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THIS IS ANOTHER 2 PART PIECE DONE BY TIM HECTOR. I FOUND IT QUITE INTERESTING AND INTRIGUING. IT MAY TAKE 30 TO 60 MINUTES OF YOUR TIME TO READ THROUGHLY AND DIGEST. AGAIN IT SPEAKS TO THE UNIQUENESS OF THE CHARACTERISTICS WE CARIBBEAN PEOPLE HAVE HARNESS DUE TO OUR HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, AND THE VAST ARRAY OF PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THE REGION.

ONE PART OF THE DISCUSSION IN THIS CENTERS AROUND TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE AND THE POLICIES HE DEVELOPED IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION...THESE POLICIES WERE SOMEWHAT SOCIALIST BUT WERE CARRIED OUT BEFORE KARL MARX WAS BORN.

ALSO, THE BRILLIANT TRINIDADIAN CLR JAMES, HAD FORSEEN THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION IN AMERICA. NOW, BEING THAT JAMES HAD SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT MARXISM AND LENINISM FORM OF SOCIALISM I THINK FROM HIS WORDS COME ACROSS MORE AS AN ANARCHIST.



May 29, 1998


The Making of Caribbean Philosophy


Part I

Following is the text of a speech I made to the Caribbean Studies Association, today, Thursday May 28. The Caribbean Studies Association meeting here at Perry Bay at the Multipurpose Centre is the largest gathering of scholars and cultural workers ever to come to Antigua and Barbuda.

To begin any discussion of Caribbean philosophy, that is, ideas that moved the history of the Caribbean and the world, one must of necessity begin with perhaps the most amazing person of all in Caribbean history. I speak of the leader of the only successful slave revolution in history and the first black man to establish a free-state in the New World, the first black Republic. That man, of course, is Toussaint L'Ouverture.

On January 26, 1801, at the very dawn of a new century Toussaint was handed the keys to the city of Haiti by a French Governor.

He at once abolished slavery and commanded slave ships in the harbour to surrender their slaves as free men, forthwith.

Toussaint, in the name of the State, took possession of two-thirds of the plantations in Haiti from which the whites had fled or died. The state had taken charge of the commanding heights of the economy.

Note well that Toussaint made this thorough-going change, in direct opposition to the overwhelming majority of the African slaves who had fought in his revolutionary ranks. The slaves wanted above all else, to escape from the dreaded plantations to the independence of farming their own land.

Toussaint virtually militarised production on both plantation owned by the State and privately held plantations, workers were forbidden to leave without "a legal permit to do so."

The underlying fact is that Toussaint had nationalised production. He had too, allowed private property to continue, in pursuit of the policy of reconciliation with the white owners. I should perhaps interject, here that at the start of the Haitian revolution there were some 30,000 whites. By 1801 only ten thousand whites remained. In the revolution some 100,000 blacks or one-fifth of the black population had been killed. Their deaths involved the loss of much needed skills in agriculture, industry, commerce and construction.

Toussaint not only nationalised production and made state property co-exist with private property. He did more. In 1801, mark you, Toussaint made it the law of the land that pregnant women must have a month's rest before and after delivery. So that Malouet, no friend of the Haitian Revolution, wrote this: "All accounts agree that there is a decrease in mortality among negro infants. This is ascribed to absolute rest enjoyed by pregnant women under the better working conditions."

Toussaint did more. The workday began at 5 o'clock in the morning and ended at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, with 3 hours rest in between. Toussaint had established the 9 hour working day, long before Europe dared.

Whipping was forbidden, and when Toussaint learned that his second-in-command Dessalines was resorting to whipping on plantations under his control for infractions, Toussaint threatened to strip him of his command, at once. Today in the Caribbean learned men, who attended the great western inns of court are advocating the use of the whip as criminal punishment. Toussaint was light years ahead of these modern Caribbean reactionaries.

Toussaint was interested in 1801 in export led growth, and ordered the cultivation of export crops like coffee, with land concessions as an inducement.

Toussaint encouraged the restoration and construction of buildings by local architects and builders as a source of national pride. He established schools. Had bridges built; he initiated a programme of road building that soon enabled four-wheeled vehicles to be used for the first time in the country.

Toussaint worked with five secretaries, dictating letter after letter, memo after memo, throughout the night and signing nothing that he did not at first read. He slept only two hours a night. He lived for days on a spare and Spartan diet of water and a few bananas. This is in striking contrast to the conspicuous consumption practised by modern day Caribbean rulers.

