"When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.” C.L.R. James at home, Brixton, 11 January 1988
It has become abundantly clear to me over the course of this semester that two books in particular loom large over the development of the various movements determined to write history “from below”: W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins (1938). That these two works, both written by independent black Marxists in the 1930s, share a common political perspective is not a coincidence but a fundamental premise of their pioneering efforts. Both DuBois and James shared a commitment to documenting and analyzing the efforts of oppressed people to emancipate themselves and thus change all of society in revolutionary ways. Because our colleague over at A Nation of Abolitionists is doing such a fine job of expounding on the towering influence of DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, I thought I would take some time this week to take a look at Comrade James and The Black Jacobins.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989) was born on the Carribean island of Trinidad, and was an instrumental figure in the Pan-Africanist and socialist movements of his era. The Black Jacobins is his best-known work, and it could be described as a transnational history of the Haitian Revolution and its intimate connection with the contemporaneous French Revolution that both inspired it and made it possible. Writing in London in 1938, James had a clear purpose in mind: to “[make] the forward step of resurrecting not the decadence but the grandeur of the West Indian people…but as is obvious all through the book and particularly in the last pages, it is Africa and African emancipation that [I have] in mind” (James 402). James did not view emancipation as something that was legislated by “the perorating Liberals in France nor the ‘philanthropy plus five per cent’ hypocrites in the British Houses of Parliament” (James 123), but rather as something that was seized by an international proletarian alliance taking direct action toward liberation.
There are several important themes of the book I would like to stress as key to the thought of C.L.R. James:
1) A social revolution is made possible chiefly through the existence of severe divisions amongst ruling elites.
“The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree how to save the situation. It is this division which opens the breach, and the ruling classes will continue to fight with each other, just so long as they do not fear the mass seizure of power” (James 123).
This important point stands in contradiction to a common understanding of revolution as being the product of a mass campaign against a coherent and unified oppressive order. The advantage of this approach is that it demonstrates how a conflict that appears rather ordinary, or at least “nonrevolutionary,” can lead to a substantial opportunity for sweeping social change. This line of reasoning has major bearing on the interpretation of the American Civil War as revolution that I have been exploring: how the sectional conflict was transformed into a social revolution by the actions of African-Americans determined to take their own freedom. Throughout the book James constantly points out distinctions between contending classes: poor whites and rich whites on the island of San Domingo, French settlers and Frenchmen of the Mother Country, mulattoes and settlers, French bourgeois and French royalists, etc. The existence of divisions brings me to the next point:
2) Revolutions are possible not only due to structural cleavages, but are made by active human agents.
“Men make their own history, and the black Jacobins of San Domingo were to make history which would alter the fate of millions of men and shift the economic currents of three continents. But if they could seize opportunity they could not create it” (James 25).
James stresses the necessity of a committed, visionary, and responsive leadership working in tandem with masses already engaged in what might now be called “everyday resistance.” Within leftist theory, this places James in a unique space between Leninist vanguardism and anarchistic theories stressing the spontaneity of “leaderless multitudes.” In James’ view, Toussaint L’Ouverture provided the right leadership at the right time, and “It is the tragedy of mass movements that they need and can only too rarely find adequate leadership” (James 25). But leaders without masses were at least as problematic as lack of leadership: “The masses were chained and muzzled; and without the masses the radical democrats were merely voices” (James 75).
3) Keen attention must be paid to racialized oppression.
Unlike some vulgar Marxists who insisted that race is irrelevant at best to the class struggle, James paid careful attention to careful dialogue between race and class. Like DuBois, he stressed the importance of the “wages of whiteness” about fifty years before “whiteness studies” became a fashionable topic in the academy. In this book, whites both “big” and “small” were determined to preserve the privileges of their skin against losses real and potential. For many – but not all – French revolutionaries “liberté, égalité, fraternité” were not considered applicable to slaves and mulattoes in the colonies.
4) No struggle can be divorced from its international context.
“[The San Domingo representatives in the French people’s assembly] tied the fortunes of San Domingo to the assembly of a people in revolution and thenceforth the history of liberty in France and of slave emancipation in San Domingo is one and indivisible” (James 60-61).
While there were many white hypocrites who did not think the famous slogan of the French Revolution applied to other races, there were others – particularly blacks, mulattoes, slaves, and the radical Left in France – who took seriously the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The ongoing French Revolution aroused the latent emancipatory impulse within Toussaint’s slave masses, and the twin revolutions developed in tandem. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike formed international and transnational networks of solidarity. It is impossible to understand one revolution without the other.
This is just a small sampling of the endless stream of wisdom to be found in The Black Jacobins and the thought of C.L.R. James. I hope you check him out!