C L R James the Case of West Indies and Self-Goverment

8/6/2019 C L R James the Case of West Indies and Self-Goverment

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Georgia Political Science Association Conference Proceedings 2006

C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist:

Reconsidering The Case for West-IndianSelf-Government

F.S.J. Ledgister

Clark Atlanta University

The usual description of C.L.R. Jamess political theory locates him at the

intersection of Marxism and pan-Africanism, generally more towards the

former than the latter. The bulk of Jamess work bears this out. Nonetheless,

Jamess earliest political monograph aligns him more with Creole

nationalists such as J.J. Thomas, Eric Williams, or Norman Manley, than

with Walter Rodney or the New World Group. In this study , I analyze that

work and delineate the ways that the ideas he expressed at that timeconnect to a West Indian Creole nationalism that stressed the need for an

end to colonial trusteeship and that saw West Indians as peoples (or a

people) shaped by the colonial experience and ready and able to govern

themselves. Jamess earliest work, then, points towards such nationalist

intellectual activists as Norman Manley of Jamaica or Eric Williams of

Trinidad who articulated a clearly defined Caribbean version of European

liberal nationalism.

The usual description of C.L.R. Jamess political theory locates him atthe intersection of Marxism and pan-Africanism, generally more towards the

former than the latter. The bulk of Jamess work bears this out. For example,

in The Black Jacobins he defines the rebels of Saint Domingue as proletarian

without forgetting their blackness. James unambiguously defined himself as

in the tradition of Marx and Lenin (Bogues 1997, 1).

Nonetheless, Jamess earliest political monograph aligns him more with

Creole nationalists such as J.J. Thomas, Eric Williams, or Norman Manley

than with Walter Rodney or the New World Group. In this study, I analyze

that work and delineate the ways that the ideas he expressed at that time

connect to a West Indian Creole nationalism that stressed the need for an end

to colonial trusteeship and that saw West Indians as peoples (or a people)

shaped by the colonial experience and ready and able to govern themselves.

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government, originally part of theLifeof Captain Cipriani, published in 1933 not long after James moved to England,

provides at first glance no indication of Jamess later radicalism. It critiques

British rule very much in the tradition of Thomass Froudacity, with a Millian,


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2C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist, F.S.J. Ledgister


not a Marxist, assertion that the West Indian peopleprojecting from Jamess

own experience and knowledge of Trinidad, but with references to other

colonieshad been sufficiently prepared by British rule to take control of

their own destinies (Richards 1995, 318).

James argues for West Indian autonomy, as we shall see, in terms little

different from those of the Creole nationalists who were to dominate the

politics of the region from the 1940s until the 1970s; but he is not normally

considered among their number. His thoughts on the subject of political

autonomy nevertheless make him a forerunner of the Creole nationalism that

became normative at the end of the colonial period; they contain both seeds

of a more radical political future and signs of Jamess own limitations in seeing

the colonial Caribbean as a Creole region. The Case for West-Indian Self-Governmentis, not altogether surprisingly, a work often mentioned but rarely

cited, largely, one suspects, because it does not fit well into the categories in

which James is normally placed.

The Setting

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government emerged from Jamess

support for Trinidads first serious political movement, the Trinidad

Workingmens Association (TWA), initially established in 1897 and revived

after World War I under the leadership of a white planter, Alfred Cipriani,

who as a captain in the West India Regiment during the war had protested

the racism that caused the regiment to mutiny shortly after the war (Ledgister

1998, 98; Robinson 1995, 245).

Cipriani became a member of the Legislative Council, the colonial

legislature, when seven elective seats were added in 1925 (Ledgister 1998,

98).1 Hitherto, the Council had been purely an appointive body. The 1925

reform effectively enfranchised only six percent of the population, and only

five of the seven constituencies were contested. Although Cipriani was

nominally the leader of a bloc of four members, the other TWA members of

the Legislative Council only sporadically supported him, leaving him to carry

out the task of opposition to the colonial regime alone (Ledgister 1998, 99).

Although not very effective, Cipriani was the first voice to speak for the

Trinidadian worker, both black and East Indian, in the legislature. That washis political role when James departed Trinidad for England in 1932.

James had not been deeply involved in the labour movement or in the

conventional politics of the island after 1925. Rather, he entered public life as


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a writer. He contributed fiction and criticism to the literary journal, The Beacon,

established by Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes (Bogues 1997, 19). Before

leaving for London in 1932, he completed the novelMinty Alley, which contains

a fresh and lively description of working class life in the barrack-yards of the

Port of Spain of Jamess youth, which he was decades later to describe as

about the fundamental antagonism . . . between the educated black and the

mass of plebeians (Bogues 1997, 24-25).

James, as a Trinidadian intellectual of the 1920s, was in a line dating to

the mid-nineteenth century of black Trinidadians who, with the tools of Western

culture, asserted an identity that colonial rule would have denied them. James

was aware of this, as Selwyn Cudjoe (1991, 43-46) notes, given his praise of

Maxwell Philip (1829-1888), the first black Solicitor-General and the firstblack writer of creative prose in Trinidads history.

