1
Paper delivered to
THE CLR JAMES CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE
CLR James at 100:
Global Capitalism, Culture and the Politics of World Revolution
The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad
20-23 September 2001
‘You don’t have to have read James to be a Jamesian’. Preliminary notes on the relationship between the work of CLR James and some of the radical black, anti-racist and left movements in the UK, 1970s to 1990s.
Dr Max Farrar
School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK
Email:
1 Introduction
(Thanks – honour to be here)
The quote I’m using in the title of this paper is one I’ve made up. It has two sources. One is a remark made in passing by another famous Trinidadian and comrade of the Oil Workers’ Trade Union, John La Rose, who said to me when I was interviewing him in preparation for this paper: “You don’t have to have read Marx to be a Marxist”. The other source, about which I shall say more in a moment, is James’ own contribution to revolutionary theory and method. One of the major arguments in this paper is in fact summed up in the statement ‘You don’t have to have read James to be a Jamesian’. The point is this: the most important tendency amongst the radicals and revolutionaries who engaged in struggle around issues of ‘race’ and racism in the UK in the period 1970 to the present adopted perspectives which I want to call Jamesian because of the conditions of social, economic and political existence in which they found themselves, even though most of them had not even heard of CLR James, and in one case at least, they were led by comrades who did know his work, and claimed to be opposed to it. My task today is to argue that point under the following headings:
q theory and method
q the question of political organisation
q ‘race’/nationalism, class and gender
My other introductory remark is to say that I’ve written today’s paper as a preliminary to my proposed research programme on the black, anti-racist and far-left movements in the UK over the past 30 years, and it is therefore rather weak on empirical detail. Many more interviews, and inspection of a wider archive of documents than my own, must be conducted before an adequate account of this period can be produced. In this paper, I am referring mainly to the Race Today Alliance as the primary example within the black movement, to Rock Against Racism as the major example of an anti-racist movement, and to Big Flame as my example from the largely white revolutionary movement. And of course all this will be done in double-quick time. There will be errors of fact and analysis in what follows, and I very much welcome the opportunity that will arise in discussion for these to be pointed out.
2 On theory and method
Darcus Howe, then the editor of the monthly magazine Race Today, explained in an interview published in 1981 that James emphased that in ‘revolutionary political activity, it is not what the working class ought to be doing, but what it is doing at any given point’ which is important. This, he said, was one of the three key influences of James’ thought upon his group, and in particular on himself (Interview with Ken Lawrence in Buhle (ed.) 1981). Now Darcus’ point here is one of fundamental importance that James made consistently throughout his life. Its philosophical basis is explained in Notes on Dialectics, first circulated in 1948. There, James argued that ‘the key to the Hegelian dialectic and therefore to marxist thinking’ is the idea that ‘thought is not an instrument you apply to a content. The content moves, develops, changes and creates new categories of thought, and gives them direction’ (James 1948/1980 p. 15). The political/ analytical point that Darcus draws is that revolutionaries take their direction from what is actually happening in the struggle, they listen to and learn from the masses, as the Maoist version of this point would say. But it is important to note that this view is not based on blind faith, it is based on a philosophy of knowledge and of historical development. For Hegel thought itself is propelled by the unceasing change in matter itself. For Jamesians who have read and understood the relevant texts the implication of this is that effective political analysis is always produced in dialectical relation to the actual changes that are taking place in society as a whole. Since these are themselves the product of previous configurations of social organisation, the method that James insisted upon was always historical: to place present events in relation to the past, and to think through the implications of both for the future. It is hard to find even a short article by James which does not demonstrate what I’m going to call, anachronistically, this genealogical approach to analysing the present.
We see a version of this method displayed throughout the pages of the monthly magazine Race Today during Darcus Howe’s editorship (1973-1986?). The detailed interviews with workers, the systematic description and analysis of struggles, the refusal to impose the group’s point of view, all these are the hallmark of the Race Today Alliance. I’ll say more about that refusal in a moment, but here is it important to make clear that this is not some disinterested pursuit of supposedly objective knowledge. Race Today would readily admit that they selected the people and the events to which they gave publicity and support. As James and his comrades had pointed out in Facing Reality (first published in 1958): ‘The Marxist organization, however, is no mere reporter of facts . . . It must have an independent view of its own. First, there are no facts in the abstract. All facts, and the selection of facts, must necessarily be governed by a view of society’ (James, CLR, Lee, Grace C and Chalieu, Pierre 1958/1974 p. 97). Exactly this approach was taken by the group called Big Flame, active in England from 1974 until around 1983. Its monthly newspaper selected events and provided long and detailed accounts, resolutely avoiding the final paragraphs, which seemed a compulsory feature of Trotskyist publications, directing workers to join their organisation and smash the State.
But neither Race Today nor Big Flame took the same trouble that James did in providing the historical context in which these events were set. To some extent Big Flame made up for this in its series of pamphlets, on education, factories, ‘race’, women, Ireland and Trotskyism, but the deep erudition and panoramic vision that emanates from James were lacking in all these publications. It is something of a mystery to me why Race Today never produced a journal in which these wider issues could be discussed. The answer might lie in the existence of the rather academic journal Race and Class, edited by A Sivanandan, with whom there had been a somewhat troubled relationship. Or it may be that the Herculean work of another leading figure in the Race Today Alliance, John La Rose, in publishing books and (briefly) the journal New Beacon made such work seem unnecessary. Of course, there may be a more prosaic reason: the sheer lack of time, energy and resources that befalls all radical, activist groups. For whatever reason, this absence of a truly historical approach, within the pages of Race Today was a weakness which was not compensated for by its re-publication of James’ History of Negro Revolt (Race Today Publications, 1985).
3 On organisation
I’m turning now to another of James’ insights which was listed by Darcus Howe in the interview referred to above, on the question of the proper form for the revolutionary organisation. Darcus said he took from James a rejection of the view that a ‘vanguard party is required to lead Blacks to some emancipation’ (Buhle (ed.) 1981 p. 69). James could not have been more explicit on this point, and as usual he based it on his reading of Hegel. Here is the relevant quote from Notes on Dialectics:
At this stage of Actuality in the labour movement I come inevitably to the conclusion that there was no further place in the labour movement for the party. The party as such had to be negated. The one-party state is the incorporation into bourgeois, capitalist society of the nearly two-hundred-year-old efforts by the labour movement to create a party to take over the state. Instead, the state takes over the party (James 1948/1980 p.11).
James employs Hegel’s term ‘actuality’, meaning the point in history at which ‘the developing reality faces an opposition with which it must engage in mortal struggle’ (p. 10). This notion is itself derived from Lenin’s reading of Hegel as the revelation that all phenomena consist in ‘contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite phenomena’ (Lenin, On the question of dialectics, quoted by James (1980 p. 7). James’ discovery, then, is that the party and the emancipatory drive of the working class are mutually exclusive. This point is driven home time and again in Facing Reality, where it is quite clear that he was not advocating anarchist spontaneism. He outlined a specific type of revolutionary organisation, one which reflects, and is guided by, the working class:
The task of the revolutionary organization is, first, to recognize these forms [of co-operation, of mutual help and solidarity, of organization which are generated by workers], to explain the significance of them, and to let itself be guided by them in what it is doing and what it is saying. The idea that the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves is the literal and the total truth . . . the working class alone is able to produce the organization, the forms, and ideas which this emancipation demands (1958/1973 p. 91).
The organisation has, as its first duty, ‘to place at the disposal of the working class all possible means, material and intellectual, of expressing itself, its own conditions of life, and its own aims’ (1958/1973 p. 94).
And it has a unique function:
Only in a Marxist organization can such workers [who are making ‘independent efforts at self-realization’] find the possibility of developing their talents without fear of being prostituted to bureaucratic ends. Only the Marxist organization can have the means, the forces, and the independence to keep the workers aware of what is taking place in their world-wide, universal, but uncoordinated (except at critical moments) efforts to create the new society. Finally, only the Marxist organization recognizes this daily activity as socialism (1958/1973 p. 95).
The organization has several tasks. One is ‘providing information on official society’ (p. 95). Another is bringing to the proletariat ‘those elements of traditional and contemporary culture which are needed for that full and total expansion of human living that is now realistically possible and only needs socialist society to bring it into being’ (p. 101). Finally, ‘only the Marxist organization basing itself of the proletariat can attempt a synthesis and transcend the essentially bourgeois antagonism between humanism and technology’ (p. 102).
In my recent interview with John La Rose, whose Black Parents Movement and Black Students Movement were key components of the Race Today Alliance, he stressed that they too saw the need for organisation, but that democratic centralism was not as important as it was in Lenin’s time, so the Alliance was careful not recruit members and become a vanguard party [taped interview, 13.9.01]. The poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, an Alliance member who had been a keen reader of CLR James work since his youth in the Black Panthers in London, told me that he took from James the view that you don’t need a big organisation to have an impact, ‘a small group of solid people can make an impact’ [interview notes, 13.9.01]. Big Flame, on the other hand, did recruit members and established a democratically elected national committee. Simultaneously, it rejected and sometimes derided the Leninist model of party organisation. It attempted to overcome this seeming conundrum by positioning itself as one organised force within the various embryonic and actual mass movements of the 1970s.
I’d like to suggest that neither the Alliance nor Big Flame had a satisfactory answer to the problem of organisation, and nor did James. John La Rose hinted at problems of authoritarianism in James and in Race Today [interview, 13.9.01]. James’ contempt for what he called ‘the miserable self-torturing and psychoanalytic preoccupation’ (‘Two Young American Writers’ (1950) in James 1980 p.110) might be one reason why such issues could not be properly analysed within that group. On the other hand, the tendency of some of us in Big Flame to overdo the self-analysis might have been one reason for its organisational difficulties. There is a wider problem, however, in James formulation of the tasks of the organisation. In requiring us to both be completely guided by the workers’ struggle, and to provide information and culture derived from the organisation’s synthesis of history and theory, it is possible that contradictory demands are being placed on the revolutionaries. In practice, the gap between ‘provision’ and ‘imposition’ seems to be too narrow.
Despite the failure to resolve these problems, both at the level of the individual and of the organisation as a whole, James’ insight has been partially vindicated in the autonomist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and in the emerging anti-capitalist movement today. The mass movement created by Rock Against Racism between 1976 and 1981-2 is, perhaps, one of the most successful UK examples of Jamesian organisational precepts. Such a conclusion is deeply ironic, since RAR’s key organisers were either former or actual members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which, while it shared James’ analysis of the USSR as state capitalist, was fiercely critical of all the autonomous movements and those groupings, such as Big Flame and Race Today, which supported them. (It was David Widgery, an SWP member whose deep commitment to popular music and anti-racism lead him to initiate RAR, who denounced me as a Jamesian before I’d ever heard that there was such a group.) Rock Against Racism mobilised thousands of young people in events which brought together the visually and musically exciting combination of Punk Rock and Reggae, many of whose followers were united in their hostility to the growing nazi organisation in the UK. As Paul Gilroy wrote, RAR reflected its SWP roots in calling upon ‘black and white [to] unite and fight’, but ‘it deviated sharply from this traditional leftism in its insistence on the autonomous value of youth cultures, and on the radical potential of ‘rock’ and its offshoots’ (Gilroy 1987 p. 121). Thus, while SWP members would sell their publications and no doubt make efforts to recruit members at RAR’s night-time gigs and all-day events, these joyful, expressive, radical, heterogeneous assemblies defied the narrow strictures of party organising and worked much more at the level of symbol and spectacle – just like all revolutionary mobilisations – than at the level of dogmatic inculcation of leftist theory. If memory serves me correctly (Paul Gilroy still has my archive of RAR publications) CLR James did get referred to in Temporary Hoarding, RAR’s marvellously iconoclastic newspaper, but even if he didn’t, RAR’s decision to call its all day events ‘carnivals’ nicely evokes those moments in Caribbean carnivals at which deeply radical lyrics are sung, anti-establishment satires enacted, and even insurrectionary acts may take place, moments which, of course, James had celebrated.