C.L.R. James, Mid-Century Marxism, and the Popular Arts

“Popular culture” has played a decidedly important role for many prominent Marxist thinkers: For Fredric Jameson, it is increasingly important in his work, for Terry Eagleton, a counterpoint to more high brow culture, and for Marx himself a potentially distracting area of inquiry. In the following examination of C.L.R. James’ interest in popular culture, Kenton Worcester argues that he was, contrary to the thought of some, very interested -- both in popular culture per se, and the relation of race to modes of expression which can only be considered “popular” in the finest sense.

C.L.R. James, Mid-Century Marxism, and the Popular Arts [printable version]

Kenton W. Worcester

I.

<1> If we consider the period prior to the era of New Left scholarship, the number of English-language intellectuals on the Left who paid significant attention to popular culture is small. The number who expressed any patience with the century's dominant cultural forms is still fewer. The views of the Trinidadian historian and Marxist social critic Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) stand out as an intriguing exception.

<2> C.L.R. James's interest in, and sympathy for, different aspects of popular culture is amply documented in American Civilization (1950), Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), and in his letters to Constance Webb. The self-conscious integration of politics and mass culture in the pages of Correspondence, the Detroit paper published by the Johnson-Forest tendency and subsequently the Facing Reality group in the 1950s and early 1960s, similarly attests to the importance James placed on "the tremendous social manifestation hidden behind what is called 'entertainment'" [1 ]. Rather than viewing mass entertainment and the "popular arts" [2 ] as a diversion from the serious business of politics, James precociously recognized popular culture's unexpected vitality, and mutability, as well as its immense political relevance. The simple fact that he could profitably analyze an Alan Ladd screen performance with a straight face was enough to distinguish his approach from many of his comrades on the socialist left [3 ] as well as from the modernist-leftists of Partisan Review [4 ].

<3> James's receptivity to popular culture is sometimes invoked as proof of his far-flung intellect. Peter Drucker, for example, in his biography of Max Shachtman, makes the case as follows:
For the Trotskyist movement as a whole, James was one of a handful of leaders who gave the Fourth International intellectual distinction, a man who wrote confidently about a wide range of subjects including Plato, Lenin, Africa, Herman Melville, cricket, and the comics [5 ].
This is accurate, as far as it goes -- James wrote and lectured on all these topics, often at considerable length -- and yet the portion of his work devoted to comics, movies, television, popular music and so on is miniscule [6 ]. The relevant texts mostly date to the 1940s and early 1950s, when he lived in the United States; some of the most important material was produced in the interval from 1949-1953, just prior to his expulsion from the country as an "undesirable alien." They include portions of private letters, a chapter in an unpublished manuscript, a passage in a privately published manuscript, and a couple of unpublished essays. While these tantalizing fragments represent only a modest slice of his efforts in this period, the extent of James's engagement with popular culture would only become apparent with the publication of these materials in the 1990s.
<4> During this American sojourn he resided for the most part in New York City, on the basis of an expired visa, although he also spent time in southern California, southeast Missouri, and Nevada, and toured other parts of the country. He later said he "took in my stride the cruelties and anomalies that shocked me and the immense vitality, generosity and audacity of these strange people" [7 ]. His literary output largely consisted of articles for far left periodicals, internal bulletins, and Johnson-Forest documents. In concert with Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee, and other comrades in the Johnson-Forest tendency, he spent these years breaking out of the box of Trotskyism and the vanguard party. The bulk of his writings addressed labor issues, U.S. history (including African-American history), race relations, and numerous political, organizational, and philosophical challenges facing active socialists, and on each of these topics he generated many pages of published and unpublished writings [8 ].

<5> In contrast, his observations on comic strips comprise three pages in American Civilization plus a couple of stray references found elsewhere [9 ]. In the same way, his fondness for Hollywood movies, and calypso music, is reflected in a soupcon of essays and letters, while his widely reported enthusiasm for jazz, and television soap operas, ceded few insights on paper [10 ]. If it is indeed the case, as the literary scholar Neil Larsen has argued, that "with the republication of James's writings on North American popular culture…one can almost hear forming on the lips of more than one aspiring legatee: that James belongs, albeit ancestrally, to the thing we now call 'Cultural Studies'," [11 ] then at first glance this claim rests on a slim, if characteristically provocative, portion of a much larger body of work.

