A ‘Bohemian freelancer’? C.L.R. James, his early relationship to anarchism and the intellectual origins of autonomism[324]

Christian Høgsbjerg

That the mature Marxism of the late Trinidadian intellectual and activist C.L.R. James (1901–1989), one of the twentieth century’s most original contributors to what Hal Draper has termed the revolutionary democratic tradition of ‘socialism from below,’ seemed to have some sort of relationship to anarchism has often been alluded to, though James’s actual relationship to anarchism and anarchists remains relatively unknown, and sadly not a matter which is discussed at length in the existing literature of James-scholarship.[325] In 1981, Paul Berman, in probably what still stands as the most extended discussion of James and anarchism, thought James ultimately had come up with ‘a version of socialism that wittingly or unwittingly incorporates elements of anarchism within a larger Marxist framework.’[326] In 1987, James D Young, subsequently author of The World of C.L.R. James, noted ‘James was always a dissident with a touch of anarchist disaffection.’[327] In 1989, in an obituary of James, Robin Blackburn declared James’s highly original interpretation of Leninism meant James was an ‘Anarcho-Bolshevik,’ while E.P. Thompson apparently went as far as to speak of James’s writing not just being ‘infused with a libertarian tendency’ but of James’s ‘instinctive, unarticulated anarchism.’[328]

Yet there is a problem here, as if James was in some way an anarchist, his ‘anarchism’ was not simply ‘unarticulated’ — rather, James was about as explicit as he could get in articulating outright opposition. In 1948, in Notes on Dialectics for example, James casually noted in passing that ‘the Proudhonists and Bakuninists represented the petty-bourgeois capitalistic influences in the proletariat’ at the time of the First International which lost out to Marxism ‘because of the decline of the petty- bourgeois individualism in capitalism as a whole,’ while he also commented on the failings of anarchism in the Spanish civil war.[329] As Berman admitted, James

‘has always called himself, in spite of everything, a Leninist...as to anarchism, in all of his writings he condemns it forcefully. But I must say, James’s forcefulness on this point reminds me of nothing so much as Rosa Luxemburg’s similar forcefulness in the opening pages of The Mass Strike — an instance of protesting too much.’[330]

Yet Paul Buhle is surely closer to the mark when he describes any reference to James’s politics as ‘anarchist’ in ‘its treatment of party and state’ as a ‘sincere but mistaken’ position.[331]

This paper will not explore why that is the case in detail, which would require a systematic exposition of how James together with his comrades in the ‘Johnson- Forest Tendency’ inside American Trotskyism, above all Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, tried to, in James’s own words, ‘work through Leninism’ during and after the Second World War in order to try to come to terms with the crisis that had overcome not just Marxism but the wider working class movement in a period dominated by Stalinism and Fascism.[332] So for example, just as the exiled Lenin in 1914 turned in despair to the library and a serious study of the Hegelian dialectics to produce his ‘Philosophical Notebooks,’ so the Johnson-Forest Tendency now spent hours engaged in serious study of the German philosopher Hegel. This ‘working through’ Leninism necessitated a break with the theory and practice of ‘orthodox Trotskyism,’ a movement James had been committed to since becoming an organized revolutionary in 1934 but this break was conceived as a conscious attempt to not only return to classical Marxism as understood by Marx and Lenin — but also to develop that tradition so it fitted with the new realities of the post war world, to as he put it, make ‘our own leap from the heights of Leninism.’[333] Leon Trotsky during the 1930s in the context of the historic collapse of the Third International as any kind of revolutionary force — something confirmed after the greatest defeat suffered by the international working class in world history, the victory of Hitler’s Nazis in 1933 — had argued for the critical importance of founding the Fourth International which for Trotsky represented the solution to what he called the historic ‘crisis of revolutionary leadership’ gripping the official political organizations of the working class movement. Against this perspective, the Johnson-Forest Tendency during the 1940s felt the critical crisis of the age was instead what they called the ‘crisis of the selfmobilisation of the proletariat,’ and so argued for a greater stress and focus on what James called ‘free creative activity’ and ‘disciplined spontaneity,’ the self-activity of the working class itself autonomous of official political parties and trade union bureaucracies.[334] Yet as James put it in Notes on Dialectics,

‘we have arrived, are arriving at Marxist ideas for our time out of Trotskyism. We would not come out of Stalinism, or social democracy, or anarchism. Despite every blunder, and we have not spared them, Trotskyism was and remains in the truly dialectical sense, the only theoretical revolutionary current since Leninism...we came from there and could have only come from there.’[335]

