C. L. R. James Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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

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.

Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany was defeated.

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

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

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.

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.