In 1992, I first became aware of CLR James. I purchased a copy of Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism & Self-Determination.1 In these pages, James in 1939, as J.R. Johnson, with Trotsky discussed in Mexico strategic questions related to building Black autonomous movements and revolutionary socialist multi-racial organisations. James was alert from experience, as a historian and political actor, of a possibility. The idea of self-determination could be distorted and abused by those who advocated it. It could not easily mean autonomy where those pushing for it wanted recognition by the empire of capital. One does not seek to overturn, or consistently agitate against, the world system that one wishes to be recognised by or included. This could be discovered before, during, and after the Third World national liberation epoch (1947–1993).
Also, around this time I saw James quoted in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa to the effect: ‘the race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is only less grave than to make it fundamental’.2 Without placing this quotation from The Black Jacobins in the context of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the Ethiopia solidarity movement (1935–1941), it can be interpreted to mean anything. The search for Black autonomy must mean the self-organisation and self-emancipation of Black toilers or it means repression of them by aspiring Black rulers.
The search for identity and heritage, in all their proper cultural nuances, for those who have known scars, exploitation, and who are overcoming insecurity, cannot be permitted to be captured by those who define freedom as managing subordinate lives. This is how all who fatefully embrace the state define it. These are the facts of the long duration of post-civil rights, post-colonial existence.
As someone who has acted with those who fought white supremacist police, imperialists, and fascists in the streets, we are not living, in the new millennium, through a ‘new Jim Crow’, slavery by another name, or a ‘decolonial’ period – though institutional racism, fascist attacks, and the empire of capital persist. Hopefully, we have now learned that the challenge to respectability politics without opposition to elite representative government is a fraud. This is something that James understood early on and that few contemporaries grasp.
1 Facing Reality: The Affirmative Action Empire and the Ethnically Plural Police State
We are living in an affirmative action empire and ethnically plural police state alongside subcontractors of guilt and activists for the government, funded by the white rich, talking about privilege. We have people lecturing us about the problem of ‘colour blindness’ who are not opposed to the police state; they are explicitly part of the boss class who murder, mass incarcerate, and get out the vote for those who exploit. Separate from intermittent public policy challenges asserted in bad faith or with malicious intent, which talk about ‘merit’ and ‘standards’, those who chatter about diversity, equity, and inclusion or racial disparities among professionals and the cultural apparatus are making new millennium rank-and-filers angry.
We can never know when it will explode. But a culture of labour strikes must hate bosses, not identify with them regardless of ethnicity or gender. And quite frankly, the main currents of what are called ‘progressive’ social movements identify with hierarchical power but have special rules for who can get excited and raise their voice. Questions are asked and conversations are had that no corporate media or social media or activist outlets are recording or recognising as a coming new synthesis.
Those who work for the cultural apparatus of the state and wish to defend their relatively secure role as professionals and administrators of compliant humanity would like us to think we function under some mode of production or governance that was current decades ago. Or they teach these frameworks as a disinformation campaign. I know it is a falsification for I am now past middle age, and when I was a youth the contradictions of post-civil rights and post-colonialism were already present in my life and times.
2 Malcolm, Mandela, and Me
In the early 1990s, I was a student activist at Hunter College in New York City. I had been reading books by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and Nelson Mandela (Frantz Fanon, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Camus were still a challenge to grasp rudimentarily) and my understanding of socialism and revolution was comparatively thin in contrast to how I would now approach these matters.3 One thing I was very clear on: I decided to identify with socialism and revolution because liberalism and progressivism were deplorable to me. There was obviously something wrong with progressivism – it was a form of conservatism.
Many who spoke against racism or for labour were in fact tangled up with the state and capital and its electoral politics. It would peculiarly keep coming up – ‘that’s progressive’. And yet every time this was said, some ethical lapse seemed to be covered up or minimised. As someone who has lived in different parts of the United States, and who has travelled abroad when small opportunities presented themselves to Europe, Canada, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, everywhere we hear this global phrase a political crime is being committed or silences and complicity are present.
