[Marxism] *tomorrow* CLR James: Urbane Revolutionary

[kazembe at gmail.com]

 Friday, February 08
7:30 pm
The Brecht Forum
451 West Street (Between Bank and Bethune)
A,C,E, 1,2,3 to 14th Street














BOOK PARTY / FORUM

Urbane Revolutionary

C.L.R. James & the Struggle for a New Society
Frank Rosengarten with Comments by Lincoln Van Sluytman

In his presentation of his new book, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R.
James and the Struggle for a New Society, Frank Rosengarten will look
at six controversial questions in James's life and work.

Born in 1901, James experienced virtually all of the intellectual,
political, and ideological storms and stresses of the 20th century.
After a youth not marked especially by a belief in revolution as the
best way to achieve a just, racially equalitarian society, James left
his native island of Trinidad in 1932, and within less than two years
of residence in England embraced the cause of revolutionary socialism,
as a member of the International Labor Party and as a fervent disciple
of Lenin and Trotsky.

But his restlessness, his constant search for more precise
articulations of his ideals, and his ever widening circles of friends
and comrades in the Black liberation and Pan-African movements of the
1930s and 1940s, impelled him to follow his own independent and
original course. From 1938 to 1953, James devoted himself to political
struggle in the United States, as a founder of the Johnson-Forest
Tendency, a dissident group within the Workers Party. But this phase
of his development gave rise in turn to still another period of
rethinking and reformulating, in response to momentous changes in the
Caribbean, in Europe and in Africa. He was swept up chiefly by the
anti-Stalinist revolutions in Hungary and Poland, the Cuban revolution
of 1959, and the Paris 1968 uprising in France. He had controversial
and still relevant things to say about these revolutionary events,
which he expounded in numerous writings ranging from newspaper
articles to essays and book-length studies.

Rosengarten sees James as a thinker who rejected pre-digested
ideological formulas, including those emanating from Leninism,
Trotskyism, and even from Marxism. He was an original thinker who was
his own man, despite the difficulties he encountered both within and
without the political movements to which he gave his allegiance. This
independence of mind was a characteristic feature of his personality
in the literary and cultural spheres as well as in the political.

Another facet of James's life that will be discussed is his lifelong
insistence on wholeness as a goal toward which to strive, whatever
one's chosen field of special interest might be.

James was far from perfect. He could be hasty and superficial,
inconsistent in his leadership style, over-enthusiastic about ideas
and trends that soon revealed their deficiencies, and often painfully
fallible in his relationships with the women who meant most to him.
Yet at the same time, few socialist revolutionaries of the 20th
century can boast of more creative and productive relations with their
women comrades than James. For many years, he worked especially
closely with four women whose contributions to his development were of
crucial importqnce to him: Constance Webb, Grace Lee Boggs, Raya
Dunayevskaya, and Selma James.