James’s pre-Marxist nationalism remained limited to parliamentarianism

Evidence

James’s politics like those of Cipriani, however, remained within the parameters of parliamentarianism. He would need Marxism, he maintained later, to break with that assumption. By the late 1920s he was a nationalist, but though he had read Garvey’s Negro World, had interviewed Garvey himself when the latter visited Trinidad after his expulsion from the United States, and was also familiar with some of Du Bois’s early works, James’s vision had still only partially progressed beyond the ideological tradition in which he had been reared: “I hadn’t really the faintest idea about Black politics then, nor was there any talk about any African or Black revolt.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1208