Classical Receptions Journal Vol 9. Iss. 2 (2017) pp. 237–267
Direct democracy and the search
for identity for colonized people:
the contemporary meanings of
C.L.R. James’s classical Athens
Matthew Quest*
C.L.R. James, author of The Black Jacobins, a historical study of the Haitian Revolution,
is often seen as a paradoxical Pan-African activist with embarrassing Eurocentric
tendencies. A major aspect of this perception is his perennial engagement with
classical Athens. He regarded it as a model for direct democracy, which could inform
workers’ self-management, and the search for identity among colonized people. These
intellectual legacies began in Correspondence, an obscure Marxist journal in the US of
the 1950s, and became the subject of global debate in the 1960s and 1970s. At the
centre of the dispute was James’s insistence, to Black Power audiences, that classical
Athens was the greatest civilization the world had ever known. Objections that classical
Athenian civilization was characterized by slavery and exclusions of women obscure the
fact that James always acknowledged the limits of Athenian society and implored his
audiences to question their own elitism and improve on the direct democratic model for
modern politics. Increasingly, the clash of so-called Western civilization and the Third
World in the post-colonial era undermined the potential of James’s Athens as a
productive thought experiment, although African American and Caribbean activists did
try to grapple with this argument, and some found it valuable.
Introduction
Contemporary scholarship on ancient Greece and Rome is alert to attempts to appropriate the ideas, images, and cultures of the past in order to authenticate the
present. It has been well demonstrated that classical Athens has been an important
presence in the modern world variously used to underscore or oppose arguments for
social and political change, and both to assert and challenge values and identities.
The latest scholarship interrogates uses and abuses of the classical past, and analyses
the complex dialogues between classical antiquity and the present.1 Particularly
*Correspondence: Department of African-American Studies, Georgia State University.
[email protected]
1 See some of the latest scholarship on the Classics concerned with the intersection of
democratic, anti-racist, and colonial themes in the following edited volumes: Hardwick
and Harrison (2013), Orrells, Bhambra, and Roynon (2011), Bradley (2010), Stephens
ß The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/crj/clw010
MATTHEW QUEST
sensitive in this field of inquiry are studies that have challenged Aryan models of the
classical world in the spirit of the racial vindication of peoples of African descent.
However, these studies also make clear that, for complicated reasons, decolonizing
and de-racing the field of Classics is no easy task. C.L.R. James, often seen as a
paradoxical Pan-African activist, with a perceived embarrassing Eurocentric disposition, especially by those he mentored in the Black Power era, approached the
classical world somewhat differently.
Scholars of James’s life and work disagree over how to evaluate James’s approach
to race, and civilization, in the context of his professed Eurocentrism. John Bracey
reminds us that James characterized himself as ‘a Black European in training, and in
outlook’ without apology.2 Paul Buhle has seen James as paradoxical for being a PanAfrican with an appreciation for the Western classics. John Henrik Clarke and Yosef
Ben-Jochanan view James as embracing Eurocentrism through his Marxism. While
Farrukh Dhondy, in contrast to the former, seems pleased with this Eurocentrism,
John McClendon sees James as a non-racialist whose Pan-Africanism was a constellation of political interests not so much an outlook on identity or culture. Paget
Henry has argued that, over the long arc of his career, James struggled to shift his
aspiring philosophical conception of heroic self-government from a Greek to an
African identity.3 Almost all of these commentators appear to have a restricted
sense of democracy compared to the highest ideals James developed in his politics.
This should be kept in mind as we consider criticism of James on cultural and
civilizational matters.
Direct democracy and national liberation struggles
C.L.R. James, native of Trinidad, best known as the author of The Black Jacobins,4
the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, is recognized as the mentor of prominent anti-colonial activists and post-colonial statesmen, such as Ghana’s Kwame
Nkrumah and Trinidad’s Eric Williams, and is also recalled as an independent
socialist. James wrote original visions of direct democracy and workers’ self-management. These culminated in Facing Reality (1958), a book very influential, not
merely in Europe and the USA, but in the post-independence Anglophone
Caribbean and among certain African-Americans engaged in post-Black Power
movement criticism. Facing Reality argued not ‘since the Greek city-state’ had
the world seen the proper combination of technology, access to information, and
and Vasunia (2010), Goff and Simpson (2008), Hardwick and Gillespie (2007), and Goff
(2005).
2 Bracey (1994: 53–54). Bracey recalls James’s lectures at Northwestern University in 1968
ranging from Aristotle, Aeschylus, and Sophocles to slaves in the Haitian Revolution and
peasants in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania.
3 Buhle (1994: 158–66), Dhondy (2001: x–xi, 42), Clarke and Ben-Jochanan (1991: 43–50),
McClendon III (2005:15–19), Henry (2000: 47–67).
4 James (1963 [orig.1938]).
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
ordinary people ready to overcome elites, whether in the name of capitalism or
communism, who wished to suppress a democracy based on popular councils and
committees. This potential was exemplified by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Yet, Facing Reality had a bifurcated nature. The direct democratic politics were not
written with peripheral nations or people of colour particularly in mind—for in 1958
James still accepted the nation-state, elite party politics, and representative government for the colonized first achieving full citizenship rights through popular mobilizations. But James never missed an educational opportunity to take a swipe at the
absurdities of these hierarchical institutions and social relationships.5
Ken Lawrence explains that James imbued in his followers an appreciation for autonomous and spontaneous labour movements in modern industrial nations and colonial revolt in peripheral nations. Yet he failed to reconcile these movements in one
organization dedicated to world revolution as he wished and this mutual appreciation
could be a thin sentiment. This was a result of many Black Power era activists having a
concern with blind spots of the white American and European working classes, and
Third World nations (but also those in more imperial positions) only being understood
at a distance through great personalities above society and vulgar political economy.6
Eusi Kwayana illustrates that Caribbean colleagues were not necessarily bothered
by James’s affinity for the direct democracy of Athens. James’s European cultural
references did not disturb for he could speak credibly about Africa as well. Kwayana
and others of the African Diaspora were inspired by James’s direct democratic vision
and applied this to post-independence politics. Still, Kwayana argues, it is mistaken
to assume that James was inconsistent if he did not always apply the same political
perspectives to imperial centres and underdeveloped territories.7
Aware of these contours, it has been among my research projects to interrogate
the contours of direct democracy and national liberation in James’s political thought.
This has meant centring James’s direct democratic politics for the first time in
scholarly literature, and documenting where people of colour, inspired by James,
fostered a vision of popular self-management. Yet upon further examination, and
consistent with Kwayana’s own experience as documented in his The Bauxite Strike
and the Old Politics, it is apparent that popular self-emancipation and self-determination were often defined in such a way that race vindication trumped a deeper sense
of Black labour’s autonomy at the post-independence moment.8
There was a widespread desire to prove that middle and professional classes of colour
were equal to the tasks of elite representative government as defined by the retreating
colonizer. This sentiment could not evaporate overnight, and was far more of a historical breakthrough for most (the defeat of white supremacy—one form of hierarchy)
than the critique of hierarchical government in itself. James’s Athenian criticism about
5
6
7
8
James, G.L. Boggs, and Castoriadis (1958: 66–68).
Lawrence (2013: 138–76).
Kwayana (2013: 199–227).
Quest (2013a: 374–91) and Quest (2013b).
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MATTHEW QUEST
the limits of representative government for those in the process of experiencing colonial
freedom or civil rights for the first time, was perhaps rooted in classical references, but
was attempting to prefigure the next democratic breakthrough. Movements of wildcat
strikes, in factories and fields, animated by visions of direct democracy and workers’
self-management among people of colour and the formerly colonized in the African
world, did emerge in the 1970s. It is only in recent years, however, that historians have
begun to pay serious attention to these trends.9
James had difficulty teaching about Athens as a direct democratic model, both
because it was seen as a ‘white’ model, but also because many anti-colonial radicals
saw colonized and post-colonial wage labour as people to be managed but not people
who could directly govern. This was a conceit that could be found in many forms of
Black Nationalist aspiration and Marxist economic planning whether Athens was
present as a thought-experiment or not.
C.L.R. James and George G.M. James
It is instructive to compare and contrast C.L.R. James’s recourse to the classics with
that of another Caribbean scholar, George G.M. James, a native of Guyana and an
intellectual forerunner of contemporary disputes between Afrocentrism and the
Western classics.
George G. M. James proposed a ‘stolen legacy’ thesis, in which he argued that
there were uncredited borrowings from Africa by the Greeks and that white supremacist doctrine had further played down and obscured cultural exchange between ancient Greek civilization and ancient African civilizations.10 Although
C.L.R. James mobilized classical Athens in very different ways, I would like to
suggest that James’s direct democratic interpretation of Athens belongs to a larger
history of Black Nationalism to the extent it has also contributed to the search for
identity among colonized people.
