World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Revolutionary Series) [Paperback]

C. L. R. James (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1993 | Series: Revolutionary Series

Written in 1937, "World Revolution" was a contemporary attempt to synthesise the experience of the revolutionary movement after World War I. James' analysis of the Soviet Union bears a surprising freshness, and many of his predictions have proved amazingly accurate.

Product Details

• Paperback: 446 pages
• Publisher: Humanity Books; 1st Paperback Ed edition (May 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573925837
• ISBN-13: 978-1573925839
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,327,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars james's weakness, james's strength the world revolution, May 19, 2003

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Revolutionary Series) (Paperback)

In the 1930s and early 1940s many intellectuals of brilliance and determination were attracted by the world revolution. CLR James, the most brilliant of West Indian intellectuals, cricketeer, sports writer, analyst of literature including his prescient writing on Melville done while imprisoned by the INS in NY harbor at the height of the 1950s witch hunt and above all the masterful author of BlacK Jacobins, the revolutionary Marxist History of Haiti's rebellions, and under the prodding of Trotsky and of the US Socialist Workers Party, the Revolutionary Struggle of the Negro people, a modern transformation of Trotsky's ideas on the African American struggle that predicted what happened in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

This book was written by James in the 1930s when he was an adherent of the real communist movement, the Fourth International led by Leon Trotsky. It charts the rise and fall of the Comintern, born as the revolutionary international of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, of James P. Cannon, and so many others and charts its murder by Stalin and his minions.

To supplement this, you must read Against the Stream, on the history of the International, by Leon Trotsky. This is a discussion of the book, the history, and its merits by Trotskly with James. Trotsky explains James' errors, his concentration on individual tactics than the inmpact of history on masses of workers, among so many other things. Indeed, Trotsky's interviews with James contained in his writings of 1939-40 and 1940 are a very good antidote to the general weaknesses of petit-bourgeois intellectualism, and so genuinely wise about life in general, that they deserve to be in every home.

James began to desert Marxism around this time, siding with Schactman and Burnham in their fight against genuine Trotskyism and Leninism. Lured back by the SWP's tremendous success in the Black struggle and the labor movement in the late 1940s, James deserted the revolutionary movement when the Korean war came because he would not defend China and the Korean national struggle against U.S. imperialism.

Sadly James sunk into opportunism and intellectual anticommunism and disgraced himself in his return to Trinidad in the 1950s in his attempts at opportunism in preindependence Trinidad.

This work reminds us he was once a revolutionary communist. Unfortunately, so many, like the editor of this collection, try to blur the line between the Leninist James tried to be in the 1930s and the opportunist he became by the 1950s, even the Leninist James would not have wasted his time to spit upon.