Quotes by C. L. R. James

About C. L. R. James:

Cyril Lionel Robert James is a staple of subaltern studies, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James's writing on the Communist International stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and his history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, is a seminal text in the literature of the African Diaspora.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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.

C. L. R. James

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

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.

C. L. R. James

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.

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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.

C. L. R. James

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.

C. L. R. James

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.

C. L. R. James

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.

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

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.

C. L. R. James

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

C. L. R. James

Author Bio

  • NameC. L. R. James
  • DescriptionTrinidadian writer
  • AliasesCyril Lionel Robert James
  • BornJanuary 4, 1901
  • DiedMay 31, 1989
  • CountryUnited Kingdom; Trinidad And Tobago
  • ProfessionHistorian; Journalist; Novelist; Writer