On CLR James’ 123rd birthday, Matthew Quest examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. Quest looks at James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James’ and Padmore’s different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveals hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition.
By Matthew Quest
In 1930s London, during the era of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, CLR James (1901–1989) and George Padmore (1903–1959) worked together as activists in the International African Service Bureau. As a youth, they became chums and bathed in Trinidad’s Arima River together. Their fathers, both were teachers and friends. In 1957 a plan was hatched in Britain for Padmore to become chief of staff of Pan African affairs in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, and James to become the editor of The Nation, the organ of Eric Williams’s People’s National Movement (PNM), but also the secretary of the effort to federate the West Indies from 1958–1962. When Padmore passed away CLR began to write him into history.
We must never forget that CLR James, in Party Politics in the West Indies (1962), was really the first to codify the framework of the Black radical tradition. He called it a tradition of anti-colonial national talent. But he underscored you don’t understand the tradition or archive unless you grasp the antagonisms and debates within it. Many of the “expert” scholars on Pan Africanism and Communism still cannot discern these hidden disputes and spread a cobwebbed collection of phantoms adjusted to their own professional development and accumulation of social capital.
Keep in mind James’s and Padmore’s friendship of many years assisted each other in surviving in the political wilderness until later in life the world came to terms with a startling fact. They theorized and led a great social movement that many doubted until, in a certain sense, what Richard Wright first termed “Black Power” began to arrive on its own authority as part of the Age of Third World National Liberation struggles (1947–1993).
Padmore: Radical Coordinator of Global Solidarity
George Padmore (1903–1959) was the Moscow coordinator of international solidarity efforts with Black workers (1928–1933) for the Communist International, and editor of The Negro Worker, before working with CLR in the International African Service Bureau in London before World War II. James’s “Notes on the Life of George Padmore,” an unpublished manuscript, is the basis for many published essays and public lectures. Padmore, among the canon of heroic representative men which James began to manufacture, holds his place in historiography largely as a result of James’s singular effort to place narratives of his life as central to a Black radical tradition.
James often tried, with his Padmore narratives, to teach his audience lessons about problems of thin conceptions of democracy, socialism, and national liberation, though his audiences frequently failed to understand all the facets of James’s Padmore stories. Though this shouldn’t be taken as a small matter, when James is misunderstood, he is generally assumed to be simply imparting lessons about Black autonomy in political organization.
Silences on James’s and Padmore’s Political Friction and Quarrels
Though James and Padmore became independent Marxists of a different variety, James constantly repeated a message of unity to younger Pan-African audiences. Despite the fact that he was initially a Trotskyist, and Padmore had begun his political career as an adherent to Stalin’s Russia, they never “quarrelled” or had “friction” between them in their dedication to African solidarity against empire. This silence in James’s public career is proven false by historical research.
In the original manuscript, these silences are slightly less muted: “Though there were difficult moments we never had any serious disagreements.” James and Padmore argued about the value of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for evaluating and building socialism, the very possibility of social revolution in modern industrial nations, and the terms for shaping national liberation struggles.
James’s Padmore, A Selfless Cadre: Political Agitator and Organizer
James presented Padmore as the embodiment of the selfless and disciplined cadre organizer of Pan-African solidarity, linking struggles in Mombasa, Lagos, Dakar, Fyzabad, and Port-au-Prince. Padmore pursued underground work in the Sudan, and Congo, and, in 1930, organized a global conference of Black workers in Hamburg, Germany, where he would later be held as a political prisoner.
George Padmore wrote letters to editors of newspapers, lobbied government officials, provided hospitality and mentoring for anti-colonial activists, published books, and gave public lectures based on original material from his sojourns and extensive library. He educated Africans in the dynamics of modern party politics, trade unionism, and the art of crafting demands and programs for action.
James repeatedly shared this basic outline of Padmore’s life and work, while omitting details of Padmore’s actual politics, emphasizing his belief that Padmore provided critical ideological continuity for global Pan-African and labor revolt. In pioneering this narrative of George Padmore’s life, James believed he was placing a crucial pillar in the framework of the Black radical tradition. With this cornerstone, James wished his audiences to understand that one need not become a statesman to be considered a successful revolutionary, but merely a disciplined organizer with skills in political education, agitation, and propaganda. Further, the terms of Black autonomy, socialism, and resistance to empire were more complicated than they first appeared.
Successful Revolutionaries Need Not Be Statesmen Above Society
It is clear James Padmore was an implacable foe of white supremacy and empire and an independent Marxist, but it was rarely apparent what this meant for Padmore’s actual practice of political teaching and advising. We know that James did not believe Padmore to be an exceptional orator; we also know that he felt that Padmore’s published works were often distinguished by dry economic details instead of epic ruptures in party politics or struggles of social classes. For Padmore, poor wages and the condition of Black working people revealed that the institutions of white supremacy and the empire of capital were synonymous on a global scale — this was essentially Trinidad’s Eric Williams’s and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah’s view.
Padmore propagandized against oppressive acts and institutions: the stealing of colonized peoples’ land, subordination of Africans through Pass Laws and other racial and anti-labour legislation in Africa, lynching, segregation, and mass unemployment in the USA. In 1959, James reflected, “Everybody says these things nowadays”; they are even “commonly heard, and play a role,” in elections in the United States and in Britain. In the early 1930s, James argued, “George was giving them currency.”
Black Toilers and Progressive Guardians
Padmore, however, beyond challenges to racism and empire, rarely offered vistas of self-emancipating labor in his writings — not even for people of color. Padmore’s Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931), despite the title’s emphasis on resistance, can only partially be seen as an exception to this rule. For Padmore, socialism and democracy meant a type of economic radicalism, where social equality and material welfare were asserted through a constitutional republic. Labor mobilized to achieve these “rights” and then was loyal and subordinate to a post-colonial guardian state. This dependence on progressive guardianship was consistent with Padmore’s reading of Leninism.
James’s Padmore, whether in Moscow or London, was single-minded in pursuit of his work. He made friends easily with people of many ideologies but allowed no sectarian allegiances of the party to stand in the way of coordinating African solidarity. Padmore, much more than James himself embodied the “Black Marxist,” the radical of African descent who experimented with the inventory of European political traditions to arrive at his own authority for crafting vistas for Black freedom.
Global Minded: Not Merely an Africa Specialist
James’s Padmore was presented as global-minded, not merely “an Africa specialist” who concerned himself only with “colonial or African affairs.” This presentation is partially true. Padmore was concerned, as James indicated, with the plight of British workers, China, Latin America, and the Middle East as well. However, unlike James, who proposed to lead and theorize “a world revolution” and make contributions in many spheres, Padmore wrote and organized overwhelmingly on matters of race and colonialism, and sought to maintain a Black International or a Pan-African Federation, of which he would be the chairperson. In contrast, James had a greater audacity. As a perpetual founder of small multi-racial revolutionary organizations, James was an aspiring leader on historical and political questions on many continents crucial to the destiny of imperial and peripheral nations.
Comrades in Anti-Colonial Coalition with Different Radical Politics
Padmore’s and James’s attitudes toward political organizations for anti-colonial work appeared compatible. In fact, James gave credit to Padmore for teaching him about how the small radical political organization should and could function. However, their approaches to the multi-faceted dynamics of world politics were very different. This is obscured if we don’t comprehend the difference between an anti-colonial coalition and a revolutionary organization.
Padmore was received by many of James’s readers as someone who would not allow the chauvinism of the white Left and the intrigue of their party politics to undermine his organizing efforts for Black freedom. This certainly proves if not false, an ambivalence, as Padmore’s London Pan Africanism is carefully reconstructed. The more conservative British Left, whether the British Labour Party or British Communist Party, had a trajectory consistent with half the British ruling class.
In the search for power above society, with Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya, and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, Padmore’s uncompromising rhetoric often existed side by side with lobbying the left bloc of capital and parliament in Britain. This is captured in Peter Abrahams’s novel A Wreath for Udomo (1956) but also in Leslie James’s scholarship on Padmore that salutes him for his “pragmatic” anti-colonialism.