George G.M. James’s Stolen Legacy, raises an unexamined historical problem at
the centre of African-American popular history. If Greece borrowed aspects of
philosophy, religion, art, and intellectual culture from Egypt, the mere fact of
Egyptian provenance does not necessarily recommend these ideas and systems to
modern black nationalisms and identity formations. Notwithstanding these tensions, before the official turn to Black Studies, Africana Studies, or Classical
Reception Studies as mainstream trends in scholarship in university life, George
G.M. James wished to establish that African peoples should be concerned with the
role of affirming their own cultures for identity and community formation. At the
9 Quest (2015: 132–62), Edwards (2014), Quest (2013c: 105–32), Kwayana (2012). In all of
these sources evidence can be found of peoples of African descent engaging James’s direct
democratic legacy and awareness of his premise that ‘every cook can govern’. Plys (2016:
1–27) has recently surveyed workers’ self-management as a broad historical trend in the
Third World in the years 1952–1979.
10 See G.G.M. James (1988) and Crawford (2004: 111–35).
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
contemporary moment George G.M. James is also revered by those interested in
ancient Kemet as a basis of a moral philosophy which observes nature.11 For all the
differences, between these two Jameses from the Caribbean, C.L.R. James did not
appear to be concerned with George G.M. James’s specific project of cultural nationalism in his Athenian meditations.
In the first volume of Black Athena, Martin Bernal located George G.M. James
among the ‘old scrappers’, including Jacob Carrouthers and Chancellor Williams,
who contributed to underlining the problems of race and civilization in intellectual
history.12 C.L.R. James exists uneasily but genuinely among race vindicationists,
and is appreciated for his anti-colonial nationalism. But he is perhaps the most
original Marxist dissenter of peoples of African descent, and as he was dedicated
to founding his own autonomous doctrine in that field with his colleagues, he is a
foundational pillar of Black radicalism.
Patrice D. Rankine has argued that, so long as imperial forces seek to degrade the
colonized, in terms of race, colour, and civilization, the study of classical receptions
will have to grapple with the various nationalisms, whether imperial or anti-colonial,
which have appropriated Greek and Roman classics.13 Michele V. Ronnick, the
scholar of Black classicist William Sanders Scarborough, notes that African
American engagement with the classics was not approached, even in the nineteenth
century, without doubts as to whether peoples of African descent could or even
should study Greek and Latin. Further they did not see such engagement as imitation of white schooling for they were aware of whites who had poorer schooling
than themselves and even no schooling despite Black people’s social subordination.14 This is an appropriate consideration for C.L.R. James’s colonial education
in the Caribbean, though lingering thoughts of British civilization’s link to the
Western canon still shadowed him until his first trip to the UK in 1932. In
Selwyn Cudjoe’s Beyond Boundaries, a study of nineteenth century intellectual
trends in the colonial Trinidad into which C.L.R. James was born, the popular
press often took up the critical framework of Socrates and an Athenian philosophical
type which appeared dedicated to exposing shortcomings of society.15
11 See Moses (1998) for a sympathetic treatment of African-American popular history by an
outstanding scholar of African-American intellectual history. Popular history is not
public history, the history of popular culture, or intellectual history as most academics
know it. Rather it is a discourse which intersects marginal scholars often with a community base larger than university scholars, social movements, and street organizations.
It is remarkable how what in one generation is considered beyond the boundaries of
acceptable academic discourse later becomes grandfathered in as a plausible perspective
which must be engaged.
12 Bernal (1987: 401, 435–36).
13 Rankine (2011: 40–56).
14 Ronnick (2006: xxvii).
15 Cudjoe (2003: 221).
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MATTHEW QUEST
These seemingly disparate commentaries, taken together, tell us of historical
problems often neglected for understanding James as the purported paradoxical
Pan-African who engaged the classics. Where people of colour and the colonized
were placed outside the trappings of civilization and self-government, and where
these latter were constructed in European terms, sustaining the deportment of selfreliance meant mastering traditions institutionally placed outside one’s authority.
While having to search for one’s identity hidden in the colonizer’s models of the
world could be a false start for Black autonomous aspirations, James’s audacity was
always greater. James speaking of Athens’s relevance to workers and the colonized
search for self-government, his race vindication project (to the extent he always
consciously had one) was telling Europeans they misunderstood the democratic
heritage of their own civilization, and as a result it was in decline. The consequence
was not simply the degradation of the colonized. Europeans, explained James, with
thin understandings of Athens, had also falsified their own heritage and degraded
their own human capacities (the democratic potential of the working class).16
Lorna Hardwick approaches the issue of classical receptions in a different but
complementary way to Rankine, Ronnick, and Cudjoe, and offers a pertinent reexamination of the concept of ‘democracy’ in the context of classical reception.
Reception studies must begin to challenge the idea that these texts have produced
a singular ‘meaning’ no matter who or what project appropriates them, and their
intended ethic. James originally proposed to posit ‘the contemporary meaning’ of
classical Athens. Yet even within that project’s own legacies there was consciously,
even for James, more than one contemporary meaning.
In most instances, whether fascist or anti-colonial, those who ascribe authoritative
meanings to their identities and civilizations through the classics desire to fuse
visions of self-government with notions of high culture which may also have repressive connotations. Further, the writings of the classical world also invented myths
and created identities for themselves, which however attractive, can be revealed as
less than democratic. Therefore, we cannot simply be concerned with classical
legacies as stolen or appropriated. Consequently, democratizing James’s black radical interpretation of Athenian democracy is an intricate task.
Hardwick reminds us that the classical world’s authors and their archaic texts
were preoccupied with manufacturing authenticity, especially where democracy
16 It is crucial to understand that consistent with James’s The Black Jacobins, Beyond A
Boundary and Minty Alley, he is concerned with vindicating the self-emancipating capacity of all toilers and he created narratives that focused on marginal workers of colour
specifically. Within this project, James’s anti-racism never discards the white working
class as permanently damaged. He believed all human beings are not what they should be,
for society is organized improperly. But they bring their limitations to freedom struggles
and are transformed by them. James’s Athenian narratives are about reminding readers
that government in the modern world is not organized properly for self-directed liberating outcomes to flourish.
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
appears to be a concern. For projects of self-government engaging these historical
and literary materials can be both inspiring and paper over exclusions.17 Hardwick’s
insight is crucial for this study, for where James constructs or claims essences of
direct democracy and colonial freedom in, or inspired by the classical world, he may
be found to be both creative, rooted among authoritative scholarship for his generation, and still imprecise.
Several scholars have addressed James’s dialogue with the classics. Emily
Greenwood has examined C.L.R. James’s and Eric Williams’s contrasting
approaches to Athens in Trinidad’s anti-colonial politics; Kent Worcester has
seen Athens’ role in James’s engagement of the Western canon as an opportunity
to reflect on a way of seeing popular government that is in decline; and Frank
Rosengarten has inquired about James’s Athens as primarily an aesthetic meditation
preoccupied with Aristotle’s poetics. By using primary sources and archives, this
article will offer a more thoroughgoing analysis of the activist political context for
James’s famous interpretation of Athenian democracy.18 We shall examine the contours of James’s use of ‘Athens’ as a trope for his advocacy of both direct democracy
and movements against empire. In a certain way the aesthetics of Athenian selfgovernment is a school for designing a society in the present. We will explore more
closely how James’s discourse emerged from within his small revolutionary organizations and influenced radical social movements and hitherto unexamined contours
of intellectual history. We will copiously document the secondary scholarship that
helped construct James’s Athenian project from the 1920s to the 1940s, and suggest
some more contemporary critical outlooks which might help us to rethink some of
James’s assumptions.
Athens: thought experiment and political project
C.L.R. James approached classical Athens as a thought-experiment that could reinvigorate radical social movements in search of workers’ self-management and a
liberating identity for colonized people. Mobilizing what he knew of democracy in
classical Athens, James used narratives of its history and culture as devices for
meditating on popular self-government. The self-emancipation of labor and freedom from empire became evolving tropes and interpretations of ‘Athens’ which
James and his partners-in-conversation struggled to reconcile.
While the exclusive qualities of Athenian democracy of the fifth century BCE
were enabled by imperial rule over other Greek states, unfolding tensions in the
dialogue were of more contemporary concern. What began as a small article on
Athens in Correspondence, an obscure journal of a small Marxist group in the
USA led by James in the 1950s in the transitional period from the Age of the
17 Hardwick (2013: 15–32). See also Hardwick (2003).
18 Greenwood (2010: 188–225), Rosengarten (2008: 178–81), Worcester (1992: 215–16).
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MATTHEW QUEST
CIO to the Third World national liberation epoch, became the basis for arguments
in the Black Power and Caribbean freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s.19 As
intellectual and social movement history moved forward in the twentieth century
there were shifts for many in the importance of emphasizing class, race, and gender
as lenses to observe the past and present. We must also be aware that while there is a
substantive basis for James concluding that there was direct democracy in classical
Athens, ‘every cook can govern’ is also a notion he took from Lenin, and the latter
fused this with a strategy for how the Bolsheviks could retain state power.
