June 5, 1998

The Making of Caribbean Philosophy

Part II

Following is the second part of a speech I made to the Caribbean Studies Association, last Thursday May 28. The Caribbean Studies Association meeting here at Perry Bay at the Multipurpose Center was the largest gathering of scholars and cultural workers ever to come to Antigua and Barbuda.

I do not wish to leave the impression that only revolutionary statesmen like Toussaint L'Ouverture or Caribbean soldiers, arms in hand, in the First World War, helped to forge a Caribbean philosophy in the process of history and at authentic moments.

Black female household servants, or maids developed strategies for coping with their white mistresses in the Caribbean in the 20th century. Such household workers believed they had a "right" to take home left-overs, excess food and well used utensils for their own home use or that of their neighbours. "Not only was it the moral thing to do" wrote Robin Kelly in his excellent Race Rebels, "given the excesses and wastefulness of white wealthy families and the needs of the less privileged." It was the necessary thing to do.

Then there is the role of community organisations in shaping Caribbean culture and ideology. Grass roots institutions such as Friendly Societies and Lodges not only helped families with basic survival needs, but created and sustained bonds of fellowship, and most important, the essential African value, a sense of community. These organisations, in particular, provided funds and other resources to members in need and to the poor generally, including death benefits (mainly to cover burial costs) as well as assistance for families whose members became seriously ill or lost their job. These were bonds of solidarity.

In my own native Antigua, it became an axiom of faith among the poor, that though one may not be able to attain dignity in life, it was absolutely important to die in dignity. Death benefits, in the lodges, was both sacred and sacrosanct.

The social links and sense of solidarity and community created by the Ulotrichians, the Odd Fellows, the House of Ruth etc., etc., occasionally translated into community and labour struggles as with the Ulotrichians in Antigua and St. Croix in 1918. But it is important to note that the bonds of fellowship developed in the Lodges and Friendly Societies, not only sought to develop loyalty and secrecy of aims and practices, to overcome the perpetual "squealing" which beset most serious efforts at effecting change, but laid the basis of the unionisation which took place in the Caribbean in the 1930's and 40's. In consequence, the struggle by the Caribbean people for a new, if not the "good" life was taken to a new and higher level based on these new ideas and new practices.

You will have noted that I am emphasising the autonomous creations of the people, the lodges and friendly societies. And you will have noticed too, that I draw from these the essential values these autonomous bodies established; solidarity, dignity, community, and in the case of the women, as maids, a rejection of the wastefulness of the system. From the latter there flows the philosophic but poetic injunction:

Let the superfluous and lust - dieted man

With that said, and I hope mulled over and grasped, I need to return to the mainstream of philosophy.

Everyone knows or ought to know, that according to both Rousseau and Kant, to discover what one ought to do one had to listen to an inner voice. This voice issues commands; it orders. Rousseau calls it Reason. Kant also calls it the Rational. Kant went even further, he offers guidelines whereby the commands or the injunctions of the inner voice can be distinguished from those other rival voices, such as the emotions or self-interest.

The point is, whatever the inner voice of Reason commands is objective, universal, timeless, true for all men, and I add, not culture determined. Reason in Kant had replaced the natural law.

The values of rational creatures must, therefore, following Kant, be free. That is, if they come from outside, depend on that same outside force, then one is not free. Once there is dependence on some outside power, blind nature or some transcendent power, God or Nature, which orders me as it wills, this is not autonomy. It is heteronomy. A form of dependence on something I do not control, slavery. Hence Kant argued, autonomy is the basis of all morality.

Logically then, for Kant, to use men or women for ends that are not their own, is to exploit them, degrade them, humiliate them. It is to deny their human essence. The most heinous of all crimes.

Thus Kant had put to rest, buried all the racist, but idealist philosophers, Locke, Hume and Hegel, to name a few.

All values are created by free human choice, reason and rational choice, are the essence of humanity; of dignity as human beings. It differentiates human beings, from things beasts and brutes.

The rules, the commands of reason, hold for me as for you, as for every other creature. Whether in a religious guise or humanistic guise; they are made universally valid. This is the basis of our notion of moral rights and moral rules of the liberty, equality and dignity, (if not fraternity) of all human beings. Kant called these rules categorical imperatives.

Kant as you will have noted is divorced from the productive process. I happen to believe that at the time he created his phenomenal body of ideas, the society he lived in was very much like the society in the Caribbean today.

