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Where did Marxism come from?

Why is Marxism important?

How is Marxism different from other forms of socialism?

How does Marxism differ from Leninism?

Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914. Then there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and modified by Joseph Stalin, which under the name of Marxism-Leninism ( see Leninism) became the doctrine of the communist parties set up after the Russian Revolution (1917). Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, Mao Zedong's Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and various Marxisms in the developing world. There were also the post-World War II nondogmatic Marxisms that have modified Marx's thought with borrowings from modern philosophies, principally from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from Sigmund Freud and others.
(Read Leon Trotsky's 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)

The thought of Karl Marx

The written work of Marx cannot be reduced to a philosophy, much less to a philosophical system. The whole of his work is a radical critique of philosophy, especially of G.W.F. Hegel's idealist system and of the philosophies of the left and right post- Hegelians. It is not, however, a mere denial of those philosophies. Marx declared that philosophy must become reality. One could no longer be content with interpreting the world; one must be concerned with transforming it, which meant transforming both the world itself and human consciousness of it. This, in turn, required a critique of experience together with a critique of ideas. In fact, Marx believed that all knowledge involves a critique of ideas. He was not an empiricist. Rather, his work teems with concepts (appropriation, alienation, praxis, creative labour, value, and so on) that he had inherited from earlier philosophers and economists, including Hegel, Johann Fichte, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. What uniquely characterizes the thought of Marx is that, instead of making abstract affirmations about a whole group of problems such as human nature, knowledge, and matter, he examines each problem in its dynamic relation to the others and, above all, tries to relate them to historical, social, political, and economic realities.

In 1859, in the preface to his Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), Marx wrote that the hypothesis that had served him as the basis for his analysis of society could be briefly formulated as follows:

In the social production that men carry on, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness.

Raised to the level of historical law, this hypothesis was subsequently called historical materialism. Marx applied it to capitalist society, both in Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto) and Das Kapital (vol. 1, 1867; "Capital") and in other writings. Although Marx reflected upon his working hypothesis for many years, he did not formulate it in a very exact manner: different expressions served him for identical realities. If one takes the text literally, social reality is structured in the following way:

1. Underlying everything as the real basis of society is the economic structure. This structure includes (a) the "material forces of production," that is, the labour and means of production, and (b) the overall "relations of production," or the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. Although Marx stated that there is a correspondence between the "material forces" of production and the indispensable "relations" of production, he never made himself clear on the nature of the correspondence, a fact that was to be the source of differing interpretations among his later followers.

2. Above the economic structure rises the superstructure, consisting of legal and political "forms of social consciousness" that correspond to the economic structure. Marx says nothing about the nature of this correspondence between ideological forms and economic structure, except that through the ideological forms individuals become conscious of the conflict within the economic structure between the material forces of production and the existing relations of production expressed in the legal property relations. In other words, "The sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of society" and is at the base of society. "The social structure and the state issue continually from the life processes of definite individuals . . . as they are in reality, that is acting and materially producing." The political relations that individuals establish among themselves are dependent on material production, as are the legal relations. This foundation of the social on the economic is not an incidental point: it colours Marx's whole analysis. It is found in Das Kapital as well as in Die deutsche Ideologie (written 1845-46; The German Ideology) and the Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844 (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844).

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Marxism | Definition, History, Ideology, Examples, & Facts

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Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program.

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Sir Walter Rodney

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In the final blog for roape.net, writer and activist Lee Wengraf celebrates Walter Rodney, the scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana who was murdered 37 years ago this week. She writes how he was influenced by Marxist ideas and remains central to the Pan-Africanist canon for many on the left. His book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a classic that must be carefully studied by activists and scholars today.

A number of African economies have experienced a massive boom in wealth and investment over the past decade. Yet most ordinary Africans live in dire poverty with diminished life expectancy, high unemployment and in societies with low-levels of industry. For the roots of these conditions of "under-development," one historical account stands alone in importance: Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana. Influenced by Marxist ideas, he is central to the Pan-Africanist canon for many on the left. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney situates himself in several theoretical traditions: the writings of Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fanon, the dependency theories of Andre Gunder Frank and others, the Pan-Africanist tradition including George Padmore and C.L.R. James, and African socialism as popularized by national leaders such as Tanzania's Julius Kambarage Nyerere and Guinea's Ahmed Sékou Touré. As Horace Campbell describes, "His numerous writings on the subjects of socialism, imperialism, working class struggles and Pan Africanism and slavery contributed to a body of knowledge that came to be known as the Dar es Salaam School of Thought. Issa Shivji, Mahmood Mamdani, Claude Ake, Archie Mafeje, Yash Tandon, John Saul, Dan Nabudere, O Nnoli, Clive Thomas and countless others participated in the debates on transformation and liberation."[1]

Rodney's scholarship and leadership in the working-class movement thus had a long reach, including within the revolutionary movement in his native Guyana. He was assassinated on June 13, 1980, likely by agents of the Guyanese government. The Nigerian novelist, Wole Soyinka, in noting Rodney's legacy, wrote how "Walter Rodney was no captive intellectual playing to the gallery of local or international radicalism. He was clearly one of the most solidly ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look colonialism and exploitation in the eye and where necessary, spit in it."[2]

Rodney's work has assumed a foundational place in understanding the legacies of slavery and colonialism for the underdevelopment that unfolded, over centuries, on the continent. The core of his analysis rests on the assumption that Africa - far from standing outside the world system - has been crucial to the growth of capitalism in the West. What he terms "underdevelopment" was in fact the product of centuries of slavery, exploitation and imperialism. Rodney conclusively shows that "Europe" - that is, the colonial and imperial powers - did not merely enrich their own empires but actually reversed economic and social development in Africa. Thus, in his extensive account of African history from the early African empires through to the modern day, Rodney shows how the West built immense industrial and colonial empires on the backs of African slave labor, devastating natural resources and African societies in the process. As he emphasizes throughout How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, "[i]t would be an act of the most brazen fraud to weigh the social amenities provided during the colonial epoch against the exploitation, and to arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad."[3]

For Rodney, underdevelopment is a condition historically produced through capitalist expansion and imperialism, and very clearly not an intrinsic property of Africa itself. He thus situates underdevelopment within the contradictory process of capitalism, one that both creates value and wealth for the exploiters while immiserating the exploited. Rodney writes:

The peasants and workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world) paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profit from the human labor that always lies behind the machines.... There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quest for profits comes into sharp conflict with people's demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled.[4]

As Rodney describes, African trade was central to its growth, most importantly through the slave trade from approximately 1445 to 1870, transforming Africa into a source of human raw material for the new colonies in North America and the Caribbean. It was to the three major powers involved in the slave trade - Britain, France and Portugal -that massive profits accrued. Trade with Africa was closely tied up with the growth of European port cities such as England's Liverpool, with the exchange of slaves for cheap industrial goods established as the primary motor for profits of European firms. Drawing on the work of Eric Williams' classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944), among others, Rodney concludes that the slave trade provided England with the capital for the Industrial Revolution to take off and with the dominant edge over its rivals.

Yet as Rodney shows, the "development" of African societies was thwarted in this process of capital expansion, first and foremost through the lost labor potential due to the slave trade. From its economic foundation in slavery, the range of exports from Africa narrowed to just a few commodities, undermining the development of productive capacity in Africa itself. These trade relations meant that technological development stagnated, creating a barrier to innovation within Africa itself, even in regions not directly engaged in the slave trade, because of the distorting influence on relations overall. The result, concludes Rodney, was "a loss of development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance.... The lines of economic activity attached to foreign trade were either destructive, as slavery was, or at best purely extractive."[5]

The nineteenth century "race for Africa" broke out, with European "explorers" seeking out access to raw materials. By the 1870s, colonial powers had expanded into new African territory, primarily through the use of force, further consolidating imperial powers and rivalries. By 1876, on the eve of the "scramble for Africa," European powers controlled only 10% of the continent, namely Algeria, Cape Colony, Mozambique and Angola. Yet after the infamous Berlin Conference of 1885 and the partition of Africa, "The number of genuinely independent states outside of Europe and the Americas could be counted on one hand - the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, Ethiopia and Afghanistan."[6]

Racist ideology justified and facilitated European imperialism in Africa as a "civilizing mission," or as Rodney remarks, "Revolutionary African thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral ...spoke of colonialism having made Africans into objects of history. Colonised Africans, like pre-colonial African chattel slaves, were pushed around into positions which suited European interests and which were damaging to the African continent and its peoples."[7] Nonetheless, Africans met European expansion with great resistance, targeting forced labor schemes and taxation, restrictive land ownership laws and later, imposed forced conscription during World War I. Workers went on strike and engaged in boycotts, and nationalist organizations - many of them illegal - were formed from the earliest days of colonial rule.

Yet African resistance during that period was caught between larger forces. The European "scramble for Africa" subjected independent states to colonial rule, transforming peasant and trading societies within a short span of time into a wage labor and cash crop system. The increasingly intense economic competition in European capitalism that eventually exploded into World War I likewise spilled over into military clashes in Africa. Alliances between and against the various powers attempted to block each other's rivals, with France and Britain seeking competing axes of control over the continent.

Colonial brutality was the standard practice across virtually the entire continent, with the chief aim of leveraging force to subdue resistance and to extract profits. Turning Africa into a conveyor belt for raw materials and industrial goods required transportation and communication systems and, as Rodney describes, a pacified - and minimally educated - labor force. The major powers on the continent set up administrative apparatuses that in some cases utilized local rulers, but, as Rodney writes, in no instance would the colonizers accept African self-rule. Infrastructure such as roads were built not only to facilitate the movement of commodities and machinery, but also that of the colonial armies and police relied upon to discipline the indigenous population, whether the expulsion of people from their land or the forced cultivation of cash crops. Industrial development was thwarted in Africa itself because manufacturing and the processing of raw materials happened exclusively overseas.

