Christian Høgsbjerg

In April 1940, in a private letter written amid a fierce faction fight then engulfing US Trotskyism, Leon Trotsky would refer in passing to Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989), one of his leading comrades hailing originally from Trinidad, as a ‘Bohemian freelancer.’[580] No doubt such an appellation would have caused distress to James had he heard of it at the time, for his political and intellectual evolution had owed much to Trotsky’s Marxism ever since his reading of the first volume of History of the Russian Revolution in 1932. Yet such an appellation would, for many, both within and outside orthodox Trotskyism, seem to be vindicated by James’s subsequent development as a political thinker, which would see him leave the official Trotskyist movement in 1951. Indeed, many commentators have gone much further than Trotsky, and associated James’s mature political thought as much with anarchist thinking as with revolutionary Marxism. In 1981, Paul Berman declared he thought James had ultimately come up with ‘a version of socialism that wittingly or unwittingly incorporates elements of anarchism within a larger Marxist framework.’[581] In 1987, James D. Young, subsequently author of The World of C.L.R. James, asserted ‘James was always a dissident with a touch of anarchist disaffection.’[582] In 1989, after James’s passing, Robin Blackburn in an obituary declared him an ‘Anarcho-Bolshevik,’ while E.P. Thompson apparently went as far as to speak of James’s writing not just being ‘infused with a libertarian tendency’ but of James’s ‘instinctive, unarticulated anarchism.’[583]

Yet there is a problem here, since James’s anarchism was not simply ‘unarticulated.’ Rather, his writings explicitly display a casual and traditional Marxist dismissiveness of anarchism as irredeemably ‘petty-bourgeois’ in both theory and practice. In 1948, in Notes on Dialectics, James noted that ‘the Proudhonists and Bakuninists represented the petty-bourgeois capitalistic influences in the proletariat’ at the time of the First International which lost out to Marxism after ‘the mass upheaval of the [Paris] Commune defeated the Proudhonists’ because of ‘the decline of the petty-bourgeois individualism in capitalism as a whole.’ During the ‘proletarian uprising’ of the Spanish civil war, James in Notes on Dialectics noted that the ‘the petty-bourgeois anarchist and socialist bureaucracies’ allied themselves with Stalinism, which ‘delivered the proletariat to Franco,’ commenting that ‘the whole Popular Front Maneuver was part of the organic movement of the new petty bourgeoisie toward Stalinism.’[584] Moreover, as Berman admitted, in one of the only sustained and detailed discussions of James and anarchism in the existing scholarship, James:

… has always called himself, in spite of everything, a Leninist … as to anarchism, in all of his writings he condemns it forcefully. But I must say, James’s forcefulness on this point reminds me of nothing so much as Rosa Luxemburg’s similar forcefulness in the opening pages of The Mass Strike — an instance of protesting too much.[585]

The debate over James’s relative intellectual affinity with or distance from anarchism is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. Given the complexity of his political and intellectual evolution, which ranged widely over both time and space, it is certainly beyond the boundaries of what is possible in one chapter to even attempt such a feat. Rather this chapter will attempt to clarify an important aspect of this question through a concrete historical exploration first of James’s early relationship to anarchism and his growing openness to the idea that the Soviet Union under Stalin was ‘state-capitalist’ rather than socialist, and second, a briefer discussion of how his more mature political thought came to inspire and influence strands of ‘autonomist’ thinking during the 1950s and beyond. In making such an examination, however, it is perhaps worth stating that we will begin from the premise that James is best recognized and understood from the outset not as an anarchist thinker, but as a Marxist. Indeed, as I have suggested elsewhere, James was one of the twentieth century’s most original and outstanding contributors to what Hal Draper has termed the revolutionary democratic tradition of ‘socialism from below.’[586] For Paul Buhle, James’s original and authorized biographer, James was ‘one of the few truly creative Marxists from the 1930s to the 1950s, perhaps alone in his masterful synthesis of world history, philosophy, government, mass life and popular culture.’ Buhle thought any reference to James’s politics as ‘anarchist’ in ‘its treatment of party and state’ was ultimately a ‘sincere but mistaken’ position.[587]

The aim of this chapter however is to illuminate the evolution and intellectual influence of James’s creativity as a ‘dissident Marxist,’ to use the phrase of another biographer of James’s, David Renton, not to attempt to demonstrate in detail his intellectual distance from anarchism.[588] Indeed, anarchists helped shape the political thought and historical imagination of the young James, and his life and work in 1930s Britain in particular offers a fascinating glimpse into an almost forgotten subterranean world of far-Left politics, a story of heretics and renegades, from surrealist poets to Jewish printers and anarchist booksellers. The empirical focus of the article will therefore firstly examine how the seeds of James’s ‘dissident Marxism’ were arguably first sown in this early period, before making a brief outline of how it flowered during his US sojourn and then came to fertilize thinking on the European far-Left during the 1950s and subsequently. In the process it is hoped that some of the creative overlaps which do exist between the two traditions of Marxism and anarchism will be illuminated.

