C.L.R. James
and The Struggle for Happiness
by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart
|
C.L.R. James by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart |
Anna Grimshaw, anthropologist, is the editor of Cricket by C.L.R. James (Allison and Busby, 1986), the editor of The C.L.R. James Reader (Blackwell, 1991), the author of the exhibition catalogue C.L.R. James: Man of the People (London, 1986), and of a forthcoming memoir, Servants of the Buddha.
Keith Hart is a social anthropologist who teaches at Cambridge University. He has worked in Africa and the Caribbean and is the author of The Political Economy of West African Agriculture (Cambridge, 1982).
C.L.R. James was working with the authors on an edition of The Struggle for Happiness when he died in 1989.
ISBN 0-918266-27-0
Published in cooperation
with Smyrna Press
(c) Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart
Desktop Publishing by Jim Murray
of Cultural Correspondence
To answer a question James would have asked,
750 copies of this pamphlet were printed for
about a thousand dollars. The tex was prepared
on home computing and printing equipment which
costs about the same as a five year old motor car.
Published January, 1991 by
The C.L.R. James Institute
505 West End Avenue #15C
New York, NY 10024
Front cover drawing by Margaret Glover of C.L.R. James,
one year before he died.
The authors wish to thank Jerome Hasenpflug, Jeremy
McBride, Graham McCann, and Jim Murray
for their generous editorial assistance.
The Struggle for Happiness in James's Life and Work
C.L.R. James and the World We Live In
Appendix:
The Struggle for Happiness:
Table of Contents
The photo overleaf [not shown here] is of C.L.R. James in the US during the 1940s. Photographer unknown.
The photo on p. 50 is James in his London flat in the mid 80s. Photographer: Lance Watson.
(Both photos courtesy of C.L.R. James Institute.)
[inside back cover: pamphlet series]
[back cover: The Crisis and the Triumph]
C.L.R. James deserves to be recognised as one of the greatest writers and activists in the Marxist tradition, a true innovator who put blacks at the centre of revolutionary discourse. He divided his time between the Caribbean (where he was born), Britain, America, Europe and Africa. The crux of his development as an original thinker was the time he spent in the United States (1938-53). Towards the end of that period James produced a book-length manuscript entitled Notes on American Civilisation. This document, in many ways, is the most wide ranging expression of his thought, the indispensable link between his mature writings on politics and his semi-autobiographical masterpiece on cricket, Beyond A Boundary.
James wrote his long essay on American civilisation in 1950 at a time which he felt was critical for the future of human society. Its central theme was the struggle of ordinary people for freedom and happiness, a struggle which he found to be most advanced in America. At the same time James recognised that the forces mobilised to repress these popular energies had never been so developed, or so brazenly employed, as in the twentieth century.
Notes on American Civilisation was an expression of a great surge of energy and imaginative vision as James, at the peak of his intellectual powers, responded to historical circumstances and launched himself on an extensive programme of writing. His concern was with no less than the conditions of survival of modern civilisation. James's work on the manuscript was abandoned as he became swept up in a fight to avoid deportation; but his expulsion from America in 1953 fractured the creative moment and he never again found the conditions in which to complete the original project he planned.
C.L.R. James died in Brixton, London in May 1989. Towards the end of his life he had returned to the 1950 manuscript, his last major unpublished work. At the time of his death we were collaborating with him, as editors, to prepare it for publication under the title, The Struggle for Happiness. The prospect of its appearance in print, some four decades after the original draft, was an event he keenly anticipated.
We believe that James, in The Struggle for Happiness, penetrated into the movement of modern history with such clarity that his vision still illuminates the world before us as our century draws to a close.
[-> Contents]
When the founders of America guaranteed the citizens of their new democracy "the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," these goals were then little more than abstract ideas in Europe. But in the twentieth century the whole world has come to expect that freedom, equality and well-being which many continue to see as symbolised by the United States. At the same time, the repression of human desires has never been greater than in the modern era.
This for James was the fundamental crisis of our time. On the one hand, a shared human consciousness, feeding the universal desire of individuals to develop their own personalities along creative lines; on the other hand, the accumulated power of modern bureaucracies whose very existence made the realisation of that goal impossible. Moreover, James felt that the general crisis had nowhere reached a more acute level of expression than within America itself, where the system of mass production had spawned social conditions deeply inimical to the country's original ideals. Here the people's struggle for new forms of society consonant with the desire for individual freedom and happiness was most advanced. James was convinced that the outcome of that struggle held the key to the future of human civilisation.
In The Struggle for Happiness James's analysis moves between different levels, juxtaposing history and contemporary social life, literary sources and first hand experience to grasp the whole at a particular conjuncture in history. Furthermore, the manuscript, despite its range and detail, has meaningful structural unity. Its organisation is divided into two halves, bridged by a long, original chapter on the popular arts which James described as "the climax" of the book. (See appendix for Table of Contents)
The first part, based on established literary sources, traces the relationship since 1776 between the social history of the United States and the emergence of a distinctively popular culture. The second grows out of James's detailed personal observations and political experience of America in the 1940s; it examines the forces shaping the lives of the people, focusing on sections (workers, blacks, women and intellectuals) whose contributions he thought would be critical to the struggle for a new society.
The text was initially drafted under the title Notes on American Civilisation. Its present title, The Struggle for Happiness, is taken from the original heading for the chapter which begins part two, as James seeks to capture what is unique about the twentieth century through an understanding of the aspirations and experiences of ordinary people.
James began his study with a sketch of the early years following independence. The establishment of democracy in America was a unique social phenomenon. For him the accomplishments of the new society were practical rather than intellectual or literary. Its population lived out and made concrete the advanced political theories which remained only ideals in the European societies of their origin. Freedom was not just a political slogan but a principle lending energy and a heroic quality to the work of ordinary individuals pursuing their daily vocation.
At the same time James sought, through a critical reading of Whitman's poetry and of Melville's monumental Moby Dick, to expose the undercurrents of the democracy. Indeed this task was made possible by the particular nature of the modern crisis in which James found himself. He believed that America in 1950 was reaching the end of a phase of its history of which these writers had been witness to the beginning. This enhanced the significance of the mid-nineteenth century writers and threw into sharp relief the developing historical forces which were caught in both the style and content of their work. In James's view, both Whitman and Melville aimed to make a satisfactory connection between free individuality and the objective world of society and nature; but they were frustrated by the social conditions of their time and by their own position in it as intellectuals. America was entering a new phase of industrial capitalism marked by the Civil War; and Ahab stood at its threshold.
James understood Whitman to be the American counterpart of the great European romantics who celebrated visionary ideals of individual freedom in revolt against industrial civilisation. America, however, lacked both a feudal past and oppressive capital to give focus to Whitman's rebellion. He was a genuine democrat who craved free association with all his fellow men; but he remained isolated, apart, unable to make a real connection with the mass of working men and things which make up modern life. Whitman, in James's view, retreated into an individualism shored up by abstract slogans (Industry, Science and Democracy with a capital D). In substituting the individual for social reality, the poet anticipated some major cultural currents of the twentieth century -- from existentialism to advertising and propaganda. Nevertheless, Whitman did find a way of making contact between the individual subject and his object, if not in the content of his lyrics, through the invention of a new form, free verse. Free verse allowed the poet to express intimate feelings within a democratic form shaped by the need to follow its object; and thus, according to James, Whitman's "passion for identification did find some permanent expression, but not in the same sense he intended."
In contrast, Melville in Moby Dick "described with absolute precision various individuals in their social setting, the work they did, their relations with other men. This led him to see that individualism in certain sections of America had become one of the most dangerous vices of the age and would destroy society." Melville's vivid description of the whaling industry was, for James, unique in portraying the practical mastery, talent for cooperation and human dignity of common men in their daily struggle with the elements. In short, he provided a picture of an advanced unit of industrial production; in James's understanding, the whaling ship was for Melville what the textile factory was for Marx. But at the centre of the book lay the unanswered question of why these men were unable to resist the destructive obsession of Ahab. Melville saw no way in which they could form a harmonious society and therefore sent the Pequod crashing to its catastrophic end. His greatness lay, for James, in his ability to combine a realistic grasp of the particulars of his day with a deep symbolic penetration to the universal movement of modern history. This synthesis underlay the remarkable invention of a new character, Ahab, whose type was prognostic not only of the captains of industry who flourished in America at the turn of the century, but also of the totalitarian tendency of the twentieth century which had culminated in the crisis James recognised in 1950. Moreover, James's reading of the narrator, Ishmael, found him wavering between the crew's humanity and Ahab's power, thereby evoking the fate of a whole class of modern individuals, the intellectuals.
Whereas Whitman and Melville sought to give artistic expression to the movement of American democracy in the mid-nineteenth century, another group of intellectuals were engaged directly in the social crisis which erupted in the Civil War. The Abolitionists -- men such as Phillips, Garrison and Douglass -- were people, in James's words, "whose whole intellectual, social and political creativity was the expression of precise social forces. They were the means by which a direct social movement expressed itself, the movement of the slaves and emancipated negroes for freedom." They did so by remaining in constant contact with the people whose cause they claimed to represent. In particular, James highlighted the career of Wendell Phillips, "a rare politician who says revolutionary things and acts on them"; but more generally, the Abolitionists represented for him a model for revolutionary activists in the twentieth century.
The principle of freedom was a cornerstone of the "old" America. It was enshrined in the frontier spirit, in a phase of heroic adventure which was brought to a close by the Civil War. The North's victory gave rise to a new phase characterised by the dominance of machine industry in the northern cities. This period of expansion and mass immigration was ended by the Crash of 1929. Now the ethos of individualism was removed from the practical lives of ordinary people, being appropriated by "captains of industry" whose market freedom entailed the subjection of the mass of workers to an oppressive economic and social structure. At the same time, democracy was transferred along European lines to "the realm of the spirit, ideals, legislation." The result was democracy by state.
The sprawling industrial plants of Detroit became the symbol of this "new" America. In place of the legendary freedom which the Yankee journeyman exercised in adapting to the conditions of his working life, modern workers had lost their freedom as producers and knew it. In its place they were eventually offered security, in the form of the welfare state. James saw more to this experience than just submission to a devastatingly inhuman production process. The stultifying monotony and uniformity reached beyond the workplace, touching every aspect of social and personal life.
"Upon a people bursting with energy, untroubled by feudal remains or a feudal past, soaked to the marrow in a tradition of individual freedom, individual security, free association, a tradition which is constantly held before them as the basis of their civilisation, upon this people more than all others has been imposed a mechanised way of life at work, mechanised forms of living, a mechanised totality which from morning to night, week after week, day after day, crushes the very individuality which tradition nourishes and the abundance of mass-produced goods encourages. The average American citizen is baffled by it, has always been. He cannot grasp the process by which a genuine democracy escapes him. With the Crash of 1929 and now the perpetual crisis of world war threatening worldwide destruction, all the tensions are rising, confusedly but remarkably to the surface."
