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This essay explores the Black Trinidadian revolutionary historian C. L. R. James’s little-theorized engagement with questions of the environment and natural world from the 1930s to the 1980s, situating this within his wider oeuvre as a Marxist who not only experienced colonial domination in the Caribbean but also witnessed other catastrophes endemic to twentieth-century capitalism, from the Great War to the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, the Second World War, and then the use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The essay first examines how James might be seen to have helped inspire contemporary theorizing around the “plantationocene” in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938). As early as 1951, James (and his fellow thinkers) noted: “It is not the world of nature that confronts man as an alien power to be overcome. It is the alien power that he has himself created.” The choice ahead, for James, was one of socialism or barbarism, rebellion or extinction. In 1958, evoking biblical language and imagery, he noted that we are already entering “the very valley of the shadow of death.”

‘The gunboat. The bomb, the prison compound. That is what the monocle-flashing warriors of the Empah mean when they speak of determination. Will the sun never set on these bristling Blimps?’ So wro...

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg. Volume III. Political Writings, 1: On Revolution 1893–1905, by Peter Hudis, Axel Fair-Schulz and William A. Pelz (eds). London: Verso, 2019. 592 pp.In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui by Mike Gonzalez. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. 231 pp.Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation and the Limits of Modernism, by Ben Conisbee Baer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 384 pp.Here to Stay – Here to Fight: A Race Today Anthology, by Paul Field, Robin Bunce, Leila Hassan and Margaret Peacock (eds). London: Pluto Press, 2019. 304 pp.

In 1968, protests against the old order swept the world. From the general strike in France and the student occupations in Paris to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, and from the Black Panthers in the U...

This paper seeks to situate the idea and intellectual narrative of “world revolution” in its modern historical context, tracing it back to the age of democratic revolution in the late eighteenth century, and then developed by great revolutionary thinkers like Marx and Engels. It examines the possible limitations of Marx and Engels’s vision of world revolution with respect to the Third World as a result of their European intellectual formation in the tradition of the Enlightenment, and examines the charge of “Eurocentrism” advanced by post-colonialist theorists among others against classical Marxism. It then explores the inspiration of the Russian Revolution for those fighting racism and imperialism, and how black radicals brought their revolutionary narratives of black liberation into communist narratives for the first time in its aftermath. The essay then discusses C.L.R. James’s pioneering 1937 history of the Comintern, World Revolution, among other things a theoretical intervention into the debates raging among socialist black radicals during the 1930s, and critically examines the charge of “Eurocentrism” often levelled at World Revolution.

This article will focus on the black Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James and how his exposure to French as part of his colonial education and sojourns and researches in interwar France shape...

In colonial Trinidad in 1919, rising industrial turmoil culminated in a rolling mass strike that would shake this outpost of the British empire to its foundations. Though it is often located as an important part of Trinidadian or at best Caribbean labour history—a precursor in many ways to the powerful wave of labour rebellions that swept the Anglophone colonial Caribbean in the 1930s—this chapter will examine the strike through the prism of transnational and global labour history. It will explore how the strike had indigenous and international roots and will aim to situate the inspiring mass strike of 1919 within the wider international turmoil of that year, not least the rising challenge the militancy of organised labour posed in the imperial metropole of Britain itself.

In April 1933 the young Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James started work alongside the famous critic Neville Cardus as a cricket correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, writing nearly 140 brief reports for the newspaper over the next three seasons. Cardus’s appointment of a newly arrived British colonial subject like James to such a prestigious post remains quite remarkable. James’s job meant he travelled widely for the first time across England reporting on county clashes, and he began to develop his distinctive philosophy on the game. This article offers the first critical excavation of James’s cricket writing in these early years and thereby examines the future author of Beyond a Boundary’s first engagement with “English cricket” as a popular dimension of imperial metropolitan culture. It argues that James’s political radicalization towards militant anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist activism in Britain during this critical period found expression in his cricket writing.

This essay explores some of the complexities of the black Trinidadian Marxist historian and activist C.L.R. James's insider–outsider relationship to continental Europe, in particular the Spanish Civil War. The eruption of the Spanish Revolution in 1936 after a coup by General Franco overthrew the newly democratically elected Popular Front government was of tremendous hope to all those concerned about the rise of fascism. As a black colonial subject and Pan-Africanist thinker, James's understanding of the Spanish Civil War was also viewed through the lens of colour, allowing us an important insight into how race and the colonial dimension of metropolitan politics manifested themselves in Europe during the 1930s.This essay will use James's little discussed writings for the Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist press during this period to elucidate his attempt to help build solidarity with the Spanish Revolution. In particular, as well as drawing inspiration from the eyewitness accounts of workers power in revolutio...

If C. L. R. James could later reflect in Beyond a Boundary that before arriving in Britain, “about Britain, I was a strange compound of knowledge and ignorance,” then the same was fundamentally true about his relation to American society before his arrival there in 1938. This article will begin with discussion of the attraction of America for black West Indians, including George Padmore, in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the young James's own love of jazz and American literature. The complexities of the young James's “anti-Americanism” will be also explored, before we explore how James's turn to both Marxism and pan-Africanism after 1934 led to a new appreciation of both the power of the American working class and a new understanding of how a revolutionary solution might be found to the “Negro Question,” the question of the systematic racism towards black people in America. The article will conclude with discussion of James's 1938 work A History of Negro Revolt, in particular its Marxist analysis of the history of American slavery and its abolition during the American Civil War, as well as the strengths and limitations of Garveyism as a social movement.