James was also influenced by J.J. Thomas, the schoolteacher whose

rebuttal to J.A. Froudes The English in the West Indies was the first assertion

that West Indian people had a legitimate claim to govern themselves, and by

A.R.F. Webber, a novelist and pioneer socialist, who Cudjoe sees as

anticipating James in some respects (Cudjoe 1991, 46-50).

Like Phillips, Thomas, and Webber before him, James was largely self-

educated and determined to promote the development of his own people. His

early intellectual development was very much oriented towards Western

civilization and its cultural products, for all that he instinctively rebelled against

them (Grimshaw 1992, 3). Cudjoe makes the point that Jamess real political

awakening only began when, in discussions with the cricketer Learie

Constantine in England shortly after arriving there in 1932, he developed the

idea of working for self-government of the West Indies.2 Even so, James had

considered the issue and begun to take a position on it earlier (Nielsen 1997,

xiv).

Nonetheless, his primary intellectual activity in the Trinidad of the 1920s

was self-education. Asked by Paul Buhle in 1987 what he did between the

ages of twenty and thirty, James replied, Reading books, thats what I was

doing. Literature and history. And I not only read as the ordinary West Indian

read, but I went to the library and found all sorts of books on history and

classical studies (Buhle 1992, 58). In his regular job, as a teacher at Queens

Royal College, James pioneered the teaching of West Indian history, a politicalact of great importance, and mentored the young Eric Williams (Buhle 1992,

58).3 He also, as he told Buhle, had a relationship with Cipriani, though limited

by the fact that as a teacher at a government school he was a public employee.


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He wrote on sports for Ciprianis paper, The Labour Leader, and spoke

occasionally on behalf of the TWA; nevertheless, speaking of himself in the

third person, he said to Buhle, James was part of the movement, he didnt

put himself forward, but he was part. Cipriani would come to me and ask me

what about this and so on. I would speak on behalf of the movement (Buhle

1992, 60).

Nor was Jamess youthful political activity limited to support of the TWA

and Cipriani. He also engaged in debate over the question of black intelligence

in The Beacon, rebutting the arguments of Dr. Sidney Harland, a lecturer at

the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, adjacent to Jamess home town

of Tunapuna about the inherent abilities of black people (Nielsen 1997, 8-12).

The thirty-one year-old who arrived in England in 1932 with the manuscriptsofThe Life of Captain Cipriani andMinty Alley in his trunk was about to

start a new life, a life that would carry him from Britain to the United States

and back to Britain and the West Indies.4 It is interesting, and perhaps

instructive, that he began his long sojourn outside the West Indies by looking

back to his homeland and speaking of its needs. As Grimshaw (1992, 5)

notes, the essay is rooted in his early life.

A People Like Ours Should Be Free

In The Case for West-Indian Self-Governmenta 32-page pamphlet,

of which 27 pages are devoted to the main textJames lays out his first

sustained political argument. Before doing that, however, he dedicates the

work to Arthur Cipriani, T.A. Marryshow, J. Elmore Edwards, and C.D. Rawle,

all activists in Trinidad, Grenada, and Dominica, whom he salutes as leaders

of the democratic movement of the West Indies (James 1933, 4).5 The

pamphlet was one of a series on political issues published by Leonard and

Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press that included pieces by C.E.M. Joad,

J.M. Keynes, and Harold Laski; James began his career as a political theorist

in some very distinguished company.

His first move is to provide a context for the pamphlet: a Colonial Office

Commissions investigating the possibility of federating some or all of Britains

Eastern Caribbean colonies. James asserts that while the Commission was

taking evidence on the constitutional question such a question required anunderstanding of the social context of government.6 That context, James,

contends is obvious. Over eighty percent of the population of the islands

being investigated consists of Negroes or persons of Negroid origin


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(James 1933, 5) who, albeit of African origin, had become a distinct people:

Cut off from all contact with Africa for a century and a quarter,

they present to-day the extraordinary spectacle of a people who,

in language and social customs, religion, education and outlook,

are essentially Western and, indeed, far more advanced in Western

culture than many a European community. (5-6)

The nature of the argument that James is to make in the remainder of the

pamphlet is thus clearly laid out: West Indians, as a westernized people, are in

a position to govern themselves and should be allowed the opportunity.

James (1933) immediately contrasts this picture of the westernized WestIndian with the view of the advocates of Colonial Office trusteeship who

dismiss the black West Indian as a savage who beneath the veneer of

civilisation (6) is still a vicious creature who will long need white tutelage

before being allowed an approach to self-government. James marshals

quotations from Sydney, Lord Olivier, a former colonial administrator and

Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Sir Charles Bruce, a former colonial

governor, that speak highly of the qualities of black West Indians, and black

people in general, to rebut the argument for black inferiority (1933, 6-7).

Men of colour are ready and able to take high office in the West Indies.