These tensions, fuelled by what James saw as a growing crisis in American society, found expression in "the entertainment industry." James devoted a long chapter in The Struggle for Happiness, "the climax of the book" and the end of Part One, to an examination of what he called "the art of the masses." He recognised that before the twentieth century, the movement of society could only be approached through the works of great writers; the people in general were hidden from direct view, even though the genius of Melville gave expression to their humanity in the symbolic form of the Pequod's crew. Now, for the first time, the people entered the stage of history in full view. For James the most striking manifestation of this was the emergence of a mass audience for entertainment and information, especially in America. Their collective force called into being new artistic forms which were intimately related to the daily lives of ordinary people -- films, comic strips and detective novels.
James highlighted recurring character types which appealed to the American audiences of his day. Chief among these were Dick Tracy, "the ordinary guy -- one who went out and did the job himself," and gangster heroes such as Edward G.Robinson and George Raft. The gangster/detective stereotype flourished in the years following the 1929 Crash; and the violence, sadism and cruelty they expressed gave vent to the passions of a people suffering the Depression. The freedom and violence of this art reflected contemporary social frustration even as it drew on the persisting myths of an earlier America. The gangster/detective was a derisive symbol of the conflict between America's ideals and the reality of the Depression; he was an individual finding scope for free activity in a mechanised society, usually outside the law. The formal concepts of social living were now in direct opposition to what the people really felt; and this, for James, was the best evidence that the time was ripe for drastic social transformations.
James rejected the idea that the mass audience were passive recipients of whatever the media barons served up to them, expressing themselves actively in different ways; and he noted, too, that both sides -- producers and consumers of the popular arts -- had a tacit agreement not to confront directly the dangerous issues raised by the social crisis. This limited the creativity of artists working for the mass audience; and James pointed out that artistic innovation had been stifled since 1929. He contrasted this situation with the energy and vitality of America's popular arts in the expansive times around the turn of the century.
Charlie Chaplin, "the one universal man of modern times," was a figure James regarded as the truly original artist of the twentieth century. The Tramp, in deliberate contrast with the romantic heroes of the previous age, celebrated the individuality of the ordinary man. As a social figure the Tramp was an individual. He defied the growing mechanisation and socialisation of life. By realising himself as a fully individual character, Chaplin could insert himself into any scene of modern life and make himself at home in it. The mass audience was able instinctively to identify with his buoyancy as he collided with the complexities of an emerging society that they knew intimately themselves. He, in turn, drew inspiration from the close relation he enjoyed with his audience. In this way, through the elementary simplicity of his pantomime, Chaplin's individual was symbolic of the whole; he was able to represent all of humanity. What James took to be the decline of Chaplin's comedy after 1929 stemmed not from the arrival of the talkies, but rather from the limitations imposed on his creativity by the loss of his audience's unity and resilience in the Depression. Now, instead of giving the most representative artists that direct impulse which sustained their creativity, the mass audience exposed its rage and desire to smash the impasse in which it found itself. James understood this change to be the reason why the heroic innovations of the early cinema had given way, in his own time, to the routine savagery of the gangster/detective.
James believed that the denial of personality to ordinary people and their determination to realise some form of individuality, however vicarious, gave rise to the dominance of the star system. "Side by side with the representation of murder, violence, atrocity, evil, the masses have fostered a system whereby a certain selected few individuals symbolise in their film existence and their private and public existence the revolt against the general conditions." Stars like Rita Hayworth, who was "more intimately known to many Americans than their wives and sisters," did not exist to express the emotions of everyday life nor did their performances demand any creativity from either actor or audience; rather the stars displayed their synthetic personality through the parts which were specially written for them. These personalities were not rounded or whole; each individual expressed the popular desire for freedom through representing only a facet of the actual or potential world familiar to their audience.
The explorations James made into the realm of popular culture were always dynamic; his analysis exposed a myriad of creative tensions as he probed beneath the surface to discover how the shifts and transformations of social life were refracted through the mass media. James's interest, however, was as much in artistic form as in content. For he understood that the movement of the modern world was towards integration; that the American people, through the extension of artistic premises and the exploration of new forms of expression, sought to bring together the different fragments of their lives (economic, political, domestic, aesthetic). In short, their common need was to reconstitute the human subject, to achieve what James called, in The Struggle for Happiness, "the creation of man as an integral human being."
The early history of the American entertainment industry, the original and expansive phase prior to the 1929 Crash, represented for James a new stage in the development of human society, transforming the conditions of artistic life. The distinctive contribution of the United States was the development of new artistic media, of genuinely popular forms, which broke down the conventional divisions between artist and audience, art and entertainment, culture and political life. In his opinion, only these forms could encompass all the complexities of modern life. James wrote: "It is not difficult to imagine a social situation in which, by means of fine artists and gifted performers, there will be an almost day-to-day correspondence between the ordinary experiences of many millions of human beings and their transmutation into aesthetic form. There enters into the field of art a closeness to life unknown in past periods of human history which will not fail to have far-reaching consequences on both."
But he understood, too, that this process--one of integration--was fraught with danger. It could lead, on the one hand, to the totalitarian state or, on the other, to a genuine democratic society of the kind which flourished in ancient Greece. "Integration was the source of the miraculous outpouring of creative genius which distinguished the Greeks, integration of all aspects of life, above all in the state, because in the world as he knew it, every man (who was not a slave) felt that the city-state, composed of free assemblies of free citizens, was the embodiment of society and that his personal individuality could only be expressed through it. This is the great need of modern man; for under those circumstances the state is not a state at all, in the modern sense of the word. The totalitarian state integrates every aspect of life, production, politics, entertainment, aesthetics, sport into a single whole and imposes these with the utmost ruthlessness upon the mass of the nation."
Thus, through his study of the American popular arts of the twentieth century, James identified two possible trajectories for human society. He believed that the integration of art and the life of modern people was inevitable; but that it could be achieved either through the most brutal repression of their hopes and desires (totalitarianism) or through the full and free release of this vitality (democracy). Both tendencies could be discerned in the history of the American entertainment industry and in the present stalemate between the producers of entertainment and the mass audience. As James saw it, since 1929 the counterpart of totalitarian state violence had been the gangster/detective figure and the cult of the leader's personality had echoes in the film star system; and he drew attention to the fact that these features contrasted sharply with the greater freedom of creative expression which marked America's popular arts before the Depression.
Drafting his manuscript in the midst of the Cold War and so soon after the war against Hitler, James's awareness of the struggle between barbarism and civilisation was not limited to perceived foreign threats; indeed, he saw all too clearly that the struggle was being waged within America itself. The American people might seem culturally backward in a European sense; but their striving for freedom and happiness was for him the most advanced expression of the drive to create modern civilisation on a world scale. With this conclusion in mind, James turned his attention next to the lives of the American people themselves in the times he knew personally.
The first part of The Struggle for Happiness was characterised by a bold, synthetic style which enabled the reader to grasp the essential currents in the history of American society. James opened the second part of his book with a question -- "What is it that the people want?" Its simplicity and directness establish the distinctive tone of the later chapters. The substance of these chapters, however, reveals the depth of his penetration into the roots of America's crisis. His approach combined an impressive mastery of the details of daily life with an imaginative interpretation of the subtle interplay between the different forces at work in American society as a whole.
James set out to examine "the actual and intimate lives of the population," taking care to distinguish between what he regarded as surface phenomena, such as voting patterns, and the deeper responses of the people to their situation. He never doubted the explosive energy contained within America; but he noted that its expression was often to be found in unexpected places. He identified a number of sections of the population where the contradictions of modern democratic society were most sharply felt. It was not surprising that he chose the organised industrial workers as his first example, for he held that work was the fundamental human experience and lay at the core of society.
James knew from his observations of American workers that they still had, like their predecessors, an immense appetite for practical mastery of the techniques of production and that each of them sought to express his or her own personality above all in their daily work. The rise of machine industry had vastly increased the social dimension of this process, bringing workers into routine cooperation with thousands of their fellows. Yet that original nineteenth century sense of individuality and free association had been crushed by the anonymous bureaucracies which now controlled America's business corporations.
"This is the fundamental conflict. There is on the one hand the need, the desire, created in him by the whole mighty mechanism of American industry, to work, to learn, to master the machine, to co-operate with others in building glittering miracles . . . to work out ways and means to do in two hours what ordinarily takes four, to organise the plant as only workers know how. And on the other hand the endless frustration of being merely a cog in a great machine, a piece of production as is a bolt of steel, a pot of paint or a mule which drags a load of corn. This conflict is staggering in its scope and implications. It goes on all day and every hour of the day."
James considered that this process of industrialisation had reached its peak in the highly centralised factory systems of the Northern cities; but it also extended into the experience of agricultural and service workers. The creative impulse of American society as a whole, which he had already explored in the context of popular culture, found its material counterpart in the struggle of its people to achieve freedom and harmony in the workplace. This struggle would either give rise to a new stage in the organisation of industrial production or its repression would require the presence of "soldiers in the factories," as in the totalitarian regimes of eastern Europe.
The sharpest expression of this conflict was in the automobile industry and James considered that nowhere had American society come closer to totalitarianism than in Detroit, especially in Ford. In the face of police state tactics from their employers, the workers built up unions to help them in their daily struggle to control production; but these unions had become one of the principal means whereby members were maintained in subordination to a system which they fundamentally opposed. Management, unions and the state formed an alliance of bureaucracies whose aim was to deny workers effective control, while offering them the palliative of improved material benefits.
But James went further than this in The Struggle for Happiness, moving beyond the workplace to integrate into his analysis inequalities of race, gender and education. His examination of the case of blacks and women threw light on the parallels in their situation. Each occupied a place at the centre of American society; yet at the same time they were denied the basic democratic rights of freedom and equality. Whereas the case of blacks ("the number one minority problem in the world") highlighted America's political crisis, the frustrations of American women exposed the deepening crisis within private life.
In the political climate of the years following the second world war, there was growing pressure to abolish the segregation of America's blacks; but James, writing in 1950, rejected the notion that change could be achieved peacefully by means of education, legislation and the public expression of higher ideals. For him, the accelerated movement of blacks into mainstream society had heightened their consciousness of being deprived American citizens to an unprecedented degree; and this, in turn, was matched by an escalation in the forces deployed to maintain them in their segregated place. Above all, there was the enormous power of the Federal Government bureaucracy which, as in the case of the unions, was willing to offer limited welfare benefits and a place within itself for a black middle-class leadership, but which would not tackle the system of segregation for fear of upsetting the complex of interests whose existence depended upon its continuation. These interests ramified throughout the core of America's economic life.