C.L.R. James’s early bohemianism

Rather than being an ‘instinctive anarchist,’ the early politics of James, such as they were while a young teacher, journalist and writer in the British Crown Colony of Trinidad were distinctly of the gradual, practical, statist, reformist variety. He was a democrat in a country without any meaningful democracy, a parliamentary socialist in a country without a meaningful parliament. James’s hero at the time, and the subject of his first book in 1932, was Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani, the former Commanding Officer of the British West Indies Regiment in the First World War and then leader of the mass social democratic nationalist Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA). Inspired in part also by Gandhi and Marcus Garvey, James became a campaigner for ‘West Indian self-government,’ but at this stage he was very far from the revolutionary Marxist and ‘class struggle Pan-Africanist’ he would become. If ‘[c]onservatism unprodded hardens into tyranny, radicalism unchecked degenerates into chaos,’ he wrote in one 1931 article.[589] If anything, James was a liberal humanist who aspired to live by the tenets of the Victorian thinker and cultural critic Matthew Arnold, but his attempt to sincerely follow Arnoldian ideals led him to first implicitly, and then explicitly, criticize British colonial rule. He joined up with other writers around two literary journals, Trinidad and then The Beacon, the latter of which the editor Albert Gomes recalled ‘became the focus of a movement of enlightenment spearheaded by Trinidad’s angry young men of the Thirties. It was the torpor, the smugness and the hypocrisy of the Trinidad of the period that provoked the response which produced both the magazine and the defiant bohemianism of the movement that was built around it.’[590]

In this early period, then, James seems to have been something of an ‘instinctive Bohemian freelancer.’[591] Arriving in Britain in 1932, witnessing the Lancashire cotton textile workers strike while up in Nelson, and then reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution amid the conditions of the Great Depression and the triumph of Hitler’s Nazis in 1933 led James to politically radicalize while working as the Manchester Guardian’s cricket correspondent. In 1934, James left the British Labor Party which he had joined in solidarity with Cipriani’s TWA and joined the tiny British Trotskyist movement, in particular the section of it inside the Independent Labor Party (ILP), the Marxist Group.

James orientated to Trotskyism largely through his own critical independent reading, but it was while searching out Marxist classics in London in 1933 that he happened to visit a bookshop on 68 Red Lion Street, Lahr, owned by an anarchist from Germany, Charlie Lahr. Lahr was, according to David Goodway, ‘very probably the last’ in the line, ‘stretching back to the late eighteenth-century,’ of ‘great London radical booksellerscum-publishers.’[592] During the 1930s, Jonathan Rose argues, his bookshop was ‘a mecca for down and out Nietzscheans and scruffy poets.’[593] James remembers Lahr soon ‘got interested in what I was doing and would put aside a book or pamphlet for me he knew or thought would interest me.’[594] The two soon formed what James describes as ‘a curious partnership,’ with Lahr helping James become acquainted with knowledge of the reactionary nature of individual Labor leaders and British trade union bureaucrats. In particular, James learned much about contemporary Germany and Hitler’s rise to power.[595]

C.L.R. James’s reading of Peter Kropotkin

One might surmise that it was Lahr who also recommended James read the great anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s masterful The Great French Revolution (1909), a pioneering volume of ‘history-from-below’ that was admired by Lenin and Trotsky, as part of his ongoing research on the Haitian Revolution.[596] In 1938, in his majestic classic The Black Jacobins, James praised Kropotkin for having a ‘more instinctive understanding of revolution than any well-known book’ on the subject of the French Revolution.[597] For Kropotkin, the ‘true fount and origin of the Revolution’ was ‘the people’s readiness to take up arms,’ noting that it was this that previous ‘historians of the Revolution had not done justice — the justice owed to it by the history of civilization.’[598] In particular, Kropotkin’s stress on the revolutionary violence of the peasantry in The Great French Revolution seems to have influenced James when he came to understanding and analyzing the liberation struggle of the enslaved black masses of French colonial Saint Domingue. For Kropotkin, ‘the insurrection of the peasants for the abolition of the feudal rights and the recovery of the communal lands’ in the summer of 1789 was, ‘the very essence, the foundation of the great Revolution’ and ‘the great rising of the rural districts,’ the jacquerie, which ‘lasted five years, was what enabled the Revolution to accomplish the immense work of demolition which we owe to it.’[599]

When James described the open revolt and indeed insurrection on the North Plain in Saint Domingue in August 1791, when the enslaved blacks ‘neglected and ignored by all the politicians of every brand and persuasion’ had ‘organized on their own and struck for freedom at last’ he effectively brought out the way in which their uprising resembled the contemporaneous struggles of the French peasantry:

The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors … the slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie … they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.[600]

By 1803, after 12 years of fighting for national independence and social liberation, James noted that the black rebel slave army had been forced to burn Saint Domingue ‘flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert’:

Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labor, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.[601]

If other writers, above all Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution, had helped James understand the way in which the enslaved blacks acted like a ‘proto-proletariat’ during the Haitian Revolution, then Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution must have been critical to helping James understand the way in which the rebellious slave army acted like a ‘proto-peasantry.’[602]