Progressivism is also permissive to those who lived by dubious social identities that criticise privilege and grab for it, that talk of equality but accept divergent political principles for different people (whites and people of colour, women and men, LGBTQ and heterosexual), and those who appear to desire to make the revolution in a poetry café.
My disgust at empty counter-cultures, how they disturbed nobody’s sense of personal advancement, I regret impeded me for many years from engaging the arts with more substance. Few grasp class struggle quite simply as the workers and bosses having nothing in common because they have psyched themselves out from the impending confrontations or justified expressions of anger and contempt toward those who share their own name, image, likeness, and heritage.
If white privilege is the placing of one’s possessive individualism or the pursuit of property above solidarity with the most oppressed, then this has been the normative basis of Black politics for decades now. Separate from propagandising the consciousness we wish to see, a comparative African worldview only confirms the process of mystification. There are obscure individuals and small groups in all communities who distinguish themselves by their radical democratic commitments. Nevertheless, ‘progressive’ always exists between propertied stakeholders and a content-less socialism.
3 A Radical Internationalist Who Listened to Elders
Ever since my early 20s I was serious about radical internationalism and always alert to and patiently listened to activist elders, both what they historically had been and how they thought in the present. Having always been friendly with and learning from those who had something to teach, I have been accused of organising the elders first, by those who otherwise felt neglected by younger generations. Having never revered anyone because they were my senior, save for neighbourly cordialities, I have been concerned with the quality of what is offered in conversation and community. In this way, and along this path, I have become a historian, a keeper of archives, concerned with clarifying the relationship between our time and previous epochs.
It takes time to grasp many of the complexities. I was familiar with many activist elders repeatedly suggesting that the next generation did not understand. Of course, there have been elders who constantly complain that youth do not take political initiative and who are never satisfied with what is pursued if they do not direct it themselves. As one elder said of himself a few years ago: ‘I have no patience to talk extensively with tired old men. After all, I am now a tired old man’. As someone who has a good memory, thinking back, I can attribute this sentiment to a few people who, as far as I know, never met each other.
Often, those who were unprincipled only elevated and supported those who could easily be made into their followers, and for whom they need not justify their historical retreats, zig-zags, and compromises. One need not be old to see this. Very few wanted young people to thoroughly understand radical democratic or independent socialist politics; there was little encouragement for those who had a nuanced grasp of historical and political reality, the complexity of human nature, who read and researched thoroughly, and who did not allow this to paralyse them from emerging to speak and act effectively.
Further, some activist elders no longer wanted the responsibility of acting like or encouraging true believers. For to do so is to take responsibility for a new generation with difficult, isolated lives who cannot easily find love, sustain health, or economic stability.
A fundamental comparative error in evaluating freedom struggles during the 1960s and 1970s in contrast to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century struggles is that many think they are a serious community organiser at high tides of resistance. But unless one ‘progressively’ liquidates all our principles, one has to learn to be competent at radical politics when one has nothing, social or economic capital, and show that they can still draw some people. Those with a reputation as great activists often merely rode the whirlwind, and when it disappeared there was no wind beneath their wings and so they gave up trying to fly.
Emerging coherently from the fragments of activist existence was difficult and would take time. Surprisingly, I have now seen many insurgent risings, campaigns, and collectives rise and fall in this epoch where nothing is supposed to happen. This is the privilege of those who keep trying to bring the new society closer. One thing that many who talk of ‘decolonising’ rarely consider today is those who are denied the right to govern themselves, and are insulted by it, wish to try.4 With this endeavour, if effort is actually being made, come not mere observations but attempts to overcome contradictions.
Certainly, not everyone who is against war is against empire. Someone who wishes for ‘peace’ might sympathise with one or more imperialists or police states. Further, not everyone who was against racism was against empire or democratic minded. If not everyone who was against empire was opposed to capitalism, not all those committed to anti-colonialism were socialist or democratic minded. Not all committed to non-violence or Black power opposed the police state but preferred one executive administration of it over another. Most who call for ‘decolonisation’ today are unable to turn words into deeds and do not campaign to free the classical colonies remaining on the planet. However, such nuances become more concrete not simply by reading but through learning by experience. And these creative conflicts cannot simply be chalked up to inexperience.
