#C.L.R James

[notchainedtotrauma]

I think that one of the things that happens both in Du Bois and in C. L. R. James is that at one moment they are addressing the slave, the ex-slave, the fugitive — then suddenly this figure has been translated into the narrative of the worker. And in the worker’s narrative, the very figure that I’m concerned with, the Black female, the fungible life, the minor figure, totally falls out of the frame of what constitutes the political notion of struggle. The “everyday resistance of enslaved women” in the context of a slave economy, for example the refusal to reproduce life, has never been considered as a component of the general strike. Yet, they too were involved in a fundamental refusal of the conditions of work and intent on destroying an economy of production in which their wombs and their reproductive capacity were conscripted along with their labor.

Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Rizvana Bradley

[hyperions-fate]

Long, long ago [Melville] had decided that an ordinary Yankee sailor was worthy to rank with the Emperor Tiberius and Milton's Satan as the embodiment of audacious and heroic evil. So Bartleby, at first, is a half-comic, half-pathetic figure. He has been turned into a clerical machine, a human typewriter who gave so much of his life to copying documents that he might as well eat and sleep in the office. But by degrees, Bartleby becomes the embodiment of a gigantic protest against this waste, this degradation of human life. At the end he looms up as a man of epic stature. With all the strength of his ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-housed body, he protested. His protest was absolute. He wanted no charity from his employer, no help, because that would not alter his basic condition. And in the only way open to him, though at the cost of life itself, he asserted that he was a human being and not a thing.

C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953)

[kosmik-signals]

Good reading for a real understanding of Haiti, past and present rather that the lies told by Trump

Silencing the Past by Trouillot spends two chapters on the history of Haiti and reveals more than all of the lies, fear-mongering, and 1/2 truths combined.

READ IT!

[jacobwren]

In Conversation with Stuart Hall

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

By C.L.R. James.

[deadassdiaspore]

C.L.R. James and Léon Damas at the second Congress of African People, San Diego, CA. 1972.

[jdsoundbite]

Top 40 Over 40.33: Blemish

Top 40 Over 40.33: Blemish

I think I’ve found my personal record of the year. It’s Roberta Flack’s First Take. There’s a song on it called I Told Jesus that joins Jesus is Waiting by Al Green as the only songs that give me a feel for what it is about Christianity that moves people. (I was raised in a secular humanist family, and never set foot in a church as a child.) It was recommended to me by Simon Joyner, and it made…

[altrbody]

"I am a black man number one, because I am against what they have done and are still doing to us; and number two, I have something to say about the new society to be built because I have a tremendous part in that which they have sought to discredit."

--C. L. R. James, C. L. R. James: His Life and Work

[intellectures]

Literatur, die im Dunkeln leuchtet

Zwei Anthologien mit Texten afrikanischer Autor:innen bieten vielfältige Perspektiven und Haltungen, um die festgefahrenen Denkmuster über Afrika aufzulösen. Continue reading Untitled

[talking-theory-with-chatgpt]

Who is CLR James?

Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989), commonly known as C.L.R. James, was a Trinidadian Marxist, historian, and writer. He was an influential figure in the Caribbean and African American left, as well as a key member of the Trotskyist movement. James is best known for his book "The Black Jacobins," a history of the Haitian Revolution, which is widely regarded as a seminal work in the field of African and Caribbean studies. He also wrote extensively on Marxist theory, cricket, and literature. James was a highly influential and important figure in the anti-colonial and Pan-African movements of the mid-twentieth century.

How did CLR James extend Marxist theory to encompass the struggles of enslaved and colonized people?

CLR James extended Marxist theory to encompass the struggles of enslaved and colonized people by emphasizing the importance of understanding the specific histories and cultures of these groups. He argued that the experiences of these groups could not be reduced to a simple economic analysis of class struggle, but needed to be understood in their own right as unique struggles against domination and oppression.

For example, in his book "The Black Jacobins," James applied Marxist theory to the Haitian Revolution and argued that the struggle of the enslaved people in Haiti was a unique historical event that could not be reduced to a simple analysis of class struggle. He argued that the specific cultural and social conditions of slavery in Haiti, as well as the unique cultural and historical background of the enslaved people, were important factors in shaping the nature of their struggle for freedom.

