Much of the scholarship that dismisses James’ placement of blacks in the vanguard obscures the significant theoretical contribution of an avowed Marxist who remained bound to nothing but his own conscience and interpretation of Marxist-Leninist theory. James, himself, was aware of the addition that he, together with Trotsky, had made to the American radical landscape: “We claim particularly that our special theoretical contribution to the Marxist understanding of the Negro question, is that the Negro’s place is not at the tail but in the very vanguard of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism.” Moreover, this argument was not transient—he continued to profess this role of the black proletariat until the United States deported him in 1953. Following James’ 1948 speech “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in US”—the last time James explicitly mentioned the “vanguard” prior to his deportation—Simon Owens, a black stamping machine operator from Detroit, recalled: “I never was so shocked and so happy in all my life…That was complete for me. I couldn’t see how I could even think of leaving the party after hearing him.” This essay will, first, illuminate James’ conception of the vanguard. Scholars who have asserted his abandonment thereof have found reason to do so, and I will try to clarify the space between James’ philosophy and their extrapolations. The pages to follow also strive to shed light on the ways in which James’ philosophy remained disconnected from American reality. The New Deal was already an unprecedented shift to the left for many Americans in the 1930s, and yet James believed that a revolution much more radical in nature was not far off. What inspired him to think that socialism would take root in the United States?Bachelor of Art