Another way in which James seems to have been influenced by Kropotkin was through his discussion of events in revolutionary France itself, particularly the ‘Communism’ in Paris between March 1793 and July 1794.[603] ‘In the streets of Paris, Jacques Varlet and Roux were preaching Communism, not in production but in distribution, a natural reaction to the profiteering of the new bourgeoisie,’ a comment that essentially summarizes Kropotkin’s more detailed discussion of ‘the Communist movement’ in The Great French Revolution.[604] It is possible that James’s admiration and respect for Kropotkin’s great work may have encouraged later assessments of his ‘instinctive’ anarchism. In 1963, in the revised edition of The Black Jacobins, James would certainly continue to praise ‘Kropotkin’s brief history of over fifty years ago’ as ‘the best general book in English [on the French Revolution] … Kropotkin thought the Revolution was a wonderful event and was neither afraid nor embarrassed to say so.’[605]

C.L.R. James, anarchists in Britain and the Spanish civil war

While James’s sense of fair play and critical thinking abilities led him to read widely and absorb a lot of different ideas, his political thought was also profoundly affected by the whole environment of far-Left politics in 1930s Britain, and the eclectic milieu around the ILP, with its various traditions including Council Communism and diverse other forms of non-Leninist socialisms.[606] Moreover, fast emerging as the intellectual driving force of British Trotskyism during the 1930s, James was on reasonably good terms with one of the leading anarchists in Britain during this period, as well as anti-Stalinist communist activists like the veteran Guy Aldred who he met in Glasgow.[607] Almost by accident, James had crossed paths with Vernon Richards, a young anarchist from Italy who was editor of Spain and the World, the main British anarchist paper of the day (previously and subsequently called Freedom) which Richards had launched in London in late 1936 in solidarity with the eruption of the Spanish revolution while only 21 years old.[608] As the editor of the Trotskyist journal Fight (launched in October 1936), James met Richards on one of his regular visits to the printers at Narod Press in 129/131 Bedford Street, Whitechapel, which was run by a team of Jewish apprentices under ‘Papa Naroditsky’ and his three sons. As Richards remembered, ‘apart from the boys themselves … one had the opportunity to meet other editors supervising their journals,’ including ‘the gentle-speaking West Indian marxist C.L.R James who was producing his Fight! No punch-ups, political or otherwise.’[609]

James would on occasion rally to the side of the British anarchist movement against the ILP and Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in Fight. For example, in November 1937, James took issue with leading ILP figure Fenner Brockway in Fight for forbidding ILP speakers to stand on the anarchist platform during the May Day celebrations in Britain that year in order to appease the CPGB In the context of the Spanish civil war then raging, James noted that in Spain ‘the ILP, the Trotskyists and the Anarchists, are in their different ways, on one side of the barricade and the Stalinists on the other’; reflecting on the British context he asked rhetorically of Brockway, ‘will he propose [a] united front, actively in defense of the Spanish Revolution, between the ILP, the Trotskyists and the Anarchists?’[610]

Richards’s publication Spain and the World suggests something about the wider connection between anarchists and the tiny Pan-Africanist movement in Britain in the 1930s. In May 1937, James with his compatriot and boyhood friend, George Padmore, launched the International African Service Bureau (IASB) in London, and the title at least of the IASB’s 1937 newsletter, Africa and the World, seems a little inspired by Spain and the World. The presence among the patrons of the IASB of the ILP affiliated socialist free-thinker F.A. Ridley, who called for an ‘anarcho-marxist alliance’ in 1938, is perhaps significant.[611] There are tantalizing glimpses in Ethel Mannin’s satirical 1945 novel Comrade O’ Comrade of one key Pan-Africanist in Britain during this period, the Barbadian veteran anti-colonialist and organizer of the Colonial Seamen’s Association — Chris Braithwaite — better known under his pseudonym ‘Chris Jones’ — speaking alongside Emma Goldman on meetings on the Spanish revolution in London during this period.[612] Such contacts and meetings meant George Padmore would later recall the period ‘immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War’ as ‘one of the most stimulating and constructive in the history of Pan-Africanism,’ noting that black intellectuals made what he called a ‘detailed and systematic study of European political theories and systems’ including anarchism.[613]

Together with the Spanish Civil War the Moscow Trials were of importance in explaining James’s later break with orthodox Trotskyism. In exposing the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism, both events led James to question Trotsky’s characterization of the Soviet Union. The same events were also to be critical for the political evolution of James’s key intellectual collaborator during the 1940s, Raya Dunayevskaya. As Peter Hudis has suggested, the Spanish civil war in particular:

… presented revolutionaries with what Dunayevskaya was later to call the ‘absolute contradiction’ of our age — the emergence of counter-revolution from within revolution. It was not only the Stalinists, however, whose role was compromised by these events. For the various anti-Stalinist tendencies, be they Trotskyist, anarchist or independent, failed to successfully combat the new phenomenon of counter-revolution emerging from within revolution.[614]