For C.L.R. James, classical Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. is a
city-state increasingly distinguished by an integrated humanism and an enlarged
concept of citizenship. As recorded in his famous essay and pamphlet Every Cook
Can Govern, Athens was a direct democracy of popular councils and assemblies
taking responsibility for economic planning, judicial and military affairs, foreign
policy, and educational and cultural matters as well. The vast majority of government officials engaged in these organizational forms were chosen by a random process of ‘sortition’ (selection by lot).20 This mode of governance was also
distinguished by a high level of scrutiny and accountability for conduct in office.
James interpreted this as a process of instant recall. For James, classical Athens was a
conscious rejection of representative government. In James’s account, there were ‘no
experts’ and no group was given the status of a professional class above society.21
19 C.L.R. James, with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, led the Johnson-Forest
Tendency (1940–51) of the American Trotskyist movement. At the most their collective
had 75 members at any one time. In 1951 they became the Correspondence group and
started a periodical by the same name. Dunayevskaya split and founded the News & Letters
group in 1955 taking half the organization. C.L.R. James, Selma James, and Martin
Glaberman led a faction that split with the Correspondence Group, now led by James
Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, to form the Facing Reality group (1962–70). The following
are selected publications from some of the collective’s other members. Dunayevskaya (1998
[orig. 1958]), G.L. Boggs (1999), Glaberman (2002), J. Boggs (2011), S. James (2012).
While James’s first American sojourn was as an underground man and an illegal immigrant
during the Age of the CIO (1938–53), his second American sojourn was as a public intellectual, professor, and elder mentor of the Black Power and Black Studies movements
(1969–79). Two important projects bridge these periods. He engaged Trinidad party politics and the project of Caribbean federation (1958–62, 1965–1966). This was also the
period where he celebrated Ghana’s independence but increasingly offered public criticism
of Kwame Nkrumah, whom he mentored as a youth. His theorizing of direct democracy
and workers’ self-management (1947–58), where Athens was a later constituent element,
began to fade as the search for identity for colonized people was increasingly underscored.
The irony was that as Athens shifted to a metaphor for Caribbean nationalism in James’s
speeches, soon the Caribbean New Left generation (1968–83) re-appropriated aspects of
James’s Athenian direct democracy for post-independence politics.
20 James (1992: 8).
21 Ibid., pp. 9, 11.
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
Athenian direct democracy was marked by its professed ethic of social equality
and the claim that anyone who did not wish to directly participate in political life was
foolish.22 James observes the contributions of personalities like Solon, Cleisthenes,
and Pericles to advancing the democracy. Yet he takes special notice of the emergence of ordinary artisan craftsmen and the power of rowers in Athens’ emerging
Navy, and ‘the proletarians’ at the port of Piraeus.23
Nevertheless, slaves and women were excluded from the status of citizenship, and
we may question whether the majority of Athenians with citizenship status actually
directly governed. It is mistaken to suggest that James did not think the status of
women and slavery blemished classical Athens. Still, he insisted that the Athenian
city-state was the greatest civilization the world had ever known. This is a bold claim
based on the totality of the framework of ‘civilization’, an assessment of a society
based on notions of progress, culture, and development which are almost always
exclusionary. Yet James’s essay Every Cook Can Govern, which was first published in
Correspondence in June 1956, actually had its origins in a contribution to his political
organization’s internal bulletin a year before.24 It was explicitly part of a study
intended to give added philosophical and historical justification to his autonomous
Marxist group’s rejection of the vanguard party. Later it became a part of discussions among the Caribbean and African Americans in the Black Power and PanAfrican movements. Let us examine James’s original intentions more closely.
An accurate historicizing of James’s Every Cook Can Govern requires an engagement with contemporary literature on classical Athens, and scholarly works that
influenced James in the first half of the twentieth century. It also requires acknowledgment of ambiguities and discontents he had with the classical world even as he
undoubtedly was quite fond of it.
James’s early imperfect Athens: clashing with slavery and African civilization
In a documentary on his autobiographical memoir Beyond A Boundary (1963),
produced by Mike Dibb, James argued that Athens, as he received it as a young
colonial student in Trinidad, and an instructor at Queens Royal College in the 1920s,
gave him a vision of an integrated whole: the people appearing to directly govern, the
Olympic Games, and Greek tragedy. If James went back in time and visited that
society on the ground, he knew certain currents found there would not please or
amuse. But the Athens in his mind’s eye gave him critical foundations for imagining
a new self-emancipating society to build on.25
22 Ibid., p. 9.
23 Ibid., p. 30.
24 See ‘The Continuation of Democracy in Greece’ in the awkwardly labelled ‘Bulletin:
Vol. I.’ Dated 26 July 1955. It is a six page manuscript. It essentially is the first draft of
what became ‘Every Cook Can Govern’. C.L.R. James Collection. Schomburg Research
Library, New York City, NY.
25 James (1992), Dibb(1976).
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James’s critical engagement with classical antiquity is evident in an episode uncovered by Christian Høgsbjerg’s C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain, involving a
public dispute in 1933 between the art critic Stanley Casson, an expert on Greek
art who condemned an African art exhibition in Britain as backward and childish,
and the supposed Eurocentric James, who thrashed Casson for not understanding
the most cutting-edge anthropology or art criticism which reflected well on African
self-governing and civilizational capacities.26
James’s concern with the public manipulation of Greek ideals and the story of
Greek slavery appeared in his political journalism more than a decade before Every
Cook Can Govern. In a polemic with Max Lerner, author of his own study of
American civilization, James seemed to chastise Lerner on the same basis for
which he would later be criticized himself. James argued: ‘Democracy is of many
kinds. In Greece, in its best days, there was truly a wonderful democracy – if you
were a free man. The famous Greek democracy rested on the merciless exploitation
of hundreds of thousands of slaves.’ James takes Lerner to task for calling Greek
slave owners ‘basically democratic’ as part of a larger discourse on contemporary
politics in Germany: ‘That is exactly what they were not. They were basically slaveowners, just as the democracies of Britain, France, and America were and are ‘‘basically capitalistic’’ ’.27 Could James have a valid basis for reversing this claim? Was
he being opportunist here? His evolving studies of Athens may have led him to see
more contours in the history.
Athens as Hegelian social motion: a philosophy of history
In correspondence of August 9 and 18 of 1948, with his second wife Constance
Webb, later the first biographer of Richard Wright, James reveals he was studying
closely Michael Rostovtzeff’s A History of the Ancient World (Vol. 1), which focused
on ‘the Orient and Greece’.28 This is remarkable for our meditation on the sources
which contributed to Every Cook Can Govern for a number of reasons.
First, James was working on his Notes on Dialectics in 1947–48. This study of the
intersection of Hegel and Lenin as applied to revolutionary history and international
labour movements was rooted in speculation on the historical leaps by popular
movements. These leaps were most often ruptures with hierarchy and domination
and presented in embryo new phases of political economy, democracy, and socialism
not generally associated with the historical epochs in which they emerged.
Consequently, aspects of ‘direct democracy’ and ‘socialism’ were found in the
Puritan Revolution and French Revolution by James as expressed in spontaneous
popular mobilizations and upheavals.29
26 Høgsbjerg (2014: 71–74). See also Casson (1922).
27 James (1943: 4).
28 James (1996: 319–21). These James letters to Constance Webb were of 9 and 18 August
1948.
29 Quest (2016: 105–31).
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
It may disturb observers that in classical Athens James might have found a hidden
depth to a direct democracy or a latent essence of socialism which that stage of
political economy could never have produced, as measured by a post-scarcity
modern welfare state. But, for James, the essence of socialism was surfacing as a
direct democracy, not a modern political economy of a certain type. Thus James
spoke of the limits of the socialism Athens could have possibly produced in economic
terms.
In his reading of the intellectual legacies of Rostovtzeff, the Marxist ancient
historian G.E.M. de Ste Croix points to aspects of Rostovtzeff’s reading of classical
antiquity that remind me of James’s reading of classical Athens. A History of the
Ancient World had a way of illuminating contemporary political challenges by a
speculative reading projected onto the classical world as Hegelian essences which
were yet to come to fruition but were nonetheless present. De Ste Croix, while aware
that contemporary historians of an empiricist bent rejected such speculative philosophies of history, and not uncritical of Rostovtzeff while focusing primarily on the
latter’s treatment of Rome, offers a subtle rebuke to those who might reject his
methods. In de Ste Croix’s argument, if modern ideologies are not present in the
classical world it does not mean that ‘the unconsciousness of it, or complete lack of
interest, is the same as absence of ideology’. Both de Ste Croix and James make
similar warnings against those who decry teleology: just because the lives of working
people or oppressed people have no transparent ideology doesn’t meant they desire
their lives to have no meaning at all. Objectivity often is merely acceptance of the
prevailing ideology with which we have been raised transposed onto our historical
studies.30
James’s Every Cook Can Govern suggests that it was astonishing that, given the
power of the assembly in classical Athens, they never attempted to carry out socialist
doctrines. Still whatever they might have attempted may have had a limited economic basis.31 What are we to make of these seemingly countervailing tendencies in
James’s analysis? These seem strange projections for economic history given a society which was primarily rooted in what has been assumed to be slavery and feudal
modes of production. But James learned from Rostovtzeff that not merely commerce
but ‘capitalism’ was present in that society. It may seem peculiar to us but according
to Rostovtzeff, mass production in factories was present ‘but the factory system was
never adopted’. This implies a combined and uneven development as a transitional
process.