The intense contradiction of the place of blacks in American society, their integration and segregation combined, led them to express most fully those characteristics which James took to be distinctive of the American people as a whole -- their capacity for self-organisation and free association (black churches); their development of popular artistic forms expressing "a tremendous elemental social force" (jazz); their propensity for radical political outbursts and mass mobilisation (Garveyism). The blacks' cause was an acute, but representative symbol of the temper of the American people as a whole. It made concrete the fundamental problem of American society -- the contradiction between social life and free individuality. Moreover, as James acknowledged, the particular form of black exclusion, their segregation, forced and facilitated easier mobilisation and thereby contained within itself the very seeds of its own destruction. As James noted, American history had already shown that, when blacks organise themselves for political action, this ". . . heralds, is an advance notice of, the whole nation in movement."
Just as aristocratic and bourgeois writers gave advance notice of the French revolution, but its most ardent advocates when it came were the lower classes, so too James saw black writers such as Wright and Himes as "pioneers of a native American radicalism." In the same way, when he turned to the problems facing the mass of American women, he chose to focus on the vocal middle class for whom the conflict between career and home life was particularly acute. The generation of women James was writing about took for granted the ideas of freedom and equality that their mothers and grandmothers had had to fight for; but they had not yet succeeded in realising this consciousness in their own personal lives. Middle class women, who enjoyed the benefits of education, found at marriage that they were expected to accept a restricted position in life.
As James observed in The Struggle for Happiness, "The American woman is undoubtedly the freest, the most advanced, with the greatest opportunities for self-development in the world. . . and yet these women are the most unhappy, the most torn, the most dissatisfied, the most antagonistic in their relations with men that it is possible to find. Equality they have in theory. The thing that tears them to pieces is that when they examine their equality they find that it is a spurious thing."
Equality for James was a social necessity in the modern world; so that to keep women secluded in the home now took extra effort, just as it did to maintain black segregation. The burden of making tolerable a life dominated by mechanised routine fell unequally on women. Their bitterness over being subject to male control was of the same order as the frustration experienced by workers in the labour process. James foresaw a revolution in the home comparable to that in the workplace; indeed he pointed out that the two were necessarily linked. Only if the workers were free to organise their own production and reproduction could life in the home and out of it be successfully integrated.
James held that sexuality lay at the heart of the question of civilisation. He observed that Americans had a passion for human relationships at all levels from the public to the intimate; but at the time he was writing, 1949/50, he saw that the relations between men and women were distorted. Middle class women, he had already indicated, had every reason to desire and expect a life of free individuality; yet their confinement within the home denied them real participation in society. Furthermore, as James was keen to point out, the cult of women as women negated their attempts to develop themselves freely and fully as human personalities; noting that "Their legs and their breasts are called into service to sell everything from insecticide to aeroplanes." In his view, "Modern society has created modern woman, and now a stage has been reached where a reckoning is being made. . . Women must become human beings first and women afterwards. The whole of modern civilisation is driving towards this."
Finally, James turned his attention to the intellectuals, to the plight of a social class for which a truly democratic world would no longer have any use. In sharp contrast with the "instinctive rebelliousness and creative force" of ordinary American people, the intellectuals of the twentieth century had nothing new to say; they had nothing to offer in the face of the modern crisis; indeed they had joined, in large numbers, the very concentrations of bureaucratic power which constituted the crisis itself. By "intellectuals" James meant several things -- in the narrow sense, individuals whose self-appointed responsibility was to be guardians of traditional ideas or to develop new ones; in its broadest definition the term meant for him all those who, by virtue of superior education, claimed the right as leaders to initiate social affairs. But at its core lay the notion that the intelligentsia had become part of a new governing class, including managers of industry, scientists, technocrats and union leaders. It was a class consolidating its power in vast centralised bureaucracies built upon suppression and fear of the creative energies of ordinary people.
James's critique extended beyond the intellectuals' lack of originality, the bankruptcy of their ideas, the equivocation in their work, to this central question -- the question of power. It was posed in the modern world in the form of totalitarianism. This was a dominant theme in American intellectual circles of the immediate postwar period; but, for James, those who wrote and talked about it most notably failed to respond to the challenge of the society in which they lived. American intellectuals, he knew, habitually denigrated their own culture, turning rather for their inspiration to the elitist traditions of European bourgeois civilisation. The crisis they were facing in 1950 had been experienced earlier, and in a more extreme form, in twentieth century Europe. For both reasons, James chose, in his manuscript, to illustrate the typical responses of American intellectuals to the modern crisis with reference to European prototypes.
He held that in the period since the Russian revolution, Europe's intellectuals had developed out of the crisis in three directions, each of which was being adapted by their American counterparts to conditions in the New World. The first of these was existentialism, a turning inwards to self-preoccupation which arose from the failure of the individual to make a satisfactory connection with the people as a whole, or indeed with any social or political group. Since Americans have always emphasised practical activity rather than contemplation for its own sake, their version of this intellectual movement was, according to James, psychoanalysis. He believed that the sophistication of consciousness in the modern world required increased knowledge of the mind's inner workings as a necessary step towards the integration of the human personality; but when psychology was separated from its social environment, being merely the intellectuals' exploration of their own neuroses, it became, in his words, "an emasculated body of ideas."
The second response identified by James in The Struggle for Happiness was what he called "catholic humanism," the idea of an intellectual elite offering faith, leadership and discipline in place of alienation and the threat of social disintegration. Recognising that the rationalist individualism of the Enlightenment provided no solution to the crisis, the intellectuals turned to the most reactionary thoughts of the idealist philosophers for a passionate vision of the whole as a superpersonal order. Their counter-revolutionary project was to harness the energies of the masses at the same time as subordinating them to a political order controlled from above. In Europe this movement was epitomised by the German intellectuals who followed Hitler; their American counterparts were academics who proposed to use higher education as a means of training a new elite corps of managers with a civilising mission.
James began his discussion of the third current with a description of the "Stalinist" type of personality. It was a type he had spent much of his life fighting and his characterisation was correspondingly acute: "He is a man animated by a doctrine -- the abolition of private property, the creation of a world state beginning with Europe, planning the economy, disciplining the workers, totalitarian....He lives for this and dies for it. There is no duplicity, cruelty, assassination of character or person, betrayal of a nation which he will not commit." James knew well how the Stalinists exploited the general feeling of impotence and hopelessness among intellectuals, offering them a purpose if they linked their fate to the vanguard of the working class. By joining the party, they could use the knowledge they felt accumulated in themselves, taking Cartesian rationalism to its ultimate form of expression, a collective mind organising the body of the working masses -- the Plan.
In Europe the spread of Stalinism among the intellectuals was underwritten by the threat of the Red Army. American intellectuals, for obvious reasons, did not face the temptations of Stalinism in its specific historical form. Nevertheless, James held that, since they faced the same kind of social problems, the Stalinist type was present in America too -- in the shape of the labour leadership whose priority was to discipline the workers; and of those intellectuals whose ideology of economic individualism, drawn from America's past, served the interests of "the bureaucratic-administrative-supervising castes."
Intellectuals of the twentieth century understood at some level the growing power of the mass of ordinary people; but they could not conceive of this movement as a force for civilisation, any more than they could conceive of a world in which they themselves did not play a leading role. For James, the individual freethinker had been the greatest product of the age which succeeded feudalism. The intellectuals of today could not face the fact that the world had moved on; and, being unable to embrace popular forces, they swung between existentialism (escape from the people) and authoritarianism (repression of the people). James linked the creative power of the intellectuals to the popular movement for self-expression, recognising that, until the conflict was resolved between the people's aspirations and the oppressive form of society in which they lived, intellectual creativity itself would continue to be stifled.
James offered no firm predictions for the future; but his essay on American civilisation was animated by a unifying vision. He believed in 1950 that human society stood on the threshold of a new stage in its development; and that in the United States, unburdened by the weight of Europe's past, there existed the conditions for a fundamental revolution in human relations. Above all, as one of the finest passages in The Struggle for Happiness reveals, he recognised the distinctiveness of the American people themselves:
"Cultured they are not, in the old European sense, and that is one of their chief virtues. The American bourgeoisie created nothing in that sphere and thus the masses today are not in any way dominated by a sense of inferiority. Furthermore, European bourgeois culture, so remarkable in its day, is today an incubus, a weight, an obstacle. The American people, the great body of them, are ignorant of many things their European brothers knew. But in social culture, technical knowledge, sense of equality, the instinct for social cooperation and collective life, the need to live a full life in every sphere and a revulsion to submission, to accepting a social situation as insoluble, they are the most highly civilized people on the face of the globe. They combine an excessive individualism, a sense of the primary value of their own individual personality, with an equally remarkable need, desire and capacity for social cooperative action. And when you consider the immense millions of them, they constitute a social force such as the world has never seen before."
James felt that he could not conclude his text without looking forward to the future of the social movement that he expected to emerge from America's crisis. He sensed the great passion and movement among ordinary people to find a solution to the conflict which threatened civilisation itself. "The life of modern man has been split into fragments and his whole life and personality need to be integrated." But he knew that this integration had to come from below, from the people whose collective force he believed would find its political expression in the form of a mass movement, sweeping aside conventional structures of organisation, demanding new kinds of leaders and developing "an integrated humanism in which man as producer becomes the center of human theory and practice."
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In concluding The Struggle for Happiness, James foresaw an intensification of the struggle to found a new society. It was only here, at the very end of his long manuscript, that he made an explicit link to the socialist revolution, citing Marx and Lenin as authorities. At the same time he explained why he had not couched his argument in Marxist language: "If I have not used the terms socialism or communism, it is because what I write about is so different from Attlee's Britain and the monstrous barbarism that Stalinism controls or prepares for, that I preferred to deal with the thing itself." Indeed James's argument, throughout his text, is conducted in the conventional language of American liberal democracy -- freedom, equality, individuality, happiness.
The use of this language enabled James to directly engage his American audience; for, as he recognised, these ideas, born with America itself, retained the power to bridge the gap between intellectual discourse and popular understanding. Clearly, political language identifying the author with the opposite side in the Cold War would have left James addressing a minority audience. James also took care to avoid terms which rooted his arguments in the specificities of immediate political controversy. To this end, he chose a vocabulary which he felt, despite its appropriation and debasement as propaganda, was yet capable of reaching to a deeper level of social analysis. Having eschewed the terms "socialism" and "capitalism," James built his study around two oppositions: "civilisation" and "barbarism;" "democracy" and "totalitarianism." However familiar these terms might seem, James used them both to convey the movement of modern history and to probe into the heart of the world crisis.
Although he attempted no formal definition in the text, James meant by "civilisation" the progressive tendency of world history as a whole. Its core was the drive to integrate the individual and society; and its creed was a humanist desire for universal freedom and happiness. Its antithesis, "barbarism," sacrificed the individual to a fragmented version of society and was based on inhuman mores, coercion and division. The social practices of the ruling segments of most historical civilisations, in contrast to their achievements in art and religion, were highly unequal, even barbaric. As James noted, the nineteenth century Abolitionist, Wendell Phillips had described the American Civil War as a struggle between civilisation and barbarism inside America itself.
