“I denounce European colonialism, but I respect the learning and profound discoveries of Western civilisation”.
"In 1950 the universal is as far beyond 1917 as 1917 was beyond the Paris Commune. A serious analysis of Stalinism will show that it is precisely the advanced objective relations of society which compel the counterrevolution to assume this form and dress itself in Marxism, fake action committees and all. We have to draw a new universal, more concrete and embracing more creative freedom of the masses than even State and Revolution."
Historian, journalist and Trotskyist activist C.L.R. James (1901-1989) read Thackeray's Vanity Fair ten times before he was nine years old. This is not a detail about precocity — it is a detail about method. The boy growing up in Tunapuna, Trinidad, at the edge of the cricket ground, was doing what he would do for the rest of his life: returning to a text until it yielded not just its content but its structural secrets, understanding how the thing was built, what it revealed about the civilization that produced it. By the time he left Trinidad for England in 1932, he had read the canonical texts of Western civilization so thoroughly that Edith Sitwell was astonished by his knowledge of English literature — though as he noted with characteristic wry amusement, it would have been more astonishing if he hadn't mastered it.
The type is ILE with slight EIE coloring — and the combination produces one of the most unusual intellectual profiles of the twentieth century.
The ILE base is visible first in the lateral synthesizing impulse that organized everything James ever wrote. His central intellectual discovery, expressed most fully in Beyond a Boundary, was that cricket and Greek tragedy and Shakespeare and Toussaint Louverture and Melville and the West Indian independence movement all instantiated the same underlying dynamic: the individual personality pushing against the limits imposed by its social form, and in that pushing generating beauty, history, and the possibility of liberation. This is Ne finding the structural rhyme between apparently unrelated domains, generating excitement from the unexpected connection, refusing to respect the disciplinary boundaries that kept cricket journalists away from Aristotle's Poetics and Marxist historians away from cricket. The Kipling parody "what do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" is an ILE question in the assumption that the interesting thing is always the connection that conventional thought has missed.
The democratic optimism is equally characteristic (and is something even the more "democratic" ILI's don't do, being largely historical pessimists). James believed in the capacity of ordinary people — Caribbean masses, cricket crowds, American workers — to make history govern themselves. This is ILE's constitutive democratic instinct — the type that genuinely cannot imagine any way of interacting with another person except as an equal, and that finds in the ordinary person not incapacity but suppressed potential waiting to be released. His historical optimism was not naive; he had watched enough revolutions fail to know the obstacles. But it was genuine and structural, not performed. He was, as Talanov characterizes the type, a historical optimist who believed in progress and in the development of humanity on the path of mutual respect — and he was this through a reading of the evidence that others, looking at the same history, could not quite manage to share.
"The speaker at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation who impressed me most was the Trinidad-born sage and Marxist historian, C.L.R. James, who had the misfortune of following his fellow countryman Stokely Carmichael to the podium. Stokely had also been born in Trinidad but grew up in New York. He no longer spoke the Caribbean dialect, but his peculiar style of repetitive oratory suggested it. And at the end of every thought he repeated the last few words, as a sort of chorus: And the resistance to doing anything meaningful about institutionalized racism stems from the fact that western society enjoys its luxury from institutionalized racism, and therefore, were it to end institutionalized racism, it would in fact destroy itself, destroy itself, destroy itself, destroy itself. Stokely was mesmerizing and brought the audience to its feet in chants and cheers. C.L.R. James, in contrast, spoke to a quiet audience that applauded politely only at the end of his speech. As a fellow black Caribbean, James subtly chided Stokely for his black nationalist hyperbole and call to arms; he spoke of a revolution based on class", — recalled activist and writer Roxanne Dubar-Ortiz. This is quite telling about ILE-vs-EIE rhetorical styles. Compared to Carmichael's more EIE-style delivery and content, James' speech worked through argument and connection — you followed his thinking, you were persuaded, you applauded when he had finished making his case. The Ne-Ti combination produces rhetoric that engages the audience's own reasoning rather than bypassing it. The ideas do the main work. The content is ILE correcting the EIE's emotional-tribal framing with a structural argument — not more cautious (neither of these two types are known for intellectual caution or love for compomise solutions), but differently oriented toward the problem.
The slight EIE coloring is what gives this ILE his particular register. James's Ne-generated connections were always framed in a historical-civilizational key — not "here is an interesting structural similarity" but "here is what it means that Greek tragedy and West Indian cricket express the same dynamic, here is what this reveals about where humanity has been and where it is going." The oratory that enchanted audiences across the United States and Britain — reciting Shakespeare and Lenin without notes, making fairly small audiences feel they were in the presence of something world-historical — is EIE's Fe-broadcast dimension amplifying the ILE's intellectual content. "Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle", — wrote he. "It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance".
The personal texture confirms ILE rather than EIE as primary. He was transparent in his intentions, whereas your average EIE is more likely to manipulate distances and manage social appearances. He was poor at recognizing enemies, seeing friends in people who would later prove to have been neither, which is the ILE's characteristic blind spot. He fought for ideas alone when necessary — the Johnsonite-Forest tendency he helped build (one of the tendencies that saw the Soviet Union as "state capitalist") was tiny, his political influence often operating through ideas rather than organizations — but the ideas that excited and inspired him shifted across his long life: from liberal humanism to Trotskyism to his own independent Marxism to the cricket-as-civilization thesis of his late work.
The remark he made to a friend — that as a husband he had been "an absolute negative, but he didn't seem as regretful as he might have" — is the ILE's characteristic half-awareness of Fi - of the relational consequences of a life organized around ideas rather than around people.
Comments
Post a Comment