<6> There is of course an enormous volume of "cultural" writing in the Jamesian corpus, most of which is devoted either to literature (not only novels and short stories, but essays and criticism), or his beloved cricket. As he makes clear in Beyond a Boundary (1963), literature and cricket were his formative passions, and he would return to them time and again. Compared to the effort he put into thinking and writing about sports or literary fiction, James only scratched the surface of his own responses to and thoughts about popular culture. The case for, and against, locating C.L.R. James within the prehistory of Cultural Studies thus logically rests with his treatment of these twin passions, rather than his analysis of popular culture per se. While James believed in taking popular culture seriously, there are other topics he took up with greater consistency and urgency, and these provide a more plausible point-of-entry into his life and work as a whole. At the same time, many of James's political descendants, at least those based in the U.S., have proven exceptionally receptive to this dimension of his thought, which has helped nurture James's status as an early avatar of cultural studies [12 ].

<7> It would be a mistake to draw too sharp a line between James's ventures into popular culture criticism and his more sustained treatment of cricket and literature, however. There are, it turns out, significant points of contact between James's reading of literature and cricket and his mid-century notes on more thoroughly commodified forms of culture. Any serious consideration of his approach toward the popular arts would need to take account of his personal sense of involvement in literature and cricket, his respect for the hard work and honest craft that good cricket, and good writing, entail, and his distinctive emphasis on the role of the mass audience in the making of both classical drama and twentieth century sport. Indeed, his writing about, and consumption of, different forms of popular culture represents an extension of, rather than a departure from, his life-long engagement with literature and cricket. It may even be said that James approached both literature and cricket as popular culture, not in the sense that their commercial context limited their ambitions but in the sense that their fullest expressions emerged within a setting defined by the interaction of the individual artist and the mass audience.

<8> James's approach to popular culture presents an unconventional hybrid of classical humanist reflexes and postmodernist receptivity to novelty, celebrity, and genre. Rather than policing barriers between art, sport, and popular culture, James's approach emphasized the dynamic relationship between creators, formats, and audiences, and the creative capacities of ordinary people as they produce and consume art and entertainment of all varieties. What he brought to the discussion was not only a background in fiction writing and journalism, but also a deeply held commitment to both humanist learning and popular protest that informed his writings not only on popular culture and literary criticism [13 ], but also politics in general and socialism in particular [14 ]. Once James chose to settle down in the United States, he mostly devoted his time to radical politics. But as a kind of anthropological sideline he began to observe, participate in, and comment on the worlds of radio drama, movie palaces, ballparks, and newspaper comics.

II.

<9> As a young adult in Port of Spain, Trinidad in the 1920s, C.L.R. James participated in the nascent popular culture of the day. He accumulated an extensive collection of jazz 78s, was active in local sports, most notably cricket, and wrote prize-winning essays and fiction. His short stories, and his novel Minty Alley (completed in 1928 but published in 1936) sought to distil the language and customs of subaltern West Indian communities. He supported himself by working as a private tutor and as a teacher at the secondary and teacher-training levels.

<10> He carried his cultural and literary sensibility with him to England, to which he relocated in 1932, but his subsequent immersion in left-wing anti-Stalinist and Pan-Africanist movements relegated his cultural inclinations to the margins of his political and social identity. His 1930s cricket journalism, for example, represented a means of supporting his political activities, rather than an end in itself. Political involvement offered a kind of drama in its own right, of course. "Night after night he would address meetings in London and the provinces, denouncing the crimes of the blood-thirsty Stalin, until he was hoarse and his wonderful voice a mere croaking in the throat," recalled his English publisher [15 ]. Or as James himself remembered in Beyond a Boundary, "Literature was vanishing from my consciousness and politics was substituting itself" [16 ] in the context of global hard times. James was by no means the only intellectual of his generation to set aside his literary persona under the proletarian hammer blows of the 1930s.

<11> Evidence of a self-consciously theoretical interest on James's part in commercial art forms surfaced in conversations and letters in the early 1940s, i.e., a full decade after he left Trinidad. By this period James had acquired a solid grounding in radical politics and political philosophy, and any return to cultural topics was bound to reflect, at least to a certain extent, his desire to reconnect dissident forms of radicalism with the experiences and felt needs of the mass audience.

<12> Close readers of James's columns and internal polemics may have picked up on certain textual clues pointing to his private interest in popular culture. In the Workers Party document "Education, Propaganda, Education: Post-War America and Bolshevism" (1944), James insists "No one has any serious grasp of Marxism, can handle the doctrine or teach it unless he, in accordance with his capabilities and opportunities, is an exponent of it in relation to the social life and development around him."

