clr james

Born in Trinidad in 1901, CLR James was a leftist writer and social theorist until his death in 1989.

In the 1930s, he worked for West Indian Independence, and moved to Britain, where he wrote a number of novels, and was the cricket reporter for the Manchester Guardian.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, he lived in the United States, and wrote about politics, film, literature, and literary criticism. Deported in 1953, he was much influenced by the 1957 revolution in which the former British colony of the Gold Coast became Ghana, and by the ensuing anticolonial and Black Power struggles of the 1950s and 60s.

Perhaps his best known work is The Black Jacobins: Touissaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Manuel Yang, writing in MR Zine, reminds us that this year is the 70th anniversary of this history of the successful slave rebellion that became the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803.

Its title refers to the Jacobins, the most radical element within the French Revolution who, like the former slaves who created Haiti, propagated. . . "extreme democracy and absolute equality."

James wrote The Black Jacobins to give inspiration to the then-struggling forces of pan-African revolt against European colonialism and racial oppression.

He said he wrote it while listening "most clearly and insistently" to "the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence."

Similarly, James’s 1936 play, also entitled The Black Jacobins, was intended to prompt the British labor movement to take a critical stance toward the Western imperialist collusion with Mussolini's fascist invasion of Ethiopia. In his essay "Abyssinia and the Imperialists," James underscored how imperialism destroyed the working class: ". . . all the money that the imperialists are making out of the country has to be paid for by labour, and the real sufferers are those millions who, unprotected by trade union organisation or any sort of organised public opinion, are driven off their lands, down into mines at a shilling a day, or working above ground for fourpence a day as in Kenya. . . ."

In order to prevent this destruction, which soon spread into the genocidal conflagration of a world war, James extracted two important insights from the Haitian Revolution.

One was the fact that the slaves recognized and organized themselves as a class of workers exploited under modern capitalist conditions: ". . . working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement."

Another was the internationalism of this class whose collective labor made the wealth of empires and nations. . . . "'Servants, peasants, workers, the labourers by the day in the fields' all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the 'aristocracy of the skin.' There were so many moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes."

Both of these revolutions however soon foundered because this solidarity was not preserved and developed further. Although "[t]here were Jacobin workmen in Paris who would have fought for the blacks against Bonaparte's troops," once in power Touissaint "ignored the black labourers" and tried to appease the white elites. . . .

The term "Jacobin" had taken on authoritarian connotations because the French Jacobin leadership stopped listening to the workers and commoners and shut down their radical organizations -- much as Toussaint in power lost touch with the Haitian workers. In short, the Haitian and French Revolutions … failed to go as far as they could because the new rulers destroyed, in the interest of capital and empire, the original conceptions of democracy that the self-activity of workers had made possible.

Today we are facing a similar destructive moment in history. The presidential election is poisoned with anti-immigrant rhetoric seeking to divide and decimate the working class. Following the Bonapartist model, the American Empire is perpetrating this class destruction in Haiti as well. According to the Haiti Information Project, "the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency… helped create the Revolutionary Front for Advancement and Progress of Haiti" (FRAPH) who are "responsible for the rape and murder of thousands of Haitians after a brutal military coup forced then president Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile in 1991." U.S. aid to Haiti's brutal police force has reached $40 million. In this dark hour of ongoing crisis, reading The Black Jacobins … could give us the necessary "clarity and influence" to sustain our struggle against this new moment of war and imperialism.

And some comments from a 1949 essay by James on “The Price of Imperialism to the People”, in which he discusses

the attack which is being carried out against the civil liberties of the American people by the American bourgeoisie.

That the cause of this is the “danger of communism” is the familiar alibi of all despots, parasites and privileged groups. This was the ideological justification for the fascist dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco-and for the police regime of Stalin, who merely substituted the word “Trotskyism” for communism. But there is one difference, a difference which speaks volumes on the subject of morality: Hitler smashed democratic rights as an open antagonist of democracy, while the American oligarchs abrogate the rights of the people in the name of the struggle against “dictatorship” and “totalitarianism.”