In response to the apparent intellectual and political failure to have fully prepared for the new reality of Stalinist counter-revolutionary terror in Spain, Dunayevskaya, Trotsky’s Russian language secretary from 1937–1938, later recalled how she first became critical of the limitations of Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ during this tumultuous period. ‘Out of the Spanish Civil War there emerged a new kind of revolutionary who posed questions, not only against Stalinism, but against Trotskyism, indeed against all established Marxisms.’[615]

James similarly began to ask questions of Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed, a work which Trotsky had completed in June 1936 and so before the Moscow Trials and the Stalinist suppression of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM)and anarchists in Barcelona. Indeed, by the time James wrote his pioneering anti-Stalinist Marxist history of ‘the rise and fall of the Communist International,’ World Revolution, published in April 1937, while still formally accepting Trotsky’s analysis he was already showing an openness to those arguing that the Soviet Union had become a state capitalist society. According to Special Branch operatives, when James spoke in London in defense of Trotsky after the first Moscow Trial on 9 September 1936, ‘he compared the conditions of the British and Russian workers, adding that a form of capitalism was creeping into the Soviet State.’[616] In the course of researching World Revolution, James read the works of a number of people who felt the Soviet Union was now state-capitalist including two former leading German Communists, Arthur Rosenberg and Karl Korsch — the latter James apparently met in 1936.[617]

Another influence was the former leading French Communist Boris Souvarine. Born Boris Liefschitz in 1885 in Kiev, Souvarine, who clearly had some sort of anarchist sympathies early on as he took his name from the Russian anarchist bomb-planter in Emile Zola’s Germinal – had been a founding member of the French Communist Party. Having known Trotsky since meeting him in Paris during the Great War, Souvarine had spoken bravely against Stalin in Moscow. Though Trotsky had high hopes of Souvarine forming a viable French Trotskyist movement, since 1929, Souvarine had broken off good relations with Trotsky, attacking Leninism and describing the Soviet Union as ‘state capitalist.’ Souvarine’s 1935 biography of Stalin maintained that ‘the Federation of Socialist Soviet Republics, the very name a fourfold contradiction of the reality, has long ago ceased to exist,’ and ‘Soviet state capitalism,’ ‘so-called Soviet society’ rests ‘on its own method of exploitation of man by man.’[618] James seems to have met up with Souvarine in Paris in 1938 and would translate his Staline into English in 1939, generously describing it as ‘a book with an anarchist bias against the dictatorship of the proletariat but irreproachably documented, very fair, and full of insight.’[619]

Indeed, while James himself in World Revolution remained loyal to Trotsky’s characterization of the Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed, he also presented much evidence which suggested that Stalinist Russia could not in any way be described as a ‘workers’ state,’ even a ‘degenerated’ one. As James noted, ‘the fiction of workers’ control, after 20 years of the revolution, is dead. But the bureaucracy fears the proletariat. It knows, none better, the temper of the people it so mercilessly cheats and exploits.’[620] For Trotsky, the bureaucracy was a brutal oppressor, but was not actually exploiting the working class.[621] Yet for James, the first Five Year Plan meant that ‘the remnants of workers control were wiped away.’[622] ‘The Russian proletariat, after its Herculean efforts, seems to have exchanged one set of masters for another, while the very basis of the proletarian state is being undermined beneath its feet.’ James declared that the methods of Stalin’s industrialization drive seemed to be just ‘discovering what the capitalists knew hundreds of years ago … where will all this end?’[623]

Such ideas were in the air on the far-Left during the 1930s, and so James’s criticisms, of the idea that state ownership of the means of production necessarily meant socialism, were not unique.[624] After writing World Revolution, for example, James would in 1937 write an introduction for Red Spanish Notebook, an eyewitness account of revolutionary Spain through the eyes of two surrealist poets who had gone to fight for the POUM, Mary Low and the Cuban Trotskyist Juan Brea. Brea had concluded by pondering the motives of the Soviet Union with respect to revolutionary Spain, noting ‘let us suppose that Russia is no longer a proletarian state but is making her first steps towards capitalism.’[625] One other witness to Stalinist counter-revolution in Spain was George Orwell, who seems to have met up with James in the summer of 1937 after returning to Britain and who once described World Revolution as a ‘very able book.’ In his 1938 classic work of revolutionary journalism, Homage to Catalonia, Orwell described the ‘socialism in one country’ being built in Russia by Stalin as little more than ‘a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact.’[626]

On 3 September 1938, at the founding conference of the Fourth International, James intervened forcefully in the debate challenging the orthodox position that Trotskyists should call for the defense of the USSR in case of war.[627] A month later, James would travel to North America, meet Trotsky himself for discussions on the strategy and tactics of the black liberation struggle in the USA, and steadily establish himself as an original and creative thinker inside the US Trotskyist movement during the 1940s.[628] Trotsky’s 1940 comment on James as a ‘bohemian freelancer’ therefore has to be seen in the context of the split in US Trotskyism, and the position James took in this split which saw him side against Trotsky and with the minority around Max Shachtman — rather than as a comment by Trotsky on James’s developing ideas on the class nature of the Soviet Union. Indeed, James’s subsequent embrace and development of the theory of state capitalism after Trotsky’s death would steadily enable him and others to help clarify Marx’s meaning of socialism itself as the self-emancipation of the working class anew, where state ownership of the means of production was not recognized as any kind of end in itself, to be equated with ‘socialism,’ but merely a means for achieving the end goal of the emancipation of the working class through the creation of what Lenin in The State and Revolution had called the ‘Commune-State.’[629]