Europeans divide-and-conquer tactics won a tiny section of African rulers to back the annexation by one power versus another. As Rodney puts it, "One of the decisive features of the colonial system was the presence of Africans serving as economic, political or cultural agents of the European colonialists.... agents or 'compradors' already serving [their] interests in the pre-colonial period." Following Fanon on the role of local elites, Rodney is scathing in his contempt for the "puppets" of "metropolitan" capitalism, where "the presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition of underdevelopment."[8]

For Rodney, "The colonisation of Africa and other parts of the world formed an indispensable link in a chain of events which made possible the technological transformation of the base of European capitalism." Copper from the Congo, iron from West Africa, chrome from Rhodesia and South Africa, and more, took capitalist development to unprecedented heights of what Rodney calls "investible surpluses." The tendency within the drive for profit towards innovation and scientific advancement built a "massive industrial complex," as Rodney described it.[9] African trade not only generated economic growth and profits, but created capacity for future growth in what he called the "metropoles," meaning the global centers of political and economic power located in Europe.

Colonial policies heightened exploitation, such as those preventing Africans from growing cash crops drove workers into forced labor like the building of infrastructure to facilitate extraction. Thus, capital accumulation was derived at the expense of greatly-weakened African states and economies, effectively reversing previous development. These two processes were dialectically related. As Rodney writes, "The wealth that was created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential."[10] This process of underdevelopment only intensified over time: as Rodney points out, investment and "foreign capital" in colonial Africa was derived from past exploitation and provided the historical basis for further expansion. "What was called 'profits' in one year came back as 'capital' the next.... What was foreign about the capital in colonial Africa was its ownership and not its initial source."[11]

Rodney argued that development in the so-called "periphery" was proportional to the degree of independence from the "metropolis," a central tenet of the dependency theorists. He looked to state-directed, national development in the post-colonial period as a template for growth, a model proven - particularly in the years after Rodney's death - not to be viable. National development in Africa, as elsewhere, proved unable to overcome the legacy of colonialism and weak economies. The wake of such failures and the onset of global crisis pushed many African states into the vice-grip of neo-liberal structural adjustment "reforms" that brought only austerity and crushing Third World debt.

These ideas had a distinctive imprint on Rodney's variant of Marxism and that of many leftists of his day. For Rodney, independence in Africa rested on "development by contradiction," by which he meant that the contradictions within African society were only resolvable by "Africans' regaining their sovereignty as a people."[12] In his view, the disproportionate weight and importance of even a small African working class offered potentially a more stable base of resistance. But, he emphasizes, that possibility cannot be fully realized as in the "developed" world because production in Africa proceeded on a different path than in Europe. In the latter, the destruction of agrarian and craft economies increased productive capacity through the development of factories and a mass working class. In Africa, he argues, that process was distorted: local craft industry was destroyed, yet large-scale industry was not developed outside of agriculture and extraction, with workers restricted to the lowest-paid, most unskilled work. "Capitalism in the form of colonialism failed to perform in Africa the tasks which it had performed in Europe in changing social relations and liberating the forces of production."[13] So, concludes Rodney, the African working class is too small and too weak to play a liberatory role in the current period. Instead, somewhat reluctantly, he identifies the intelligentsia for that role:

Altogether, the educated played a role in African independence struggles far out of proportion to their numbers, because they took it upon themselves and were called upon to articulate the interests of all Africans. They were also required to ... focus on the main contradiction, which was between the colony and the metropole. ...The contradiction between the educated and the colonialists was not the most profound. ...However, while the differences lasted between the colonizers and the African educated, they were decisive.[14]

Thus, while Rodney sees the "principal divide" within capitalism as that between capitalists and workers, the revolutionary role for the African working class was nonetheless a task for another day. On this score, Rodney was mistaken: mass upheavals by workers across the continent have shown the capacity for struggle, from the colonial period up to the present day.

Yet, however contradictorily, Rodney's ideas on political leadership and liberation indicate the potential for resistance under today's conditions. First, as we have seen, Rodney - following Fanon - was keenly aware of the class contradictions embedded in the new African ruling classes, tensions bound to be thrust to the surface with greater clarity. He writes: "Most African leaders of the intelligentsia... were frankly capitalist, and shared fully the ideology of their bourgeois masters.... As far as the mass of peasants and workers were concerned, the removal of overt foreign rule actually cleared the way towards a more fundamental appreciation of exploitation and imperialism."[15] This dynamic has only been accentuated over time. Furthermore, Rodney implies, internationalism on a class basis lay in the historical development of capitalism and solidarity as a crucial "political" question. "European workers have paid a great price for the few material benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table," he writes. "The capitalists misinformed and mis-educated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists."[16]

Rodney's characterization of European workers "led like sheep" may be too simplistic a description of workers' understanding of capitalism. But Rodney is correct in stressing that racist ideas undermined their own liberation. The "crumbs" Rodney describes are the products of divisions sown by ruling class ideology, and not of insurmountable material barriers. Actually realizing this (future) possibility - that of an international movement of workers of Africa and the West - has much to be gained from Rodney's invaluable research and analysis.

Lee Wengraf writes on Africa for the International Socialist Review, Counterpunch, Pambazuka News and AllAfrica.com. Her new book Extracting Profit: Neoliberalism, Imperialism and the New Scramble for Africa will be published by Haymarket in 2018.

[1] Horace Campbell, "Walter Rodney, the Prophet of Self Emancipation," Pambazuka News, May 12, 2005, https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/walter-rodney-prophet-self-emancipation. Cf. Clairmont Chung, ed., Walter Rodney: A Promise of Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). The Chung volume includes contributions from Shivji, Thomas and others on Rodney's legacy.

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How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: The Legacy of Walter Rodney - ROAPE

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In her final blog in the series Lee Wengraf celebrates the life and work of Walter Rodney, the scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana who was murdered 37 years ago. His book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a classic that must be carefully studied by activists and scholars today.

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Trevor Monroe

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Hart, A. Richard 1937 "From Garvey to Roberts." Public Opinion, December 31.
Google Scholar

Post, Ken 1978 Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. |
Google Scholar Crossref

PNP (People's National Party) 1979Principles and ObjectivesKingston.
Google Scholar

WPJ (Workers' Party of Jamaica) 1987Contribution to RethinkingKingston.
Google Scholar

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The Light That Failed? Short Circuits in Caribbean Marxism by Nelson W. Keith Trevor Munroe Jamaican Politics: A Marxist Perspective in Transition (Kingston: Heinemann and Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1990) 336 pp, 1994

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Hart, A. Richard 1937 "From Garvey to Roberts." Public Opinion, December 31. Google Scholar Post, Ken 1978 Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. | Google Scholar Crossref PNP (People's National Party) 1979Principles and ObjectivesKingston. Google Scholar WPJ (Workers' Party of Jamaica) 1987Contribution to RethinkingKingston.

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Maurice Bishop

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13 March marked the anniversary of an insurrection by a small party in 1979 - with the popular support of the masses - who ousted a dictator and attempted to throw off the shackles of imperialism. This insurrection was carried out by a party known as the New Jewel Movement (NJM), self-described "Marxist-Leninists", who set about making a series of positive gains in a country suffering from a legacy of imperialism and slavery. Democratic structures, measures to liberate women, improved healthcare and education earned popular support for the revolutionary party in the early stages of the revolution - an inspiring episode in the history of the Caribbean.

This revolutionary moment ended with a factional struggle in the party and the imposition of a puppet regime by the USA, which set about undoing the gains of the revolution. We should study the Grenadian Revolution, not only to celebrate this struggle against imperialism, but to learn its lessons for the present.

'Blood from every pore'

Grenada is an island in the south east of the Caribbean Sea. It encompasses a number of smaller outlying islands, the two populated ones being Carriacou and Petite Martinique. The population is relatively small - only around 110,000 - and wasn't much less during the revolution.

Like most former colonies, the history of Grenada is dominated by genocide, slavery and imperialism. Nevertheless, it also contains great periods of heroic class battles, from the 1800s, when slave revolts attempted to throw off the domination of their imperial oppressors, to the 1900s, when numerous general strikes reached almost insurrectionary levels in order to achieve justice and equality.

Grenada changed hands between the French and the British from its first colonisation in 1654. This colonisation exterminated the 'unruly' Amerindians, who had settled the islands before them, and filled it with the elements of French society deemed 'undesirable' - criminals, religious heretics, etc. Sugar production came to dominate the island, through the use of slave labour, until the early 1800s when the industry became unprofitable due to the more productive (read: brutal) sugar plantations of Cuba and Brazil. Slavery was abolished in the 1830s due to its unprofitability and, more importantly, the series of mass slave revolts that had shaken the West Indies.

Growing militancy

On the surface, there was a period of relative class peace in Grenada during the early 20th century, compared with the mass general strikes and insurrectionary struggles that had taken place in Caribbean countries, such as Trinidad and Tobago, after the First World War. However, Grenada was not exempt from similar grinding poverty - the 1945 Moyne Commission found that there was rampant malnutrition, poor housing, abysmal healthcare, and a minimum wage which today would equal $4.35 per day!