Industrial activity in Athens was based predominantly on slave labour. Slaves also
participated in trade and banking. Through Rostovtzeff, James concludes that the
Athenian slave had an essentially proletarian experience, in a political economy
designed not to favour them (though James wished to see the democracy as affirming). Rostovtzeff and James conclude that most Athenian slaves generally lived like
30 de Ste. Croix. (1998: 33–34).
31 James (1992: 23, 31).
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MATTHEW QUEST
the rest of the population, certainly not as an especially degraded caste.32 The
transition to capitalism was made easier by the existence of slavery in classical
Athens, something Atlantic World scholars generally accept for modes of production over two thousand years later, and that capitalist enterprise was limited by the
state. Rostovtzeff even speaks of the ‘socialist tendencies’ of classical Athenian
government in the fourth century BCE.33
Frank Rosengarten has noted that James travelled to Greece in the Fall of 1954
and this sparked some aesthetic meditations on sculpture but also a sense of the
integrated nature of that civilization.34 But James was not merely concerned with
art, but the politics and journalistic methods of his revolutionary organization.
Athens and the vanguard party
In a letter of 26 July 1955, six pages in length, we see a partial draft of Every Cook
Can Govern, which was originally published in Correspondence the following June.
But it was not merely the narrative that we have come to know, for in the letter
didactic commentary about revolutionary political organization is found among the
crisp fragments of concise Greek history.
James was working out perspectives which continued his journey beyond the
vanguard party idea towards a condemnation of representative government and
advocacy of direct democracy as the basis of social revolution for the 1950s. The
following passage of the letter should not be misread as boorish but marked by
reference to a Hegelian dialectical discourse with which his comrades were familiar.
Let me repeat, for you may think you understand this and that you accept it. In reality you
don’t. The conception is too foreign to modern thought and also too easily misrepresented.
The Greeks did not say and did not think that anyone could write plays like Aeschylus. They
did not think that anyone could be a philosopher like Aristotle. They did not think that
anyone could be a political head of state like Pericles. But. . . as far as the daily administration
of the government was concerned, something which was not the work of an artist or a genius,
but ordinary everyday affairs, every man was as good as any other man; and in particular, the
judgment of a lot. . . or a section of ordinary men chosen to represent the community, was
better than that of any single individual, however gifted. . . and certain to be less mischievous. 35
This passage has many contours. In certain respects, James reminds his comrades
in the Correspondence group that they do not really understand or accept a society
could do without representative government. Yet James also reminded them of the
32
33
34
35
Rostovtzeff (1945: 289–91).
Ibid., 316–18, 320.
Rosengarten (2008: 189–90).
James (1955: 1). C.L.R. James Collection. Schomburg Research Library, New York, NY.
This letter was labelled ‘Bulletin: Vol. I Continuation of Democracy in Greece’ but it
does not appear to be part of a conscious series or internally consistent journal.
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
fluidity of Hegel’s categories of cognition where essences of historical things disappear and reappear. James also underlines the point that the Athenian civilization
was marked by artistry and genius which were achievements of great individual
personalities. So he was not emphasizing, as he would elsewhere, that there was
creativity among ordinary people for political leadership. What we see then is that
James is interpreting direct democracy in Athens as a process of government and
administration where citizens could not make policy but could judge it. There is a
type of carry-over of James’s Leninism, where the judgment of popular councils of
citizens could exist side by side with the state power or city-state. Simultaneously,
James insisted that government did not need experts. Greek history was an archive
for meditation where contemporary politics could be formulated. James insisted
there was something in the Greek model which could help his revolutionary organization capture American proletarian sentiments when these insights were applied to
how Correspondence was edited in 1955. James continued:
That is the stage of society at which we have reached today [1955]. What we have to smash to
pieces [is this] idea that the ordinary man can only vote for people to represent him but the
actual work of government must be done by experts. That is the enemy. And that is why we
have to absorb and internalize; and get rid of this fetish of representative government so that
we, who produce the paper, can begin to think in terms of direct democracy. Don’t worry so
much about convincing other people. Convince yourselves first and the rest will follow.36
We must note James’s prescribed methodology. One did not do political education, agitation, and propaganda work to raise consciousness. Rather, the revolutionary who mediates uprisings and enhances others’ politics had to get their own mind
right. Instead of seeing themselves as a vanguard, his comrades had to develop a
method consistent with the belief that every cook could govern.
Still, James reminded his group that while they wanted to project direct democratic perspectives, this should not be taken as an endorsement of anarchy or direct
democracy as a process inside his Leninist organization.
And by the way, do not commit the foolishness of believing that what applies to the varied
classes. . . occupations. . . personalities of a city, which is an economic entity, also applies to
thirty people. We have some very intelligent people among us, but that does not prevent an
idiot in the modern, not the Greek, sense, turning up every now and then, and turning up in
the person of the very intelligent.37
It appears that James believed direct democracy could work in a small Athenian citystate (even a large country like the USA), because while it was too technologically
primitive to produce a socialist economy, it had a cross section of classes and talents
to draw on to produce this integrated humanism rupturing with representative
36 Ibid., p. 2.
37 Ibid., p. 3.
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MATTHEW QUEST
government. In contrast, for James, a small revolutionary political organization
needed to be centrally directed. But if we read James’s further commentary in the
letter carefully we see an overlap between his account of Greek history, his advocacy
of direct democracy, and his Leninism. It is not the break with representative government James claims it to be, even if we account separately for who was excluded
from the Greek polity.
James Boggs, an African-American autoworker with Alabama sharecropper roots,
who later with his wife Grace Lee Boggs, the Chinese-American philosopher, profoundly influenced the Black Power movement in Detroit, in an unpublished
‘Worker’s Report’ of 1956, detailed ordinary toilers’ reactions to the
Correspondence newspaper during the Cold War. Boggs, mentored by C.L.R.
James, felt his popular approach to classical Athens, Herman Melville, and
Shakespeare were equally valuable. C.L.R. had shown ordinary people were decisive
for the development of direct democracy in Athens and Boggs felt such concise
treatments should be the model for their circle’s historical and political journalism.
Yet Boggs also noted that the workers with whom he came in contact in Detroit
factories and neighbourhoods asked why to focus on democratic origins in Greece.
Why couldn’t the philosophical meditation have been on Egypt or China?38
Historical problems of slavery and civilization
Though he must have been aware of C.L.R. James’s essay and views on Athens,
Orlando Patterson, author of the critically acclaimed Freedom in the Making of
Western Culture and a member of the famous London study group with James of
1964–65, which included Walter Rodney, did not address Every Cook Can Govern in
his volume which analysed how liberty came to be constructed in Western culture and
Athens in particular. However, Patterson is in complete disagreement with an apparent
Jamesian notion. Freedom may be the character of the non-slave population in Athens
but cannot be attributed to the city-state as a whole. Patterson asserts that the condition
of slaves and women in Athens could not make liberty the common property of all.39
38 J. Boggs (1956: 7,11,15) ‘Workers Report.’ Undated unpublished manuscript. CLR
James Collection. Schomburg Research Library, New York, NY. This document acknowledges the publication of ‘Every Cook Can Govern’ in Correspondence in June 1956.
It does not acknowledge the presence of the Hungarian Revolution, central to the group’s
politics, which emerged later in the year. Those later events advanced the group’s analysis of direct democracy further into the contemporary world.
39 Patterson (1991: 55, 66–67, 70–71). Patterson does take note of a remarkable development in Solon’s Athens which appears to strengthen James’s Athenian Exceptionalism.
In Solon’s Athens, a substantial and successful effort was made to ‘buy back’ slaves of
Athenian descent from across the known world. Solon had wanted Athenian identity, at
least at that juncture in the city-state’s history, not to be degraded by slavery and be
distinguished by self-reliant workers—really a relative autonomy from their own elite.