CLR’s critique of Padmore’s How Britain Rules Africa (1936) is that Padmore implied it was possible for half the imperial ruling class to be moral and help their trustees to independence. This was consistent with their disagreement on relying on the League of Nations, however late, to restore Selassie to power. Later Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1955) implied something similar. Namely, white lobbyists of the British Empire, such as the later Sylvia Pankhurst, were somehow part of the Pan-African movement. In fact, it was the Popular Front style of anti-imperialism around Haile Selassie, that undermined the global movement for Black toilers in militias and nurse corps to come to fight the Italians in Ethiopia, a similar social motion to the global effort in the Spanish Civil War. Finally, Padmore was not only concerned with the self-mobilization of Black toilers but also with making agreements with imperialist powers to respect and prop up the self-determination of Black-led nation-states. His take on self-determination foreshadowed that it did not mean a profound autonomy, but recognition by the empire of capital. This disturbed CLR in the 1930s.
Uncompromising with the White Left? Or in Coalition with part of the British Empire?
Some wondered why CLR James appeared to allow debates within the overwhelmingly white Trotskyist movement to preoccupy him — though many forget James was a global leader and co-founder of that movement. Further, James was the leader of his own multi-racial collectives where American revolutionary socialists, many of European descent, looked up to him as their teacher for insight on European, African, and Caribbean developments equally.
CLR did not intend Black autonomy to be the sole emphasis in his Padmore stories. He also tried to explain why the problems of Stalinism were relevant both to colonial independence and a socialist future. Padmore, formerly aligned with Moscow, became an independent Marxist as a result of Russia’s shift to the Popular Front strategy (which many people of color all over the world, not merely whites, accepted). By redefining the United States, Britain, and France as allies, and “democratic imperialists” on the eve of World War II, Stalinism revealed that for them, socialism and internationalism primarily meant defending their own nation (first Russia), and really their own regime, above promoting independent workers’ power at home or abroad.
Moscow asked Padmore to refocus anti-colonial work on Italy, Japan, and Germany, although Italy had only one colony in Africa, Ethiopia, and the others had none. Padmore refused, in defense of Black autonomy, and was purged from the Communist International. He found it an “unspeakable betrayal.” James used this example to explain a further political lesson, which he felt could be gleaned from Padmore’s life. In contrast to Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), which suggested that Jews and West Indians controlled African American politics through the Communist Party in the United States, James explained that in China, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, the top-down approach and political philosophy affiliated with Moscow was the same.
For James, though he recognized the Communist Party was permeated with racism despite genuine struggles to root it out, Russia’s affiliates in the United States, certainly by the measures of their time, were not behaving in particularly “a white chauvinist” fashion. Instead, Russia, the standard bearer of socialism for many, collaborated with the empire of capital. For James, this revealed another dilemma. The working class did not directly govern in the Soviet Union, and Popular Front-style politics in the United States didn’t seek to promote workers’ self-management either.
“Notes on the Life” contains two other George Padmore stories rarely told in public by James. In one, Padmore has tea with a Russian friend in his Kremlin apartment in Moscow in 1933, the same year as the great famine in the Ukraine. His friend stopped Padmore from cleaning the table of “small crumbs” of bread which he was about to throw away. Her family hadn’t seen white bread for months. Padmore began to “sneak” food to his friend to take to her family. He would occasionally courageously speak to ordinary Russians in the repressive environment, inquiring whether they knew of the privileged life of the Party hierarchy. This narrative, while plausible, suggests James’s own particular gloss.
Soviet Union: National Liberation Struggle or Workers Democracy?
Padmore had the privileges of the Kremlin bureaucracy and could purchase fine foods from the Torgsin, the Kremlin-subsidized shop, at the cheapest prices. Many told him they were aware and disturbed by the inequalities as represented by the Kremlin hierarchy, but feared German and Japanese imperialism more. James used this example to illustrate the fact that the Stalinists, who claimed to serve working people, lived like an aristocracy in the midst of severe poverty. Yet even in James’ rendering of this Padmore story, one can see through Padmore’s eyes, that Russians under Stalinism saw themselves in the midst of a national liberation struggle not a fight for workers’ self-management. More crucial to James was the cavalier negation of direct democracy, the erasure of the soviets (workers and popular councils) in Russia.
