THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Matthew Quest (Round II)

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#7, JUNE-AUGUST/2019

Brotherwise Dispatch – Your comprehensive engagement with the thought of C.L.R. James clearly informs the discursive trajectory of your own intellectual endeavors. As such, why do you advocate “resisting the tendency to group him narrowly in the fields of ‘Marxism’ or the ‘Black radical tradition’”?

Matthew Quest – In short because these frameworks contaminate freedom movements where they minimize debate within radical traditions and obscure the most original and creative contributions of C.L.R. James’s political thought.

We should not confuse choices about the interpretation of radical history, which may be an invented tradition, with distinct traditions of political practice that can be termed radical but also may be in conflict with other radical schools of thought and action.

To not see these conflicting tendencies in political movements and ideas means our struggles for power, clarity, and influence may be undermined.

In James's Party Politics in the West Indies (1962), he underscored that there is an anti-colonial radical tradition (he calls it “a tradition of national talent”). Those within this tradition have written historical and literary studies, organized toilers of color and opposed empire. Most of these major figures are informed by some form of Marxism or socialist politics directly or indirectly.

But James did not emphasize what Cedric Robinson later did – that Black radicals experimented with American and European traditions of radical thought to arrive on their own authority, producing something called “Black Marxism.”

James said something quite different, totally ignored by scholars of his life and work thus far. James said “you don’t understand the tradition unless you understand the antagonisms” or debates within the tradition. This maneuver was far from saying there was a unitary Black radical or Black Marxist tradition. James was explaining there are conflicting tendencies in radical traditions, as there are in mass social movements.

James said when you understand his differences with Eric Williams on the writing of history, and party politics; when you understand his differences with the early Kwame Nkrumah on political economy; then you can begin to grasp what James contributed to a Black radical or anti-colonial tradition.

James also had major differences with Richard Wright and George Padmore on radical democracy, the meaning of Stalinism (it wasn’t a problem only in Russia), and the prospects for an American revolution, a European revolution, a World revolution, not simply a revolution of the Black World or Third World.

James had major differences on the meaning of international law, the League of Nations and the U.N. with W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, William Patterson, and Claudia Jones, for Black radical internationalism. James reminded those who would listen, that as an anticolonial he was not working for self-determination (that is the autonomy of Black or colonized hierarchical governments, the capitalist of color’s right to accumulate or defend their own capital) but self-reliance (popular self-management, where the chief actor is ordinary people, where there must be a breakthrough of labor’s self-emancipation, the toilers of color beyond public and nationalized property). Already I hope we are beginning to see the conflicting outlooks in the Black radical tradition.

Cedric Robinson made clear, in his study, that the Black radical tradition was a tradition of historiography, how to write history, not a unitary conception of politics. James was very fond of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, and critical of Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery for the same reason – the former recorded ordinary Black toilers’ self-mobilization as the key to historical development which he termed “the general strike”, the latter did not. Yet this is Du Bois the historian.

It is impossible to conclude that Du Bois in his political practice ever suggested what Black workers, the unemployed or street force could do as central to a social revolution. Du Bois never related to one “general strike” in real life. Instead he was for equal justice under the law, a welfare state, perhaps a one party state abroad, Black professionals in administrative positions of government – and a certain type of anti-imperialism was naturally concerned with impediments to this (but this is only one approach).

Robinson deserves some credit for including James as a pillar of his framework of the Black radical tradition. Robinson has thrashed otherwise faithful scholars of James for trying to discard his anti-Stalinism and critique of the bankruptcy of progressive thinkers. Robinson elsewhere in his scholarship has shown a sympathy for anarchism, and how it clarifies the terms of political order. Robinson did not intend the Black radical tradition to be an uncritical buzzword for the revival of the Moscow oriented tradition of African American radicalism.

But aware of this matter let’s look at what would happen if the Black radical tradition had been organized to include Lucy Parsons, Ben Fletcher, Wally and Juanita Nelson, Joffre Stewart, CLR James and Ella Baker as the pillars? Such an archive for political thought would be much more radically democratic, much more anti-state, and much more centered on working class self-emancipation – it would be more clear, that while one can run for office as a dissident seeking to expose the system, that electoral politics largely is a form of degradation.