Beneath the surface bubbled a growing class anger. This burst forth with the first general strike on 19 February 1951. The newly formed Grenada Manual and Mental Workers' Union (GMMWU), headed by Eric Gairy, called for this general strike. This gave an expression to the growing anger in society and the strike became a full-blown revolt: plantation houses were looted and burnt down; nutmeg and cocoa fields were destroyed; roadblocks were set up across the island. The working class of Grenada had completely paralysed economic life on the island.

A state of emergency was declared, British navy and police detachments were brought in. Eric Gairy was arrested, yet this proved insufficient to quell the discontent. The ruling class was forced to quickly bring Gairy back, asking him to give a radio address to restore peace. The government conceded to the strike's demands - universal suffrage and a massive wage increase.

Because of the strike's success, Gairy became the most popular politician in Grenada. He formed the Grenada United Labour Party (GULP) to contest the 1951 election and won by a landslide, receiving 65 percent of the vote and taking six of the eight legislative council seats (the others were decided by the British government). However, once in power, Gairy allied himself with various bourgeois figures.

Alarmed by the strike, a party emerged based on the petty-bourgeoisie and plantation owners called the Grenada National Party (GNP). The GNP and GULP would alternate in government from 1951-1973. Gairy would line his and his backers' pockets, be kicked out for corruption, and the GNP would carry out the bidding of the ruling class. The GNP sold the telephone and electricity companies off to private investors, provided subsidies to the plantation owners, and increased their income by 170 percent. During their re-election in 1962, the GNP outlawed strikes in the telephone, electricity and water services as well any industries deemed 'essential'. The GNP would then become discredited due to these brutal policies, Gairy would cynically use his organisations to win support through strikes and campaigns, and GULP would be re-elected. This was until 1973, when Gairy began to maintain his power through election-rigging and paramilitary groups.

The New Jewel Movement emerges

By the 1970s, public services had deteriorated drastically. The majority of teachers lacked any professional training, up to 80 pupils were packed into a single classroom, and only 15 percent of primary school children went on to secondary school. Hospitals lacked beds, medicines, and other basic medical equipment. The mortality rate was high and most pregnant women had to give birth on concrete floors.

In response to these conditions, 30 nurses from the local hospital in St George's organised a protest. Gairy responded by transferring them to other parts of the country, which then caused this protest to spread - Gairy's police met them with tear gas and clubs. 22 of the nurses were arrested and defended in court by Kenrick Radix and Maurice Bishop, two lawyers who had just returned from graduating abroad and threw themselves into the struggle, going on to form the New Jewel Movement (NJM). The young intelligentsia - figures like Bishop, Radix, and Bernard Coard - after studying abroad, influenced by the ideas of various anti-imperialists like Fidel Castro, black nationalists like Malcolm X (himself half-Grenadian), and the black power movement in the US, returned to their homeland to fight for the emancipation of the working masses.

The NJM was founded in 1973 through the merging of a number of smaller organisations: the 'Movement for Assemblies of the People' (MAP) and the 'Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education, and Liberation (JEWEL)'. Although this party would later call itself "Marxist-Leninist", organisationally it had a loose structure. The party atmosphere was more like a discussion group and for the majority of its existence there was no central committee. Most party structures were created in the process of struggle rather than in accordance with any plan or theory.

With the adoption of a "Marxist-Leninist" line came all the trappings of Stalinist theory, such as the "two-stage" theory of revolution. The NJM believed it needed the support of all classes in society as it deemed the coming revolution to be a national anti-imperialist struggle. The socialist programme would therefore have to wait. They saw the poverty suffered by the masses, not as the result of a capitalist imperialist dominated economy, but as the creation of a small, exploitative 'pro-Gairy' bourgeoisie of merchants and bankers who were dependent upon American and European capital. This flowed from the argument that a national-democratic revolution should be an alliance of all classes, including the 'patriotic' bourgeoisie, which would allow the construction of a national economy free from imperialism.

Therefore, the NJM took up the slogan of "national unity" - allying with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties (like the GNP) on the condition that they were anti-Gairy. Like in other countries where this popular frontism was tried, the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties were numerically weak and were only given strength by the popular NJM, which propped them up. The programme of the NJM was ultimately a reformist one of cheaper housing, preventative healthcare, agricultural reform, and the building of schools. Yet, it inspired the masses, and the NJM could easily have dispensed with these capitalist hangers-on.

Gairy responded to this growing discontent by organising a band of violent criminals known as the Mongoose Gang, who were trained and supplied with weapons by the Chilean dictator, Pinochet, and would be used to smash any dissent.

The independence distraction

In late 1973, Gairy attempted to use the question of independence to cut across this growing dissatisfaction. He argued that independence would open the door to international financial institutions and encourage aid. The British government, now only a second-rate power, was willing to be free of this economic and social burden. The NJM opposed independence on the basis that it would strengthen Gairy's grip on power. In response to independence, the NJM organised a People's Congress attended by over 10,000 people - which would be equivalent to 7,000,000 people in the UK out on the streets of London! This mass meeting passed motions accusing Gairy of corruption and murder and called on him to resign within two weeks or face a general strike. He did not take this threat of a general strike lightly and attempted to force the NJM into submission. Gairy's Mongoose Gang and the police followed six NJM leaders on their way to organise the general strike with a group of businessmen. The six of them were set upon, beaten to within an inch of their lives, and then thrown into the local prison. The police chief ordered their heads to be shaved with broken glass and threatened to force them to eat the resultant mixture of blood and hair.

When word spread of this brutal torture, mass opposition forced Gairy to release the six prisoners. This brutal treatment of the NJM leaders was a serious miscalculation. The whip of reaction spurred on the general strike he had intended to prevent. Dockworkers organised in the Seamen and Waterfront Workers Union (SWWU) came out on strike on 1 January 1974 against Gairy along the waterfront of St. George's. The strikers gained more and more sympathy and solidarity strikes broke out as it continued. The strikes prevented the importing of food and fuel. Gairy had no money to pay the civil service - nor even the Mongoose Gang! His position grew even more precarious as sections of the civil service and police began to sympathise with the striking workers. Gairy lashed out and set the Mongoose Gang upon strikers and protestors.

Gairy was propped up by British imperialism, who sent him £100,000 to pay off the civil service and sent gunboats to the docks to intimidate the workers. Gairy also had another ally - the cowardice of the Trade Union leaders. $45,000 arrived from Grenadians abroad for the strike fund, which would have allowed the strike to continue its militant action and could have brought down Gairy. The SWWU leaders, supporters of the liberal GNP, were alarmed at the militancy of the strike and worried what would happen if the strike was allowed to continue - they consequently called the strike off. This gave Gairy some breathing space and he compromised with sections of the disaffected bourgeoisie. The Grenadian masses had suffered another defeat.

The 'Revo' begins

Gairy rigged the 1976 election by striking opposition members off the voting register, letting his supporters vote twice, adding the names of deceased people, as well as using the police and army to break up anti-Gairy rallies. The NJM had opportunistically joined forces with the GNP and United People's Party (a right-split from the GNP) in the 'People's Alliance'. However, despite the machinations of Gairy, the People's Alliance won 48.5 percent of the vote and gained six of the fifteen seats. This 'People's Alliance' quickly broke down the following year as the class differences in the bloc came to the fore, with the bourgeois parties denouncing the "domination" of the NJM.

Support for the NJM was growing across the island. They won workers over to their programme through building up support in existing unions and winning executive positions in them, alongside building new unions. They set up a youth and women's group alongside the main party. The NJM also infiltrated the army and the police whilst building up its own paramilitary detachment. The infiltration into the state forces would prove useful as it was after a tipoff by a police sympathiser that the NJM learned that Gairy had ordered the liquidation of the NJM leadership while he was away in the US. This intelligence forced the hand of the NJM to start the insurrection to take power.

On the same day Gairy left, the NJM organised the insurrection and set the date for 13 March 1979. The group were to assault Gairy's men stationed at the barracks in True Blue. The assault required virtually no effort. After seizing the army's unguarded arsenal and burning the barracks to the ground, they seized the Broadcasting Station and broadcast an address, appealing for support for the revolution. Thousands of Grenadians poured into the streets, arresting the members of the Mongoose Gang, seizing the police stations, and flying the flag of the NJM. By the following day, the entire island was in its hands.

The National-Democratic stage

The rottenness of the regime meant there was little resistance. As Trotsky once said, "A lion you kill with a shot; the flea you squash between the fingernails". The NJM proclaimed the beginning of the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) but didn't take steps to overthrow capitalism.

Like the Stalinists, they argued that due to the low level of development in Grenada and small size of the working class, Grenada would first have to pass through the "National-Democratic stage". For the NJM, this consisted of the building of a national economy, run on a mixed economy basis, with the alliance of all anti-Gairy groups including the supposed 'anti-imperialist', anti-Gairy bourgeoisie. The state enterprises would supposedly lead the development of the economy but also work alongside and compete with the private sector.

On the revolution, Bishop stated:

"The Grenada Revolution is a national-democratic, anti-imperialist Revolution, involving the alliance of many classes including sections of the small bourgeoisie but under the leadership and with the dominant role being played by the working people and particularly the working class, through their vanguard Party the NJM." - (Line of March Speech 1982)

As a result, there was to be little nationalisation by the new government. However, the PRG was forced to nationalise certain companies due to economic sabotage and mismanagement by the bourgeoisie. For example, the Electricity Corporation and Telephone Company had to be taken over due to poor management. The Holiday Inn Hotel was taken over after a fire broke out and the owners refused to rebuild. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce ceased all economic activity and was consequently nationalised.