<13> In another section he argues:
Today the whole organization of society is moving rapidly towards mass collective action on a grand scale. Workers in any numbers are repelled by small insignificant groups. The perspectives of one-by-one building up of a party to have effect in ten or twenty years have little sense to a worker in a country where organized labor is fourteen million strong, and the NAACP has half a million members. Further, social and political developments are accelerated not only in space but in time. A new political organization issues at one stroke millions of pamphlets, the political leaders address the nation and the world by radio and are seen by the nation on the screen. Labor unions make special film shorts of their own…This is the age we live in. We haven't the resources to begin these things. But to us our popular press is not what Iskra was to the early Bolsheviks. They did not have to contend against the technical facilities of the bourgeoisie that we have to contend with and the collective social consciousness corresponding to it. The odds against humble proletarian beginnings like Iskra and Labor Action lengthened enormously. Labor Action becomes our press, our radio, our plane, and our film short. We have to make it into something which with the necessary backing, will approach, win recruits and adherents far beyond our limited present contact. [17 ]
In these passages, phrases like "social life and development," and "mass collective action," refer not only to strikes, housing struggles, and the like, but also mass cultural habits such as comic strip reading and movie going. Not all Workers Party members would have picked up on the hints that these documents dropped. It would take a full decade before his engagement with the popular arts would be adequately reflected in his published writings; the 1953 publication of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways represents a key turning point in this regard.
<14> Before outing himself in print as a fan of and advocate for popular culture, James shared his new-found interest in movies, comic strips, and radio plays in his letters to his L.A. based correspondent, and future (second) wife, Constance Webb. He initially described his movie going as the unintended consequence of his health problems and solitary habits as a writer and underground socialist activist. In a letter written in 1943, he reported that for
the past two years illness and other difficulties have caused me to spend a certain amount of time at the pictures. I rather despised them -- Hollywood I mean. I don't any more. The rubbish I look at would astonish you. I can sit through almost anything…The reason? I work at home. At times I must stop . The only thing that keeps me quiet is the movies. So at all hours of the day or night I go where there is a picture, often the nearest. That is why I see some over and over again. And I am learning plenty, I can assure you. [18 ]
Here James describes the act of watching movies as a respite from health problems, and as the product of happenstance. Ten years later, by way of contrast, in the concluding chapter of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, he invoked his interest in comic strips and Hollywood movies as evidence of his conscious determination to "become a part of the American people":
I remember my first journey from Chicago to Los Angeles, by train -- the apparently endless miles, hours after hour, all day and all night and the next morning the same again, until the evening. I experienced a sense of expansion which has permanently altered my attitude to the world. From that beginning, stage by stage I have spared no pains to understand the United States and become a part of the American people. I remember that for years I pertinaciously read comic strips, unable to see what Americans saw in them. I persisted until at least today I will walk blocks to get my comics. In Europe and when I first came here I went to see movies of international reputation. Now I am a neighborhood man, and I prefer to see B gangster pictures than the latest examples of cinema art. I know the tension of American life and the underlying tension which gives American movies, however superficial, the permanent attraction that they have. [19 ]

This passage suggests that his appreciation for popular culture emerged not as the byproduct of health concerns, but as a self-aware response to the "sense of expansion" which his travels across the American West gave him. As before, the overarching theme is one of dogged perseverance -- popular culture as intellectual labor rather than private leisure -- but there is no indication of what he revealed to Constance Webb, that he sat through countless studio releases because "it keeps me quiet." Instead, "I have spared no pains," he tells the readers of Mariners, to see and experience the world through American eyes and thereby become, in an evocative phrase, a "neighborhood man." Having been steeped in high culture, he came to value the "superficial" pleasures offered by movies and comics. While his deepening delight in the popular arts was genuine, he saw popular culture as a perch from which he could demarcate the "underlying tension" in American life. Even as he acknowledged popular culture's vigor, he noted its usefulness as a sociological resource. While the sequence of steps that led him to embrace popular culture are less important than the lessons he drew from the experience, his insistence that he "spared no pains" to become one with the American people almost certainly reflected his strategically considered but ultimately futile effort to appease the authorities and secure U.S. citizenship [20 ].