Instead, “the tradition” has been handed down to us, and many conclude the socialist future is the one party state or welfare state, where we reject “state repression” because this happens to Black people, like the racial gaze projected on Black bodies, instead of Black radicalism’s actual or more consistent opposition to the state in principle in American and world politics.

C.L.R. James, especially in the last twenty-five years of his life, through charismatic lectures as a now famous “ancestor” of Black radical movements, often grouped famous radical personalities together anticipating the idea of a “Black radical tradition.” From W.E.B. Du Bois to Frantz Fanon; Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro; Lenin, Mao, Gandhi, and Kwame Nkrumah; Marcus Garvey, Aime Cesaire, George Padmore, Stokley Carmichael, and Walter Rodney. James also noted the significance anecdotally of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, George Jackson, and H. Rap Brown. These visions were primarily around the themes of Black Power, the African, Caribbean, and Third World’s search for identity for colonized people as a historical development. But it is a mistake to think that James did not have fundamental differences with most of these figures, as expressed in the vast archive of his writings, or face to face. Whether for scholarship or political strategy these differences are crucial and which people have to make decisions about.

In these visions of “a Black radical tradition” the struggle of social classes and James’s damning criticism of state power was often restricted. Despite this he suggested that “black power,” deep in the post-civil rights, post-colonial moment, could only mean power to the common people, even where Black people already held professional or hierarchical positions. Otherwise, he said, the idea made no sense.

But James, for these audiences, often based his authority on being a scholar, an intellectual forerunner of the Age of Black Power and Third World, a mentor, colleague, advisor, and/or sometimes critic of famous African and Caribbean statesmen such as Trinidad’s Eric Williams, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere.

James in this way was instrumental in internationalizing the Black Power movement in the U.S., particularly with deep discussions of state power, political economy, and party politics. Mentioning anecdotally iconic personalities can make this opaque. Also historians have to reconstruct the conversations and debates James had with younger activists in the 1960s and early 1970s to understand the complexity of his contributions, particularly in the Caribbean and among African Americans in the U.S.

James reminded, by substantially speaking and writing George Padmore into history (but also himself), that you don’t have to be a politician above society to be an organizer of the Pan African or anti-imperialist movements. Through his Padmore stories, James would take the opportunity to clarify to Black Power audiences that there were many things wrong with the Moscow oriented tradition of communism. But James also recognized that those who came to political consciousness in the 1960s and early 1970s for the most part did not understand (nor care too much) the distinctions and conflicting tendencies among socialist and communist thought – if repressive governments said someone or some idea was radical apparently that was enough.

By the mid-70s this would change a little. Those most influenced by James were using his most radical thought as a basis of doing an autopsy of the Black Power movement in the U.S., for it largely had crashed into a new form of American Exceptionalism, or projecting direct democracy and workers’ self-management as the most radical politics of the Caribbean New Left before the Grenada Revolution.

James never affirmed the uselessness of distinctions among “radicals” – on the contrary he saw the inability to distinguish between currents within progressive and revolutionary thought as a sure sign someone was not a serious radical political cadre. This also made for useless social movement history that misinformed future generations.

This was despite the fact that James reminded that ordinary people will never pay attention to the intricacies of history and political philosophy – this will not stop them from rebelling and organizing themselves productively. Such ideas, James concluded, are for getting the mind right of the aspiring cadre.

It is a great mistake to mystify in James’s critique of vanguardism and affirmation of the autonomy of Black or anti-colonial movements, that his politics (even as historian) is primarily to instruct the aspiring radical cadre. That was a major purpose of The Black Jacobins, his classic history of the Haitian Revolution.

James was fond of a quotation from Napoleon: “first engage, then we will see.” One engages aspiring mass movements or struggles around local grievances trying to radicalize them, knowing that there are conflicting tendencies within them. Many seek only reform and empowerment within the dominant hierarchies. To preach against hierarchy and wish to diversify them, to believe in equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy today, is a total failure to reconsider what went wrong with the Age of Black Power and the Third World.