The West Indian Negro is ungracious enough to be far from perfect,

sharing the vices of all those who live in the tropics not excluding people of

European blood, but has a magnificent vitality that overcomes the

enervating influences of the climate (James 1933, 7). They lack the thrift,

the care, and the almost equine docility of Europeans whose harsher climate

and industrial economy have imposed a discipline on them. But they also, as

a young people, lack the cramping traditions which inhibit the European (James

1933, 7).

James then looks at the divisions of caste within the Negroid population,

noting that it is composed of a majority of actually black people and a

minority of fifteen to twenty percent of people of mixed black and white

ancestry (James 1933, 8). This minority had from the days of slavery on

asserted a claim of superiority to the ordinary black. Between the brown

and black people a distrust exists which has been skillfully played on by thewhites and which poisons the life of a community made up of a variety of

racial mixtures and in which relations within families can be made tense by

differences in shade between close kindred (James 1933, 8).


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Possession of wealth, however, matters: It is not too much to say that in

a West Indian colony the surest sign of a mans having arrived is the fact that

he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself (James

1933, 9). Status concerns on the part of the middle class make it hard for

them to unite, and this is the gravest drawback of the coloured population

(James 1933, 9) as it should, naturally, take leadership but is instead divided

by distinctions of color.

The most important of other groups, writes James, are the white creoles.

However, he footnotes this assertion with a statement that bears quoting in

full:

Many of the West Indian Islands are cosmopolitan, and EastIndians form about twelve per cent of the total population, though

concentrated in Trinidad. But there is no need to give them

special treatment, for economically and educationally they

are superior to the corresponding class in India; and get on

admirably with the Negroes. (James 1933, 9fn, emphasis mine)

We will return to this point later, as it is crucial for any analysis of Jamess

understanding of his own society in the early 1930s.

Whites, James asserts, face two disadvantages: they cannot stand the

climate for more than three generations, and being white automatically makes

them people of consequence. Yet this is power without more than personal

responsibility since the white people who govern are not West Indian but

English (James 1933, 9-10).

James then proceeds to give us a portrait of the English colonial

administrator who arrives in the West Indies with experience in dealing with

primitive peoples in Africa and who in the West Indies is confronted by a

thoroughly civilized community whose members are his intellectual equals.

In response, the Englishman has to fall back on claims of inherent Anglo-

Saxon ability, and on a claim that the crown colony system needs to be

maintained (James 1933, 10-11).

In reaction to the claims of West Indians, the colonial bureaucrat takes

up a hyperpatriotic celebration of Englishness and reinforces his inherent

snobbishness with an unearned aristocracy which is ever vigilant for insults(James 1933, 11). English liberalismthe celebration of a history that includes

the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rightsdisappears in the colonies, as the

colonial administrator defines anyone who exhibits a local patriotism as


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a dangerous person, a wild revolutionary, a man with no respect for law and

order, a self-seeker actuated by the lowest motives, a reptile to be crushed at

the first opportunity. What at home is the greatest virtue becomes in the

colonies the greatest crime (James 1933, 12).

Turning from the psychology of the colonizer to the administration of the

colonies, James gives us a description of the Governor-in-Executive-Council

(James 1933, 13).7 While the governor was advised by an executive council

which included senior government officials and prominent locals, the latter

selected by himself, he did not need to follow that advice (James 1933, 13).

James lays out as an example of the arbitrary behavior of colonial

administrations the relationship among the colonial government; the Trinidad

Electric Company, which both supplied electricity to the island and operatedPort of Spains municipal trams; and the Port of Spain city council, in which

the government acted to promote the profits of the company and its officials

and to defeat the legitimate aspirations of the citizens of Port-of-Spain

(James 1933, 17).

While the Executive Council met in secret, the Legislative Council

attracted public interest. The Council was divided into three parts: the first

consisted of twelve government officials chosen by the governor; the second

consisted of thirteen unofficial members, six appointed by the governor and

seven elected by the people; and the third was the governor himself as

presiding officer (James 1933, 18-19).

James (1933) notes that some official members serve in the Council for

years without saying a word, and that

[t]here is a further unreality, because whenever the Governor

wishes he can instruct the officials all to vote in the same way.

And the Council becomes farcical when two members of a

committee appointed by the Governor receive instructions to vote

against their own recommendations. (18-19)

The officials, who are a solid block of Englishmen with a few white creoles,

generally from some other colony work in solidarity with wealthy white

creoles against the political advancement of the coloured people (James

1933, 18-19). The government and the Chamber of Commerce constitute asingle political bloc. It had become government policy, however, to appoint a

few Negroes to unofficial positions on the Legislative Council. These persons

were Negroes of fair and not of dark skin notes James, who goes on to say


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that such people are frequently more hostile to the masses of the people

than the Europeans themselves(James 1933, 19).8 This hostility James

attributes to a lack of self-respect. When light-skinned Negroes recognize

that they will receive respect only when they respect themselves, then the

racial power of whites will be ended (James 1933, 23).

