C. L. R. James

“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.”

“All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.”

“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.”

“As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.”

“I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.”

“Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.”

“I may as well say it, I have been married three times.”

“The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.”

“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.”

“Today we ought to be able to see first that Booker T. Washington faced a situation in which he was seeking desperately for a way out, and he could see no way out except capitulation.”

“Du Bois marked a great stage in the history of Negro struggles when he said that Negroes could no longer accept the subordination which Booker T. Washington had preached.”