Toussaint invented a new state-craft arriving, they say with lightning speed to inspect agricultural management, building programmes, or the quality of the schools. His inspections became an institution and raised the level of efficiency, as he was accompanied by knowledgeable experts. Haitian productivity increased unbelievably.

The English writer James Stephens remarked in this respect "So raped was the progress of agriculture, that it was a fact, not believed at the time in England that Haiti promised to yield in the next crop, one third part as large a return of sugar and coffee as it had ever given in its most prosperous years. This considering all the ravages of a ten years' war, and the great scarcity of all necessary supplies from abroad, is very surprising, yet has since clearly appeared to be true."

Without a doubt then Toussaint's philosophy of government and statecraft had kindled the enthusiasm of the people of revolutionary allowing them to overcome insuperable odds.

Concerned as ever to promote reconciliation between black and mulatto, and black and white, Toussaint granted a general amnesty without a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

So far so good.

A devout catholic himself Toussaint allowed his private prejudice to govern public policy. He ordered the military to destroy voodoo altars and to detain any who persisted in Voodoo practices. This was a policy doomed to failure.

I have outlined Toussaint's revolutionary policy the product of his revolutionary philosophy. Where did Toussaint get this philosophy.

Remember this nationalisation of the major means of production was carried out by Toussaint in 1801, 17 years before the great Karl Marx was born, and 47 years before the Communist manifesto, one of the great philosophical and political works of all time, a point conceded by all modern thinkers of note.

Toussaint had gone well ahead of the French thinker Mably who denounced private property as the chief source of evil men do to their fellowmen. Mably had argued that only through communal ownership of the means of material production can justice be ensured and the minority of the strong prevented from oppressing the liberty of the weaker majority. Mably however, went back to the pre-feudal communalism as the solution. Not so Toussaint. Another French philosopher, Moudly, in his Le code de la nature, had outlined the doctrine that the sole source of injustice and misery is the unequal distribution of property.

Voltaire, Diderot, Helevétius and the great Encyclopedists had with great passion argued that change would avail nothing, unless accompanied by guarantees against the unequal accumulation in private hands.

Rousseau did not advocate the abolition of private property, but he denounced competition, blatant inequality, the unbridled accumulation of property, wealth and power.

The French Revolution itself occurring at the same time as Toussants Haitian Revolution did not encourage nationalisation, nor the freedom Toussaint granted to women, nor the shortening of the working day. In fact the French Revolution had proclaimed among the sacred rights of every man and citizen the right to property in unlimited amounts. Though to be fair, Robespierre passed a law aimed imposing state control upon the unlimited acquisition and enjoyment of resources.

The vast transfers of the property of the enemy classes, the aristocracy and the Church, the austere Robespierre in control or not, did not go to the State in revolutionary France but to private individuals who enriched themselves, becoming the classic nouveau riche of the great French Revolution of 1789.

The point ought to be clear, Toussaint put his Caribbean country of newly liberated slaves at the head of the world class, in philosophy, in theory and practice. Hundreds of black slaves who in 1790 trembled before the back of a single armed white man, were now in the vanguard of philosophy, beyond Rousseau, beyond Diderot and Voltaire, my favourite Encyclopaedists. From the pits, the very bottom of human degradation, chattel slavery in the plantation Caribbean, Toussaint had catapulted himself and revolutionary Haiti to the head of the class in human thought and the realisation of that thought. The first Black Republic, in human history, had come onto the world stage, not with a whimper, but with a military, political and philosophical bang. The most backward had become the most advanced apostles of human freedom. A revolution, a genuine revolution, leaps a thousand years in but a day.

I have I think made and substantiated claims for Toussaint and Caribbean philosophy more boldly than any of the condescending historians of Europe and those who follow Eurocentric historical writing. I do not think any can refute. But there will be those quick to note that Haiti is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But to assert that, and leave it there, is to forget that for more than 50 years Europe and America combined to bring Haiti to its knees. Be that as it was, there can be no doubt either that Toussaint as soldier, as statesman, as exponent of Caribbean philosophy had no peer in his time. Others wrote rigorous and voluminous philosophical tomes, still poured over by scholars. But in the combination of philosophic theory and practice, Toussaint had no peer.

Napoleon Bonaparte, Europe's only rival of Toussaint, had a mean-spirited racism in his character. He persecuted the mulatto, General Dumas. In July 1802 Napoleon banned black and coloured people from coming to France. He set about to restore slavery in Haiti. And, from Haiti and the French colony in Louisiana, Napoleon proposed to conquer the United States, having first secured the agreement of the Revolutionary United States to restore slavery in Haiti. All that is a matter of record.