This moment of anti-slavery imperative cannot be confused with the idea that Athens
was opposed to slavery for those born elsewhere. For classical references to this claim see
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
Walter Rodney’s original objection to James, insisting that classical Athens was
the greatest civilization the world had ever known, at the famous Black Writers
Congress in Montreal in 1968, was sanitized in his famous book The Groundings with
my Brothers (1969). David Austin has restored this challenge in a new transcript of
‘African History in the Service of Black Liberation’; Rodney questioned how Greece
could be a great civilization if it was marked by slavery, and he also inquired as to
whether the very term civilization had outlived its usefulness.40 Yet the dilemma of
Black Power era activists, most whom did not conduct independent research on
classical Athens, was that they increasingly rejected engagement with European
history as a thought experiment relevant to the African world. James’s meditation
was not meant to be an uncritical defence of Western civilization but part of teasing
out self-emancipating possibilities for ordinary people with an enlarged concept of
citizenship.
Athens as awkward metaphor for black power and labour’s self-emancipation
Modibo Kadalie, a member of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers
(1969–71) who for a time was in dialogue with C.L.R. James, recalls that Every
Cook Can Govern was read by members of this proletarian-oriented Black Power
organization in the midst of disputes as to whether the League should become a
vanguard party. Certain of the more Black Nationalist members were not fond of
exploring a European society as a case study, and most who discussed it were not
impressed by the overall logic of the pamphlet. Still, Every Cook Can Govern had a
way of helping certain League members to fight for greater democracy within the
organization, and to be more alert to the limits of representative government and
party politics which were previously accepted uncritically. This was particularly so
when the conflicting tendencies inside the League came to a head in 1971, when
those who opposed the increasing vanguard and undemocratic tendencies in the
group were purged.41
Emily Greenwood’s study of how Athens functioned in James’s anti-colonial
nationalism of 1958–62 deserves special consideration here. In a study of uses of
classics in Anglophone Caribbean intellectual history in the twentieth century,
Greenwood observes ways in which James, and his protégée Eric Williams, were
able to mobilize and reinvent the legacy of Athens in the context of Trinidad.
Aristotle (1930: 12.4) and West (1989 and 1992). It is remarkable that in a long oral
history dedicated to Patterson’s intellectual development as a historical sociologist, he
acknowledges James’s influence on his anti-colonial nationalism, and treatment of slavery
in his book Slavery and Social Death but reveals no perspective on James’s direct democratic reading of classical Athens, the critique of which is central to Freedom. See Scott
(2013: 96–242).
40 Rodney (2001:66–80); (1969: 51–59). The original rendering can be found as ‘African
History in the Service of Black Revolution.’
41 Kadalie (2013: 25–26).
251
MATTHEW QUEST
Instead of being intimidated by the classics, James and Williams saw it as a source of
movable tropes and changeable analogies which could blur different forms of government, and co-opt Athenian democracy into anti-colonial nationalism. They also
borrowed the tropes of classical Athenian rhetoric used in crowd politics before
popular assemblies, which maintained that, as a collective, ordinary citizens had the
wisdom to understand things that professional intellectuals could not. This
obscured what could be an unequal social contract between orator and crowd. It
is also notable that Williams, with James’s assistance in this period, was pursuing a
Fabian welfare state, not a direct democratic city-state.42
James pushed further in 1965–66 in both Trinidad and Guyana. He used the citystate of Athens (and Renaissance Italy) as a model to question elite party politics and
even marshalled Heraclitus in a discussion with Indo-Trinidadian sugar workers
whose independent labour action precipitated James being placed under house
arrest during a declared state of emergency by Williams. This peculiar moment of
James’s career, the only time he ran for electoral office with the Workers and
Farmers Party in Trinidad, ended up becoming a touchstone for the direct democratic tendency of the Caribbean New Left (1968–83).43 The basic thread in the
original essay about Athens continued to be present in his shift from anti-colonial
middle class politics to labour agitation at the post-independence moment. Ordinary
people, without formal scholarly training, had the wisdom to understand and govern
in a manner that professional intellectuals could never understand.
Why did Athens fail?
Classical Athens failed in James’s eyes as a result of not taking into account how
humanity laboured. He was not concerned primarily that they did not implement a
socialist society, however primitive, such a political economy could produce.44
Rather, he believed that slavery and subordination of women ultimately killed the
democracy. At the same time, James emphasizes that, while most critics, some radical,
‘sneer’ and take a swipe at the form of democracy present in classical Athenian institutions, as a result of the exclusion of women and slaves from citizenship, behind this
condemnation for the city-state as a whole is a lack of commitment to actually extending these ideals of citizenship in the contemporary world. This assertion is profound and still valid if we keep in mind that James’s intention was to selectively mine
archives of political thought to advance future struggles. While fully aware of the
limits of Western civilization, James believed, he could engage fruitfully with it
without getting caught in the web of its exclusions and subordination of the human.
Following W.H. Auden’s view of classical Athens found in Auden’s introduction
to the Portable Greek Reader, James’s American Civilization explains that modern
society is distinguished by great works of culture, progress, and development, but
42 Greenwood (2010: 210–14, 220).
43 James (1966) and Quest (2008: 206–07).
44 James (1992: 31).
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
there are no well-rounded civilized persons. Instead, there are specialists, artists who
know little of natural science, scientists with no wisdom about art and literature,
philosophers who have no interest in religion, clergy who are unconcerned with
politics, and politicians who know only politics, and ‘a very superficial’ conception of
that. Through James’s optics, under direct democracy the average classical Athenian
citizen engaged fully in a politics that encompassed philosophical, literary, and
cultural matters.45 Thus James is impressed with the fact that classical theatre
and the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides were popular, mass art forms where
the assembled democracy decided which plays should win prizes, through ten nonexpert judges who were selected by lot.46
The organization of Athenian governance, in James’s outlook, was such that an
integrated humanism constituted a national purpose which justified whatever hierarchy and bureaucracy was present. However, besides the subordination of women
and slaves, James was insufficiently aware of how this society was divided by masses
and elites. These elites, facilitators and legislators of government, often shaped the
popular will through a type of crowd politics. They were often privileged with a
well-rounded education and skilled in persuasive oratory, if not officially given the
status of a class above society.47
Though James was aware that intellectuals such as Aristotle and Plato opposed
what he terms a direct democracy, he inadequately takes issue with a subtle discourse
of guardianship in the Athenian national ethos, as best represented by Pericles’
famous Funeral Oration. Pericles famously argued that although all could not make
government policy, the character of Athenian citizens was such that all were competent to judge it.48 This seems a very profound limitation to be found in a government
of popular assemblies and committees where, not merely theoretically but structurally, citizens are purportedly meant to be directly sovereign.49
The riddle of ‘the Black Plato’
In James’s reflections on Athens, his condemnation of the average contemporary
trade union bureaucrat or parliamentarian for scoffing at ordinary working people’s
potential to directly govern society, appears to have a dual character. On one hand, it
45 James (1993: 153), Auden (1977 [orig 1948]:5).
46 James (1992: 13–15).
47 Ober (1989: 156–91), especially Chapter 4 ‘Ability and Education: The Power of
Persuasion’. More recently Ober has revisited the question of the balance of knowledge
between mass and elite in democratic Athens, arguing for the more successful distribution, sharing, and exchange of knowledge between demos and the elite through the
institutions of Athenian government. See Ober (2008).
48 The relevant passage for Pericles’s Funeral Oration can be found in Thucydides History
2.40.2.
49 James (1992: 24–25). See Popper (1963) for critical discussion of the ethos of both Plato
and Pericles in relation to narratives of a self-governing society.
253
MATTHEW QUEST
was a swift condemnation of the fraud of representative government;50 however, on
the other hand it could also function as a cautionary tale for progressive guardians
elevated above society. James, nicknamed ‘the Black Plato’ by the London Times,
often posed as a critical dialogic mentor for those who aspired to govern above
society, particularly in peripheral nations.
The London Times’ labelling of James as ‘the Black Plato’ must be perceived as
that annoying Eurocentric disposition to categorize Black achievement in the
shadow of assumed precursors of Western Civilization, instead of appreciating
Black autonomy and originality. James was not annoyed, and in some respects
subtly embraced this moniker, for he felt that the newspaper was saying he had
authored a certain body of work of social significance. However, this nickname
becomes prescient when speculation about his tendency to advise ‘Black Jacobins’
or philosopher-statesmen, and not everyday people, comes into focus.
James believed Plato’s Republic endeavoured through a speculative methodology
to arrive at a theoretical model for an ideal society which could replace direct democracy. This was a process where Plato means to advise those who would rule above
it, and thus for James had totalitarian implications. Yet James also believed that, as a
result of his rhetorical dialogic method, Plato ultimately concluded that the direct
democratic form was the best type for classical Athens.51
Curiously, James argues, originally addressing an American audience, that ‘in the
past’ there was justification for intellectuals considering the merits of Plato’s speculations. In modern industrial societies James concludes that there is no longer any
reason to avoid direct government by the common people. However, in peripheral
colonized nations, James had a different outlook, which is why it is worth revisiting
this matter of ‘the Black Plato’.52
James’s classical Athenian city-state is a type of project of democratic order, a metaphor of what the Caribbean and Africa can be under the proper leadership of progressive guardians. In James’s view, intellectuals, artists, and political leaders of the Third
World who reflect the popular forces from which they emerge, should not be confused
with the actual capacities of ordinary people, and expose the fraud of meritocracy of
governance in a world distinguished by white supremacy and colonialism.53
50
51
52
53
James (1992: 8–9).
