Content uploaded by William Clare Roberts
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by William Clare Roberts on Apr 21, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
Leadership in C.L.R. James’s
History of Principles1
William Clare Roberts
The writing of history becomes ever more dicult.2
The Communists of the metropolitan countries were all for the African
revolution. . . but they continually wrote and spoke in terms of
‘giving’ freedom to Africans.3
In some way, forms of organization are always quite similar:
collectivity, cooperation, self-activity; that is, autonomy from all the
forces and agents of repression.4
C own, C.L.R. James’s World Revolution, 1917–1936
would seem to merit slight study. Despite its length and scope, it is
one of James’s minor works. Both polemical and didactic, it pursues its aim
by means of repetition: from the young Soviet Union to Germany, to Britain,
France, and Spain, to China and back again, the Comintern under Stalin
thwarts, sties, and smothers proletarian revolution, directing the militant
workers of the world to prioritize national struggles, in league with the local
bourgeoisie, over class struggle. The argument is eective—to the extent it
is—not by its development, but by its re-emergence from each new situation
under review.
And yet, whatever its limitations, World Revolution also shines a light on
one of James’s two undisputed classics, The Black Jacobins. The “pre-text” of
The Black Jacobins was James’s play, Toussaint Louverture, published in 1936.5
James nished writing World Revolution in January 1937.6 The rst edition of
The Black Jacobins was completed twenty months later, in September 1938.
Beyond contemporaneity, themes of revolutionary strategy and leadership,
© . ISS N 2167-4256
doi:
Online First:
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
2
and of the interconnection of historical events, unite the works. World Rev-
olution undoubtedly belongs, therefore, to the same “text-network” as The
Black Jacobins, and needs to be considered as such.7
The contrasts between the two works are stark, however. Most obvi-
ously, where The Black Jacobins tells a sweeping story of personal tragedy
and revolutionary success, World Revolution is an indictment of revolution-
ary failure and the faithlessness and corruption of the leadership that was
responsible for this failure. The danger against which James guards himself
in The Black Jacobins is that of slipping from the writing of history into the
writing of poetry. Hence his castigation of “the traditionally famous histo-
rians” in the Preface. They “have been more artist than scientist: they wrote
so well because they saw so lile.”8 Hence, also, his insistence that L’Ouver-
ture’s “life and death are not truly tragic,” that his failure was “not a moral
weakness,” but “a specic error” of historical-conjunctural analysis.9 Even
though The Black Jacobins focuses on L’Ouverture, it is not his story, and
James has to break out of the artful narration of his life in order to allow in
“the historical actuality of his dilemma.”10
World Revolution does not face this diculty. It is never in danger of
slipping over into poetry. Rather, it trembles on the verge of becoming the-
ory. This is true in two senses. On the one hand, James has to restrain his
urge to go from explaining events to explaining history itself. Rather than
restricting himself, for example, to explaining the rise of bureaucracy within
the working class movements of Western Europe, James wishes to draw a
larger lesson from that development, which culminates in his exclamation:
“That is the way that history works.”11 On the other hand—and explaining
to some extent this inclination towards a meta-historical theory of history—
James explicitly describes his project in World Revolution as “a history of
principles.”12 A principle, in James’s usage, is a idea insofar as it is a political
cause and a political eect. A principle motivates struggle, and directs it, but
also expresses it in the realm of ideas. Because World Revolution is a history
of principles—and a very partisan one at that—it traces, like a palimpsest,
a social and political theory, according to which both the normative appeal
and the institutional logic of an ideal are constantly suggested without ever
being explicated as such.
This essay seeks to bring this latent political theory to the fore, to show
how it is at work in World Revolution, and, beyond that, to explain certain
aspects of The Black Jacobins on this basis. The core of James’s theory is the
premise of all his analysis and strategic advice in World Revolution, that so-
cial classes are organically and internally identied, and that each has a
preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political
principles. Class formation is, for James, a non-existent problem because it
has already occurred. A class is called to act by the voice that expresses the
class’s interest in the terms of its political principles. This comprises almost
3
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
the whole of James’s theory of leadership. Once these points are made clear,
several problems regarding the interpretation of The Black Jacobins disappear.
First, James was serious when he called the slaves of San Domingo
“closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the
time,”13 for this description follows from his organic concept of the proletar-
iat. Second, James’s turn away from Leninism, and his subsequent revision
of his account of the Haitian Revolution over the decades between 1938 and
1962 (and beyond), do not signify a move in the direction of “history from
below,” for James was already there in 1938. What changed, instead, was
his estimation of the conditions under which the mirroring operation he
assigned to political leadership might take place. What seems to be James’s
inordinate interest in the individual leader, nally, is more properly under-
stood to be his antipathy to institutions and organizations. Because these
mediating structures of social and political action belie the immediate unity
of class interests, James looks right past them to the individual leaders at
their heads, and aributes the growth of organization and bureaucracy to
a failure of self-clarity and self-integrity on behalf of these leaders, and of
the masses themselves. Reading The Black Jacobins through World Revolution
risks reducing the stature of the former, but the power of The Black Jacobins
has always resided in its ambivalent grandeur and its discernment of detail
rather than its systematic clarity or rigorous political line. Nothing is lost in
recognizing the book for what it is and surrendering the vain eort to make
it into something it is not.