James’s reading of Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution and fraternal relationship with such anarchists as Charlie Lahr and Vernon Richards in Britain should not then detract from the fundamental importance of the towering revolutionary figure of Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism for James during the 1930s in shaping and informing his entire world view. Any criticisms of Trotskyism that James had that may have been informed in part by anarchism were not going to lead him to fundamentally break with Marxist ways of thinking. After exploring some of the ways in which James politically evolved from parliamentary socialism to a politics based on the revolutionary democratic tradition of ‘socialism from below’ during the 1930s, we shall now examine how his later intellectual development in the USA from 1938 to 1953 would come to influence one currently influential strand of autonomist political theory.

The evolution of C.L.R. James’s mature Marxism

In Beyond a Boundary, James’s 1963 semi-autobiographical classic cultural history of cricket in its colonial context, he had this to say when he looked back at his political evolution after arriving from Trinidad to encounter a Europe devastated by the First World War and the economic slump and now witnessing the alarming rise of fascism:

Fiction-writing drained out of me and was replaced by politics. I became a Marxist, a Trotskyist. I published large books and small articles on these and other kindred subjects. I wrote and spoke. Like many others, I expected war, and during or after the war social revolution. In 1938 a lecture tour took me to the United States and I stayed there 15 years. The war came. It did not bring soviets and proletarian power. Instead the bureaucratic-totalitarian monster grew stronger and spread. As early as 1941 I had begun to question the premises of Trotskyism. It took nearly a decade of incessant labor and collaboration to break with it and reorganize my marxist ideas to cope with the postwar world. That was a matter of doctrine, of history, of economics and politics.[630]

To attempt to do justice to this ‘reorganization’ of Marxism by James is impossible here, but a few words on its most crucial aspects is essential. Using his Trotskyist pseudonym, ‘J.R. Johnson,’ James, together with Raya Dunayevskaya, or ‘Freddie Forest’ as she was known, and Grace Lee Boggs and others, became known collectively as the ‘Johnson-Forest Tendency’ inside 1940s US Trotskyism. It is noteworthy that during the Second World War and its aftermath they drew inspiration from Lenin’s attempts to come to terms with the disaster that had engulfed the working-class movement during the First World War. So for example, just as the exiled Lenin in 1914 turned in despair to the library and a serious study of Hegelian dialectics to produce his ‘Philosophical Notebooks,’ so James, Dunayevskaya and Lee in their search to find a philosophy of revolution now also spent hours engaged in serious study of the German philosopher. One product of this was James’s 1948 work Notes on Dialectics (subtitled Hegel, Marx, Lenin).

Though a systematic exposition is impossible, it is vital to have some sense of how the Johnson-Forest Tendency attempted to, in James’s own words ‘work through Leninism’ in order to try to come to terms with the crisis that had overcome not just Marxism but the wider working-class movement in a period dominated by Stalinism and Fascism.[631] This ‘working through’ Leninism necessitated a break with the theory and practice of ‘orthodox Trotskyism,’ a movement James had been committed to since becoming an organized revolutionary in 1934. However, this break was conceived as a conscious attempt to not only return to classical Marxism as understood by Marx and Lenin — but also to develop that tradition so it fitted with the new realities of the postwar world. It was to make, as James put it grandly, ‘our own leap from the heights of Leninism.’[632]

For Trotsky the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 represented the solution to what he called the historic ‘crisis of revolutionary leadership’ gripping the official political organizations of the working-class movement. Against this perspective, the Johnson-Forest Tendency during the 1940s felt the critical crisis of the age was instead what they called the ‘crisis of the self-mobilization of the proletariat,’ and so argued for a greater stress and focus on what James called ‘free creative activity’ and ‘disciplined spontaneity,’ the self-activity of the working class itself autonomous of official political parties and trade union bureaucracies.[633]

Yet James, writing while still a member of the official Trotskyist movement, still felt in an important sense that the struggle to build a Fourth International amid a period of world-historic defeats for the international working-class movement had at least preserved the honor and the tradition of revolutionary communism associated with Marx and Lenin. The new-found stress on the self-activity of the working class in the work of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, James insisted, had not come from anarchism. As James put it in Notes on Dialectics,

… we have arrived, are arriving at Marxist ideas for our time out of Trotskyism. We would not come out of Stalinism, or social democracy, or anarchism. Despite every blunder, and we have not spared them, Trotskyism was and remains in the truly dialectical sense, the only theoretical revolutionary current since Leninism … we came from there and could have only come from there.[634]