<15> In his letters to Webb, James began to make the case for taking popular culture seriously from a Marxist perspective. The most important realization he came to was that "even the most absurd Hollywood movies" were expressive of larger social forces and trends. Far from dismissing mainstream studio pictures as lifeless products designed to narcotize the masses [21 ], he insisted that these pictures are suggestive of "what the people miss in their own lives." In Hegelian terms, they represent "an extension of the actual." That is, they provide a kind of horizon by which audiences measure the potentiality of their own lives. "Why the popularity of the Western?" he asks.
Because young people who sit cramped in buses and tied to assembly lines terribly wish they could be elsewhere; if even, not consciously, yet when they see it they respond. That is the fundamental principle. Like all art, but more than most, the movies are not merely a reflection, but an extension of the actual, but an extension along the lines which people feel are lacking and possible in the actual. [22 ]
This claim -- that movies and other forms of popular culture suggest the potential for change within the framework of everyday life -- is best understood not as an aesthetic or political validation of the films themselves but as an anticipation of deep-rooted social conflicts bubbling over the cultural surface. That some movies undoubtedly achieved artistic merit was both noteworthy and praiseworthy, from James's perspective, but this was also icing on the cake. For James, films and other forms of mass entertainment offered "social facts" [23 ] as reliably empirical as those reported by statisticians and demographers. More significantly, these social facts pointed to a painful tension between the prosaic realities of waged labor ("the degradation and humiliation…the grinding slavery of the machine" [24 ]) and the hopes, aspirations and charismatic role models of the big screen. The notion of a social crisis inspired by a widening gap between the real and the ideal would become the central trope of American Civilization, and it provided him with a framework for interpreting not only movies but other, less glamorous forms of popular entertainment, such as comic strips and radio plays.
<16> A central assumption of this argument is that popular culture occupies a space within, rather than outside, the experiences of everyday life. As he argued in a 1944 letter, "The inter-relation of everything is a fundamental characteristic of our society. Every day I see it more and more…politics, art, life, love, in the modern world, all become so closely integrated that to understand one is to understand all" [25 ]. From this perspective, genre films constitute not so much a release from the tedium of factory and office work as a tightly interwoven aspect of an impermanent and inherently contradictory totality. In this respect as in so many others, James's approach undermined, or at least complicated, the familiar distinction between "base" and "superstructure" that would continue to shape leftist analyses of politics and popular culture well beyond the Popular Front era.

<17> In emphasizing the political semiotics of mid-century popular culture, James resisted the temptation to condemn or champion all of its emanations. As his letters to Webb make plain, James hardly adored every B-movie he ever sat through, or equated ordinary screen dialogue with his favorite authors, such as Shakespeare or Thackeray. His position was more nuanced, and interesting, than either "two-thumbs-up" or "two-thumbs-down;" James's sympathy for the creative process and for the different forms of the popular arts did not lead him to, in Neil Larsen's crucial words, "abdicate…the task of aesthetic judgment per se" [26 ]. James's confident summing up of the novels of best-selling author Frank Yerby -- as "bad, as writing, as they can possibly be" [27 ] -- indicates the extent to which James felt at ease inhabiting the familiar role of cultural critic.

<18> Criticism, both in its aesthetic and political aspects, was an ingrained reflex for James. Although he has been heralded as the "philosopher-king of mass society," [28 ] this implies that his relationship to commercial culture was unconflicted, which is far from the case. Even as he strived to be a "neighborhood man," James retained a commitment to modes of criticism and evaluation that owed a great deal to his early exposure to classical philosophy, European literature, and the rigorous standards espoused by his parents and teachers. "I judge every picture," he told Webb, by "one standard -- great art [that] had been brought to the proletariat" [29 ]. His conception of what "great art…brought to the proletariat" might mean predated his relocation to the United States, and most films were unlikely to pass his exacting test, however suggestive they might be of political possibilities and simmering social tensions. But during this period he became open to the idea that movies released by the commercial studios, or comics published in daily newspapers, could, indeed should, be seriously considered in their own right. He also came to believe that radicals could no longer afford to cut themselves off from what might be described as the culture of popular culture.

<19> Some critics have argued that, in reinventing himself as a neighborhood man in mid-century America, James tacitly embraced the dominant narratives of the political culture and turned his back on the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements that he participated in during the 1920s and 1930s. Accordingly, the literary theorist Grant Farred has argued that "the 'local' that America came to represent in the fifteen years James spent in this country" contracted "James' view of the world" and narrowed "the focus of his struggles." Pointing to the neglect of international relations and the global dimension in American Civilization, Farred reports "in his attempts to 'nativize marxism' or 'Americanize Bolshevism'…James was blinded by the imperialist predilections and practices of his 'hosts'." While Farred concedes that James "did a great deal of valuable radical work while in the United States," he insists that James "wrote from within U.S. society, for an American audience, with a blinkered view of the world and his own place in -- and relation to -- the struggles that were being conducted in the very causes he had earlier championed and to which he had given historic articulation" [30 ]. The fact that much of what James wrote in these years was aimed not only at U.S. leftists, but also an international audience found in the national organizations of the Fourth International, may not help dissuade Farred that in this period James was insufficiently anti-imperialist. But it complicates Farred's portrait of a "blinkered" intellectual operating within the suspect framework of the American nation, as does James's abundant commentary on the relationship of socialist organization and African-American struggles for civil rights, which identified civil rights and anti-colonialism as sister movements for social justice [31 ].

