African Revolutionary Writers, Part 8
C L R James
C L R James was the author of “The Black Jacobins”, about the 1791
revolution that created what is regarded as the world’s first independent black
republic, in Haiti. James also wrote about the game of cricket, and the social
consequences of cricket. He was a great writer, and a revolutionary writer.
James was also, often in his
long life, a political actor, together with, among others, his
fellow-Trinidadian George Padmore in the 1930s in
London, then later with the Socialist Workers’ Party in the USA from 1938 to
1953, and then back in London and in his native Trinidad, West Indies. James
died a famous and a well-respected man, although he had annoyed plenty of
people along the way. But perhaps he was still under-appreciated as the great political
intellectual that he was.
The attached and linked
downloadable text given below is from C L R James’s 1948 work on G W F Hegel, called “Notes on
Dialectics”. It can serve in this series to show that the ability of the
revolutionary writers to challenge the bourgeoisie at the frontier of
philosophy is crucial, and that African revolutionaries have not been shy to do
so, as difficult as this task may be.
James says in the second
paragraph of this text that “The larger Logic is the most difficult book I
know” (meaning the book that is more often referred to as Hegel’s “Greater
Logic”).
Lenin wrote that “It is impossible completely to understand
Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having
thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.
Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!”
Naturally, this applies to Africans as well.
The last great hurdle of
Marxist study is Marx’s own master, Hegel. How well did James do in tackling
it? Raya Dunayevskaya, the former
secretary to Leon Trotsky, writing in 1972 when James was
still very much alive, did not think much of his work on Hegel. She accused him
of “skipping”!
But for us, as beginners,
James is a great help with Hegel, and is maybe just what we need. He gives us a
way in (and so does Andy Blunden with his “Hegel by Hypertext”). James himself
gives an adequate answer to Dunayevskaya in the very text that we are using
today: “I am not giving a summary of the Logic. I am not expanding it as a
doctrine. I am using it and showing how to begin to know it and use it.” This
is what we want: an opening (in French: ouverture).
African revolutionary theory
and practice cannot be separated from the world’s general revolutionary
history, neither chronologically, nor geographically, nor in relative
sophistication. Nor can it be said that one is derivative of the other. To say
so, is to display ignorance. Because is precisely when the African
revolutionary heritage is looked at, that this inseparability becomes apparent.
On MIA there is a C L R James Archive at http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/index.htm.
We have chosen, for the
purposes of this section, to take a sample of C L R James on Hegel. But in
terms of the African Revolutionary Writers Series as a whole we would equally
benefit from the following items that are in the MIA James Archive:
·
Black
Power, 1967
·
Reflections
on Pan-Africanism, 1973
These articles are to a large
extent reflections by James on the interplay of revolutionary literature with
the mass political movements that changed the African political landscape in
the 20th Century.
They can therefore be read as
reinforcing, or contrasting with, the remarks of Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar
Cabral, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and soon to come, Walter Rodney, that we have used for
this course. You may also take all of these articles as validating the
editorial choices and comments that have been used in the construction of this
course; or alternatively you may regard them as a good exposure of the
inadequacies of this course.
Either way, it is the
problematisation of all these overviews of the literature which can be
educational, especially if problematisation is followed by face-to-face or
e-mail dialogue and discussion.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: C L R James, The Hegelian Logic,
1948.