The NJM similarly stopped any attempts by the masses to go beyond the boundaries of the capitalist system. The most famous example was the suppression of the People's Collective Farm on the River Antoine estate. This estate was seized by the workers and they began to run it under democratic workers' control. The leaders of this initiative denounced the PRG as the "Petty-Bourgeois Reformist Government" and wrote numerous articles attacking it. The PRG attempted to 'negotiate' with the workers but claimed that they were going too far and were being counter-revolutionary. After numerous unsuccessful meetings, the leaders of this seizure were thrown in prison and the factory was handed back to its previous owner.

This was seized on by reactionaries, who accused the PRG of being Cuban/Soviet stooges wanting to abolish all human rights. This, in turn, was used by the PRG as supposed evidence that the leaders of the expropriation were in the pocket of reaction. Whether or not this is true is debatable - though it raises the question of why reactionaries would want to challenge bourgeois property rights in the first place. However, what cannot be debated is that the occupation of the factory was a genuine upsurge of the workers against the bosses. No amount of propaganda can force workers to seize control of production.

The sabotage carried out by the capitalist class was a significant factor that ultimately caused the downfall of the PRG, which could have been avoided provided the NJM leadership were prepared to abolish capitalism and expropriate the ruling class, which ultimately retained control of the economy. However, to do that would have required the active participation of the workers and peasants - an action the NJM leadership were not willing to take.

A "respectable" face

The construction of a 'National-Democratic' government also served the aim of presenting a 'respectable' face to world imperialism. Members of the anti-Gairy bourgeoisie were given positions in the government and only the property of the pro-Gairy bourgeoisie was nationalised. The NJM believed that by eliminating the influence of Gairy's group, and parachuting bourgeois figures into government positions, they would prevent imperialist aggression.

To quote Bishop:

"This was done deliberately so that imperialism won't get too excited and would say 'well they have some nice fellas in that thing; everything alright.' And as a result, wouldn't think about sending in troops."

Another instance was when the NJM came to power and arrested the Governor-General. They asked him to pledge loyalty to the new government and consequently left his position intact. This led to the bizarre situation where the PRG was a 'Marxist-Leninist' government with the British Queen as the proclaimed Head of State! People's Law No. 3 states:

"The Head of State shall remain Her Majesty The Queen, and her representative in this country shall continue to be the Governor General who shall perform such functions as the People's Revolutionary Government may from time to time advice."

This was in order to give the PRG a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of imperialism. However, despite the 'legitimacy' the NJM leaders believed it gave them, the US proceeded to invade regardless of any degree of legality. Imperialist powers will use any measures to achieve their aims, no matter how legal or illegal they may be. The US was always going to want to invade as the PRG represented a threat to US interests in the Caribbean. Therefore, the PRG should have gone further and expropriated the US capitalists and their lackeys, seized the large estates and implemented workers' control.

The only true break from imperialism is overthrowing capitalism. No construction of 'socialism in one country', the building of a 'national economy', or veneer of 'respectability' can prevent the destructive waves of imperialism crashing against this wall of isolated self-preservation. The only defence of socialism is international revolution, that is, to turn outwards and appeal to the exploited masses through the Caribbean and Americas, to join in the struggle to overthrow their oppressors, in a socialist federation of the Caribbean, which would inspire further revolutions across the world, further strengthening the international socialist revolution.

The gains of the revolution

Despite the failure of the PRG to seriously challenge the structures of capitalism, the revolution made a series of gains. All the anti-worker trade union laws were repealed by the PRG in 1980. 14 percent of the budget was allocated to health expenditure, making it one of the highest in the Commonwealth Caribbean. The PRG ended the corruption in the health sector and used St. George's University to train up new doctors and clinical staff for their hospitals. Mobile health teams were also set up for remote areas.

The PRG instituted a number of measures that helped elevate the position of women within society. The burden of childcare was alleviated with the establishment of pre-school and daycare centres. All legal forms of discrimination, like equal pay, were removed immediately, and women were given maternity leave and greater job opportunities. Low-income single mothers were also given subsidies to help with the purchase of school uniforms and other expenses.

Additionally, over 22 percent of the budget was allocated to education, and illiteracy was reduced from 70 percent to less than 3 percent in under 4 years. A programme was also set up to give primary school teachers a formal education. Secondary school was no longer an unattainable privilege, as the rate of students attending secondary school increased from 11 percent to 40 percent. Adult education courses were set up to enrol thousands of Grenadians in Maths, English and the Sciences. Skills training programmes were set up for workers, training workers in the agricultural, fishing, tourism and public service sectors. Alongside that, scholarships for free university education increased from a handful to hundreds.

Once coming to power, the PRG attempted to solve the land question. Before the revolution, the largest estates, accounting for less than 1 percent of the total landholdings, made up 50 percent of cultivable land. By 1979, a third of this cultivable land was abandoned. The NJM distributed hundreds of acres to the peasantry and used the land to reduce unemployment to 10 percent by 1983. However, the PRG only nationalised land that was being unused, meaning most of the land was still in the hands of the large landlords.

Zonal councils or workers' councils?

Another gain of the revolution was in the area of democracy. The PRG organised what were essentially proto-Soviets called Zonal councils, which represented zones or clusters of villages in a parish. Meetings were organised every month and a member of the NJM politburo had to be present at every council meeting. Many of the programmes of the PRG had their origins in discussions and debates in these council meetings. The PRG used these councils to help draw up a "People's Budget" by letting the workers and peasants participate in its writing.

However, there were a number of problems with these councils. Their structures were born out of existing NJM structures and consequently had a top-down character. Although a member of the government attended these meetings, there was nothing that mandated them to carry out the people's demands. There was no immediate right of recall as this member was appointed by the party. That is not to say that the people were ignored, but a basic feature of this system was unaccountable state bureaucrats who only had to "listen" to the masses as opposed to the council officials being appointed by the workers and peasants. As the revolution progressed and the difficulties bore down on the party leadership, by the final year of the revolution, no PRG official had attended a council meeting in over 18 months. This meant that the only avenue through which the workers and peasants had some semblance of democratic control over the revolution was cut off.

The defeat of the revolution

The masses were kept in the dark about debates within the party and the way forward for the revolution until the fateful hour. Within the party, a power struggle erupted between two groups - one headed by Bishop, the other by Coard.

This struggle took place in late 1983 under the threat of imperialist intervention. In March, US warships gathered near to within six miles of the Point Salines airport and the US government claimed that this airport was being used for Soviet and Cuban military purposes. These claims were proven false after the US invasion. The CIA also corrupted and controlled the trade union leadership through the American Institute of Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which was set up by the AFL-CIO. They attempted to destabilise the government through various acts of sabotage, such as attempting to incite workers to go on strike and cut off the power to the whole country.

On top of this were the administrative inefficiencies, which bore down on the NJM leadership. The members of the NJM Central Committee (CC), who were all ministers in government, disregarded the masses as they focussed on the running of the state as the economy started to wane. The party base, of only 500 members, was also too small to be able to manage the economy. Overworked and overstretched, many members had to take time off for sickness, only further exacerbating these problems.

Reasons had to be found for these inefficiencies. The root of these problems was first identified as slackness and a lack of discipline on behalf of officials, but eventually developed into criticism directed towards Bishop - accusing him of 'arrogance', 'one man-ism', and 'petty-bourgeois deviations'.

To resolve this crisis, the NJM agreed on a joint leadership model for Bishop and Coard in early September 1983. Bishop agreed to the joint leadership suggestion and left for Hungary on a diplomatic mission. Bishop told his security (Cletus St. Paul and Errol George) this was a power struggle and that only one of them would emerge victorious. After Hungary, Bishop went on to Cuba before returning to Grenada on 6 October. St. Paul and George, circulated a rumour back in Grenada that Coard was planning to kill Bishop. Alarmed by this, Coard's faction ordered Bishop apprehended and placed him under house arrest for counter-revolutionary activities on 13 October.

Members of the Bishop faction alerted people about Bishop's imprisonment and thousands of people came out onto the streets to demand he be freed. Behind the scenes, Bishop's faction was negotiating with the Coard faction, hoping to reach some sort of compromise. They actively tried to hold back the masses, using them only as a negotiating tactic against Coard's faction. However, the masses burst out onto the streets. 15,000 people came out on 19 October and some went to Bishop's house to free him. From there they then marched with him down to Fort Rupert.

Other members of the Bishop faction began to hand out weapons to the masses to defend Bishop, which led to a standoff between the People's Revolutionary Army (PRA) and the armed masses, before ending in a violent clash. Seeing the carnage unfold, Bishop protested and handed himself in to stop the violence. Bishop, along with a few others, were rounded up and summarily shot. Hudson Austin, leader of the PRA and part of the Coard faction, took charge and formed the "Revolutionary Military Council" - instituting a 72-hour curfew in which if anyone was to leave their homes then they would be shot. However, hundreds of people still came out onto the streets to protest Bishop's murder. In less than a week, on 25 October, the USA invaded the island, overwhelmed the PRA's forces and overthrew Austin's government. Having swept away the PRG, US imperialism then arranged the election of a puppet regime, which set about undoing all the gains of the revolution.

Lessons for today

This power struggle is generally presented as a battle between two opposing ideologies. Bishop is portrayed as the 'moderate' or more like a social democrat, in contrast to Coard who is portrayed as the hardline Marxist who wanted to eradicate capitalism and establish a dictatorship. However, nothing that Coard said indicated a more radical direction - they both agreed on the 'national-democratic revolution'. Before the revolution, they had worked practically in tandem on all decisions within the NJM. Bishop would often ask people to pass proposals by Coard before agreeing to them and vice versa. But despite this, the power struggle still ended in a bloodbath. This shows that, despite the good intentions of the leadership of the NJM, the workers and peasants had no democratic control over the party, which created a situation where the struggle between two opposing factions could only be resolved through the liquidation of the other.

