Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T00:28:25.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Democratizing Dialectics with C.L.R. James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2008

Andrew J. Douglas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay explores the work of C.L.R. James in an effort to rethink the democratic import of dialectical thought. James is best known as a West Indian Marxist and the author of The Black Jacobins, but he is also a deeply democratic thinker and a creative reader of Hegel. Alongside the more orthodox Marxist strand of his thought, James develops a mode of dialectical reflection that is attentive to a sense of democratic uncertainty and that aims to enrich political participation among ordinary citizens. By thinking both with and against James, and by exploiting the ambiguities in his postwar writings on dialectics and American democratic culture, I argue that James inspires a kind of participatory democratic ethos grounded in the language and conceptual resources of Hegelian humanist thought and modern dialectical reflection.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , Summer 2008 , pp. 420 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 James, C.L.R., The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989)Google Scholar. David Scott has been somewhat influential in reintroducing contemporary political theorists to James's work, although Scott has focused almost exclusively on The Black Jacobins. See Scott, , Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent introduction to James's overall political theory, see Bogues, Anthony, Caliban's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

2 The key texts in our analysis include James's 1948 theoretical study, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1980)Google Scholar and his 1950 manuscript on American social and political culture, American Civilization, ed. A Grimshaw and K. Hart (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993).

3 Three sections of Marx's 1844 manuscripts were translated between 1943 and 1947 by Grace Lee and Raya Dunayevskaya and circulated within James's political-theoretical group at the time, the Johnson-Forest Tendency. For James's introduction to these translations, see James, , At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), 65–72Google Scholar. For some historical background on these translations and James's early engagement with the 1844 manuscripts, see Schwarz, Bill, “C.L.R. James's American Civilization” in Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies, ed. Gair, C. (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), 150–51Google Scholar.

4 In addition to the texts already noted, a select bibliography includes James's critical study of Melville, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001)Google Scholar; his semiautobiographical work on cricket, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); his writings on Marxist organization, some of which are collected in Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organization, ed. M. Glaberman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999); and his writings on black America, some of which are collected in C.L.R. James and the “Negro Question,” ed. S. McLemee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996). For a wide range of writings on politics, history, literature, and culture, and for a more extensive bibliography, see The C.L.R. James Reader, ed., A. Grimshaw (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). A number of James's shorter essays and excerpts from some of his longer pieces are available online from the C.L.R James Institute (http://www.clrjamesinstitute.org).

5 For a detailed biography of James's remarkable life, see Worcester, Kent, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)Google Scholar and Buhle, Paul, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (New York: Verso, 1988)Google Scholar.

6 See the Introduction to C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics.

7 Ibid., 7.

8 As Kent Worcester notes, “even in the 1960s and 1970s James had nothing but the highest regard for Lenin as a revolutionary leader, whom he thought of as a democrat and an ally of both the working class and the peasantry.” See Worcester, , “C.L.R. James and the American Century,” in C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, ed., Cudjoe, S.R. and Cain, W.E. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 182Google Scholar. And when asked in an interview in 1980 to reflect on his “greatest contributions,” James says plainly, “My contributions have been, number one, to clarify and extend the heritage of Marx and Lenin.” See James, Interview with James Early, Miller, Ethelbert, Buhle, Paul, and Ignatin, Noel in C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, ed., Buhle, Paul (New York: Allison and Busby, 1986), 164Google Scholar.

9 James, et al. , State Capitalism and World Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), 10Google Scholar.

10 James, et al. , Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1974), 87Google Scholar. I thank an anonymous reviewer at The Review of Politics for calling this text to my attention.

11 James, , “‘Civilizing’ the ‘Blacks’: Why Britain Needs to Retain Her African Possessions,” New Leader, May 29, 1936Google Scholar.

12 James, Letter to Raya Dunayevskaya, 1949, cited in C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, 197.

13 See James, Notes on Dialectics, 33.

14 James makes these “transfers” repeatedly throughout the text. See his discussion in Notes on Dialectics, 17.

15 McClendon, John H. III, C.L.R. James's Notes on Dialectics: Left-Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005), xvGoogle Scholar.

16 For an introduction to this complex claim, a claim that McClendon will develop in detail throughout his book, see McClendon, James's Notes on Dialectics, xxii.

17 Ibid., 119.

18 We should note that McClendon does not appear to pick up on James's “transfers” from Hegel and instinctive dialectic to the theoretical dialectic of Marx and Lenin.

19 James, Notes on Dialectics, 56.

20 Ibid., 26, 31.

21 Ibid., 95

22 Ibid., 79.

23 Ibid., 19.

24 I should note that McClendon would almost certainly describe mine as an “anachronistic” reading. McClendon wants to distance his own approach from any reading that is, as he puts it, “arrogantly presentist in orientation.” He warns against any temptation to link James to “contemporary political and ideological fads and trends” and to “interpret James in the mode of an external retrospective” that would thereby “distort the integrity of James's corpus” (James's Notes on Dialectics, 18). In reading James, I just get the sense that he would want us to interpret him in the way that he interprets Hegel, not as a figure to be got right or wrong, but as a source of creative inspiration for emerging generations of readers with their own political problems.

25 Cornelius Castoriadis, “C.L.R. James and the Fate of Marxism,” in C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, 285.

26 James, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity” in The C.L.R. James Reader, 161–62. See also James, , Modern Politics (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1973), 99–100Google Scholar.

