C. L. R. James's Quotes

One of the surest signs of the estimated changes in the consciousness of the American proletariat is to be found in the character of the demands now being put forward by the leadership.

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

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.

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.

Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.

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

Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.

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

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

Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.

First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle.

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

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

Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage.

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.

Du Bois marked a great stage in the history of Negro struggles when he said that Negroes could no longer accept the subordination which Booker T. Washington had preached.

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

I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.

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.