There are many lessons which can be drawn out from the Grenadian revolution whether that be the organisational problems associated with ruling without the masses, or the tactical questions such as Popular Frontism, but the main lesson of the Grenadian revolution is the failure to not complete the revolution. Instead of attempting to manage a 'mixed economy' with an alliance of hostile classes, the NJM should have overthrown capitalism - expropriating the economy and placing it under the democratic control of the workers and peasants.

The NJM leadership showed that, despite their desire to liberate the masses, they were not prepared to go the whole way. Instead, they allowed the majority of the capitalist class to keep their property and to actively sabotage the revolution. When the workers took the initiative to take control over their workplaces, the PRG rounded up the "provocateurs" and threw them in prison, whilst handing the ownership back to the capitalists. The NJM ultimately did not have faith in the masses, instead believing that the construction of socialism could be left to the guiding hand of the party alone. This is shown by the lack of any actual workers' democracy in Grenada, despite the presence of the Zonal Councils, which were mainly talking shops rather than organs of workers' power.

It was inevitable that, without the overthrow of capitalism with the active participation of the masses, the revolution would end in defeat. The contradictions in society and influence of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois forces do not weaken when the revolutionary party comes to power, but only become stronger. The difficulties in maintaining this unhappy alliance of classes bore down on the leadership immensely. The pressures of imperialism, active sabotage by the local bourgeoisie, and the growing apathy of the masses, acted as the catalysts for a factional struggle which US imperialism exploited to the full.

Today, the events of 1979 to 1983 provide an inspiring example to the oppressed masses of the world. Despite the limitations of the revolution, the workers of this tiny island, threatened on all sides, stormed heaven. But out of their heroic struggle there is a crucial lesson for our own: you cannot make half a revolution. Only an international struggle to overthrow capitalism worldwide can guarantee the victory of socialism. This is our fight.

Sources

Searle, C., (1983). Grenada: the struggle against destabilization.

Heine, J., (1990). A Revolution aborted: the lessons of Grenada.

Brizan, G. I., (1984). Grenada: island of conflict: from Amerindians to people's revolution 1498-1979.

Schoenhals, K. P. & Melanson, R. A., (1985). Revolution and intervention in Grenada: the New Jewel Movement, the United States, and the Caribbean.

Payne, A., Sutton, P. & Thorndike, T., (1984). Grenada: revolution and invasion.

Grenade, W., (2010). Retrospect: A View from Richmond Hill Prison: An Interview with Bernard Coard.

Ferguson, J., (1990). Grenada: revolution in reverse.
www.thegrenadarevolutiononline.com

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"Forward ever, backward never": the tragedy of the Grenadian Revolution

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13 March marked the anniversary of an insurrection by a small party in 1979 - with the popular support of the masses - who ousted a dictator and attempted to throw off the shackles of imperialism.

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Forbes Burnham

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

GEORGETOWN, Guyana. May 19 - Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, the man the Central Intelligence Agency helped put in power 12 years ago to avert a Communist takeover, has established the only Marxist government in South America.

By the end of this month, in time to commemorate Guyana's 10th anniversary of independonce from Britain, the Government will have more than 70 percent of the economy under its control. Yet until now, this gradual takeover has occurred with none of the upheaval and economic setbacks that undermined the Marxist government of the late President Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile.

Mr. Burnham is building a party along frankly MarxistLeninist lines, moving ahead with a "people's militia," and strengthening his ties with Cuba and other Communist nations. But there is not a single political prisoner in the country and his opponents readily admit that they can and do air the most outrageous charge; in Parliament or even on street. corners without fear of arrest.

Only recently has Guyana's turn to socialism attracted atItention beyond the Caribbean area. During the Angolan civil war earlier this year, there were rumors published abroad that Guyana was being used as a staging base for Cuban troops en route to Africa, and that Cuba was training Guyanese military units.

But correspondents, who have been given unrestricted access to Georgetown and the hinterlands, have failed to substantiate these reports, and it is impossible to find a diplomat, government official or opposition politician who would confirm those rumors.

Mr. Burnham faces no organized conservative threat, leither from the security forces, who arc firmly under his conitrot, or from middle‐class interests, which are small and fragmented.

Instead the main stumbling block to national unity and the creation of a strong, one‐party Marxist regima are the racial anto gonisms that have been at work in Guyana for more than A hunded years.

For Mr. Burnham is black, like 40 percent of the Guyanese, who are descendants of African slaves. His party, the People's National Congress, has an overwhchningly black following.

On the other hand, more than half the population is East Indian. For ethnic reasons, most of them support the People's Progressive Party of Dr. Cheddi Eigan, the former Government leade??, whom the C.I.A. helped overthrow in 196.1 because he was even more radical than Mr. Burnham and strongly sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

"Both Burnham and Jagan have been talking about crossing racial harriers to broaden their political appeal," said Fielden Singh, the leader of a small opposition party, which still defends private enterprise. "But it has come to nothing. So Burnham has an obligation to look after his own, and we East Indians find ourselves secondclass citizens in our own country."

Hamilton Green, the Minister of Cooperatives and National Mobilization, asserts that the Burnham Government has recently tried to bring East Indians into the bureaucracy and security forces, which are predominantly black. But he concedes that racial feelings run deep.

"The British always tried to divide us to rule better," said Mr. Green, who like other leftwing Guyanese prefers to be addt'essed as "Comrade."

"In school, the teacher always told us the East Indians were dirty," he said.

"And they were told that the Africans were stupid. I grew up on the South Slde-the poorest section of Georgetown -and the rich were always the Indian merchants. They would charge up to 20 cents a pound of rice. They would create shortages and a blackmarket. Well, those people now know they are threatened. If we catch them, we jail them. I'm only sorry we don't have a harsher punishment than that."

The racial antagonisms which flared into bloody riots in the early 1960's are further abetted by a natural economic conflict between Georgetown and the farmlands.

According to popular belief, the blacks hated the sugar estates so much that after their emancipation, they fled to Georgetown, where they now constitute the majority.

Most of the East Indians, who came here as indentured rural workers in the 19th century to fill the labor gap created by the end of slavery, have stayed on as small landowners and sugar workers in the coastal plains. Many of them saved enough to open small shops and other larger businesses in the city.

Georgetown, where onefourth of the 800,000 Guyanese live, is unlike the rest of Latin America. The language is mostly pidgin English. Children in the street play cricket instead of soccer. The cacophony of music in the downtown shops is American soul, Jamaican reggae and sentimental Hindi songs.

The black women dress in bright tropical cottons, many of the Indians still use saris, and the Chinese stroll with parasols. The food is Creole or curries or Cantonese.

Lawyers are barristers. Legislators are ministers of parliament, and sometimes address themselves as "Right Honorable Comrade."

The city's architecture is largely a heritage from the Netherlands, which held sway over Guyana before the British consolidated control at the end of the 18th century. In the nicer neighborhoods, where the streets are lined with bougainvillea, poinsettias and palm trees, the houses are two‐story wooden Dutch colonial structures.

The larger ones are embassies or government ministries, their interiors now cooled by air conditioners, while the overhead fans remain as motionless mementos of a colonial past. There are only a few multistoried concrete buildings-banks, usually-and none of them over four floors, so that the wooden Anglican Church towers over the city.

Georgetown apparently has a serious crime problem. It seems that every government driver warns visitors against the "choke 'n rob" boys.

"One man chokes and the other man robs you," explained a policeman.

"They are cowards, sir, not one of them tough. But man, they are quick. They take your wallet and run into Tiger Bay And nobody will go in there after them."

Tiger Bay and the adjoining West Side face the port on the Demerara River, the hub of Georgetown's activity. Although the city is on the Atlantic, it has pretty much ignored the ocean. The marshy smell of the river overpowers the salty trade winds.

Tiger Bay and the other slums are collections of dilapidated, two‐story wooden frame houses. Without a central water systern, many of the colorless homes share water faucets and outhouses in well‐exposed patios.

Even in the midmorning hours, large groups of young men, most of them blacks, mill about house entrances and storefronts.

Guyana was poor while it was a British colony, and it remains so today. National unemployment is estimated at about 20 percent, but in Georgetown perhaps half the potential male working force under 21 is jobless.

"Haven't ever had a real job, comrade," said Richard Long, a 19‐year‐old, drinking a bottle of strong ale in front of a Tigerbay pub. "Unless you count deliveries, and 1 don't find those too often."

Across the Demerara River is a world as alien to Georgetown as a foreign country. The sugar cane and coffee land begins almost as soon as the ferry pulls against the dock. And almost everyone is East Indian.

It was a Sunday, and many of the wooden frame houses on stilts alongside the irrigation canals had white and red banners flying in their gardens, indicating that Hindu religious services were taking place. At one large house, a wedding feast was in progress and the women wore bright, orange saris

In New Anglet, a farming community about 20 miles from the docks, followers of Dr. Jagan were distributing the People's Progressive Party newspaper.

"We are all Communists here," said Mahase Kumarsingh, 28, the party organizer in the district, who also harvests sugar cane on his fiveacre plot. "We don't like to use the expression, because it upsets the bourgeois elements in the party."