Within the history of civilisation, "democracy" represented for James a specific stage of politics -- people power or rule from below. Its principles were self-organisation, freedom of association, individual freedom and equality. James contrasted the restricted form of parliamentary democracy with the direct participatory form of ancient Athens. For him the antithesis of democracy was "totalitarianism" -- control from above, the fusion of party and state, the destruction of the individual in the name of totality. In the twentieth century this form of government was epitomised by the Stalinist regime. James held that the completion of the civilisation process was socialism; and by this he meant the extension of democratic principles to production. When the mass of ordinary working people controlled their own labour processes, the consequences for the organisation of all aspects of society would be fundamental. Although the name "socialism" was largely absent, the idea permeated James's text; the daily evidence of the struggle for such a society in America was what he called "the thing itself."
James sought to capture this historical movement of society in the organisation of his text. Through the use of America as his example, he aimed to distill the universal progress of civilisation into a specific contrast between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In essence, a high culture for the few was giving way to a society where common people occupied centre stage. Thus the first part of The Struggle for Happiness, dealing mainly with the past, draws heavily upon literary sources in which the presence of ordinary men and women can only be guessed at; whereas in the second part, based largely on James's own observations, the people make themselves known directly in the fullness of their lives.
The fact that James abandoned work on his American civilisation project before reaching a final version of the text meant that his method remained explicit within the writing process itself. This offers the modern reader a unique insight into the intricate structure which he was building, each chapter being carefully placed within the overall development of his complex argument.
At various points in the original 1950 text, James recognised the stylistic tension between the two halves of the book, reflecting as it did the more general historical shift from the culture of the intellectuals to the lives and concerns of ordinary people, a movement from abstract ideas to real life.
In his attempt to integrate two levels of analysis, the abstract and the concrete, James's manuscript was reminiscent of the work by his great predecessor, Alexis de Tocqueville. Indeed, James explicitly placed himself in the tradition established by the classic two volume study Democracy in America published a century earlier; and it is not difficult to find many parallels in the scope and method of their writing.
James made it clear, at this early stage of his drafting of a manuscript on American civilisation, that he had in mind both an intellectual and a popular audience; and he stated that later drafts would entail a movement from one to the other.
His intended readership for the first draft was a limited circle of intellectuals whom he was sure would recognise themselves in the devastating critique towards the end of the book. For them his aim was to make clear his general ideas and method; this required extensive quotations from authorities, references, repetitions and digressions. On the basis of discussions with this audience, James expected to revise his draft several times, while conducting "an immense research" into the lives of ordinary people. In the end he hoped to have a book of 75,000 words suitable for the general reader which could be "read on a Sunday or on two evenings"; its form would be "one closely interconnected logical and historical exposition," with the ideas expressed as far as possible through "the lives, activities and opinions of the people concerned."
The dialectic of ideas and life, of form and content was also reproduced at the heart of James's critical theory. He derived his method from what he found best in Melville's writing, particularly in Moby Dick -- a creative synthesis of the real and the symbolic. For James the distinctiveness of Melville lay in his great sympathy with the common man; he anchored his story of the Pequod in a precise description of various individuals at work and in their relations with others, bringing a sharp realism to the task. At the same time, by means of symbolism, he reached beyond the actual to the deepest stirrings of his age, finding "indications and points of support by which the innermost essence and widest reaches of the universal may be grasped." Evidently James aspired to a similar unity in his own text, while recognising that his initial draft was inhibited by the need to expose his method to a critical view.
James's method was given its most serious test in his long, central chapter on the popular arts, the bridge between the two parts of his argument. He regarded this chapter as one of "unusual difficulty." Here he explored the relationship between different levels of human experience -- the actual and the possible, the past and the future in the present. James believed that art (and in twentieth century America that meant above all the movies) was the principal means through which people sought to make connections between real life and the world of the imagination. With this in mind, he identified the essential ingredient of great art as simplicity. The scope of the artistic medium was always widened, he felt, by simplification with a view to appealing to the widest audience possible. But once a new artistic form had been simplified, James added, there was a substantial increase in the complexity of relations which can be built up from it.
James illustrated his thesis by taking as the finest example of modern art the elemental quality of Chaplin's films before the watershed of 1929. He understood the appeal and greatness of Chaplin's pantomime as deriving from the primitive connection it made with the visceral emotions of the people; but the simplicity of Chaplin's character opened out, touching the universal, drawing the audience into the complexities of the modern world and linking its everyday experiences to the general movement of society.
If the two parts of The Struggle for Happiness represent the shift from historical abstraction and literary ideas to personal observations of contemporary life, this chapter on the popular arts combined both elements in a methodological synthesis. For it was here that James examined the relationship between ideas and everyday life which had been brought to a point of creative connection at the beginning of the twentieth century. For a brief period it seemed as though the American people, in the form of a mass audience for the silent cinema, had taken over the ideals of their civilisation and infused them with their own expanded sense of life. The brilliance of this creative moment derived from the temporary fusion of the appearance and essence of social life. After 1929, however, the relationship between the surface of American society and its deeper undercurrents was transformed. James now sought to use the popular arts to penetrate to the hidden complexities of ordinary human experience, interpreting the gangster/detective and the synthetic personalities of the stars as simplified symbols, both containing and expressing the real frustrations and desires of the people.
James derived from his analysis of the popular arts a vision of the political movement of American society which he tried to realise in the second half of his book through an account of the actual lives of the people. This task was complicated by the repression of popular energies which had become normal in his day. The massive apparatus of propaganda which denied agency to the people obscured the concrete manifestation of their struggles for freedom and happiness. James recognised that an empirical method was not adequate to the task. Just as the great artists, through the use of symbolic forms, led their audiences by stages to a concrete grasp of the facets of their own lives, so too James had now devised a method for the systematic objectification of everyday experience conceived of as a social totality.
What he saw in art, he also identified in politics, namely that the American people, as the symbol of modern people everywhere, was already beginning to shape the forms and content of political life. As a result twentieth century politicians had to address popular needs with a specificity and concreteness that was lacking in the nineteenth century More profoundly, the needs of the people were reflected in the increasing dominance of economic considerations in politics. At one level this may be understood as a simplification. But as James interpreted it, the economy touched directly the different strands of everyday life; and in this way, his aesthetic found resonance in the historical movement of civilisation from art and culture, through politics to that reorganisation of economic life which would be the foundation of the most profound of twentieth century social transformations.
The remarkable power of The Struggle for Happiness stemmed from the author's ability to trace the complexities of modern life from a unified base of simple ideas, ideas which contained in their form and substance the movement of our own age. But James knew too that it was impossible for one individual intellectual to achieve a unity of vision and method appropriate to the size of the transformation required if the mass of ordinary people were to make a new society suited to their own needs.
The Struggle for Happiness was written at a critical moment in James's own life, as he broke finally with the intellectual tradition of culture and revolutionary politics of which he had been part for so long. This was reflected in the fact that he presented the first draft in a form with its own development programmed into it. In some ways James, with his vision, his fascination with the intricate details of everyday life and his commitment to serving the genuinely popular forces for change, was Melville and Wendell Phillips rolled into one. Yet he lived in a different age. It was one which they anticipated in their creative work; and one which James, in turn, seeing the struggle between the old and the new society at a time of transition, penetrated deeply. But given his understanding of the fundamental current of modern history, and confronted with the necessity of serving the popular social movement in more practical ways, James abandoned his ambitious literary project and did not, until the end of his life, return to this striking original work.
The Struggle for Happiness was drafted under difficult circumstances. At the beginning of 1950, James was living in New York. He had married Constance Webb not long before and their son was born in the spring of 1949. These new family responsibilities exacerbated his longstanding financial anxieties; moreover, he was being threatened with deportation by the immigration authorities. These pressing conditions were conveyed starkly in a letter James wrote to Daniel Guerin in January 1950. Here he revealed that for some years he had been planning to write a book on the civilisation of the United States; indeed, a good part of the draft had already been written. He had received comments on his manuscript from Eugene Raskin, a member of James's circle of literary friends which included Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison; and, as he explained to Guerin, he was writing at great speed to complete a first draft of the work which he could show to a publisher. He hoped to raise an advance to alleviate his straightened circumstances; but he felt, too, that the work itself was assuming a new importance.
The haste with which he completed his manuscript is indicated by references in the text to the New York Times of January 17th to February 7th, 1950. It would appear that at this stage he was working mainly alone, intending to circulate the draft among his friends and collaborators before incorporating their comments into a final, publishable version. James's correspondence about his project on American civilisation conveyed an atmosphere of secrecy. There were a number of reasons for this. First of all, James did not wish his vulnerable personal situation (sickness and shortage of money) to be known to his opponents, including the Federal Government. Furthermore there was a potential conflict between publishing a highly personal document and maintaining his responsibilities as a prominent representative of a political group. This was reflected in a degree of tension between his political associates in the Johnson-Forest Tendency and the circle of artists, writers and musicians James knew in New York.
Having written the first draft, James felt that a good deal of work remained to be done before the book could reach a publishable form. Moreover, he was soon swept up in an intensified struggle to resist expulsion from the United States. This resulted in the politicisation of the American civilisation project as James, drawing on the established working methods of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, involved his associates in preparing part of it for a public audience. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, written largely while he was held on Ellis Island, represented a passionate plea to remain in America; but it did not prevent his deportation back to England in 1953.
The original manuscript of 1950 languished, unrevised, among his papers. At first, he tried to interest his old London publisher, Frederick Warburg, in his book on America; but it was no easy matter to revise the work for a European audience, a very different one from that which he had originally in mind. Several sketches for a new version he planned to write with Selma James can be found among his papers for the years 1953-55. By the beginning of 1956, the American civilisation project had become a focus for discussion among his old political associates in the United States, now organised as the Facing Reality Group. An incomplete draft, however, dealing mainly with American workers and women, was the only outcome of this collaborative exercise; and it was again put aside when the pressing issues raised by the 1956 Hungarian revolution diverted the energies of James and his group. Parts of this second document were later incorporated into a book, entitled Facing Reality, animated by the Hungarian question.
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The Struggle For Happiness in James's Life and Work
C.L.R. James arrived in the United States at the end of 1938. Behind him were six years of intensive political activity in Europe and a substantial body of writings. The major texts of his pre-war period--World Revolution (1937), The Black Jacobins (1938) and The History of Negro Revolt (1938)--reflected the direction in which James's ideas were developing; specifically his attempt to integrate the struggles of black and colonial peoples into the revolutionary concerns of European Marxism. They also contained the seeds of his future work--work, both practical and theoretical, which he brought to maturity during his fifteen year stay in America.
It would however be mistaken to think of James as having only been made by his experiences of Europe. When he left his native Trinidad for England in 1932, he was 31 years old, mature and educated, widely read in the classics, in European history and literature. He was a published author of fiction and a sports journalist of note. Furthermore, James's method and his perspective were already formed, having evolved during his early years; and both were encapsulated in his understanding of the game of cricket.