Kant is really philosophising about the individual who is no longer related to other persons by even the appearance of a general bond. It is therefore as free agents in a general conflict between person and person, individual and individual, so the whole society is only the mutual conflict of all individuals, who are no longer distinguished by anything other than their individuality each listening and obeying his own inner voice, be it, to borrow from psychology, the ice or the super-ego.

The Romantics, following Kant and led by Fichte, would show that in the contest of individual wills, and the collision of values which this implies, society would be torn apart, between barbarism and creativity, issuing from the various wills.

If you look closely at Jamaica, where the elite is too small to control the economy, and the mass of people are not a class for-itself or in-itself, you will find both the extreme expressions of individuality, creative expression and at the same time unspeakable criminality, all issuing from free agents answering their individual inner voices. Modern cooperative labour in industry was not in Kant's time a sufficient general bond, as is the case now in the Caribbean archipelago, where plantation society had collapsed and no autonomous new form had replaced it.

Let us now dart back to the Caribbean after that European Safari. The peculiarity of the Caribbean Nation is that it exists as much in the archipelago in the Caribbean Sea, as well in its huge migrant communities in the several metropolitan capitals of the world.

Five such Caribbean exiles were to make an astonishing philosophic impact on the world the most significant being Marcus Garvey, Jose Marti, and George Padmore, Frantz Fanon, and C.L.R James. It is upon the last named that I shall concentrate the remainder of what I have to say on this occasion. But before that, this.

Dr. Winston James in that very find book, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, to which I have referred before makes this point!

"It is easier for those who have travelled, than those who have not, to develop a Pan-Africanist consciousness. It is no accident that the Caribbean being the area that has historically produced the most peripatetic of all African peoples, has also thrown up an extravagantly disproportionate number of Pan-Africanist political activists, thinkers and intellectuals. Edward Wilmott Blyden, H. Sylvester Williams, J. Albert Thorne, J. Robert Love, Theophílus Scholes, Anténor Fermin, René Maran, Hubert Harrison, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Una Marson, J.A. Rodgers, Jean Price Mars, Ras Makonnen, CLR James, Aimé Cesaire, Leon Gontrain Damus and - perhaps the most under-rated of them all - the great George Padmore of Trinidad, and all hailed from this remarkable chain of tiny islands and all participated in and were products of its peripatetic tradition. In more recent times the region produced Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney."

Concentrated within those names is a remarkable body of thought, which constitutes an essential part of a Caribbean philosophy, and if one were to add the imaginative writers and poets and the economist and Nobel Laureate, Professor Arthur Lewis, it could modestly be stated that the Caribbean had produced the most amazing body of thought in the modern world, far disproportionate to its size and its economic importance. I suggest to you that this is in part because the Caribbean is a cross-section of world civilisation and a concentrated expression of it. For here residual, but indigenous Taino, African, European, Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern civilisations met in an intense culture of foreign accumulation and exploitation. Notably, and to be fair, our dependence, age-old dependence, and alienation from large scale agriculture, large-scale commerce and large-scale industry, has made us particularly weak in the areas of science and technology. But the amazing body of Caribbean thought is indisputable. Canada one-twentieth of the world's surface cannot so claim. Nor can continental Australia.

I need only point out that where the great George Padmore broke with Stalinism as a mode of thought, the Grenada Revolution of 1979 - 83 was to embrace it, leading to its bloody convulsion.

And where the world renowned Walter Rodney had advocated "grounding with the brothers and sisters" as the new method for the politics of liberation and transformation, the Grenada Revolution, substituted the Central Committee for the people, and then the Politburo substituted itself for the Central Committee, and then Joint-Leadership was to substitute itself for the Politburo. In the end the maximum-leader would wipe out, Joint Leader, Politburo, Central Committee, Party and Revolution in a murderous blast of gun-fire. It was the Stalinism, the great George Padmore had so dramatically and authentically rejected, in its essential form and content-murder. I need only add, that Stalin to produce the Russian counter-revolution after 1924, murdered all the leaders of the Bolshevik Park, and the Russian Revolution. This awful tragedy would reproduce itself in the Grenada Revolution, despite our best efforts in Antigua to scotch to snake.

I come now to C.L.R James. And I begin with my largest claim. There is no thinker in the whole of human philosophy whose thought and revolutionary thought depended more on his organic relation to the working-class than that of C.L.R James. Not of Marx himself, or Lenin, or Gramsci can this be said.