4 Sojourns to Cuba and the Search for Socialism
In 1993 I visited Cuba twice, first to work on a voluntary agricultural labour brigade in Matanzas, and then six months later to bring material aid to Havana. In both instances the goal was to break the US embargo. I was excited of course to see a socialist society, a country where a revolution had been made. I highly recommend that radical critical thinkers go to such countries. It is difficult for those without family connections to be guests of ordinary people and not their hierarchical governments. It was clear that Cuba solidarity activists who spoke of ‘a people-to-people foreign policy’ were decorating something short of that.
In one instance we flew to Cuba from Canada; in another we crossed the border in Texas into Mexico, flying to Cuba from there. In certain respects, a radical internationalist commitment marked by a certain level of disobedience was being carried out. But two things disturbed me. First, many of those who travelled to bring material aid to Cuba were still getting out the vote for the Democratic Party, and advertised a Cuba solidarity coalition that included certain capitalist politicians. For many, the revolution was a type of vacation abroad; radical solidarity was mixed up with charity, the welfare-state, and electoral politics.
Second, when I questioned whether the working people of Cuba actually governed that country, many dedicated revolutionaries, socialists, and anti-imperialists replied that it did not matter. For most insulted by the historical denial of self-determination of conquered peoples and for most organising for some future socialism or communism, it did not matter whether ordinary people directly governed or not. This should shake those who are not Machiavellians to the core. We should not be so thirsty for empowerment that we will accept a half-made or second-hand society as a dwelling to sustain our search for liberation.
Historically, the US had tried to overthrow many times and had menaced the Cuban government, which many agreed embodied socialism and revolution. And the important thing was to break the US embargo that desired to undermine trade relations with Cuba. Yet, visits to Cuba, even with the decline of Soviet Russia’s aid, showed that there were many joint economic ventures with global capitalists and their governments from abroad. No workers or youth to whom we were introduced asked questions about their contradictions. Surely, ordinary people in Cuba asked these questions but were not featured on the directed tours and cultural events. This raised questions about the democratic content and the political economy of the socialist future and the ethics of those who took part in such projects.
5 Anti-Apartheid and the Future of the Fight against Racism
In the same period, I was active in the last phase of the Anti-Apartheid South Africa movement. I worked with a coalition to bring an African National Congress (ANC) Youth League speaker to campus – her name, as I recall, was Sister Ntombe. I was captivated by Nelson Mandela’s personality and speeches at first. Though his initial working with F.W. De Klerk, the Apartheid leader, toward transitional government seemed to convey a peculiar morality. While it was good under adversity to struggle to bring a non-racial or multi-racial society into being, where there had been intense racial oppression and racial insecurity, this project as it was organised seemed to chide if not fear the insurgent dual power in the streets in South Africa that informally brought Mandela from prison.
Apparent revolutionaries and socialists were circulating Mandela’s speeches along with the ANC Freedom Charter. It was difficult to reconsider if the elder Nelson Mandela’s life, much of which was spent as a political prisoner, was all about struggle as his first book of speeches suggested. Had his most recent speeches and practice suggested a different tone?
There appeared to be strong commitment to a socialist future and Black labour in the coalition around Mandela’s party that included many communists and trade unionists. Yet Wall Street, in the mainstream press of 1992–1993, underlined that global capital understood that Mandela’s party would not redistribute wealth in any fashion (as limited as this commitment had been at its best), and as the ANC programme promised. This was consistent with sections of the US government and its ruling elite warming to Mandela, who as a political prisoner was dismissed as a ‘communist’ and ‘terrorist’ for many years.