Ibid., pp. 26–27.
Ibid., pp. 8, 26.
Abdullah (2005). I am indebted to a conversation with the Oilfield Workers Trade Union
education secretary, which helped to clarify this perennial Jamesian reading of classical
Athens. It nevertheless re-frames its contemporary meaning for peripheral nations as
aspiring to less than a direct democracy. In James’s personal copy of Werner Jaeger’s
Paideia he underlined: ‘if the Greeks were united they could rule the world’. In the
margin James wrote ‘W.I.’ for the West Indies. There is nothing direct democratic about
this passage. Jaeger (3:1945:289), C.L.R. James Collection, West Indiana Collection,
Alma Jordan Library, University of West Indies Trinidad & Tobago. I will subsequently
refer to James’s personal copies of Jaeger’s three volumes.
254
CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
In this context, James, speaking to a Caribbean audience in Modern Politics, raises
the spectre of Aristotle and asks, ‘What is the good life?’ Notably when he speaks to
an American audience about ‘the struggle for happiness’, James proclaims freedom
is ‘on the road’ to being ‘lost’—that is a conception of democracy independent of the
state. But for his Caribbean audience, as a result of the present condition of statecraft, ‘the good life’, where ‘the individual must have community with the state’,—
‘that today is impossible’. Where his Athenian ideals to save American civilization
explicitly evoke direct democracy, in a peripheral nation such as Trinidad, James’s
Athenian lesson is that the masses’ creativity is significant when the state properly
organizes society. On this basis, a post-colonial regime led by the national bourgeoisie under certain conditions can be said to represent the interests of everyday
people for a time.54
Still, James also drew a different analogy between classical Athenian city states
and Caribbean islands. These islands really had no isolated rural areas in comparison
to Latin American or African societies. The high level of social density, particularly
in Trinidad, suggested a relative urbanity for the entire country. With constant
contact with the outer world, modern systems of communication, high levels of
literacy, and productivity which approximated industrial life even under the plantation order, James’s fusion of Athenianism and Marxism could suggest, at least to
some of his admirers, that the ordinary working people of the Caribbean were in fact
modern enough to directly govern. The outstanding Caribbean New Left organization that propagated this as a consistent vision was Bukka Rennie’s New Beginning
Movement based in Trinidad. Tim Hector’s Antigua Caribbean Liberation
Movement also for a time advocated this type of direct democratic vision. Both
tried to modify the Athenian vision by placing it in conversation with the AfroCaribbean and Indo-Caribbean cultural heritage.55
Can ‘Athens’ be used as an instrument of social control?
James’s discourse on direct democracy in classical Athens may not be what it at first
appears. The model of direct democracy might be construed as an instrument of
politics that must generate or invent a body of ideal or worthy citizens distinguished
by their capacity for self-reliance. It might also function, perhaps beyond James’s
awareness, as an instrument of social control, since the imperfection of human
nature makes it questionable how such large numbers of self-governing citizens,
who are said to be the essence of such a unique society, shall be manufactured. The
city-state may strive to create a shared identity through discourse that will encourage
exemplary citizens. In this scenario, perhaps the state can take credit for the intellectual and political capacities of certain individuals among the masses, as representative of the type of society the ruling elite is cultivating. The state may advance a
type of education which affords citizens the opportunity to pursue a higher level of
54 James (1973: 103); (1993: 107).
55 Rennie (1980: 99). See also Quest (2007: 211–32).
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MATTHEW QUEST
self-development—imagined, somewhat Platonically, in terms of aspiring to the
perfection of beauty.56
We are aware that James knew of Hegel’s meditations on Greek art as a basis for
thinking about the city-state’s self-governing capacities.57 Philip Kain’s analysis of
Greek aesthetic ideals and myths about wholeness of personality and spontaneous
self-governing instincts present in Hegel and Marx speaks to concerns of James
scholars. Kain notices that Hegel and Marx believed, like James, that these human
capacities were on the road to being lost in the modern world. This leads James to
assert that Marx was pushing not for greater material production but dynamic
humanistic development as the meaning of progress. Yet Kain recognizes in
Marx a dual character.
First, there is an assertion by Marx that ‘socialism’ will be a holistic selfemancipating experience of labour located in their workplaces where the shadow
of state power will not be over ordinary people. Second, another implied approach to
government is present where their personality will increasingly be culturally developed outside their workplaces in their leisure time by a certain type of state. Thus
Kain suggests that the marshaling of Athenian ideals in Marx can place labour and
the state in conflict, a possibility with which James’s interpretation does not appear
to be concerned.58
James is aware that the aesthetic dimension of the Athenian city state is partially
an invented one. One way of seeing Athens was as a beautiful totality. But James
acknowledged early and later in his public life that Athens historically was not an
absolute masterpiece. Though as a framework of political philosophy it helped him
to imagine a new society, and posit an evolving heritage where it had been unfolding.
James personal copies of Werner Jaeger’s Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture
(3 volumes) are well marked up and give an indication of this alertness to political
aesthetics and his attentiveness to other matters. In the front of Volume 1, James
noted Jaeger is ‘a defeated aristocrat’ but nevertheless finds his scholarship valuable.
James underlined Jaeger’s reflection that Aristotle defined the relation of art to
nature by suggesting that art imitated nature. Art was invented to compensate for
its defects. This view assumes that nature has an all-pervading purpose, and it sees
in nature art’s prototype. Jaeger reinforced the idea of popular instinctive genius
James found in Rousseau and Michelet when he argued: ‘since nature herself does
what is right without having learn[ed] how, she must possess the genius of selfeducation . . . [and] she develops her masterly skill by using it directly on the task on
which she is concerned’.59 This concern was the creation of the Athenian city-state
in ideal terms.
56
57
58
59
Dynneson (2008: xii–xiii, 1–5, 194–98).
See Hegel (1920).
Kain (1980: 236–37, 249–51); (1982).
Jaeger (3:1945: 28–29).
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
An Athenian ideal of culture: the perfect state comes from within self-development
Jaeger argued, and James enthusiastically underlined, that the fourth century BCE is
the classical epoch in the history of paideia, ‘if we take that to mean the development
of a conscious ideal of education and culture’. From an intellectual point of view, the
fourth century is the fulfilment of the promise, of the fifth and earlier centuries. But
from another perspective, it is also an age of tremendous revolution. The previous
century had been dedicated to the task of bringing democracy to perfection, of
attaining the ideal of self-government extended to all free citizens.60
James’s reading of Jaeger’s Paideia also informed his reading of Plato. James
underlined Jaeger’s claim that ‘Plato proposes that education should aim to create
the perfectly just state within each of us – after all, that is how actually existing states
are created. He had given up the contemporary state as incurable’.61 Though Plato
desired to tutor elites to govern, this insight seemed to paradoxically reinforce a
libertarian impulse in James, for the perfect state was to come from within, and the
existing states previously known had failed. But the nuances continue to be
complicated.
James is also fond of the rhetoric of Demosthenes. This classical Greek orator is
found in Every Cook Can Govern, as well as in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution in
conversation with African market women.62 Jaeger informed James that, in Against
Aristocrates, Demosthenes was astute in recognizing that elite politicians desired to
help their country no further than ‘plastering a wall here and repairing a wall there’.
Similarly, in On The Crown, Demosthenes argued that appeals to politicians had
been useless and that people must be educated to a new mentality—for politicians
always said what the public wanted to hear anyhow. James found this interpretation
‘quite’ good and agreed with Jaeger that Demosthenes’s speeches must be understood as not moving toward advocacy of a political party. Rather he was transforming into a ‘popular leader’.63
C.L.R. James is a defender of Pericles against the challenges of direct democracy,
which James could be fascinated with, but could also view as excessive when mobilized against a popular leader.64 Pericles ‘ruled Athens as general command for some
thirty years’. James saw Pericles as an instance where citizens delegated him to rule
repeatedly but could subject him to censure and instant recall. James is fond of
Jaeger’s interpretation of what happened to Pericles: Pericles began to be challenged
by the spirit of the direct democracy, because his rule, according to Jaeger, appeared
to be ‘a concealed tyranny. Yet the logic of history led to the conclusion that, if the
democratic state was to maintain itself, it must have the right kind of man as its
leader’. James found this assessment by Jaeger ‘quite’ good. Jaeger believed:
60
61
62
63
64
Ibid., 2:1944: 5.
Ibid., 3:1945: 200.
James (1977: 131).
Jaeger (3:1945: 276–77).
