Here are excerpts from an article by David Scott (Boston Review), who writes that C. L. R. James’s radical vision of common humanity is “at the heart of what makes The Black Jacobins a classic. [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]

C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins was first published in London in the summer of 1938 by Secker and Warburg (later that year it would appear from Dial Press in New York). Born in 1901, James had moved from colonial Trinidad to metropolitan Britain only six years before, in March 1932. Initially a self-consciously literary man oriented vaguely toward Bloomsbury modernist realism, and with no more than an incipient sense of anticolonial, let alone socialist politics, within these six years he had more or less abandoned his commitments to writing fiction and established himself at the center of both the Marxist debate about the Soviet Union and the prospect of a new international left, and the anticolonial debate about national and Black self-determination. These would form interlocking axes shaping the analytical and political framework of The Black Jacobins.

Specifically, the anticolonial question in the British West Indies was centrally a question about the rise and fall and social and economic effects of plantation slavery. In 1933–34, shortly after James’s arrival in Britain, there were centennial celebrations of the passage of the parliamentary act abolishing slavery throughout the British empire (the act received Royal Assent on August 28, 1833, and took effect on August 1, 1834), and in particular, of the role of William Wilberforce and his humanitarian allies in overcoming the prevailing West India slaving interests. Thereafter, the prevailing story of slavery abolition in British historiography was motivated and animated by the idea (one may as well say, the racist conceit) that abolition was largely a benevolent act of English charity toward a benighted people good for little more than service and brute labor. It was a story, therefore, that occluded, or disavowed, both the fact of the unjust enrichment of Britons and British society out of the plunder and violation of Black people for two hundred years, and the fact that the enslaved were not mere passively grateful objects of rule, abjectly accommodating themselves to their condition, but actively involved in their own emancipation.

In The Black Jacobins, James addresses himself to both these strands of racial prejudice in British historiography. But between them, his principal focus is the latter, namely, the role of the enslaved in liberating themselves from their bondage. And clearly the most dramatic historical instance of the self-emancipation of the enslaved was the Saint Domingue insurrection that led to the Haitian Revolution. For James in The Black Jacobins, the story of the Haitian Revolution, told as a revolutionary account of a revolutionary history (learned in part from Jules Michelet’s History of the French Revolution and Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution) is the story of Black anticolonial self-determination embodied in the vindicating singularity of Toussaint Louverture.

Above all, it is Toussaint that fascinates James, almost to the point, perhaps, of identification. Indeed, James was already thinking about Toussaint and what he represented as a heroic Black figure before he left Trinidad for Britain. And throughout The Black Jacobins he struggles with how best to render his protagonist satisfactorily as a distinctive historical actor—the circumstances of his condition as a relatively privileged enslaved man (James apparently did not know that Toussaint was already a free and slave-owning Black at the time of the insurrection), the noteworthy qualities of his personality, the ideas and forces that moved him, and so on. For James, Toussaint is exceptional, unprecedented, novel. He is not only a Caribbean creole and therefore neither African nor European; he is entirely modern, a subjugated product of the shaping social and economic technologies of the proto-factory sugar plantation.

But this is not all. Toussaint is not only modern (in a sense all the enslaved were obliged to be—or become—modern); he is the embodiment of that quintessentially modern subject, the intellectual. The intellectual is not merely someone who thinks creatively, but someone whose very form of life is mediated and activated through the temporal fold of reflexive being. In this respect, for James, Toussaint is wholly unlike most of his Black contemporaries, unlike Makandal (an earlier rebel leader), for example, and unlike Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Toussaint’s general and successor), both men of remarkable intelligence, courage, and will—but not intellectuals. And part of what intrigues James about this quality is that it is at once a gift and a curse: it is what enables Toussaint to see, in a visionary way, what others around him cannot see; and it is also what, from a certain point in his career of leadership, blinds him to what lies under his nose and clouds the clarity and decisiveness of his actions. Across the arc of The Black Jacobins, James endlessly troubles over the form of life of an intellectual and political leader who is struggling to do what has never been done before.

It is a central dimension of Toussaint’s singularity, of the sheer novelty of his subjectivity and his undertaking that he did not know with certainty where he was going or how he would get there. This is crucial to James’s point about Toussaint: he could not have known. He had no blueprint to guide him. And so, he could not have foreseen what the horizon or endgame of the insurrection he was leading should be. He could not know, for example, as those after him would claim to know, that he should have been heading toward nation-state sovereignty all along. We who read The Black Jacobins in our time, with a ready-made anticolonialism that Toussaint could not have had, follow him, sometimes with frustration, as he stumbles around his given world without a map, trying to find his way. He knows that his is a fight for freedom from slavery, but even with so (to us) elementary a project he has to work out through experience and reflection the idea that the relevant freedom cannot be for himself and a few select officers alone, but must be for all the enslaved. [. . .]

Again, in trying to work out the mode of labor that should accompany liberation from slavery Toussaint angers some of his most trusted comrades (his adopted nephew, Moïse, among them), when he returns the enslaved to the plantations and, to add insult to injury, sometimes even to their former enslavers. But for James, this is not, surely, because Toussaint is cynically indifferent to brutality of plantation labor or ignorant of what it symbolizes to the enslaved, but rather because he can dimly, inchoately recognize that Saint Domingue is integrated into a wider system and that the sugar plantation is a necessary part of the survival of his fledgling state. After all, from the vantage point of decolonization, it is easy to see that de-linking from colonial capitalism might have been at least as catastrophic to Toussaint as neocolonial political leaders have imagined (or feared) in the contemporary Caribbean.

Similarly, James was well aware that he would have to meet the question of Toussaint’s supposed enchantment with Europe. Was Toussaint merely a supine Europhile, a mimic-man? Was Europe simply the hegemonic condition of his formation (as a man, an intellectual, and a political leader), or was it also, and more deeply, the motivating impetus of his moral aspirations? Given the formation of the Caribbean (the destruction of the native population, and the fragmenting cultural processes involved in the enslavement of Africans) these were unavoidable questions. And they would have had a special resonance for James as a Caribbean colonial intellectual and political activist himself grappling with the presence of Europe in his own orientations, attitudes, desires, and so on, and searching for an idiom in which to express his own distinctive individuality. [. . .]

Throughout his life, James kept returning to The Black Jacobins in a revisionary attitude, as though it kept generating new questions for him—especially new questions about Toussaint Louverture. [. . .]

For full article, see https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/c-l-r-jamess-radical-vision-of-common-humanity

[Photo above by Roy Milligan/Daily Express/Getty Images: James addresses a group of students in London in 1967.]