The Europeans who exercise power are intellectually shallow and

provincial, but they have power and can thus maintain a degree of exclusivity.

This, for the fair-skinned Negro who does not seek much is a paradise

(James 1933, 20). At the same time, any white talent will be clustered around

the governor. Non-whites with powers above the average will seek to

penetrate such groups even though they are dominated by Englishmen who

are constitutionally incapable of admitting into their society on equal termspersons of colour (James 1933, 21).

The man of colour could only hope for a position at the fringe of polite

society. Those who were unwilling to accept place-at-any-price remained

in splendid isolation distrusting each other and united only in jealousy at each

others ability to stand well with the government (James 1933, 21-22). That

government, while pointing to the number of colored men appointed to the

Council as a sign of its non-racialism, rarely appoints black men (James

1933, 22).

The result is that while the Colonial Office is congratulating itself on

ensuring that the coloured people are represented in government, the colonial

administration and the local white population know that these representatives

are in fact more royalist than the King and far from being in solidarity with

the black majority are at one with [the English] in their common antipathy to

the black (James 1933, 22).

The third part of the Legislative Council is the governor himself. James

(1933) wittily states that

The Governor of a Crown Colony is three things. He is the

representative of His Majesty the King, and as such must have

all the homage and respect customary to that position . . . In

Trinidad the Governor is Governor General and Prime Minister

in one. But that makes only two. When the Governor sits in the

Legislative Council he is Chairman of that body. The unfortunateresult is that when a member of the Council rises to speak he is

addressing at one and the same time an incomprehensible

personage, three in one and one in three. (23-24)


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Jamess allusion to the Athanasian Creed serves to introduce the point that in

this way the governors avoid taking responsibility for their actions while

members of the Legislative Council are always eager to jump to the defense

of the Crowns representative and the president of the Council while being

quite neglectful of the responsibility of the head of the administration (24).

The governors power gives him disproportionate influence on the legislative

process and his presence in the Council inhibits freedom of speech (James

1933, 25-26).

The result is that the government faces no effective criticism or check,

and since it is administered by bureaucrats rather than politicians with vision

it becomes slack and regardless. The members of the Legislative Council,

far from being vigilant on behalf of the public, are no more than sycophants,and the function of government appears to be no more than a favor granted

to the people rather than a responsibility for the common good and general

welfare. James illustrates this by considering a debate on racial discrimination

at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in which biracial members of

the council had insisted that there was no discrimination against Trinidadians

of color attending the College even though one of them knew that there was.

Attempts by Cipriani, a white Creole, to deal with the matter were stymied by

the Colonial Office being able to point to these statements in response to

Ciprianis complaints (James 1933, 27-29).

For all that English officials would want to underplay or deny racial

discrimination, James reserves his greatest contempt for the so-called

representatives of the people who are caught between fear that speaking up

about racial discrimination would deny them the opportunity for advancement

and fear that they would have to confront publicly the perfectly obvious but

nevertheless dreadful fact that they are not white men (James 1933, 29).

James (1993, 30) notes that in smaller, more racially homogeneous,

colonies such as Grenada and Dominica the government has managed to

unite nominated and elected members in opposition to itself. In this way, the

British are preparing unwittingly for the destruction of their empire.

For James (1933, 30), the only way forward is a democratic constitution,

perhaps modelled on Malta or on Ceylon. High income qualifications to hold

office or to vote would have to be abolished and the legislature should be

made up exclusively of elected representatives (James 1933, 31).9

Jamesdoes not see democratization as a panacea. He sees it as necessary in order

that the concerns and needs of the people are regularly and consistently taken

into account by the government:


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No one expects that these Islands will, on assuming responsibility

for themselves, immediately shed racial prejudice and economic

depression. No one expects that by a change of constitutions the

constitution of politicians will be changed. But though they will,

when the occasions arise, disappoint the people, and deceive the

people and even, in so-called rises, betray the people, yet there is

one thing they will never be able to doand that is, neglect the

people. As long as society is constituted as it is at present that is

the best that modern wage-slaves can ever hope to achieve.

(James 1933, 31)

Crown colony government has run its course. It is based on the fraudulentassumption of superior ability by the English and is wicked because it permits

a small number of privileged Englishmen to control hundreds of thousands of

defenceless people. In using Englands overflow to prevent the people

from achieving their natural aspirations to personal advancement and self-

government it is, in fact, actually criminal (James 1933, 31). The colonial

administrators are itinerant demi-gods ever eager to hear of opportunities

for advancement elsewhere in the empire while men often better than they

stand outside rejected and despised (James 1933, 32).

Britain can control the West Indies as long as it desires. It has the naval

and air power to do so. Nevertheless, James asserts, a people like ours

should be free to make its own failures and successes (James 1933, 32).

Without that freedom, West Indians remain without credit abroad and without

self-respect at home, a bastard, feckless conglomeration of individuals, inspired

by no common purpose, moving to no common end (James 1933, 32). Britain

has promised its colonial subjects self-government when fit for it. It would

lose little by keeping its word.

