I have said it before and I will say it again. And, if need be, again and again. What is it I have said which will be said again, and if need be again, and again? It is that CLR James is the most important revolutionary thinker of the 20^th century and one who will survive into the 21^st century.

To make such a claim for a black man is to make a large claim. The whole idea of western civilisation was to prove that black men are no important part of history. Hegel, the all-important western philosopher, with the arrogance of ignorance was to assert that Africa was "no important part of history". That was bad enough in the 19^th century.

But, as late as the 1980’s, Henry Kissinger, was to assert the same foolishness that Africa and Africans had no meaningful historical role. This after, Kwame Nkrumah, led Ghana to independence in 1957, and there followed some 45 African nations to free themselves from colonial bondage. Not to see this monumental movement for human freedom as not only historic, but unprecedented in all of previous human history, is not to see. That Kissinger did not see, speaks volumes about the blindness that rules the world. And simultaneously, the clarity with which James saw the world, advocating African independence since 1938 in the Black Jacobins. And struggled for it too. He was way ahead of all the thinkers of his time in theory and practice.

The assertion then, that Cyril Lionel Robert James, born in Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1901, at the very beginning of the 20^th century is the definitive thinker of the 20^th century, more relevant to the 21^st century than Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin or Jean Paul Sartre, is bound to shock many who still believe that the white western world is still the leader in terms of thought which can regenerate global civilisation, which is descending into barbarism as evidenced in Kosovo, as in Rwanda, or in Chechnya, or in the school shootings in the USA, to name a few.

Just in case there are those who will accuse me or a Caribbean bias of a personal bias as a colleague of CLR’s, I hasten to make it objective.

Paul Buhle, one of the finest scholars writing and thinking in the U.S. today, himself a Professor of American Civilisation at Brown University, had this to say in his book CLR James The Artist as Revolutionary: "I make no pretence to a definitive statement, because the richness of James’ life and the full trajectory of his influence will require a large collective scholarship barely under way." Read it again. It is sober assessment.

It is high praise indeed though understatement too. But Buhle followed with this: "The story of CLR James will look different, more complete and more understandable from the mid twenty-first century than from today’s perspective". Think on that.

Buhle continues this way: CLR James "has often been called a Renaissance Man. That label seems imprecise, if only because his many-sidedness represents not a break from mediaeval constraints but rather an expansion upon the particular human possibilities in our own time. He has been called a "Black Plato", a characterisation in some ways wildly inaccurate but not lacking a glimmer of truth. James has been an important West Indian (one could say, Third World) novelist, a keen sports critic, a leading historian, Pan-African theorist and spokesman of great pioneer importance, and a philosopher of universal scope. All in all, James would seem to prefigure, in the paths he has taken, the personal range and categorisation that the vision of a better society holds out to us all. He has insisted that only artists, and international figures who truly encompass diverse worlds within themselves, can cast their shadow into the future. James himself is both of these."

That should put to rest any argument that only Caribbeans see James as a major figure in 20^th century thought and action but one who will be best understood "in the mid 21^st century."

And now Paul Le Blanc writing in CLR James and Revolutionary Marxism: "Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) is generally acknowledged to be one of the most original Marxist thinkers to emerge from the Western hemisphere…….. He offered penetrating analyses on the interrelationships of class, race and gender and his discussions of colonialism and the anti-colonial revolution could be brilliant, if not unsurpassed. But CLR James also embraced the heritage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the working class and socialist movements of Europe and North America, the Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky which transformed Russia and promised to liberate the world from all oppression."

But as you would suspect as the 20^th century draws to a close in its last year, 2000, my intention is not to produce encomiums on James. It is to do much more than that. But before that this:

"In the most recent work on CLR James, Rethinking CLR James, which would have pleased CLR no end, because it is edited by a South African, Grant Farred. Farred has this to say: "It is one of the abiding ironies of Cyril Lionel Robert James’ intellectual career that in the ten years that have passed since his death in London in 1989, and for perhaps half a decade before that, the Caribbean thinker has already been able to secure a status denied to him during most of his life. Within a range of disciplines where he was barely recognised for decades there are now a panoply of critics laying claim to James."

That again is high praise indeed. It bears out my point, and Paul Buhle’s point that increasingly as we go into the 21^st century James will become more and more relevant. I am done on that score. I go now to why CLR James will become more and more relevant.

I begin with this abominable tendency to write people out of history which has gripped the western world, especially in its recent unipolar character. There can be no doubt that Leon Trotsky is one of the great figures of the 20^th century, and indeed his History of the Russian Revolution, like CLR James’ Black Jacobins and W.E.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction, is one of the great triumphs of historical writing of this or any other previous century. Only Michelet’s History of the French Revolution is in its class.

