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THE TRAINING of an INTELLECTUAL, the MAKING of a MARXIST, by Richard Small

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THE TRAINING of an INTELLECTUAL, the MAKING of a MARXIST, by Richard Small TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION, by the editor. ........................................................2 Varieties of Influence THE AFRICAN REVOLUTION, by Walter Rodney. ......................................5 THE TRAINING OF AN INTELLECTUAL, THE MAKING OF A MARXIST, by Richard Small...............................................13 IN ENGLAND, 1932-1938, by Robert Hill ..............................................19 MARXISM IN THE U.S.A., by Paul Buhle................................................28 THE FALL OF KWAME NKRUMAH, by Manning Marable ............................39 THE CARIBBEAN REVOLUTION, by Basil Wilson.....................................47 IX QUEST OF MATTHEW BONDSMAN: SOME CULTURAL NOTES ON THE JAMESIAN JOURNEY, by Sylvia Wynter...........................54 INTERVIEW, Darcus Howe with Ken Lawrence. ........................................69 LETTERS, C. L. R. James and Martin Glaberman. .........................................76 INTERVIEW, C. L. R. James with Paul Buhle, Noel Ignatin, James Early. ...................81 WILLIAMS WAS NO GENIUS ... THE OIL SAVED HIM, C. L. R. James with Harry Partap. .83 Times and Places A CRITICAL REMINISCENCE, by James and Grace Lee Boggs. .........................86 REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST, by Stan Weir ............................................87 YOUNG DETROIT RADICALS, 1955-1965, by Dan Georgakas . .89 ONLY CONNECT, by Ferruccio Gambino................................................95 Books and Subjects MINTY ALLEY, by E. Elliot Parris ........................................................97 A PROFOUND THINKER, by Peppino Ortoleva .........................................98 PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE, by David Wagner.. .99 MARINERS, RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, by David Roediger ......................100 PIONEERS OF WEST INDIAN SURREALISM, by Franklin Rosemont. ................101 FACING REALITY, by Paul Berman. ...................................................105 WHAT IF C. L. R. JAMES HAD MET E. P. THOMPSON IN 1792? by Peter Linebaugh ..........................................................108 BLACK WOMEN WRITERS, by E. Ethelbert Miller....................................111 Encounters THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JAMES, by Gregory Rigsby........................112 A MEETING WITH COMRADE JAMES, by David Widgery ...........................115 A UNIQUE MARXIST THINKER, by Wilson Harris .................................. .118 PERSONAL NOTES, by George Rawick ................................................118 BLACK SCHOLAR, by Richard Thomas................................................121 CONVERSATION, Vincent Harding and Ken Lawrence.................................122 XELLO, by John Bracey. ...............................................................125 MEETING IN CHICAGO, by Noel Ignatin ............................................ .126 C. L. R. JAMES AT 80, by E. P. Thompson. .....................................Back Cover Introduction Any "introduction" to James's life and work, by way of anthology or collected views on him, faces one almost insurmountable problem. As Martin Glaberman noted in the first anthology of James's selected writings (edited and published by this writer as Radical America, Volume IV, Number 4, May 1970), the sheer range eternally evokes the question, "where does one begin?" Happily, our beginning does not have to be so rudimentary as eleven years ago. A growing number of James's works are readily available in commercial editions throughout the English-speaking world. We anticipate confidently that an autobiography will soon be completed. And surely, as the world crisis brings another generation of insurgents to the fore, many of James's now less available studies will receive the proper attention. Already, many readers of this symposium will be familiar with James the Pan-Africanist historian of The Black Jacobins, the political visionary of the post-Vanguard Party age, and (especially in Britain) the West Indian and British commentator on sports and culture. We mean here only to sketch out the general contours of James's life, his travels, the main periods of his political and theoretical endeavors, and the specific influences which have prompted this volume. James was born in 1901 in Trinidad, in the kind of family that used to be called "poor but honest," driven down economically but determined to hold onto self-respect and the ideals of education and upward mobility. Like many revolutionary artists, he had a mother devoted to literature as her time and energies would allow. Several of the following essays show how James might well have become a