In 1932, the Trinidadian writer and political activist Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) moved to England as the cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and the Glasgow Herald. He also helped his friend, the cricketer Learie Constantine, write his autobiography. It was through Constantine that James connected with trade union activists and other figures of the radical British left.
In 1934, inspired by Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930) James joined a Trotskyite group on the left of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In 1936 James and his group left the ILP to form their own party, which underwent several mergers to become the first Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) in 1938. In 1939 he visited Trotsky at the house of the Mexican communist artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
After a US lecture tour, James was deported from the US in 1953 under the pretext of visa violations, but it was actually his prolific political activity which had offended officials. He returned to England, which remained his home until his death, although he travelled much in the following twenty years; during the 70s he taught in the US and lectured in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. He died in Brixton, London in 1989.
From the early 1930s James wrote extensively for leftist publications. His is perhaps best known for his anti-imperialistic study The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). James’ earlier play on the same subject Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (1934) was staged for performance in London.[1]
But it is James’ Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece, Its Meaning for Today (1956) that provides us with the clearest example of the intersection of James’ leftist politics with the ancient world. It was published by the Correspondence Publishing Committee, a radical left organisation led by James for some time. The title’s “every cook can govern” provides an utopian “correction” to Lenin’s 1917 assertion that:
“We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration.”[2]
In the essay James discusses the governmental and constitutional framework of classical Greece, praising direct democracy as an ideal form of governance. He proposes selection of a large legislative body via sortition (like the US Congress). For James, the democratic structure of ancient Greece was the pinnacle of governance. He saw Athenian democracy as:
“a miracle of democratic procedure which would be beyond the capacity of any modern body of politicians and lawyers, simply because these [moderns] believe that when every man has a vote, equality is thereby established.”[3]
James therefore looked to the classical past to provide guidance for the present. He called the sailors and foreigners living in the Piraeus as “the proletarians of the Piraeus” and described them as “the most radical of the democrats.”
James received backlash over Every Cook Can Govern. Scholars refuted some of his ideas about the position of women and slaves in classical Greek society. James was also criticised for suggesting that ancient Greece was the high-point of civilisation.[4] Many felt that such Eurocentric sympathies were antithetical to Pan Africanism.
James made similar suggestions in Facing Reality (1958), which examined the practical realities of a social revolution in the wake of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He argues that revolution could happen since there was a good combination of technology, information, and popular support: “since the Greek city-state, it is the first time in history that this is possible.”[5]
This profile was written by Maeve Neaven.
[1] See Justine McConnell ‘Staging the Haitian Revolution in London: Britain, the West Indies, and C.L.R. James’ Toussaint Louverture’, in Stead, Henry & Hall, Edith (eds.) Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform. Bloomsbury, 2015, 256-268.
[2] Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 87-136.
[3] C. L. R. James, ‘Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece, Its Meaning for Today.’ Correspondence 2 (12), 1956.
[4] Matthew Quest, ‘Direct democracy and the search for identity for colonized people: the contemporary meanings of C.L.R. James’s classical Athens.’ Classical Receptions Journal 9 (2), 2017, 237-267. See also Emily Greenwood Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 188-225.
[5] C. L. R. James, Lee, & Castoriadis, Facing Reality. Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1958. p. 67.
* Image: C.L.R. James, 1946. Photo published in Not without Love: Memoirs by Constance Webb (University Press of New England, 2003)
