C. L. R. James Quotes

• Body-line was not an incident, it was not an accident, it was not a temporary aberration. It was the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket.

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in America, History

  Tags in Imperialism, Commodity

• Today we ought to be able to see first that Booker T. Washington faced a situation in which he was seeking desperately for a way out, and he could see no way out except capitulation.

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Desperately, Except

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

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Democracy

  Tags in Suffrage, Elected

• 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

  Topics in America, Future

  Tags in Skepticism, Section, Depression

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Development, Industrial, Political

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revolution, Proletarian

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

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Capitalist, Contrast

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  The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known.

   

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Profound, Social

• The antagonisms between men and women express themselves in the most delicate phase of their life together – in their s*xual relationship.

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Relationship, Delicate

• Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Technological, Discoveries

• 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

  Topics in Leadership

  Tags in Consciousness, Proletarian

• 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

  Topics in Father

  Tags in Teacher, Behaviour

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Slavery

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

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Germany, Defeated

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

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revolutionary, Trends

• In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital.

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hostility

• In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism.

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Capitalism, Commercial

• Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences.

  C. L. R. James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Consequences

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Militant, Labour

C. L. R. James (31)

Birth:	4th January, 1901
Death:	19th May, 1989
Nationality:	Trinidadian
Profession:	Historian, Journalist, Writer

About

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Tunapuna, Trinidad. He was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, socialist theorist and essayist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of subaltern studies, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James's writing on the Communist International stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and his history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, is a seminal text in the literature of the African Diaspora. He is also famed as a writer on cricket.

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Deaths

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