III.

<20> James's distinctive approach is expounded on at greatest length in American Civilization. The chapter on "Popular Arts and Modern Society" pulls together insights he had already shared with Webb. In particular, the chapter argues that mass culture constitutes an integral part of everyday life, that the audience plays a critical but often neglected role from the standpoint of both classical drama and contemporary Hollywood, that genre entertainment often serves as a vehicle of social commentary, and that the subtle constraints that bind modern artists are political rather than commercial in nature. The popular arts play an important part in the book's overall schema because they provide the specific context within which the contrast between the country's founding ideals, and the stresses and strains of the modern industrial age, is laid bare.

<21> Or, as he argues at the chapter's outset:
The modern popular film, the modern newspaper (the Daily News, not the Times), the comic strip, the evolution of jazz, a popular periodical like Life, these mirror from year to year the deep social responses and evolution of the American people in relation to the fate which has overtaken the original concepts of freedom, free individuality, free association, etc. To put it more harshly still, it is in the serious study of, above all, Charles Chaplin, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, genuinely popular novels like those of Frank Yerby (Foxes of Harrow, The Golden Hawk, The Vixen, Pride's Castle), men like David Selsnick, Cecil deMille, and Henry Luce, that you find the clearest ideological expression of the sentiments and deepest feelings of the American people and a great window into the future of America and the modern world. [32 ]
Having insisted on the social significance of popular culture, James went on to conjoin two arguments that might conventionally be viewed as incompatible. The first is that entertainment in a capitalist environment caters to legitimate consumer demands, which means that in an important sense individuals in class-divided societies are able to develop firmly held tastes and opinions and exercise a considerable degree of creativity and autonomy as consumers. As he points out in American Civilization, "The producer of the film or the newspaper publisher of a strip aims at millions of people, practically the whole population, and must satisfy them …Any success tends to be repeated and squeezed dry, for these people are engaged primarily in making money. Huge and consistent successes are an indication of mass demand" [33 ].
<22> Rather than unconsciously colluding in their own oppression, mass audiences generally displayed sound judgment in filling studio coffers. The almost libertarian quality of this argument is rooted in James's characteristic emphasis on the concept and practice of self-activity. Even as James devoted time and effort to uncovering the hidden self-activity of workers, blacks, young people and others, he extended the same capacity to moviegoers, whose collective ability to inflate and then, if so desired, destroy individual careers and entire genres kept movie studio owners from overestimating their own creative abilities.

<23> The second argument is that these popular wants and desires reflect the working out in cultural terms of an ongoing social crisis ultimately requiring a political solution. In this view, popular culture provides measurable consumer satisfaction for individuals who are nevertheless profoundly and perhaps irreconcilably dissatisfied and alienated within their daily lives. Movies and comic strips neither sate nor provoke the political and psychological pressures that largely reflect the disjuncture between everyday existence and the social possibilities implied in the popular arts. "In such a society," he writes, "the individual demands an esthetic compensation in the contemplation of free individuals who go out into the world and settle their problems by free activity and individualistic methods," [34 ] which helps explain the popularity of certain genres, such as westerns, crime, and vigilante pictures, as well as hard-boiled strips like Dick Tracy.

<24> As Larsen explains, popular culture in James's view tends toward a kind of "negativity," in that it "clears a space that it itself cannot occupy." Popular culture "creates demands that it ultimately must fail to satisfy; it promises 'personality' to its consumers, but necessarily breaks its promise, thus calling forth the aggressively irrationalist populism of 'fandom'" [35 ]. Or, in James's own words, "as soon as statistics, voters, wage-earners, unionists, white-collar workers…had the choice of what they should choose as 'entertainment', they expressed themselves in negative and concealed form, but clearly enough within the limitations allowed to them" [36 ]. The phenomena of fandom -- which has metastasized since American Civilization's inception -- represents a poor substitute for the integration of art, labor, and everyday life that James regarded as central to the entire socialist project.

<25> In linking individual attitudes and feelings, pop-cultural trends, and macro-historical developments, James combined political, literary, and social-psychological modes of analysis to an extent that is unusual within the literature of mid-century Marxism. The notion that popular culture articulated both freely expressed desires and underlying social tensions is crucial for understanding this integration of perspectives. As various passages in American Civilization attest, James understood this "tension" as not merely as the result of contending social classes or political parties, but as part-and-parcel of a thorough going crisis of individualism rooted in the transformation of work and community under the hammer blows of industrialization and modernization. The argument is constructed in such a way as to be accessible to Americans who might experience alienation in their jobs, and even in their personal lives, and yet nevertheless recoil from a European and socialist vocabulary.

