'Sociology based upon form of property, i.e., relations between men and things, a theory of accumulation based upon consumption, socialism as the plan by which these inequalities of property and consumption are readjusted-this is the sociology, the economics and the politics of Stalinism inside and outside Russia. Sociology based upon relations of production, that is to say, relations between people, a theory of accumulation based upon production, socialism as the organisation of a higher mode of labour, that is the theory the International of world revolution must adopt.' C.L.R. James, Grace Lee and Raya Dunayevskaya, State Capitalism and World Revolution (Detroit , 1969), p. 35.
2.
James, Beyond A Boundary (London, 1963), p. 116; and Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (London, 1983), pp. 264-5.
3.
James derided nineteenth-century British historiography for its omission of W.G. Grace, the great cricketer and 'the best known Englishman of [that] time'. James, op. cit., pp. 158-60.
4.
Oliver C. Cox, The Foundations of Capitalism (New York, 1959). Andre Gunder Frank testifies that 'world system history is now "conventionally" started around 1500, or more "precisely" in 1492 by Frank ... 1494 by Modelski ... and more generously about 1450 by Wallerstein'. Andre Gunder Frank, 'A theoretical introduction to 5,000 years of world-system history' , Review, Vol. XIII, no. 2, Spring 1990).
5.
Cox, ibid., pp. 122-3.
6.
Frank, op. cit., pp. 155-248.
7.
Janet Abu-Lughod, 'Restructuring the premodern world-system', Review, Vol. XIII, no. 2, Spring 1990), p. 275.
8.
Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore, 1973 ).
9.
James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (New York, 1953 ).
10.
Copies of Mariners... were sent to every member of Congress. Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: the artist as a revolutionary (London , 1988), p. 106.
11.
James, 'After Hitler, our turn', in Spheres of Influence (London , 1980), p. 28.
12.
James, Modern Politics (Detroit, 1973), p. 54.
13.
'They were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time'. James, The Black Jacobins (New York, 1963), p. 86.
14.
James, Lee, Dunayevskaya, op. cit, pp. 38 and 58, respectively.
15.
Ibid., p. 58.
16.
Ibid., p. 38.
17.
Ibid., p. 35.
18.
Ibid., p. 11.
19.
James, Notes on Dialectics (London, 1980), p. 18. For further elaboration, see Robinson, op. cit, pp. 390ff, and Paul Buhle, op. cit., pp. 70-71 and p. 93.
20.
James, Lee, Dunayevskaya, op. cit., p. 53.
21.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York, 1986), pp. 116-17.
22.
Ibid., p. 205.
23.
D. North, The Economic Growth of the United States: 1790-1860 ( Englewood Cliffs, 1961); and Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York, 1980 ), ch. 10.
24.
Cf. Alan Wald , The New York Intellectuals ( Chapel Hill, 1987).
25.
Cf. Harold Cruse , The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1967).
26.
For more recent examples of the same, see Brian Higgins' summary in 'Melville', American Literary Scholarship 1986 (Durham, NC, 1988).
27.
D.E. Pease , 'Melville and cultural persuasion', in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds), Ideology and ClassicAmerican Literature (Cambridge, 1986 ), p. 392.
28.
Ibid., p. 389.
29.
Ibid., p. 400.
30.
Ibid., p. 412.
31.
Ibid., p. 413. Ishmael is also the centrepiece of Paul Royster's 'Melville's economy of language', a second essay in the same collection containing Pease's article. But in a direct, if unwitting, contradiction of James (and Pease), Royster interprets the relationship between Moby Dick and Pierre (1852) in a rather startling way. Arguing that Melville's approach to language 'travelled from one extreme [language as the "world's perfect counterpart"] to the other [language as a "shadow without corresponding substance"]', Royster maintains that, 'in the same process, Melville also moved from a deep commitment to the capitalist economy to an outright condemnation of it, both as a means of life and as a mode of representation'. p. 313.
32.
Ibid., p. 415.
33.
Buhle, op. cit., pp 106-13.
34.
Cf. Robinson, op. cit., pp. 389ff.
35.
'Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it attained its most beautiful form, exert an eternal charm because it is a stage that will never recur?... The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the immature stage of the society in which it originated.' Marx in Maurice Dobb (ed.) A Contribution to the Critique ofPolitical Economy (New York, 1972), p. 217.
36.
Hayden White, op. cit., p. 110.
37.
Cedric J. Robinson, 'Oliver Cromwell Cox and the historiography of the West', Cultural Critique (1991).
