The Black Jacobins encoded Trotskyism, Leninism and anti-Stalinism within its analysis.

Evidence

It was from this political base and ideology that he would write World Revolution: 1917–1936. The Rise and Fall of the Communist International in 1937, and translate Boris Souvarine’s Stalin in 1938.142 It was as a Trotskyist that James would author The Black Jacobins, the work for which he is best known. First published in 1938, this still formidable study of the Haitian and French revolutions and their signification for British abolitionism, was at one and the same time an analysis of the relationship between revolutionary masses and leadership, and an attempt to establish the historical legacy of African revolutionary struggles. Within the same volume it is not difficult to unearth a critique of Stalinism, an expression of Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution, and the elaboration of Lenin’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat—all constructed upon Marx’s extraordinary determination of the primitive, that is, the imperialist accumulation of capital. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1239

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ideological program The Black Jacobins actually carried—Trotsky’s permanent revolution, Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat, and a critique of Stalinism.