In another of James’s stories, Padmore, while working one day in the Kremlin, before the purges and show trials of the late 1930s, was asked by Dimitry Manuilsky, a functionary of the Communist International, if he would like to stand for election with Stalin to the Moscow Soviet. Equivalent roughly to a city municipality, the Soviet was once a popular council, a directly democratic form of freedom, which had, by this point, long been suppressed by the Bolshevik State. Padmore, as described by James, was careful to not get caught up in “political intrigue.” He “knows nothing about the Moscow Soviet, does not speak Russian, and has enough work to do.” Manuilsky insisted he should run for this position, that it was not necessary to campaign, and that somehow Padmore was sure to attain this office. Should he win, Padmore would have no tasks to perform.
Padmore Alert but Not Preoccupied with Russia’s Contradictions
Sometime later, Padmore was informed that he had been elected to be a representative of the Moscow Ballbearing Factory (where he was surely not a worker) to the Moscow Soviet with Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich. James wrote that Padmore “does not care, attends no meetings,” and continued in his work for Black workers and anti-colonial revolt. Undoubtedly, on more than one level, Padmore was uninterested.
George Bernard Shaw later led a British delegation to the Soviet Union and Manuilsky introduced Padmore as an elected member of the Moscow Soviet. Padmore was held up before this British audience as an example of the anti-racism of the Russian regime. The British delegation was astounded. For James, their pleasure reveals a thin conception of socialism. People of color or immigrants, Manuilsky boasted, could never be elected to the British parliament or American Congress. The British social democratic-minded delegation and the USSR’s Stalinist bureaucracy believed socialism meant affirmative action. This dilemma foreshadowed the global Popular Front politics of the future.
Bolshevism Could Not Be Discredited: It Was a Forerunner of Black Power
Socialism or national liberation came to be synonymous for many, not with workers’ sovereignty or defeat of capitalist nation-states or ruling elites, but with equal opportunity to enter the ranks of hierarchy. James recognized that Padmore was always careful to see that Bolshevism not be discredited in the world. For James, this recognition largely meant the need to defend the legacy of Lenin. For Padmore, the legacy of Bolshevism was the idea, even after he was purged from Moscow, that the Soviet Union was a progressive nation-state. In 1946, Padmore began to conclude that the defense of the Soviet Union was crucial to defending the viability of national liberation struggles as a whole.
In 1946, Padmore and his wife Dorothy co-authored How Russia Transformed Its Colonial Empire. They argued that whatever criticism could be made of Stalinist Russia from the point of view of the limits of “socialism in one country” or “world revolution,” Russia had still, in their minds, facilitated the self-determination of oppressed nationalities. This was, of course, false. James’s earlier volume World Revolution (1937) was not cited in this work, but the Padmores’ criticism was an allusion to his ideas which they disagreed. The Padmores recognized that the workers’ councils no longer had any meaningful sovereignty within Russia. But they blamed this on the failure of the revolutions abroad not suppression of the soviets by the state in Russia. They went on to emphasize, however, that any person in Russia, regardless of nationality or property qualifications, could be elected to office. James would have been disturbed by such an argument.
Russia: An Affirmative Action Regime Betrayed Self-Determination
If someone from Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary were elected to representative office in Stalinist Russia, or within their own national borders colonized by the Red Army, this would not have meant for James that their countries were autonomous from the Soviet Union. Further, James argued in this same period, in The Invading Socialist Society (1947), there was no dual or progressive character of government bureaucracy. We must remember that both James and Padmore were silent about what Lenin’s and Trotsky’s concession of the Ukraine to Germany meant for the self-determination of oppressed nations.
In 1953, James and Padmore had a dispute triggered by the former’s study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1952). James presented the multi-racial, multi-national motley crew of the whaling vessel as the site of global solidarity seeking unity and self-government at the point of industrial production against the tyranny of capitalist management. For James, this perspective was synonymous with the potential of the United States. Padmore was neither enthusiastic nor concerned with the potential of American workers as represented in James’s literary criticism.