14
James’s stated aim in World Revolution is to show the “inter-connection” of
the apparent “jumble” of inter-war events, and to “characterise their politi-
cal signicance.”15 He calls this project “not so much a history of events, as a
history of principles, their origin, when and where they were departed from,
the necessity for their regeneration.”16
The principle that most interests James in this, his most Trotskyist mo-
ment, is the principle of Marxist internationalism. His understanding of this
principle emerges in the rst pages of the book as a complete repudiation of
all patriotism and nationalism. “If the Marxist theory of the class-struggle
was the basis of the whole ideological structure of the Third International,”
he claims, “the peak of its edice, the banner which waved over all its teach-
ings, was the repudiation of the rst duty laid upon every citizen by the
bourgeois State—the duty of national defense.”17 To this duty of national
defense, the revolutionary Marxist retorts that that there will be no end to
“war except by revolution.”18 Internationalism, therefore, is unwavering fe-
alty to international proletarian revolution as the only path to socialism: no
war but class war. James’s book is, in its structure and arguments, a history
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
4
of this principle, its origin (chap. 1–4), when and where it was departed from
(chaps. 2–14), and the necessity for its regeneration (chap. 15).
Despite the clarity of James’s statement and the consistency with which
he adheres to it throughout the rest of the book, there is, from the beginning,
ambiguity in how James portrays internationalism’s relationship to the rest
of Marxism. This is manifested in the images and metaphors James uses in
his discussion. As I have already noted, he introduces his major theme by
calling internationalism “the peak” of the ideological “edice” of the Third
International. This suggests that it is the highest achievement and nal re-
sult of working out Marxism’s political strategy. On the next page, however,
he claims that, by prioritizing the ght against Hitler and Hirohito over the
ght with the bourgeoisie, Communists throughout the world “shaer the
foundations of the building which houses them.”19 This suggests that inter-
nationalism is the most basic element of Marxist politics rather than its most
advanced conclusion.
One might harmonize these architectural metaphors by saying that,
under Stalin’s direction, the Comintern has repudiated not only the
strict internationalism that is the peak of Marxism’s edice, but also the
class-struggle that is its foundation. This is surely what James meant. But
this highlights the ambiguity of James’s formulation, rather than dispelling
it. Class-struggle is only really the foundation of Marxist ideology if inter-
nationalism is the peak of its edice. James draws this conclusion himself
when he declares “Internationalism the basis of the First International” in
Chapter 2.20 Without this banner waving over everything, the foundation it-
self is shaered. Why would this be? It is a strange and fragile building that
needs, for the structural integrity of its foundation, the highest point of its
edice. How could such a building be constructed in the rst place?
As Althusser argued, Marxism has a freighted and often confusing re-
lationship with architectural images. Thinking in the terms of Marx’s base/
superstructure image from the 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy produced endless reams of Marxist (and anti-Marxist)
work without obviously clarifying the connections between the economy
and the state, or between technology and ideology. Althusser claimed that
the usefulness of the metaphor was exhausted in that it revealed the ques-
tions of determination or eectivity that needed to be thought conceptually.
He described his own project as an “aempt to think what” the base/super-
structure image “gives us in the form of a description.”21
Besides the base/superstructure image, however, Marx also forwarded
us the image of castles in the air. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party,
he and Engels derided utopian socialists for dreaming “of founding iso-
lated ‘phalansteres,’ of establishing ‘Home Colonies,’ or seing up a ‘Lile
Icaria’—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem,” and pointed out that,
“to realise all these castles in the air,” the utopians “are compelled to appeal
5
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.” In 1859, Marx applied the same
metaphor to political economy, claiming that “Science, unlike other archi-
tects, builds not only castles in the air, but may construct separate habitable
storeys of the building before laying the foundation stone.” Perhaps some-
thing similar holds for Marxism, according to James? The task, however, is
the one Althusser identied, to think this situation using concepts.
James’s argument is that the proletariat of each nation is faced with
an existential choice: to ally itself, rst and last, with the international pro-
letariat or to ally itself with its national bourgeoisie. This is “the eternal
struggle in the labour movement,” as James calls it, “either to be with and
therefore subordinate to your own bourgeoisie, or to be with the interna-
tional proletariat.”22 To downgrade internationalism, therefore, is also to
prioritize cross-class alliances and harmonization, or solidarity on the basis
of nation rather than class. Therefore, without internationalism, the ban-
ner, class-struggle, the basis, shaers. Internationalism is not so much the
late-drawn and nal development of Marxist politics as it is an immediate
inference from the embrace of class struggle.
The metaphor of the edice is misleading, therefore, in an important
sense. It suggests a separation and mediation between class struggle and
internationalism. If Marxism as a political ideology were an edice, there
would be dierent levels and multiple structuring elements. If the interna-
tional movement were a building that housed Communists, it would have
load-bearing walls and functional compartmentalization. But James is actu-
ally denying all of this. Marxism is an elementary substance, according to
World Revolution. Its basis is class struggle, and this is identical to its peak,
internationalism. There is an immediate unity between the most basic ele-
ment of the Marxist approach and its greatest development. “No war but
class war” is the sum of all Marxism.23
I think this implicit claim about the immediate unity of the communist
movement is the loose end of a thread running through much of James’s
work. It foretells what will come to the fore in his works of the 1950s and
‘60s, after he has broken with the Fourth International, and what will be
developed further as the explicit focal point of Selma James’s writings. This
is the organizing principle that there is an already existent unity of class in-
terest among the poorest and most exploited, and that there is, therefore, a
categorical duty of solidarity with—and faith in—their struggles.
In the following two sections, I want to try to trace the emergence of this
organizing principle in James’s analysis in World Revolution, and to connect
it to his distinctive understanding of the role and risks of centralism. I will
argue that already visible in World Revolution is James’s tendency, more and
more pronounced as the years went by, to downplay—and even to deni-
grate—organization in favor of an immediate moral and theoretical bond
between the individual leader and the revolutionary masses. This anti-insti-
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
6
tutionalism, as I will call it, is further developed in James’s greatest work of
history, The Black Jacobins, to which I will then turn.
