CLR James is now, by any standards, an old man. He appears somewhat frail, but this impression evaporates when he begins to talk. It is almost as if one is being transported back to the polemical debates and arguments of the Thirties.
the Thirties and soon developed a reputation as a sports writer and historian.
Roundhouse in 1967. On that occasion he had clashed fiercely with the black American leader thundered, 'No,' James had replied with quiet dignity, it is class.
Birmingham, held to pay tribute to Malcolm X.
17 years. His conversations with Trotsky were published under the pseudonym of Johnstone. He left because of differences on the class character of the Soviet Union.
view. It must end as the Second Test Match began, as he did not want to miss a single minute of cricket.
TA: What were the main literary influences on you in your youth? What were the first books you read and how much impact did these make on you?
CLR: The greatest literary influence on me before I left the Caribbean Makepeace Thackeray. I first read Vanity Fait William when I was nine years old. Subsequently I read it on nine other occasions. I didn't know it was a literary classic.
My mother had a Shakespeare, Vanity Fair, ana DOOK cale STON Halifax, Gentleman. These were on the shelf and I was liv ing in the Caribbbean countryside with nothing to do, so I read.
Thackeray and his constant attacks upon the aristocracy nau more part in snaping my alulude towards the establishment than Marx.
TA: Would you say your views have altered over the last decades at all, or are you still as intransigent as ever on the themes close to your heart?
CLR: My views haven't altered. I left the Trotskyist movement in 1951, but I have remained an independent Marxist ever since I do not subordinate myself to any state. I have never been to Moscow, though I have much more sympathy with the Chinese developments. I am attached to no political organisation whatsoever.
TA: But how would you view world politics today? The situation has altered in many ways since the Thirties.
CLR: My view of world politics is based firmly on what Lenin said in 1919. He told us that this was going to be an epoch of wars: imperialist wars, nationalist wars, civil wars. And of course, an epoch of revolution.
I see the old societies falling apart, in severe crisis and I don't think there is any way out except through building a new, socialist society. In that sense I have not changed since 1934, when I first joined the Fourth International.
It was Marx who first stated that the choice confronting humanity was socialism or barbarism. I believe that. I believe that in the last half century we have seen many examples of barbarism. Can I say something to you. I don't wish to start any controversy or polemic, but have your read Solzhenitsyn?
TA: Yes CLR: Well, how can you still say that the USSR is a workers' state, eh?
TA: But what Solzhenitsyn is writing about is things which surely Trotsky and his supporters knew about in the Thirties?
The Old Man used to often reflect on the fact that the purges and the trials were just the tip of the iceberg. You didn't appreciate the crimes carried out against a mass of the population during the collectivisation?
CLR: Of course, all that I knew and thought and wrote about, but the concreteness and the detail supplied by Solzhenitsyn is still a surprise. How can we see in that any element of socialism?
TA: How would you view China today?
CLR: Now that is difficult for me to say, but I know that up till Mao's death I was always very sympathetic to the Cultural Revolution. Mao said that the two things which mattered most to him were the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and of Japanese imperialism and the Great Proletarian Socialist Challenge 3 July 1980 Page 8 James was born in the West Indies some 80 years ago. He came to Britain in I had last heard him speak at the 'Dialectics of Liberation' conference in the Stokely Carmichael. Race is decisive, Carmichael had The same year James spoke at an International Marxist Group meeting in CLR James was a Trotskyist and a member of the Fourth International for He is presently in London for the publication of a number of his writings by Cultural Revolution.
It was, in my view, an attempt to get the proletariat to govern the country. Mao was genuinely interested in that process. He was trying to get the masses to play a greater role in governing the state and building a socialist society Since his death they have turned backwards but I don't believe they can succeed. TA: But how can you square all this - with which I disagree but let's leave that aside - with Mao's view of Stalin and the fact that the Stalin cult was promoted in China after the limited deStalinisation measures of Kruschev in 1956-7? CLR: These are details, but nevertheless Mao held a view of Stalin with which I disagree entirely, but despite this he avoided the pitfalls of Stalin's Russia THE slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food. It was the incentive to work and the guardian of discipline.
But there was no ingenuity that fear a depraved imagination could devise which was not employed to break their spirit and satisfy the lusts and resentment of their owners and guardians - rons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slaves eating the sugar-cane, Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim; salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were com mon, limbs, ears, and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense.
I neir masters poured burning wax ou their arms and hands and shoulders, emp tied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them; fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their excrement, drink their urine, and lick the saliva of other slaves.
One colonist was known in moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into their flesh.
From The Black Jacobins TA: But there was alist democracy in China under Mao, no rights for the masses unless they happened to agree with Mao.
CLR: I accept that, but they were doing their best to prevent the decline into barbarism that took place in Stalin's Russia. But what has China got and paston aske you abou Russia?
TA: Quite a lot. For me there no qualitiative difference (there never was) between the mode of production in China and in the Soviet Union regardless of whether it was under Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin or Brezhnev..
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Allison and Busby, including a revised edition of his classic The Black Jacobins. I met him last week in his hotel room. He stipulated one condition for the inter-