(or today, against terrorism)

The American bourgeoisie, first and foremost, and from first to last, is in mortal terror of the American people and, above all of the American workers. Let the stupid liberals put their fingers to their foreheads and wonder at the “hysteria” of the American government
…. Let them wonder at the constant betrayals in Congress of every promise made at the election. Let them be perpetually “astonished” at the apparently senseless persecution of … scientists. They will know only frustration and impotence until they recognize that the struggles over civil rights in the United States express the intensification of the irreconcilable class antagonisms of … capitalism. These struggles are an expression of the inevitable break-up of that society, a stage … in the transition from capitalism to a new social order.

Capitalism in its decline must destroy the democracy and civil rights which it brought into the world and nourished in its progressive days. The attack against civil rights is the defense of capitalism. The defense of civil rights … involves the attack against capitalism.

You can no more separate the crisis of civil liberties from the crisis of capitalist production and the . . . war than you can separate the arm which is administering the blows from the body [to] which it is attached.

state capitol

historical allusions

"This extension is four bare rooms of shelf beds intended to house thirty people each. Each wall is covered with three layers of shelves plus an access ladder or two. Each shelf is to be a long, narrow bed intended to sleep two people, usually either feet to feet or head to head." (225)










"There was at least one major escape attempt. The people of Acorn took no part in it, but of course they suffered for it later along with the rest of Camp Christian. Its leader was the same David Turner that my mother had met and liked in 2033. . . . 'Day Turner's people were convinced that they could overwhelm the guards by piling onto them three or more to one.'" (238)



















(all from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents)

po lice

The Prologue to Dario Fo’s 1970 play Accidental Death of an Anarchist explains that in late 1969 there were a number of bomb incidents in Italian cities.

Milan police arrested an anarchist and accused him of the crime. At a certain point in his interrogation, the anarchist flew out the window of the police station. Something similar occurred in New York in 1921, when the anarchist Salsedo flew out the window of a police station, around the same time that Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for a crime never proven against them. From these stories we can conclude that many anarchists are obsessed by the urge to jump out of the window, because they believe they are able to fly.

It is an illusion of theirs that when they're two or three yards from the ground, they merely have to open their arms and move their feet to fly up again. Some observers have suspected that anarchists are able to fly, but they are also so underhanded that they smash themselves to the ground, just to incriminate the police and other state institutions by dying.

The case of the kamikaze anarchists helps explain similar events, such as the asymmetrical warfare of prisoners at Guantanamo, and the recent propensity of American college students to throw themselves repeatedly in front of TASERS. Only time will tell if we are at the beginning of a similar wave of middle-aged women strangling themselves with their handcuffs.

Kristian Williams has argued that the modern

police system was not created in response to spiraling crime rates, but developed as a means of social control by which an emerging dominant class could impose their values on the larger population.

Organized police forces arose specifically when traditional, informal, or community-maintained means of social control broke down. This breakdown was always prompted by a larger social change, often by a change which some part of the community resisted with violence, such as the creation of a state, colonization, or the enslavement of a subject people. In other words, it was at the point where authority was met with resistance that the organized application of force became necessary.

As Naomi Klein has pointed out, the dominance of neoliberalism is not the result of a lack of alternatives but of the violent suppression of alternatives.

But if the recent increased visibility of police brutality is a consequence of expanding corporate power, dismantling or privatizing social and government services, giving away the commons, deregulating and polluting food air water and land, spiraling inequality of income, and all of the other things which may be making previously docile segments of the population more restive--it’s still the case that police violence most particularly targets the racial and economic groups traditionally most subject to it.

Consider, for instance, Susie Day's report in Counterpunch about an incident in which Cops shot yet another Rich White Man

Hours before he was to be married, a wealthy Caucasian man leaving his bachelor party at a country club in East Hampton was shot and killed in a hail of police bullets. Two of his friends were wounded, one critically. Witnesses at the scene expressed shock and outrage, one of the club's patrons voicing the pervasive sentiment: "Why, oh why is it always rich white people who suffer at the hands of bigoted, trigger-happy cops?"