James (1992: 24–25).
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MATTHEW QUEST
That was in fact the chief . . . problem of democracy, for the democratic principle was bound
to develop ad absurdum whenever the democratic state attempted to be more than a strictly
regulated system of ratifying the decisions of its representatives, and really become the
domination of the masses. From its appearance, therefore, the aim of the educational movement led by the sophists was not to educate the people but to educate the leaders of the
people. . . the pupils of [the sophists] were the men who wished to become politicians and
eventual leaders of the states.65
The hero, artist, and ordinary person as one?
Let us explore James’s affinity for Athenian ideals of citizenship, and its critical discourse, further. When a common substance of citizenship is said to exist that all can
partake in, modelled on Athenian ideals, a blurring of workers’ movements and
nationalist movements can take place where both are dissatisfied with the limits of
representative government. But when it accesses this dynamic this state can kill its
direct democratic potential. Through its simplicity and monumentality, James’s Athens
was constructed in such a manner that its citizens were said to have a shared past where
the ordinary person, the hero, and the artist were one.66 Surely great individuals may
approximate this multidimensional character portrait, which James accesses from his
Greek archive, but for this to distinguish an entire society would be quite remarkable.
He seems to know this privately as he projects these ideals publicly.
Nicole Loraux has illustrated that the Funeral Oration, as an Athenian genre,
offers a peculiar representation of a direct democracy because it has so many aristocratic implications. It does not really renounce elites and tends to define democracy in non-democratic terms. The drawing of lots to decide who will govern, an
aspect central to James’ direct democratic conception, is totally ignored by the genre.
In fact, among the abundant literature that has survived from classical Athens, no
statement of direct democratic political theory appears to have endured. Loraux asks
why the shift towards a more direct democratic way of life was not accompanied by a
theoretical justification or a defence against counter-attack by oligarchs?67 James did
not speculate on this dilemma in his study.
65 Jaeger (1:1939: 286–87).
66 See Mosse (2001). Mosse’s discussion of the intersection of nationalism and workers
movements and their dissatisfaction with representative government from Napoleonic
Europe to Nazi Germany, combined with nation-states’ desire to co-opt and disorient, by
cultural activities, popular movements striving for direct democracy, is an outstanding
model for insurgent cultural studies. He explains presciently how self-governing aesthetic-political ideals, with their origins in classical Athenian culture, have been borrowed throughout time to both enhance and disrupt instincts toward direct democracy.
Linking Mosse’s and James’s studies of popular culture is excellent for enhancing critical
reflection. I thank Paul Buhle, who knew both Mosse and James, for conversations which
amplified this insight.
67 Loraux (2006: 219–20, 223–24, 226, 228–30, 233).
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CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
We must also remember that the Funeral Oration was not the same type of speech
that one might make before a popular assembly, instead it has the spectre of war,
which was a persistent reality of Greek city states, hanging over it. It was almost as if
these self-governing Athenians peculiarly needed to be reminded all the time of their
special character. When we observe closely James’s critical discussion of Third
World anti-colonial politicians, consistent with The Black Jacobins, we see repeatedly how they ominously remind ordinary people of their urgent tasks while often
acting not to allow them to hold the reins of society. They do this often with an
awareness of direct democracy, a concern for the spectre of ‘anarchy’, and with the
flare of classical rhetoric.68 There is a subtle discourse of the division of labour in the
genre of the Funeral Oration where self-government is divided between those who
are administrators, those who make decisions, and those who show mere concern.
There is an aristocracy of talent in the discourse of the Funeral Oration and the role
of the crowd is approval not initiative. In addition, there is a preoccupation with
establishing a type of national identity through ‘participation’ in civic affairs rather
than implementing a direct democracy.69
James was aware through Jaeger’s Paideia that perhaps Thucydides worked up
and invented Pericles’ personality as a whole and of the importance of the Funeral
Oration as not merely a brilliant account of soldiers’ prowess but also an idealized
rhetorical construction of the whole Athenian state. I believe that James would have
welcomed the subsequent scholarly insights of Loraux.
Contingency, Greeks and the good life
James, clearly animated by Greek ideals of a good life, and not just by Marxist
historical materialism, often minimizes contingency (chance and luck) in human
affairs and at times relies on false terms of rational self-sufficiency. This has implications for the ability to imagine a direct democracy and reveals moments where he
forgets himself. If James can be read as alert to contingency in evaluating statesmen,
he rarely acknowledged this in assessing the potential of labour’s self-emancipation.
We should be clear this does not mean that James has a utopian conception of the
self-governing abilities of workers.
James, unlike many, was born with more than adequate personal intellectual and
political capacities. All human beings are not endowed with comparable skills in
reading, writing, oratory, philosophy, and political strategy. Despite all this, James
was often faced with fragile health and the potential of economic hardship—as are
many ordinary people. More importantly, his fortunes depended on outside forces:
Would friends and family care for him? Would the wider society share his ambitions
and projects? Would political institutions (official society and those he created to be
68 James (1963: 206). This is especially so where Toussaint L’Ouverture in the Haitian
Revolution lectures the newly freed slaves about ‘anarchy’ and the responsibilities of
citizenship that must fall short of direct self-government.
69 Loraux (2006: 239–41).
259
MATTHEW QUEST
insurgent), based on human association, be subject to reversals of fortune? Personal
achievement, politics, and love were not always under his control. In his meditations
on ‘the good life’ of Athenian direct democracy, James did not always consider the
fragility of the human condition or his own. This is partially understandable because
it is the task of a revolutionary to strive for progress beyond what is ordinarily
believed possible. But when theorizing a direct democracy and a self-emancipating
society these are not just personal meditations but ethical questions about matters
between people. For what happens by luck does not come through individual selfgoverning actions alone. To aspire to make a good life through the power of ‘reason’,
safe from chance or risk, can become a tragic and authoritarian project. The contours
of Greek philosophy and literature at times overlook these dilemmas while at other
junctures ponder these challenges.70
The crafting of James’s Athens: competent authority and discontents
James’s study of the classical Athenian city state and its lessons for direct democracy
can appear to some as a less than scholarly gloss with the character of propaganda
rather than serious education, but diligent research in James’s archive reveals
the actual historical sources he used to come to conclusions about Athenian direct
democracy. Somewhat overturned by the scholarship of recent generations,
‘the competent authorities’ he leaned on can be surveyed for further critical
reflection.
In the pages of Correspondence in August of 1956, on the readers’ letters page, can
be found concerns by readers from New York City and British Columbia, Canada
that James’ Every Cook Can Govern painted ‘an overly rosy picture, although basically it is not too great a strain on the realities’. ‘The . . . account of democracy in
Ancient Greece was quite good, although I think there were errors in it. But on the
whole, it presented a better picture than we usually get.’ The ‘Editor’s Reply’ was
quite extensive. And the reader begins to see James’s engagement with the secondary
literature beyond Rostovtzeff and Jaeger. James reveals that Alfred Zimmern’s The
Greek Commonwealth (1931) and Gustav Glotz’s The Greek City and Its Institutions
(1929) were major influences on his perspective.
Both these scholars, while not defending slavery, oppose the view that the Greek Democracy
was possible only because of the leisure of a population of slave owners. Zimmern points in a
moving paragraph how ‘all this is false, false in its interpretation of the past and in its
confident pessimism as to the future, willfully false, above all, in its cynical estimate of
human nature.’ Glotz goes further and shows how it was actually the Athenian workers,
in continuous struggle against the aristocracy and oligarchs, who produced the democracy
and how the workers were the strongest defenders of the democracy. He goes on to show how
later the developing capitalist economy, intensified by war, created a slave labor force of a
70 Nussbaum (1986: 1–8, 344–45).
260
CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
qualitative different character which threw the free workers out of productive employment,
impoverished them and brought about the decline of the democracy.71
In response to critics, James felt the need not only to separate out the direct
democratic character of Athens from slavery but also to address the question of a
woman’s place in that culture. He also revealed more sources for Every Cook Can
Govern. J.P. Mahaffey’s Social Life in Greece: from Homer to Menander (1925), Larue
Van Hook, Greek Life and Thought (1923), A.W. Gomme’s Essays in Greek History
and Literature (1937), and H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks (1951) shaped James’s views on
gender.72
(1) The seclusion of Athenian women was not like that of the Oriental harem since they
participated in the dramatic and religious festivals which were an organic part of the social
and political life of the Greek city-state; (2) the freedom of women of the working classes was
much greater than that of women of the aristocracy; (3) the literature of the late 5th century
shows that the role and claims of women were becoming a lively issue.
