By Christian Hogsbjerg
Race & Class
March 2019
The
republication, thirty years after it was first written in 1988, of Paul
Buhle’s pioneering biography of the Trinidadian writer and
revolutionary C. L. R. James, ‘the artist as revolutionary’, might at
first sight be viewed slightly cynically as an attempt by Verso to join –
or perhaps rather rejoin – what Robin D. G. Kelley in his new foreword
to the work somewhat provocatively calls ‘a literary gold rush’ around
James. Yet this would be a mistaken judgement, for as the ‘authorised
biography’ of James, Buhle’s work remains, and will always remain, both
distinc- tive by its very nature, despite the accumulation of new
knowledge about James and his life and work that has since come to
light, and educational and revelatory in its own right, thanks to
Buhle’s closeness to, and deep understanding of, his subject.
Though
the original work was written at some speed, Buhle’s The Artist as
Revolutionary successfully provided an account of James’s individual
political and intellectual evolution situated within a narrative about
the intertwined col- lective fate of the broader wider Left over the
course of the twentieth century, replete with thought-provoking
contrasts with other critical contemporary activ- ists and
intellectuals. With an eye for the telling quote, and making excellent
use of interviews he had conducted with James about his life, Buhle
brought to this work his own lived experience of socialist activism in
the American New Left, his understanding of Marxist theory as an early
youthful admirer of Daniel de Leon’s Socialist Labour Party, and his
skills as a social historian. To adequately contex- tualise James’s long
life, from his growing up in Port-of-Spain in colonial Trinidad in the
early twentieth century, to his turn to militant Pan-Africanism and
revolu- tionary socialism in 1930s Britain, to subsequent sojourns in
the United States, Caribbean and Africa amid decolonisation, is no small
task for any scholar writ- ing even now. But to do so when ‘James
scholarship’ was in its infancy was a remarkable achievement. Buhle’s
work also successfully succinctly and cogently summarised the wide
variety of James’s writings, from novels like Minty Alley to classic
socialist histories like World Revolution and The Black Jacobins to
treatises on Marxist philosophy such as Notes on Dialectics and works of
literary criticism such as Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (on
Melville’s Moby Dick).
Indeed, there are still hidden depths
to Buhle’s work – the original text of which he resisted the temptation
to change or update for this new edition – and even the most seasoned
scholar of black radicalism will benefit from reading, or perhaps more
likely, rereading, Buhle’s biography.
This is partly because
the period in which it was written ensured that it was written as a
‘political biogra- phy’ first and foremost. As Kelley rightly points out
in the foreword, the 1980s was a world ‘marked by crisis and its
antithesis: opportunity’, and ‘Buhle was part of a New Left generation
of writers, organisers, and scholars seeking a new direction for
revolutionary movements’ as official ‘Communism’ stagnated, declined and
then finally collapsed. Though Buhle’s biography made it clear enough
that his sympathies for a return to ‘Leninism’ in whatever form were
distinctly limited, and indeed he was open to the possibilities and
potentialities of postmodernist theory for new scholarship on James, he
closed his biography in 1988 still calling for ‘a Jamesian politics’.
Buhle quoted ‘the young old revolution- ary’ James himself, grappling
with the challenges of the 1980s but still stressing that the ‘workers
and peasants must realize that their emancipation lies in their own
hands and in the hands of nobody else’.
The new edition
includes a substantial, valuable and illuminating afterword, co-written
by Buhle and his collaborator Lawrence Ware, a lecturer in philoso- phy
at Oklahoma State University, entitled, ‘Reviewing – and Renewing – the
C.L.R. Legacy for the Twenty-First Century’. This among other things
reflects in a generous fashion on the new scholarship on James which has
appeared over the last thirty years, and provides a more detailed
commentary on aspects of James’s life and work which received less
attention and were less well known when the original biography was
written. The afterword to the new edition also includes a brief piece on
‘C.L.R. James Today’ by Ware, which attempts to situ- ate James in the
context of contemporary black struggles in the United States. This short
piece might be usefully read alongside a new ‘Palgrave Pivot’ publi-
cation by Ornette D. Clennon, a sociologist at Manchester Metropolitan
University, which tries to do the same for contemporary black struggles
in the United Kingdom: The Polemics of C.L.R. James and Contemporary
Black Activism. It is obviously encouraging that a new generation of
black ‘critical race theorists’ in both the US and UK are turning to
James and engaging with his life, work and legacy for thinking about
questions of race and resistance amid the current BlackLivesMatter
Movement.