Toussaint, unlike Napoleon, was anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-monarchy. The Caribbean through Toussaint had made an imperishable claim to be among the foremost in the struggle for freedom and a new and higher humanity.

I leave 1801 and race to 1901 and do not be surprised when I get to 2001! What was the situation, the human condition, like in the Caribbean at this juncture in time.

Patrick Bryan writing in 1899 very succinctly and very aptly had this to say: "Her Majesty's black and coloured subjects .... have to choose between death from starvation in their native islands and suffering and ill-treatment in Santo Domingo, where many have sought employment under the circumstances that their native islands are merely Islands of Death". Merely Islands of Death. A most graphic and descriptive phrase.

And just in case you think this is a literary exaggeration, let statistical reality confirm the description.

In a remarkable piece of contemporary Caribbean scholarship Winston James in his Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia published this year provides us with the necessary data. Between 1910 and say 1930, Dr. Winston James points out in his very fine book "Barbadian men lived on average 28.5 years, and while Barbadian men were dead before their twenty-ninth birthday, Jamaican men lived to almost 36 years, Trinidadians lived to 37.6. In 1920 - 22 Barbadian women died before they were 32, while their Jamaican and Trinidadian sisters lived to 38.2 and 40.1 years respectively."

I add that in Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, men here lived an average of 29.5 years with women dying before they were 32. These were indeed Islands of Death.

The great Caribbean figure and poet Claude McKay writing in 1912, in a poem aptly entitled "Hard Times" articulated the feelings of the labouring population in the language really spoken by men. Claude McKay wrote:

De mo we wuk, de mo time hard
I don't know wha fe do
I ben my knee and pray to Gahd
Yet t'ings same as befo
De taxes knockin at me door
I hear de bailiff's voice
Me wife is sick, can't get no care
But gnawn me like mice
De picknies hab to go to school
without a bite fe taste
And I am working like a mule
While Backra sittin in the cool
hab nuff nynyam fe waste
The poet had expressed it as only a poet can in verse, showing the harsh realities of race and class. While a waterfront worker in Jamaica, at the dawn of the 20th century, in the great Waterfront strike in Kingston, when some 800 - 1000 wharf workers went on strike, expressed it this way in the Daily Gleaner. He wrote "We, the labouring classes, do strike for higher wages, for we are under the advantage of the Agents of ships, we asked for more wages, so that we may be able to sustain ourselves in a respectable manner." Continuing the waterfront worker wrote expressing his own consciousness "We been suffering a long, long time under the tyranny of small wages, so it is time we look around ourselves." A Caribbean worker, probably the son of a slave, was repudiating a system imposed on him from within and without, "the tyranny of small wages," and rejecting that tyranny and determining for he and his fellows to "look around ourselves" for an alternative. The worker was speaking for himself, not being just being spoken for.

A system could not meet the basic needs of the overwhelming majority of the population in the Caribbean who wanted to live "in a respectable manner". Something had to give. The system had collapsed and had not been replaced by another. Life was unbearable. People left. Migrated in droves. As Dr. Winston James points out: "Between 1881 and 1890 some 78,000 Jamaicans migrated to the Isthmus of Panama, and between 1891 and 1915 no less than 91,000 left the island for Panama." The same was true for Barbados, Antigua, St. Kitts. The heartless colonial government imposed exit taxes on those leaving. Add to this between 1919 and 1931 some 83,885 Jamaicans migrated to Cuba. The same pattern occurred in the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean. Dr. Winston James concluded that the migration were the next best thing to revolution. In the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands the migrant flow to the United States picked up apace. A system, virtually unchanged since the abolition of slavery, which abolished chattel slavery, but not the conditions which fostered it, could not meet the needs of the people. The people escaped, "glad to leave, but too sorry to go" as one migrant so profoundly expressed the complex of emotions.

It may well be, and most likely was the case, that the oppressed workers in the Caribbean at the beginning of the 20th century could not develop more than a wages consciousness, and were preoccupied with the "tyranny of low wages" since real wages throughout the region had not increased much between 1834 - 38 and 1920.

