larger, "invisible" totality. He joins the crowd and at the same time he creates a position for himself as an observer of the crowd. Even when he is in the crowd he distances himself intellectually from it. The boy at the window is working alone.

Both of the boy's landmarks--Jones's stroke and Bondman's contrasts--have certain elements in common: a distinctive individual personality performs, the crowd functions as a living body, the individual and the crowd relate to each other in a fluid process, the boy at the window joins that process, and the boy at the window maintains his own intellectual distance from that process, re-working it for his own purposes. The boy is not just joining the community, he is also staying back, using the window as his own private haven for studying the relationships out there in the world. That he does both does not mean he must sacrifice any intensity in doing either one: what matters is his mastery of the overall structure, keeping both processes fluid. He must maintain the window as his own, he must keep the window stable (and unbroken), he must concentrate on what is required to reach out to society while keeping his distance. He reaches out, but doesn't get lost in the crowd; he works alone, but doesn't cut himself off from society. The imaginative community he achieves is made possible by the controlled distance he maintains.

Several times in Boundary, James refers to mastering himself. To understand what he means by that, we have to take one more large factor into account. He tells us, in the book's first paragraph, (at the end of which we meet Bondman):

From the chair also he could mount on to the window-sill and so stretch a groping hand for the books on the top of the wardrobe. Thus early the pattern of my life was set. ¹²

The boy was a reader, he filled every minute he wasn't playing cricket or football with his single-minded pursuit of English and European literature and history. He read, reread, and memorized many passages of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, ("It was not to me an ordinary book. It was a refuge into which I withdrew."), and then went on to read all of Thackeray's other novels, along with all the other books he could find. Reading gave him the confidence which became so central to his life's work, the trademark of every article he ever wrote, every speech he ever gave. In Boundary he tells us:

I made clippings and filed them. It served no purpose whatever, I had never seen or heard of anyone doing the like. I spoke to no one about it and no one spoke to me.

Me and my clippings and magazines on W.G. Grace, Victor Trumper and Ranjitsinhji, and my Vanity Fair and puritanical view of the world. I look back at the little eccentric and would like to have listened to him, nod affirmatively and pat him on the shoulder. A British intellectual long before I was ten, already an alien in my own environment among my own people, even my own family. Somehow from around me I had selected and fastened on to the things that made a whole. As will soon appear, to that little boy I owe a debt of gratitude. ¹³

It was just like the boy at the window to research a public subject, one he could discuss with people around him, and at the same time be doing that research for his own private reasons, his own interests, his own development as defined by himself. He could function, indeed, he could master himself as an eccentric, "an alien in his own environment," because he discovered that he could find out for himself the things he wanted to know, and that he could build his own life around his own intellectual pursuits.

From the moment he learned to read, the boy decided that he did not have to follow the program his parents and school expected him to follow. ¹⁴ (That program was to rise as far as a black man under colonialism could rise, to carrying the papers upstairs to the Governor.) He rebelled completely. From Boundary :

When I left school I was an educated person, but I had educated myself into a member of the British middle class with literary gifts and I had done it in defiance of all authority. . . .

I was not a swan among geese. There were other boys who read hard, and with more discrimination than I did, for I read everything. But none pursued criticism to any degree and not one read cricket literature except in the most casual way. (One curious fact: I read one book on soccer and never read another.) But for cricket and English literature I fed an inexhaustible passion. I had had it from the earliest days that I remember. The boys in Ancient Greece must have had the same. If for them games and poetry were ennobled by their roots in religion, my sense of conduct and morals came from my two, or rather my twin, preoccupations, and I suspect that it was not too different with a Greek boy. But he went out into a world for which his training had prepared him. There was no world for which I was fitted, least of all the one I was now to enter. ¹⁵ (Emphasis mine)

But he had fitted himself with a mastery of his own working method, and a mastery of his own needs as an "individual personality in society." When the boy at the window refused to settle for the official result, and instead visualized the social processes involved in the game, he was creating (for his own life's work) a conception of politics which is recognized today in a way that it was not by the old left. Politics is about society, not just government; daily life and community, as lived by people, not positions and policies as advocated and enacted by parties and states. Also: democracy (James's goal) is cultural, not just political or economic. ¹⁶

James used the same basic method in all the rest of his work. He learned a way to appreciate the concrete totality of social existence, to observe the structural patterns in society and history. Even on the more abstract levels, he managed to use that method without losing the original sense of the concrete with which he started, without using abstractions to obscure reality.