Let me illustrate the point beginning with his works of fiction La Divina Pastora and Minty Alley. It is C.L.R James' social life in the "barrack-yards" of working people in Trinidad, which is the real foundation of these works. Similar too, is the origin of Cipriani - The Case for West Indian Self-Government, the manuscript of which he left with in his bags when he left Trinidad and Tobago for England in 1932.

What some regard as his magnum opus, The Black Jacobins was written as part of his immersion in the English working class in Nelson, Lancashire, and as part too, of his activity in the Independent Labour Party up to 1938.

Similar too, is C.L.R's involvement with Padmore with the International Friends of Ethiopia, later to become the International African Service Bureau, from which we get the History of Pan African Revolt, culminating later in what many regard as another magnum opus, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, which for greatest profit ought to be read alongside Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.

But to me C.L.R. James reaches his acme, in his organic relation with the most advanced working class in human history, the American working class. State Capitalism and World Revolution is definitely a pioneering work as is Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity as is Every Cook can Govern, all of which broke, or sought to break the stranglehold of the Cold War, between Soviet State Capitalism, which passed as Socialism to many, on the one hand, and American Corporate Capitalism, on the other hand, both of which held human thought by the neck from say, 1938 to 1989. This great period is capped by two great works, James' Thesis on the American Negro Revolution, which philosophically did a unique thing in all philosophy, predicted the Civil Rights Movement or Revolution in the U.S. Then there is C.L.R James immortal, but immensely difficult work Notes on Dialectics, which freed the advanced industrial working class, from Lenin's necessity of a vanguard as an external power, over and above it and determining for it. All, in my view, creating major break-throughs in human thought and related praxis.

Do not think I have omitted C.L.R's Beyond the Boundary, which yet others regard as his magnum opus, which is the combined product of C.L.R's relation to the American working class, through the organisation "Facing Reality" - and a remarkable work by that name Facing Reality - and his immersion in the Trinidad nationalist movement of the PNM and his role as Secretary of the West Indies Federal Labour Party which sought to federate the West Indies between 1958 and 1962. It is from that well - spring that we get the remarkable Beyond the Boundary, which through the prism of the Caribbean working man, with the striking name, Matthew Bondman, looks at sport in the history of human art and development.

To repeat my contention, I state it in the opposite, when C.L.R is not organically linked to the working class, in the Caribbean, in Africa, in England or in the United States, as when he was a professor at several American universities in the 60's and 70's one gets brilliant essays, but not the insightful, new explanation of new developments of social reality, which is the essence of philosophy.

Let me now re-state my point in the positive, from Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, through Rousseau and Kant, down to Hegel, and Marx, Sartre and Heidegger, there is no thinker whose thought depended more on his organic relation to the working class, than that of C.L.R James. It is that principally, and his West Indian origin as part of that cross-section of world civilisation, which accounts for his premier role in human thought and action in the era of globalisation, as this period of time is called.

C.L.R James (1901 - 1989) is the polar opposite, or if you prefer, the anti-thesís of another significant modern philosopher, Martin Heidegger, (1889 - 1976), who extended the idealist and racist current that culminated in Hegel.

To Heidegger human suffering, exploitation and dehumanisation are irrelevant. Philosophy is far above such banalities. He saw history not in terms of increasing freedom or decreasing misery, but, believe it or not, as a poem. "Being's poem" he wrote "just begun is man."

For Heidegger the "words of being" of the great philosophers gave successive epochs in history their self-image. History, as the history of Being, is the narrative of changes in human beings' image of themselves, their sense of what ultimately matters. The philosopher's task therefore, is to "preserve the force of the most elementary words," in other terms, to prevent the words of the great houses-of-Being-building thinkers of the past from being trivalised. However, Heidegger, almost single-handedly, re-shaped what had before been thought of as purely literary matter into a doctrine of the nature of human life. His Being and Time changed the course of philosophy by breaking down barriers between genres, barriers no one else had been able to surmount.

Though I would not argue the point here, he and C.L.R James are similar in that latter respect. And James by including sports, calypso, and other forms of popular culture including the comic strip and the art form of the 20th century -- the cinema - in my view, at any rate, excels him.

It is of course necessary to give, in brief, some of the essential insights of C.L.R James within the narrow bark of a single article, or a couple of articles.