Mandela, following his release from jail, toured the United States and Britain and gave speeches suggesting that the principles – peculiarly now these included non-violence – he embodied would never be compromised. The Black middle class, Black politicians, Black capitalists, and Black celebrities were delighted to see this ‘revolutionary’, a role that none of them was ambitious to pursue. Liberals, regardless of race, engaged Mandela like he was the return of Dr. Martin Luther King. If we really understood King’s relationship to the state and capital, we would not have wasted so many tissues, whether tears of joy or sadness. For when the modern Civil Rights movement was not a direct action anti-fascist movement, it was stage-managed from the White House. Nevertheless, many persist in seeing Mandela and King as saints.
Nobody would tell South Africa who could be their ‘friends’, Mandela suggested. The US would not keep South Africa from sustaining their friendship with Castro’s Cuba, Qadhafi’s Libya, Arafat’s Palestine, and the declining Soviet Union. This was an allusion to the Cold War, anti-colonialism, and self-determination. However, anyone not out to lunch could see that the Anti-Apartheid coalition at home and abroad included socialists, capitalists, Pan Africanists, imperialists, and Washington lobbyists – many of them maintaining a plurality of identities. They were not mutually exclusive as anyone attending activist coalition meetings could find out.5 Mandela’s South Africa clearly was carrying out a model that was stretching toward something similar to post-civil rights America. The projection of a ‘democratic South Africa’ that unfurled electoral politics was a retreat from the popular democracy in the streets. Many saw, in the streets, only the potential of a racial blood bath.
A handful of Pan Africanists and independent socialists were not pleased with Mandela’s and the ANC’s collaboration with global capitalism. But the more meticulously one examined the situation, keeping in mind a long view of history, most anti-colonial and communist thinkers (certainly who were Russia, China, or Cuba oriented) were not against the accumulation of capital, which could only be extracted from labour. This compelled in me a reconsideration that opposition to the empire of capital had many diverging meanings.
If we remember the image of Mandela embracing Castro on that pamphlet How Far We Slaves Have Come!, the mode of production being overcome was not slavery but colonialism. Much talk of objection to capitalism, opposing imperialism for many is not related to this, obscured no actual opposition to it. While it is a nice metaphor that acknowledges the collective memory, it was a falsification of not simply the epoch but the impending confrontation.6 More than thirty years later, ANC led South Africa produced many African billionaires, some who previously were communists and trade unionists.7 South Africa went from a social revolution to an ‘ordinary country’ where post-colonial ‘affirmative action’ led to the murder, brutality, and exploitation of toilers of colour.8
My employment and activism increasingly brought me into contact with trade union activists (representing hospital, healthcare, autoworkers, civil service, and telecommunications) who often did not toil in workplaces alongside the rank and file. When they did, these union activists most often did not support independent or rebellious workers. The ‘social unionists’ and ‘business unionists’ did not function much differently in regard to labour; they gave money to the same capitalist political party, the Democrats. The trade union staffers with Paul Robeson and Ella Baker posters on their wall were also ‘business agents’. A large trade union hall could be an interesting place provided one did not expect, for all the socialists and communists apparently present, that they would be responsible for stirring or supporting insurgent struggle.
6 The Summer of Mumia
The summer of 1995 was the apex of the solidarity movement for Mumia Abu Jamal, the death row inmate, former Black Panther, and radical journalist.9 Many talking about ‘stop the execution, start the revolution’, conspicuously over that summer, were still getting permits from the police to march and abhorred insurgent direct action that did not do so, or which they did not control.
Also, it became increasingly clear that long-time activists who appeared radical and constantly talked about raising consciousness could behave intermittently one step inside and one step outside the elite brokerage and ethnic patronage of the Democratic Party. Those who seemed militant, in many ways, could be quite hesitant. That summer, after a few years of dedicated activism, I experienced my first impending confrontation that I was part of initiating (in contrast to just finding myself among an insurgent crowd, which also could be astonishing). Startling and disorienting many of my friends and associates, soon after my arrest with others taking direct action, I took my posters down of Malcolm X and Che Guevara.
