16 C. L. R. James Quotes

C. L. R. James quotes

1. Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics, I did not have too much to learn

2. What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?

3. The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

4. Between Toussaint and his people there was no fundamental difference of outlook or of aim. Knowing the race question for the political and social question that it was, he tried to deal with it in a purely political and social way. It was a grave error. Lenin in his thesis to the Second Congress of the Communist International warned the white revolutionaries--a warning they badly need--that such has been the effect of the policy of imperialism on the relationship between advanced and backward peoples that European Communists will have to make wide concessions to natives of colonial countries in order to overcome the justified prejudice which these feel toward all classes in the oppressing countries. toussaint, as his power grew, forgot that. He ignored the black labourers, bewildered them at the very moment that he needed them most, and to bewilder the masses is to strike the deadliest of blows at the revolution

1. I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense.

2. As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

3. 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.

4. It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.

5. I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.

6. 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.

7. It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany was defeated.

8. Why are you chasing your tail so?" Said the kitten, "I have learned that the best thing for a cat is happiness, and that happiness is my tail. Therefore, I am chasing it: and when I catch it. I shall have happiness." Said the cat, "My son, I, too, have paid attention to the problems of the universe. I, too, have judged that happiness is in my tail. But, I have noticed that whenever I chase it, it keeps running away from me, and when I go about my business, it just seems to come after me wherever I go.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known.

12. 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.