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.