As a young boy, James watched cricket from the window of his house. His attention was caught by different players with their distinctive styles; he talked extensively to cricketers; he studied technique and played himself to a good standard; he built up his own library of newspaper clippings and collected books which enabled him to trace the evolution of the game. In this way he developed a sure grasp of history; but it was combined with a strong visual memory and sensitivity to the uniqueness of individuals within particular social contexts. These elements and the thoroughness with which James approached questions in cricket became the hallmark of all his subsequent work. For James, cricket was a metaphor for the world and at the core of its interpretation lay an historical method.
James's youth was not marked by any obvious political interest; but he reached adulthood during a period of considerable change and unrest in the island's colonial society. As he wrote subsequently, "Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have much to learn." Cricket clubs in Trinidad expressed the prevailing principles of social stratification, divisions based on wealth and colour. James, a member of the black middle class, chose to join the leading club of the brown-skinned elite. He later regretted this political misjudgment on the grounds that it distanced him from the creative energies of the Caribbean people. These were exemplified in the exciting styles of cricket played by Trinidad's lower middle class blacks, most notably by Learie Constantine.
Nevertheless it was Constantine, with his pragmatic political sense and his experience of touring abroad as a professional cricketer, who began to question James's bookish notions of the world. It was also Constantine who invited James to join him in England, to collaborate on the writing of his cricket memoirs. But, by the end of the 1920s, James's perceptions were being changed by other forces. He could not ignore the restlessness of the Trinidad people in the years after the first world war; and he was, like everyone else, closely following the activities of Captain Cipriani.
Cipriani, a local man, achieved prominence in the war as a champion of West Indian soldiers serving abroad. When they returned, these men were expected to settle back into the old structures of colonial authority. But this was impossible given their experience of the war, their struggles against discrimination and segregation, their encounters with the ferment of revolutionary ideas (some of which crystallised in Garvey's Back to Africa movement). The strong bond forged between Cipriani and the men formed the basis for a political movement which took off after their return to Trinidad.
For Cipriani the war had proved beyond doubt the capacity of the West Indian people for self-government; and he articulated the frustration and general dissatisfaction with Crown Colony government. James was in active sympathy and he prepared to write a biography of Cipriani. Moreover, during the period of growing agitation against the colonial regime, he was writing short stories celebrating the vitality of the ordinary men and women of Trinidad.
James was part of a literary circle whose members, prominent among them Gomes, Mendes and de Boissiere, founded two journals: Trinidad (1929-30) and The Beacon (1931-33). These publications provided an outlet for poetry and fiction; and they acted as a forum for debate on matters of art, culture and philosophy. The five short stories published by James between 1927 and 1931 reflect the leanings of this group of writers towards life in the urban slums ("barrackyards"). The themes and characters he chose, however, were not dictated by conscious political considerations or by an explicit desire for social realism. Rather they grew naturally out of the material available to him as a writer in Trinidad.
Barrackyard life, vibrant and unexplored, was a creative source, native to the Caribbean. Through its discovery James and his contemporaries began to break the hold of the English tradition over the subject matter of colonial writing. Their work, located in the conditions of the Caribbean, laid the foundations for a distinctive body of literature, a genre consolidated and expanded by a later generation of writers such as V.S.Naipaul, George Lamming and Wilson Harris.
In the spring of 1932 James left behind the confines of Trinidad's colonial society and embarked on the life of a cosmopolitan writer in London's Bloomsbury. He carried with him an unfinished novel (Minty Alley, published in 1936) and a draft of his biography of Cipriani. But his career in Britain soon took a different course from the one he expected: "I arrived in England intending to make my way as a writer of fiction, but the world went political and I went with it."
The intellectual atmosphere of Bloomsbury was dominated by political debate, especially over the events of 1917, the formation of a Workers' State in the Soviet Union and the emergence of Stalinism. But, in an economic climate of depression, the early optimism had begun to dissipate. The growing fascist threat weighed down over a turbulent Europe.
James's first taste of radical politics came soon, when he moved to Nelson, the militant Lancashire textile town, nicknamed "Little Moscow," which employed Learie Constantine as a professional cricketer. Industrial unrest throughout north-east Lancashire culminated, during August, in an all-out strike which brought cotton manufacturing to a virtual standstill. James found himself caught up in the events. He took part in the public meetings, the demonstrations and the discussions which spilled over into people's homes.
It was in this atmosphere that he completed his biography of Cipriani; and, with Constantine's financial help, it was published by a small Nelson firm in September 1932. It was abridged a year later by Leonard Woolf as The Case For West Indian Self-Government. The pamphlet reached a wide audience. Its publication, however, marked the end of the first phase of James's life, one situated firmly in the formative conditions of his Caribbean youth.
James learned a great deal from his stay in Lancashire, witnessing the day to day struggles of its working class communities; finding, too, considerable interest among them in the colonial question. He and Constantine became widely known as spokesmen on the West Indies; and, in the process of explaining social conditions there, they learned about themselves and were able to clarify their own political position.
It was while living in Nelson that James first became acquainted with Marxism. He read Trotsky's The History of the Russian revolution; and later he began to study the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin. He quickly dispensed with the literature being produced by Moscow and its British agent, the Communist Party; and he developed a Marxist position which was implacably opposed to the Stalinism of the Soviet Union. James joined the British Trotskyists and became a member of the Marxist Group which operated within the Independent Labour Party (ILP).
For the next two years James was primarily concerned with the possibilities of revolution in Europe; and he was immersed as a writer and political activist in Britain's radical movements. His approach to questions of politics was distinctive. It stemmed, in part, from the fact that he was soaked in European history and literature before he studied the principal works of the Marxist tradition. This was in contrast to many who ventured into history only after reading Marx. James's historical perspective, laid down in the West Indies, and the method he developed through his study of cricket, the rigour and thoroughness with which he handled material, marked every aspect of his political career in Britain. He quickly became one of the leading spokesmen of the Trotskyist movement and his job as a cricket reporter on the Manchester Guardian enhanced the public profile of the Marxist Group.
James's work on revolutionary movements in Europe taught him the importance of international working class collaboration; and this lay at the heart of his response to the Ethiopian crisis of 1935/36. After Mussolini's invasion of the last independent African state, James supported a motion at the ILP's annual conference calling for workers' sanctions against Italy instead of the government's League of Nations sanctions. The party's pacifist members refused to accept the conference's endorsement of the resolution, on the grounds that it might precipitate war. Many members, including James, broke with the ILP on this issue. It was a harsh lesson in the equivocation of the organised labour movement.
At that time the widely held view of radicals was that the revolution had to take place first in Europe; only then would its leaders be able to grant the subjects of the colonies their freedom. James rejected this view, since he knew from history and from his own experience the great potential of the so-called "backward" peoples. He wrote at the time: "Africans must win their own freedom. Nobody will win it for them. They need co-operation, but that co-operation must be with the revolutionary movement in Europe and Asia."
The Ethiopian crisis turned James decisively towards Africa. It gave focus to general questions concerning leadership and the masses in revolution and the relationship between the European powers and the colonial world. He had already begun to explore these questions in his study of the slave revolution in San Domingo.
James's work on these issues was strengthened in 1936 by the arrival in London of his old Trinidadian friend, George Padmore. After being recruited by the Comintern to head its Negro Bureau, Padmore broke with Moscow over its changing line on the colonies. In the context of the Soviet Union's attempt to make an alliance with Britain and France against Germany, Italy, and Japan, Padmore had been instructed to cease his anti-imperialist organising against Britain and France (who had the most colonies in Africa) and direct his political efforts against the very powers who had no African territories. Padmore brought to England his considerable skills, his international perspective and his knowledge of how to build a political movement. He helped to reorganise the International Friends of Ethiopia, a committee set up by James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta and other blacks. It became known as the International African Service Bureau with Padmore as chairman. James was for a short time the editor of its journal, International African Opinion.
James's activities in the pre-war period connected him to a long line of immigrant radicals who had played a distinctive role in British political life. These people often advocated broad ideals (such as colonial freedom) while, at the same time, also inserted themselves into the struggles of local working class communities. James was conscious in particular of those Irish and Indian radicals whose struggle for freedom was then more advanced than that of the Pan-African movement he was instrumental in launching.
The different threads of James's political activity and historical research during the years 1932-38 came together in the three books he published towards the end of his stay in England.
The first, World Revolution (1937), was a history of the Communist International, considering in detail the foundation and development of the Soviet Union. James examined the part played by key figures (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin) in the Russian revolution and its aftermath; and he firmly linked the fortunes of the newly created Workers' State to the fate of the revolution in Europe. He showed the far-reaching consequences, for both the Soviet Union and the international movement, of Stalin's 1926 pronouncement: "Socialism in One Country".
World Revolution was not particularly original; but James's revolutionary Marxist position opposed to Stalinism was badly needed at that time by Trotskyists and their sympathisers on the left. It was the first systematic work in English written from a Trotskyist viewpoint. James had access to the plentiful material available in French. He was already engaged in translating Souvarine's monumental biography of Stalin (published in 1939); and he had long been fascinated by France's revolutionary history. This comprehensive study of the Communist International appeared in a climate of confused rhetoric among intellectuals about the status of the Soviet Union. It dealt with the recent defeat of the workers' movement in France and Germany; and it faced squarely Stalin's role in the struggle for Spain.
The method James employed to understand the Russian revolution, focusing on its international aspect and on the special role of leaders and masses in revolutionary situations, marked a second book published a year later. The Black Jacobins (1938) was an account of the San Domingo uprising in 1791, the only successful slave revolution in history. It was written with the coming struggles in Africa and the colonial world clearly in mind. In both cases the relationship between the metropolitan centre and the colonies was critical to an understanding of the course of local rebellion and resistance. James's explicit aim, here and in The History of Negro Revolt written at much the same time (1938), was to document the history of populations exploited by colonial powers over centuries, but who were denied a place, except as passive subjects, in the official accounts.
The slaves of San Domingo moved in the wake of the French revolution. Their island's wealth was central to the challenge posed by the French bourgeoisie to the old forms of authority. Although uneducated, illiterate and led by an ex-slave Toussaint L'Ouverture, this black mass constituted a formidable revolutionary force. The sugar plantations were then the most advanced mechanism of industrial production in the western world. This lent organisational structure to the the slaves as they successfully fought off the colonial powers, France, Britain and Spain. The slaves won their freedom and eventually their independence with the creation of the state of Haiti in 1803.
At the heart of The Black Jacobins lay the figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture. James's analysis of his career as a revolutionary leader and of his successor, Dessalines, echoed the portraits of Lenin and Stalin in his history of the Communist International. The problem of power in moments of transition was a theme explored by James in the two books. In both the Russian and San Domingo revolutions "backward" or peripheral populations were catapulted to the forefront of the advanced movements of the day.