In World Revolution (1937) James said “the liberals and social democrats are the comedians of the modern world and on the side of the permanent slaughter.” Note he was not concerned with hurting anyone’s feelings. He said that “progressives” were “a recently discovered political phenomenon” who are exposed by their intermittent anti-imperialism, usually discarded in capitalist election cycles. It is a disposition James never discarded.

James it is true saw himself as an orthodox Marxist who had clarified the legacies of Marx and Lenin. This is historically and politically inaccurate in so many ways. But what makes James a dynamic thinker was that he was perhaps the most romantic, libertarian, dissident anti-capitalist thinker of both the international labor and anticolonial movements, and who maintained his independence from the orthodoxies of the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban regimes in some remarkable ways. James began inside the Leon Trotsky movement, but always maintained his own autonomous collectives and developed his own body of original radical political thought, completing a rupture with it.

James saw the socialist future so differently than most Marxists it is worth underscoring this as the best refutation of James informing some unitary Marxist framework. In fact, James most original works on the state and political economy are based on the denunciation of state orthodoxies and even orthodoxies among dissident socialist and communist parties.

It is not productive to fight over James as the most original Marxist or to defend something called revolutionary Marxism. Certainly, James’s original politics can’t productively be understood when disciplined in conversation with Marxism as primarily aesthetic meditation, or Marxism that assumes historical defeat, social democracy, or the Leninist vanguard party.

By all means let’s have a conversation, whether as historians or as politicos, about how social revolutions are made, what type of new or free society we wish to design, and how repression and human limitations have obstructed the process thus far. But James's thought is distinguished by philosophical projections not just rejections.

James believed the socialist future must be distinguished by direct democracy and workers’ self-management. He underscored there is no progressive or dual character of government bureaucracy. James rejected the one party state and welfare state and repeatedly said the nation-state cannot guarantee world peace, economic security, or colonial independence. The radical cadre’s task, for those who oppose vanguardism and elitism, is to propagate the destruction of hierarchy so ordinary people can arrive on their own authority. Not because ordinary working people, the unemployed or street force were beautiful, or because they have a special consciousness but so they could directly govern.

James made clear in order to have both socialism and democracy, it is not a question of higher taxes on the rich so we can have more healthcare and education. Rather, you have to oppose the minority who aspires to rule above society. James believed that professionals should be abolished as the embodiment of culture and government. Everyday people could directly govern through workplace councils and popular assemblies in economic planning, judicial affairs, foreign relations, and all educational and cultural matters.

Just by this basic summary I don’t know how James could be grouped with W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, or Angela Davis as a political guide to accomplish any common project – even if that common project is Black liberation. Black or Africana Studies is something else. But mass movements and insurgent actors will choose the strategies and ideas and the forerunners who will be their preferred mind springs. But let’s using these figures have more comparative discussions about how Black radicals feel about state power, political economy, and party politics using James as a comparative measure.

James the close scholar of the French, Haitian, and Russian Revolutions (I do not say I agree with every one of his interpretations), made a profound point time and again, for those who were listening. He said most social revolutions begin as a revolt against aristocratic and conservative forces whose authority and institutions are in decay. But pretty soon it becomes clear to the insurgent forces that one has to make the revolution against the progressive forces as well. The progressives whether as middle class intellectuals or statesmen and state planners wish to finish up the revolution as soon as possible. They reconcile themselves with the left bloc of capital, with a section of the armed forces, and would rather do this than allow ordinary people to hold the reins of society and directly govern. The progressives who at first appear to be radical democrats begin to expose themselves as undemocratic, elitist, authoritarian, and agents of state repression.

This is the second of a three part interview through email correspondence from April 28th, 2018 – August 12th, 2018 between Matthew Quest and A. Shahid Stover for The Brotherwise Dispatch.

The rest of the interview will be published in upcoming issues . . .