While
Williams is not quite as forgetful, he is loathed to go into more detail about
James's radical past than is necessary. There is a degree of political laziness
in this attitude, and Williams seems to be more content in studying James's sex
life than in his political history.
CLR
James died on a May morning in 1989, but in terms of Marxist politics, he had
been dead since the late 1940s when he broke with orthodox Trotskyism advocating
a form of State Capitalism during the debate over the Fourth Internationals
position on the Korean war[1]
Like
many young men and women of his generation, James was attracted to Trotskyism
through the writings of Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's Russian Revolution History was
particularly important to the young James. According to Williams, "it made
an immediate and profound impression".
Williams
works through James' life in chronological order. Williams explains that James
was a child prodigy and was given a much sought-after scholarship to a British
university. Also detected at an early age was James's ability to not only speak
to an audience but would be able to explain complex matters in a way that his
audience would understand without diluting the content. He was said to have
"a style so austere and at the same time so colourful that his pupils
listened to him in thrall.". James' empathy with the downtrodding is clear
in his first novel Minty Alley (1936).
Not his best work but worth a read.
James's
next book, The Black Jacobins (1938),[2] was
researched in the early 1930s in Paris, France. Although the book takes on many
aspects of the "history from below"genre, it is also heavily influenced
by Trotsky's historical materialist approach. James believed that the leader of
the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, "did not make the revolution,
it was the revolution that made Toussaint."
In
many ways, the revolutionary decade of the 1930s made James. He quickly became
an important figure in the American Socialist Workers Party(SWP). James wrote
some of his most important work while under the influence of the then-leader of
the party James P Cannon and, more importantly, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, who held
some ground-breaking talks with James over the" Negro Question," was not
too impressed with James's political manoeuvring and concluded his assessment
of James in a private letter written in 1940, writing
"I
received a letter from Lebrun on the IEC. A peculiar people! They believe that
now in the period of the death agony of capitalism, under the conditions of war
and coming illegality, Bolshevik centralism should be abandoned in favour of
unlimited democracy. Everything is topsy-turvy! But their democracy has a
purely individual meaning: Let me do as I please. Lebrun and Johnson (C.L.R.James)
were elected to the IEC based on certain principles and as representatives of
certain organisations. Both abandoned the principles and ignored their organisations
completely. These "democrats" acted completely as Bohemian
freelancers. Should we have the possibility of convoking an international
congress, they would surely be dismissed with the severest blame. They do not
doubt it. At the same time, they consider themselves as unremovable senators –
in the name of democracy!".[3]
Trotsky's
characterisation of James turned out to be accurate. James was to develop many
oppositional tendencies to orthodox Marxism. One was his opposition to building
a Leninist-type party like the Russian Bolshevik Party. Although this did not
lead to his break from Marxist politics, his evaluation of the class nature of
the Soviet state under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was a deal-breaker.
The first open appearance of James's position was at the founding conference of the Fourth International. James went to the conference in opposition to the orthodox position on the "Russian Question". In an interview given later in his life, he recounts
"I
can remember that conference for one reason. We were against the Trotskyist
position on the defence of the USSR. In the United States in particular, when
the Moscow Trials took place, there was a movement against the Fourth
International, but the Russian question was the reason. I was in the United
States, that was my last trip, and I told them, "I have joined you, but I
have not joined because I agree with you on the Russian position". They
said, "You cannot have an international which is all united with Trotsky,
but opposed to Trotsky on the Russian question. It means you are opposed to
Trotskyism". Freddie Forest and I set out like Christopher Colombus. We
had another boy with us who had some money, and he supported us with some
finance. We had not a position, but she said, and we agreed, we were going to
find out why it is that the Trotskyist position seemed to be wrong on the Russian
question in general. After a year or two, we came out with a full position in
which we attacked Trotskyism from beginning to end. We started looking for the
answer in Capital Volume I and the Communist Manifesto. That pamphlet we
published (7). After, we started to study the question to find out why in the
Trotskyist movement, we were against on the Russian question but in agreement
on other issues. Trotsky died in 1940. I am positive if he had been alive he
would have seen what we were talking about. No one mentioned it but they
weren't able to argue against it".[4]
Up
until his death, Trotsky opposed the conception that the USSR was "State
Capitalist. In his seminal book, The Revolution Betrayed, he writes, "We
often seek salvation from unfamiliar phenomena in familiar terms. An attempt
has been made to conceal the enigma of the Soviet regime by calling it "state
capitalism." This term has the advantage that nobody knows exactly what it
means. The term "state capitalism" originally arose to designate all
the phenomena that arise when a bourgeois state takes direct charge of the
means of transport or industrial enterprises. The necessity of such measures is
one of the signs that the productive forces have outgrown capitalism and are
bringing it to a partial self-negation in practice. But the outworn system,
along with its elements of self-negation, continues to exist as a capitalist
system.
Theoretically,
to be sure, it is possible to conceive a situation in which the bourgeoisie as
a whole constitutes itself a stock company that, by means of its state,
administers the whole national economy. The economic laws of such a regime would
present no mysteries. A single capitalist, as is well known, receives in the
form of profit, not that part of the surplus value which is directly created by
the workers of his enterprise, but a share of the combined surplus value
created throughout the country proportionate to the amount of his capital.