Evaluating the Argument

In a very small compass, James has presented a liberal nationalist argument

for self-government. By that, James does not necessarily mean independence.

At the time he wrote, no colony run by non-white subjects had achieved

independence. Only in 1931 had the full autonomy of Australia, Canada,Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa been recognized by the Statute

of Westminster, and all of these, except South Africa, were territories with

white settler majorities. South Africas white settler minority was large enough


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to dominate the non-white majority and deny it political power.

The British West Indies was not a collection of colonies of exploitation,

as were most colonies in Africa and Asia, nor were they colonies of settlement

in the sense of having a large segment of the population deriving from the

mother country. It was a region of colonies somewhere in between containing

a population that was Westernized rather than Western, and imported for the

purposes of exploitation rather than exploited in their aboriginal homeland.

The Caribbean Sea is a lot further distant from Europe than the west coast of

Africa, but it was under European ruleas opposed to a marginal presence

for much longer.

It is for this reason that James begins his essay by asserting that the

population of the British West Indies is both black and Western, and why hemakes a point of the historic distance between the people of the West Indies

and their African roots. West Indians are blacks, but they are not Africans as

James states both explicitly and implicitly.10 Rather, as Bogues (1997, 23)

notes, they are a distinct people. James is asserting that the people of the

Caribbean, certainly of the British West Indies, constitute a nation formed by

a shared history. That history, it must be noted, is one that involves British

colonial rule and the imposition of British political ideas as normative. The

lens through which James sees the British West Indies has been shaped by

the thought of people like J.S. Mill, for whom black West Indians, as the

descendants of slaves, had to be taught freedom; freedom, that is to say, in a

British mode. James, thus, declares that West Indians no longer need British

tutelage and are ready to govern themselves.

This declaration requires that he confront the question of the East Indian

segment of population, which was clearly not Afro-Western. He thus has to

state that many islands are cosmopolitan because they have East Indian

residents. But he then dismisses them in two curt phrases: they are better off

than in India, and they get on admirably with the Negroes. These apodeictic

claims sweep a significant issuethat of ethnic differenceunder the carpet.

The politics of Trinidad and Tobago and of Guyana since World War II has

been dominated by the ethnic division between Creoles and East Indians in a

way that indicates that neither group gets on admirably with the other. Or, in

other words, that the latter does not find the culture of the former normative.

Since Jamess argument rests on asserting that West Indians havedeveloped enough to be able to govern themselves according to Western

norms, he has to assume that the East Indian section of the populace is aligned

with those norms, but he can present no evidence for this. Even worse, he


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ignores the middleman minoritiesthe Chinese, Portuguese, and Levantine

Arabswho were and are highly visible even though their numbers are small.

The story of the West Indies, from Jamess perspective, is entirely black and

white.

Race relations, relations between white, black, and biracial West Indians,

are central to Jamess account of the condition of the West Indian colonies

and to his argument for self-government. The brown-skinned middle class

which ought to provide leadership to the black mass of the population is so

divided by squabbles over fine distinctions of color that it cannot take up that

role. The whites, meantime, are enervated by the climate and by the automatic

deference accorded to their race. Clearly, it is the job of black West Indians

to govern themselves. Glen Richards (1995, 318) sees this, correctly, as themeans by which James believed that they would be able to overcome the

burden of racism.

It is racism that makes the English assume that West Indians cannot

govern themselves without the supervision of their betters. Racism makes

the English blind to the difference between Westernized Caribbean people

and primitive Africans (James 1933, 10).The latter, in his eyes, require the

trusteeship which the former no longer need. Where a black nationalist like

Marcus Garvey would have emphasized racial solidarity and rejected divisions

between blacks in Africa and in the Diaspora, James embraces that distinction.

That same racism is what leads to the bickering over differences in color

and the arbitrary inclusion or exclusion of talented people. Yet, racial prejudice

in the West Indies is not accompanied by racial antagonism, and, free of

crown colony rule, West Indians will be able to live in peace under the rule of

their elected representatives. James has come to a conclusion which would

have surprised Edward Wilmot Blyden or Marcus Garvey, both of them

Caribbean people themselves. Indeed, while Garvey would probably have

nodded at Jamess description between brown and black West Indians as

support for his contention that the former were inimical to the latter, James

has no such intention. Rather, he wants us to see that continued British

domination through the crown colony system divorces status from ability,

makes lightness of color the sign of the former, and ignores possession of the

latter by those who lack the fortune to have begun life with some European

ancestry.We have to see James as taking a very different stance from some earlier

black political activists. Though figures like Blyden and Garvey had their

limitations, they were critics of the trusteeship doctrine which James is invoking.


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Jamess critique of British rule comes after both black nationalists, such as

Blyden and Garvey, and pan-Africanists, such as W.E.B. DuBois had

presented critiques of both imperialism and racial domination of which the

young James could not have been unaware. Yet his argument, in 1933, stays

firmly within the boundaries of British liberalism. Interestingly, Jamess turn

towards Marxism parallels that of DuBois, and his own introduction of Marxist

analysis to Caribbean history occurs shortly after DuBoiss own unorthodox

application of Marxist thought to the understanding of the history of black

Americans (Bogues 2003, 69-94).

