Explore Quotes by C. L. R. James

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

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.

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

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

The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.

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

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

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

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

Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.

Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions: to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.

The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.

Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.

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.

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

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

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

The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.

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