The originality of The Black Jacobins derived from James's fusion of Marxism with the colonial struggle of blacks in the New World and Africa. This perspective also informed The History of Negro Revolt, a synoptic review of the intimate link between industrial capitalism and black resistance over two centuries. Here he showed how the American Civil War over slave emancipation in the nineteenth century and the coming African decolonisation struggle in our own time were crucial to international capitalist development..
Many black radicals merely tacked Marxist rhetoric onto their primary preoccupation with national emancipation; whereas most European radicals saw colonial struggles as inherently secondary to their own revolutionary initiatives. For James the two strands were interwoven; and, as he remarked in the context of the San Domingo slave revolution, "People do not just win freedom for themselves; but they expand the struggle for freedom worldwide."
The three texts James published in 1937/38 defined his future work. When he visited the United States shortly afterwards, he was a leading international figure of the Trotskyist movement, with a distinctive position on both Marxism and political organisation. He only intended to stay in America for a few months, but he ended up staying fifteen years, when he was forced to leave, protesting vigorously. So, although he was not aware of it when he went, the New World became the crucible of his mature life work, inseparable as a historical and social context from his personal development as a writer and political activist. It was here that James reached a new and original conception of political life. It was encapsulated in his manuscript, The Struggle for Happiness.
James was invited to the United States by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He arrived in November 1938 and immediately embarked on an extensive speaking tour which took him across America -- from the east coast, through the mid-west and down into California. Having already escaped the confines of a small Caribbean island, he was now freed from the claustrophobia of a decaying Europe. This journey was the symbol of the beginning of a new stage in James's life. At the end of his stay in America he wrote: "I remember my first journey from Chicago to Los Angeles by train -- the apparently endless miles, hour after hour, all day and all night and the next morning the same again, until the evening. I experienced a sense of expansion which has permanently altered my attitude to the world."
James addressed American audiences on the approaching war in Europe and the race question. These issues formed the basis for discussions he held with Trotsky at his headquarters in Coyoacan, Mexico. During April 1939, Trotsky, James and a handful of comrades established the strategy for the SWP's work with blacks. James insisted that the organised revolutionary movement should recognise that the blacks' struggle was for basic democratic rights rather than socialism as such.
The consequences of James's tour were far-reaching. He left Mexico with serious doubts about Trotsky's interpretation of events in Russia and Europe; and his journey, particularly his return to New York, travelling by bus through the old south, gave him valuable first-hand experience of the race problem in the United States. The two themes, the revolution in Europe and the black question, defined James's work for over a decade. In order to clarify his position as a Marxist on the key issues raised by these questions, James undertook a serious study of philosophy, while being engaged in intensive political activity, especially in the black communities. His theoretical investigations and political work fed directly into each other. Both lie at the heart of the original synthesis, his new political vision, reached in 1950.
James, the activist, began by addressing America's black communities on the pressing issue of the day -- their response to the war. In the context of Roosevelt's call for Americans to defend democracy in Europe, James reminded blacks of their own lack of freedom and basic democratic rights in the United States. Drawing on historical precedents, he recognised the tremendous threat blacks, employed at the heart of the American capitalist machine, could pose to the government. This threat was strengthened not only by their potential alliance with white workers, but also by their links with the millions of colonial peoples resisting imperialism worldwide. Later, during 1942, James travelled among the rural black communities of Missouri and he learned a great deal through his participation in the sharecroppers' fight for better wages. Writing in 1943, he described this as going "into the wilderness for ten months -- a tremendous experience involving thousands upon thousands of workers, black and white, and much travelling over hundreds of square miles."
The more deeply he penetrated into the lives of America's blacks, both the industrial workers of the northern cities and the agricultural labourers in the south, the more certain James became of the key role they would play in America's future. In the most advanced society of the day the blacks were the most exploited and oppressed section of the population. Their struggle, rooted in the history and day-to-day experience of a stark inequality, had an independent vitality and developing organic political perspective of its own. For James the black question was the American question. It encapsulated the central contradiction of a society whose original ideals of freedom and equality were, in the twentieth century, crushed at every turn by the coercive power of industrial capitalism.
James's work on the position of blacks within the United States led him directly into the question of the revolution in America. His interest in exploring this question quickly grew. It followed his decision to extend his American visit beyond his visa limit; and although this step forced him thereafter to function underground, James felt that, given the links he had forged with a few close political collaborators, he could push his revolutionary work in new directions.
The challenge of the New World was the bridge into the other main body of work James carried out in America during his fifteen year stay. This consisted of theoretical investigations stimulated initially by the confusion which followed the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1940. James, with a handful of others, left the SWP when it was split by this development. His closest associates at this time were women--Raya Dunayevskaya, a Russian expert and Grace Lee, a student of German philosophy; and later they formed what became known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency. It was a group marked more by its disciplined search for a coherent Marxist position than for its stability of attachment to any of the parties on the left.
In the mid-1940s James announced his aim to do for Marxism in America what Lenin had done for Marxism in Russia, namely to adapt the master's method and concepts to national history. He held, following Marx, that American events such as the War of Independence and the Civil War had had profound consequences for relations between the classes in Europe. Now the second world war had launched the United States into a bid to replace Europe as the main imperial power. This meant that the American people were projected onto the world stage as an agent of revolutionary change.James recognised that the soviets of the Russian revolution -- self-organised communities of workers and peasants -- had introduced a new political form, one which pointed to the future. Its introduction to the United States would require what he called "the Americanization of Bolshevism" -- a programme of political education which James and his group planned to make the basis of its organisational work.
One of the prime tasks of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, however, was to examine what lay at the centre of debate within the Trotskyist movement, the nature of the Soviet Union. But once James began to analyse the history of the Soviet Union and its relationship to the development of capitalism, he found himself being drawn deeper into questions of philosophy. The process of thought and action, the dialectical method of Marx and Lenin, was involved; and James sought clarification in the writings of Hegel. He, and his collaborators, published the conclusions of their theoretical and practical work towards the end of the decade. An important pamphlet, The Invading Socialist Society (1947), was expanded into State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950). Meanwhile, James circulated, in the form of letters written from Reno, Nevada in 1948, the results of his own work on method (Notes on Dialectics).
State Capitalism and World Revolution contained as its main theme the notion that Stalinism was the last stage of capitalist development worldwide. Although hostile to private property capitalism, the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union was just as committed as the western bourgeoisie to the maintenance of a regime of wage slavery. For the sake of accumulation through increased labour productivity, state monopoly capital subjected workers to an extreme rationalism (the idealism of the intellectuals run amok, otherwise known as "The Plan") which differed only in degree from the industrial tyranny of American capitalism. The book's inspiration was Lenin's last writings after 1917; and it ends with the observation that the political deficiencies of the revolutionary movement in 1950 were substantially philosophical.
In Notes on Dialectics, James set out to teach his followers how to use Hegel's Science of Logic. Dialectical reason, he explained, was a way of thinking which reflected the movement of the object of thought, the world in which we live. Analytical thinking and common sense can only identify what is or has been; but, the dialectic, in contrast, enables us to imagine a different future by combining speculation with knowledge in the context of action. James applied this method to the history of the international labour movement since the French revolution. He showed that Trotsky's thought never moved with history, remaining trapped in the circumstances of the Russian revolution and its immediate aftermath. His conclusion was that it was time to abolish the distinction between the political party and the masses. The revolution should be left in the hands of the working class itself.
Having concluded that Trotskyism was not just wrong in its ideas, but fundamentally wrong in its method, James broke decisively with the Trotskyist movement. In doing so he was also ready to break with the old European forms of political life, which he had come to see as irrelevant to America and an incubus on world development. For he had long been engaged in the process of seeking to understand American society. The basic premise of his investigations was clear: "From the first day of my stay in the United States to the last, I never made the mistake that so many otherwise intelligent Europeans made of trying to fit that country into European standards. Perhaps for one reason -- because of my colonial background -- I always saw it for what it was, and not for what I thought it ought to be. I took in my stride the cruelties and anomalies that shocked me and the immense vitality, generosity and audacity of those strange people."
Since his arrival in 1938 James had immersed himself in a study of American history and literature, but he also paid serious attention to the popular arts of the American people. He read detective novels and comic strips; watched B movies and followed the careers of Hollywood film stars. He became a "neighbourhood man," observing closely the daily lives of men and women, their social relations, their living space, their routines of work and leisure. Aside from the two conventional political documents James published on the American revolution in 1944, there were few hints of this enormous, but largely personal project in his voluminous journalistic contributions to the debates within the Trotskyist movement during the 1940s.
The evidence of his commitment to understanding America was to be found elsewhere, particularly in the remarkable correspondence he maintained during these years with Constance Webb. Here, not bound by the terms of left-wing polemics, James ranged widely over questions of politics, art, music and culture. The letters suggest that, through his friendship with Constance Webb, he sought to grasp the key to American society--the independence and vitality of its people. She was a representative of twentieth century America: young, free-spirited, aware but uneducated in the European sense; struggling to find an integrated life, a struggle sharpened by her experiences as a woman (a section of the population whose lack of freedom and equality James likened to the experiences of America's blacks).
If the polemical world of Trotskyism forced James to re-examine the intellectual foundations of his work, his explorations of American society brought forth a dialectical synthesis, The Struggle for Happiness. Drafted with great vigour in 1949/50, this manuscript, initially entitled Notes on American Civilisation, represents, in both its style and content, the crux of James's development as a political thinker and activist. It stands between his major theoretical works of the 1930s and 1940s and the broader perspective of his mature years, encapsulated in the classic book, Beyond A Boundary (1963). It marks James's coming detachment from organised revolutionary politics, in which he had been a prominent participant for two decades, and it contains the elements of his unique vision of humanity.
In The Struggle for Happiness James moved beyond the European model of intellectual leadership, party politics and culture ("old bourgeois civilisation") and situated himself firmly in the New World with an original conception of political life. It was one rooted in the unique conditions of America society and its people; and at its centre lay his recognition of the power and developed consciousness of ordinary men and women. The struggle in the modern world was for the full and free release of popular, creative energy; and for James, this represented the force for civilisation. Writing at the mid point of the twentieth century, conscious of the collapse of Europe and the rise of the superpowers who threatened destruction on a scale not previously possible in world history, James posed fundamental questions concerning the future of humanity itself. It was the first work he planned in an ambitious programme of writing by means of which James intended to penetrate to the core of the modern crisis. But the uncertainty of James's position in America meant that the project quickly became fragmented and he did not again find the conditions which enabled him to complete the original work he planned.
James was forced to drop his American civilisation project in order to focus upon his fight with the US immigration authorities. It was the height of the Red Scare; and, having never acquired a regular visa, he was served with a deportation order. He sought to gain support for his case by delivering public lectures on American literature, and in particular on the great nineteenth century writer, Herman Melville. These formed the basis of a critical study, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953); and although it was sent out to every Congressman and others who might influence James's case, he lost and the book did not then reach a wider audience.
