OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | The CLR Mantra: ‘No Kings’ Rallies In US A Pointer To A Marxist Future? | Farrukh Dhondy

“Poets celebrate the nightingale’s song

What’s a nightingale look like? I recognise a crow

I suppose not knowing makes me inobservant, wrong!

Of course, birds are different, but significantly so?

What poets call ‘song’ I hear as cheeps and screeches

As ‘caws’ and ‘tap-tap-tap’ from bad-lucking magpies

Their sounds are ‘bird-song’ not in any way beautiful speeches

But then poetry has always been addicted to lies?”

From Pay Shower: The Story of Pakistani Inflation

The attendance of several million people in the 2,500 rallies of the “No Kings” democracy movement in the United States has, gentle readers, triggered an ideological thought.

My late friend and guru CLR James (1901-1989) was the leading exponent of Marxism in the last century. He held one startling and, to many, bewildering opinion.  Asked which country in our beleaguered planet was historically closest to Marx’s vision of Communist societies, he would say…

OK, fill in the dots! Russia? China? Venezuela? -- Don’t be absurd, these are degenerate oligarchical capitalist dictatorships which have outlawed democracy…

CLR’s answer? “The United States of America”!

Er… Yes. No, it wasn’t a joke. Here’s why.

CLR was born and brought up in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad. He turned to Marxism when he came to Britain and lived in the working-class North. He then went to America and, in a categorical rejection of the Stalinism, joined a Trotskyist movement there. He then left it, moving ideologically on.

His central contention in abandoning Trotskyism was, through his observation of American history and contemporary actions and politics, that the era of the vanguard party leading nations to socialism was dead.

It’s not, as they say, “socket reliance” (I think you mean “rocket science”? --Ed).

(Of course, sorry yaar, old age catches up --fd)

What would CLR say today if he was asked this question in the age of the legally-elected Donald Trump, MAGA and this POTUS’ demented, illegally vengeful and unconstitutional policies and moves. Would James now say: “America Socialist in the Future?” (AS IF???)

Gentle reader, having known him and talked over politics for hours with him (I’ve even written and published his posthumous biography -- but this is not to prompt you to rush to Amazon to buy it!), I fear he would have still maintained his observation, because he wasn’t basing it on ballot-box evidence.

Having denounced the vanguard party as a vehicle of change -- witness what happened to Russia’s Communist Party. What do we have now? A Vladimir Putin dictatorship with Hitlerian ambitions run by a mafia of oligarchs who own and control the natural resources and the economy of the country? Ownership of the means of production by the working class? Yes, and Pope is on a pilgrimage to Mecca?

China? The vanguard party, born to bring socialism to the country and safeguard it, now presides over a controlled capitalism and suppresses all dissent, playing the fool with the hacking and subversion of international networks.

Undoubtedly CLR witnessed the horror, the assassination of all opponents, including Trotsky, the concentration camps, the virtual genocide of resistant farmers, the imperial bargaining, control and suppression of the countries of what became the Soviet Union’s empire after the “deals” following the Second World War.

He witnessed the “vanguard” party’s actions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. He lived through the news of Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

In Marxist jargon, this supposed vehicle of Communism had “turned into its vicious opposite”.

CLR was aware that as Lenin, the originator of the instrument known as the vanguard party, disillusioned with what he saw it becoming, changed his mind about it in his final years. CLR points to two late essays of Lenin as evidence of this disillusionment and a formula for its replacement. One of the essays is called “On the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection” and the other is “On Education”.

What in our times is the instrument that replaces the vanguard party to bring about change and why is the United States still named by James as its best candidate?

In his time in the Trotskyist movement of the US, this perception of the in-built flaw in the vanguard party came hand in hand with James’ watching, and analysing, the movements of masses of people demanding this or that in their own social or material interest. This included the growth of the trade unions in the US, but of course the main spontaneous movement which would find its own variegated leadership in several places, was the civil rights movement of America’s Black people. James lived through the era of the civil insurgency of Martin Luther King Jr. He lived through the entire movement of the Indian

National Congress led by Mahatma Gandhi, who inspired Martin Luther King Jr, demanding, through mass popular protest, the end of colonial rule. These leaders gave vice to the spontaneous and desperate demands of millions.

James was a mentor to Kwame Nkrumah who led the popular movement to demand the decolonisation of Ghana. The rest of Africa followed.

I became closely acquainted with CLR in the last two decades of his life. He lived those in London and was the ideological mentor of several “immigrant” Black-and-Asian organisations such as the British Black Panther Movement and the Black-and-Asian magazine and activist collective Race Today.

Yes, all mass movements need organisation and leadership but they, and not some politburo that calls them to arms, define their own demands and trajectories.

Aren’t the “NO KINGS” demonstrations in the United States an indication of its future?

Thus spake CLR!