But a new consciousness would come, not so much from within, but from without. The outbreak of World War I had West Indians enlisting in the West India Regiment "to save king and country". They were unaware, that in no circumstances did the British want Black West Indians killing white Europeans, not even their mortal white enemies. English racism did not allow for that - no way! The West India Regiment was confined to menial jobs. They died from horrible conditions, 1,071 dying of illness, whereas only 185 died of battle wounds. They were segregated and humiliated. On December 6, 1918, the West India regiment at Taranto, Italy revolted. Fully assimilated to British ways, they had marched into Taranto singing "Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves" only to be cut short by British soldiers that the song was not for such as them to sing. The West India regiment, scorned and humiliated, decided to take it no more. They "mutinously" refused to work. Shootings and bombings occurred. The Worcestershire Regiment had to be despatched to restore order.

But on December 17, some fifty or more West Indian sergeants met and formed an organisation with an astonishingly simple name. It was called "The Caribbean League". The League made up of sergeants from British Guiana in the South to the Bahamas in the North, demanded "self-determination of the Caribbean. The West Indies should have freedom and govern itself" they declared. The Caribbean League pledged to organise a general strike throughout the sub-region when they got back home. There would be a regional body with headquarters in Jamaica. Some demurred on the choice of location. The Caribbean League was betrayed, some said by a Garrot, who reported the discussions of the meeting to his commanding officer. The British determined the League had "Seditious dangers." The League disbanded in the face of the betrayal from the 'garrot' among them.

But there on the battle fields of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Italy a new Caribbean consciousness had been forged in the life and death business of war. A Caribbean consciousness emerged. The dread plantation system could not be defeated in one place, it had to be defeated in all Caribbean places, preferably simultaneously. And to this end the Caribbean League decided (quote) "Force must be used, and if necessary bloodshed to obtain this object."

I want you to note that in their determinations the Caribbean sergeants in the Caribbean League had made a quantum leap. Their thought leapt over a national insular consciousness and went straight to a regional - consciousness, in a regional state! In the authentic moment of their intense struggle against racism, at once colonial and international, this is the category of thought they arrived at --- a Regional State. It is a truly astonishing philosophical leap.

Nor did the Caribbean League end in Taranto, Italy. It came to the Caribbean. In Trinidad, food, clothing and furnishings in the war years had risen by 145 per cent for the colony generally and 126 per cent in Port of Spain. The same was true for Jamaica, Belize, Guyana and the OECS territories. In Trinidad and Belize members of the Caribbean League led the uprisings which took place in 1919. CLR James was then 18 years old, as this movement, this revolutionary movement from below took place in his native Trinidad. Members of the Caribbean League, became leaders of the Garvey Movement, still the largest black organisation and movement in history, and which laid the philosophic basis of Black Nationalism, with its own means of transport, its own industries, it own rulers.

But be it noted too the philosophic dilemma of the Caribbean in the 20th century. The people lived in an outmoded plantation system, which never met the needs of the people, even as slaves, and which could not meet the needs of a modern, 20th century people. The Caribbean then oscillated between Rebellion and Immigration, to Panama, to Santo Domingo, to Cuba, to England, the Virgin Islands, the United States, to Canada.

This tendency to migrate out of an outmoded system which had not been replaced by another, provoked this comment from Barbadian migrant Clyde Jemmott who wrote:

"When you take away large numbers of the strong, the able-bodied and healthful members of a community, then those who are economically strong the middle class, and finally those who are ambitious, progressive and far-sighted you are practically skimming the cream of society, and the results are a preponderant increase in the mediocre members of the community .... there takes place a gradual weakening of the physical and mental vigour of the people and a lessening in the number of those progressive and far-seeing people, without whom no society can go ahead."

This then is the philosophic position of a transplanted society, in which the overwhelming majority are dispossessed, rooted only in a sense of cultural formation, without economic linkages to the sea-scape and land-scape.

That particular mode of existence, produces what the BBC recently gave expression to when it praised the Caribbean writer V.S. Naipaul "as the best writer of the English language in the world today, and the most English of writers" Naipaul the Indo-Caribbean, had never had a home-coming, but expresses the Caribbean genius in mastering a language not his own, and the Caribbean dilemma, where nearly everything is imported, importing an identity, in his case, Englishness.

To be continued

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June 5, 1998


The Making of Caribbean Philosophy


Part II

Following is the second part of a speech I made to the Caribbean Studies Association, last Thursday May 28. The Caribbean Studies Association meeting here at Perry Bay at the Multipurpose Center was the largest gathering of scholars and cultural workers ever to come to Antigua and Barbuda.

I do not wish to leave the impression that only revolutionary statesmen like Toussaint L'Ouverture or Caribbean soldiers, arms in hand, in the First World War, helped to forge a Caribbean philosophy in the process of history and at authentic moments.