However, because attention on James and anarchism remains so underexplored in the literature, this paper will first explore James’s early relationship to anarchism — which may throw some light on why Leon Trotsky would refer to his erstwhile loyal lieutenant from Trinidad C.L.R. James in a private letter in 1940 as a ‘Bohemian freelancer’ — before making some tentative comments about how and why James’s mature Marxism came to be an intellectual influence for those who would later develop what we now call autonomism, above all in Italy.[336]

Rather than being an ‘instinctive anarchist,’ the early politics of James, such as they were while a young teacher, journalist and writer in the British Crown Colony of Trinidad were distinctly of the gradual, practical, statist, reformist variety. He was a democrat in a country without any meaningful democracy, a parliamentary socialist in a country without a meaningful parliament. James’s hero at the time, and the subject of his first book in 1932, was Captain Andre Cipriani, the former Commanding Officer of the British West India Regiment in the First World War and then leader of the mass social democratic nationalist Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (T.W.A.). Inspired in part also by Gandhi and Marcus Garvey, James became a campaigner for ‘West Indian self-government,’ but at this stage he was very far from the revolutionary Marxist and ‘class struggle Pan-Africanist’ he would become. If ‘Conservatism unprodded hardens into tyranny, radicalism unchecked degenerates into chaos,’ he wrote in one 1931 article.[337] If anything, James was a liberal humanist who aspired to live by the tenets of Matthew Arnold, but his attempt to sincerely follow Arnoldian ideals led him to first implicitly and then explicitly critique British colonial rule. He joined up with other writers around two literary journals, Trinidad and then The Beacon, the latter of which the editor Albert Gomes recalled:

‘became the focus of a movement of enlightenment spearheaded by Trinidad’s angry young men of the Thirties. It was the torpor, the smugness and the hypocrisy of the Trinidad of the period that provoked the response which produced both the magazine and the defiant bohemianism of the movement that was built around it.’[338]

If perhaps not therefore quite an ‘instinctive anarchist,’ James seems to have been something of an ‘instinctive Bohemian freelancer.’[339] Arriving in Britain in 1932, witnessing the Lancashire cotton textile workers strike while up in Nelson, and then reading Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution amid the conditions of the Great Depression and the triumph of Hitler’s Nazis in 1933 led James to politically radicalize while working as the Manchester Guardian’s cricket correspondent. In 1934, James left the British Labor Party which he had joined in solidarity with Ciprani’s T.W.A. and joined the tiny British Trotskyist movement, in particular the section of it inside the Independent Labor Party (I.L.P.), the Marxist Group.

James orientated to Trotskyism largely through his own critical independent reading, but it was while searching out Marxist classics in London in 1933 that he happened to visit a bookshop on 68 Red Lion Street, quite near where James lived during most of the 1930s, called Lahr, owned by an anarchist from Germany, Charlie Lahr. Lahr was, according to David Goodway, ‘very probably the last’ in the line, ‘stretching back to the late eighteenth-century,’ of ‘great London radical booksellers- cum-publishers.’[340] His bookshop, according to Jonathan Rose during the 1930s was ‘a mecca for down and out Nietzscheans and scruffy poets.’[341] James remembers Lahr soon ‘got interested in what I was doing and would put aside a book or pamphlet for me he knew or thought would interest me.’[342] The two soon formed what James describes as ‘a curious partnership,’ with Lahr helping James become acquainted with knowledge of the reactionary nature of individual Labor leaders and British trade union bureaucrats — and James learned much particularly about contemporary Germany and Hitler’s rise from power.[343] One might surmise that it was Lahr who also recommended James read Peter Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution (1909) as part of his ongoing research on the Haitian Revolution, a work which James in his 1938 classic The Black Jacobins described as having a ‘more instinctive understanding of revolution than any well-known book on this subject’ and in 1963 would even describe as ‘the best general book in English’ on the French Revolution.[344]

