News and Letters  Book Review--November 1997

C.L.R. James and the dialectic

By Peter Hudis

C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, by Aldon Lynn Nielsen (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997)

Though a number of book-length studies of C.L.R. James have recently appeared, this is the first to contain an extended discussion of James' studies on dialectics. This is not to say that Nielsen's point of concentration or expertise is dialectics. His primary aim is to present James as social historian and literary critic, especially in light of recent trends in postmodernism.

Nielsen commends such historical works of James as The Black Jacobins , while reserving his most fulsome praise for James' literary studies of such figures as Melville, Richard Wright and Wilson Harris. He is especially taken with James' writings on the liberating potential of popular culture, which he contrasts to the "high-brow intellectualism" of other Marxists. He writes, "In the same way that Marx had viewed the modes of industrial production that oppressed workers as simultaneously organizing them for revolution, James viewed the mechanistic constructions that disrupted and commodified aesthetic practices as at the same time repositioning the masses for a new universal" (p. 146).

However, the book has less discussion of James' attitude to actual forces of revolution. James' politics are in fact only selectively presented. While he discusses James' view of the independent character of the Black movement in the U.S. as well as in Africa (developed when he was a co-leader of the Johnson-Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya in the1940s), Nielsen skips over the works and passages in which James fell into an uncritical embrace of Third World nationalism after the mid-l950s. There is also little discussion of James' work in the Caribbean; his relation to the revolution in Grenada is not discussed at all.

Yet what is discussed is the work which James considered the pillar of his life's work, but which few have chosen to dwell upon Notes on Dialectics (1948).

Nielsen is much enamored of the Notes, for he sees it as anticipating present philosophic concerns. He makes much of James' discussion of Hegel's concept of identity and difference in the second section of the Science of Logic, the Doctrine of Essence, where Hegel says every identity contains difference. James' enthusiasm for this section, he says, prefigures today's poststructuralists, who elevate difference over identity. He writes, "James is historically posthumanist already in 1947."

Yet Nielsen only briefly touches on the central concern of James' Notes-- his effort to relate dialectics to organization. Though he approvingly quotes James' comment that "the coming of age of the proletariat means the abolition of the party", he does not quote his comment, "The Party is the knowing of the proletariat as being. Without the party the proletariat knows nothing".

Nielsen spends several pages attacking Raya Dunayevskaya's critique of James for failing to break down the meaning of  Hegel's Absolutes for today's freedom struggles. Dunayevskaya argued that James failed to develop the philosophy needed for our age by, l) having little to say about the last section of  Hegel's Logic, the Doctrine of the Notion, and 2) seeing "nothing of importance" (as James put it in a letter of 1949) in Hegel's Philosophy of Mind. Nielsen dismisses this critique on the grounds that James actually said he found nothing of importance in the Philosophy of Mind "for now". James later returned to such issues, Nielsen insists, as seen in his essay "The Gathering Forces" which discusses the master/slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology.

There are a number of problems with Nielsen's position. First, if Dunayevskaya in fact distorted James' view by failing to note that he only said he found nothing of importance in Hegel's Philosophy of Mind "for now", Nielsen would need to show that somewhere in the next 40 years of his life James returned to that crucial work of Hegel. In fact, there is no indication that he ever did. That he can only cite James' later discussion of the master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology a different work entirely from the Philosophy of Mind only reinforces the cogency of Dunayevskaya's critique.

Second, Dunayevskaya's critique of James for failing to break down Hegel's Absolutes for today's freedom struggles does not rest on a phrase from one letter. It rests on Notes on Dialectics itself. As she showed in her letter on this published in the October issue of News & Letters, James barely even approached a serious discussion of Hegel's Absolutes in the Notes, so taken was he with an earlier section of the Logic, the Doctrine of Essence. Nielsen's own preference for this section reinforces Dunayevskaya's point that James and his followers have never known how to relate the Doctrine of the Notion to today's realities.

Since Nielsen is oblivious to this, he can hardly be expected to explain how such philosophic limitations affected James' politics--especially his zig-zags between praising spontaneous revolts at one moment and "the party" at the next. Nor does he show any recognition of what Dunayevskaya achieved when she broke down the significance of   Hegel's Absolute in seeing in it "both the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory and the movement from theory that is itself a form of philosophy". In achieving this breakthrough Dunayevskaya worked out the concept of a totally new relation of philosophy to organization which escaped James.

As she wrote in l983, "What is totally new is that we place philosophy of revolution and not just committee form as ground for organization. In a word, we do not stop, as Rosa Luxemburg did, with full appreciation of the genius of the masses in action. Rather, we deepen that with such a philosophic penetration of that action of the masses that we call their attitude not just force but Reason, and Reason means the totality and new unification with the movement from theory".

While Nielsen's rush to make James au courant to postmodernists prevents him from exploring such issues, the fact that his work does discuss his writings on dialectics at least opens the door for further discussion.

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