However, James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s ‘Marxist ideas for our time,’ developed inside 1940s US Trotskyism, would ultimately come to influence the origins of a new and different current of political thought to either anarchism or Marxism in its classical forms — autonomism. As Steve Wright suggests, ‘the core premises of autonomist Marxism were first developed in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s’ when militants first sought to confront Marx’s Capital with ‘the real study of a real factory’ in 1960s Italy, beginning with Romano Alquati’s pioneering 1961 ‘Report of the new forces’ at F.I.A.T. However, as Wright and others including Harry Cleaver have noted, the intellectual origins of such a research project and ‘autonomist Marxism’ in general lie outside Italy and date back to before the 1960s.[635] During the momentous year of 1956 and for two years subsequently, for example, Daniel Mothé, a member of the French revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie around Cornelius Castoriadis and a milling machine operator at the Renault Billancourt vehicle factory, kept a diary. This was subsequently published as Journal d’un Ouvrier, 1956–58, and translated into Italian in 1960. Even earlier, in 1954, Danilo Montaldi, a ‘dissident Marxist’ sociologist had published in Battaglia Communista a translation of a 1947 work titled The American Worker by a member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency Phil Singer (who used the pseudonym Paul Romano). This work had first been translated into French by the comrades of Socialisme ou Barbarie who published it in their journal in parts from 1949 onwards, before being translated from the French by Montaldi.[636] It therefore seems important to explore in detail the circumstances in which Phil Singer’s highly influential work came to be written.

C.L.R. James and the making of The American Worker

Phil Singer was an American car worker at a General Motors plant who in his late twenties had kept a diary, which, with the help of Grace Lee Boggs, he had written up in order to portray ‘Life in the Factory,’ ‘what the workers are thinking and doing while actually at work on the bench or on the line.’[637] For Singer, most significant was his recording of not simply the degrading experience of factory work but also the everyday attempts by workers to resist at the point of production through struggles for dignity and a meaningful existence:

This pamphlet is directed to the rank and file worker and its intention is to express those innermost thoughts which the worker rarely talks about even to his fellow workers. In keeping a diary, so to speak, of the day to day reactions to factory life, I hoped to uncover the reasons for the workers deep dissatisfaction which has reached a peak in recent years and has expressed itself in the latest strikes and spontaneous walkouts.[638]

The contribution made by Singer himself to the making of The American Worker, was then clearly profound — yet it would be mistaken to assume this was not essentially also a ‘collective work’ of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, with James himself playing a particularly critical role. As Grace Lee Boggs, who under her pseudonym Ria Stone wrote a lengthy piece of commentary titled ‘The Reconstruction of Society’ as an afterword to Singer’s commentary in The American Worker, recalled:

… because CLR could not be publicly active, we acted as his transmission belt to the larger American community … one of CLR’s great gifts was that he could detect the special abilities and interests of individuals and encourage them to use these to enrich the movement and at the same time enlarge themselves…. Phil Singer, a young GM worker, was always talking about the frustrations of the rank-and-file worker in the plant. CLR proposed that he keep a journal of his experiences. These were subsequently published in The American Worker.[639]

In a sense this does not sound that original, as attempting to understand society from the standpoint of working-class experience at the point of production had, ever since Marx’s own Workers’ Inquiry of 1880 if not before, at least been nominally at the heart of classical Marxism. A few months after launching Pravda in 1912, for example, Lenin noted that ‘the chronicle of workers’ life is only just beginning to develop into a permanent feature of Pravda … the workers’ newspaper is a workers’ forum. Before the whole of Russia the workers should raise here, one after another, the various questions of workers’ life in general and of working-class democracy in particular.’ Though the repressive conditions of Czarist Russia meant Lenin’s Pravda only lasted for a couple of years at a time of rising class struggle (1912–1914), one study of the paper by Tony Cliff noted that over 11,000 letters and items of correspondence from workers were published in a single year, or about 35 items per day.[640] As James had noted in his discussion of ‘Lenin and Socialism’ back in 1937 in World Revolution:

The creative capacity of the masses — he [Lenin] believed in it as no other leader of the workers ever did…. The Soviet system based on the masses in the factories was to organize this creativeness not only for purpose of government but also for production, linking the two closer and closer together until ultimately the all-embracing nature of production by the whole of society rendered the State superfluous.[641]

Indeed, the British Trotskyist journal Fight, which James had edited in the 1930s, had carried a regular series titled ‘On the Job’ in 1937, featuring, for example, ‘The Building Worker’ by a young member of the Marxist Group who was a carpenter, Arthur Alexander Ballard, and then ‘From the Engineer’s Bench’ by a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.[642] Trotsky himself in 1939 famously criticized the US Trotskyist paper, Socialist Appeal, on the grounds that ‘[it] is a paper for the workers’ and not a workers’ paper…. You do not hear at all how the workers live, fight, clash with the police or drink whiskey … the task is not to make a paper through the joint forces of a skilled editorial board but to encourage the workers to speak for themselves.’[643]