Democracy would make wealth and ability, rather than race, the markers

of status and would remove the barriers confronted by talented West Indians

of wholly or partly African descent. It would not remove racial prejudice, butin the absence of racial antagonism that does not for him seem an insuperable

difficulty. The problem is, of course, that race antagonism was hardly absent

in the colonial Caribbean. The reactive racial philosophies of Blyden and

Garvey could not have come into existence had they not believed in a racial

hostility directed at persons like them from the white authorities and believed

that it was necessary to reciprocate. Jamess own depiction of the racial

prejudice of brown to black indicates more than mere prejudice; James

recognizes that mixed-race West Indians were possessed of a racial fear.

Equally, James the Marxist a few years later would not have assumed

that bourgeois democracy was the best alternative available, even if it was

corruptible. Yet that is what James the liberal does. Little wonder that

Trinidadian political scientist John LaGuerre could dismiss the early James as

a nationalist without a political theory (quoted in Bogues 1997, 25). While

Bogues rejects this as too superficial an approach, he also disagrees with

LaGuerres saying that James when he arrived in England was at best a

liberal (Bogues 1997, 25).

But this is what James was at the time. Although Bogues turns to Jamess

fiction for evidence of a deeper understanding of the situation of black working-

class Trinidadians of the 1920s and contends that James did not yet understand

the implications of his thinking for that class, the reality is that James, in

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government is arguing entirely within the

framework of the liberal imperialist idea of trusteeship. His argument is that

this trusteeship has achieved its end and is no longer necessary. A few yearslater, in The Black Jacobins, he was to articulate a very different kind of

argument, but in 1932 and 1933 he was not yet either a Marxist or a pan-

Africanist. For James in 1933, West Indians constituted a nation whose


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aspirations were being frustrated by the continuation of crown colony

government. He does not see them as part of an international proletariat

created by and antagonistic to capitalism. Nor does he seem them as part of

a larger African community.

Jamess argument with respect to the crown colony system echoes the

Canadian political scientist Hume Wrong (1923) writing a decade earlier:

Crown Colony government is a political blind alley. It is, and must

be, paternal, and it gives no chance for education in political

responsibility. To regard it as a permanent institution is to give up

all hope for the political development of the inhabitants of the

colonies in which it prevails. All these colonies are far from beingready to control their own affairs, but some of them may be

sufficiently advanced to make a start on the long road which

may ultimately lead to responsible government. (144)

While James would obviously have disagreed that the West Indies was not

yet ready to govern itself, he would have considered Wrongs assertion that

the crown colony system was a blind alley to be correct. James would have

agreed with Wrongs statement that the negro in the West Indies is a very

different person from his racial kin in Africa (1923, 171). Indeed, this is the

very claim that James makes in asserting that the West Indian is ready for

self-government. Wrong, like James, places the link with Africa securely in

the past and sees the West Indian black as Westernized (1923, 171). And, like

James, Wrong sees the absence of open racial hostility as a hopeful sign

for the political development of the West Indies (1923, 179).

While there are many points of disagreement between James and Wrong,

not the least of which is Wrongs assessment that the West Indies was still

far from ready for self-government, what should concern us here is the similarity

of their approach. Both see the West Indies as a backward part of the West

and crown colony government as contributing to that backwardness. They

occupy different points on the spectrum of liberalism, James being far more

radical than Wrong, but they share the basic assumptions of Western liberalism.

It is instructive in this regard to consider that at the same time that James

was articulating a liberal argument for West Indian independence, his childhoodfriend Malcolm Nurse, using the nom de guerre of George Padmore, was

already a major voice in the anti-imperialist counsels of the Third

International.11 Padmore, who was later to reject Marxism-Leninism for pan-


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Africanism, had left Trinidad several years before James and thus had an

earlier exposure to more radical ideas than were current in the West Indian

colonies at the time.

Creole Nationalism

While James was writing The Case for West-Indian Self-Government

time was not standing still in the West Indies. The Great Depression was

biting the poorest West Indians, and they were not accepting it stoically. Starting

in the early 1930s, workers in the colonial Caribbean began to protest their

continuing immiseration, and their demands for justice, work, and bread were

gradually joined by middle-class West Indians who awakened to their racialand/or cultural solidarity with the poor.12 Labor uprisings in 1937 in Trinidad

and in 1938 in Jamaica were especially important in this regard because they

reinforced and expanded existing political movements, as was the case in

Trinidad, or generated new movements with middle-class leadershipas was

the case in Jamaica.