The farmers in the area had a litany of complaints against the Government. They said the Government was too oriented to Georgetown and its black majority, that credits were not forthcoming and that food prices were too low. Then there were the rains that had flooded the irrigation canal, and this, too, was allegedly the Government's fault because it had failed to dredge the weeds from the waterway as it was supposed to do twice a year.

"My son went to Georgetown looking for a job," said Rahim Madura, a 56‐year‐old farmer who lost most of his coffee plants when the canal flooded over recently. "Bur he did not belong to the Government party, so now he is working as a sugar‐cane cutter."

Not all of Dr. Jagan's followers are leftists, and some of them have been disturbed by his recent overtures to Mr. Burnham. The East Indian leader is planning to take up the 14 seats allotted to his party in the 55‐member Parliament. Until now, he has refused to participate in Parliament because he says-and many Guyanese believe him - that Mr. Burnham stuffed the ballot boxes during the 1973 election.

Dr. Jagan appeared on the same platform with Mr. Burnham during the last May Day celebrations, and he recently announced his "critical support" for the Government.

A few miles from New Anglet, a Jagan party worker andhis friends gathered at the home of Sam, the local auto mechanic. As they usually did on a Sunday afternoon, they ushered out the women, cooked themselves some chicken curry, drank copious quantities of rum and talked politics.

Sackee, who owns four trucks, was worried about the pace of socialization under the Government. The more rum he drank, the angrier he got at Dr. Burnham and Dr. Jagan.

"Jagan has sold out," he asserted. "He is no longer taking care of his people."

Most of the others also felt uneasy about Dr. Jagan's courting of the Government, but they all agreed that Sackee was more of a capitalist than a socialist.

The transition to socialism in Guyana still sounds frequent discordant notes. On the radio station, which is under Government control, a minister's speech denouncing the evils of capitalism may be interrupted by advertisements urging listeners to buy Dunlop car tires because "they are the best" or assertions that "you get a better deal at Simon's."

The only daily newspaper, The Guyana Chronicle, which is also Government‐controlled carries a column of advice for the forlorn. In one recent letter, a young woman of poor means recounted how she had been jilted by a rich man in the "hope that other girls will learn from it." In reply, the newspaper columnist warned her that "it is unfair to gauge all rich boys by the one with whom it was your misfortune to be involved."

Despite such contradictions, there is little doubt that Guyana's economy will be progressively more socialist.

Later this month, to mark the 10th anniversary of independence, the Government will take over the subsidiaries of Booker‐McConnell, a British conglomerate that controls 80 percent of sugar production and exports, the only department store, 60 percent of the rum industry, a livestock feeding company, pharmaceuticals, shipping and warehouses.

The Booker holdings, with an estimated value of about $80 million, will be compensated by a minimum cash payment and the rest in long‐term, lowinterest bonds, according to Government sources.

The takeover will bring close to three‐fourths of the nation's production of goods and services into Government hands. It will also virtually mark the end of private foreign holdings in Guyana.

Despite the dramatic change, few economists have suggested that Guyana is worse off than before. In fact, the country's economic performance during the last three years has been excellent compared with its past record.

Thanks in part to high sugar prices during 1974 and early 1975, there has been a favoraable trade balance. The favorable trade balance. The nationialized bauxite industry, forImerly controlled by Alcan, has increased its earnings, mostly because of Guyana's nearmonopoly of the world production of alumina refractories, used to reline steel furnaces.

The country is also fortunate to have large agricultural resources for its small population. Virtually self‐sufficient in foodstuffs, it exports rice to Caribbean countries.

Perhaps the most troublesome spot on the economic horizon has been a "brain (drain." Guyana's usual annual emigration of about 4,000 people more than tripled last year. Many of them were skilled workers, technicians and businessmen, who, fearing the new political and economic order, converted 'their holdings into jewelry and moved abroad.

Prime Minister Forbes Burnham at a public gathering with fellow Guyanese

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A Marxist Guyana Bucks Trend in South America (Published 1976)

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GEORGETOWN, Guyana. May 19 - Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, the man the Central Intelligence Agency helped put in power 12 years ago to avert a Communist takeover, has established the only Marxist government in South America.

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Fidel Castro

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Following a year of severely strained relations between the United States and Cuba, Cuban leader Fidel Castro openly declares that he is a Marxist-Leninist. The announcement sealed the bitter Cold War animosity between the two nations.

Castro came to power in 1959 after leading a successful revolution against the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista. Almost from the start, the United States worried that Castro was too leftist in his politics. He implemented agrarian reform, expropriated foreign oil company holdings, and eventually seized all foreign-owned property in Cuba. He also established close diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and the Russians were soon providing economic and military aid. By January 1961, the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba. In April, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion took place, wherein hundreds of rebels, armed and trained by the United States, attempted a landing in Cuba with the intent of overthrowing the Castro government. The attack ended in a dismal military defeat for the rebels and an embarrassing diplomatic setback for the United States.

In December 1961, Castro made clear what most U.S. officials already believed. In a televised address on December 2, Castro declared, "I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life." He went on to state that, "Marxism or scientific socialism has become the revolutionary movement of the working class." He also noted that communism would be the dominant force in Cuban politics: "There cannot be three or four movements." Some questioned Castro's dedication to the communist cause, believing that his announcement was simply a stunt to get more Soviet assistance. Castro, however, never deviated from his declared principles, and went on to become one of the world's longest-ruling heads of state. In late July 2006, an unwell Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul. Fidel Castro officially stepped down in February 2008. Castro died on November 25, 2016, at 90.
READ MORE: How the Castro Family Dominated Cuba for Nearly 60 Years

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Fidel Castro declares himself a Marxist-Leninist

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Following a year of severely strained relations between the United States and Cuba, Cuban leader Fidel Castro openly declares that he is a Marxist-Leninist. The announcement sealed the bitter Cold War animosity between the two nations. Castro came to power in 1959 after leading a successful revolution against the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista.

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C.L.R. James

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Against the Current, No. 60, January/February 1996

Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) has begun to enjoy a revival among U.S. and European intellectuals which promises to spread his influence more widely in the present and future than was the case at any time during his life. He is best known for his magnificent history of the Haitian revolution, entitled Black Jacobins (first published in 1938 and reprinted often since then), but a growing number of people are becoming increasingly familiar with many other facets of his work.

There has been a flood of works by and about James since his death. There are now two biographies-one by "new left" historian Paul Buhle, and a more recent product of Kent Worchester's careful scholarship. A massive anthology of his writings, edited by Anna Grimshaw, was glowingly reviewed in the New York Times. A fascinating collection edited by Buhle and Paget Henry entitled C.L.R. James's Caribbean has now been followed by a re-issue of his sports classic Beyond a Boundary.

Grimshaw and Keith Hart have also made available a major work by James, rich in pioneering cultural analysis, entitled American Civilization. Professor Robert Hill of the University of California at Los Angeles is projecting the publication of the Collected Works of C.L.R. James over the coming years, according to a front-page story in the Chronicle of Higher Education. An important collection of essays by various scholars, edited by Selwyn Cudjoe and William E. Cain, C.L.R. James, His Intellectual Legacies, has just appeared.

The Revolutionary Studies series of Humanities Press has recently republished his 1937 classic World Revolution (a history of the Communist International), has published a volume edited by Scott McLemee and myself, entitled C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, Selected Writings 1939-1949, and plans to bring out his wonderful 1960 lectures Modern Politics in the near future.

James is generally acknowledged to have been one of the most original Marxist thinkers to emerge from the Western hemisphere, yet essential aspects of his identity came from the other side of the Atlantic, from Europe and Africa. As he explained to one African-American scholar, "I am a Black European, that is my training and outlook."

He offered penetrating analyses on the interrelationships of class, race and gender, and his discussions of colonialism and anti-colonialism could be brilliant. But C.L.R. James also embraced the heritage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the working-class and socialist movements of Europe and North America, and the Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky which transformed Russia and promised to liberate the world from all oppression. At the same time, his writings on sports deserve special emphasis-which is something that can be said of few Marxist theorists. James began his writing career by writing about baseball's distant cousin, cricket, first in the West Indies and later in England.

Paul Buhle, following James, tells us that such sports are a means of "expression for ordinary genius," adding that James regarded cricket as "a fully fledged art form equal to theatre, opera and dance. To this claim James added a populist amendment: 'What matters in cricket, as in all the finer arts, is not the finer points but what everyone with some knowledge of the elements can see and feel.' It embodied the elemental human movement which ... constituted the basis and the source of renewal for all arts." (One can imagine that these insights could also be applied to modern-day basketball, music videos on MTV, and much else.)

Such things-James felt-come from the same deeply creative sources as more conventional great art and also as genuinely revolutionary politics. The mass popular response to such things, similarly, has something in common with the emotions and sensibilities associated with social revolutions, in which masses of people creatively transform reality.

James's Political Involvements

James moved to England in 1932 from the West Indian island of Trinidad. In England he quickly made contact with the British working-class movement, becoming part of the radical Independent Labor Party and of a small Trotskyist organization within it called the Marxist Group. He learned his Marxism within this context, and some of his most enduring contributions to Marxism were made while he was part of the Trotskyist movement in Britain and the United States. James also became involved in the Pan-Africanist movement, becoming associated with such figures as George Padmore, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah.

In 1938 James helped to found the Fourth International, the world-wide organization of revolutionary socialists, and was elected to its International Executive Committee. In the same year he moved to the United States and became part of the Socialist Workers Party. Frank Lovell has offered this recollection:

"When C.L.R. James came to this country from Britain, where he was a leader of the Trotskyist movement, he was welcomed into the Socialist Workers Party and given leadership responsibilities. James was an impressive speaker with his British accent and his poise. He was a tall, handsome Black man... He spoke without notes, standing aside from the podium on the speakers platform. It was as if he were a great actor delivering a famous oration."