Yet if James’s encouraging of a fellow member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency to keep a diary detailing his experience at work was then not so original — the group’s distinctive perspectives, particularly that of a shift towards ‘state capitalism’ from the 1930s on not simply in Russia but internationally, profoundly shaped what became The American Worker. As the leaders of the Johnson-Forest Tendency put it themselves in 1947:

… the Russian question is only a part of the world crisis. The decisive stage of economic development is statification of production. Statification of production is not a phrase or a description. It marks the capitulation of anarchic capitalist society to the planning of the invading socialist society. The planning, however, torn by class contradictions, repeats the fundamental features of capitalist antagonisms in their most barbarous form. Statification carries in itself the most profound social awareness of the proletariat, and its social structure repeatedly propels the proletariat on the road to the complete transformation of society…. The barbarism of capitalism was concretely demonstrated in Russia. But it was the American proletariat which concretized for us the necessarily abstract conception of the creative power of the proletariat in industry as a force for the social regeneration of society. The work of American industrial psychologists and the observations of proletarian comrades whom we had developed opened this door to us. The Johnson-Forest Tendency will soon publish a pamphlet by Phil Romano and Ria Stone which will deal fully with this question from both a practical and a theoretical point of view.[644]

The American Worker then was about reaffirming and re-emphasizing the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s ‘conception of the creative power of the proletariat in industry as a force for the social regeneration of society’ at a time when ‘socialism’ had come to be seen merely as state ownership without any accompanying revolutionary democracy or workers’ control.[645] In particular, James’s individual contribution to developing this conception should be noted. As the American Trotskyist Stanley Weir recalled:

… James was the first and only leader in the entire Trotskyist movement, from which I heard discussion of the special form of workers’ control which develops in every workplace naturally and informally. He knew of the existence of informal cultures and that they were the basis from which to broach the entire question of workers’ control … For me, he introduced the ideas which demonstrated the value of what is done socially from below on the job to get out production and to survive.[646]

C.L.R. James, The American Worker and Italian workerism

We can now tentatively assess the impact of the Johnson-Forest Tendency as expressed through The American Worker on Italian workerism, something which as we have seen was possible thanks in no small part to the translations of Danilo Montaldi.[647] As Montaldi noted, The American Worker expressed:

… with great force and profundity, the idea — practically forgotten by the marxist movement after the publication of Capital Volume1 — that before being the adherent of a party, a militant of the revolution or the subject of a future socialist power, the worker is a being who lives above all in capitalist production and the factory; and that it is in production that the revolt against exploitation, the capacity to construct a superior type of society, along with class solidarity of other workers and hatred for exploitation and exploiters — both the classic bosses of yesterday and the impersonal bureaucrats of today and tomorrow — are formed.[648]

Moreover, for those on the anti-Stalinist far-Left in France and especially Italy during the 1950s, The American Worker was even more remarkable given the anti-Americanism of the Communist-dominated official Left in the context of the Cold War. As Ferrucio Gambino, a sociologist from the University of Padua and co-founder of two 1960s Italian workerist journals Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks), and Potere Operaio (Workers Power) recalls, after the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Russian tanks:

… tiny groups and individuals in Southern Europe discovered and read ‘the American comrades’ — two words that at long last it was possible to put together again — ‘the American comrades’ who contributed to Socialisme ou Barbarie … The conditions of the working class looked strikingly similar throughout the so-called First World — and, we argued at that time, it could not be dissimilar in the Second World. State capitalism was a living category whereby we could relate in solidarity to the people who were bearing the brunt of the opposition to ‘actuated socialism.’[649]

In the 1960s, Gambino and another historian of US labor, Bruno Cartosio from Milan — would eventually establish relations with James and his loyal disciple Martin Glaberman, and the publishing of James himself into Italian began with The Black Jacobins in 1968 — and continued subsequently.[650] Links were established with the Jamesians in Detroit at the heart of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers while the translation of other US Jamesians followed in the 1970s.[651] As Cleaver noted in 1979, ‘works by C.L.R. James, James Boggs, George Rawick, and Martin Glaberman, among others, have been translated into Italian and probably received wider circulation and discussion in Italy than in the United States.’[652]

Overall, though it has not been possible here to examine James’s influence on Italian autonomism more fully, it might still be possible to draw a few conclusions. In one sense it is a pity that after helping to provide a critical focus on the self-activity of the working class at the point of production, a stress on the possibilities which flowed from wildcat strikes and other unofficial industrial action, that more of James’s writings were not translated into Italian during the 1960s. It is possible that they might have ensured less of a subsequent retreat from revolutionary Marxism towards an ultimately elitist substitution of the actions of a minority for the mass action of the working class among many in the Italian autonomists. From joining the Trotskyist movement in 1934 up until his death in 1989, James — unlike say some of the current ‘thought leaders’ of autonomism such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — never lost sight of either the central importance of working-class struggle or the need for some sort of revolutionary Marxist organization.[653] Moreover, as Chamsy El-Ojeili has noted, compared to the majority of early Italian workerist theorists who failed adequately to consider the lives of workers outside of the purely economic battles at the point of production, James was more ‘attentive to the wider cultural aspects of such an investigation of proletarian working life.’[654]