Yet as well as James’s sense of fair play and critical thinking abilities which led him to read widely, of more significance in my opinion in the making of James into a creative and distinctly anti-statist Marxist was the whole environment of far-left politics in 1930s Britain, and the eclectic milieu around the I.L.P., with its various traditions including council communism and diverse other forms of non-Leninist socialisms.[345] For us it is particularly interesting here to note that James, fast emerging as the intellectual driving force of British Trotskyism during the 1930s, was on reasonably good terms with some of the leading anarchists in Britain during this period, including the veteran Guy Aldred who he met in Glasgow.[346] Also almost by accident James crossed paths with Vernon Richards, a young anarchist from Italy who was editor of Spain and the World, the main British anarchist paper of the day (previously and subsequently called Freedom) which Richards had launched in London in late 1936 while only 21 years old.[347] As the editor of the Trotskyist journal Fight (launched in October 1936), James met Richards on one of his regular visits to the printers at Narod Press in 129/131 Bedford Street, Whitechapel, which was run by a team of Jewish apprentices under ‘Papa Naroditsky’ and his three sons. As Richards remembered, ‘apart from the boys themselves...one had the opportunity to meet other editors supervising their journals,’ including ‘the gentle-speaking West Indian Marxist CLR James who was producing his Fight! No punch-ups, political or otherwise.’[348] Indeed, James would on occasion rally to the side of the tiny British anarchist movement against the I.L.P. and Communist Party in Fight.[349]

Indeed, Richards’s publication Spain and the World suggests something about the wider connection between anarchists and the Pan-Africanist movement in Britain in the 1930s. In May 1937, James with his compatriot and boyhood friend, George Padmore, launched the International African Service Bureau (I.A.S.B.) in London, and the title at least of the I.A.S.B.’s 1937 newsletter, Africa and the World, seems inspired by the anarchist Spain and the World. The presence among the patrons of the I.A.S.B. of F.A. Ridley, a libertarian socialist intellectual and member of the I.L.P., who called for an ‘anarcho-Marxist alliance’ in 1938, is perhaps significant.[350] There are tantalizing glimpses in Ethel Mannin’s satirical 1945 novel Comrade O ’ Comrade of one key Pan-Africanist in Britain during this period, the Barbadian veteran organizer of colonial seamen — Chris Braithewaite — better known under his pseudonym Chris Jones — speaking alongside Emma Goldman on meetings on the Spanish Revolution in London during this period. Mannin notes that Braithewaite took the opportunity ‘to put the anti-Imperialist case, with special reference to Africa,’ something Mannin makes light of given the meeting was theoretically on Spain, but actually not to be passed over lightly given the critical question of the Moroccan troops who fought for General Franco on the vague promise of colonial liberation, a promise the Spanish Republic was unwilling to make.[351] George Padmore would later recall the period ‘immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War...was one of the most stimulating and constructive in the history of Pan-Africanism,’ noting that black intellectuals made what he called a ‘detailed and systematic study of European political theories and systems’ among which he included Anarchism.[352]

That said, of critical importance in sowing the seeds of James’s later break with orthodox Trotskyism during the 1930s was the impact of two external events which revealed the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism — the Moscow Trials and the Spanish Civil War. These were also to be critical for the political evolution of James’s key intellectual collaborator during the 1940s, Raya Dunayevskaya. As Peter Hudis has noted, the Spanish Civil War in particular

‘presented revolutionaries with what Dunayevskaya was later to call the “absolute contradiction” of our age — the emergence of counter-revolution from within revolution. It was not only the Stalinists, however, whose role was compromised by these events. For the various anti-Stalinist tendencies, be they Trotskyist, anarchist or independent, failed to successfully combat the new phenomenon of counter-revolution emerging from with revolution.’

Trotsky’s Russian language secretary from 1937–38, Dunayevskaya later recalled how she first became critical of Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ during this tumultuous period. ‘Out of the Spanish Civil War there emerged a new kind of revolutionary who posed questions, not only against Stalinism, but against Trotskyism, indeed against all established Marxisms.’[353]