CLR James writing in World Revolution while denouncing Stalin, made many criticisms of Trotsky in that work. And this is how the great historical figure Trotsky responded: "It is very important" wrote Leon Trotsky "to convince James that his criticisms are not considered by any one of us as an item of hostility or an obstacle to friendly collaboration in the future." But Trotsky accepted some of James’ criticisms of his positions while he was an important, the second most important figure in the Russian Revolutionary government after 1917. In response to James, Trotsky conceded "not only Bukharin, but I and all of us at various times wrote absurd things. I grant you that."

In 1938 two of the finest minds of the time, met. James, penetrative as ever, made bold criticisms of these Russian historical figures, and they conceded he was right. James, I remind, was Trinidadian. Caribbean, not Russian. But he had so incorporated European history into himself "that he could make criticisms of even Trotsky and Trotsky conceded James was right. That put simply was no small achievement, as Trotsky conceded little to anyone.

I could give one or two dramatic moments in the historic life of James, but that would distract me further.

In 1939, no one could tell where blacks in the United States were going. The Communists had urged "black and white to unite and fight", but each and everytime that happened blacks or negroes - to use the term of the time - felt betrayed by the white leadership.

James enters the fray with a completely new approach. Wrote James, in 1939, mark you, "The American Negroes, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society and the most discriminated against are potentially the most revolutionary elements of the population."

No other thinker conceived of blacks in that way, not in 1939. James continued in his now famous "Resolution on the Negro Question" this way: "The awakening political consciousness of the Negro not unnaturally takes the form of independent action uncontrolled by whites. The Negroes have long felt that more than ever today [1939] the urge to create their own organisations under their own leaders and thus assert not only in theory but in action, their claim to complete equality with other American citizens. Such a desire is legitimate and must be vigorously supported even when it takes the form of a rather aggressive chauvinism."

James was breaking with theories that blacks, being a minority, had to be led by progressive white organisations be it the Communist party which had done much useful work for blacks in fighting lynchings etc. or white radicals of good, liberal intentions. The important thing was "blacks creating their own organisations under their own leaders." To many, back then, this sounded far-fetched, wrong-headed, "unrealistic" or even "romantic".

15 years later there burst upon the scene the Birmingham Bus Boycott, which was to mature into the Civil Rights movement, "in which blacks in responding "to the urge to create their own organisation under their own leaders" would proceed to transform the human rights scene in the United States. It is well to remember that Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X formed or worked in independent black self-organisations. James had foreseen it, after being in the US for only one year and 15 years before it came to pass. It was not prophecy. It was historical method at work.

No where in the work of 20^th century thinkers like say Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Williams, Arthur Koestler, E.H. Carr, can one prefigure the future in the present and past as in CLR James. It was not just genius. It was a unique gift to understand ordinary people, their creative and authentic future in their everydayness.

I must of necessity give one of James statements especially in the light of nonsense written mainly by whites, but accepted by blacks that there is such a thing as "black racism". This nonsense has been written so often to maintain the status quo that even blacks have come to accept it.

On this score as long ago as 1939 James wrote: "Black chauvinism in America today is merely the natural excess of the desire for equality and is essentially progressive while white American chauvinism, the expression of racial domination is essentially reactionary."

In other words, blacks are in no position, anywhere in the world, to racially dominate whites and subordinate them to inferior positions. Because, nowhere in this world are blacks in charge of Capital, its accumulation and investment, and so capable of dominating whites or other races.

People speak of racism in Guyana. It is an absurdity. Africans in Guyana do not wish to reduce Indians to inferiority. Nor do Indians have any such intention or possibility against blacks or Africans. What is taking place in Guyana, is a struggle over a too small and dwindling an economic pie. And so, each racial group is intent on maintaining its small piece of the pie in opposition to the other. Each, Indian and African, is dispossessed. Each struggles for state power, in two parties, the better to secure its advantages. This is racialism. Not racism. The latter is the domination of one race by another, and the development of theories and institutions to justify and enforce that domination, by way of the police, the laws, the courts, education and jobs etc. Racialism is the feuding between the dispossessed races.

Without James as guide, one falls into abysmal error. The excesses, of say, the Nation of Islam, is not racism or racist. It is precisely what it is "the natural excess of the desire for equality, and is essentially progressive."

I want to proceed finally in this discourse on James at the end of the 20^th century, to a recent criticism of James. It comes in a remarkable essay entitled "Silence and Dialectics" by a brilliant Latin American scholar, Santiago Colias. Namely that James had nothing to say about the Cuban Revolution or Latin America after 1968.

I am not out to prove that this is factually untrue. That would be nit-picking. But on his 80^th birthday in 1981 this is what James had to say about Cuba in an interview with Stuart Hall. Said CLR:

"I believe that the revolution in San Domingo [of 1801] was a total revolution. It cleared out what stood in the way completely. And the Haitian revolution weakened because there was no international assistance, they were by themselves. But after 150 years the same thing happened in Cuba. The revolution was complete, the whole system was thrown aside."