With emotions swirling around this case, and a long history of no criminal indictments for police who kill rich white people, legal experts say it will be difficult to determine if the shootings were justified. "Let's be honest," said district attorney Roger Gray, "As an affluent white male, Mr. Bellwether was part of a minority community. Those people don't trust us. They don't understand that cops confront danger every day and have to react in seconds. And if cops happen to shoot the same minority people from the same minority community again and again, that's a simple mistake--not a systemic pattern of brutality and injustice." Mr. Gray went on to say that reporters and investigators would be barred from questioning the officers, "to give them time to get their story straight."

The investigation into this case will likely prove controversial. At a time of growing social division, any appearance of police carelessness or bias could set off civic unrest. "And when white people get mad, it's really scary," said police commissioner Patrick O'Reyes. "That's why the department has maximized equal-opportunity. With our new, fully-armed multi-ethnic teams, we've got it fixed so nobody can say we're racist--even if we only shoot white people." The commissioner then ordered his multi-ethnic officers to roughly interrogate witnesses and family members of the victims, and ransack their homes for anything incriminating. "It's routine," he added.

Although civil rights leaders concede that social awareness has improved in recent years, some say more progress is needed. "The negative stereotype of the 'well-healed honky' is rampant in this case," proclaimed activist Martha Stewart at a press conference today. "But I think we can get it out with a touch of white vinegar."

On-the-street interviews, however, indicate that this prejudice might be harder to eradicate.

"Face it, prosperous white people own the corporations; they break unions; they're behind environmental degradation; they got us into Iraq--they're nothing but little Eichmanns," declared a professor of Equality and Justice Studies at Red Hook Community College. Victim advocates say this mentality has wormed its way into the police force.

One of the plainclothes officers who had been working undercover at the country club on the night of the shooting spoke on condition of anonymity. He said he thought there might be trouble when he saw several of the revelers wearing their black, navy blue, and beige "gang colors." Noticing hushed voices and some numbers being scratched onto cocktail napkins, the officer suspected that another hostile corporate takeover was being planned. "I couldn't stand to see more people suffer because of lost jobs, lowered salaries, the privatization of our infrastructure," the officer stated. "That's why I joined the police force--I wanted to help."

For more information on the problem and how you can help—and defend yourself and your community against police violence, check the links here:

National Day of Action to Stop Police Brutality, repression and the criminalization of a generation: The October 22nd Coalition ;The IWW. See also Portland Copwatch on Portland Police shootings and deaths in custody through August 2007. See also Prison Planet. The ACLU website offers A Community Action Manual on Fighting Police Abuse.

hard day's night of the living dead

the iron heel

Last year, Penguin Books issued a new edition of Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel.

Probably London’s fullest fictional presentation of his socialist views, it’s a book that Leon Trotsky, some thirty years later, called a “prophetic vision” of “fascism, of its economy, of its governmental technique, its political psychology. . . . Jack London foresaw and described the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution.” The book has its flaws, as Trotsky acknowledged, though I would include that sense of inevitability as one of them. Still, it’s a compelling depiction of the workings of capitalism.

The middle-class female narrator speaks in the sentimental rhetoric of melodrama, a kind of appeal that has historically proved effective in moving Americans on political issues, most famously in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Avis Everhard focuses her narrative on a working-class hero devoted to the rational appeal to material fact.

When Avis Cunningham meets Ernest Everhard, he tells her that her dress is stained with blood, and then goes on to introduce her to the bleeding workers whose unrecompensed injuries, as well as their more figurative lifeblood, has gone to swell the stock dividends that have paid for Avis’s dress. The injuries are unrecompensed because although workers can sue for damages, the other workers won’t risk their own jobs by honest testimony, reporters know editors won’t publish stories unfriendly to their advertisers and investors, and the judge and the corporate lawyer belong to the same club. The need to feed their children keeps workers bound to the industrial machine by their heart strings, but some are bound so that they are on top of the machine, and the aristocratic class believes that they are in the right.