"At his first appearance he shared the platform with [the top leaders of the SWP, Max] Shachtman and [James P.] Cannon in the Irving Plaza meeting hall where Trotskyist meetings were often held. Shachtman was the first speaker and was not brief. James came on next and even though his talk was longer than Shachtman's, he completely captivated his audience and received a big ovation. Cannon was the last speaker. Although he was the national secretary of the party and had been announced for a major speech, Jim had no intention of standing on his dignity or trying to hold the audience so late at night in order to have his turn. He put aside his notes, congratulated James on his speaking ability and welcomed him to the Socialist Workers Party." [James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, ed. by Les Evans (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), pp. 138-139.]

James remained part of the Trotskyist movement until 1951, adopting the party name "J.R. Johnson." In 1940, when Shachtman and many others split from the SWP and set up the rival Workers Party, James initially lined up with the Shachtmanites. At the same time, along with an energetic theorist-in-the-making named Rae Spiegel, later known as Raya Dunayevskaya, who took the party name "Freddie Forest," James formed a very distinctive political current: the Johnson-Forest tendency.

The Johnson-Forest tendency, which never had more than a few dozen adherents, mapped out an ambitious project for U.S. revolutionaries: to develop an Americanized Marxism, and an Americanized Bolshevism, that would involve a dynamic interpenetration of the U.S. and international revolutionary traditions.

This was to include intellectual efforts that have had an impact on later scholars and social critics: the development of substantial analyses of U.S. history, studies of modern culture (including a serious attitude toward popular culture), historical and sociological labor studies, the development of Marxist economic analysis, and an awesome embrace of dialectical materialism which involved an immersion in the philosophical writings of Hegel. Among the contributions of the Johnson-Forest tendency was to produce the first English-language translation of Marx's important Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of the early 1840s.

Shachtman and those who were close to Shachtman had little use for the Johnson-Forest tendency, which attracted some of the more energetic young comrades and-among other things- -sought to inspire them with the ambition to master the complexities of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind. As one veteran of Shachtmanites later recalled: "You would see these 17 year olds who could barely spell, and they were carrying Hegel." A one-time Shachtmanite youth leader agreed: "In the youth group, with Hegel, they would get up and start espousing Hegel, and it was utterly incoherent."

There were three other sins of the Johnson-Forest tendency that aggravated Shachtman and his co-thinkers: 1) the position that the African- American struggle, rather than being subsumed under the general struggle of the working class, had a powerful dynamic of its own and would be central to the socialist revolution in the U.S.; 2) the position that the American working class was far more radical, having a greater revolutionary character, than many of the Shachtmanites imagined; and 3) that the Socialist Workers Party of James P. Cannon was much better than Shachtman and others were willing to admit, and that the two groups should reunify.

This finally led to a split from the Workers Party in 1947, and the Johnson-Forest group returned to the SWP. While many SWPers were not inclined to accept much of the Johnson-Forest theoretical output, and especially rejected the Johnson-Forest notion that the Soviet Union was a "state-capitalist" society, the tendency's members were seen as serious and hardworking revolutionaries. The contributions that James had to make regarding the so-called "Negro Question" were also highly valued. And yet disappointed hopes regarding the failure of the U.S. working class to turn in a revolutionary direction, growing difficulties and frustrations brought on by the Cold War and McCarthy periods, and deepening political differences, caused James and his followers to leave the SWP within five years. In doing this, they also openly rejected Trotskyism and any commitments to building a Leninist-type party in the United States.

Shortly after this 1951 split, James-who was not a U.S. citizen-was arrested and thrown out of the country because of his revolutionary politics. In 1955, Raya Dunayevskaya and others split away to establish their own "Marxist-Humanist" News and Letters group; in 1962 the Johnsonmites-known by the name of their own paper Correspondence-suffered another split led by James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs. James and his cothinkers regrouped around the name "Facing Reality" (the title of a major Johnsonite document). By the end of the 1960s, the remnants of the Facing Reality group (led by James's close associate Marty Glaberman) decided to dissolve.

In the meantime, however, two of James's proteges in other countries-Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Eric Williams in Trinidad-assumed state power, and welcomed their mentor's support and assistance. To a limited extent in Ghana, and to a much greater extent in Trinidad, James contributed what he could-especially important writings-to advance the revolutionary struggle. In both cases, he was forced to break with the political course adopted by Nkrumah and Williams, each in their own way veering off from the revolutionary-democratic and socialist perspectives which he represented.

In the final decades of his life, James was able to see his influence grow in England, the United States, and in the Caribbean among activists who were attracted to these revolutionary perspectives.

James's Method and Contributions

It would be wrong to allow James to become-as has been done by some over the years-a cult figure. He is not some sort of earthly deity whose judgments must be worshipped, but a comrade from whom one can learn (sometimes even as one is challenging him and clarifying a disagreement). Rather than offering criticisms or noting contradictions in his ideas and work, I want to focus on certain of his strengths and insights that I believe can be beneficial for the revolutionary socialist movement. At the end of this presentation, however, I will touch on one aspect of his thought which strikes me as somewhat problematical.

James's general approach to reality seems to me to be very dynamic and exciting. An essential aspect of his method is to make links between seemingly diverse realities, sometimes to take something that is commonly perceived as being marginal and to demonstrate that it is central, for example: the relation of the Haitian Revolution to the French Revolution and later to the fortunes of Napoleon Bonaparte; the relation of blacks to world history, Western civilization, and the class struggle; the relation of popular culture-sports, movies, hit songs, dancing, pulp fiction, comic books, etc.-to more "refined" culture, to social realities and to class consciousness. James focuses on these so-called "marginal" realities in a manner that profoundly alters (rather than displacing) the traditionally "central" categories.

The attentive reader will find that such a methodological approach generates innumerable fruitful challenges which help to move one's thinking forward on a variety of issues.

Among James's most substantial contributions was his assistance in making revolutionary Marxists aware of the centrality of "the Negro Question" to the class struggle and to any genuinely revolutionary perspective in the United States, and I want to give major attention to that. First of all, he insistently demonstrated that the history of blacks in the Americas was not simply a history of poor victims of oppression, but of a vibrant and conscious people that found innumerable ways to resist their oppression, assert their humanity, and periodically struggle for their own liberation.

But James went much further than this. On the basis of in-depth study and experience in black communities of the United States, creatively utilizing Lenin's views on oppressed nationalities, and in collaboration with Trotsky (with whom he had extensive discussions in Mexico), James developed a profound theoretical orientation to help guide the practical work of U.S. revolutionaries.

"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," James explained in one resolution which he wrote in 1939. "They are designated by their whole historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution." He added that "the broad perspectives of [Trotsky's theory of] the permanent revolution will remain only a fiction" unless revolutionary socialists could find their way to the African-American masses.

The implications of this were that a consistent, uncompromising struggle for the democratic rights of African Americans (largely proletarianized) would necessarily challenge bourgeois power and capitalism, with a potential for growing over into a struggle for working-class power and socialism. Yet James did not leave things at that. A second resolution noted that African Americans might feel moved, on the basis of their own historic oppression, to advance the demand "for the establishment and administration of a Negro state." He explained that "in a revolutionary crisis, as they begin to shake off the state coercion and ideological domination of the American bourgeois society, their first step may well be to demand the control, both actual and symbolical, of their own destiny."

Rejecting schematic definitions having to do with whether blacks in the U.S. constituted "a nation," James pointed out that "the raising or support of the slogan by the masses of Negroes will be the best and only proof required." Under such circumstances, revolutionary socialists should support the demand, the realization of which could constitute, as James put it, a "step forward to the eventual integration of the American Negroes into the United Socialist States of America."

James added: "The advocacy of the right of self-determination does not mean advancing the slogan of self-determination. Self-determination for Negroes means that Negroes themselves must determine their own future." It is worth noting that there are, in fact, two meanings attached to the term self-determination here. One meaning involves separation, setting up a politically-distinct nation-which may or may not take place, depending on what blacks themselves wish to do. The other meaning involves the right of an oppressed people to define what they shall be and to determine their own future-which, James insisted, must be a constant principle for revolutionary Marxists.

He also observed that "the awakening political consciousness of the Negro not unnaturally takes the form of independent action uncontrolled by whites. The Negroes have long felt, and more than ever feel today the urge to create their own organizations 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's next point is of particular interest: "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."

This general orientation was so advanced for its time that the SWP proved incapable of fully assimilating it, and even today many socialists, even some who identify with Trotskyism, don't accept it. But in the 1960s James's position provided a basis for understanding the rising tide of militant struggles and nationalist consciousness in the Black community. While these new developments proved to be unexpected by and utterly confusing to many observers, Trotskyist analyst George Breitman was able to draw on the earlier perspectives to provide a revolutionary Marxist explanation. Especially important was Breitman's ability to highlight, document and help popularize the profoundly revolutionary meaning of the ideas and life of Malcolm X-which would have been impossible without the kind of analysis pioneered by James a quarter of a century before.

As I have already indicated, James by no means confined himself to "the Negro Question." His approach to the world around him was comprehensive, multifaceted and penetrating. As a revolutionary interenationalist, he concerned himself with revolutionary events in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa-and also with the real struggles of working people and the oppressed in the United States, in which he saw genuinely revolutionary qualities. There is a profound continuity in how he viewed these struggles and the manner in which he defined socialism. This comes through in this passage from a 1947 document of the Johnson-Forest tendency entitled The Invading Socialist Society.