Clennon, in particular, is to be congratulated for
making the critical intellec- tual effort to try and wrestle
theoretically with how James might have made sense of the contemporary
critical moment in Britain, amid ‘Brexit’ and the rise of Corbynism. He
writes about how he metaphorically ‘became friends’ with James and came
to appreciate his ‘intense intellectual creativity and playfulness’ as a
theorist after getting involved with a short-lived and sadly defeated
com- munity campaign in 2015 to try to revive the derelict ‘Nello James
Centre’ in Whalley Range, South Manchester, as a resource centre for the
local black com- munity, as, for decades, it had once been after its
founding in 1967. As might be expected from someone who freely admits
that he has only begun really reading and thinking about James over the
last couple of years, Clennon’s work – despite its somewhat grandiose
title – is less about ‘the polemics of C.L.R. James’ than it is about
using a rather random and limited selection of James’s essays (mainly
about black struggles in Jim Crow America from the 1940s and 1950s) as
an entry point for Clennon to give us his own take on ‘contemporary
black activism’ in Britain from the perspective of what he calls ‘a
synthesis of Post-Colonial and Post-Marxist theories’.
As a
result, perhaps we ultimately learn more about Clennon and his politics
than we do about James and his. Clennon’s take on ‘Brexit’ is that a new
English ‘colonial administration’ has emerged which, under a
bureaucratic deception of ‘social unity’, ‘encouraged synthetic
anti-immigrant sentiment of the masses during the Referendum’; there is
also a sense of the contemporary and historic tensions between black
community organisations and trade unions in Britain around various black
struggles. Though Clennon praises James’s polemics for representing ‘an
unguarded and visceral James that enables him to display his
outstanding abilities in the areas of cultural commentary, historical
and critical thinking’, James’s Marxism is deemed flawed both for its
advocacy of multira- cial working-class unity and the fact it is
apparently unable to come to terms with the challenges posed by the rise
of neoliberalism. For Clennon, ‘not only has capitalism transcended the
notion of the nation state, it has permeated the culture of our
institutions, our ways of thinking, and in so doing, it has drasti-
cally re-orientated our psychic spaces’. Indeed, ‘neoliberalism has
become too entrenched a Zeitgeist for us to un-imagine’, though how
Clennon manages to utilise his imagination effectively in order to
analyse it, when apparently the masses are unable to make this leap,
remains unclear.
Indeed, such an argument about neoliberalism, in
the British context at least, appears to be belied by the rise of
Corbynism, and Clennon accepts that ‘with Momentum leading a grass-
roots surge in support of Corbyn … there does appear to be an appetite
from certain quarters to put an end to our system of “colonial
administration”’.
However, ‘the utter end of capitalism and the introduction of a post-racial social- ism’ apparently remains ‘a utopian ideal’, and so the best we can learn from James is how ‘to be creative in our resistance’ to neoliberalism, working ‘from within the system’. Whatever the strengths of Clennon’s work, it hardly makes for a particularly insightful read if the reader was hoping for a book that would seri- ously try to apply a radical ‘Jamesian’ perspective to contemporary black strug- gles in the UK. Such a book would surely have as its bedrock the considerable rich body of writing and speeches by James on black struggles in Britain from the 1930s up to the 1980s – though admittedly much of these remain scattered and hidden away in often hard to find publications.
With respect to future
directions in James scholarship, Buhle and Ware rightly note that in
particular ‘more research needs to be done in Trinidad’ with respect to
understanding his early life. The two have worked with black American
car- toonist Milton Knight to produce The Young C.L.R. James: a graphic novelette,
which brings some of the autobiographical elements of James’s Beyond a
Boundary to life in Knight’s distinctive style, and in a format – a
‘graphic novelette’ – that has the potential to enable the story of
James’s early life to reach new, younger audiences. This was originally
envisioned as a project which would ambitiously try to cover the whole
of James’s life, and sadly we just have here ‘chapter one’ on ‘the
little black puritan’ in colonial Trinidad, together with some sketches
about the 1936 London production of James’s play Toussaint Louverture.
Though Knight’s idiosyncratic ‘Americanised’ style is something of an
acquired taste, and one can imagine many cricket purists in particular
raising the odd eyebrow over depictions of cricket matches which
resemble baseball games, nonetheless one is left wanting more. Given the
success of Kate Evans’s superb Red Rosa, about the life of Rosa
Luxemburg, it is to be hoped that Knight might one day be inspired
enough to return to his portrayal of James’s revolutionary life, and
give us ‘Red C.L.R.’.
Back to Milton Knight’s Artist Page| Back to Paul Buhle’s Editor Page | Back to Lawrence Ware Editor’s Page