That leadership took the language of British imperial liberalism and the

imperialist attitude to the colonial Caribbean and gave it a new twist:

There are those who love our thatched huts and the

picturesqueness of Back-O-Wall, and those who look at smiles

on peoples faces and believe that all is well because people will

smile, nature is bountiful and one season follows another. I have

lived in that feeling myself, I have felt those sentiments. If you

live in a place long enough you become complacent. What you

see every day you regard after a time as belonging to the order

of things. (Manley [1938] 1971a, 15)

Thus spoke Norman Manley in September 1938, announcing that self-

government had become a central political demand for middle-class West

Indians such as himself. In another text that year, Manley ([1938] 1971b)

was to echo James even more directly:

The dead hand of imperialism is made manifest in the dearth ofour culture, in the paucity and poverty of our arts, in the drying

up of the sources of charity, in the decay of faith and the

licentiousness of morals, in the dishonesty of our escapism, in the


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malice of our leaders, in the cowardice of government, in the

narrow mean circumscription of all our horizons. One touch of

creative intensity and a veritable desert would quicken into

life with rank weeds jostling the flower shoots striving for

living room. There would be life and trouble, blossom and fruit,

but the dead hand, quietly with blind efficiency, closes on it all.

(385, emphasis in the original)

This is a vision of political freedom from which racial and class differences

are absent. It rests on the assumption that expanded political liberty will unleash

the creative potential that the crown colony system has suppressed. Manley,

speaking as the leader of a political party dedicated to the achievement ofself-government and eventual independence for the West Indies, shares with

James the desire to see his people have the freedom to achieve their own

successes and experience their own failures.

That people is not cast in terms of black and white, but as a West Indian

people who have emerged from the particular historical experience of the

Caribbean, that is to say as a creolized people. Creolization involves the

inescapable mixing of peoples and cultures as an undeniable facet of the

modern world (King 2001, 143).

Hence Jamess odd treatment of the East Indian: He defines them as

creolized, and therefore part of a political community which also contains

brown people, black people, and white people. West Indians are a creolized

people, and the nation that James and Manley envision is a Creole nation.

White, black, brown, East Indian, all are brought together in a single Creole

pepperpot in which the flavors of Africa, Asia, and Europe achieve a new,

fierce harmony. This is, a generation later, to be echoed by Jamess pupil

Eric Williams (see Williams 1962, vii). Williams, however, was to go a step

further proclaiming the end of imperial rule, not simply calling for it: You are

nobodys boss, and nobody is your boss (Williams [1961] 1982b, 266). It was

the end of what Williams called Massa day, the rule of a backward,

obscurantist class, but not every white was a massa, and not all Massas

were white (Williams [1961] 1982a, 238-46).

Creole nationalism, so defined, is a Caribbean form of European liberal

nationalism. Trusteeship is seen as having played its role as midwife of thenew nation, which henceforth must achieve its successes and failures on its

own. Thus far, Burke and Mill. Equally, continued crown colony rule, with its

sidelining of ability and creativity, was a noisome nuisance to be condemned


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by all. Thus far, Machiavelli.

Conclusion

If we can see James as participating in a tradition that has its roots in

sixteenth century European republicanism and nineteenth century European

liberalism, then The Case for West-Indian Self-Government represents a

direction that he was not to take in his own intellectual and political

development. It is not a precursor to a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist analysis

of the impact of imperialism, nor is it part of a pan-African resistance to that

imperialism. These were to be the major themes of Jamess career as a

political activist and thinker in the United States and Britain from the mid-1930s on. They were to lead to James meeting with Leon Trotsky to discuss

the struggle of black Americans as part of the worldwide revolutionary

movement. In 1933, however, James had not yet moved in that direction.13

Nonetheless, The Case for West-Indian Self-Government is focused

on Jamess own people, their history, and their political plight. It is, therefore,

very much in tune with his later concernssocialism, anti-imperialism, anti-

racism.

How, then, should we see this pamphlet? I would venture to suggest that

we see it in two ways. One is as a precursor of the Creole nationalism that

was shortly to emerge full-blown in the colonial Caribbean. It is no large step

from James in 1933 to Manley in 1938, nor to Williams in 1961. This is James

as he might have become had he never left the West Indies and had not

become involved in the international Marxist movement. And this is the

approach that has motivated this study.

The other is as a first, untutored effort at developing a coherent political

vision of the Caribbean in the modern world, a true work of theory informed

by the normative values which James accepted at the time. It contains themes,

such as imperialism and racism, which he was to explore in great depth

throughout his career, and regarding which he was shortly to acquire and to

develop new analytic tools.

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government then can be seen as a

liminal work. It sits at the boundary between Jamess youth and his adult life,

between his early liberalism and his later Marxism, between Creole nationalismand pan-Africanism. That James was to go beyond those boundaries does

not mean that it is not a work of significance both for an understanding of

who James was and for understanding the world in which he came to his first


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maturity.

It is, finally, a work of tremendous importance for Caribbean political

thought. Like J.J. Thomas before him, James was not content to accept

subordination or the disvaluing of his abilities and the abilities of those around

him. He felt himself part of a nation, and spoke on its behalf. As a people,

West Indians were entitled to take their chances in the world, and in doing so

to develop their own self-respect, their own common identity, and their own

common purpose. That is a message that still needs to be heard.