It was immature to see such personalities as heroes or martyrs (in reality they had known great isolation under adversity) if the point was that I, like others in freedom movements, were supposed to aspire to arrive on our own authority. Historical figures could not be permanent fountains of wisdom; whether they had only lived half or their whole lives. It was a mistake to have been in awe, that I might never live up to who they had been. History is not shaped that way. My job was to prepare to face the questions and challenges that define my epoch, not theirs. However many may think about that measure, few have uncovered it yet.
And whatever past political achievements, the heroes in their past service had only had pushed things so far. Ever since, the specific modes of oppression and managerial society, unique to my generation and after, have been unrolling. Only half-buried individuals and small groups have faced them squarely. Allies and opponents know I have been in their number.
Too many activists for official society and their governments, most socialists or communists, are for some kind of capitalism or hierarchy and domination they call ‘revolution’ or ‘progressive’. This could be seen through practical experience but there appeared at first little strategies or ideas that were available to combat these disturbing scenarios. I have always had the courage to ask difficult questions and try to live by the principles that flowed from them, even if I had to place value on myself under arduous circumstances. How much of a heretical or prophetic teacher I have become, or the quality of how I have acted to disturb authority, or contributed to bringing the new society closer, that is for the future to judge. I have yet to be counted among the activist-preachers who receive thousands of dollars to speak at universities, for just one appearance, and who have never disturbed anyone.
But the book in your hand mirrors in certain ways the political contributions and intellectual controversies I have stirred and taken part in. There were those who came before, some met their demise or retreated, new forces gathered as reinforcements, who acted consistent with CLR James’s most dynamic political legacies. James’s most vibrant heritage, we should be clear, are a product of a global archive of political challenges in the twentieth century that many faced. He does not singularly own them.
A politically devastating distillation of not merely CLR James’s life and work, or intellectual legacies, but ideals and principles to wield as weapons in freedom struggles, I began shaping up long before my time in graduate school. When I finally arrived at a place to support such scholarship, I was told ‘nice research’ but nobody was teaching the fundamental principles of CLR’s political thought. And so this endeavour should not be attributed to any university setting.
7 From 9/11 to Barack Obama
In fact, CLR James’s values were subordinated to every school of thought and practice he despised. And as the years passed, it has become more stridently so. The transition from before (and after) 9/11 (when I was very active in Palestine solidarity) to the Age of Barack Obama was a very difficult period even for people of strong political faith. I worked all my life not to be such a degenerate person as Barack Obama – and without a doubt, so did CLR James. And yet apparently many others worked their whole life, they considered it a dream, to have a person of colour be emperor of the world. It is very important to underscore this, for whoever hesitates to do so cannot stand in historical judgement of a rigorous presentation of CLR James’s heritage and legacies.
President Barack Obama targeted and assassinated people of colour without trial all over the world, bailed out Wall Street but not Main Street, did not make healthcare more accessible but with Big Business was an accomplice to find them more customers, overthrew Libya, repressed whistleblowers and investigative journalists, used respectability politics to degrade toiling Black men, deported way more immigrants than the first Donald Trump administration, and accompanied all this with a civil discourse. But most African Americans revealed that all they wanted was a ‘black royal family’.10 It was not the beginning but the end, and it was a fiery crash landing, of the longue durée of the Black Power and Third World national liberation epoch in the United States.
I once was invited to give a talk in Greensboro, North Carolina. This was at the beginning of now two decades living in the American South and before I had relatives there. It was during the presidential primaries that ultimately allowed Barack Obama to ascend to become emperor of the world. One question from the audience inquired if he was not being treated in a racist fashion by the Clintons where they suggested he was not qualified to be president. I underscored, this is the one time that I will defend him: ‘He is most definitely qualified to be president; he supports murder and thievery like all the other candidates’.
Whether CLR James would have said something like this in the new millennium does not matter. That was what was indispensable for this era and his political thought prepared me with such clarity under adversity. Not only did ‘progressives’ defend Obama, but the meaning of the entire epoch prior to his election (the last fifty years up to the point) was rolled back and animated by a false philosophy of history to protect post-civil rights, post-colonial rulers and their administration of brutality and exploitation.