27 We might compare this with the Lukács, of History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Livingstone, R. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar. Lukács describes a “pristine unity” of subject and object, and suggests that this unity prefigures a politics aimed at recovering this unity, a politics aimed at “the abolition of the antithesis of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity” (123, 142).

28 James, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” 170.

29 Grace Lee Boggs, “C.L.R. James: Organizing in the U.S.A., 1938–1953,” in C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, 170.

30 McClendon, James's Notes on Dialectics, 207.

31 James, “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, 183. Many race theorists remain unsatisfied with James's treatment of the black experience and black political struggle. The basic complaint here is that, despite his efforts, James implicitly privileges European Marxist categories of analysis and subordinates race to class. For more on this complaint, see Robinson, Cedric, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Totowa, NJ: Zed Press, 1983)Google Scholar and Martin, Tony, “C.L.R. James and the Race/Class Question,” Race 14, no. 2 (1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 For a helpful discussion of how James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency move beyond any simple notion of proletarian class struggle, see Cleaver, Harry, Reading Capital Politically (San Francisco: AK and Anti/Theses, 2000)Google Scholar, introduction. See also Brian W. Alleyne, “C.L.R. James: Critical Humanist,” in Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies, 189. Alleyne notes, “James's vision of what modernity might become was inspired by transcendent emancipatory political projects like the French and Haitian Revolutions, yet he was demonstrably aware that such ideas and projects were ideals whose realization had constantly to be struggled for—they were always unfinished. This openness, rare in a Marxist who began his career in the 1930s, is manifested in James's early attempts to incorporate non-class aspects of social differentiation more seriously into his revolutionary praxis.”

33 See Berman, Paul, “Facing Reality,” Urgent Tasks, Summer 1981, 107Google Scholar.

34 James, Notes on Dialectics, 9.

35 Ibid., 13.

36 Ibid., 9.

37 Hegel, G.W.F., Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. Miller, A.V. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1969), 28Google Scholar.

38 Hegel, Science of Logic, 28.

39 Hegel, , Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, A.V. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 51Google Scholar.

40 Hegel, , The Enclyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. Geraets, T.F., Suchting, W.A., and Harris, H.S. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002), 187Google Scholar.

41 Hegel, Science of Logic, 439.

42 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. Patton, P. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 49–50Google Scholar.

43 Deleuze, , Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Tomlinson, H. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 157Google Scholar.

44 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Hollingdale, R.J. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12Google Scholar. See also Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 10; and The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 297–98.

45 Hegel, Science of Logic, 442.

46 James, Notes on Dialectics, 92.

47 Hegel, Science of Logic, 37.

48 James, Notes on Dialectics, 105.

49 Ibid., 42.

50 James, American Civilization, 169.

51 Hegel, Science of Logic, 42.

52 James, Notes on Dialectics, 91–92.

53 Ibid., 25. For the reference in Hegel, see Science of Logic, 24. See also Phenomenology of Spirit, 51.

54 On James's assessment of Hegel's materialism, see “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” especially 166. “Hegel,” James says, “led his Logic into an impossible and fantastic idealism about world-spirit, etc. But the basis of his work was solidly materialistic.” James's emphasis on a materialist dimension in Hegel is further evidence that his consideration of Hegel is meant not to check, but to enrich his broader Marxian sensibilities.

55 James, Notes on Dialectics, 29. One might compare James's concern for desire in Hegel with Judith Butler's treatment of twentieth-century French Hegelians. See Butler, , Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. The major Hegelian works of both Hyppolite and Kojève were published in 1947, the same year James began drafting Notes on Dialectics. James read and spoke French, but as far as I know, he never commented on or even acknowledged his French contemporaries.

56 Worcester, C.L.R. James, A Political Biography, 114.

57 See Grimshaw, “American Civilization: An Introduction,” in James, American Civilization.

58 Ibid., 277, 272.

59 Ibid., 159.

60 Ibid., 121.

61 Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography, 109.

62 James, American Civilization, 184.

63 Ibid., 289, emphasis mine.

64 We might compare James here with Theodor W. Adorno who, in the mid 1940s, wrote, “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the messianic light” (Adorno, , Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Jephcott, E. F. N. [New York: Verso, 2002], 247Google Scholar). Insofar as James plays up the critical function of dialectical thought, he displays a real theoretical affinity with the early Frankfurt School. In Notes, James acknowledges his debt to Marcuse's Reason and Revolution, and he met Adorno and Horkheimer in New York in the 1940s. Despite the affinities, James's popular democratic enthusiasm and generally more hopeful tenor seem to have prevented any productive correspondence with the far more pessimistic critical theorists. For a brief discussion of James's encounter with the early Frankfurt School theorists, See Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 106.

65 Wolin, Sheldon S., “The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls's Political Liberalism,” Political Theory 24, no. 1 (1996): 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a helpful essay on the idea of a participatory democratic ethos in the context of Wolin's conception of the political, see White, Stephen K., “Three Conceptions of the Political: The Real World of Late Modern Democracy,” in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Connolly, W. and Botwinick, A. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

66 Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide,” 98; and Wolin, , “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib, S. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 31Google Scholar.

67 Wilson Harris, “A Unique Marxist Thinker,” in C.L.R James: His Life and Work, 230.

68 See, for example, the essays collected in Garber, M., Hanssen, B., and Walkowitz, R. (eds.), The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar.