Imperialism after Colonialism

EDITORS’ NOTE

Spectre is thrilled to publish here an interview with C.L.R. James that was largely unknown for half a century. The interview appeared in 1970 in an Ottawa-based radical newspaper called Octopus. We have kept spelling and punctuation as in the original for the sake of historical accuracy, although we have identified historical figures in parentheses. “On Trinidad” was a spoken interview and carries many of the traits of oral speech. It remains a fascinating document.

Several people were instrumental in allowing us to bring this to print. Ravi Malhotra, professor of law at the University of Ottawa, first alerted us to this piece and proposed that Spectre publish it. David Austin, a Montreal-based C.L.R. James scholar, helped identify the source of this article. Robert A. Hill, literary executor of the C.L.R. James Estate, kindly granted Spectre permission to publish this piece. We thank them all for their assistance and solidarity.

Selma James REF1, renowned socialist-feminist writer and activist, generously offered Spectre her perceptive introduction to “On Trinidad.”¹ Based on her close knowledge of this phase in C.L.R. James’s life, and her own involvement with him in the movement for Caribbean independence, Selma James gives us unique insights into James’s internationalist approach to anticolonial struggle. We thank her for this, and for being an inspiration in the struggle for global justice.

Introduction to C.L.R. James’s “On Trinidad”

SELMA JAMES

When C.L.R. James returned home to Trinidad in 1958, after twenty-six years in the UK and the US, he was invited to stay and help the independence movement headed by Dr. Eric Williams, his old student. At that time, we saw independence as not only possible but inevitable and did not see the dangers of being part of a movement which was not anticapitalist. The Cuban revolution had not yet happened.

C.L.R. supported Williams against the British and for the return of the military base at Chaguaramas, which the British had given to the US during World War II. Though C.L.R. went along with Williams’s nationalism, what he focused on and campaigned for was internationalist. The British government had brought the islands into a federation in order to offload their Caribbean colonies. C.L.R. saw the possibility for the populations of the islands to work together to develop their own internal economy and power by regenerating agriculture away from sugar, first of all growing their own food, and pursuing other aspects of their natural resources to which each island could contribute.

It seemed to us that the only way the Caribbean could stand against the imperial power to the north was to develop an independent politics based on economic independence which could only be attempted through a federation built by the populations working together for themselves and each other. C.L.R. campaigned from British Guiana (later Guyana) to Jamaica for this federation.

But the politicians who took the power that the movement had won from the British Empire were so greedy that they refused to share that power even amongst themselves, making deals with the imperialists instead. Williams, who had asked C.L.R. to stay and help, soon wanted to be “king of Trinidad,” as I saw it then, and was ready to sell out on Chaguaramas (the US military base) and much else, and to shed C.L.R.

Up against the personal ambition of the politicians, the federation fell apart. It was that tragic defeat that taught C.L.R. (and me) that nationalist politics without a class perspective would undermine the movement and enable a new form of colonialism. The capitalist colonial structure that had been imposed on the society and which the elite had been educated to assume had to be rejected and destroyed.

By 1970, C.L.R. had seen and embraced the Cuban revolution, which has held its own for the past sixty-five years against the monster to the north. He had met Julius Nyerere, the president of Tanzania, who in 1967 had produced The Arusha Declaration based on the policy of ujamaa—the mobilisation of the majority rural population. (Despite Nyerere’s efforts, by 1969 that movement was destroyed by the same ambition within his party that the independence movement faced everywhere.) Later we were all to see what President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was able to do with Haitian grassroots creativity until the Haitian elite, backed by the US, Canada, and France, overthrew the people’s power which he had helped to build.

Before we left Trinidad in 1962, the offer came to republish The Black Jacobins, C.L.R.’s history of the victorious Haitian revolution which abolished slavery and created the first independent Black republic. It had been out of print for years. C.L.R.’s 1970 remarks “On Trinidad” is his considered view of what anticolonial movements anywhere result in unless the society they aim to create is based on the self-mobilization of the population to recreate society anew.

On Trinidad

C.L.R. James (1970)

This will tell you what Trinidad is like. You get off at Piarco (Airport) and you take a taxi to the chief town which is Port-of-Spain. You turn up the main street and within 200 yards, you stop. Independence Square. Good! So you pull up the taxi and you say. Well, this is a fine square. You have some magnificent buildings here. Yes. You ask him, What is the building? He says, That is Barclay’s Bank. And what is that building? That is the Canadian Bank of Commerce. And what is the big one next to it? That’s the Royal Bank of Canada. And what is the big one over there? That is Chase Manhattan. And what is that one? That is the Bank of London and Montreal. And that one? That is the Bank of London and Halifax. In other words, Independence Square is surrounded by some of the most magnificent buildings in the territory and all of them are foreign banks. That’s how we live. They rule the place. That’s why Cuba’s Castro is doing so well. All the money that used to go abroad stays there now. So that the purchasing power of the population has increased by many hundreds of millions of pesos. But that’s where we are in Trinidad. ..If you are in the taxi he puts on his radio. You say, You have a fine radio station here. That belongs to Lord Thompson. You say, Well at any rate this paper, this Trinidad Guardian, this is your paper? He says, No, that belongs to Lord Thompson, too. You say, For God sake take me out of here, please! I thought I had left Lord Thompson behind me in London. Take me out of here. Drive me through the country. And then you see mile after mile of sugar-cane. You say, O this is lovely, this is native to the place. He tells you, No it belongs to Tate and Lyle. And then you say, O God, take me to the sea. He takes you to the sea, and there are the oil derricks and he says, that belongs to Texaco….so that is how we live….there is nothing else. And those men who are political leaders carry out the instructions of these people, Texaco, Barclay’s Bank, Chase Manhatton [sic] and these are masters of those islands, as they were before we had the flag, before we had independence, before we had the national anthem, that is Trinidad!

The foreign capital that is there is holding the country up by the throat. And the country is fed up with them. Now there is going to be a very serious situation in Trinidad. The population is one million. The amount of unemployed is 200,000—20 per cent of the population. If there was a similar number of unemployed in America, the unemployed would be 40 million. Now the country is small, but twenty percent of your population unemployed….whether the country is large or small that is a very serious matter….and they have no way of getting out of it….and this money year after year goes away….