One reason James has not been properly understood is that people have abstracted from James what they wanted to see in him, and have used that abstraction to obscure the concrete totality of James. Among other things, he has been abstracted as a Third World revolutionary, the "Black Plato," "the artist as revolutionary," and now he is in danger of becoming some sort of Cultural Studies icon. Even James's revolutionary Marxism is being abstracted by those who would separate it from his theoretical work on culture. All these divisive categories are actually useless, for beneath all of James's diversity of topics, there is a common structure that has not yet been named. If we understand James as he understood himself, as the boy at the window, then we will be able to see the structure that links his works together.

James was an autodidact who opposed "that categorization and specialization, that division of the human personality, which is the greatest curse of our time." ¹⁷ He thought that "[t]he distinctive feature of our age is that mankind as a whole is on the way to becoming fully conscious of itself." ¹⁸ The realization of the individual personality was a lifelong theme of his work. Indeed, Marx's analysis of alienation, how the labor process shapes living people, is at the core of James's Marxism. ¹⁹

Beyond A Boundary itself explores the author's own development, as a person and as a writer, but, because its focus is cricket, the book leaves out the years James spent in the US, 1938-1953 (although he does discuss his shock at a point-shaving scandal in college basketball and his annoyance with rude fans at a baseball game.)

I want to suggest an unusual way that James, by mastering the dual processes of the window, was able, by opening himself to different cultures, to see his own reflection and not confuse his method.

From the 1960s on, James was always telling people that his US years were the richest intellectually of his life. He especially appreciated the working environment created by the Johnson Forest group. Also, he took a special interest in US society and culture, as we know from recent publications, especially his ambitious study American Civilization and his uninhibited letters to Constance Webb. ²⁰ Now that we have this material we are better able to look at James's life and work as a whole, and to understand some of the important ways--as Anna Grimshaw has written--that Boundary is itself a product of his US period, not just chronologically but intellectually as well. ²¹

The experience of living in the US freed James to go back to his earliest devotion to literature and popular culture and to write about himself. In my own focus on the development of James himself, especially the unity and coherence of his seemingly scattered life, I turn to another passage he wrote in 1953. It is easy to find in it the themes of his life's work, the terms he used to define the world, but I include it here as his report on his personal struggle, not just to master himself, to keep his distance steady, his window clean, but to live an integrated life, again, imagining himself in history:

Every American citizen, ignorant of so many things that his European counterpart knows, is conscious of himself as a distinct personality, in his own opinion and the opinion of his fellows, as entitled to special consideration of his ideas, his feelings, his likes and dislikes as the most aristocratic heroine of a European novel. And at the same time he is consumed by the need of intimate communion with his fellows. This is the crisis of the modern world and because of the material conditions and the history of the United States that crisis is here, in every personality, in every social institution, permeating every aspect and phase of life. I watch it every hour of the day, I have spent countless hours studying American history and American literature, relating the present to the past, estimating the American future. I am profoundly conscious of the deficiencies of American civilization. But they are as nothing to the fact that America is unburdened by the weight of the past which hangs so heavily on Europe, that as a result there is here not culture, but a need for human relations of a size and scope which will in the end triumph over all deficiencies. ²² (Emphasis mine)

There is a great deal more between the lines of this passage. (His whole book on American Civilization, for example.) Here, I mean to suggest that James, in defining the crisis of the modern world, knew personally whereof he spoke. That crisis is a relationship, a struggle between two processes. James was intimate with both, and still he found a way to observe the whole structure. James saw Americans, with their needs for individual expression, tossing off the burden of European culture. Then (in Boundary) he told us his own life story, the boy at the window, who named his own needs and found himself rejecting the hegemony of the score and colonialism's Plan for his life.

Almost thirty years later, in his early 80s, James ended a London talk on African American women writers by addressing himself to the writers present. Wasn't it just like the boy at the window to say of himself,

You must be able to write what you think--and maybe what you write about your day-to-day, everyday, commonplace, ordinary life will be some of the same problems that the people of the world are fighting out. You must be able to write what you have to say, and know that that is what matters; and I hope you can see that you can begin anywhere and end up as far as anybody else has reached. I hope you are not scared to write about what concerns you, what you know--these things matter. ²³

Notes

My thanks to Grant Farred, Keith Hart, Ralph Dumain, Charles Frederick, and Anna Grimshaw for their assistance with this paper. Earlier versions of it have been presented at the University of Cambridge, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, The Massachusetts College of Art, and Brecht Forum in New York.