James similarly began to ask questions of Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed — a work which Trotsky had completed in June 1936 — so before the Moscow Trials and the Stalinist suppression of the P.O.U.M. and anarchists in Barcelona. Indeed, by the time he wrote his pioneering anti-Stalinist Marxist history of ‘the rise and fall of the Communist International,’ World Revolution, published in April 1937, James while still formerly accepting Trotsky’s analysis was already taking a harder line on Stalinism and showing an openness to those arguing that Stalinist Russia had become a state capitalist society. According to Special Branch operatives, when James spoke in London in defense of Trotsky after the first Moscow Trial on 9 September 1936, ‘he compared the conditions of the British and Russian workers, adding that a form of capitalism was creeping into the Soviet State.’[354] In the course of researching World Revolution, James read the works of a number of people who felt Stalinist Russia was now state-capitalist including two former leading German Communists, Arthur Rosenberg and Karl Korsch — the latter James apparently met in 1936 — and also the former leading French Communist Boris Souvraine whose 1935 biography of Stalin maintained that ‘the Federation of Socialist Soviet Republics, the very name a four fold contradiction of the reality, has long ago ceased to exist,’ and ‘Soviet state capitalism,’ ‘so-called Soviet society’ rests ‘on its own method of exploitation of man by man.’[355] James seems to have met up with Souvraine in Paris in 1938 and would translate Souvraine’s Staline into English in 1939, generously describing it as ‘a book with an anarchist bias against the dictatorship of the proletariat but irreproachably documented, very fair, and full of insight.’[356] Indeed, James himself in World Revolution presented much evidence that Stalinist Russia, while certainly a dictatorship, could not in any way be described as a ‘workers’ state.’ As James noted, ‘the fiction of workers’ control, after twenty years of the revolution, is dead. But the bureaucracy fears the proletariat. It knows, none better, the temper of the people it so mercilessly cheats and exploits.’[357] For Trotsky, the bureaucracy was a brutal oppressor, but was not actually exploiting the working class.[358] Yet for James, the first Five Year Plan meant that ‘the remnants of workers control were wiped away.’[359] ‘The Russian proletariat, after its Herculean efforts, seems to have exchanged one set of masters for another, while the very basis of the proletarian state is being undermined beneath its feet.’ James declared the methods of Stalin’s industrialization drive seemed to be just ‘discovering what the capitalists knew hundreds of years ago...where will all this end?’[360]

Such ideas were in the air on the far-left during the 1930s.[361] After writing World Revolution, James would in 1937 write an introduction for Red Spanish Notebook an eyewitness account of revolutionary Spain through the eyes of two surrealist poets who had gone to fight for the P.O.U.M., Mary Low and the Cuban Trotskyist Juan Brea, who had concluded by pondering the motives of the Soviet Union with respect to revolutionary Spain, noting ‘let us suppose that Russia is no longer a proletarian state but is making her first steps towards capitalism.’[362] One witness to Stalinist counter-revolution in Spain, George Orwell, who seems to have met up with James in the summer of 1937 after returning to Britain and who once described World Revolution as a ‘very able book,’ in his 1938 work Homage to Catalonia described the ‘socialism in one country’ being built in Russia by Stalin as little more than ‘a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact.’[363]

On 3 September 1938, at the founding conference of the Fourth International, James intervened forcefully in the debate challenging the orthodox position that Trotskyists should call for the defense of the U.S.S.R. in case of war.[364] A month later, James would travel to America for a lecture tour, during which time he would meet Trotsky himself for discussions on black liberation in the US.[365] Trotsky’s 1940 comment on James as a ‘bohemian freelancer’ has to be seen in the context of the split in American Trotskyism over the class nature of the Soviet Union and were made in part because of James’s growing openness to and sympathies for state capitalist theories to explain Stalinist Russia but also because James had increasingly also come into conflict with the official bureaucratic apparatus of the Fourth International and its International Secretariat over a number of tactical questions — differences he had tentatively tried to raise in a theoretical manner in his discussion of ‘democratic centralism’ in World Revolution.

James and the Intellectual Origins of Autonomism

Though as Steve Wright suggests, ‘the core premises of autonomist Marxism were first developed in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s’ when militants first sought to confront Marx’s Capital with ‘the real study of a real factory’ in 1960s Italy, the intellectual origins date back earlier, and include the work of James and the Johnson- Forest Tendency more generally during the 1940s. As Wright, and others including Harry Cleaver have noted, the likes of Romano Alquati’s pioneering 1961 ‘Report of the new forces’ at F.I.A.T . was not totally unprecedented. During the momentous year of 1956 and for two years subsequently, for example, Daniel Mothe, a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie around Cornelius Castoriadis and a milling machine operator at the Renault Billancourt vehicle factory kept a diary, which was published as Journald’un Ouvrier, 1956–58, and translated into Italian in 1960. Even earlier, in 1954, Danilo Montaldi had published in Battaglia Communista a translation of a 1947 work entitled The American Worker by a member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency Phil Singer (who used the pseudonym Paul Romano). This work had first been translated into French by the comrades of Socialisme ou Barbarie who published it in their journal in parts from 1949 onwards, before being translated from the French by Montaldi.[366] Singer was an American car worker at a General Motors plant who in his late twenties had kept a diary which with the help of Grace Lee Boggs he had written up in order to portray ‘Life in the Factory,’ ‘what the workers are thinking and doing while actually at work on the bench or on the line.’ The work was published alongside a lengthy piece of commentary entitled ‘The Reconstruction of Society’ by Grace Lee Boggs. As Singer put it,