Under an integral "state capitalism", this law of the equal rate of
profit would be realised, not by devious routes – that is, competition among
different capitals – but immediately and directly through state bookkeeping.
Such a regime never existed, however, and, because of profound contradictions
among the proprietors themselves, never will exist – the more so since, in its
quality of universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too
tempting an object for social revolution.[5]
James
disagreed with Trotsky's definition of the Soviet Union as a degenerated
workers' state and its bureaucracy as a caste, not a social class. During his
time in the SWP, James, alongside Raya Dunayevskay the formed Johnson-Forrest
tendency that put forward that the Soviet Union represented a new form of "state
capitalism" with imperialist tendencies. James exclaimed in his complete
and open break with the Fourth International's perspectives: "Orthodox
Trotskyism can find no objective necessity for an imperialist war between
Stalinist Russia and American imperialism. It is the only political tendency in
the world which cannot recognise that the conflict is a struggle between two
powers for world mastery." [State Capitalism and World Revolution, 1950].
James would desert the SWP over its correct position in the Korean War. Moreover,
the outbreak of the Korean War was the major postwar event which put the state
capitalists to the test and decisively exposed them as apologists for
imperialism within the workers' movement.
James's
State Capitalist position was echoed by Max Shachtman and the leader of the
British Socialist Workers Party, Tony Cliff. As the document, The Historical
and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (US) relates, "The
Korean conflict demonstrated the reactionary implications of the theories that
the Soviet Union had become a new form of class society, either "bureaucratic
collectivist" or "state capitalist." The theoretician of "bureaucratic
collectivism," Max Shachtman, had broken with the Fourth International ten
years earlier, promising to maintain an independent "third camp"
position. But in 1950, he went over to the camp of American imperialism.
Leaflets prepared by Shachtman's organisation, called the Workers Party, were
airdropped to Chinese and North Korean soldiers, giving them "socialist"
arguments for surrendering to the American invaders. The leading proponent of
the "state capitalist" view, Tony Cliff, broke with the Revolutionary
Communist Party, then the British section of the Fourth International, which adhered
to Cannon's uncompromising opposition to the imperialist war. Cliff adopted a
position of strict neutrality instead, condemning what he called "Russian
imperialism" equally with that of the United States".[6]
While
much of the material of James' life inside the Trotskyist movement is on the
internet and in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, one is at a loss to
understand why so little is in the book. This is puzzling because James's future
life was so much influenced by his time in the Trotskyist movement. Also, Williams
makes light of the fact that James was at the founding of the Fourth
International in 1938. Given that just by turning up, many of the people at the
founding conference were later murdered by the Stalinists, Williams skates over
this fact. It does not take a dialectical materialist to figure out that James's
life was in danger just by turning up. The murder of Rudolf Clement merits only
a footnote. Again there is a wealth of material on this murder and others on
the internet, so why does Williams give it so little attention.[7]
I cannot say that I recommend this book. Leaving so much out is akin to writing a book on the bible and leaving Jesus out. James was a complex figure worthy of another biography from an organisation that would defend the Fourth International's history instead of leaving much of it out as Williams does. Despite James's break from Marxism, he is a person worth reading. His writings on the Negro Question are worth looking at, and his essay on the English Revolution is well worth a look. His book on cricket and other things Beyond a Boundary has never been out of print. The book had admirers, including John Arlott, the great cricket commentator. Former cricketers David Gower and Ian Botham were regular visitors to James's Brixton flat. As regards Marxism, James was finished after the 1950s, and he ended his days a supporter of the deeply reactionary pan-Africanism.
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins
[3]Three Letters to Farrell Dobbs-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/29-dobbs2.htm
[4] Interview is given by CLR JAMES-to Al
Richardson, Clarence Chrysostom & Anna Grimshaw-on Sunday 8th June &
16th November 1986 in South London. https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1986/11/revhis-interview.htm
[5] Chapter 9-Social Relations in the
Soviet Union- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch09.htm
[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/00.html
[7] I have received a letter from
Rudolf Klement's aunt, who lives in one of the countries of Latin America,
asking whether I know anything about her missing nephew. She states that
Rudolfs mother, who lives in Germany, is in a state of utter despair, torn by
the lack of any word about his fate. In the heart of the unhappy mother the
hope arose that Rudolf might have succeeded in escaping danger and that he was
perhaps hiding at my home. Alas, nothing remains to me but to destroy her last
hopes.The letter of Rudolfs aunt is a further proof of the GPU's crime. If
Rudolf had in fact voluntarily abandoned Paris, as the GPU with the help of its
agents of various kinds would like us to believe, he would not of course have
left his mother in ignorance and the latter would not have had any reason to
appeal to me through her sister in Latin America. Rudolf Klement was murdered
by the agents of Stalin. Leon Trotsky: On the Murder of Rudolf Klement-December
1, 1938-[Writings of Leon Trotsky, Vol 11, 1938-1938, New York ²1974, p. 137]