In Notes on Dialectics James begins with a revolutionary piece of philosophy, which to quote another remarkable piece of Caribbean scholarship Tony Bogues' Caliban's Freedom, published in 1997, according to Tony Bogues, James' Notes on Dialectics "announces James' rupture not only from Trotskyism but traditional Marxism-Leninism." So James the Marxist philosopher is breaking with traditional Marxism-Leninism. This then, is a revolution within a revolution in human thought. Here is the historic break in C.L.R's Notes on Dialectics.

"Truth can only be where it makes itself its own result. Truth in our analysis, the total emancipation of labour, can only be achieved when it overcomes its complete penetration by its inherent antagonism, the capital relation. At this stage of actuality in the labour movement I come inevitably to the conclusion that there was no place in the labour movement for the Party."

Here then is a real revolution in human thought. The Party, the centre-piece of Leninism, -- Proletarian man must have a party or he is nothing - the party, the instrument for the creation of the nation-state in 19th century Europe, James now argues that this instrument has become a negation to be negated, for the emancipation of labour in the most advanced forms of industrial society.

In the process, C.L.R James, as Caribbean internationalist and activist, is rewriting the whole philosophic encyclopaedia. Consciousness is not some working of the Zeitgeist or world spirit in the thinker as posited by the idealist Hegel, or the commands of the inner voice of reason. For C.L.R James, and I quote, "consciousness is to know the concrete, but to know it dialectically" for "the content [of the concrete] moves, changes, develops and creates new categories of thought and gives them direction .... Philosophic cognition means not philosophy about it, but a correct cognition, a correct grasp of it, the concrete, in its movement."

It would be correct for me to give you James himself on the concrete - "concrete socialism". This James says came in 1917 with the Soviets - the self-organised workers councils. "It was", says C.L.R, "the workers who did the concrete work on the Soviet." They thought over the Soviet which first appeared in 1904 in Russia. "They analysed it and remembered it, and within a few days of the February Revolution in 1917 they organised in the great centres of Russia this unprecedented social formation." This creation of the soviets, by the Russian working class, as a self-organisation, is for James the essence and quintessence of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

James then is forever looking in history, and the concrete labour movement, for the creative interventions of the great mass of the people, and the movement, changes, developments in these creations of the working people, which create new categories in his thought and gives them direction.

In other words, the soviet form, the workers council which appeared in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, replaced the Paris Commune of 1871 as the highest organ the mass of workers had created for their own democratic governance as free agents acting for - itself, and therefore all society, at one and the same time.

It is well to note, that James also saw the self-activity of the Polish workers in Solidarity in the 1980s as the fulfillment of his idea until Lech Walesa and others turned it into its opposite. The deconstruction of the party did not mean the abolition of organisation, but the abolition of one kind of organisation, the Party, as the "knowing" of the workers determining a line, and getting the workers to follow, more as objects than as subjects; at any rate with the party, as transcendent power.

I cannot in the course of the 30 minutes allotted me, detail the whole of James philosophy, which is Caribbean in national origin, but global in its scope. I can though point that Caribbean philosophy has created in James, in his new categories of thought, the quintessential modern philosopher on the emancipation of labour from thralldom to global capital.

I can only state that like Marx, James through the agency of the most advanced working class in human history, the American working class, came to see that an industrialised working class in its historical movement shows "By deed, instead of by argument, that production on a large scale and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion and of extortion against the labouring man or woman, himself or herself; and that like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil, with a willing hand, a ready mind and a joyous heart."

This is one of the classic but little known definitions of that political and philosophical category, known as socialism, often banalised by prating coxcombs.

It is this tremendous revolutionary praxis of C.L.R James which led him to his magnificent philosophic view of freedom with which I end. James saw freedom as:

Not the enjoyment, ownership or use of goods as the proponents of globalisation now advocate, in which process many of us in the Caribbean will be underclassed, but for James, freedom is self-realisation; with one's natural and acquired abilities, freed from the capital relation, and "the incorporation into the individual personality of the whole previous development of humanity." No more concrete and stirring definition of freedom as the inexorable goal of humankind, to my mind, exists. It is the Caribbean speaking on its own, to the world, now confused, with a clarity, a philosophic clarity, which makes a new alternative thrust possible, and establishing the philosophic premises on which this great leap can be made.

Thank you all for your patience.