From Louverture to Lenin: Aimé Césaire and the Problem of the Postcolonial State

From Louverture to Lenin: Aimé Césaire and the Problem of the Postcolonial State by bunnychow

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.

The Dual Power

by Vladimir Lenin, The Marxists Internet Archive

The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.

The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old “formulas”, for example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to be different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.