Famous Quotes by C.L.R. James

“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”

This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.

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.

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.

The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous.

An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions.

The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression.