CALIBAN AND CEASARAuthor(s): RICHARD SMALLSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4, ESSAY and LECTURES by C.L.R. JAMES: ATRIBUTE (DECEMBER 1989), pp. 89-92Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654153 .

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CALIBAN AND CEASAR*

by

RICHARDSMALL

"To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must pioneer into regions Ceasar never knew."

C.L.R. James

(Preface to Beyond a Boundary)

For me the two most important features of C.L.R. James' life are that he was a West Indian, a fully grown product of the West Indies intellectually before he left here at age thirty-one, and that he became a marxist and brought to bear on marxist thought and action the peculiar attributes of West Indian personality and method that he had deve- loped in the West Indies. As a result of this combination, he has produced a body of ideas which will leave the world a different place.

It is also an imperative for my own understanding of him to realise that all he has produced in cricket, in literature, in literary criticism, in historical writing and in his political work is intricately bound up - not to be separated from those two prongs - the indigenous, the native, West Indian intellectual and the international marxist. It is also essential in my view, not to avoid the theme of marxist analysis, which is the back- drop to all of his work since the mid-thirties. It is even more important not to avoid this consideration particularly in light of the barbarism that raised its head in Grenada under the guise of marxism. This seems to me to be essential in considering James' contribu- tion to modern political reality and in distilling what is the significance of his life.

The West Indian Intellectual Let me begin with that. I ask you to think of him as he left the Caribbean at the age of

thirty-one, as not only a full grown man, but an entirely self-trained intellectual. He had taken full advantage of the opportunities that a widely used and modern language gave him to be in touch with current thoughts, historical writing, literary and musical criticism. He subscribed to and read a wide range of sporting journals that came from abroad. He

♦Speech delivered at a tribute to C.L.R. James organised by the Institute of Jamaïcain collaboration with the Friends of C.L.R. James, at the auditorium of the Jamaica School of Music on June 29, 1989, Kingston, Jamaica.

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regularly bought the weekly newspaper of Marcus Garvey and kept in touch with the great debate between W.E. Dubois and Booker T. Washington. He kept abreast of the political developments in Europe. Much of this is described in Beyond a Boundary. He relentlessly developed and practiced his techniques in writing about cricket, about literary criticism, about Caribbean development and personalities.

Yet he did all this within a somewhat unorthodox setting. He never attempted to go beyond what is the equivalent of Olevels, the academic horse racing sport of the day. There was no doubt in his mind at the time that he could have excelled in these accus- tomed races. He had already done this at a somewhat tender age. Even in Jamaica of seventy years later, we still know the importance of this path which lay open to him to conquer, the ATievel, the university, the professional training and of how so much is subordinated to make sure that it is trod. Yet he took his decision while he was still in school, and against the insistence of family and friends. It must have required audacity and personal confidence to insist on not following something that was so easily within his grasp and seemed so absolutely essential for making the escape from the restrictions of his circumstances.

But it must be something more than individual personality that led him instead to pursue a path of intellectual development that was rooted very concretely in the activities of the community around him. As he trained himself for instance through the study of foreign journals in cricket, he kept his eyes at all times on the development and practice of cricket in Trinidad; he studied and wrote about it and, what is important, played it. It is this combination of theory and activity which keeps emerging in his later life. The same is true of him and literature while in Trinidad. He studied what was taking place in the world of literature and literary criticism, and practiced the art of both criticism and creative writing. He was involved in the activity of establishing the journal "The Beacon". He was a moving figure in the discussion group that surrounded the publication.

He also maintained the link between intellectual work and physical energy, the brain and the body. In later years he was to say that his colleague Paul Robeson, had become for him the personification and resolution of this duality.

However, before he leaves the Caribbean, there is one paradox that remains for me, particularly in light of the man he becomes in later years. He pursued the study of history and worked at his historical writings, yet up to the time that he left the West Indies, the closest he appears to have come to involvement in political activity was the writing of the biography of captain Arthur Ciprianni.

What he had developed by the time he sets out from the Caribbean was clearly identifiable method, a historical method that remains with him throughout. And I hasten to say that he developed it not just because of his personal capacities, but because, as was always to be the case afterwards, he had also attracted around him a body of people who in the end always contributed greatly to his growth. Indeed it becomes a feature of his method of work in later years.