In sum the Cuban revolution did what it could do. There was some international assistance from the Soviet bloc, and it survived doing far better in consequence than the Haitian revolution. More importantly it stands alone, the lone proponent of socialism in an increasingly hostile world. It is testimony to the fact that Fidel Castro is an exemplary leader, like Toussaint, but the like of whom the latter half of the 20^th century has not seen. He is borne aloft, the foremost political figure of the 20^th century, by the strength of the Cuban Revolution. So much so, that Castro gave one of the finest speeches of the 20^th century on Globalisation, in Venezuela. Even the WTO itself, in search of legitimacy before the progressive forces had to quote Fidel Castro in its Seattle booklet.

But I want to quote James again, after 1968, on Cuba. In a little known booklet The Caribbean Revolution by CLR James, published in 1973, James makes an astonishing point about Cuba and the Cuban Revolution.

"The population of Cuba should have been formally represented here, in a congress of this kind. Because I say, you call a Congress of the intellectuals of the world, in a socialist country, using a modern language, familiar with modern languages, and in this Congress the working class of Cuba is not represented"! [Exclamation added]

James continued "I said, what is this! We are intellectuals yes. This is our good luck and our misfortune. But here you are intellectuals and you have a socialist proletariat. They ought to be in here discussing with the intellectuals of the world, listening to what we have to say and then we listening to what they have to say. I said you haven’t done that. That’s why your conference is not what it ought to be." This, to say at least, is as simple as it is profound.

James went on to say that the Cuban Congress of intellectuals of the world should prepare a way for the abolition of the intellectuals as an embodiment of the culture." This is as profound as you will get. It will take pages and pages to understand it. Suffice it to say, that the intellectual should become so involved with the work of the mass of workers in production and in society, that in that process, the distinction between intellectual and mass disappears. The worker becomes an intellectual and the intellectual a worker. All this would lead to a going beyond.

There is no doubt that James regarded the Cuban revolution as a great anti-colonial revolution, which completely destroyed American imperial dominance over the economy and people. In James’ own words ‘The Cuban revolution was complete, the whole system was thrown aside."

However it was an anti colonial revolution as distinct from an anti-capitalist revolution. That is to say, the working class did not make the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban Revolution was not one made by the working class, and so creating new organs for the self-government of society. As in the Paris Commune of 1871, where the self organisation of the workers governed for 90 days. Or as in the Soviet Revolution of 1917 where the "Soviets" the self-organisation or workers, actually governed for longer than 90 days until the Civil War in Russia destroyed this new organ.

The development of the productive forces in Cuba did not allow for that creativity of the working people.

But CLR, is very respectfully critical of the Cuban Revolution. When he says that by excluding the working class from a Congress of world intellectuals, it demonstrates that the workers are still seen as objects, beneficiaries, and not subjects of the revolution.

James said in the same 1973 speech that he had heard three great orators. "One is a Welshman called Aneurin Bevan, a tremendous orator. The second one, I don’t want to give them marks, I am not setting an exam, is Fidel Castro.

"Fidel Castro is a speaker you get one in a hundred years and Stokeley Carmichael at his best is number three."

That is the estimate James had of Fidel Castro, not only an exemplary leader, but the finest orator of the 20^th century. James was always capable of seeing the new, and he knew that Fidel Castro by his own organic relation with the mass of Cuban people, had an imperishable claim to be ranked with Lenin, Gandhi and Mao Tse Tung among the titans of the 20^th century.

In an article by James and I written in the Gathering Storm, the Cuban Revolution is seen as one of the defining moments in world history and the Caribbean’s 20^th century contribution to world civilisation. There are few more heroic chapters in world history than the Cuban revolution surviving the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But that is not my point. James essential contribution to human history and philosophy is the creative capacity and contribution of the mass of the people, and it is this at once spontaneous or self-organised, which really and truly moves history from Athenian democracy in ancient Greece to Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s before it was transformed. James had to rethink the science of history and human thought to come to these startling new conclusions - best represented in his most difficult work Notes on Dialectics or his less well known American Civilisation.

And now a joke I gave to an American friend the other day about James. In our last conversation in Buxton, London, James said to me that when he died he would come back when South Africa was free. I looked for him then but I did not see him at all, anywhere. But on November 30^th in the Battle at Seattle I saw CLR James, at his full 6ft 4 height beating iron in the percussion section, and he was singing away "The WTO kills people, Kill the WTO". That international self-organisation of people, workers, consumers, women, environmentalists was the re-incarnation of CLR James. Look out for it and him in the 21^st century.