Christian Hogsbjerg, "Beyond the Boundary of Leninism? C.L.R. James and 1956"

The late C.L.R. James (1901-1989) was one of the outstanding anti-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals of the twentieth century, yet he is absent from almost all of the historiography of the first ‘New Left’ in Britain. Given his birth and early life in a British colony (Trinidad), his experience of the working class movement in 1930s Britain, and the fact that he was living in London from 1953 to 1957, the current silence here arguably needs to be interrogated. How did James relate to the crisis of imperialism in 1956? How did James relate to the British ‘New Left’? Finally, the 1950s were years of high dissidence in James’s ‘dissident Marxism’, but there were also strong continuities with his earlier political thought which arguably deserve closer attention from socialist historians.

In 1953, C.L.R. James was deported back to Britain from the United States, then in the grip of McCarthyism. Yet this dangerous ‘Communist’, forced to leave his organisation, wife and young son behind, had been an opponent of Stalin’s rule since becoming a Marxist in the early 1930s. In 1937, as a leading figure in the British Trotskyist movement, he had published World Revolution; The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, 1918-1936 which described the counter-revolution that was taking place in Russia and outlined its consequences for the future. If James did not need Khruschev’s ‘secret speech’ in 1956 to learn about the horrors of Stalin’s Great Terror, he noted the speech did reveal something about the resistance of the Russian working class to ‘their’ State. In the early 1940s, together with Raya Dunayevskaya, James had helped develop an analysis of Russia as ‘state-capitalist’ – and if the revolts from below in the Eastern bloc were celebrated as confirmation of this theory, the Hungarian Revolution was seen as its complete vindication. Yet after his fifteen year absence in America, and his break with ‘orthodox Trotskyism’, James had been all but forgotten by the British Left, though he did gather a tiny ‘Marxist Group’ around him for a period. James’s 1950 work State Capitalism and World Revolution was republished and in 1958, he published Facing Reality, which championed Workers’ Councils and predicted imminent working class revolt, both East and West, autonomous of all established Parties and trade unions. Yet James’s apparent total failure to influence either former Communists or a new generation of radicals deserves some explanation – especially when compared to the success of say, Isaac Deutscher

There is much that could be said about 1956 and James’s relationship with the American Left, the French Left (where he had close links with Cornelius Castoriadis and the Socialisme Ou Barbarie group), etc., but this paper will focus on James and the British Left. It will therefore also briefly by necessity discuss the impact of the decline and fall of British colonial power. James had been a campaigner for West Indian Self-Government, and remained a significant figure in the international Pan-African movement and a resolute anti-imperialist. The victory now of many national liberation movements in the struggle for their independence – often led by people James knew as very good friends - saw James invited to celebrations in Ghana and then Trinidad in 1958. Yet James’s decision to stay and work for Eric Williams in his home country, while perhaps understandable, turned out to be a disasterous mistake politically. The author of The Black Jacobins (1938), a book which had so illuminated the Marxist theory of permanent revolution in its historical context with respect to the Caribbean, arguably failed in his attempt to face up to the present realities in their full complexity.

Finally, James developed his view of culture in general and with particular focus on imperial Britain during this period, writing his classic social history of cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963). It is in this sphere that he later perhaps found most resonance with the ‘New Left’, but to explore this in the detail it deserves goes beyond what is possible in this paper.

Overall, this paper will argue that James, with his creative and revolutionary politics of ‘socialism-from-below’, could and should have been one of the ‘thought leaders’ of the first British ‘New Left’, recognised as a figure as important as say, E.P. Thompson, or Raymond Williams. That he was not – and in Britain was indeed to remain in relative obscurity for another two decades - raises many questions, to which there are few, if any, easy answers.