LATEST LISTINGS:

Online Events

CLR James on history and black struggle

Tuesday 26 October 2021

For Black History Month in the UK, we will be discussing CLR James’ 1939 essay ‘Revolution and the Negro’

 

For Black History Month in the UK, we will be discussing CLR James’ 1939 essay ‘Revolution and the Negro’. The full text of the essay is available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1939/12/negro-revolution.htm.

CLR James was a Marxist, humanist, and pan-Africanist writer and activist, born in Trinidad in 1901. James arrived in England in 1932, where he worked as a journalist, including as a cricket correspondent for The Guardian, and became acquainted with Marxist writings and methods. He had a long and varied political and scholarly career, including approximately 17 years of involvement in the Trotskyist movement. He died in Brixton, London in 1989.

Arguably James’ most famous work is The Black Jacobins (1938), which is still widely seen as the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution. The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 as a slave uprising in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. It ended in 1804 with the declaration of Haiti as an independent state, the first state in history to ban both slavery and the slave trade unconditionally from the first day of its existence.

‘Revolution and the Negro’ explores many of the same themes as The Black Jacobins. It considers the under-appreciated role of black struggle in the great events of 1789-1856 in France, Britain, and America that cemented the end of feudalism and the birth of capitalism. It does so to highlight the kind of world-changing agency that exploited and oppressed blacks have exercised in the past and could exercise again in our present struggle for socialism.

More Online Events Listings MORE