In this way, James emphasized the need for Marxists to take seriously the struggles of colonized and enslaved people as distinct and unique struggles against oppression, rather than simply as part of a broader class struggle against capitalism.

[metamatar]

So the real crime of fascism was the application to white people of colonial procedures "which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'c***s' of India, and the 'n***s' of Africa." (p. 36) Here we must situate Cesaire within a larger context of radical black intellectuals who had come to the same conclusions before the publication of Discourse.

As Cedric Robinson argues, a group of radical black intellectuals,including W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R James, George Padmore, and Oliver Cox, understood fascism not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of Western Civilization itself. They viewed fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism, global systems rooted not only in capitalist political economy but racist ideologies that were already in place at the dawn of modernity. As early as 1936, Ralph Bunche, then a radical political science professor at Howard University, suggested that imperialism birth to fascism. "The doctrine of Fascism" wrote Bunche, "with its extreme jingoism, its exaggerated exaltation of the state and its comic-opera glorification of race, has given a new and greater impetus to the policy of world imperialism which had conquered and subjected to systematic and ruthless exploitation virtually all of the darker populations of the earth." Du Bois made some of the clearest statements to this effect: "I knew that Hitler and Mussolini were fighting communism, and using race prejudice to make some white people rich and all colored people poor. But it was not until later that I realized that the colonialism of Great Britain and France had exactly the same object and methods as the fascists and the Nazis were trying clearly to use." Later, in The World and Africa (1947), he writes: "There was no Nazi atrocity-concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world. The very idea that there was a superior race lay at the heart of the matter, and this is why elements of Discourse also drew on Negritude's impulse to recover the history of Africa's accomplish ments. Takirng his cue from Leo Frobenius's injunction that the "idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention," Cesaire sets out to prove that the colonial mission to "civilize" the primitive is just a smoke screen. If anything, colonialism results in the massive destruction of whole societies-societies that not only function at a high level of sophistication and complexity, but that might offer the West valuable lessons about how we might live together and remake the modern world.

Robin DG Kelley's A Poetics of Anti Colonialism, published as introduction to a new edition of Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Anti Colonialism

[seriousbrat]

quite contrary: mary macdonald + historical context, music

this is my Mary MacDonald playlist and I'd like to talk a little about my interpretation of her and her cultural/historical context! it might not align with fanon, ive no idea but idc frankly haha. I hope to have done my due diligence in terms of research (i'm an absolute research fiend) and in general this is a topic I'm personally highly interested in. because it's highly interesting and (ime) little-discussed. I'll be providing links for further reading. tagging @goldenromione bc she asked me to do this!

so in my fic Mary is a muggle-born girl from a British-Caribbean family in Croydon. Her family owns a Caribbean restaurant in Thornton Heath. She's rebellious and punky and gets a lot of this from her two older brothers, both Muggles; Toby, the eldest, is part of the Race Today Collective in Brixton, dedicated to the publication of a political magazine (Race Today) on race relations in the UK. The middle brother, Lewis (who has a fling with Sirius as a matter of interest lol) is a musician/DJ very active in the Ska Revival/Two-Tone scene of the late 70s-early 80s.

All this is very influential on Mary; she is very outspoken about muggle-born rights at school, and her music taste reflects her background. I do think she would like women-led punk especially x-ray spex, but also in terms of ska a group I think she'd have liked is the selecter, which features pauline black the coolest female vocalist i've ever seen in my entire life. just look at her:

this will be explored in the upcoming 4th part of my fic, in which we see Sirius in his Brixton flat, and Mary and Lewis both spend a lot of time there. Specifically, he lives on Railton Road, which was a very important street in terms of both Black and LGBT history in Britain. It was the scene of the 1981 Brixton Riot and the location of many collectives at different points like the British Black Panthers, the 121 Centre (one of London’s longest running squats, also housed anarchist groups and other orgs), the aforementioned Race Today Collective, the Pink Fairies/South London Gay Community Centre, among others. It was also the home of many important Black British activists and historical figures like C.L.R. James, Darcus Howe and Leila Hassan. A few links:

