Cyril Lionel Robert James was born Jan. 4, 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad. He was historian, literary critic and philosopher who was a leader of the pan-African movement.
C.L.R. James was also a passionate of cricket and wrote extensive about it for the Manchester Guardian. In 1963, he published a book on cricket called Beyond the Boundary.
James is known as the last surviving major figure from the pan-African movement of the 1930’s and the last black scholar of the older generation.
He died on May 31, 1989, in London, England.
It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.
C. L. R. James
The antagonisms between men and women express themselves in the most delicate phase of their life together – in their sexual relationship.
C. L. R. James
Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.
C. L. R. James
My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.
C. L. R. James
One of the surest signs of the estimated changes in the consciousness of the American proletariat is to be found in the character of the demands now being put forward by the leadership.
C. L. R. James
Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.
C. L. R. James
The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known.
C. L. R. James
The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.
C. L. R. James
The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.
C. L. R. James
The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.
C. L. R. James
The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.
C. L. R. James
Today we ought to be able to see first that Booker T. Washington faced a situation in which he was seeking desperately for a way out, and he could see no way out except capitulation.
C. L. R. James
It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany was defeated.
C. L. R. James
I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.
C. L. R. James
The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage.
C. L. R. James
All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca.
C. L. R. James
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism.
C. L. R. James
It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.
C. L. R. James
All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market.
C. L. R. James
As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.
C. L. R. James
Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.
C. L. R. James
Du Bois marked a great stage in the history of Negro struggles when he said that Negroes could no longer accept the subordination which Booker T. Washington had preached.
C. L. R. James
I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.
C. L. R. James
I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.
C. L. R. James
I may as well say it, I have been married three times.
C. L. R. James
In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital.
C. L. R. James
I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense.
C. L. R. James
Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences.
C. L. R. James
After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.
C. L. R. James
First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle.
C. L. R. James
