James, Cyril Lionel Robert

(1901–1989)

   A Marxist historian, novelist, critic, philosopher and lecturer, C.L.R. James, among many other accomplishments, wrote one of the finest history books of the 20th century, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). Born in Trinidad to a comfortable middle-class family, James developed an early interest in both literature and cricket as well as demonstrating outstanding academic ability. In the 1920s he was editor of Trinidad, a literary review, as well as contributing pieces to the London Saturday Review and writing a novel, Minty Alley. In 1932 he moved to Great Britain where he became a cricket correspondent for The Manchester Guardian and embraced revolutionary socialism. His lifelong passion for cricket found its most brilliant expression in his partly biographical book Beyond a Boundary (1963), in which he discussed not just cricket, but also its social context. He moved to the United States in 1939 from which he was expelled in 1953 for his political activities when Mc- Carthyism held sway. Back in Trinidad he became editor of the Trinidad People’s National Movement (PNM) journal The Nation in 1958, spent time as secretary of the West Indian Federal Labour Party, and in 1965 co-founded the radical Workers’ and Farmers’ Party. After 1966 he lived abroad in the United States and Britain. James’ revolutionary political outlook developed from Trotskyism to an independent libertarian Marxism. He opposed the bureaucratic centralism of Stalinism and any notions of a vanguard party or of statist socialism. Philosophically his Marxism was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and he sought always to emphasize the importance of culture and national identity while retaining the radical spirit of Marxism and not losing sight of the goal of universal human emancipation. He was seen as a forerunner of both Pan- Africanism and “new left” politics.