C.L.R. James Quotes

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

C.L.R. James

#2. Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.

C.L.R. James

#3. 1789 the French bourgeoisie was the most powerful economic force in France, and the slave-trade and the colonies were the basis of its wealth and power.

C.L.R. James

#4. If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

#7. 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.

C.L.R. James

#8. My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.

C.L.R. James

#9. When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

#13. 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 an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

#16. What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

C.L.R. James

#17. 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.

C.L.R. James

#18. But today as then, the great propertied interests and their agents commit the most ferocious crimes in the name of the whole people, and bluff and brow-beat them by lying propaganda.

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

#20. The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

C.L.R. James

#21. 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.

C.L.R. James

#22. An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.

C.L.R. James

#23. In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital.

C.L.R. James

#24. The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

#28. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism.

C.L.R. James

#29. 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.

C.L.R. James

#30. Cricket is an art. Like all arts it has a technical foundation. To enjoy it does not require technical knowledge, but analysis that is not technically based is mere impressionism.

C.L.R. James

#31. Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

#34. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.

C.L.R. James

#35. Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions: to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.

C.L.R. James

#36. 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.

C.L.R. James

#37. 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.

C.L.R. James

#38. 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.

C.L.R. James

#39. 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.

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

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

C.L.R. James

#42. It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

C.L.R. James