A Radical History of 121 Railton Road By the Waters of Babylon; The Battle of Railton Road; International Centres Today in London gay history: the South London Gay Centre evicted, Brixton, 1976 Activist Streets (on history in Thornton Heath, linked above)

If anyone is interested in this topic I cannot, cannot recommend enough the miniseries Small Axe on Amazon, which covers a few different important moments in Black British history from the 60s to the 80s. It's so incredibly good and the soundtrack is SUPREME. Another good one to get a feel for the period is In the Long Run, created by Idris Elba and set in London in the 80s, loosely based on his own childhood.

Lastly, a few images of how I see Mary under the cut:

this is simona brown, my mary fancast, though the image I used for my playlist is of brenda sykes who I also think is an absolute Mary vibe.

[fatehbaz]

[D]eviance and mischief. [...] [F]urtive [...]. [O]ther poetically inspiring words: secretive, surreptitious, clandestine, covert, conspiratorial, oblique [...]. We must fold these small acts of love and creativity and play (and laughter and irreverence and whimsy) into other resistant projects against white supremacy [...]. In various trans-American imaginaries, the boonies are raced as nonproductive land inhabited by people who are not fully part of the Western episteme. [...] Caribbean(ist) people are familiar with el monte, the hills, or les mornes. El monte is always just around the corner, encroaching, sprouting persistently [...] amid the rubble of hurricane disasters or abandoned plantation and industrial sites. [...] The hills, like much of our hemisphere, are sites of damage containing the residual energy of violence, [...] the “places of irresolution.” [...] [T]urn over rocks and push thorny vines to the side to find wet dirt, small creatures, and, perhaps, delightful hidden treasures [...]. I open my hands so that these and other surprises "jump into [them] with all the pleasures of the unasked for and the unexpected" [...]. Remaining open to these gifts of the nonhuman natural world [...]. How much ruddier might we be against the multiheaded hydra of white supremacy as “a world of mutually-flourishing companions” [...]?

Text by: Dixa Ramirez D'Oleo. "Mushrooms and Mischief: On Questions of Blackness." Small Axe 23 (2 (2)): 152-163. July 2019.

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Every day I wake up and rehearse the person I would like to be. […] To use the words of [...] C.L.R. James, “every cook can govern.” [...] [T]his is what happens when people consciously decide to come together and “shape change,” to think with Octavia Butler. And to move through the world with the intention of making it a better place for living creatures to inhabit. […] And most importantly, it’s an invitation to join in. And it is a reminder that liberation is not a destination but an ongoing process, a praxis. Every day, groups of parents, librarians, nurses, temp workers, ordinary people, tired of the horrors of the present, come together to decide what kind of world they want to inhabit. […] [W]e bear witness to rehearsal, study, experimentation in form, a multiplicity of formations of struggle being waged, often most strongly by people for whom freedom has been most denied. [...] “If We Must Die”: “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” [...] [F]or so many people, whether abandoned by the state [...] or abandoned by society in a carceral site, fighting back, by virtue of necessity as well as of ethics, is building, always building. This is the freedom work, and the love work, and the care work, of rehearsal.

Text by: Robyn Maynard. “Every Day We Must Get Up and Relearn the World: An Interview with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.” Intefere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics Volume 2, pages 140-165. 19 November 2021.

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The no of refusal is a mode of survival: an impenetrable boundary, silent or shouted. It is a refusal to be killed or to succumb [...]. Vast ecosystems flattened for plantations and fields, raw minerals pulled from the ground and sea for the building of nation-states [...]. Being-with requires a pause from which to imagine this otherwise, in all of its vastness and uncertainty. [...] To be-with [...] needs a disposition of attentiveness, listening, curiosity and noticing, [...] a "pedagogy of deep engagement". [...] The scale of violence [...] is immeasurable. [...] The immensity of the loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities exceeds what we can comprehend. But [...] so do the myriad, and insuppressible flourishings and alliances, the joyfulness and love, the lives lived otherways. Attunement leads us to the gaps and silences and soundings that run through everything [...]. [T]hose imaginations of life [...] might rise to the surface.