<26> In an arguably belated effort to translate socialist ideas into the native idiom, and to make sense of the "energy, thought and intelligence" [37 ] of popular culture, James turned to the writings of the liberal columnist Max Lerner as a model for crafting accessible prose for mainstream Americans. Born, like James, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Lerner moved leftwards during the 1930s but became a leading "cold war liberal" of the 1950s and 1960s. For many years Lerner was one of the country's foremost editorialists and pundits, and at American Civilization's outset James acknowledges Lerner's musings on popular culture, literary culture, and political culture as an inspiration for his own foray into American studies [38 ].

<27> Lerner started writing about U.S. exceptionalism in the early 1940s, and eventually published a best-selling book, America as a Civilization (1957), that summed up his thinking in this area. Like James, Lerner regarded "the problem of America" as "the key problem to the modern destiny," [39 ] and Lerner was similarly cognizant of the feelings and conditions of industrial workers, young people, Negroes, and women as they made their way in a dynamic but undeniably stratified society. Both writers warned of the dangers of a "two Americas" divided along the lines of race and class [40 ], and both self-consciously followed in the tradition of Tocqueville and Bryce. In addition, both raised Melville and Whitman above other historical figures as spokespeople for the country's ideals, and they both admired the extent to which various manifestations of contemporary culture exhibited an "exuberant" or "cartoon"-like quality "in which everything is bigger than life" [41 ].

<28> It should not be expected, however, that their approaches or agendas were identical, even if their terminology and historical reference points overlapped in interesting ways. One defining difference in their approaches was that Lerner tended toward a consensus-era complacency that minimized the subterranean social tensions that James discerned at the close of the 1940s and that would arguably command center stage during the turbulent 1960s. Lerner's whiggish analysis of American culture is wholly lacking in any sense that "wearisome struggles" [42 ] could wreak havoc with one of the world's most prosperous societies. Furthermore, Lerner was far more inclined than James to assume a "constant movement into the middle-class status" [43 ] on the part of the American masses, a status that would protect them from the vicissitudes of economic necessity. James may have agreed that the class structure was partially fragmented, and that the social structures were to some measure pluralistic, but he also saw "industrial workers and their future" as "the basis of the whole edifice," [44 ] whereas the key group from Lerner's standpoint was the broadly satisfied middle class.

<29> With regard to popular culture, a key difference was that Lerner retained a strong sense of cultural hierarchy and lacked any kind of post-modernist sympathy for marginal literature, overlooked genres, or outsider art. While James wrote about Chester Gould's Dick Tracy comic strip with sympathy and insight, Lerner merely dismisses the "cloacal literature with which street newsstands are filled" and condemns "the apathy of people who have never been exposed to quickening ideas, and the slackness of thought which makes them victims of cynical and greedy men" [45 ]. At root, their differences reflected wildly divergent political perspectives, as well as contending visions of the future. But their differences also reflected the disparity in their social positions: Lerner, of course, was a paid-up member of the country's intellectual establishment, and James was not [46 ].

Notes

[1] C.L.R. James, American Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993 [1950], p. 119. The Johnson-Forest tendency was incubated in the early 1940s as a small faction within the Workers Party led by Johnson (James) and Forest (Raya Dunayevskaya). The group described the Soviet Union as state-capitalist and developed radically democratic and ultimately post-Leninist political perspectives. Facing Reality was formed in the mid-1950s after Dunayevskaya and her followers broke from the tendency. For more on Johnson-Forest and Facing Reality, see Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996, chapters 3-6. [^]

[2] Popular culture is my term, or our term, rather than James's. The phrase that most resembles popular culture in his vocabulary -- the popular arts -- places a greater emphasis on the separate media themselves (radio, movies, comic strips, and so on) and the craft that goes into their creation, rather than on their public reception or commercial derivation. The popular arts is a more bounded term than popular culture, which is why James could plausibly have regarded cricket as "popular culture" even though it is unlikely he would have referred to it as a "popular art." [^]

[3] "To mind springs a late supper in the Village of Connie's Calypso Restaurant after seeing The Glass Key starring Alan Ladd. Our table companions had never heard cinema analysis used so effectively to relate the depths of alienation in our society, but I knew as I switched attention momentarily from them, to myself, and back to James, neither had I." Stanley Weir, "Revolutionary Artist," in Paul Buhle, ed. C.L.R. James: His Life and Work. London: Allison and Busby, 1986, p. 184. [^]