My analysis does not begin from colourblindness but from the fact that the number one racial disparity (a disproportionate outcome) is overwhelmingly police murder, and mass incarceration is administered by mayors and police chiefs who are people of colour (a significant number of women). This is what happens under an affirmative action empire and an ethnically plural police state.
Not all Black lives matter – this was decided among ‘progressives’ without asking my or anyone else’s opinion.11 This is the perspective of those who rule above society where the votes of people of colour are counted in cities and countries all over the African world. And whoever is interested in an African, Caribbean, American or world revolution, despite the machinations of white racial psychopathic personalities, has to deal with that.
CLR James famously said: ‘Political treachery is not the monopoly of the white race’. He also said there are Black people who treat Black toilers like ‘colonial trustees’, and while they talk of desiring ‘independence’ and ‘power’ they already live a ‘delightful’ existence at the toilers’ expense. It is a great miseducation in any country, whether in formal schooling or activist settings, when one has to find this in an obscure book or archive. But, of course, it is in front of our noses.
CLR was among the first thinkers I came across to place these fiery dynamics and conflicted political experiences I had known in a philosophical, historical, economic, and cultural perspective. It was not a class reductionist outlook. It was firmly rooted in what was actually happening in countries, cities, and districts where people of colour were the overall majority. But those who object to telling lies and claiming easy victories (and then do so anyway repeatedly) will always refuse CLR as the foundational stone of their approach. One cannot be politically radical, or even more modestly functional, in the African world without the clarity CLR James brings.
He did not simply frame the political questions we should be asking; as if we could answer them any way we wished. James also stridently agitated against what he constantly labelled as a hustle or foolishness in socialist and progressive movements, and among the formally educated. As a master-teacher, his errors of judgement or misleading projections are always rewarding provided we seek more precise knowledge while we continue to affirm what he lived his life for – the way out, world revolution.
In the future, those who wish to elevate CLR James’s most radical and creative political thought will decide how useful this book is and how crucial is disciplined and precise research. One need not be an expert in archives or go on a odyssey all over the globe to gather every obscure document to discover what is essential.
Reading James’s books widely in print makes clear that he thought liberals and social democrats were the comedians of the modern political world and on the side of the permanent slaughter; that global forums that gathered imperialists and more peripheral rulers to talk about human rights, peace, and collective security were a den of thieves that lived by jungle law. Or that James thought people who were looking for safe spaces and more civility, thinking terror showed up a short time ago, had deliberately doped their personality; that such people could never unveil all the possibilities for nurturing a new society.
Apparently, there is a whole archive of strategies to confront the morass into which freedom movements have fallen. Those who will find them useful will not silence or subordinate them to their own professional development or equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy. They are a weapon against such people.
Trotsky 1992.
Rodney 1981, p. 89; James 1963a.
Malcolm X 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1990; King Jr. 1991; Fanon 1965; Ellison 1992; Camus 1991; Guevara 1987; Mandela 1990, 1993.
Many are familiar with Palestine’s and Puerto Rico’s search for self-government. But with the exception of obscure individuals and small groups, where are the anti-colonial solidarity movements for the US Virgin Islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, Bermuda, Turks and Caicos, and Anguilla that still exist in a classical colonial status? What of French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, and Clipperton Island? This is not an exhaustive list but a reminder of how empty ‘decolonial’ talk is today in many locations.
Kwayana 2023c. Eusi Kwayana in dialogue with the author confirms that both of us witnessed similar meetings in solidarity with South Africa exhibiting these peculiar conflicting tendencies more than thirty years ago in New York City. It is a pattern that is not unique to that moment in time.
Mandela and Castro 1991.
Du Toit 2024; Du Toit 2025.
Brown 2024; Alexander 2003; Alexander 2006.
Abu Jamal 1995.
Dixon 2011.
Dixon 2015a, Quest 2019b, Minka 2021, Minka 2023b