The Herman Melville or Anti-Communism Controversy
However, the last chapter of the book, devoted to a recounting of James’s detention on Ellis Island as an independent radical immigrant who overstayed his visa, somewhat inexplicably touched off this dispute with Padmore. As James explains in the book, in the prison on Ellis Island, he encountered a genuinely friendly Communist Party member, who offered solidarity to all his fellow prisoners and even to James himself. The Communist likely knew that James had a Trotskyist background. However, James’s counterpart — and this is James’s emphasis — simply did not understand the perils of affiliation with Moscow. James wrote this in a book he circulated to many members of the U.S. government as part of his campaign to legally appeal his immigration status during the McCarthy era. His argument would have been the same, if he merely articulated it in public forums. For he was already under surveillance and knew it. Rachel Peterson and Donald Pease, in their own ways, recognize that James’s circle represented a grassroots anti-communism that took workers’ self-organization and self-emancipation seriously. This is something that the historiography of American communism, that presents the Moscow oriented in a free speech fight, does not.
Increasingly, the politics of solidarity in American and world politics had little to do with working for the direct self-government of toilers. Rather, the Popular Front pursued an enhanced welfare state in Europe and the United States and peace with the Russian one-party state. James, instead, wished to see both types of regimes toppled, though he tactically, like Moscow-affiliated Communists in this era, argued for his own peculiar brand of popular democratic politics in the United States.
Richard Wright to George Padmore: Unethical Critiques of CLR James
In a letter of 22 June 1953, CLR James responded to Padmore’s irritation, firmly insisting that, despite accusations, he had not changed. James emphasized that, unlike Padmore, he had never seen anything progressive in the Moscow regime and never would. On the lower frequencies, the 1950s correspondence between Richard and Ellen Wright and George and Dorothy Padmore revealed disputes the Padmores had with James over the years that are corroborated by muted aspects of “Notes on the Life.”
Padmore came to believe that James had been working for “a paper revolution,” that his political faction was irrelevant, and that James had been an abstract “ivory tower” elitist in his talk of the potential of Detroit’s industrial workers, whether black or white. James was “a dreamer” in his plans for an American Revolution. Dorothy Padmore believed James was partially seen as an “interloper,” “poseur,” and “carpet bagger” at Ghana’s independence celebrations for doing little to propagate African anti-colonial revolt during his first American years, while still feeling he was “instrumental” in bringing Ghana’s independence about, and seeing in Ghana “the permanent revolution.”
This perspective is remarkable, as James referred Kwame Nkrumah to the Padmores and actually did have an impact as Nkrumah’s mentor. On some level, the Padmores detested Facing Reality (1958), which James shared with them in draft form at Ghana’s independence celebrations. They saw no direct democracy or instinctive proletarian revolution in the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, nor in the shop stewards’ movement in Britain.
Radical Traditions: A Mask for Those Opposed to a New Society?
CLR James was recalled by many radical Black Nationalists and Marxists of the next generation (not all) as at a certain point having stale formulations about the United States, Hungary, and Classical Athens. But upon closer look the common identification with George Padmore’s and Richard Wright’s earlier perspective started from a premise that it was “radical” to believe there would be no American Revolution, no significant European revolutions, and even no popular self-directed vision of an African or Caribbean revolution. This is astonishing. Is the point of maintaining “radical traditions” to sustain pragmatic and sociological interpretations of the world where nobody has a philosophy of becoming that seeks to bring the new society closer?
The Padmores sensed that James had wasted much of his political career theorizing about social revolutions in the United States and Europe. They could not understand why he was writing a book on American civilization and on the prospects for social revolution there. They also felt James spent too much time theorizing about the exact nature of the Soviet Union.
Who Needs an American, European, African, or Caribbean Revolution?
Why had CLR not written more books like The Black Jacobins (1938) in the service of colonized nations? James was aware of this criticism and found it absurd. By 1959, James had written more on anti-colonial revolt (separate from his writings on revolution in other sectors of the world) than the entire London Pan-African circle. In discipline and productivity, he regarded only George Padmore as his peer. Yet the Padmores, in their correspondence with Richard Wright, found James’ references to “world revolution” and “permanent revolution” as ridiculous. They believed they were working more concretely for “Black revolution.”
George Padmore confided in Richard Wright that CLR’s mentoring of Kwame Nkrumah in the United States was more influential than most realize, and from his point of view, very disruptive. The young Nkrumah, it appeared to Padmore, was too internationalist and not nationalist enough. Padmore attributed Nkrumah’s lack of primary preoccupation with the future of Ghana’s state to the influence of James’s “Trotskyism.”