At the heart of World Revolution is a cluster of concepts—class, interna-
tionalism, and leadership—and the relations among them. James does not
explicate these relations as such, but they structure and motivate his histor-
ical analysis and even come to the surface of the text in the epigrammatic or
aphoristic declarations that punctuate his narrative.24 In this way, World Rev-
olution is of a piece with the tradition of “history from below,” even if James
is not here telling a history from below. Suspicious of theory, but commit-
ted to an explanatory and political program, historians from below held the
weft of their histories together with a warp of concepts drawn, more or less
directly, from the tradition of Marxist theory. Because this conceptual warp
is largely or entirely submerged in the tapestry of the narrative, it can be
dicult to discern, despite its structuring role. James’s penchant for apho-
rism sometimes reveals the warp of his thought, though, and gives a reader
crucial clues for understanding what holds his texts together. My recovery
of the structure of World Revolution, therefore, is especially keyed to its many
aphoristic declarations.
The basic conceptual structure of James’s argument is straightfor-
ward and familiar to anyone conversant with his work: the revolutionary
masses are instinctively or spontaneously internationalist in orientation,
and this class-instinct must be matched and conrmed by a principled in-
ternationalism from the leadership of the workers’ movement in order for
revolutionary socialism to carry the day. This position is consistently artic-
ulated by James, even as it is asserted in more progressively more radical
terms over the following decades. Hence, in a 1943 essay criticizing Sidney
Hook, James claims that, “when a worker joins the revolutionary movement
he interprets history, acting instinctively on the basis of his class.”25 Implicit
in the formulation from 1937 is already the thesis that James will later make
central, that “The whole course of the development of labor . . . shows that
the labor leadership at the decisive moment is always lagging behind the
working class.”26 The leadership is, at best, responding to or mirroring the
instincts of the working classes. The masses lead, and, since their situation
is not dened by nationality but by class position, their interests and desires
are fundamentally internationalist. The leader aends to the masses and ar-
ticulates their desires in the concrete form of a program.
This basic framework governs James’s approach to the history of Marx-
ism. According to his reconstruction of this history, it is the “belief in the
international proletariat which so sharply distinguished Marx and Engels,
Lenin and Trotsky, from other leaders of the working-class movement.”27
7
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
This can be read in two ways, both correct. First, they believed that the
proletariat was an essentially international class. “The all-round interde-
pendence of Capitalist production” was a fundamental tenet of Marxism,
from which it followed that “sheer economic necessity” compelled workers
of all nations to work together.28 James quotes the rules of the International
Workingman’s Association: “the emancipation of labor is neither a local nor
a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern
society exists.”29 But besides believing in the international nature of the
modern proletariat, the founders believed in—that is, had faith in the rev-
olutionary agency of—that international proletariat. They believed in “the
infallible instinct of masses in revolution.”30 This faith was not limited by
national boundary or location, and neither was the revolutionary activity
of the masses. Thus, the two aspects of James’s dictum converge: the prole-
tariat is, according to Marxism, international and revolutionary, and knows
itself, instinctively, to be international and revolutionary. “It is this instinc-
tive internationalism to which theoretical Marxism must give organization
and direction.”31
James’s aribution of “instinctive internationalism” to the masses must
be understood in relation to his reading of Marx and Engels’s class theory.
Classes can be dened in various ways within the connes of the Marx-
ist tradition, but almost everyone takes as their point of departure Marx’s
claim, in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
that, “in the social production of their life, human beings enter into relations
that are denite, necessary, and independent of their wills—relations of pro-
duction—which correspond to a denite step in the development of their
material powers of production.”32 Classes are, in some way or another, de-
ned by the relations of production. Relations of production, however, may
be specied in a multitude of ways. Some understand them as “the network
of ownership relations.”33 Others understand them as “the property or sur-
plus-extraction relationship.”34 Still others, wishing to eliminate reference
to all legal concepts, treat production relations as “roles or positions which
dier determinately in the kind and degree of control their occupants have
over the process of social production, the kinds of claims they have on social
labor or its fruits, and the kinds of claims other members of society have
on them.”35 What unites these disparate aempts is an implicit assumption
that relations of production—and hence the denition of classes—are fun-
damentally inter-class relations. That is, the mutual denition of a number
of contending and opposed classes is inherent in the denition of any single
class in a given social order. James seems to disagree. He seems to under-
stand relations of production as consisting entirely of the relations among
members of a given class and between the members of that class and the
means of production.
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
8
According to James in World Revolution, classes are “groups of people
who were distinguished from other groups by the fact that they earned their
living and lived in a common way and therefore had common needs, aspi-
rations, and ideas.”36 This way of conceiving classes makes no reference to
inter-class relations—relations of exploitation, domination, or conict—but
only to the common form of life that denes a given class, much as Aristotle
derives the “many forms of life” of human beings from the “many forms of
food” by which humans might be sustained and the many ways of acquiring
it.37 Relations of production, on this account, are relations of commonality
that emerge from people having the same relationship to the means of pro-
duction. Class is an identity, a commonality of needs and aspirations, a
common way of thinking that emerges from a common way of living.
James’s position bears comparison to E. P. Thompson’s apparently
similar claim that “class happens when some men, as a result of common
experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their in-
terests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are
dierent from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”38 Read in isolation, this sen-
tence seems to claim that common experience gives rise to felt identity and
felt opposition to others, who have dierent experiences and dierent felt
identities. This seems very close to James’s position. However, Thompson
presages his claim by stating that “we cannot have two distinct classes, each
with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each
other,”39 a premise that James never quite articulates. James takes for granted
class distinctions, but does not presume that relations between classes are in-
ternal to the distinct existence of each class. Thus, when Thompson claims
that “The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations
into which men are born—or enter involuntarily,”40 he does not reproduce
James’s implication, that the productive relations are the relations among
members of a class and between that class and nature.
James’s denition of class may seem isolated—it does not come up
again in World Revolution—but that it is his considered view is supported
by claims he makes elsewhere. The clearest example is from State Capitalism
and World Revolution, a text he co-wrote with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace
Lee Boggs in 1950. There, they claim that “the proletariat, like every organ-
ism, must from itself and its conditions develop its own antagonisms and
its own means of overcoming them.”41 Rather than being dened socially
by its relation to the bourgeoisie within a the capitalist mode of production,
the proletariat is dened immanently and materially, by its common condi-
tions and its relation to nature. Its antagonisms emerge from its own inner
existence.
This conception of class also has two corollaries in World Revolution.
First, James insists that “the real task” of the workers’ rule—not its presup-
position, but its purpose—is “to increase production” by way of increasing
9
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
the productivity of labour.42 In line with his organic conception of class,
this increase in production is the self-realization and self-overcoming of the
working class.43 Second, James repeatedly juggles the ideological line of the
party and its “social composition.”44 That is, regardless of cautions, he slips
into treating political tendency and class origin as spontaneously aligned.
The upshot is that class struggle, domination, and exploitation seem to
be, for James, exterior and consequential to class, not constitutive of it. From
this it seems to follow that internationalism is a principle of solidarity based
on class-identity. Proletarians everywhere are of the same class because they
have the same relationship to the means of production, and therefore they
see one another as of the same class and have an instinctual solidarity with
one another across national lines.45
46
“But in politics instinct is not enough. You must have political clarity.”47 If
internationalism and class are immediately linked up at the level of proletar-
ian class instinct, this is insucient for any proletarian class politics, much
less a revolutionary class politics. Instinct, in James, is implicit or latent. It
is a potentiality for action. This potentiality is called forth into action much
as a supersaturated solution is provoked into crystallization by the intro-
duction of a seed crystal as a site of nucleation. “Having gained nothing but
misery from capitalism,” James writes of “a billion colonials, among whom
there are 150 million exploited Negroes,”
they are ready to ght it, instinctively, as a man is always ready to throw
o someone who is siing on his back and squeezing his life away. . . .
Like all masses, however, they can judge only by action. They want to
see the socialist alternative. But once it is posed concretely they will au-
tomatically prove themselves what Lenin called the Russian workers,
‘the most advanced representatives of society.’48
Posing the socialist alternative concretely—dropping the seed crystal into
the solution—is the task of the revolutionary leader. The leader is the guard-
ian of political clarity. James’s appreciation of Lenin as a revolutionary
leader and as a strategist is inseparable from his judgment that Lenin was
unswervingly dedicated to the principle of internationalism and relentless
in supplying the political clarity that principle entailed.
As James notes in World Revolution, however, “Lenin was not only Le-
nin. He was Lenin plus the Bolshevik party.”49 The Bolshevik party was
rigorously centralized, and “centralism is a dangerous tool for a party which
aims at Socialism.”50 Hence, James will also claim that “the very strength”
of Lenin’s “leadership was its weakness, for when he went the party, built
around him, almost instinctively clung to the centre he had dominated, but
which, without him, was already heading for reaction.”51
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
10
Centralism is so dangerous because it gives rise to bureaucracy. Party
leaders “judge history from the necessities of their organizations and not their
organizations from the necessities of history.”52 These leaders “deceived the
workers,”53 and their “cowardice and treachery” stopped the revolutionary
movement.54 Indeed, it is only “the intrigue, corruption, and stupidity of fel-
low-workers in the cause which destroys revolutionary will.”55 The trouble
is, “the learned blindness and conservatism of the organization” is endemic
to the organization as such; “men who can use theory and organization,
and not be used by them, are rare.”56 In short, “there was too much need for
Lenin in both the planning and the execution of Leninism.”57
This is a tough nut to crack. It is not just that party apparatchiks hijack
the movement of the masses. It is not just that the Stalinist or revisionist or
social democrat “believes in the bourgeoisie far more than he believes in
the proletariat.”58 The problem penetrates the proletariat itself. Whatever
James’s faith in the revolutionary instincts of the masses, “the pathetic faith
the average worker has in the leaders of the organizations he has created
is one of the chief supports of the capitalist system.”59 Organization, disci-
pline, the division of labour, industrialization: all of these tend to fortify the
bureaucracy in equal measure as they strengthen the proletariat.60 And yet,
mass movements “need and can only to rarely nd adequate leadership;”
this is their “tragedy.”61
Because he analyzes things in these terms, James produces a picture of
the revolutionary movement in which the immediate, instinctive unity of
the masses can only properly be mirrored in an immediate and categorical
faith in the masses on the part of the individual communist. The communist
militant always tells the masses the truth, always reects back to them the
unity of their interests. This is reected in James’s advice to intellectuals:
“Identify yourself with a fundamental class and go where it goes, mount
with it when it mounts and fall with it when it falls. On this basis you will
commit some blunders. But you are always in a position to judge and intel-
lectually command the contending forces of society.”62
This theoretical perspective, given its fullest articulation in World Revo-
lution, structures the analysis also of The Black Jacobins, and survives all the
revisions James made between the rst edition of 1938 and the second, com-
pleted in 1962. It explains James’s positioning of the slaves of San Domingo
as the forerunner of the modern proletariat, and recasts James’s supposed
abandonment of Leninism for a “boom-up” theory of revolution, based
upon the self-activity of the masses. In fact, James’s Leninism had always
been based upon this self-activity. What he abandoned—or what atrophied
and died in his analysis and writing—was his conviction that a party orga-
nization was necessary in order for this self-activity to communicate with
a leader who transcended local contexts of struggle. The structure of his
theory of leadership did not change as the prospects of world revolution
11
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
dimmed; the leaders got smaller, more local, and “closer” to the people, or
else more mediated by modern communication technology, but James’s the-
ory remained just as resolutely anti-institutional, and just as insistent upon
the immediate unity of class interests.