In its themes and preoccupations, however, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways was clearly taken from the more original and comprehensive study of America which James had already begun. Writing with explicit reference to the barbaric, totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin, but mindful also of American trends, James addressed "..the obvious, the immense, the fearful mechanical power of an industrial civilisation which is now advancing by incredible leaps and bringing at the same time the mechanisation and destruction of human personality."
For James the question had been posed a century earlier by Melville in Moby Dick, his tale of the Pequod's ill-fated voyage in search of the great White Whale. James took the ship to be a microcosm of the newly emerging industrial society; and he discussed the different characters and the dynamics of their relations as they unfolded within the novel's narrative structure. He began with the towering presence of Captain Ahab, the embodiment of a wholly new human type, the captain of industry and ultimately the modern totalitarian dictator, a man prepared to bring about the ruin of civilisation in the pursuit of his own personal ambition.
Counterposed to this terrific destructive force was the ship's crew, its members being representative of the ordinary people of the world. Melville showed them at work in the whaling ship. His delight in describing the intricacy of their tasks, their skills, their cooperation and sense of community was evidently shared by James who saw here the prototype of the modern industrial system. Echoing a central theme of The Struggle for Happiness, James here offered a particularly penetrating analysis of the characters of the narrator, Ishmael, and the ship's three officers, Starbuck, Stubb and Flask. They were the intellectuals, the educated, the possessors of technical knowledge, those trained to be "leaders"; and yet, when the Pequod neared its destiny, they wavered hopelessly, as did their twentieth century counterparts, between submission to the monomaniacal power of Ahab and an affirmation of the crew's humanity. They could not decide.
Moving beyond Moby Dick to explore the relationship between the writer and the world around him, James developed this theme, the crisis of the intellectuals or what he called "the revulsion of modern man from an intolerable world." But he was interested too in the process by which "strange stuff," the raw material of the imagination, was moulded and refined to make something new, an Ahab, "...that rarest of achievements--the creation of a character that will sum up a whole epoch of human history." In Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, James located the novelist in the movement of history, placing him at the moment of transition from one world to another. At the same time he celebrated Melville's ability to "see," to create a masterpiece out of the uniqueness of his artistic personality. This was at once highly individual and rooted in society, expressive of its fundamental dynamic.
In his critical study of Melville's work, James demonstrated the maturity of his dialectical method. Its foundations had been laid during his boyhood years of cricket watching and developed self-consciously through political activity and the study of revolutionary leaders such as Toussaint L'Ouverture. Now James's investigation of a major literary figure was closely tied to the other theoretical and political work in which he had been engaged while living in America -- work which by 1950 had brought about fundamental changes in his thinking. For this reason Mariners, Renegades and Castaways was more than a penetrating exercise in literary criticism; it was also a chapter of an autobiography, revealing aspects of the life of James himself.
This perhaps explains why, in an unusual finale to the Melville study, he described his experiences as an internee among the renegades and castaways of Ellis Island. It represented an author's passionate plea to be allowed to remain in the United States. America had irrevocably altered his perspective on the world and his fifteen year stay there had enabled him to develop an original conception of political life. It was one in which James, given his own personal history, his education and training in the European intellectual tradition, had no obvious place. It was a vision founded on his recognition that the fate of humanity lay in the hands of ordinary men and women, that intellectuals would play no decisive role in the working out of society's future form. This was no fanciful notion or mystical belief, but a conception rooted in James's understanding of history and his many years of political activism.
In a sense, then, both Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and the longer, unfinished work, The Struggle for Happiness, can be understood as the first stage in James's attempt to place himself in history, an autobiographical project which occupied him intermittently in his final years. This was so not just because together they contain the fullest statement of his political position as he reached the peak of his creative powers; but also because they have at their heart the excavation of the intellectual tradition to which James himself was so closely bound. Their writing cleared the way for a more explicitly autobiographical volume. It went further back, exploring the formative conditions of James's Caribbean upbringing, through an interpretation of the world of cricket. It appeared a decade later as Beyond A Boundary.
After his departure from the United States in 1953 James found himself adrift. He had broken with the organised revolutionary movement in which he had worked for twenty years; and he had been separated from the vitality and expansiveness of the New World. He returned to a Europe changed by the experience of war, its intellectuals isolated and demoralised, and settled in Britain . The great socialist ideals of the 1930s had been transformed by the Labour Government into the palliative institutions of the welfare state; but emancipation struggles in the colonies had set in motion the disintegration of the British Empire.
James's profound dislocation, geographical and political, coupled with the pressing need to earn a living, left him struggling to continue the work inspired by the popular arts of the United States. But the experience of America was something very specific, as he revealed in a letter written to his friends in New York shortly after his arrival in England: "It is most remarkable, but at the present moment the feeling that I have and the memory of life in the United States are expressed most concretely in gramophone records, jazz records in particular, and movies."
During the 1950s James drafted a number of documents which explored the themes and ideas first articulated in his late American writings. He was seeking to develop a critical method by means of which the work of great artists could be approached; at one and the same time, to open up the individual creative process itself and to assess its place in social life. His approach to criticism was fused with his political perspective, for he believed that it was through artistic work above all that one approached central questions about society and human experience. This led James eventually to pose the question of the relationship between creativity and the popular movement for democracy. His discussion of the relationship drew heavily upon his developed sense of history and a keen sensitivity to contemporary artistic forms.
Beyond A Boundary, a highly original study of the game of cricket, became the focus for these ideas in exile; but James's analysis was already advanced, having evolved and crystallised in his mind during his lengthy sojourn in the United States. Although James had not seen a single cricket match between 1938 and 1953, Beyond A Boundary was made possible only by the work of his American years. In the context of the New World James's work on problems of philosophy and historical method had established the foundations of his future political activity, freeing him thereafter from a primary concern with such questions. At the end of this work, too, he had transcended the divisions built into the European tradition--the separation of politics and culture, art and entertainment, intellectuals and the common people. Beyond A Boundary, in its broad imaginative sweep, gave expression to this newly found freedom. The heart of the book (and its alternative title) was contained in the question : "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" It stands as a fine analysis of the game itself, but it is also much more.
Here James forged a creative synthesis from the disparate elements of understanding. He integrated the individual and the social, the unique player with the conditions which produced him. He brought together the team and the spectators in an active, evolving relationship. He placed cricket firmly within the dialectical movement of history, as a manifestation of social and political change, at any one time embodying the fundamental forces of society. What distinguished James's approach in this book was the careful attention he paid to strictly technical matters, using his knowledge of style and method in cricket to push his interpretation of the game into new, unknown regions -- into politics, aesthetics and popular culture.
In the middle of writing Beyond A Boundary, James accepted an invitation to return to Trinidad as editor of a party newspaper. The Peoples' National Movement was led by Dr. Eric Williams, a former pupil of James, and he was set to lead the island to independence. James arrived in Trinidad in 1958 at a time when the Caribbean was alive with political debate and when unresolved tensions, released by changes in society, found expression on and around the cricket field. James was at once the same and a different man from the young, educated, colonial intellectual who, twenty six years earlier, had left Trinidad in search of a literary career abroad. This was the island of his formation and Beyond A Boundary was securely rooted there; but the quality of his analysis drew on the decades of intensive political work in Europe and America.
The book was autobiographical because, for the first time, James self-consciously examined the conditions of his childhood and youth through the lens of a mature method and understanding. But Beyond A Boundary was autobiographical for reasons more profound. In James's mind the completion of his book and the imminence of Caribbean independence were intimately connected. He sought through cricket to integrate history with personal biography, to "see" himself; and in this way he merged his unique vision of humanity with the historical movement which brought forth a new society.
James never retreated from this vision, from his belief in the creativity and capacity of the Caribbean; but all around him political and economic conditions thwarted its realisation. He left Trinidad on the eve of its independence; and Beyond A Boundary was published a year later, in 1963, to great critical acclaim. It was his last major work, representing as it did the completion of a personal journey which carried him from a tiny outpost of the British Empire into the very heart of world politics.
In the years after, James travelled widely; he wrote essays and lectured to audiences in Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. He continued to explore the themes which had been established during his creative years and which constitute his original work.
James died in Brixton, London in May 1989 and his body was returned to his native Trinidad.
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C.L.R. James and The World We Live In
C.L.R.James died as popular forces exploded across China and eastern Europe to challenge some of the most brutal and oppressive bureaucratic state formations in modern history. These outbursts were a watershed in political resistance, a vivid reminder of the presence and power of ordinary people in the struggle for civilisation.
At the same time, too, they constituted a unique experience in terms of mass communications. This movement of the people was a world event like no other. Television beamed around the globe pictures of the confrontation between the forces for freedom and those of repression; and the images were stark and unforgettable--the Chinese youth standing before the tank as it rolled into Tiananmen Square, crowds swarming onto the Berlin Wall, the appearance of Havel and Dubcek in front of thousands in Wenceslas Square, the fierce battle fought on the streets of Bucharest, and the quiet moment of liberty as Nelson Mandela walked through the gates of a South African gaol.
We live in one world; and, in many of its essential features, it is the world James foresaw in The Struggle for Happiness. He understood the modern era as a moment in the history of humanity which would result either in the total reorganisation of society by ordinary men and women (socialism) or the continuing degradation of civilisation as manifested in the public violence of fascism, the Stalinist state and the threat of nuclear war (barbarism). James's interpretation was built upon the recognition of the subjective and objective features which together, for him, were what made the twentieth century distinctive. The development of industry, urban growth and the tremendous expansion of mass communications had given ordinary people a coherence, concentration and awareness they had never known before; moreover, this sense of collective purpose was becoming increasingly universal (worldwide). But, at the same time, their capacity for self-expression and self-organisation came up against the enhanced powers of rule from above, embodied in the modern state apparatus and in bureaucratic organisation more generally. As the struggle intensified, James saw that it reverberated through all areas of life, including the most personal relations between men and women.
Reading James's 1950 manuscript some forty years after it was drafted, it is possible to find there anticipations of a world to come. He drew attention to political developments which subsequently unfolded within America itself (for example, the civil rights and feminist movements) as well as highlighting certain characteristics of the modern crisis which now stand more fully revealed in the world as a whole. The remarkable prescience of The Struggle for Happiness, however, was not fortuitous. James wrote his study at a critical moment in the modern world; and following his own approach to the work of great artists and writers, we can understand it to have been produced out of a moment of transition, as one historical era gave way to another. James's analysis caught the deeper currents of modern history and these were revealed not just in the substance of the text but in the unfinished form of the writing itself.