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. It is its basis. Proletarian democracy is not the result of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties and other organizations.

An essential aspect of James's approach is not that members of small revolutionary socialist groups need to persuade the working class to become such a "self-acting force." Rather, he insisted, the working-class already is such a force, carrying out innumerable forms of resistance and struggle in everyday life in their own workplaces and communities and personal lives which-while not necessarily conforming to the blueprints and schemas of revolutionary socialist groups, and often not noticed by these groups-effectively combat, undermine, subvert capitalist power, creating elements of a new democratic-collectivist society within the shell of the capitalist society around us.

In 1943 James expressed this outlook in a brilliant polemic against Sidney Hook (a pioneering post-Marxist whose 1943 volume The Hero in History is being echoed today in fashionable ex-leftist critiques of Marxism and Leninism). Here James wrote eloquently about the relationship between the working class and genuinely revolutionary socialist groups. Noting that one aspect of Lenin's strength was that he was an organic part of Russian culture, he went on to say:

"As to the outstanding role Lenin played inside his own party, even Marxist histories tend to give it a false significance. Lenin fought for the Bolshevik principles in 1903 and won. He was constantly winning, which means that he expressed ideas which stood the test of practice. The proletariat as a whole, at all critical moments, followed the Bolsheviks.

"More important than this, however, is the fact that the Russian proletariat taught and disciplined Lenin and the Bolsheviks not only indirectly but directly. Basically the organization of the party paralleled the organization of the productive power of the proletariat in revolution. In 1917, Lenin thought the struggle hopeless, and was thinking of giving it up. A few weeks later came the massacre of January, and the magnificent response of the Russian proletariat revived the faltering leader. The proletariat created the soviets [democratic workers' councils]. The Bolsheviks learned here to understand the vitality and creative power of the proletariat in revolution.... The great change in policy in April was only a manifestation of the essential policy of the Bolshevik Party, to express and organize the instinctive desires and aims of the proletariat....

"The proletariat repeatedly led the Bolsheviks and gave Lenin courage and wisdom. Between 1890 and 1921 the interrelation between leader, party, class and nation was indivisible. The transformation of Bolshevism into totalitarianism is adequately dealt with in the literature of Trotskyism. The analysis is embodied in history, and the lessons are plain. With the proletariat or against it, that is the future of every modern nation. The secret of Lenin's greatness is that he saw this so clearly, and he saw this so clearly because this choice was the inescapable product of the whole past of Russia...."

We have here a vision of revolutionary organizations being organically connected with the history and culture of their own countries, and especially with their own working classes, the insight that a revolutionary organization must be able to learn from the working class if it hopes to be able to have anything to teach the working class, that it must follow the workers in order to be able lead, that the relationship between the revolutionary group and the working class must be profoundly interactive.

A Challenge to Revolutionary Marxists

Here I want to turn to a problematical aspect of James's thought, which hopefully will provide a challenging conclusion to this presentation. James never altered his analysis of and admiration for Lenin and the Bolshevik party. But by the early 1950s he discarded the conception of building a revolutionary vanguard party in the United States because he felt this conception-as understood by most U.S. Leninists-got in the way of cultivating the necessary interactive relationship between revolutionary Marxists and the actually-existing, self-acting working class.

He came to the conclusion that Trotsky and other revolutionary Marxists had been wrong about believing that, after a working-class revolution, a transitional period between capitalism and socialism would be necessary. He felt that before the working class made its revolution it would already have created-spontaneously, or semi-spontaneously, through its own activity-democratic, collectivist, socialist relations through its resistance to capitalist oppression.

Even if the working class did not put a "socialist" label on its own consciousness, activities, and relationships, these were developing in a socialist direction within the very framework of capitalist society, through the class struggle which-as noted in the Communist Manifesto-is "now hidden, now open." The transition to socialism, he felt, is taking place now in the consciousness and struggles of working people in their workplaces and in their communities, and the transition will be completed (not begun) by a working-class revolution.

I believe that there are elements of truth in all of this, but that James took it too far. Socialism is not inevitable. There are countervailing tendencies-anti-socialist, anti-democratic, anti-humanist tendencies-in our society, in our culture, and within the working class.

The genuinely revolutionary and socialist tendencies that James points to are there in the consciousness, the struggles, and the everyday life of those who are part of the working class. But these can become triumphant only to the extent that they become conscious, are organized and mobilized-and there are no guarantees that this will happen on its own. Elements within the working class, including people like ourselves, will need to work hard to help make it happen.

To be effective in this, we will need to organize ourselves, we will need to learn how to work collectively and carry out coherent activities that contribute to the growth of a working-class socialist movement, creating organizational structures that can facilitate all of this. This means that, contrary to what James argued in the 1950s and afterward, we will be moving to create a U.S. variant of the Bolshevik-Leninist party.

As we do that, however, we will be well served if we critically draw from the rich contributions offered to us by our comrade C.L.R. James. There is much that recommends him to us-his great intellectual breadth, which is reflected in the quality of his Marxism, combining a serious concern with philosophy, history, economics, culture, and practical political work. There is also his capacity to see things which aren't quite "there" yet, but which are in the process of coming into being.

Related to this is his capacity to identify fruitful connections between seemingly disparate phenomena, and his consequent ability to take what is "peripheral" and show that it is, in fact, central to an adequate understanding of politics and society. In addition, there is the deep humanism which is essential to revolutionary Marxism but which James makes very much his own, which opens to us a crucial insight: socialism is not something that is simply thought up by brilliant intellectuals-it is an integral part of the reality around us. Essential elements of it can be found in the thinking, the perceptions, the values, the desires, the everyday life- activities, the many ongoing struggles of the human beings who are part of the working-class majority.

Writings of C.L.R. James referred to in this presentation:

American Civilization, ed. by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, with an afterword by Robert A. Hill (London: Basil Blackwell, 1993)

Beyond a Boundary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1962)

C.L.R. James's Caribbean, ed. by Paget Henry and Paul Buhle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992) The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. by Anna Grimshaw (London: Basil Blackwell, 1992)

C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, Selected Writings, 1939-1949, ed. by Scott McLemee and Paul Le Blanc (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993) ____ with F. Forest (Raya Dunayevskaya) and Ria Stone (Grace Lee),

The Invading Socialist Society (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1972) Modern Politics (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1973); scheduled to be republished by Humanities Press "Philosophy of History and Necessity: A Few Words with Professor Hook," The New International, October 1943

World Revolution 1917-1936, The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993)

(My thanks to Paul Buhle, Scott McLemee and Martin Glaberman, who read and commented on earlier versions of this article, and to participants in the Solidarity summer school class which was the occasion for its composition.)

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Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) has begun to enjoy a revival among U.S. and European intellectuals which promises to spread his influence more widely in the present and future than was the case at any time during his life.

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Michael Norma Manley

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Michael Norman Manley, longtime prime minister of Jamaica, was born December 10, 1924 in the suburbs of Kingston, Jamaica to a well-off family. His father, Norman Manley, was a lawyer and political activist in Jamaica and considered by many to be a national hero. Michael Manley became interested in politics as his father was helping to found the People's National Party (PNP) in 1938. His education at Jamaica College was followed by enrollment in McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1943 where he also joined the Royal Air Force. At the end of World War II, Manley left the RAF as a pilot officer and obtained a bachelor's degree at London ( UK) School of Economics, studying politics and economics with a special focus on Caribbean politics.

Manley spent a year in London as a journalist for BBC before returning to Jamaica in 1946 to write for a socialist newspaper and help his father with the PNP. He was selected for the PNP's National Executive Council in September 1952 just as the party was re-establishing its founding democratic socialist beliefs and purging Marxist members. When the National Workers Union (NWU) was created by the PNP as a more moderate trade union than the previous Marxist-oriented Trade Union Congress, Manley in 1955 became first vice president of the new union. Over the next decade he led many successful efforts for better treatment and wages for workers in Jamaica, including one of the longest strikes in Jamaican history in 1964. His union also campaigned for Jamaican independence from the British which was finally achieved in 1962.

In 1967 Manley won a seat in the Jamaican parliament, and became the opposition leader when his father passed away. After a fierce campaign, Manley was elected prime minister February 29, 1972. Following his election, Manley began a vast reform of Jamaica's economic and social welfare systems, promoting fairer pay, gender equality, free education, and encouraging self reliance.

Manley's government began to arouse the suspicion of the United States, Great Britain, and other major powers when Manley began to befriend Cuban political leader Fidel Castro. He particularly angered the U.S. in 1975 when his government publicly supported Cuba's presence in Angola. Jamaica immediately lost U.S. aid and its economy began to decline. In response Manley declared a state of emergency in 1976. The economic and political crisis cost the Manley regime crucial support and he was defeated in the 1980 election by Jamaican opposition leader Edward Seaga, a political conservative. Over the decade of the 1980s Manley slowly regained support as Seaga's policies proved no more effective in improving the economy. Manley won the election of 1989. His second administration, however, abandoned many of his earlier democratic socialist policies.

Michael Manley, a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, retired from politics in 1992 due to poor health, and died March 6, 1997 in Kingston, Jamaica of prostate cancer. He 73 at the time of his death and was survived by his five children, David, Natasha, Sarah, Rachel, and Joseph.

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Michael Norman Manley, longtime prime minister of Jamaica, was born December 10, 1924 in the suburbs of Kingston, Jamaica to a well-off family. His father, Norman Manley, was a lawyer and political activist in Jamaica and considered by many to be a national hero.