Matthew Quest. CLR James: Cultivator of the Popular Will. A Study of the History and Politics of World Revolution (Brill, 2026).

As Matthew Quest notes in his appendix, “Top Ten Reasons We Don’t Know More about CLR James,” CLR James is a relatively obscure thinker even among the African-American left. This is doubly so on the left more generally. According to Quest, James’ thought occupies a marginal position on the left primarily because his fundamental orientation — an affinity for direct democracy and workers’ self-management — is fundamentally at odds with the centralized, mass-based politics of the Old Left, whether Marxist-Leninist or Social Democratic. He was hostile to the British Labour Party and Atlee, the US Democratic Party and FDR, and to post-independence African leaders who were lionized elsewhere on the left. He saw nation-states and vanguard parties as mostly destructive rather than helpful, and the history of nationalization by progressive governments as hostile to self-management. James also saw the class reductionism of the dominant currents of the left, with their neglect of racial and anti-colonial dimensions of struggle, as failing to meet the needs of the time.

Quest himself is a perfect fit for intellectual biographer of James, as a historian and critic of national liberation movements in Africa and elsewhere in the colonial and post-colonial world, as well as post-independence governments. James’ central values of direct democracy and self-governance resonate strongly with Quest’s hostility — which come through clearly in these quotes from his Preface — to self-serving establishments, Black, revolutionary, and/or “progressive.”

The search for identity and heritage, in all their proper cultural nuances, for those who have known scars, exploitation, and who are overcoming insecurity, cannot be permitted to be captured by those who define freedom as managing subordinate lives. This is how all who fatefully embrace the state define it. These are the facts of the long duration of post-civil rights, post-colonial existence.

…Hopefully, we have now learned that the challenge to respectability politics without opposition to elite representative government is a fraud….

We are living in an affirmative action empire and ethnically plural police state alongside subcontractors of guilt and activists for the government, funded by the white rich, talking about privilege. We have people lecturing us about the problem of ‘colour blindness’ who are not opposed to the police state; they are explicitly part of the boss class who murder, mass incarcerate, and get out the vote for those who exploit.

* * *

…[W]hen I questioned whether the working people of Cuba actually governed that country, many dedicated revolutionaries, socialists, and anti- imperialists replied that it did not matter. For most insulted by the historical denial of self-determination of conquered peoples and for most organising for some future socialism or communism, it did not matter whether ordinary people directly governed or not. This should shake those who are not Machiavellians to the core. We should not be so thirsty for empowerment that we will accept a half-made or second-hand society as a dwelling to sustain our search for liberation.

…No workers or youth to whom we were introduced asked questions about their contradictions. Surely, ordinary people in Cuba asked these questions but were not featured on the directed tours and cultural events. This raised questions about the democratic content and the political economy of the socialist future and the ethics of those who took part in such projects.

* * *

CLR James famously said: ‘Political treachery is not the monopoly of the white race’. He also said there are Black people who treat Black toilers like ‘colonial trustees’, and while they talk of desiring ‘independence’ and ‘power’ they already live a ‘delightful’ existence at the toilers’ expense.

James’ life (1901-1989) spanned the Russian Revolution, the rise and fracturing of Marxism-Leninism, and postwar national liberation movements, and intersected with them at numerous points.

Born in Trinidad, he lived in numerous countries over the course of his lifetime. His activist career was wide-ranging and global; as Quest writes, “James and his associates worked for an American revolution, a Caribbean revolution, African revolution, and world revolution.” He authored numerous historical works, including The Black Jacobins on the Haitian Revolution, and a huge volume of political work and occasional writing. Along with Trotsky’s former secretary Raya Dunayevskaya, he co-founded the Johnson–Forest Tendency, a tendency within the Shachtmanite Workers’ Party (the Shachtmanites being a split from Trotskyism which held that the USSR was not simply a deformed workers’ state, the orthodox position, but a new form of oligarchical class system under the collective rule of the bureaucracy). The Tendency was a major formative influence on autonomist Marxism.

Quest sets out to show “for the first time,” in contrast to the neglect of previous scholarly treatments of James, the centrality of direct democracy and workers’ self-management to his life and work. And he does not hide behind scholarly neutral language. “This book is not for the hesitant, the insincere, or pretenders, or those who wish to sustain illusions. For such readers, encountering this work will be like walking on broken glass barefoot.” As he summarizes it:

James’s philosophy of history, as well as his radical journalistic strategies, transcends the material facts of suffering and trauma, and it observes the self- directed liberating activity of ordinary people, sustaining with reverence their character, beyond blind spots, in search of the hidden depth of their creative capacities and repressed strivings.

This book, abundantly documented with primary archival sources (from obscure letters to unpublished manuscripts), illustrates aspects of James’s intellectual history and reveals biographical elements previously unknown. However, it also offers the most comprehensive treatment of James’s political thought to date. It will stand out for the detail in which it explores James’s theorising, strategising, and the internal dynamics of his small revolutionary political organisations and mass party politics.

