C. L. R. James

Du Bois marked a great stage in the history of Negro struggles when he said that Negroes could no longer accept the subordination which Booker T. Washington had preached.

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

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

The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.

I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.

Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

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

One of the surest signs of the estimated changes in the consciousness of the American proletariat is to be found in the character of the demands now being put forward by the leadership.

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

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

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

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

I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.

I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense.

I may as well say it, I have been married three times.

After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.

The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.

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

First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle.

I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.

Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.

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

All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market.

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

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

Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences.

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca.

My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.