‘This pamphlet is directed to the rank and file worker and its intention is to express those innermost thoughts which the worker rarely talks about even to his fellow workers. In keeping a diary, so to speak, of the day to day reactions to factory life, I hoped to uncover the reasons for the workers deep dissatisfaction which has reached a peak in recent years and has expressed itself in the latest strikes and spontaneous walkouts.’[367]

Yet what I want to do is to examine briefly James’s contribution to the making of The American Worker — which was essentially how some of his ideas came to indirectly influence early Italian autonomism. As Grace Lee Boggs, who under her pseudonym Ria Stone wrote a lengthy piece of commentary entitled ‘The Reconstruction of Society’ as an afterword to Singer’s commentary in The American Worker, recalled of the Johnson-Forest Tendency,

‘because CLR could not be publicly active, we acted as his transmission belt to the larger American community...one of CLR’s great gifts was that he could detect the special abilities and interests of individuals and encourage them to use these to enrich the movement and at the same time enlarge themselves...Phil Singer, a young GM worker, was always talking about the frustrations of the rank-and-file worker in the plant. CLR proposed that he keep a journal of his experiences. These were subsequently published in The American Worker.’[368]

In a sense this does not sound that original, as attempting to understand society from the standpoint of working class experience at the point of production had ever since Marx’s own Workers Inquiry of 1880 if not before at least had been nominally at the heart of classical Marxism. As James had noted in his discussion of ‘Lenin and Socialism’ back in 1937 in World Revolution,

‘The creative capacity of the masses — he [Lenin] believed in it as no other leader of the workers ever did. That creative capacity had hitherto been seen only in revolution. The Soviet system based on the masses in the factories was to organize this creativeness not only for purpose of government but also for production, linking the two closer and closer together until ultimately the all-embracing nature of production by the whole of society rendered the State superfluous.’[369]

Indeed, the British Trotskyist journal Fight which James had edited in the 1930s had carried a regular series entitled ‘On the Job’ in 1937, featuring for example ‘The Building Worker’ by a young member of the Marxist Group who was a carpenter, Arthur Alexander Ballard, and then ‘From the Engineer’s Bench’ by a member of the engineers union, the A.E.U.[370] Trotsky himself in 1939 famously criticized another Trotskyist paper, Socialist Appeal, on the grounds that

‘is a paper for the workers’ and not a workers paper...You do not hear at all how the workers’ live, fight, clash with the police or drink whiskey...the task is not to make a paper through the joint forces of a skilled editorial board but to encourage the workers to speak for themselves.’[371]

Yet in a sense James’s encouraging of a fellow member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency to keep a diary detailing his experience at work was quite original — as the group’s distinctive perspectives profoundly shaped what became The American Worker. As the leaders of the Johnson-Forest Tendency put it themselves in 1947,

‘the Russian question is only a part of the world crisis. The decisive stage of economic development is statification of production. Statification of production is not a phrase or a description. It marks the capitulation of anarchic capitalist society to the planning of the invading socialist society. The planning, however, torn by class contradictions, repeats the fundamental features of capitalist antagonisms in their most barbarous form. Statification carries in itself the most profound social awareness of the proletariat, and its social structure repeatedly propels the proletariat on the road to the complete transformation of society...The barbarism of capitalism was concretely demonstrated in Russia. But it was the American proletariat which concretized for us the necessarily abstract conception of the creative power of the proletariat in industry as a force for the social regeneration of society. The work of American industrial psychologists and the observations of proletarian comrades whom we had developed opened this door to us. The Johnson-Forest Tendency will soon publish a pamphlet by Phil Romano and Ria Stone which will deal fully with this question from both a practical and a theoretical point of view.’[372]

The American Worker then was about demonstrating the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s ‘conception of the creative power of the proletariat in industry as a force for the social regeneration of society.’[373] In particular, James’s individual contribution to developing this conception should be noted. As the American Trotskyist Stanley Weir recalled,

‘James was the first and only leader in the entire Trotskyist movement, from which I heard discussion of the special form of workers’ control which develops in every workplace naturally and informally. He knew of the existence of informal cultures and that they were the basis from which to broach the entire question of workers’ control...For me, he introduced the ideas which demonstrated the value of what is done socially from below on the job to get out production and to survive.’[374]