Black female household servants, or maids developed strategies for coping with their white mistresses in the Caribbean in the 20th century. Such household workers believed they had a "right" to take home left-overs, excess food and well used utensils for their own home use or that of their neighbours. "Not only was it the moral thing to do" wrote Robin Kelly in his excellent Race Rebels, "given the excesses and wastefulness of white wealthy families and the needs of the less privileged." It was the necessary thing to do.

Then there is the role of community organisations in shaping Caribbean culture and ideology. Grass roots institutions such as Friendly Societies and Lodges not only helped families with basic survival needs, but created and sustained bonds of fellowship, and most important, the essential African value, a sense of community. These organisations, in particular, provided funds and other resources to members in need and to the poor generally, including death benefits (mainly to cover burial costs) as well as assistance for families whose members became seriously ill or lost their job. These were bonds of solidarity.

In my own native Antigua, it became an axiom of faith among the poor, that though one may not be able to attain dignity in life, it was absolutely important to die in dignity. Death benefits, in the lodges, was both sacred and sacrosanct.

The social links and sense of solidarity and community created by the Ulotrichians, the Odd Fellows, the House of Ruth etc., etc., occasionally translated into community and labour struggles as with the Ulotrichians in Antigua and St. Croix in 1918. But it is important to note that the bonds of fellowship developed in the Lodges and Friendly Societies, not only sought to develop loyalty and secrecy of aims and practices, to overcome the perpetual "squealing" which beset most serious efforts at effecting change, but laid the basis of the unionisation which took place in the Caribbean in the 1930's and 40's. In consequence, the struggle by the Caribbean people for a new, if not the "good" life was taken to a new and higher level based on these new ideas and new practices.

You will have noted that I am emphasising the autonomous creations of the people, the lodges and friendly societies. And you will have noticed too, that I draw from these the essential values these autonomous bodies established; solidarity, dignity, community, and in the case of the women, as maids, a rejection of the wastefulness of the system. From the latter there flows the philosophic but poetic injunction:

Let the superfluous and lust - dieted man


Fall your power quickly
So that distribution will undo excess
And each one have enough.
With that said, and I hope mulled over and grasped, I need to return to the mainstream of philosophy.

Everyone knows or ought to know, that according to both Rousseau and Kant, to discover what one ought to do one had to listen to an inner voice. This voice issues commands; it orders. Rousseau calls it Reason. Kant also calls it the Rational. Kant went even further, he offers guidelines whereby the commands or the injunctions of the inner voice can be distinguished from those other rival voices, such as the emotions or self-interest.

The point is, whatever the inner voice of Reason commands is objective, universal, timeless, true for all men, and I add, not culture determined. Reason in Kant had replaced the natural law.

The values of rational creatures must, therefore, following Kant, be free. That is, if they come from outside, depend on that same outside force, then one is not free. Once there is dependence on some outside power, blind nature or some transcendent power, God or Nature, which orders me as it wills, this is not autonomy. It is heteronomy. A form of dependence on something I do not control, slavery. Hence Kant argued, autonomy is the basis of all morality.

Logically then, for Kant, to use men or women for ends that are not their own, is to exploit them, degrade them, humiliate them. It is to deny their human essence. The most heinous of all crimes.

Thus Kant had put to rest, buried all the racist, but idealist philosophers, Locke, Hume and Hegel, to name a few.

All values are created by free human choice, reason and rational choice, are the essence of humanity; of dignity as human beings. It differentiates human beings, from things beasts and brutes.

The rules, the commands of reason, hold for me as for you, as for every other creature. Whether in a religious guise or humanistic guise; they are made universally valid. This is the basis of our notion of moral rights and moral rules of the liberty, equality and dignity, (if not fraternity) of all human beings. Kant called these rules categorical imperatives.

Kant as you will have noted is divorced from the productive process. I happen to believe that at the time he created his phenomenal body of ideas, the society he lived in was very much like the society in the Caribbean today.

Kant is really philosophising about the individual who is no longer related to other persons by even the appearance of a general bond. It is therefore as free agents in a general conflict between person and person, individual and individual, so the whole society is only the mutual conflict of all individuals, who are no longer distinguished by anything other than their individuality each listening and obeying his own inner voice, be it, to borrow from psychology, the ice or the super-ego.

The Romantics, following Kant and led by Fichte, would show that in the contest of individual wills, and the collision of values which this implies, society would be torn apart, between barbarism and creativity, issuing from the various wills.

