James projected his own class tensions onto Toussaint’s tragic limits

Evidence

Alas, from no less an authority than James himself, we know this last defense of Toussaint was not without its element of rationalization. As Toussaint wasted away in his prison in the Jura mountains, writing his letters of supplication to the little emperor, his vision gave him away: “Despite the treachery of France he still saw himself as a part of the French Republic ‘one and indivisible.’ He could not think otherwise … there was a limit beyond which he could not go” (p. 364). We, of course, recognize James (and perhaps even his impressions of Padmore) in these assertions. We can see the declared identification of a Black revolutionary intelligentsia with the masses; the willingness to continue the submission to “scientific socialism” by denying the material force of ideology while indicating a bitter disappointment with the Communist movement; the patronizing attitude toward the organic leaders of the masses; and the ambivalent pride of place presumed for the Westernized ideologue. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1298

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader thesis about the Black radical intelligentsia’s tense identification with the masses and its ideological captivity to Western Marxism.

Related

• Robinson reads James’s Toussaint as masked self-critique of the Black intelligentsia (similarity 0.87)
• James saw Toussaint’s psychology, not just Europe, as limiting his revolution. (similarity 0.86)
• Haitian slaves were not a Marxian proletariat yet shared its historical formation (similarity 0.81)
• James linked Toussaint’s failure to the defeat of revolution in Europe. (similarity 0.79)
• James’s insight severed revolutionary consciousness from bourgeois ideology for Black peoples (similarity 0.79)
• Haitian plantation slaves were closer to a modern proletariat than any workers then (similarity 0.79)
• James required Marxism to break from parliamentary nationalist assumptions (similarity 0.79)
• The 1960s Black intelligentsia rediscovered James as a link to their radical past (similarity 0.79)
• James pushed Marxian philosophy to its postwar limit while staying disciplined within the tradition. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• James stretched Marxist categories to fit the Haitian slaves #corroborates (0.80)