CLR James and Kwame Nkrumah’s Radical Internationalism
Close scholars of James understand he did not view the main currents of Leon Trotsky’s followers as internationalist enough. They wanted to see nation-states as the embodiment of socialism, even where the working class did not govern. Frankly, the Trotskyists and Padmore’s Pan-African vision saw the socialist state and political economy in very similar terms.
James and Padmore, who had previously exchanged marked-up political literature across the Atlantic, were growing apart, even as they celebrated independence in Nkrumah’s Ghana. While James viewed the Hungarian Revolution as the culmination of the instinctive struggle against state power, Padmore was increasingly captivated by the wisdom of Mao Zedong. Mao viewed the Hungarian revolt as a contradiction that had to be resolved on behalf of the supremacy of the one-party state.
Interestingly, Padmore’s criticism of James did not reveal an excessive idealism on James’s part. It was more stratospheric during World War II for Moscow-oriented Communists to view Britain, where the sun never set on their empire, and the USA, distinguished by Jim Crow and Japanese internment, as “democratic,” and the Soviet Union as a workers’ republic (with no soviets) that had abolished property relations and liberated Eastern Europe.
Revolutionary socialists, one would think, should be genuinely concerned with the destiny of working people all over the world, not merely as an empty cultural banner. James did not believe it was internationalist to subordinate the destiny of one nation, or one working class, to another; this was a stance he never took, regardless of how this worker behaved or whether that government executed a deformed policy in one global sector or another. Yet Padmore, partially as a result of an increasing disbelief that white working people in Europe or the United States would be part of making a social revolution, anticipated a type of Third World Marxist perspective that equated toilers of color with progressive nation-states and ruling elites.
Concerns with white supremacy and empire increasingly collapsed the distinction between toilers and rulers above society in both imperial and colonized nations. Padmore, in this way, anticipated certain perspectives of Walter Rodney and Stokely Carmichael. Crucial for understanding Padmore’s postcolonial vision is recognition, regardless of the blind spots of white workers in imperial centers, of its lack of content for Black labor’s self-emancipation.
At their best, James’s politics appear to have continuity. Was he not engaging the frustration and anger of the masses, and the new leaders they installed, so as to clarify the purpose of national liberation and socialism as he attempted to facilitate the popular will toward self-government? At the same time, James had to position himself strategically in order to minimize the chances of his being perceived as an out-of-touch “old man” from another generation, even as Black Power activists and Third World regimes craved his mentoring.
Workers Self-Emancipation: “Obsolete” or “White Idea” Until Discovered by Black Power activists among African Americans and the Caribbean?
CLR, the elder, was not always able to rigorously explain, save for the most attentive, where he came from politically. James began to recognize the fact that, for youth who wanted him to tell stories about the Black radical tradition, chronicles which included George Padmore, the distinctions of ideological and party affiliation among the Red and Black were irrelevant — it was all “communism” because the white racists and capitalists said so, and because conservatives appeared to be threatened by such ideas. The next generation did not understand that many of the Old Left had also come to this conclusion, to the qualitative detriment of how one viewed white workers, imperial nations, and national liberation in colonized nations.
This conflict between workers’ self-management (increasingly seen as a “white” idea) in metropolitan centers and national liberation struggles tore apart the last manifestation of the Facing Reality group, James’s last small revolutionary organization in 1970 — this was expressed through internal uncertainty about where Mao Zedong and Stokely Carmichael were going. Ironically, at this moment the direct democratic tendency of the Caribbean New Left (in Trinidad, Antigua, Guyana, Grenada, and Jamaica — many who met each other in Canada) and certain dissident currents in Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers began to see the merits of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for Black post-civil rights and post-colonial revolt. These are evidence of other hidden disputes in the radical tradition stimulated by CLR James.
[A revised section of a longer and older scholarly essay. For archival evidence and citations see Matthew Quest. “The Not So Bring Protegees and the Comrades that Never Quarreled: CLR James’s Disputes on Labor’s Self-Emancipation on the Political Economy of Colonial Freedom.” Insurgent Notes. October 4, 2013.]
Matthew Quest is an editor of Clash! a collective of writers who advocate for Caribbean unity from below. He has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities in the United States. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.
Feature Photograph: CLR James at work (wiki commons)