Text by: AM Kanngieser. "To undo nature; on refusal as return." transmediale Almanac. 2021.

[marxism-transgenderism]

74– you can choose one only!

74. What is your favorite book?

This ask is torturous thank you for sending it and fuck you for making me pick only one. I'm probably gonna go with Black Marxism by Cedric J Robinson. This behemoth of a book is amazing and I think literally every needs to read at least the first chapter which coined the term racial capitalism but if you do please read the rest it's so good.

There's three sections to the book. The first traces the history of capitalism to show that the tool of racialization predates capitalism and emerged in feudalism, and that when capitalism did emerge it used this tool so much even prior to colonialism and slavery that to speak of capitalism without racism is incomplete. He goes on the critique Marx and much of Marxism generally for ignoring this fact beyond a few throw away lines in the manifesto showing how integral racial divisions were to early capitalism.

The second section traces a historical outline of what he terms the Black Radical Tradition, being the loose ideology which emerged from Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved in the Americas and their decendents. How marronage emerged among different groups from southern Brazil to new England and how it evolved into the ideologies expressed in uprisings like the Haitian revolution.

The last section focuses in on three Black communists—W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright—and how they came to Marxism in their early years but later on came to identify more with the Black Radical Tradition as a more accurate and liberatory tradition than the European radicalism which dominated (and still dominates) left wing discussions.

It's fucking incredible. Read it.

[lakecountylibrary]

Read -> Reading -> To-Read: Black History Month Graphic Novel Round Up

Check out these awesome graphic novels reader's advisor Ashley has been picking up for Black History Month!

Read: Kindred by Octavia Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy

This graphic novel was adapted from the book Kindred by Octavia Butler. This story more recently has also been made into a TV series for Hulu. In this twisted tale, Dana is living in the 1970s when she begins having dizzy spells shake her to the core. These dizzy spells lead to her waking up in the 1800s helping a boy who she refers to as “Rufe.” While Dana is not sure what brings these spells on at first, she has an even harder time time trying to figure out how to make it stop.

Ms. Davis: A Graphic Biography by Sybille Titeux de la Croix, art by Amazing Ameziane

The story of Angela Davis is filled with resistance and unwillingness to accept unfair treatment and judgment. She is infamous for being a part of the FBI's Most Wanted List in 1971 due to an incident that occurred where she was accused as the main conspirator.

Reading her story as a graphic novel does not take away the seriousness of her story. I appreciate that the book provides explanations of key events; that is helpful if you are only hearing about some of the events for the first time, as I was. This book was a random find but it sent me down a research hole that made me want to learn more, and that is what any good book does.

Reading: Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound by Dave Chisholm

Miles Davis was an extremely talented musician. He thought outside of the box when it came to his music, so it is fitting that this graphic novel tells his story in an eclectic way.

The story begins as Miles has just gotten a piece of life-altering news in 1982. From there, he reminisces and begins telling his origin story. The artwork and illustrations of this graphic novel are beautiful. The colors truly jump off the page and speak to you, as clear as the words do. The funky art and the insight of Miles' fascinating yet tumultuous life make this book a true learning experience that explores the cool world of jazz and many of its legends.

To-Read: Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History by C.L.R. James, adapted by Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee

This graphic novel details the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint Louverture. This graphic novel is based on the play by C.L.R. James, produced in 1936. If you love history, and revolutions, this graphic novel my pique your interest.