[4] It is difficult to imagine James opening an essay on the classic comic strip Krazy Kat, as Partisan Review contributor Robert Warshow did in 1946, by complaining about "the underside of our society, those who have no real stake at all in respectable culture…readers of pulp magazines and comic books, potential book burners, unhappy patrons of astrologers and communicants of lunatic sects, the hopelessly alienated and outclassed who can enjoy perhaps not even Andy Hardy but only Bela Lugosi, not even the Reader's Digest but only True Detective." See Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001 [1962], p. 19. [^]

[5] Peter Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's Odyssey Through the 'American Century'. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994, p. 101. By the early 1950s James had renounced all ties to Trotskyism, orthodox or unorthodox, and the Fourth International. [^]

[6] This is grossly unfair to Peter Drucker, in that I was the source for the comics reference in the first place, having mentioned this "side" of James in an email. It is only from the perspective of obdurate literal-mindedness that Peter's pocket summary of James's life and work becomes in the least problematic. [^]

[7] C.L.R. James, Beyond A Boundary. London: Stanley Paul, 1963, p. 52. [^]

[8] In James's own words: "In 1940 came a crisis in my political life. I rejected the Trotskyist version of Marxism and set about to re-examine and reorganize my view of the world, which was (and remains) essentially a political one. It took more than ten years, but by 1952 I once more felt my feet on solid ground, and in consequence I planned a series of books." James, Beyond a Boundary, p. 29. He refers to Mariners and Beyond a Boundary as the fruits of this reorganization, but at one time he also planned to write a study of Shakespearean drama. [^]

[9] See James, American Civilization, pp. 120-123 and 139; Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In. New York: privately published, 1953, p. 193; C.L.R. James, Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-48. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 62; and C.L.R. James, The C.L.R. James Reader (edited by Anna Grimshaw). Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 128-131, 220-242, 247-262, 405-417. Grimshaw's editorial selections call attention to James's role as a critic as well as the more familiar guises of fiction writer, journalist, historian, and polemicist. [^]

[10] See, inter alia, "On Gone With The Wind" [1939-1940], reprinted in Scott McLemee, ed. C.L.R. James on the 'Negro Question'. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996; "The Artist in the Caribbean" [1959] and "The Mighty Sparrow" [1961], reprinted in C.L.R. James, The Future in the Present. London: Allison and Busby, 1977.While only a handful of the roughly 140 letters reprinted in Special Delivery dissect Hollywood movies, they do so with considerable insight; see pages 73-78, 132, 139-140, 183. On James's early love of jazz, and his later passion for television soaps, see Macdonald Celestin Taylor, "C.L.R. James -- A Most Talented and Remarkable Man," Sunday Express [Trinidad], April 25, 1982, p. 13; and Anna Grimshaw, Jim Murray and Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James in the 1980s: A Conversation With Anna Grimshaw. New York: C.L.R. James Institute, 1991. A fair number of James's surviving essays and letters on pop-cultural topics are as yet unpublished: see Anna Grimshaw, The C.L.R. James Archive: A Reader's Guide. New York: C.L.R. James Institute, 1991. [^]

[11] Neil Larsen, "Negativities of the Popular: C.L.R. James and the Limits of 'Cultural Studies'," in Grant Farred, ed. Rethinking C.L.R. James. London: Blackwell, 1996, p. 86. [^]

[12] Paul Buhle, Robin D.G. Kelley, George Lipsitz, and Jim Murray all come to mind as having variously and enthusiastically taken up popular culture with a recognizably Jamesian spin. Furthermore, the present author is a contributing writer to The Comics Journal, a monthly magazine of cultural criticism. This "turn toward culture" has not proven universally popular: "Having suffered serious political and economic defeats in the last twenty-five years, sections of the left, instead of addressing why these defeats occurred and how they could be reversed, have turned to something labeled 'culture' as an area where through verbal sleights of hand they can declare a victory that has little meaning beyond intellectual reviews and academic departments and journals. In the social sciences and humanities this is often expressed in the tendency to take on the relatively marginal and unimportant, and beyond declaring it to be crucial and highly consequential, converting it into a 'hot' and trendy fad. At this point, nothing stands in the way of the most destructive forms of political self-indulgence." See Samuel Farber, Social Decay and Transformation: A View from the Left. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000, p. xviii. [^]

[13] See, for example, "Popular Art and the Cultural Tradition" (1954) and "Preface to Criticism" (1955), reprinted in Anna Grimshaw, ed. The C.L.R. James Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. The former was delivered as a lecture in Paris organized under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and explores the continuities between the work of such major film directors as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Eisenstein, and "artistic creation in the great tradition of Aeschylus and Shakespeare." The latter identifies the neglect of the audience as a major flaw in modern literary and theatrical criticism. [^]

[14] An obvious source is C.L.R. James, Modern Politics [1961]. [^]