If you look closely at Jamaica, where the elite is too small to control the economy, and the mass of people are not a class for-itself or in-itself, you will find both the extreme expressions of individuality, creative expression and at the same time unspeakable criminality, all issuing from free agents answering their individual inner voices. Modern cooperative labour in industry was not in Kant's time a sufficient general bond, as is the case now in the Caribbean archipelago, where plantation society had collapsed and no autonomous new form had replaced it.

Let us now dart back to the Caribbean after that European Safari. The peculiarity of the Caribbean Nation is that it exists as much in the archipelago in the Caribbean Sea, as well in its huge migrant communities in the several metropolitan capitals of the world.

Five such Caribbean exiles were to make an astonishing philosophic impact on the world the most significant being Marcus Garvey, Jose Marti, and George Padmore, Frantz Fanon, and C.L.R James. It is upon the last named that I shall concentrate the remainder of what I have to say on this occasion. But before that, this.

Dr. Winston James in that very find book, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, to which I have referred before makes this point!

"It is easier for those who have travelled, than those who have not, to develop a Pan-Africanist consciousness. It is no accident that the Caribbean being the area that has historically produced the most peripatetic of all African peoples, has also thrown up an extravagantly disproportionate number of Pan-Africanist political activists, thinkers and intellectuals. Edward Wilmott Blyden, H. Sylvester Williams, J. Albert Thorne, J. Robert Love, Theophílus Scholes, Anténor Fermin, René Maran, Hubert Harrison, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Una Marson, J.A. Rodgers, Jean Price Mars, Ras Makonnen, CLR James, Aimé Cesaire, Leon Gontrain Damus and - perhaps the most under-rated of them all - the great George Padmore of Trinidad, and all hailed from this remarkable chain of tiny islands and all participated in and were products of its peripatetic tradition. In more recent times the region produced Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney."

Concentrated within those names is a remarkable body of thought, which constitutes an essential part of a Caribbean philosophy, and if one were to add the imaginative writers and poets and the economist and Nobel Laureate, Professor Arthur Lewis, it could modestly be stated that the Caribbean had produced the most amazing body of thought in the modern world, far disproportionate to its size and its economic importance. I suggest to you that this is in part because the Caribbean is a cross-section of world civilisation and a concentrated expression of it. For here residual, but indigenous Taino, African, European, Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern civilisations met in an intense culture of foreign accumulation and exploitation. Notably, and to be fair, our dependence, age-old dependence, and alienation from large scale agriculture, large-scale commerce and large-scale industry, has made us particularly weak in the areas of science and technology. But the amazing body of Caribbean thought is indisputable. Canada one-twentieth of the world's surface cannot so claim. Nor can continental Australia.

I need only point out that where the great George Padmore broke with Stalinism as a mode of thought, the Grenada Revolution of 1979 - 83 was to embrace it, leading to its bloody convulsion.

And where the world renowned Walter Rodney had advocated "grounding with the brothers and sisters" as the new method for the politics of liberation and transformation, the Grenada Revolution, substituted the Central Committee for the people, and then the Politburo substituted itself for the Central Committee, and then Joint-Leadership was to substitute itself for the Politburo. In the end the maximum-leader would wipe out, Joint Leader, Politburo, Central Committee, Party and Revolution in a murderous blast of gun-fire. It was the Stalinism, the great George Padmore had so dramatically and authentically rejected, in its essential form and content-murder. I need only add, that Stalin to produce the Russian counter-revolution after 1924, murdered all the leaders of the Bolshevik Park, and the Russian Revolution. This awful tragedy would reproduce itself in the Grenada Revolution, despite our best efforts in Antigua to scotch to snake.

I come now to C.L.R James. And I begin with my largest claim. There is no thinker in the whole of human philosophy whose thought and revolutionary thought depended more on his organic relation to the working-class than that of C.L.R James. Not of Marx himself, or Lenin, or Gramsci can this be said.

Let me illustrate the point beginning with his works of fiction La Divina Pastora and Minty Alley. It is C.L.R James' social life in the "barrack-yards" of working people in Trinidad, which is the real foundation of these works. Similar too, is the origin of Cipriani - The Case for West Indian Self-Government, the manuscript of which he left with in his bags when he left Trinidad and Tobago for England in 1932.

What some regard as his magnum opus, The Black Jacobins was written as part of his immersion in the English working class in Nelson, Lancashire, and as part too, of his activity in the Independent Labour Party up to 1938.

Similar too, is C.L.R's involvement with Padmore with the International Friends of Ethiopia, later to become the International African Service Bureau, from which we get the History of Pan African Revolt, culminating later in what many regard as another magnum opus, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, which for greatest profit ought to be read alongside Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.

