16. ond prize going to Stuart Richardson, and Keith Sinclair third. Next month IT COULD BE YOU! To enter costs just £5 per month. Send us a cheque now and we will send you a handy Standing Order that takes the trouble out of entering. And then sit back and wait for your winnings to arrive! It really is as easy as that! Send your cheque (f5 per month) to: Soclalist Outlook Supporters Fund PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU NEXT ISSUE Socialist Outlook is taking a well-deserved summer break. Our next issue will be published in the first week of September. Letters and articles for publication should be at our office for August 25. ...For now, we will fight them on the beaches ... [Sorry, someone is going delirious, Ed] YES, you have at least one chance in 300 of winning a fabulous prize, the equivalent of buying thousands of lottery tickets! This month's lucky winners sharing out the prizes are Carole Dixon (£50) with secGramsci, who have enriched Marxism with original ideas. One can disagree with him on several issues but no one can deny the stimulus of his contributions.
This book by Anthony Bogues -the first of two volumes - maps James' political evolution from his youth in Trinidad in 1901 until his deportation from the United States in the early 1950s. It is a truly formidable odyssey.
While still in Trinidad James became interested, though at first not involved, in the anti-colonial movements. Yet he always maintained the fount of his political identity came from Europe and America: "I am a Black European, that is my training and outlook Tames always maintained that he came to Marxism through Trotskyism. It was Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution which first inspired him.
His first book after his adherence to the Trotskyist movement was World Revolution (1937), a critical history and analysis of the Communist International. Although the book was written from the perspective of the Trotskyist Left Opposition, it was by no means unstitical o: Trotskr. :: as casted audit is the heisting tige Tro cists o: his easter fositions and stressed "It is very important to convince James that his criticisms Permanent Revolution.
His major critique of Trotskyism was presented in State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950):
"Our position is that the chaos in the (Fourth) International is due to the fact that Trotsky's method of analysis and system of ideas is wrong and (this) will continue to grow until a new system is substituted for the present one."
Role of party
Differences with Trotsky were to lead inevitably to disagreements with Lenin, not only on the role of the vanguard party but also on the traditional Marxist paradigm that the socialist revolution could only be achieved through the seizure of power by the proletariat. Against this James postulated:
"The revolution is not the means by which workers achieve new socialist institutions to replace the old bourgeois institutions. The revolution is the means by which the socialist institutions emerge and destroy the bourgeois institutions which restrain them."
This conception of the working class achieving consciousness through their own self activity - almost a theory of spontaneity - was to become central to James' theory of revolutionary politics.
This was to be developed further with his conception of the "invadiro arialict carier"
He also broke with Trotskyism on the class nature of the Soviet state, maintaining that it was a played a leading role organising campaigns against Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, even volunteering to go and fight in Haille Selassie's army.
His experience of Negro (sic) politics in America enriched his understanding of the dialectical inter-relationship of socialism and the liberation struggles in the colonies.
But it was Trotsky who taught him and the American Trotskyists that the "chauvinism" of the Black Americans was not the equivalent of the chauvinism of White America, just as he had previously taken the position that the chauvinism of Black South Africans was progressive, the first step to revolutionary consciousness.
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