In The Black Jacobins, James characterizes the slaves of San Domingo as
“closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at
the time.”63 This claim almost inevitably draws aention and comment. It
is generally interpreted as Cedric J. Robinson interpreted it, as “a rhetorical
gesture” and as “an intervention by James” into Marxist class theory.64 Along
these lines, Nikhil Pal Singh takes it to signify James’s break with Marx’s
inability to think of slave emancipation as anything “but a prelude to a uni-
ed working-class struggle.”65 On this reading, bestowing the moniker “a
modern proletariat” upon the slaves means identifying in them an advanced
revolutionary potential, one that could have driven the Haitian Revolution
past the mere creation of a bourgeois, capitalist order. Nick Nesbi seems
to agree, claiming that, while the “specicity” of James’s claim is “less than
convincing,” it makes perfect sense within James’s political project in 1938.
“If the proletarian is, in classic Marxist usage, a ‘free’ wage laborer forced
onto the market by nonpossession of the means of production, James, like
Mao in this same period, instead wishes and indeed must refocus hopes
for world revolution on a much broader base—that of the colonized mass-
es.”66 James is drafting the working masses of the colonized world into the
Communist revolutionary project by interpellating the enslaved plantations
workers of San Domingo as the subjects of the rst proletarian revolution.
The common ground among these readers of James should not distract
us from their dierences. Indeed, their political and theoretical divergences
bring this moment of agreement into relief. It is clear that Nesbi exagger-
ates the distance between James’s use of “proletariat” and the classic Marxist
usage.67 As Singh points out, Marx did not treat the proletarian as synony-
mous with the free wage laborer, but used the term to refer to all “those
without reserves.”68 Hence, there is a basis for treating James’s claim about
the masses of San Domingo as continuous with classical Marxism, rather
than as betraying a secret proximity to Maoism. On the other side, Robin-
son wants to see in James a preguration of his own eort to trace a Black
radical tradition with its own, autonomous “ideological and cultural devel-
opments,” in contrast to the European proletariat’s formation “through and
by the ideas of the bourgeoisie.”69 But Nesbi is surely right to insist that
“the success of the Haitian Revolution,” for James, “had nothing to do with
the African cultural remnants of the slaves, nor with vodou or Kreyol, or
any other local feature of the culture of Saint-Domingue.”70 The “dream of
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
12
freedom” James locates in the slaves of Haiti is neither Nesbi’s “idea of
justice as equality,” derived from “the radical Enlightenment,” nor is it a
synecdoche for the “critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought,
of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality” that Rob-
inson identies with “African cultures.”71 We misunderstand James when
we read him teleologically as an insuciently universalist Trotskyite or an
insuciently decolonial Third Worldist.
We have already seen in World Revolution the key to understanding
James’s assimilation of the slaves of San Domingo to the modern proletar-
iat. For James, a class is dened by its organic relationship to itself and to
nature through production. When he discusses the class-character of the
San Domingo masses, these are the features he stresses: their immediate
work on the land and the large-scale, cooperative nature of their work-re-
lations. “The slaves worked the land,” he notes, “and, like revolutionary
peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppres-
sors.”72 The particular quality, aim, and intensity of peasant struggles is a
result of agricultural work. James is not specic here, but anyone who has
experienced the bloodiness and intimacy with killing that comes with farm
work can make a guess. However, the slaves were not merely agricultural
workers. Their existence was also dened by “working and living together
in gangs of hundreds.” This is why their uprising was “a thoroughly pre-
pared and organized mass movement.”73 The slaves were used to working
together, and they knew the futility of isolated action. According to James,
the dream of freedom is universal.74 The aempt to get it by exterminating
the oppressors is agricultural. The pursuit of it by mass organization and
planning is proletarian.
For this reason, Nesbi’s aempt to identify “a symptomatic contra-
diction in the logic of The Black Jacobins” falls at.75 Following James’s own
self-interpretation, most commentators see James moving from a “a Lenin-
ist vanguard theory,” in the 1938 rst edition, to a “a model of “’history
from below,’” in the revisions he made to the 1963 second edition.76 This
trajectory was carried further by the work of Carolyn Fick, and by James’s
1967 rewriting of his theatrical script about the Haitian Revolution.77 Some,
like Nesbi and Mahew Quest,78 seek to complicate this narrative by locat-
ing the tension between the two poles of James’s movement in one or the
other terminus of the movement itself. In this spirit, Nesbi—who wishes to
valorize the Leninist vanguard James—claims that the 1938 edition already
“possesses not one but two logics of universal mass revolution”:
The rst, the one James openly analyzes and endorses, is that a leader
of genius is necessary to focus the anonymous and even unthinking
passion of the masses, or more simply, a Leninist vanguard theory that
James nds operative, though certainly not identically so, in the Hai-
tian and Russian Revolutions. At the same time, analysis of the French
13
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
Revolution in The Black Jacobins follows an entirely dierent logic, un-
theorized in the 1938 edition, then supported by the citations from
Lefebvre in 1963. . . . Rather than the vanguardism that is one of the
principal features of The Black Jacobins’ explicit argument, the French
Revolution seems to have proceeded as a leftist, spontaneous uprising,
one in which popular leaders freely arose like mushrooms in the forest
as the masses heroically overthrew feudalism.79
I want to object to this reading, not to deny that the 1938 edition contains both
a “leader of genius” theory and a leftist theory of spontaneous uprising, but
to argue that they are, for James, one and the same theory. Nesbi’s com-
plication of the standard picture reproduces its errors: thinking that there
is an opposition between vanguardism and mass revolutionary agency,
and thinking that James moved further to the Left as he moved away from
Trotskyism.
