C.L.R. James Quotes

Leader of a backward and ignorant mass, he was yet in the forefront of the great historical movement of his time. The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution, and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman. That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton. And in one respect he excelled them all. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class complications of their society, too often had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify. Toussaint could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time. The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood that elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth.

An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.

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

All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market.

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.

I may as well say it, I have been married three times.

But today as then, the great propertied interests and their agents commit the most ferocious crimes in the name of the whole people, and bluff and brow-beat them by lying propaganda.

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.

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

If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.

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.

The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. [...] Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all. Yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. "Vengeance ! Vengeance" was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard.
And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. [...] Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands.

After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.

My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.

The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.

Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

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

The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.

1789 the French bourgeoisie was the most powerful economic force in France, and the slave-trade and the colonies were the basis of its wealth and power.

The end toward which mankind is inexorably developing by the constant overcoming of internal antagonisms is not the enjoyment, ownership, or use of goods, but self-realization, creativity based upon the incorporation into the individual personality of the whole previous development of humanity. Freedom is creative universality, not utility.

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

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.

Cricket is an art. Like all arts it has a technical foundation. To enjoy it does not require technical knowledge, but analysis that is not technically based is mere impressionism.

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

When Rochambeau put to death 500 at Le Cap and buried them in a large hole dug while they waited for execution, Dessalines raised gibbets of branches and hanged 500 for Rochambeau and the whites in Le Cap to see. But neither Dessalines' army nor his ferocity won the victory. It was the people. They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.

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.

All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca.

The antagonisms between men and women express themselves in the most delicate phase of their life together - in their sexual relationship.

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.

The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?