This method, if it can be summarised into a few words, I would say involves a certain thoroughness of approach to whatever the matter at hand, a mastery of the

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essentials of the subject, and in presenting it in a way that ordinary people can under- stand and be stimulated to pursue the matter. He was, and remained always the Intellec- tual In The Community. In later years as he reflected on his life, he placed great im- portance on the fact that his social personality had been formed in a household and family that was dominated by teachers - a type who even in the memory of some of us were a focus of authority, knowledge and form but who were always deeply involved in the activity of the community.

In a nutshell then, that is the man that sets out for England in 1932. A man who not only has avoided the traditional path, but without more than the Senior Cambridge Certificate, ends up teaching at his alma mater, later at a teacher's college and even while in Trinidad tries his hand at forming his own school. He comes to the conclusion that Caribbean society as it is, cannot give him full range to the possibilities that he feels within himself.

He goes to England to be a writer and a literary figure. He already has in mind to write the history of the Haitian revolution, and in his luggage , the manuscript for his novel "Minty Alley". His friend Constantine, of whom it can be said did not "only cricket know" invites him to the Lancashire town of Nelson to shelter him from the shortage of funds that he had experienced in London after arrival, and througfi this act of generosity, puts James in touch with a school that will be of great importance for him. In the community of Nelson he is exposed to Lancashire workers who teach him a great deal about the British working class movement, and help him to place in context an area that is becoming of great interest to him.

With the same comprehensiveness of approach that I mentioned earlier, he is pursuing an examination of the history of the Russian Revolution. In a relatively short time he not only has joined the Trotskyist movement, significantly rejecting very easily, and early the Stalinist party. It is that same independence of thought that was nurtured and developed in the West Indies that guided him away from what was the overwhelming tendency of the 30s amongst the growing left-wing in Britain, that is, to turn to the Stalinist parties.

And because of the unusual preparation of his West Indian training, he very soon becomes a leading personality in the British and European Trotskyist movement. He writes, he founds and edits political journals. He becomes a leading ideologue. He writes a history of the communist international entitled "World Revolution" and side by side with this he founds the International African Friends of Abbysinnia aggitating for the sovereignty of Ethiopia, and with George Padmore and others expands it into the Inter- national African Service Bureau for the aggitation of African independence. Black Jacobins and A History of Negro Revolt are also written.

By the time he leaves England in 1938 for the United States, he has once again pre- pared himself comprehensively to enter into a new and important, perhaps the most important phase of his life. He certainly demonstrates that in his meeting with Trotsky in Coyoacan in Mexico, shortly after his arrival on the American continent. His background

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in politics, history and the Caribbean and African independence movements has prepared him to make, in my view, one of the most penetrating political analysis of his life. He identifies the struggle of the African-Americans as having an independent validity of its own which should not be subordinated to any political party, including the Trotskyist, and that the black struggle contained within it the elements for setting in motion the reorganization of American society. Looked at closely, and studying the exchanges in the verbatim notes of his discussion with Trotsky, one can see the embryo of James working towards the position that he later takes in the United States (again as a result of close collaboration with others), and that is, that the vanguard party had become the obstacle to the emancipation of the working class and society in general, and that the task of the revolutionary is to recognise and point out the new forms of political action and social organization that have been and are emerging as the vehicles for this movement.

It is a profound development, difficult to encompass in a few sentences, but preg- nant with significance in the contemporary Caribbean, and the contemporary world.

He brings back to the centre of marxist theory the need to identify and recognise the importance of the independent activity of ordinary people as the motive force in his- tory, production, politics and all forms of cultural development. He had of course already broken publicly with Trotskyism in 1950.

The important point of his life I think, is the way that to each new stage that he entered he seemed to come so well prepared for it. Years before the Hungarian Revolu- tion of 1956, he wrote with confidence of the expectation of the kind of upheaval that took place there. His book Facing Reality which is partly a review of that revolt, recog- nises the Hungarian workers councils and the rejection of the Stalinist bureaucracy, as if in anticipation of the revolts in France and Czechoslovakia, and more recently Poland, much as in 1938, the Black Jacobins speaks with confidence of the coming African inde- pendence movement.

It is not possible for me to go into many significant aspects of his work and acti- vities, but I suggest that as you listen and reflect on his life his own phrase taken from the preface to Beyond a Boundary will help illuminate much - and it is this:

"To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Ceasar never knew."

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