Notes

1 Prior to that date, Trinidad and Tobago had been an example of what HumeWrong called a pure crown colony. The addition of an elective element,

albeit elected on a limited suffrage turned Trinidad into a semi-representative

crown colony. See Wrong (1923, 113 and 136).

2 James ([1963] 1993, 53) attributed his late political development in part to

the decision to join the Maple Cricket Club, with a predominantly biracial and

middle-class membership, rather than the working-class predominantly black

Shannon Cricket Club: Faced with the fundamental divisions in the island, I

had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed

my political development for years.

3 The references to Williamss relationship with James are legion, including

Williamss own in Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister

(London: Andre Deutsch, 1969).

4 James went to Britain with the encouragement of Learie Constatine who

promised to see him through if he had financial difficulties. See James (1993,

110).

5 The pamphlet was excerpted from The Life of Captain Cipriani while

James was living in Lancashire in 1932. (See King 2001, 75).

6

The constitutional question was the question of whether some form ofrepresentative government should be introduced in a reformed constitution.

7 The phrase alludes to the constitutional term the King-in-Parliament, which


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refers to the Crown in its legislative role operating in conjunction with the

House of Commons and House of Lords.

8 In a later work, James (1993, 106-07) describes the official treatment of the

great cricketer Learie Constantine who was unable to get any regular

employment other than acting positions in government because of his race.

9 Malta at the time had a bicameral legislature. Universal suffrage was

introduced in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1931.

10 James makes the point that the oil companies operating in Trinidad would

as soon appoint a Zulu chief as a local man of colour to a position ofresponsibility, the implication being that there is a real difference between the

Zulu and the Trinidadian Creole that the oil company is not recognizing.

11 James was to work with Padmore and other pan-Africanists such as

Amy Ashwood-Garvey and Jomo Kenyatta after becoming a Marxist in 1934

(Bogues 2003, 72).

12 The and/or is necessary because some of the middle class activists who

emerged in the 1930s, such as Albert Gomes in Trinidad or Richard Hart in

Jamaica, were unambiguously white.

13 Jamess move to Marxism seems to have occurred only a year after the

publication of the pamphlet (Bogues 2003, 88).

References

Bogues, Anthony. 1997. Calibans Freedom: The Early Political Thought

of C.L.R. James. London: Pluto Press.

____. 2003.Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals.

New York: Routledge.

Buhle, Paul. 1992. The Making of a Literary Life: C.L.R. James Interviewed

by Paul Buhle. In C.L.R. Jamess Caribbean, edited by Paget Henry

and Paul Buhle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 56-62.Cudjoe, Selwyn R. 1991. The Audacity of It All: C.L.R. Jamess Trinidadian

Background. In C.L.R. Jamess Caribbean, edited by Paget Henry

and Paul Buhle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 39-55.


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Grimshaw, Anna. 1992. C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision. In The

C.L.R. James Reader, edited by Anna Grimshaw. Oxford: Blackwell.

1-22.

James, C.L.R. 1933. The Case for West-Indian Self-Government. London:

Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press.

____. [1963] 1993.Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

King, Nicole. 2001. C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence.

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Ledgister, F.S.J. 1998. Class Alliances and the Liberal-Authoritarian State:

The Roots of Post-Colonial Democracy in Jamaica, Trinidad and

Tobago, and Surinam. Trenton: Africa World Press.

Manley, Norman W. [1938] 1971a.Launching of the Peoples National Party.In Norman Washington Manley and the New Jamaica: Selected

Speeches and Writings, 1938-1968, edited by Rex Nettleford. London:

Longman Caribbean. 11-22.

____. [1938] 1971b. Of freedom. InNorman Washington Manley and the

New Jamaica: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1938-1968, edited by

Rex Nettleford. London: Longman Caribbean. 384-85.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. 1997. C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction. Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi.

Richards, Glen. 1995. C.L.R. James on Black Self-Determination in the

United States and the Caribbean. In C.L.R. James: His Intellectual

Legacies, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain. Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press. 317-27.

Robinson, Cedric J. 1995. C.L.R. James and the World-System. In C.L.R.

James: His Intellectual Legacies, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William

E. Cain. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 244-59.

Williams, Eric. 1962. History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. Port

of Spain: PNM Publishing.

____. 1969.Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister. London:

Andre Deutsch.

____. [1962] 1982a. Independence Day Address. InEric E. Williams Speaks:

Essays on Colonialism and Independence, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe.

Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co. 237-64.

____. [1961] 1982b. Massa Day Done. InEric E. Williams Speaks: Essayson Colonialism and Independence, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Cambridge,

MA: Schenkman Publishing Co. 265-69.


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Wrong, Hume. 1923. Government of the West Indies. Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

C L R James the Case of West Indies and Self-Goverment

Documents

Transcript of C L R James the Case of West Indies and Self-Goverment