Cyril Lionel Robert James
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901-19 May 1989) was a journalist, and a prominent socialist theorist and writer.
Born in Trinidad, he attended the Queen's Royal College on the island before becoming a cricket journalist and also wrote fiction. In 1932, he moved to Nelson in Lancashire, England in the hope of furthering his literary career. There, he worked for the Manchester Guardian and wrote a biography of the cricketer Learie Constantine.
James began to campaign for the independence of the West Indies. He was a leading figure in the International African Service Bureau. He also joined the Independent Labour Party, in which he was convinced by Trotskyism and became a member of the entrist Marxist Group.
In 1933, James moved to London.and wrote a play about Toussaint L'Ouverture, which was staged in the West End and starred Paul Robeson. During this period, he wrote what are perhaps his best-known works of non-fiction: World Revolution (1937), a study of the Communist International, and Black Jacobins (1938) about the Haitian revolution.
In 1937, James split from the Marxist Group to form a new group of the same name with some supporters. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League. By this point, he had come to the attention of Trotsky and the leadership of the new Fourth International, who encouraged him to embark upon a speaking tour of the United States.
James moved to the US in late 1938, but by 1940 had developed severe doubts about Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state. He formed the Johnson Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya in Max Shachtman's Workers' Party, and came to describe himself as a Leninist and argue for socialists to support the emerging black nationalist movements. The Workers' Party did not accept this, and so in 1945, the tendency left, in 1947 joining instead the Socialist Workers' Party. By 1949, he came to reject the idea of a vanguard party. This led his tendency to leave the Trotskyist movement and rename itself the Correspondence Publishing Committee.
In 1952, James was deported from the US to England for having overstayed his visa by over ten years. In 1958, he returned to Trinidad, where he edited The Nation newspaper for the pro-independence People's National Movement (PNM) party. He also became involved in the Pan-African movement, believing that the Ghana revolution showed that Africa was the most important inspiration for international revolutionaries.
James also advocated West Indian Federation, and it was over this that he fell out with the PNM leadership. He returned to Britain, then to the US in 1968, where he taught at the University of the District of Columbia. Ultimately, he returned to Britain and spent his last years in Brixton, London.
Bibliography
- The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of the British Government in the West Indies (1932)
- Minty Alley (1936)
- World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (1937)
- The Black Jacobins: Touissant L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)
- Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx and Lenin (1948)
- State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950)
- Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1952)
- Facing Reality (1958)
- Modern Politics (1960)
- Party Politics in the West Indies (1962)
- Beyond a Boundary (1963)
- Kwame Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977)
- Cricket (selected writings) (1986)
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