On the Negro Question by Cyril Lionel Robert James - Essay Example

Running Head: - REVIEW ON "ON THE NEGRO QUESTION" BY C.L.R. JAMES Review on "On The Negro Question" By C.L.R. James of Institute] Review on "On The Negro Question" By C.L.R. James About The Author - Cyril Lional Robert James Cyril Lional Robert James generally known as C.L.R. James was the son of a school tutor. James was born in Tunapuna, Trinidad, on January 4th 1901 (James, Online). James was intensely inclined by his mother who was a keen booklover. An extremely intellectual child, at the age of six James succeeded to achieve scholarship to Queens Royal College. After departing from the college James did job as a school tutor and as a cricket journalist. He got an enthusiastic attention in politics and wrote a biography of the Trinidadian labor leader, Arthur Cipriani. James was a sturdy enthusiast of West Indian sovereignty. James shifted to London and throughout this period he considered the work of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky. He originally connected the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and following moved to London, became chairman of its Finchley branch. He also put in writing for military journals such as the New Leader and Controversy. James turned to a Marxist and left the ILP to form the Revolutionary Socialist League. James, now a devotee of Trotsky, was extremely serious of the government of Joseph Stalin and the British Communist Party. James also published quite a few publications on politics. This history of the Comintern was exceedingly serious of Stalin's 1924 statement, "Socialism in One Country" and offered help for the thoughts of Leon Trotsky. His learning of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, was published in 1938. James shifted to the United States in October 1938. He addressed on political subjects and sustained to publish books about politics counting Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity (1947), Notes on Dialectics (1948), The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA (1948), State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950) and The Class Struggle (1950). James too inscribed at length about the occupation of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. The Marxist publications of James distress Joseph McCarthy and associates right-wingers and he was ultimately expelled from the United States. James stayed a short time in Africa but in 1958 come back to the West Indies. The book is a blending of autobiography and a thorough examination of sport and politics. Cyril Lional Robert James came back to London and expired in Brixton in May 1989. Review on "On The Negro Question" "Briefly, the idea is this, that the Negro is "nationalist" to the heart and is perfectly right to be. His racism, his nationalism, is a necessary means of giving him strength, self-respect, and organization in order to fight for integration into American society. It is a perfect example of dialectical contradiction. Thus, side by side with his increasing integration into production, which becomes more and more a social process, the Negro becomes more than ever conscious of his exclusion from democratic privileges as a separate social group in the community. This dual movement is the key to the Marxist analysis of the Negro question in the U.S.A." (James, 1996, Pg XXVI - 64) The book C.L.R. James on the Negro Question comprises of seven sections. The book has many chapters and total numbers of pages are hundred and fifteen. Though it seems to be a little reading book but it contains the Historical Development of the Negro's especially in the United States. The history of the Negro's question and the American Revolutionary movement in common, and the Malcom X and Trotskyite movement in importance, makes it very imperative at this phase to sketch in though concise a form the role of the Negroes in the political expansion of the American society. James in his book have stated that there are 14 million Negroes in the United States are focused to each believable diversity of economic domination and social and political unfairness. These torments are to an extent hallowed by law and experienced devoid of disgrace by all the pieces of government. The Negroes, nevertheless, are and have been for several centuries in every intellect of the speech, Americans. They are not alienated from their tormenters by dissimilarities of culture, dissimilarities of religion, dissimilarities of language, as the people of India or Africa. They are not even regionally estranged from the left of the society as national groups in Russia, Spain, or Yugoslavia. The Negroes are for the preponderance part amateur or semi-proletarian and consequently the resistance of the Negroes is primarily a group question. He has repeatedly stated that the Negroes do not comprise a nation, but, due to their individual circumstances, their isolation; economic, social, and political domination; the disparity in color which differentiate them out so effortlessly from the left of the society; their problems become the difficulty of a nationwide minority. The Negro question is a part of the countrywide and not of the "national" question. This nationwide minority is mainly effortlessly famous from the rest of the society by its ethnic individuality. Therefore the Negro question is a question of contest and not of "race." The differences flanked by their state of affairs and the rights take pleasure in by those around them have at all times made the Negroes that part of American society mainly amenable to world-shattering thoughts and the fundamental explanation of societal problems. The white operational class fights back next to the purpose regulation of assets and for some biased objective, which even on the each eve of rebellion is not possible to imagine completely in tangible and optimistic terms. The Negroes, conversely, thrash about and will carry on to fight dispassionately next to capital, but in distinction to the white employees, for the very actual purpose self-governing rights that they see more or less around them. But the entire history of the United States and the function of the Negroes in American economy and the public are a steady evidence and memento of the truth that it is completely unfeasible for the Negroes to increase fairness under American entrepreneurship. In the United States social revolution is impossible without the independent mass struggles of the Negroes, whatever the prejudices, the reactionary fantasies, the weaknesses and errors of these struggles. The amateur work of the Negro citizens and the increasing manual labor progress, present immense chances for a incessant decrease of the discriminations of the Negro public. James in his different chapters of this book have emphasized that this kind of progress of American entrepreneur society and the function of Negroes in it that the Negroes' resist for independent human rights brings the Negroes more or less instantly face to face with capital and the situation. The Marxist assistance of the Negro fight back for autonomous rights is not an allowance that Marxists make to the Negroes. In the United States these days this fight is a straight part of the struggle for Marxism. James' debates of "nationalism" surround an inquiring incorporation and elimination. On one hand, the Negro Movement's addition into American society paradoxically takes for granted a definite level of "black chauvinism", a method of criticizing white America so as to highlight the distinction stuck between races. Alternatively, by attaining "organization" adequate to oppose American capitalism, the Negro Movement in actual fact increases entrance into the same communal systems that refute its society. "The dialectic teaches that in all forms of society we have known, the increasing development of material wealth brings with it the increasing degradation of the large mass of humanity...Thus it is that the moment when the world system of capitalism has demonstrated the greatest productive powers in history is exactly the period when barbarism threatens to engulf the whole of society." (James, 1996, Pg 154-155) The Workers Party discarded James's declaration on Black Nationalism. Both the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party, the two mainly imperative Trotskyist assemblies in the United States, sustained to look upon the black resist as impressive to be included within the lower-class fight back as a whole. The proceedings that go after the books of James's motions would be inclined to give credibility to the class-only advancement since the instantaneous postwar times was observer to the nearly all influential business union encounters since the 1930's. After overpower of Germany and Japan, the American labor class determined that there was no justification for wartime severity any extended and they prearranged one commanding and confrontational smack after any more. In one of his sections "Aspects of Marxist Theory" he has discussed that it was Malcolm X, who turned out to be the supporter angel of this novel association. The motive that he was slayed is that the verdict class familiar that it had a radical in its middle who was completely competent of heading 13 to 14 million black Americans or Negro's in a confrontational fight back against white preeminence. In the last year of Malcolm X life, he happened to appreciate the affiliation among this fight back and the resist for communism. He was developing in the direction of a mixture of the communist and autonomist programs in an approach reliable with the views of Lenin, Trotsky and CLR James himself. " This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism." (James, 1996, Pg 91-92) All grave evils occurring from the Negro question rotate more or less the correlation of the self-determining mass proceedings of the Negroes for self-governing rights to the lower-class great effort for communism. Bibliography James C.L.R.; C.L.R. James On The Negro Question. (8 Jan 1996). University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 0878058230. James C.L.R: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SLAjamesC.htm Read More