Coming to terms: the Third World and the dialectic of imperialism

C.L.R. James , Notes on Dialectics (London, 1980), pp.123-4.

Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York, 1970), pp.211-12.

Of course, despite the dissimilarities in their backgrounds, both James and Reich were raising political objections to an international Communist movement dominated by Stalin's authorisation of 'Marxist-Leninist' (Bolshevik) centralisation. In the early 1930s, James had opted for Trotsky over a Stalin resolute in the pursuit of 'socialism in one country', the destruction of the revolutionary Bolshevik party and the abandonment of national liberation movements in the colonies of the 'bourgeois-democracies' of Britain, France and Belgium. Reich, from his direct experience of workers' consciousness in the clinics he helped to organise in Vienna and Berlin in the late 1920s, expelled from the German Communist Party (and the International Psychoanalysis Association) in the early 1930s for his public criticisms of the Party's defaulting to the Nazi movement, was in his first stage of disaffection: the pursuit of 'sexual politics'. See C.L.R. James, 'Laski , St. Paul and Stalin' , in The Future in the Present (Westport, 1977);

Wilhelm Reich , 'What is class consciousness', in Sex-Pol (New York , 1972).

Hugh Trevor-Roper , 'The rise of Christian Europe 1', in The Listener (28 November 1963), p. 871.

Karl Marx , 'On the Jewish question', in Robert Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, 1972), p.48.

Ibid., p.50.

Walter Rodney , 'Upper Guinea and the significance of the origins of Africans enslqved in the New World' Journal of Negro History (Vol. LIV, no. 4, October 1969), p.345.

These are, obviously, pre-eminently economic indices and it is the convention of this particular tradition of inquiry to employ them as such, strictly, to divulge the nature of the relationship between blacks (labour) and capitalism (mode of production). Here, however, the intention is not a reductionist one but an attempt to demonstrate in the simplest terms.

Philip Curtin , The Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison, 1969 ), pp.265-9.

Philip Curtin , 'The Atlantic slave trade, 1600-1800', in J.F.A. Ajya and Michael Crowder (eds), History of West Africa , Vol. I (New York, 1972), p.240.

Karl Marx , Letter to P.V. Annenkov, December 28, 1846, in The Poverty of Philosophy (New York, 1971), p.188.

Karl Marx , Capital, Vol. I ( New York, 1977), p.751.

Abbot Smith , Colonists in Bondage (Williamsburg, 1947), p.134.

Edmund Morgan , American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975), pp.325-6.

Richard B. Moore , 'On Barbadians and minding other people's business' , New World Quarterly (Vol. III, nos. 1&2, Dead Season, 1966 and Croptime, 1967), p.69.

Curtin , The Atlantic Slave Trade, op. cit., p.151.

Ibid., pp.151-4.

Ibid., p.282.

Ibid., pp.139-40.

Orlando Patterson , The Sociology of Slavery ( Kingston, 1969), pp.142-4.

Curtin , The Atlantic Slave Trade, op. cit., pp.91-2.

Ibid.

Gerald Mullin , Flight and Rebellion ( New York, 1972), p.7.

Ibid., p.43.

F. Nwabueze Okoye , 'Chattel slavery as the nightmare of the American revolutionaries' William and Mary Quarterly (Vol. XXXVII, no. 1, January 1980), pp.3-5;

C.L.R. James , 'The Atlantic slave trade,' in The Future in the Present ( Westport, 1977), p.246;

Jeffrey Crow , 'Slave rebelliousness and social conflict in North Carolina 1775-1802' , William and Mary Quarterly (Vol. XXXVII, no.1, January 1980), p.89.

Eric Williams , Capitalism and Slavery ( New York, 1966), p.52.

David Davidson , 'Negro slave control and resistance in colonial Mexico, 1519-1650', Hispanic American Historical Review (Vol. XLVI, no.3, August 1966), p.236.

Peter Boyd-Bowman , 'Negro slaves in early colonial Mexico' The Americas (Vol. XXVI, no.2, October 1969), p. 136.

Davidson , op. cit., p.236.

Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa , author of Compendium and Description of the West Indies (Washington DC, 1942),

recounts some of the measures used by Spanish colonists to delay the loss of Indian labour to their enterprises: '...although the Royal Council of the Indies ... has tried to remedy this evil with warrants and the amelioration of this great hardship and enslavement of the Indians, and the Viceroy of New Spain appoints mill inspectors ... since most of those who set out on such commissions, aim rather at their own enrichment ... and since the mill owners pay them well, they leave the wretched Indians in the same slavery ... the mill owners keep places provided in the mills in which they hide the wretched Indians against their will, so that they do not see or find them, and the poor fellows cannot complain about their wrongs.' (p.134)

Davidson , op. cit., p.237.

Boyd-Bowman , op. cit., p.134.

Leslie Rout Jr. , The African Experience in Spanish America ( Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 105;

Davidson , op. cit., pp.242-3.

Rout , op. cit., p. 101.

Davidson , op. cit., p.244.

Ibid., pp.245-6.

William Taylor , 'The foundation of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa', The Americas (Vol. XXVI, no.4, April 1970 ), pp.441-6.

As an indication of how fleeting is certainty, Davidson in 1966 was willing to argue that San Lorenzo de los Negros had been the only such settlement: 'Yanga's maroon movement is a notable incident in the history of Negroes in Mexico — the only known example of a fully successful attempt by slaves to secure their freedom en masse by revolt and negotiation and to have it sanctioned and guaranteed in law.' (Davidson, op. cit., p.259) Only four years later, Taylor (op. cit.) had published his discovery of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa. And Vazquez de Espinosa, writing contemporaneously to the foundation of San Lorenzo, described a 'village of free Negro and mulattoes' in the nearby district of Guatemala (op. cit., p.224).

Rout , op. cit., pp.278-82.

Ibid., pp.109, 111;

Aquiles Escalante , 'Palenques in Colombia', in Richard Price (ed.), Maroon Societies (Garden City, 1973), pp.76-7;

Miguel Acosta Saignes , 'Life in a Venezuelan Cumbe', in Richard Price, op. cit., pp.64-73.

Ernesto Ennes , 'The Palmares "republic" of Pernambuco: its final destruction, 1697', The Americas (Vol. V, no.2, October 1948 ), p.201.

R.K. Kent , 'Palmares: an African state in Brazil', Journal of African History (Vol.VI, no.2, 1965), pp.166-8.

Ibid., p.162.

Ennes , op. cit., p.213.

Ibid., pp.209-10.

Ibid., p.211. Some measures of the morality to which Ennes refers with approval are the sentiments expressed by Colonel Domingos Jorge Velho while justifying his impressment of Indian natives into his army: '...we augment our troops, and with them we carry war to those obstinate ones who refuse to give up; and if afterwards we avail ourselves of them for our plowing, we do them no injustice, because it is that we may sustain them and also their children no less than ourselves and ours; and so far is this from enslaving them that it rather does them an inestimable favour in that it teaches them to plow, plant, reap and labour for their own support — a thing which, before the whites teach it to them, they do not know how to do.' (p.207)

Barbara Kopytoff , 'The early political development of Jamaican maroon societies' William and Mary Quarterly (Vol. XXXV, no.2, April 1978), p.187.

Mullin , op. cit., pp.89-103.

C.L.R. James , The Black Jacobins (New York , 1963), pp.356-7.

Eugene Genovese , From Rebellion to Revolution ( Baton Rouge, 1979), pp.95-6.

W.E.B. DuBois , Black Reconstruction (New York, 1962), p.12.

Mary Reckord , 'The Jamaican slave rebellion of 1831', Past and Present (No. 40, July 1968), p.125.

W.E.B. DuBois , The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (New York, 1954).

C.L.R. James , and George Padmore , 'Revolts in Africa', in The Future in the Present (Westport, 1977 ), p.79.

Ibid., p.70.

Bonnie Keller , Millenarianism and resistance: the Xhosa cattle-killing' , Journal of Asian and African Studies (Vol. XIII, nos. 1-2, January/April 1978).

Basil Davidson , The African Past (London , 1964), pp.357-8.

Michael Taussig , 'Black religion and resistance in Colombia: three centuries of social struggle in the Cauca Valley', Marxist Perspectives (Vol. 2, no.2, Summer 1979), pp.88-9.

Genovese , op. cit., pp.108-10.

Morgan , op. cit., p.309.

Ibid.

James , The Black Jacobins, op. cit., p.256.

Genovese , op. cit., pp.9-11.

Terence Ranger , 'The people in African resistance' in Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol.4, no.1, October 1977 ), p.126.

Amilcar Cabral , 'National liberation and culture', in Return to the Source (New York, 1973), p.43.