SPHERES of EXISTENCE Selected Writings

C. L. R. James SPHERES OF EXISTENCE Selected Writings All & Bu by This selection first published 1930 by Allison and Busby Limited 6a Noel Street, London W IV 3RB Copyright © 1980 C. L. R. James and Allison & Busby Ltd All rights reserved ISBN 0 85031 292. 1 (hardback) ISBN 0 B5031 299 x (paperback) The publishers gratefully acknowledge the invaluable help they have received in compiling this selection from C. L. R. James, David Cork, Michael Dibb, Robert A. Hill, Selma James, John LaRose, Alan J. MacKenzie, Reinhard Sander, Richard Small. Set in Times by Malvern Typesetting Services and printed in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Ltd, Trowbridge & Esher Contents Biographical introduction l La Divina Pastora 2 Turner’s Prosperity \O\II"—* “After Hitler, Our Turn" I4 -kl;-I The Philosophy of History and Necessity: A Few Words with Professor Hook 49 5 After Ten Years 59 6 Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity 70 Two Young American Writers 106 Marxism and the Intellectuals 113 The West Indian Middle Classes 131 “Othello” and “The Merchant of Venice” 141 :5~oo=~4 Parties, Politics and Economics in the Caribbean 151 l2 On Wilson Harris 157 13 The Making of the Caribbean People 173 l4 Peasants and Workers 191 15 Black Power 221 l6 Discovering Literature in Trinidad: the Nineteen-Thirties 237 l4 Learie Constantine 245 I8 Paul Robeson: Black Star 256 Index 265 Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and the future Are conquered, and reconciled, Where action were otherwise movement Of that which is only moved And has in it no source of movement—- T. S. Eliot The Dry Salvages C. L. R. JAMES: A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION C. L. R. James—the author of historical studies, a novel, short stories, a play; a seminal figure in black politics on three con- tinents; writer on Hegel and philosophy, and a major innovator in marxist theory and working-class organisation; the author of books and essays on literature, art and sport; and above all a Earticipant, teacher and activist in the events of his time—was orn in Tunapuna, near Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1901, the son of a schoolteacher. He attended Queen’s Royal College, the island’s major government secondary school, as a scholarship boy, and in the 1920s became a teacher there himself; during this time he played club cricket and began writing fiction. In 1932 he came to England with the encouragement of an old acquaintance and cricketing opponent, Learie Constantine, whom he was to help to write his autobiography; for a while James lived in Constantine's adopted town of Nelson, Lan- cashire. He had brought with him his first political book, The Life of Captain Cipriani, a pioneer work arguing the case for West Indian self-government which was published that year in Nelson with Constantine's assistance, and later in a shortened version by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in London. An article by James on cricket in the Daily Telegraph brought him to the attention of Neville Cardus, and as a result of this meeting James began to write as cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. This, followed by similar employment with the Glasgow Herald, was to provide him with a living throughout his first stay in the country. Meanwhile he had become active in British politics and society. Until 1936 he was a member of the Independent Labour Party and chairman of its Finchley branch, and he wrote regularly for the ILP papers Controversy and the New Leader. In that year he left to help form the Revolutionary Socialist League, along with other irotskyists who had left the ILP, and he was editor of its newspaper Fight. At the same time he was editor of In- ternational African Opinion, the journal of the International African Service Bureau; the members of this organisation in- cluded Jomo Kenyatta, and its founder and chairman was George Padmore, whom James had known from childhood and whom he was later to introduce to Kwame Nkrumah. (James was to write in a letter to Padmore in 1945: “George, this young man [Nkrumah] is coming to you . do what you can for him because he’s determined to throw the Europeans out of Africa.” 2 C. L. R. JAMES It was under the auspices of the Bureau that Nkrumah was to go from London to the Gold Coast in 1947 to begin his preparations for the revolution which was to initiate a new Africa.) James participated in the movement of the unem- ployed, and made speaking tours in England, Scotland and Wales. He was chairman of the International African Friends of Abyssinia during the Italian invasion, writing many articles on this issue for The Keys (the journal of the League of Coloured Peoples) and agitating among British workers for solidarity actions. He also played a part in the growth of the trotskyist movement in France, and was one of the British delegates to the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938. During this period he wrote his famous history of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938), an extensive history of the Third International, World Revolution (1937), and A History of Negro Revolt (1938), as well as publishing a novel, Minty Alley (1936). He translated Boris Souvarine’s Stalin (1939), the first major expose of its subject, from the French. He also wrote and acted in a play, Toussaint L ’Ouvertare (1936), inl which he and Paul Robeson appeared together at the West- minster Theatre. At the end of 1938 James went to the United States of America on a lecture tour, and stayed there for the next fifteen years. In this period his activity developed in two main direc- tions. First of all, he pioneered the idea of an autonomous black movement which would be socialist but not subject to control by the leaderships of white-majority parties and trade unions. The record of his 1938 discussions with Trotsky, in which he laid the basis of this principle, is still one of the fundamental texts establishing a black marxism. James took part in wartime sharecroppers’ strikes in the South, and agitated among blacks to oppose the world war. In the course of this activity he came to the conclusion that not only did the black movement have autonomy, it was also more advanced than the rest of the labour movement and would act as its detonator: this view is summed up in the programme entitled The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the US (1948). His other main activity (and in fact they interacted) was in the Socialist Workers’ Party, where together with Raya Dunayevskaya he led a tendency that gradually elaborated an independent marxism, breaking with its trotskyist background. It extended to women and youth its idea of the special role of the black movement (this was still the 1940s) and later began to criticise the traditional “democratic centralist” version of the marxist organisation. This rethinking is recorded in various political documents of the tendency and in articles in The New International during the 19405; it culminates in two full-length works, Notes on Dialectics (1948), a study of I-legel’s Science ofLogic and the development of the dialectic in Marx and his continuators, and State Capitalism and World A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 3 Revolution (1950). During this period, James had also helped to initiate the first English translation of Marx’s Economic and Plrilosophic Manuscripts of I844. In I952 he was interned on Ellis Island, and was expelled from the USA in the following year. It was during his internment that he wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, a study of the work of Herman Melville. James spent the next five years in England. He continued to contribute to the political debate in the US through the pages of the Detroit-based journal Correspondence. In 1958 he published Facing Reality, which presented the ideas worked through in the forties in the light of the Hungarian revolution and the growth of rank-and-file shop stewards’-type movements in Europe and North America. But at the same time he embarked upon a long programme of writing in which he was to re-examine the basis of his assumptions about human culture, and it was with this purpose that on his return to England he began his now classic book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963). The struggle for colonial emancipation in which James had continuously been involved was by now showing some results. In the years before the second world war he had been among the very few who not only foresaw but worked for the independence of Africa, and he maintained and strengthened his links with the Pan-Africanist movement, and with Nkrumah, during his visits to Ghana during the early years of the new regime. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977) chronicles the events that led up to and ensued from Ghana becoming the first African country to win independence in 1957. In 1958 James returned to Trinidad, in the run-up to the West Indian independence which he had already been advocating when he left a quarter of a century earlier. He became Secretary of the Federal Labour Party, the governing party of the em- bryonic West Indies Federation, and he worked with Dr Eric Williams in the Trinidad PNM (People's National Movement), editing and contributing copiously to its newspaper The Nation. Over the next three years he wrote two books, Modern Politics and Party Politics in the West Indies, as well as writing and lecturing on West Indian culture.

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