Crowds

Abstract

In 1948 C. L. R. James delivered a report to the national conference of the Socialist Workers Party in America, entitled ‘The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA’. The report, which was published under a pseudonym in Fourth International later that year, is widely seen as the culmination of his decade-long grappling with the experience and history of racism in America, and with the question of the relationship between the politics of black resistance and those of class struggle (see James 1996a: introduction and Grimshaw in James 1992: 424). It was here that he most explicitly laid out the claim that black political struggles should be treated as ethically and politically significant in their own right. That the struggle against racism, in other words, could not be dissolved into the category of class and that black resistance to oppression pointed towards its own conclusions about what socialism might be. In his peroration James appealed, as he did often in his writings and speeches, to a kind of ethnographic evidence. The ‘awakening passions’ (James 1977a: 126) which simmer among the black population in America, he says, are there to be recognised by anyone who takes the time to get to know that population and its history ‘intimately’. And for James, it becomes clear, such intimacy begins with the willingness to watch that population as its gathers, not only in public rallies or marches, but ‘at their own theatres […] at their dances […] in their churches’ (126–7).