Silences on the Suppression of Workers Self-Emancipation: Historical Problems with CLR James's Interpretation of V.I. Lenin

by Mathew Quest, Insurgent Notes, 2012

CLR James (1901–1989), native of Trinidad, was perhaps the most libertarian revolutionary socialist intellectual of both the Pan African and international labor movements. Best known as the author of the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, he also became famous for mentoring anti-colonial intellectuals and post-colonial statesmen such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Trinidad's Eric Williams. Far less understood was James's creative advocacy of direct democracy and workers self-management as found in his analysis of the Age of the CIO, Classical Athens, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Yet undermining our understanding of the contours and absence of popular self-management as a framework for James's visions of the African World and Third World is the lack of a proper assessment of how he understood V.I. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This selection from a forthcoming larger work will attempt to examine this dilemma by uncovering silences and dilemmas for how James understood Lenin.

Organisational Questions of the Russian Revolution

Rosa Luxemburg

by Rosa Luxemburg, 1904, LibCom

This text is a translation of two articles entitled 'Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy', written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1904.

The translation was made by the United Workers' Party in America and first published in Britain in Pamphlet form in 1935 by the Anti- Parliamentary Communist Federation. It was later republished by the Independent Labour Party in the 1960s and went under the title of "Leninism or Marxism?" This text was scanned from the ILP pamphlet. In the 1935 edition, several of the paragraphs were transposed. This version follows the 1935 edition, except for a few grammatical amendments.

The Working Class and Organisation

Cornelius Castoriadis, 1959, via LibCom
 
The organizations created by the working class for its liberation have become cogs in the system of exploitation. This is the brutal conclusion forced upon anyone who is prepared to face up to reality. One consequence is that today many are perplexed by an apparent dilemma. Can one become involved without organization? And if one cannot, how can one organize without following the path that has made traditional organizations the fiercest enemies of the aims they originally set out to achieve?