provincial schoolteacher but, through love for cricket, felt drawn toward the common pastimes of the West Indian masses. When I asked James recently why Ireland and the West Indies had produced so many great literary figures, he answered simply that young people of talent had no other options — as if to say that becoming a writer had, negatively speaking, been for him as well the only means to use the available political and intellectual resources. But surely there is a positive side: fiction about daily life in the slums, about the education of a young intellectual learning about that life (Minty Alley) offered a synthesis of James's background, training, cultural and political proclivities. So while James took a hand in the emerging West Indian literature by way of editing and writing, and ulti- mately drew a novel from his experiences, he became a self-consciously and primarily political intellectual only after he had removed to Britain. One might have thought, from his political work and cricket journalism there, that he had found his calling as an editor-agitator and his vocation as a sports reporter. In addition to the pioneering Pan-African agitation that various authors describe below, James served as Chairman of the Finchley Independent Labor Party branch, wrote for the ILP press, and after the Trotskyists' abandonment of that organization became editor of their own newspaper, Fight. With the publication of Boris Souvaraine's Stalin under James's translation, The Black Jacobins and World Revolution, along with the History of the Negro Revolt and The Case for West Indian Self- Government, he had proved to be an international historical and political author. Here again, he had established a promising (second or third) career and intellectual self-identity. His fifteen-year sojourn in the U.S. represents in many ways the most curious and personally obscure part of James's life. Foremost intellectual in a small but lively Trotskyist organization with any number of fledgling luminaries (Irving Howe, Dwight MacDonald, B. J. Widick and Harvey Swados, to name only a few), he published not a single book outside the movement's own miniscule press until the very end of his stay. He edited no newspapers himself, and contributed only occasionally to the theoretical journal, The New International. When his collaborators and followers launched their own political movement, centered in Detroit, he remained in New York within an intellectual and cultural orbit that Marxist politics never fully encompassed. And yet he produced, in those years, the intellectual corpus of his philosophical-analytical advance beyond the notions of the Vanguard Party, his critique of State Capitalism and State Socialism as the stage of class formation to be overcome, and his cultural critique of industrial society through the pages of Moby Dick. Scarcely a handful of Americans outside his political group had even heard of James, let alone understood his contribution, by the time of his expulsion in 1953. The answer lies in the peculiar conditions imposed upon James personally and politically in those years. Unlike other intellectual giants whom immigration brought to American radicalism — Morris Winchevsky, Daniel DeLeon and Moissye Olgin, to name three — James was Black and an illegal. He had to keep a low profile. Even more important, the almost shadowy character of the Left-opposition to the Communist Party held an entire milieu from public gaze. Its writers gained attention as individuals only when they abandoned revolutionary 2 politics for culture or delivered denunciations of Stalinism in favor of bourgeois democracy. Moreover, the very quest of the faction that broke with Trotsky became contact with working class life and collective development of theoretical-strategic-tactical options. James submerged his independent identity as a writer into a maelstrom of debates, discussions and reconsiderations. In this he followed the relentless dedication of the Old Bolsheviks at the very moment when he ruled so many of their propositions archaic for modern conditions. He did not submerge his intellectual, cultural personal identity so thoroughly as the now-forgotten rank-and- file militants around him. He remained one of the handful of Blacks, even fewer West Indians in such circles and that alone would have divided his sentiments and interests. It should be remembered also that the metropolis, then perhaps in the most hopeful years of an emerging multi-racial identity, had secrets which could be revealed only to the participants of its day- and night-life. On rare occasions, the political documents of the era bear hints of this participation: James feels he is part of a new civilization struggling to be born, not abstractly as the intellectual might imagine, through mass acceptance of blazing new ideologies, but concretely human as the characters in Minty Alley. James's own group, which in the early 1950's began to publish
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