Furthermore, he self-consciously employed a method, the dialectic, which he had studied closely in relation to the historical circumstances of its major exponents. James understood the work of Hegel, Marx and Lenin to mark the rise of popular social forces in the modern world; but their specific contributions to political thought and activity reflected the particularities of the historical period in which they wrote. In his own work, too, James was concerned with the evolution of popular movements and his distinctive contribution to the Marxist legacy grew out of his understanding of the specificities of his own time.
James took his method from Hegel, but he looked at history from Marx's perspective. He understood the moving force of history as the contradiction between the whole of society and its divisions. In Hegelian terms this meant that at each stage of history, society aimed for the universal; but realised it only partially in the shape of a dominant class which excluded the rest of its members from the freedoms it enjoyed. For Hegel the motor of change was the growing tension between those who enjoyed privileges and those who were excluded, leading to an explosion (quantity into quality) and a new stage in which progress towards the realisation of the universal was greater, but as yet incomplete. This, in turn, led to another round of contradiction and so on. James recognised that Hegel had reached this formulation at a time when Europe had been radicalised by the principles of the French revolution and subsequently terrorised by Napoleon's monstrous extension of territorial power. His conception of history was essentially ideal; but Hegel was able to see that the organisation of workers in the nascent capitalist industry represented an insuperable barrier to the extension of universal community to all. He therefore sought that universality in the idea of a state founded on the principle of absolute right and governed on behalf of the people by an enlightened class of intellectual bureaucrats; and only in this way could he envisage the mediation of the polarised conflict between rich and poor set in motion by capitalism. For James, then, although Hegel was limited by the historical conditions of his time, his method revealed the movement of world society, shedding light particularly on the forms of state control which emerged as the conflict between labour and capital intensified in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
If Hegel had shown the intimate link between capitalism and the development of the modern state, Marx saw that the emergence of working people as a social force was part and parcel of the same movement. He wrote in the context of revolutionary upheavals in Europe, first in the 1840s, then culminating in the 1870 Paris Commune, and he had the emergence of Britain's mass proletariat in mind. Marx developed Hegel's dialectical method but he worked from the opposite pole, from the people and from an understanding that their struggle for a new society, rooted in the fundamental transformation of the conditions of their work, constituted the movement of history. Marx specifically grounded his theory of the transition to socialism (universal society) on the potential for concentration and socialisation of the proletariat inherent in capitalist machine industry This was James's perspective. But he was sensitive to the new features of the age in which he lived. He understood the greatest political event of his time to have been the Russian revolution of 1917, taking the French revolution to an even more universal stage and overturning the conventional conceptions of political life. Crucial, then, to the development of James's dialectical Marxism was his study of the writings of Lenin, for they reflected the latest stage reached in the evolution of capitalism. Not only were rival bourgeois states now competing on a world scale (to the point of mutual ruination in the first world war), but the working class itself had become international in response to that development. Moreover, as Lenin recognised, imperialist rivalry between capitalist powers had brought the peoples of Africa, Asia and the New World into an increasingly unified movement of production, population and markets.
Most importantly for James, Lenin's work had been formed within the context of revolutionary struggle, giving impetus to the dialectical interplay between theory and practice. What he admired was Lenin's keen sense that the movement of modern history lay in the actions of the people; and that in revolutionary situations the speed and creative energy of the masses outstripped their leaders, advancing notions of political society to a new stage. Given this perspective, Lenin saw, too, the dangers which lay ahead for the new Workers' State. James returned again and again to Lenin's last writings, warning of the dangers of the party becoming a detached bureaucratic straitjacket imposed on the energies of the people; for he lived in the very period when this reached its ultimate brutal manifestation in the Stalinist state. Stalinism formed his own political work.
It is impossible to assess James's political ideas outside the context of the Russian revolution. Opposing the notion of "socialism in one country," James, like many others, initially joined the followers of Trotsky. But, in making the break with the Trotskyist movement in the late 1940s, he traced the descent of his own ideas directly from Lenin. In his theoretical work, Notes on Dialectics, James used the dialectical method of Hegel, Marx and Lenin to demonstrate how ideas move in response to the movement of history. He took the central questions raised by Lenin's work and pursued them, within the political contours of his own age, to their logical conclusion.
In so doing, James, with his American collaborators, began to extend the Marxist tradition beyond the stage reached by Lenin. Furthermore, their conception of state capitalism as the current stage of development of world society had profound implications for the nature of their political work, breaking as it did with the notion of the party as the vanguard of revolutionary struggle. Indeed the party had become the greatest obstacle to the revolutionary movement of the people. This enabled him to later recognise the Polish Solidarity movement, the logical successor to Hungarian workers' councils of 1956, as the most advanced manifestation of socialism, conceived of as a popular struggle for collective self-determination against the forces of state capitalism.
But James had never been a conventional European Marxist. He certainly had little in common with his leading Marxist contemporaries, such as Lukacs, Benjamin and Adorno. Their work, a response to the same historical developments, focused on the importance of the state, culture and ideology; but their perspective was limited by the fact that none of them broke out of the European mould of nationalism, intellectual culture and party politics. They remained generally hostile to America and their writing, aimed in the main at other intellectuals like themselves, remained separate from the day to day political struggles of a genuinely popular movement. The figure who invites comparison with James is the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. But, working as he did in the immediate aftermath of the Russian revolution and then in solitude during his his long imprisonment, Gramsci's writing too failed to break out of the confines of European political discourse.
In contrast, James's work was truly international. It addressed not just theoretical problems within the Marxist tradition, but the pressing political questions of the day. Critical to James's particular insight into the twentieth century, was the self-conscious incorporation of his own life experience, containing as it did several distinctively new currents of the twentieth century world. First of all, he was black and he had grown up at a time when imperialist war had projected black and colonial peoples onto the world stage as a potential revolutionary force. This the Garvey movement had revealed. James's experience of the intense political struggles in Europe during the 1930s and his later involvment with the movement for colonial freedom gave him a unique insight into the collapse of European hegemony and the interrelation between struggles in the metropolitan countries and the peripheral areas.
But this was not all. James's move to the United States in 1938 opened his eyes to the specific contribution to be made by the people of America to the global struggle for a new society. He saw early on that the second world war represented an opportunity for America to launch its bid for world dominance at the expense of European imperialism. By the end of his fifteen year stay, a new world system based on competition between the two superpowers--the Cold War--had arisen to terrorise mankind with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Th unravelling of that system as a result of the collapse of Stalinism reopens all the questions that James posed four decades ago at the beginning of the postwar era.
It was this transition from Europe to America that holds the key to James's revolutionary vision. Although he had made a significant political breakthrough in his collaborative work within the Johnson-Forest Tendency, it was, above all, in the highly personal and original text, The Struggle for Happiness, that he found the synthetic means of giving expression to the sense he had of his own moment in history.
James, like Saint-Just in 1794, brought to the world from America the new idea of happiness as a revolutionary goal to be added to the European legacy of freedom (bourgeoisie) and equality (peasantry/workers). Happiness became a word which appeared repeatedly in James's writing, from his assertion that Marx and Hegel "believed that man is destined for freedom and happiness" to his lengthy exposition, in a letter to the literary critic, Maxwell Geismar, on the centrality of happiness to American society and culture, in contrast to Europe with its sense of the tragic. The notion of happiness lay, too, at the heart of his volume Modern Politics, but there James called it "the good life".
Conventionally, though, "happiness" has been understood as a trivial thing, as a moment of pleasure which is necessarily fleeting. More recently, it has been reduced to mean simply material satisfaction. James, however, took his lead from the conceptions of the eighteenth century, where the pursuit of happiness in this life was contrasted with religious passivity in the face of earthly suffering.
Although he nowhere defined the concept closely, the idea permeated his work, The Struggle for Happiness; for he held happiness to be as essential to the human experience as the desire for freedom and equality It was the desire of the modern age, "what the people want," expressive of complex and deeply rooted needs of human beings, for integration, to be whole, to live in harmony with society. For James, then, happiness had two facets, the freedom to be a fully developed creative individual personality and to be part of a community based upon principles conducive to that aim. This was the unity of private interest and public spirit which de Tocqueville had found in the early American democracy and which James believed was still the palpable goal of the American people in the twentieth century. Indeed, it was the great contribution America had made to our understanding of the notion of civilisation itself. Today it has become a universal goal; and with the emergence of the people of eastern Europe, Asia and Africa as the potent symbols of the collective force of humanity in its opposition to the forces of oppression, we are reminded again that happiness is inseparable from the active struggle for its attainment.
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The Struggle for Happiness:
An essay on American Civilisation (1950)
by C.L.R. James
Table of contents
Part One : Culture and Society in American History
Introduction
Chapter 1. American Society Before the Civil War
Chapter 2. The American Intellectuals of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 3. The Making of Modern America
Chapter 4. Mass Production and Freedom Today
Chapter 5 The Popular Arts in the Twentieth Century
Part Two : Race, Sex and Class in the Struggle
Chapter 6. The Industrial Workers
Chapter 7. The Blacks
Chapter 8. The Women
Chapter 9. The Intellectuals
Chapter 10. The American People and the Next Stage
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C.L.R. James and The Struggle for Happiness is the first pamphlet in a series to be published by the C.L.R. James Institute. The Institute was established in 1984 with James's full support and approval and it is committed to the dissemination of his life's work. Just as James in 1953 wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways to publicise his case, his threatened deportation from America, so too the purpose of these pamphlets is to publicise the case for making his work more widely and easily available. Since James's death in May 1989 it has become increasingly difficult to obtain his books. The Struggle for Happiness is not available; the few volumes which are in print are almost impossible to find and the bulk of his other titles remain out of print.
The pamphlet series planned by the C.L.R. James Institute will explore the major themes of James's writing, examining particular texts and inviting discussion from anyone interested in the remarkable legacy of this major twentieth century figure. We are eager to receive comments on the pamphlets themselves as well as suggestions for future activities. And we have a free mailing list, through which we will notify you of other pamphlets related to James.
Forthcoming: Popular Democracy and the Creative Imagination: The Writings of C.L.R. James 1950-1963, by Anna Grimshaw. Also forthcoming: As Ever, Nello: Exploring the C.L.R. James Archive by Jim Murray. We have some books by James for sale, especially At the Rendezvous of Victory (1984), Vol. 3 of Allison & Busby's series of selected writings, including a 26 page bibliography. ($15 for the hardback)
Please write to:
Jim Murray, Director
505 West End Avenue #15C
New York, NY 10024
[-> Contents]
THE CRISIS AND THE TRIUMPH
(Text by C.L.R. James, 1953)
"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 every 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."
[-> Contents]
Editor's note, 2001: The Struggle for Happiness was published, after a long struggle, under the title American Civilization (Cambridge, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993). This pamphlet was the basis of the introduction to the book.
Original publication (c) 1991. Web page (c) 2001 The C.L.R. James Institute. All rights reserved. This text may not be published, reprinted, or reproduced without the permission of The C.L.R. James Institute.
Web page prepared by Ralph Dumain, 31 March 2001
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Uploaded 31 March 2001