1. C.L.R. James, letter to Constance Webb, 1944, in Special Delivery: The Letters of CLR James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 190. It also appears in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 147. James is describing a meeting with Richard Wright. [->main text]

2. C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1944, in Special Delivery, p. 190; also in the James Reader, p. 136. In the same paragraph, he writes: "A political attitude today is a philosophy of life. Little by little, and then with sudden flashes of insight that complete in a minute the work of a year, one masters the fundamental movements of our age, sees it in relation to past and future and becomes intellectually and emotionally a part of it." [->main text]

3. The least familiar Jamesian aspect of the ones I mention is "the story coming to us live" from afar. James loved the democratic power of modern communications, and not just its democratic potential. In the 80s, the TV in James's room was usually turned on. "Watching TV with C.L.R. James" first appeared on the back cover of a pamphlet, Anna Grimshaw's C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the 20th Century, (New York: C.L.R. James Institute, 1991). [->main text]

4. James analyzes the painting itself in "Picasso and Jackson Pollock," James Reader, pp. 405-410. [->main text]

5. C.L.R. James, Beyond A Boundary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 7. [->main text]

6. The project never got off the ground. [->main text]

7. Derek Walcott praises the rhythm, grace, confidence and balance in Boundary's prose. See "A Tribute to C.L.R. James" in C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William J. Cain, eds. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). [->main text]

8. I use "passive" to refer to the way many new left intellectuals, and their descendants who practice media criticism, think of culture as what happens to the people consuming it. They assume that dominant culture dominates minds directly, that there is only or at least mainly a one-way relationship between, say, a television show and its viewer, or a song and someone who listens to it. They don't think that something meaningful can be created by people brought together by the dominant culture, or, I should say, using British English, they "do not prefer" those meanings. [->main text]

9. Neil Lazarus writes:

Because, in order to make cricket their own, the West Indian masses had to prise it loose from British culture; because British culture was precisely what, as a colonized population, they struggled against, and because, by virtue of the specificity of the circumstances of their colonization, they had comparatively few institutionalized forms of cultural practice of their own, they bestowed a privileged position upon cricket. At the risk of oversimplification, one might say that in the West Indies, cricket became culture. Thus James, citing E.W. Swanton's 1957 observation to the effect that "in the West Indies the cricket ethic has shaped not only the cricketers but social life as a whole," comments that "[i]t is an understatement. There is a whole generation of us, and perhaps two generations, who have been formed by it not only in social attitudes but in our most intimate lives, in fact there more than anywhere else. The social attitudes we could to some degree alter if we wished. For the inner self the die was cast." (Boundary, p. 49.) (Emphasis mine) Neil Lazarus, "Cricket and National Culture," in C.L.R. James's Caribbean, Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 102-103.

For a dismissive view of Boundary as a work of propaganda (to reassure London that the independence movement was culturally British), see Selwyn Cudjoe, "The Audacity of It All: C.L.R. James's Trinidadian Background," in C.L.R. James's Caribbean, pp. 39-55. Cudjoe does not mention cricket. [->main text]

10. I gratefully borrow this last phrase from Charles Frederick's forthcoming book, Imagining Myself in History. [->main text]

11. James, Beyond A Boundary, p. 4. [->main text]

12. Ibid., p. 1. [->main text]

13. The "refuge" quote is Boundary, page 18; "no one spoke to me" is p. 17, "alien in my own environment" is p. 18. [->main text]

14. At about the same time as he was working on Boundary, when he was about to leave for the independence ceremonies in Ghana, he wrote a children's story for his son Nobbie. In it, the main character learns to read because the club asked everyone to come tell a story about national independence. And in the end learning to read is itself equated with personal independence. The literacy campaigns in Cuba and in the US South (run by SNCC) were still a few years away. See "Nobbie Story: Independence," C.L.R. James, letter to C.L.R. James Jr., 19 February 1957, available at the C.L.R. James Institute. [->main text]

