Contact with Lancashire workers converted C. L. R. James from abstract Labourism to Trotskyism
Evidence
Perhaps one reason for James’s less euphoric reaction to English society was that his introduction to the country had differed in important ways from those of Makonnen and Padmore. Living in Lancashire with Learie and Norma Constantine, physically remote from the more typical sites of middle-class radicalism and organized politics, James was enveloped by a more contemplative work and a more mundane politics. Through Constantine, to be sure, he had gained access to the Manchester Guardian and was soon substituting for Neville Cardus, the paper’s cricket correspondent. But his major preoccupations: the collaboration with Constantine on Cricket and I, the public lectures on the West Indies, the editing of The Life of Captain Cipriani, provided him the opportunity to read Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, to review the lie of labor politics in Britain, and to meet with British workers for discussions removed from super-heated circumstances. Indeed, he would later admit that the development of his critical stance regarding the Labour Party (with which he had identified as a “Ciprianian” nationalist) was due to discussions with Lancashire workers that brought discredit on the Party’s leadership: “My Labour and Socialist ideas had been got from books and were rather abstract. These humorously cynical working men were a revelation and brought me down to earth.” Apparently sharing their disillusionment with the Labour Party, he soon found an alternative: … I read the History of the Russian Revolution [Trotsky] because I was very much interested in history and the book seemed to offer some analysis of modern society. At the end of reading the book, Spring 1934, I became a Trotskyist—in my mind, and later joined. It was clear in my mind that I was not going to be a Stalinist. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1237
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the Madrid/Kent chapter pattern of émigré radicals formed through exile geography rather than ideology alone.