We can now tentatively assess the impact of the Johnson-Forest Tendency as expressed through The American Worker on Italian workerism. As Danilo Montaldi noted, The American Worker expressed

‘with great force and profundity, the idea — practically forgotten by the Marxist movement after the publication of Capital Volume 1 — that before being the adherent of a party, a militant of the revolution or the subject of a future socialist power, the worker is a being who lives above all in capitalist production and the factory; and that it is in production that the revolt against exploitation, the capacity to construct a superior type of society, along with class solidarity of other workers and hatred for exploitation and exploiters — both the classic bosses of yesterday and the impersonal bureaucrats of today and tomorrow — are formed.’[375]

Moreover, for those on the anti-Stalinist far-left in France and especially Italy during the 1950s, The American Worker was even more remarkable given the anti- Americanism of the Communist dominated official Left in the context of the Cold War. As Ferrucio Gambino, a sociologist from the University of Padua and cofounder of two 1960s Italian workerist journals Quaderni Rossi — Red Notebooks — and Potero Operaio — ‘Workers Power’ — recalls, after the Hungarian Revolution,

‘tiny groups and individuals in Southern Europe discovered and read “the American comrades” — two words that at long last it was possible to put together again — “the American comrades” who contributed to Socialisme ou Barbarie.The conditions of the working class looked strikingly similar throughout the so-called First World — and, we argued at that time, it could not be dissimilar in the Second World. State capitalism was a living category whereby we could relate in solidarity to the people who were bearing the brunt of the opposition to “actuated socialism.”’[376]

In the 1960s, Gambino and another historian of American labor, Bruno Cartosio from Milan — would eventually establish relations with James and his loyal disciple Martin Glaberman, and the publishing of James himself into Italian began with The Black Jacobins in 1968 — and continued subsequently.[377] Links were established with the Jamesians in Detroit at the heart of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers while the translation of other American Jamesians followed in the 1970s.[378] As Cleaver noted in 1979, ‘works by C.L.R. James, James Boggs, George Rawick, and Martin Glaberman, among others, have been translated into Italian and probably received wider circulation and discussion in Italy than in the United States.’[379]

Overall, though it has not been possible here to fully examine James’s influence on Italian autonomism, it might still be possible to make a few speculative conclusions. In one sense it is a pity that after helping to provide a critical focus on the self-activity of the working class at the point of production, a stress on the possibilities which flowed from wildcat strikes and other unofficial industrial action, that more of James’s writings were not translated into Italian during the 1960s as they might have ensured less of a subsequent retreat from revolutionary Marxism towards an ultimately elitist substitution of the actions of a minority for the mass action of the working class among the Italian autonomists, as James — unlike say Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — never lost sight of either the central importance of working class struggle or the need for some sort of revolutionary Marxist organization.[380] Moreover, as Chamsy El-Ojeili has noted, compared to the majority of early Italian workerist theorists who failed to adequately consider the lives of workers outside of the purely economic battles at the point of production, James was more ‘attentive to the wider cultural aspects of such an investigation of proletarian working life.’[381] However, that said, James’s own reification of spontaneity, and own gradual abandonment of the rich classical Bolshevik legacy of strategy and tactics after his 1951 break with the official orthodox Trotskyist movement meant that he, like the Italian autonomists, was unable to ever really satisfactorily develop a new form of revolutionary Marxist organization able to adequately relate to the key insight of ‘working class autonomy.’[382] It is possible that this was because that insight in itself without an adequate material understanding of the wider economic and political context outside the factory, and the wider, uneven consciousness among the working class where forms of reformist politics are inevitably almost always dominant even inside the most militant factory itself can only reveal so much. Yet if James, the ‘bohemian freelancer,’ ultimately failed to make his great leap forward ‘from the heights of Leninism,’ his creative and revolutionary Marxism and its subsequent influence on movements such as Italian autonomism remain worthy of critical study by anticapitalist scholars and activists today.

As Peter Hudis has noted, ‘James’s emphasis on spontaneity can be seen as having influenced a number of currents in autonomist Marxism, including Negri and Hardt. At the same time, in regard to the problem of organization, they seem not to have gone beyond his stopping point, as seen from the conclusion of Empire: The only event that we are still awaiting is the construction, or rather the insurgence, of a powerful organization. We do not have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real.’ Peter Hudis, ‘Workers as Reason: The Development of a New Relation of Worker and Intellectual in American Marxist Humanism,’ Historical Materialism, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2003), p. 290. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (London, 2001), p. 411.