See more of Ashley's recs

[reddest-flower]

The Communist International struggled to balance the needs of its European members with the members from the countries colonized by Europe. The former represented the countries of the colonizers. They had to fight in their own societies to build organizations of the working class and other allied classes at the same time as they were charged with driving an anti-colonial agenda. The Comintern’s attempt to get them to hold a Colonial Conference spluttered. It was difficult to find out what these European communists – seen as a pipeline to the colonies – were doing in terms of practical work to build alliances between workers in their countries and in the colonies. These European communists found it difficult to work amongst workers in their countries who had been dominated by a labour aristocracy that was often pro-imperialist. It was not easy to push a double agenda – for the rights of the European workers and for the workers and peasants in the colonies. No such difficulty lay in the colonies – from Indo-China to the Gold Coast of Africa. But other difficulties haunted communists in the colonies. They found it difficult to create a precise framework to work with the bourgeois nationalists who also hated colonial rule but who had no problem with capitalism. These contradictions dampened the work of the Comintern. Nonetheless, it was through the Comintern that trade unionists and revolutionary nationalists from one end of the world found out about the work of their peers on the other side. The infrastructure of global communism was created by the Comintern activists, who travelled from one end of China to the other end of Mexico to meet with socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, rebels of all kinds to urge them towards unity with the Communist movement.

Papers such as The Negro Worker allowed unionists across the continents to keep up with each other and to experience the unity that allowed them to magnify their work. The Trinidadian Marxist intellectual C.L.R. James observed the work of his Trinidadian friend George Padmore, head of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. ‘It must be remembered that men in Mombasa, in Lagos, in Fyzabad, in Port-au-Prince, in Dakar, struggling to establish a trade union or political organization, most often under illegal conditions and under heavy persecution, read and followed with exceptional concern the directives which came from the revered and trusted centre in Moscow’, James wrote. This ‘trusted centre’ was the Comintern. It provided the necessary organization to help workers from one end of the world to be in touch with others at the other end. Padmore edited The Negro Worker, which gave ‘hundreds of thousands of active Negroes and the millions whom they represented’ access to the world, wrote James. It gave them insight into ‘Communism in theory and the concrete idea of Russia as a great power, which was on the side of the oppressed’. This, James wrote even as he was critical of the USSR, ‘is what The Negro Worker gave to the sweating and struggling thousands in the West Indies, in Nigeria, in South Africa, all over the world’.

Platforms such as Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (Workers’ International Relief – IAH) emerged initially to help draw attention to the struggles inside the USSR with hunger – to enable Europeans mainly raise funds to help prevent famine. But the work of the IAH would eventually widen outwards, building solidarity campaigns from Japan to Mexico, from Argentina to Australia. The IAH worked from Germany, but turned its energy outwards towards the ‘oppressed and exploited’ peoples of the world. It enabled communists and their allies to forge connections across continents and deepened the relations of radicals within their own countries. It allowed words like ‘solidarity’ to take on a tangible meaning. This would not have been possible without the active support of Moscow.

From one end of the planet to the other, Comintern agents such as Mikhail Borodin carried instructions and methods, wondering how best to help along the revolutions. Alongside them were men and women of the colonies who came to Moscow, studied revolutionary theory and then found their way back home to build communist parties against all odds. These people led colourful lives, dangerous lives, going from factory gate to printer’s shop, from prison to exile. Their journeys were unpredictable – the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy becomes a founder of the Mexican Communist Party, while the Chilean socialist Luis Emilio Recabarren becomes a founder of the Argentinian Communist Party. Dada Amir Haidar Khan (1900-89) leaves his remote village in Rawalpindi for the merchant marine, becomes an activist of the American Communist Party and then goes to the USSR to train at the University of the Toilers of the East, which sends him to India. Yusuf Salman Yusuf (1901-49) – known as Fahd – met a Comintern agent Piotr Vasili who helps him go to the University of the Toilers of the East, which sends him back to Iraq after a sojourn in Europe. Tan Malaka (1897-1949), who leaves the Dutch East Indies to study in Holland, returns to become a popular educator and communist, finds himself in exile and then in Moscow for the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern. Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969), meanwhile, works on the ships and the hotels in France, the United States and on the Atlantic Ocean. He becomes a founder of the French Communist Party, goes to the USSR to study at the University of the Toilers of the East and then returns to Indo-China to lead his country to revolution. Each of them was born close to 1900 and each lead a colourful life, marked by the October Revolution which occurred in their teens. These were the people who lived along the circuits of the Comintern, for whom the USSR was a crucial node to develop their own ideas and to build their own revolutionary theories and networks.

Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2019