A thorough survey of the changes James introduced into the second
edition of The Black Jacobins undercuts the notion that the rst edition was
more authoritarian, elitist, or vanguardist than the second. The mistaken
impression that James moves in the direction of history from below comes
from commentators focusing on the two long footnotes on George Lefebvre
in chapters XII and XIII.80 Aention is directed to these because of James’s
own—misleading—comment in 1971 that he was “condemned to footnotes”
in his revisions of the text.81 Because the rst edition is rare and hard to nd,
most people have simply taken James at his word.
In fact, chapters VI, VIII, IX, X, and XIII all contain signicant revisions,
and these revisions do not show any clear movement one way or another on
the question of vanguardism. Look rst at what remains in both editions.
The vanguardist thesis, that “It is the tragedy of mass movements that they
need and can only too rarely nd adequate leadership,” was not cut.82 The
spontaneist thesis, that “From the people heaving in action will come the
leaders,” was not added.83 The notes on Lefebvre stress the need to aend to
“the obscure leaders” and “the popular mentality,”84 but James cut the story
of two such obscure leaders, the Kinas, father and son, who fought for the
British until they saw the “unmitigated slavery” on British-held Martinique
and “organised an insurrection of the blacks for freedom.” The story was
meant to illustrate what “the people of San Domingo were like.”85 Yet, all
that remains of this episode in the second edition is the lesson that “this in-
stinctive power will display itself in all populations when deeply stirred and
given a clear perspective by a strong and trusted leadership.”86
Simply put, nothing supports the contention that James moved away
from his theory of leadership, or towards a theory of boom-up revolution,
between 1938 and 1962. Boom-up revolution always required leadership,
on James’s account, and the test of leadership was always its loyal subser-
vience to the revolutionary instincts of the masses. Without the mirror
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
14
provided by a commied leader, the masses cannot see themselves and their
freedom struggle for what it is, and this is the only function of leadership: to
show the masses to themselves.
The masses—especially the most oppressed—do not need the “the rad-
ical intellectual class” for their ideas.87 This was James’s consistent position,
even when he was a Trotskyist. In 1939, he argued that “The most exploited,
the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, Negroes are the ones
who experience most acutely and most unbearably the overwhelming bur-
dens which capitalism places upon the masses in every country. Negroes
haven’t to read in books about the fraud of capitalist democracy. Karl Marx
and Lenin have lile to teach them about the fact.”88 A month later, he
extended the argument further, writing, “It is the masses of the under-priv-
ileged, the disinherited, who are least corrupted by the prevailing ideas of
a society. They, in the mass, are the readiest to ght most desperately for
the overthrow of any social system.”89 Seven years later, he would trace this
argument back to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and to Chapter 14 of Capital,
claiming that, when Marx saw in “the division of labor in manufactures, that
the laborer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the mate-
rial process of production as the property of another and as a ruling power,”
this meant that the laborer “does not need revolutionary parties to teach
him.” “This process” of working in the manufactory, James continues, is the
laborer’s “revolutionary education.” The laborer does not need the party to
educate him, since “capital educates the worker socially and politically.”90
When James repudiated the vanguard party in the 1950s, he did not aban-
don the notion that “mass movements need and can only too rarely nd
adequate leadership”—for he never abandoned that notion. Neither did he
abandon the notion that the masses needed a “radical intellectual class” to
give them radical emancipatory ideas—for he had never held that notion to
begin with, and so could not abandon it.
What he abandoned instead was any hope that a vanguard organiza-
tion could henceforth be anything other than a bureaucracy-in-waiting. But
without a party organization, the mirroring operation between the masses
and their leaders cannot extend very far. Hence, James’s embrace of “ob-
scure,” local leadership went hand-in-hand with his hopes for “the modern
media of mass communication,” by means of which “the black masses can
hear on the radio news of Dr. Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyaa, Dr. Julius [Nyer-
ere], Prime Minister Nehru,” thereby activating the “inherent antagonism
between the consciousness of the black masses and the reality of their lives,”
an antagonism that is “constantly produced and reproduced not by agita-
tors but by the very conditions of the society itself.”91 The party organization
divided loyalties and divided labor. The party was an institution, and all
institutions have what Hegel called “ethical substantiality”—they can only
exist as a motley assemblage of particular oces, duties, and roles92—and so
15
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
they split up the immediate unity between the universality of the proletar-
ian class interest and the individuality of the leader’s call to action, diverting
it into a thousand channels. Happily for James, “the developing structure
of capitalism itself” had delivered the means by which the working class
could replace “union and labor party administration” by a combination of
immediate proximity to the sites of struggle and self-organization, on the
one hand, and the dissemination of elaborations and defenses of worker
self-organization via radio and newspaper, on the other.93
The long-run consequences of this approach were disastrous for James’s
own conception of the class struggle. In his 1986 Foreword to the re-edi-
tion of State Capitalism and World Revolution, James himself noted of “the
emancipation of the working class” that the “phrase sounds awkward in
my ears today.” He continued: “Today I do not know of any body of peo-
ple who speak or preach with any condence of the ‘emancipation of the
working class.’ People are not against, not at all—but they are not for. . . .
There is a conscious desire to wait and see.”94 This diagnosis was as much
a self-diagnosis as it was a claim about the proletariat. And the basis of his
waning condence in emancipation is to be found in the way James framed
the problem already in 1937. The immediate unity of class interest was a
myth that obscured the hard work of forging a common interest.
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
16
1. [Redacted]
2. James, The Black Jacobins, 1989, x.
3. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, 66.
4. James and Augustin, “Beyond Boundaries.”
5. Forsdick and Høgsbjerg, The Black Jacobins Reader, 4.
6. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 20.
7. Gilman, “Black Jacobins and New World Mediterraneans.” The third text
that would need to be brought into any fuller consideration of this network
is A History of Pan-African Revolt.
8. James, The Black Jacobins, 1989, x.
9. Ibid., 291.
10. Ibid.
11. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 191.