But to me C.L.R. James reaches his acme, in his organic relation with the most advanced working class in human history, the American working class. State Capitalism and World Revolution is definitely a pioneering work as is Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity as is Every Cook can Govern, all of which broke, or sought to break the stranglehold of the Cold War, between Soviet State Capitalism, which passed as Socialism to many, on the one hand, and American Corporate Capitalism, on the other hand, both of which held human thought by the neck from say, 1938 to 1989. This great period is capped by two great works, James' Thesis on the American Negro Revolution, which philosophically did a unique thing in all philosophy, predicted the Civil Rights Movement or Revolution in the U.S. Then there is C.L.R James immortal, but immensely difficult work Notes on Dialectics, which freed the advanced industrial working class, from Lenin's necessity of a vanguard as an external power, over and above it and determining for it. All, in my view, creating major break-throughs in human thought and related praxis.

Do not think I have omitted C.L.R's Beyond the Boundary, which yet others regard as his magnum opus, which is the combined product of C.L.R's relation to the American working class, through the organisation "Facing Reality" - and a remarkable work by that name Facing Reality - and his immersion in the Trinidad nationalist movement of the PNM and his role as Secretary of the West Indies Federal Labour Party which sought to federate the West Indies between 1958 and 1962. It is from that well - spring that we get the remarkable Beyond the Boundary, which through the prism of the Caribbean working man, with the striking name, Matthew Bondman, looks at sport in the history of human art and development.

To repeat my contention, I state it in the opposite, when C.L.R is not organically linked to the working class, in the Caribbean, in Africa, in England or in the United States, as when he was a professor at several American universities in the 60's and 70's one gets brilliant essays, but not the insightful, new explanation of new developments of social reality, which is the essence of philosophy.

Let me now re-state my point in the positive, from Hera################us, Plato and Aristotle, through Rousseau and Kant, down to Hegel, and Marx, Sartre and Heidegger, there is no thinker whose thought depended more on his organic relation to the working class, than that of C.L.R James. It is that principally, and his West Indian origin as part of that cross-section of world civilisation, which accounts for his premier role in human thought and action in the era of globalisation, as this period of time is called.


C.L.R James (1901 - 1989) is the polar opposite, or if you prefer, the anti-thesís of another significant modern philosopher, Martin Heidegger, (1889 - 1976), who extended the idealist and racist current that culminated in Hegel.

To Heidegger human suffering, exploitation and dehumanisation are irrelevant. Philosophy is far above such banalities. He saw history not in terms of increasing freedom or decreasing misery, but, believe it or not, as a poem. "Being's poem" he wrote "just begun is man."

For Heidegger the "words of being" of the great philosophers gave successive epochs in history their self-image. History, as the history of Being, is the narrative of changes in human beings' image of themselves, their sense of what ultimately matters. The philosopher's task therefore, is to "preserve the force of the most elementary words," in other terms, to prevent the words of the great houses-of-Being-building thinkers of the past from being trivalised. However, Heidegger, almost single-handedly, re-shaped what had before been thought of as purely literary matter into a doctrine of the nature of human life. His Being and Time changed the course of philosophy by breaking down barriers between genres, barriers no one else had been able to surmount.

Though I would not argue the point here, he and C.L.R James are similar in that latter respect. And James by including sports, calypso, and other forms of popular culture including the comic strip and the art form of the 20th century -- the cinema - in my view, at any rate, excels him.

It is of course necessary to give, in brief, some of the essential insights of C.L.R James within the narrow bark of a single article, or a couple of articles.

In Notes on Dialectics James begins with a revolutionary piece of philosophy, which to quote another remarkable piece of Caribbean scholarship Tony Bogues' Caliban's Freedom, published in 1997, according to Tony Bogues, James' Notes on Dialectics "announces James' rupture not only from Trotskyism but traditional Marxism-Leninism." So James the Marxist philosopher is breaking with traditional Marxism-Leninism. This then, is a revolution within a revolution in human thought. Here is the historic break in C.L.R's Notes on Dialectics.

"Truth can only be where it makes itself its own result. Truth in our analysis, the total emancipation of labour, can only be achieved when it overcomes its complete penetration by its inherent antagonism, the capital relation. At this stage of actuality in the labour movement I come inevitably to the conclusion that there was no place in the labour movement for the Party."

Here then is a real revolution in human thought. The Party, the centre-piece of Leninism, -- Proletarian man must have a party or he is nothing - the party, the instrument for the creation of the nation-state in 19th century Europe, James now argues that this instrument has become a negation to be negated, for the emancipation of labour in the most advanced forms of industrial society.