[15] Fredrick Warburg, An Occupation for Gentlemen. London: Hutchinson, 1959, p. 214. [^]

[16] James, Beyond a Boundary, p. 124. [^]

[17] Martin Glaberman, ed. Marxism for Our Times. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999, pp. 20 and 9. Here and elsewhere all emphases appear in the original text. [^]

[18] Special Delivery, p. 72. Throughout his adult life James suffered from stomach ulcers and painful writers' cramps. [^]

[19] Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, p. 193. The journalist Dave Marsh has taken this passage to mean that James read comic books. In introducing a 1995 graphic novel, Marsh asserts the following: "When the social critic C.L.R. James first arrived in the United States from Trinidad and Great Britain, in 1938, he found it mystifying that so many workingmen went to the newsstand each week to buy comic books. But soon enough, James reported in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, he also headed out each week for his favorite comics. Because the best comics encapsulated the most important workaday myths of his age, he'd learned to love them." The problem with this account is that by "comic strips" and "comics" James was referring to newspaper strips rather than comic books. The best evidence for this is the fact that while he mentions Gasoline Alley and Dick Tracy, there are no references to superheroes such as Batman, Captain America, the Spirit and so on. See Dave Marsh, "Introduction," Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Tarantula (New York: DC Comics, 1995), p. 1.[^]

[20] The historian Gerald Horne charges James with "groveling" before the U.S. authorities to obtain citizenship papers, citing a letter in which James assured NAACP leader Walter White that the "idea that I was a dangerous agitator abroad is entirely ridiculous…I would get rid of every copy of World Revolution [a key document in the prosecution's case] that I could, because I no longer believe in it." Quoted in Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988, pp. 63-64. [^]

[21] The argument that pop culture is underwritten to deceive the masses is an argument with a long and distinguished pedigree, on the left and elsewhere, and James rejected it tout court. As he wrote in 1949-1950: "If even for the sake of argument, it is agreed that the publishers, the movie magnates, the newspaper proprietors and the banks which directly or indirectly control them, are interested in distracting the masses of the people from serious problems or elevated art, then the question still remains, why, at this particular time, this particular method of distraction should have arisen and met with such continuous success. To believe that the great masses of the people are merely passive recipients of what the purveyors of popular art give to them is in reality to see people as dumb slaves." American Civilization, p. 122. [^]

[22] Special Delivery, p. 73. [^]

[23] Special Delivery, p. 138.[^]

[24] Special Delivery, p. 139.[^]

[25] Special Delivery, pp. 123. [^]

[26] Larsen, "Negativities of the Popular," p. 89.[^]

[27] American Civilization, p. 119.[^]

[28] Paul Buhle, "Introduction: The 1960s Meets the 1980s," in Paul Buhle, ed. Popular Culture in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. xxii. [^]

[29] Special Delivery, p. 139. [^]

[30] Grant Farred, "C.L.R. James' Postcolonial Thinking: Prophetic Readings, Prophetic Failings and the American Years," Against the Current, January/February 2001, pp. 21-22. See also Andrew Ross, "Civilization in One Country? The American James," in Farred, Rethinking C.L.R. James. [^]

[31] See McLemee, ed. C.L.R. James on the 'Negro Question'.[^]

[32] American Civilization, p. 119. [^]

[33] American Civilization, pp. 122-123. [^]

[34] American Civilization, p. 127. [^]

[35] Larsen, "Negativities of the Popular," pp. 98-99. [^]

[36] American Civilization, p. 148. [^]

[37] American Civilization, p. 123. [^]

[38] American Civilization, p. 31. [^]

[39] American Civilization, p. 31.[^]

[40] Max Lerner, America As a Civilization (30th anniversary edition). New York: Henry Holt, 1987, p. 505. [^]

[41] America As a Civilization, p. 875. [^]

[42] American Civilization, p. 277.[^]

[43] America As a Civilization, p. 500.[^]

[44] American Civilization, p. 166. [^]

[45] America As a Civilization, p. 799. He goes on to say: "In this sense there is no great difference between the sleaziness of the 'comic books' (a hundred million copies of which flow into the American market every year) and that of the 'slick' magazines produced on coated stock and selling for much higher prices. They have in common the assumption of an inert reader who will respond to a formula. In both cases the situation is contrived and the solutions are easy. The difference is largely that the comic books contain stronger ingredients, including violence and sadistic terror, that they take less pains at simulating plausibility, and that they mainly reach young readers." [^]

[46] The copious acknowledgments to America As a Civilization include such names as Daniel Bell, Daniel Boorstein, Nathan Glazer, George Kennan, Margaret Mead, Arthur Schlesinger, C. Wright Mills, and Herbert Marcuse, among others. [^]