12. Ibid., 70.
13. James, The Black Jacobins, 1989, 86.
14. This is how James characterized the Bolshevik Revolution in his 14 No-
vember 1939 column in Socialist Appeal, “The Negro Question: The Greatest
Event in History.”
15. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 64.
16. Ibid., 70.
17. Ibid., 67.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 68.
20. Ibid., 89; emphasis added.
21. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 238.
22. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 102.
23. In Chapter 1 of World Revolution, James tries to attribute this tactical doc-
trine to “the instructions Marx wrote for the revolutionaries in Germany in
1850,” and argues that these “retain all their validity today” (84). James’s
description of Marx’s tactics is based entirely on the “Address of the Cen-
tral Committee to the Communist League.” For an able contextualization
of this address, and a detailed demonstration that Marx’s political strategy
between 1848 and 1851 was very nearly the opposite of what James thought,
see Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels.
24. Robert A. Hill has called attention to James’s “deployment of stunning aph-
orism” in his Forward to Forsdick and Høgsbjerg, The Black Jacobins Reader,
xiv. Aphorism is the mode in which James makes programmatic declara-
tions, and may be related to his writing method. According to Selma James,
17
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
CLR suggested writing sentences regarding a given topic on slips of paper,
placing the slips in a shoe box, and then, when the shoe box was full, assem-
bling the slips into an essay (James, Sex, Race, and Class, 13).
25. James, “History and Necessity, Part I,” 210.
26. James, “In the International Tradition: Tasks Ahead for American Labor,”
13.
27. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 102.
28. Ibid., 81.
29. Ibid., 89.
30. Ibid., 122.
31. Ibid., 124.
32. Marx and Engels, MEW, 13:8; my translation.
33. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 73.
34. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe,” 11.
35. Wood, Karl Marx, 84.
36. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 75.
37. Pol. 1256a20. Aristotle catalogues these ways of life: nomadic herding, hunt-
ing, piracy, shing, farming, and commercial exchange.
38. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution, 111.
42. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 158; see also 80, 160, 166, 280.
43. This conclusion is supported by James’s claim, elsewhere, that the primary
contradiction of capitalist society is that between the possibilities of produc-
tion and the workers’ articially limited power of consumption. “What is the
crying contradiction in society today? It is the contradiction between the ca-
pacity of production, actual and potential, and the consuming power of the
masses limited by the fact that in modern society the masses are compelled
to live on what is sufcient to maintain them alive and to reproduce an-
other generation of workers. . . . The solution of the problem requires, among
other things, the release of the productivity of a billion colonials, among
whom there are 150 million exploited Negroes. Their release necessitates the
overthrow of capitalist wage slavery” (“Negro Masses and the Struggle for
World Socialism”).
44. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 286; see also 277, 285, 290, 292.
45. This may extend to bourgeois class solidarity as well. In his critical essay on
Sidney Hook, James seems to claim that the international market is what ties
together the internationalism of modern class identities, and that this applies
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
18
equally to all modern classes. “The needs of the class,” James writes, “are
determined by the economic needs of the nation. In the world market of the
twentieth century, the problems of every nation and therefore of every class
within the nation can be solved only on an international scale. Hence thepro-
letarianinternational basis of Bolshevism, the foundation of the Communist
International and the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky”
(“History and Necessity, Part II,” 274). In The Black Jacobins, James general-
izes to claim that slavery is “the inevitable fate of any class which allows
itself to be led by another” (The Black Jacobins, [2nd edition, 1989], 129).
46. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 190.
47. James, “The Negro Question: [In Politics Instinct Is Not Enough].”
48. James, “Negro Masses and the Struggle for World Socialism.”
49. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, 190.
50. Ibid.; see also 212.
51. Ibid., 190.
52. Ibid., 93.
53. Ibid, 138.
54. Ibid., 313; compare 138.
55. Ibid., 101–102.
56. Ibid., 212.
57. Ibid., 211.
58. Ibid., 275.
59. Ibid., 198.
60. Ibisd., 292.
61. James, The Black Jacobins, 1989, 25.
62. James, “To and From the Finland Station,” 127.
63. James, The Black Jacobins, 1989, 86.
64. Camp and Heatherton, “The World We Want,” 102.
65. Singh, “On Race, Violence, and ‘so-Called Primitive Accumulation,’” 49.
66. Nesbitt, “Fragments of a Universal History,” 141–142.
67. As does Robinson when he declares that “the slaves of Haiti were not a
Marxian proletariat” (Black Marxism, 275).
68. Singh, “On Race, Violence, and ‘so-Called Primitive Accumulation,’” 53n51,
citing Denning.
69. Robinson, Black Marxism, 275.
70. Nesbitt, “Fragments of a Universal History,” 155.
71. Nesbitt, 144; Robinson, Black Marxism, 120–121.
72. James, The Black Jacobins, 1989, 85.
19
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
73. Ibid., 85–86.
74. There is a parochialism at work in Nesbitt’s attempt to trace the desire for
freedom to an idea of equality that emerged in the Netherlands and France
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ironic given his championing
of “universal history” against “Glissant’s concept of the resistant ‘opacity’
of local culture” and “Chakrabarty’s theory of local histories and cultural
practices that resist and disrupt the globalization of capital” (“Fragments
of a Universal History,” 155). James is more of a universalist than this; the
desire for emancipation does not need to be invented somewhere.
75. Nesbitt, 142.
76. Ibid., 152–153.
77. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below; Fick,
“C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, and The Making of Haiti; James, The Black
Jacobins, 1992; James, “Lectures on The Black Jacobins: How I Would Rewrite
The Black Jacobins.”
78. Quest, “On ‘Both Sides’ of the Haitian Revolution?: Rethinking Direct De-
mocracy and National Liberation in The Black Jacobins.”