In the process, C.L.R James, as Caribbean internationalist and activist, is rewriting the whole philosophic encyclopaedia. Consciousness is not some working of the Zeitgeist or world spirit in the thinker as posited by the idealist Hegel, or the commands of the inner voice of reason. For C.L.R James, and I quote, "consciousness is to know the concrete, but to know it dialectically" for "the content [of the concrete] moves, changes, develops and creates new categories of thought and gives them direction .... Philosophic cognition means not philosophy about it, but a correct cognition, a correct grasp of it, the concrete, in its movement."

It would be correct for me to give you James himself on the concrete - "concrete socialism". This James says came in 1917 with the Soviets - the self-organised workers councils. "It was", says C.L.R, "the workers who did the concrete work on the Soviet." They thought over the Soviet which first appeared in 1904 in Russia. "They analysed it and remembered it, and within a few days of the February Revolution in 1917 they organised in the great centres of Russia this unprecedented social formation." This creation of the soviets, by the Russian working class, as a self-organisation, is for James the essence and quintessence of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

James then is forever looking in history, and the concrete labour movement, for the creative interventions of the great mass of the people, and the movement, changes, developments in these creations of the working people, which create new categories in his thought and gives them direction.

In other words, the soviet form, the workers council which appeared in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, replaced the Paris Commune of 1871 as the highest organ the mass of workers had created for their own democratic governance as free agents acting for - itself, and therefore all society, at one and the same time.

It is well to note, that James also saw the self-activity of the Polish workers in Solidarity in the 1980s as the fulfillment of his idea until Lech Walesa and others turned it into its opposite. The deconstruction of the party did not mean the abolition of organisation, but the abolition of one kind of organisation, the Party, as the "knowing" of the workers determining a line, and getting the workers to follow, more as objects than as subjects; at any rate with the party, as transcendent power.

I cannot in the course of the 30 minutes allotted me, detail the whole of James philosophy, which is Caribbean in national origin, but global in its scope. I can though point that Caribbean philosophy has created in James, in his new categories of thought, the quintessential modern philosopher on the emancipation of labour from thralldom to global capital.

I can only state that like Marx, James through the agency of the most advanced working class in human history, the American working class, came to see that an industrialised working class in its historical movement shows "By deed, instead of by argument, that production on a large scale and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion and of extortion against the labouring man or woman, himself or herself; and that like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil, with a willing hand, a ready mind and a joyous heart."

This is one of the classic but little known definitions of that political and philosophical category, known as socialism, often banalised by prating coxcombs.

It is this tremendous revolutionary praxis of C.L.R James which led him to his magnificent philosophic view of freedom with which I end. James saw freedom as:

"The end towards which humankind is inexorably developing by the constant overcoming of internal antagonisms. Freedom is not the enjoyment, ownership or use of goods, but self-realisation, creativity based upon the incorporation into the individual personality of the whole previous development of humanity. Freedom is creative universality - not utility."

Not the enjoyment, ownership or use of goods as the proponents of globalisation now advocate, in which process many of us in the Caribbean will be underclassed, but for James, freedom is self-realisation; with one's natural and acquired abilities, freed from the capital relation, and "the incorporation into the individual personality of the whole previous development of humanity." No more concrete and stirring definition of freedom as the inexorable goal of humankind, to my mind, exists. It is the Caribbean speaking on its own, to the world, now confused, with a clarity, a philosophic clarity, which makes a new alternative thrust possible, and establishing the philosophic premises on which this great leap can be made.

Thank you all for your patience.

In a remarkable piece of contemporary Caribbean scholarship Winston James in his Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia published this year provides us with the necessary data. Between 1910 and say 1930, Dr. Winston James points out in his very fine book "Barbadian men lived on average 28.5 years, and while Barbadian men were dead before their twenty-ninth birthday, Jamaican men lived to almost 36 years, Trinidadians lived to 37.6. In 1920 - 22 Barbadian women died before they were 32, while their Jamaican and Trinidadian sisters lived to 38.2 and 40.1 years respectively."

I add that in Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, men here lived an average of 29.5 years with women dying before they were 32. These were indeed Islands of Death.


**Cimo says**--It is stats like this that start me thinking. Imagine ah world were maturing is ah sign of old age. No wonder our family structure is soo messed up today. Imagine generations upon generations of people who must plan your life in (Aver. of ) 35years. What will it do to you psychologically to know that you will not die fron old age or sickness. These things sicken me. Just ah small window into the past.