C. L. R. James Quotes

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C. L. R. James

Profession : Journalist

Birth : January 4, 1901

The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.

C. L. R. James

My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.

C. L. R. James

One of the surest signs of the estimated changes in the consciousness of the American proletariat is to be found in the character of the demands now being put forward by the leadership.

C. L. R. James

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

C. L. R. James

I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.

C. L. R. James

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

C. L. R. James

I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.

C. L. R. James

The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.

C. L. R. James

I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.

C. L. R. James

All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca.

C. L. R. James

All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market.

C. L. R. James

It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.

C. L. R. James

Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.

C. L. R. James

The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage.

C. L. R. James

I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense.

C. L. R. James

After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.

C. L. R. James

It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany was defeated.

C. L. R. James

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

C. L. R. James

Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences.

C. L. R. James

The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.

C. L. R. James