15. Beyond A Boundary, p. 32-34. [->main text]

16. I was present several times in the 1980s when James would patiently explain to a young interlocutor something like the following: "You must understand that in the 1930s and 40s everyone on the left was a member of a political party or in the orbit of a party. This meant that your politics were defined in terms of those parties and what they defined as the political issues of the day." James fought, within the left, for more societal issues to be understood as political. And he worked as independently as it was possible to do within the left, both in England and the US. It is the argument of this paper that it was as the boy at the window that he trained himself to do so. His theoretical work within the left is too big a subject to explore here, but any interested reader should start with James's 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins. James travelled from his window in Trinidad, to the far left in England, then to the archives in Paris, in order to tell the story of the relationship between the San Domingo slaves and their leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the story of their revolution's relationship to the French Revolution. [->main text]

17. Ibid., p. 195. Almost every chapter of Boundary has a denunciation along these lines. The chapter on W.G. Grace ends this way: "Yet he [Grace] continues warm in the hearts of those who never knew him. There he is safe until the whole crumbling edifice of obeisance before Mammon, contempt for Demos and categorizing intellectualism finally falls apart." Boundary, p. 185. [->main text]

18. C.L.R James, letter to Constance Webb, 1944, in Special Delivery, p. 191; also in James Reader, p. 147. [->main text]

19. James's group, the Johnson Forest Tendency, translated material from the early Marx (part of what became more widely known later as The Economic and Philosophical Writings of 1844) in 1947. In their introduction to their own pamphlet edition, James (and Grace Lee and Raya Dunayevskaya) wrote:

Family, education, relations between the sexes, religion, all would lose the destructive alienated quality in a new mode of production in which the universality of the individual would be the starting point and source of all progress, beginning with economic progress. . . .

The personality of the modern worker is assailed upon all sides from morning till night (and even in his dreams) by such stimuli that his needs as a modern human being make him and his class the most highly civilizeds social force humanity has ever known. But the greater the needs of social living, inherent in the socialized nature of modern production, the greater the need for individual self-expression, the more it becomes necessary for the masters of society, themselves slaves of capital, to repress this social expression which is no more and no less than complete democracy. Production which should be man's most natural expression of his powers, becomes one long murderous class conflict in which each protagonist can rest not for a single minute. Political government assumes totalitarian forms and government by executive decree masquerades as democracy.

The psychological appeal of totalitarianism, of Fascism in particular, is to transcend all social and individual frustration in the nation, the state, the leader. It cannot be done. In one of these essays Marx says: "We should especially avoid re-establishing `society' as an abstraction opposed to the individual. The individual is the social essence." ("On Marx's Economic-Philosophical Essays," reprinted in C.L.R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), pp. 69-70.) The original pamphlet is available at the C.L.R. James Institute. [->main text]

20. James's voluminous writings for the left press in the 1940s are also beginning to be reprinted. There are ten such pieces in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James 1939-1949, eds. Scott McLemee and Paul Le Blanc (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994). McLemee has also edited a forthcoming volume of James on the Negro Question, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. [->main text]

21. See Anna Grimshaw, Popular Democracy and the Creative Imagination: The Writings of C.L.R. James 1950-1963 (New York: C.L.R. James Institute, 1991). In this pamphlet she revised and expanded a similiar piece that appeared in Third Text, Number 10, London, Spring 1990. [->main text]

22. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (London: Allison and Busby, 1985), pp. 167-168. The 1978 edition of the 1953 book was published by Bewick Editions without including the last chapter, "A Natural But Necessary Conclusion," in which the passage appears. The C.L.R. James Institute has distributed the passage as a poem, "The Crisis and the Triumph." As a poem it originally appeared in Jim's Letter, (New York: Cultural Correspondence, 1985) and as my Introduction to Every Cook Can Govern in C.L.R. James, Every Cook Can Govern & What is Happening Every Day: 1985 Conversations, Jan Hillegas, ed. (Jackson: New Mississippi, Inc., 1985). [->main text]

23. C.L.R. James, "Three Black Women Writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange," printed most recently in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 417. [->main text]

This essay was originally published as the Afterword of Rethinking C.L.R. James, edited and introduced by Grant Farred (Cambridge, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 205-218.

(c) 1996, 2001 Jim Murray

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