CLR James is best known for his social history of the Caribbean. But he's less known for being a committed revolutionary socialist his whole life, working tirelessly for 40+ years to form a Marxist organization in the U.S. These are some of his writings on that struggle.

James goes after far left groups posing as a revolutionary leadership, when they only have a few hundred members. he does so from a thoroughly Marxist standpoint, arguing that revolutionaries have to root themselves in the class, and that academic Marxism is a distraction, at best. But he also places theory at the centre of revolutionary practice. A historical materialist understanding of your country is vital to connecting with the masses.

Having encountered a few mini-vanguard groups in my time, I can appreciate James' insights. Writing in 1944, he has a sober assessment of where the left is, and where it's going to come from:

The American mass party will not be built by us... Groups of Virginia miners, West Coast sailors, Southern sharecroppers, Pittsburg steel workers, all sorts of 'left' formations will coalesce in time and hammer out a unified organization.... Our task is to form such a strong nucleus that the coalescence will take place around us... They [American workers] and only they can build a mass party.... They need to be given, not prospects of a happy life and higher wages, but a method of thought and a conception of social development that makes their own lives and efforts intelligible to them.

This is a spectacularly democratic vision, tinged with regret by the subsequent attempts by American revolutionaries in the 60s to substitute themselves, or other groups, for the mass action of the working class.

CLR James - no substitutionism here

James goes on to critique revolutionary elitism, in his 1963 essay "Marxism for Our Times":

Let me warn you, my friends. The spirit, the attitude, that is pervasive, particularly among revolutionaries who live with it every day: the revolution does not happen or is defeated, and finally they begin to look upon the revolution as a necessity but somewhat abstract. They either commit the folly of preaching to the workers that they ought to make a revolution, the quicker the better; or they convince themselves that the idea of revolution is utopian.

Against this, James places Lenin's method:

In February 1917 he [Lenin] said: we who are members of the Marxist movement may not live to see the world revolution. That was a month or six weeks, I believe, before the Russian Revolution... He was concerned with the objective circumstances of bourgeois society at that stage... and as complete and precise as possible [a] rejection of bourgeois society.

Ground yourself firmly in reality, while using Marxism to see the revolutionary potential in that reality. Don't patronize the working class, become part of it and learn from it. Don't lead by example, don't reject those who disagree with you - do use your political understanding to further the self-emancipation of the masses. Marxism is not sectarian or utopian. It's reality - as it is, and as it might be.

This should be glued to the forehead of every Marxist. And then, everybody the Marxist sees - postmodernists, anarchists and the mirror - will have to read it as well.