They believe this despite having no good explanation for the miseries of capitalism. When Ernest challenges a group of oligarchs to defend capitalism’s bad management of a world with both massive productive forces and massive poverty, he gets no satisfactory answer other than the response that will ultimately come in the form of a bullet.

The socialists do first win at the ballot—in the days before widespread purging of voter rolls and electronic voting machines—but they’re framed for a bombing, and the whole socialist congressional delegation arrested. So the revolutionists move underground, spying on the oligarchs as they are spied upon.

The second half of the novel—once Avis Everhard’s political education is complete, her marriage consummated figuratively as well as literally—consists in the story of a failed revolt against the machine, the blood of the workers become literal blood in the streets.

But the fascist dystopia of The Iron Heel is wrapped inside a socialist utopia—the manuscript Avis writes has been published some 700 years after her death, and features a foreword and footnotes written in year 419 of the Brotherhood of Man.

It’s not surprising that it’s called the Brotherhood of Man, since despite the presence of Avis and other women in the ranks of the revolutionaries, the book doesn’t register the possibility of women’s emancipation, nor the possibility that there might be anything other than the class system from which to be liberated.

And as some readers have noted, it’s probably just as well, given London’s record on questions of race, that there’s little about that in the book, though it is strange to think of a socialist revolution in the US that doesn’t have something to do with race.

Those aren’t the only omissions in The Iron Heel. It’s not clear how, in the three hundred years between the events of the novel and overthrow of the oligarchy, the revolutionaries have escaped from the trap of coming to mirror their oppressors. But the long view does provide a kind of hope in the face of defeat.

Moreover, for readers today, the book offers a salutary reminder of the struggles of the past and of how close the possibility of socialist change has sometimes seemed in the US.

As Naomi Klein has recently reminded us, we haven’t lacked for ideas— “universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren’t new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN Charter.”

Nor have we lacked resources. Last year, “ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, a world record. . . . We can tax the polluters and the casino capitalists to pay for alternative energy development and a global social safety net.”

Nor is the problem political will or coordination among political leaders.

In The Iron Heel, the character who most believes that the problem is simple ignorance is a clergyman who is shocked to learn, under Ernest’s tutelage, the extent of the suffering of the poor. But his wealthy congregation is shocked at the turn his sermons have taken, and he ultimately loses his job, his home, and his freedom, when he’s declared insane and committed.

As Klein says, “elites don’t make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse. And that is what happened all those years ago when the income gap began to close. That was the motivation behind the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism . . . needed to soften its edges.”

Klein notes of these alternatives to the so-called free market, “They were chosen, and then they were stolen. They were stolen by military coups. They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror. . . . These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They’re popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly.”

As Frederick Douglass knew, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

On beliefs about Iraqi WMDs

Last week in class someone referred to the US administration’s belief, before the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It may well be true that the administration believed that Iraq posed a threat to the US at that time. However, there were reasons for skepticism about the danger of the Iraqi weapons program even then. Hans Blix, the executive director of the UN inspection commission (UNMOVIC), reported that Iraq was increasingly complying with inspectors, who would need some months further to complete their work. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter also argued that Iraq’s weapons were unlikely to pose a threat.

In addition, the administration would have had more reasons that did the public at large for skepticism about Iraq’s possession of WMDs. Joseph C. Wilson reported, before the war to the administration, as well as after the war to the public, that it was “highly doubtful” that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq. The subsequently leaked Downing Street memo has suggested to some that the US administration was not interested in exploring counter-evidence; the statement that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” has been read as indicating that intelligence and facts were being read selectively to achive the desired conclusions.

Anyway, as with the varieties of socialism, things may be more complex than they might seem.