79. Nesbitt, “Fragments of a Universal History,” 153.
80. James, The Black Jacobins, 1989, 276, 338.
81. James, “Lectures on The Black Jacobins: How I Would Rewrite The Black
Jacobins.” For example, and as Aldon Lynn Nielsen notes with curiosity,
James’s comments do not “fully address the changes that were made in
the nal passages of his book when it was reprinted in the 1960s” (“‘On
the Wings of Atalanta,’” 306).
82. James, The Black Jacobins, 1938, 17; The Black Jacobins, 1989, 25.
83. James, The Black Jacobins, 1938, 315; The Black Jacobins, 1989, 377.
84. Ibid., 338n39.
85. James, The Black Jacobins, 1938, 203.
86. James, The Black Jacobins, 1989, 243.
87. Nesbitt, “Fragments of a Universal History,” 152.
88. James, “The Negro Question: [The Place of the Negro Is in the Vanguard].”
89. James, “The Negro Question: The American Negro and the Proletarian
Revolution.”
90. James, “Historical Retrogression or Socialist Revolution,” 28.
91. Quoted in Hill, “Foreword,” xvi, n7.
92. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 197, §154.
93. Boggs, James, and Castoriadis, Facing Reality, 89–91.
94. James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution, vii–
viii.
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
20
Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses. London ; New York: Verso, 2014.
Boggs, Grace Lee, C.L.R. James, and Cornelius Castoriadis. Facing Reality. De-
troit: Correspondence, 1958.
Brenner, Robert. “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe.” In The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and
Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
Camp, Jordan T., and Christina Heatherton. “The World We Want: An Inter-
view with Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson.” In Futures of Black Radicalism,
95–107. London: Verso, 2017.
Cohen, G. A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2001.
Fick, Carolyn E. “C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, and The Making of Haiti.”
In The Black Jacobins Reader, 60–69. The C.L.R. James Archives. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2017.
Fick, Carolyn E. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below.
Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
Forsdick, Charles, and Christian Høgsbjerg, eds. The Black Jacobins Reader. The
C.L.R. James Archives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Gilman, Susan. “Black Jacobins and New World Mediterraneans.” In Survey-
ing the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio, edited
by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, Owen Robinson, and Lesley
Wlyie, 159–82. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Frierich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Al-
len W. Wood. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge Texts in the History
of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Hill, Robert A. “Foreword.” In The Black Jacobins Reader, xiiv–xx. The C.L.R.
James Archives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Hunt, Richard N. The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels. Vol. 1 of 2 vols. Pis-
burgh: University of Pisburgh Press, 1974.
James, C.L.R. “Historical Retrogression or Socialist Revolution.” The New Inter-
national, January 1946.
James, C.L.R. “In the International Tradition: Tasks Ahead for American Labor.”
The New International, January 1944.
James, C.L.R. “Lectures on The Black Jacobins: How I Would Rewrite The Black
Jacobins.” Small Axe 8 (2000): 99–112.
James, C.L.R. “Negro Masses and the Struggle for World Socialism.” Labor Ac-
tion. April 28, 1941, Vol. 5, no. 17 edition.
James, C.L.R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison and Busby,
1977.
21
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolu-
tion. 1st ed. London: Secker and Warburg, 1938.
James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
James, C.L.R. “The Black Jacobins.” In The C.L.R. James Reader, edited by Anna
Grimshaw, 67–111. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
James, C.L.R. “The Negro Question: [In Politics Instinct Is Not Enough].” Social-
ist Appeal. October 10, 1939.
James, C.L.R. “The Negro Question: The American Negro and the Proletarian
Revolution.” Socialist Appeal. August 22, 1939.
James, C.L.R. “The Negro Question: The Greatest Event in History.” Socialist
Appeal. November 14, 1939.
James, C.L.R. “The Negro Question: [The Place of the Negro Is in the Vanguard].”
Socialist Appeal. October 6, 1939.
James, C.L.R. “The Philosophy of History and Necessity: A Few Words with
Professor Hook, Part I.” The New International, July 1943.
James, C.L.R. “The Philosophy of History and Necessity: A Few Words with
Professor Hook, Part II.” The New International, October 1943.
James, C.L.R. “To and From the Finland Station.” The New International, June
1941.
James, C.L.R. World Revolution, 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist In-
ternational. Edited by Christian Høgsbjerg. The C.L.R. James Archives.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
James, C.L.R., Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs. State Capitalism and
World Revolution. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013.
James, Selma. Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, a Selection of Writ-
ings 1952–2011. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.
James, Selma, and Ron Augustin. “Beyond Boundaries.” Monthly Review
71, no. 4 (September 1, 2019). hps://monthlyreview.org/2019/09/01/
beyond-boundaries/.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Werke. Vol. 13. Berlin: Die Verlag, 1961.
Nesbi, Nick. “Fragments of a Universal History: Global Capital, Mass Revolu-
tion, and the Idea of Equality in The Black Jacobins.” In The Black Jacobins
Reader, 139–161. The C.L.R. James Archives. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2017.
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “‘On the Wings of Atalanta.’” In The Black Jacobins Reader,
297–310. The C.L.R. James Archives. Durham: Duke University Press,
2017.
Quest, Mahew. “On ‘Both Sides’ of the Haitian Revolution?: Rethinking Direct
Democracy and National Liberation in The Black Jacobins.” In The Black
Jacobins Reader, 235–255. The C.L.R. James Archives. Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2017.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 26, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2020
22
Singh, Nikhil Pal. “On Race, Violence, and ‘so-Called Primitive Accumulation.’ ”
In Futures of Black Radicalism, 39–58. London: Verso, 2017.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 1991.
Wood, Allen W. Karl Marx. 2nd ed. Arguments of the Philosophers. New York:
Routledge, 2004.