However, today the question of women’s place in Athenian society is a very difficult one
because our own conception of the family and equality of women is still so confused and to a
large extent still governed by the idea that equality means the adoption of women of the
habits and manners of men. The understanding of women’s role in modern society from the
standpoint of the working class is just beginning and will in time illuminate her role in
Athenian society (James’s numeration).73
In the unearthing of these fragments we see James’s concern for how studies of
classical Athens should consider woman’s autonomy from the vantage points of a
pre-capitalist and modern society. This requires examining woman’s development
from the perspective of the spaces where their own political thought may have
emerged, in artistic and theological spaces, and in carrying out unwaged work in
the home. This reveals the influence of Selma James, C.L.R.’s third wife and comrade, and the analysis found in her pamphlet, A Woman’s Place (1952). Furthermore,
recent scholarship in the field by Kostas Vlassopoulos mirrors these earlier interpretations by C.L.R. and Selma.74 Still, writing before the emergence of feminist
classical scholarship, C.L.R. James was not aware of how Athenian patriarchal creation myths, like that of Pandora and the story of the Amazon war, created a type of
sexual social contract where women were considered ‘the passive half’ of the polis.
Women were artificially ‘created out of earth’ and thus were said to belong to an
71 Editors’ Reply (1956: 4), See Zimmern (1956 [orig.1911]) and Glotz (1965 [orig.1929]).
See Cohen (2000) for a more contemporary study of how the Athenian slave economy was
distinguished by a significant number of wealthy slaves who were powerful entrepreneurs
and civil servants and who maintained independent households.
72 See Mahaffey (2014 [orig. 1925]), Van Hook (1977 [orig. 1923]), Gomme (1962 [orig.
1931]), and Kitto (1991 [orig. 1951]).
73 Editors’ Reply (1956: 4).
74 S. James (2012: 13–31) and Vlassopoulos (2007: 33–52).
261
MATTHEW QUEST
inferior race apart. Where they strove to be warriors like ‘men’ they found themselves defeated and subordinated as ‘damsels in distress’.75
Steve Johnstone reminds us that scholars of classical Athens have often conflated
the character of popular assemblies and popular courts. According to Johnstone, it
was out of the popular courts, rather than the assemblies, that what we know of a
potential direct democratic Athenian identity emerged.76 James’s Every Cook Can
Govern can be accused of blurring the lines of the character of Athenian popular
courts and assemblies to assert a society where no experts over-lorded government.
He argued that the Athenians were great believers in law, ‘both written and unwritten’.77 What did this mean for James?
Bolshevism and Athens
James saw in the Athenian popular courts judges or magistrates who became a ‘mere
clerk of the court’. Juries did not decide only on the facts and look to judges for
information on the law. ‘They decided on the law as well as on the facts.’78 Litigants
argued for their own cause, though they could hire someone (logographoi) experienced in the law to write their speech, and then read it for themselves. James placed
Athenian popular courts in conversation with Bolshevik experimentation with
‘people’s courts’79 in the Russian Revolution during ‘its heroic period’.
James may have the heroic period of the Russian Revolution mistaken despite
having written the first anti-Stalinist history of the Communist International. While
it is inspiring to conceive of ordinary people in Athens crafting the law, not just
interpreting the facts of specific cases under the direction of professionals, James was
mystified that Lenin had convinced labour to police itself for his authoritarian state
instead of challenging it, as represented by the people’s courts of that historical
moment in Russia.80
Perhaps Nicholas Jones’s The Associations of Classical Athens contributes most to
helping to reassess James’s Athenian direct democracy, and his affinity for Rousseau,
who also relied on the Athenian archive for experimental political thought, and the
thread which has James ultimately meditating on Soviets, and the workers’ councils
of Russia, in relation to Lenin. Jones’s Athens was a place, counter-intuitive in many
ways, where the integrated humanism of the ordinary citizen doesn’t seem to be
present. Furthermore, there is a need to account for what was in reality a low level of
75
76
77
78
79
80
Loraux (2000: 7–8, 33). See also Pomeroy (1995).
Johnstone (1999: 128–33).
James (1992: 10).
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid., pp. 10–11.
Ibid., pp. 10–11. See also James (1993) and Quest (2012). James’s Leninism and advocacy
of direct democracy could become intertwined in an ambiguous discourse; James implausibly concluded that Lenin was both a patron of direct democracy and that he
smashed the autonomy of the soviets (workers councils) in the Russian Revolution.
262
CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
participation among citizens. The city-state, as central government, was trying to
cultivate the popular will. It was trying to incorporate all legitimate participation
while insisting all must participate. Animated by Solon’s law, the city-state validates
and regulates associational life, which Jones makes clear, was overwhelmingly outside
the government. In this manner the state often responded to associational life, which
could be a haven for aristocrats, but also at times the marginal, as subversive. The
city-state governed under the premise of egalitarianism. But the way in which it
framed direct democracy, made participation, by those who were recognized as
citizens, actually involuntary.81 This can be an authoritarian dilemma even if all
humans were included under the category of citizenship. It is difficult to fathom this
if we assume simply that all must be included without a colour, class, or gender bar.
Instead, we should begin to re-imagine what the Grenada Revolution may have
learned from James’s Athenian outlook as it wished to have a one party state facilitate
assemblies or zonal councils for the people. In Grenada there were political prisoners
with dissenting viewpoints where they could not be transparently brought to trial.82
‘The questions are still disputed:’ James’s need for the Athenian City-state
We might close this section reflecting on James’s Athens by considering his concise
treatment in the lectures in Modern Politics. James began his lectures, aware that ‘the
questions are still disputed’, about how the Athenians ‘rejected representative government and followed a pattern of direct democracy’. ‘I am going to make this as
vivid as possible’.
I doubt if you could take thirty or forty people today from anywhere and put them into some
government, however small it might be and ask them to run it. It is not because government
is so difficult. The idea that a little municipality, as we have them all over the world today,
would have more difficulty and complex problems than the city of Athens is quite absurd. It
is that they have lost the habit of looking at government and one another in that way.83 (James’s
italics)
James knew that ‘there were great gaps in our knowledge of many aspects of
Greek life’, and that the facts that scholars of classical Athens had gathered were
‘variously interpreted’.
Yet James insisted that ‘history is a living thing’ and was not merely a body of
facts. The direct democratic position James originally took in Every Cook Can
Govern explicitly built on and transcended the latest scholarship of his time. It
was based on something more: ‘our own belief in the creative power of freedom
and the capacity of the ordinary man to govern. Unless you share that belief [about]
the ancient Greeks, you cannot understand the civilization they built’.84
81
82
83
84
Jones (1999: 288–92, 299–300, 306).
See Joseph (2010: 4–31), Quest (2007: 213–215).
James (1973: 2–4).
James (1992: 24).
263
MATTHEW QUEST
While the intentions and conflicting tendencies of classical Athens are still in
dispute, reflection and scrutiny as to how direct the Athenian democracy was still
has currency—providing we expect that democracy entails that the majority should
actually govern. The truth is that even most progressive people, even those who
speak occasionally of popular democracy, are substantially content with a mere
republic based on electoral politics. James was seeking to go beyond the one party
state and the electoral politics of the welfare state.
However, the perennial sustainability of James’s Every Cook Can Govern, as a
concise study of the Athenian city state and its meanings, cannot ultimately rise and
fall on the verdict of the exclusions of that society. Neither can it be discarded
because of an awareness that Athens in many ways embodies a truth that had
been ‘baked for generations and hardened from an initial error’ as Jennifer
Tolbert Roberts has remarked in Athens on Trial. ‘Athens’ should not be held in
special contempt simply because in many ways it is an allegory which fuses democracy with state power and is surrounded by discourses that fear and undermines
popular democracy from many sectors even through its populism. It is a social
dynamic that those who resist and wish to topple hierarchy and domination must
learn if it possibly can be overcome. Roberts also notes that Alfred Zimmern, who
influenced James, was one of many of his time, who insisted Greece was the greatest
civilization and example of social organization the world had ever seen.85
How much further can a city-state or nation-state push itself as a minority rule
regime through periodic elections and subordinate participation? What is popular
about assemblies and committees subordinate to state power? Can we throw away
Athens for all it represents uniquely as an anti-democratic tradition in Western
thought as if these contradictions cannot be found elsewhere including in the
modern world? This is what James’s push for direct democracy through the trope
of classical Athens was trying to get at.
James’s comrade Marty Glaberman, who as publisher based in Detroit kept Every
Cook Can Govern from languishing in obscurity, suggested at a conference on
James’s intellectual legacies that slavery could be found all over the ancient
world, as could the subordination of women and feudal relations. In similar and
in different more modern forms, there are still relations of exclusion and domination
on a global scale. Humanity was not and is not what it should be—even in the postcivil rights, post-colonial era. Yet James reminds us that it is out of such fragmented
historical environments that experiments in framing social revolutions and designing a free society happen, and it is out of that incomplete heritage that future battles
will be inspired to sweep aside institutionalized oppression and obstacles that we
place in our own path.86
85 Roberts (1994: xi, 3, 12).
86 Glaberman (2001).
264
CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF C.L.R. JAMES’S CLASSICAL ATHENS
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