However, that said, James’s own reification of spontaneity, and own gradual abandonment of the rich classical Bolshevik legacy of strategy and tactics, after his 1951 break with official Trotskyism, were not without consequences of their own. They meant that his subsequent groups of supporters, like even the best elements of the Italian autonomists, were unable to ever really satisfactorily develop a new form of revolutionary organization able to adequately relate to the key insight of ‘working class autonomy.’[655] It is possible that this was because that insight in itself, without an adequate material understanding of the wider economic and political context outside the factory, and the wider, uneven consciousness among the working class where forms of reformist politics are inevitably almost always dominant — even inside the most militant factory itself — can only reveal so much. Yet though James, the ‘bohemian freelancer,’ ultimately failed to make his great leap forward ‘from the heights of Leninism,’ his creative, revolutionary and democratic ‘dissident Marxism’ nonetheless deserves critical appreciation and study by anti-capitalist scholars and activists today.

Conclusion

When one looks back over the last 20 years to those men who are most far sighted, who first began to tease out the muddle of ideology in our times, who were at the same time Marxist with a hard theoretical basis, and close students of society, humanists with a tremendous response to and understanding of human culture, Comrade James is one of the first one thinks of.

So spoke E.P. Thompson in 1967 at a ‘National Conference on Workers Control and Industrial Democracy,’ after ‘Comrade James’ had introduced himself to the gathered assembly at Coventry in a contribution from the floor.[656] Of course, Thompson could arguably have gone further and dated James’s contribution to ‘teasing out the muddle of ideology in our times’ back not just 20 years to 1947 but 30 years, from the publication in 1937 of James’s history of the ‘rise and fall of the Communist International,’ World Revolution, a pioneering critique of Stalin’s ideology of ‘Socialism in One Country’ and its consequences for the international working-class movement.

Nevertheless, Thompson’s eloquent 1967 tribute and acknowledgment of the ‘hard theoretical basis’ of James’s Marxism arguably serves as a more accurate remembrance than his later apparent suggestion of James’s ‘instinctive, unarticulated anarchism.’ This chapter has tried to demonstrate not simply why this is the case but also some of the complexities involved in any discussion of James’s relationship to anarchism. While acknowledging that James’s reading of Kropotkin and meeting individual anarchists made an impact on his early political thought, the ‘Marxism for our time’ developed by James and his co-thinkers in the Johnson-Forest Tendency during the 1940s was fundamentally shaped within the theoretical parameters of Marxism in order to overcome the limitations of orthodox Trotskyism in facing up to the new realities of the postwar world. The Johnson-Forest Tendency’s stress on the changing nature of the worker’s experience of exploitation and revolt at the point of capitalist production both anticipated and, through ‘the observations of proletarian comrades’ such as Phil Singer in The American Worker, also helped shape the ideas driving Italian workerism in the 1960s and 1970s.

James’s distinctive stress on the ‘free creative activity’ and ‘disciplined spontaneity’ of the working class has often led commentators to detect an anarchist bent to his political thought. Paul Berman felt that ‘anyone who has read Dolgoff’s or Lehning’s editions of Bakunin’s writings will recognize a Bakuninist resonance to James’s anti-state proletarianism,’ which was in full flow in for example the 1958 co-written work Facing Reality.[657] A Bakuninist resonance to James’s mature political thought cannot be discounted, and here it is worth recalling that James himself in 1948 regarded Bakunin as ‘the anarchist who believes in the spontaneous uprising of all the people to establish socialism forthwith.’[658] However, despite the assertions of E. San Juan Jr., who has suggested that ‘James’s belief in permanent world revolution ultimately committed him to a radical-popular democracy almost anarchic and utopian in temper and motivation,’ James’s vision of revolutionary socialism was always shaped more by Marxism than any strand of anarchic or utopian thinking.[659] Whatever the contribution of the early anarchist thinkers to the struggle for socialism, for James, as he put it in Notes on Dialectics, what was of critical importance was that Marx ‘sees further’ than the likes of Bakunin, ‘an aristocrat,’ and Proudhon, ‘the petty-bourgeois economist of a capitalism controlled by the state.’ ‘He [Marx] settles down to a patient systematic preparation for the fusion of the economic and political struggles of the workers, the integration of day-to-day and revolutionary struggles. He will give the formless labor movement form.’[660]

Finally, E.P. Thompson’s thoughts on the great revolutionary socialist William Morris may make for one fitting conclusion, for they are words that seem also applicable to C.L.R. James, perhaps the ‘William Morris of the Twentieth Century.’ As Thompson noted, ‘we have to make up our minds about William Morris’:

Either he was an eccentric, isolated figure, personally admirable, but whose major thought was wrong or irrelevant and long left behind by events. This could be so … on the other hand, it may be that Morris was a major intellectual figure [who] may be assimilated to Marxism only in the course of a process of self-criticism and re-ordering within Marxism itself.[661]

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to David Goodway for some of the material quoted in this chapter, while I would also like to thank Ian Birchall, David Howell and the three anonymous reviewers of this piece in draft for their constructive, critical comments.