C. L. R. James was a British journalist, historian, and writer who became a leading voice for social change and anti-colonial movements in the Caribbean. His work on the history of slavery, imperialism, and the fight for independence remains pivotal in understanding global politics and culture. James' legacy encourages us to challenge the status quo, strive for equality, and never underestimate the transformative power of knowledge and activism.

"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."


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



"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."



"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."



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



"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."



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



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



"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."



"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."



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



"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 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."



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



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