Indeed, this is a massive book, totaling over 1100 pages. Besides those on his personal and literary life, individual chapters detail his views on the philosophy of history, direct democracy, the progressive welfare state, revolutionary praxis, dialectics, his interpretation of Marxism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the postwar communist regimes of Eastern Europe, Castro, Mao, the Haitian Revolution, Kwame Nkrumah, Caribbean revolutionary politics, Black liberation in the United States.

The chapter “Every Cook Can Govern” is key to James’ approach to everything, as covered throughout the rest of the book. As James states his own philosophy:

…[I]n any society, particularly contemporary society, you have people born and grow up with a tendency to rule. In order to have democracy, you have to oppose those people. That is the problem. It isn’t lack of faith in the democracy itself. But the instinct to rule is because there are a number of people who believe that there must be order and some people in charge. The whole history of humanity tells them that, and that is the problem the ordinary man faces … My idea of socialism is very extremely opposed to the usual. For many people, socialism is the further control by people who are put in authority. For me it is the opposite.

In his chapter on the New Deal, Quest quotes James comparing the state capitalism of FDR, and specifically its conflicts with the CIO, to that of Stalin:

What the American workers are revolting against since 1936 and holding at bay, this, and nothing else but this, has overwhelmed the Russian proletariat. The rulers of Russia perform the same functions as are performed by Ford, General Motors, the coal operators and their huge bureaucratic staffs. Capital is no Henry Ford; he can die and leave his whole empire to an institution; the plant, the scientific apparatus, the method, the personnel of organisation and supervision, the social system which sets these up in opposition to the direct producer will remain the same. Not inefficiency of bureaucracy, not ‘prestige, powers, and revenue of the bureaucracy’, not consumption but capital accumulation in its specifically capitalist manner, this is the analysis of the [American] and Russian econom[ies].

James’ critique of Nkrumah’s Ghana in the 1960s, following his earlier admiration, was typical of his views on the national liberation movement leaders who came to power after independence.

CLR James’s critique of Nkrumah for a high modernism focused on urban construction and big development projects like the Volta Dam (the Akomsombo Dam) is little known in contrast to the fuss over deposing Nkrumah’s chief justice. James argued ‘Nkrumah has been playing around with a fiction called social democracy’. ‘Not the mild Fabianism of Grantley Adams, Norman Manley or Eric Williams’, which Caribbean politicians ‘don’t take too seriously’, James explained Nkrumah was really working too hard to impose modern economic development on Ghana, in a fashion that subordinated workers and peasants. James revealed disappointment that almost all economic activity by the people of Ghana was controlled or engaged in by state power. Ghana had become ‘a totalitarian state: no democracy, no socialism’.

This is no hagiography. Quest is more than willing, when he considers it necessary, to take James to task for inconsistency with his own values. A good example is the chapter on Lenin, in which he criticises him for his admiration of Lenin.

James’s Leninism existed in tension with his politics of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for modern industrial nations – aspects of which appear in his historical narratives of peripheral nations as well. We are partially indebted to his more libertarian socialist writings as a basis for making this criticism. Nevertheless, James’s Leninism and labour’s self-emancipation are not intellectual legacies which can be reconciled uncritically, save for scholars and activists who wish to elevate the banner of labour’s self-emancipation only to discipline and discard working people when they have their opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy.

Quest’s summary of the significance of James’ philosophy in the Conclusion also sums up his own understanding of the world:

World revolution is not absurd. CLR James and his associates worked for an American revolution, Caribbean revolution, African revolution, and world revolution. And for this reality not to be faced as the unapologetic centre of inquiry into his life and legacies is to carry out a dastardly deed. Especially for those who believe fascism is on the brink, as if an avalanche fast approaching, and barbarism can be found everywhere, it is time to move beyond the thin gruel many offer in the name of historical scholarship and dried-up social movement thinking.

…If the world seems to be breaking up and in crisis, we must remember that it is not our world that’s in crisis. Just as if the government is in crisis, it is not our government. Not only is a new world possible, but new types of political people, different forms of organisation and arrangements of society are feasible and within our reach.

…Those who wish to restore institutions and systems they insisted were fundamentally bankrupt only a few years ago are emblematic of contemporary derangement. False words, banners, and picket signs responding to our accursed lot, necessarily are distributed by those who in fact are in social harmony with a significant section of overseers.

The moment for the socialist-curious (dubious as it always has been) to be enamored with senators, mayors, parliamentarians, and congresspeople condemning oligarchy (rule by the few), while openly collaborating with half the rulers of the world and their blocks of capital, is coming to an end. It is like cheering on those who oppose theocracy wishing to be Pope or the Ayatollah. Something else is required of us.

Quest’s book is a monumental work of scholarship, likely to be a standard resource on CLR James for years to come. It will be valuable to James scholars and the James-curious, researchers of national liberation movements and the left more broadly in the 20th century, and anyone interested in broadening their understanding of politics and society.