Direct democracy and the search for identity for colonized people: The contemporary meanings of C.L.R. James's classical Athens

Abstract

C.L.R. James, author of The Black Jacobins, a historical study of the Haitian Revolution, is often seen as a paradoxical Pan-African activist with embarrassing Eurocentric tendencies. A major aspect of this perception is his perennial engagement with classical Athens. He regarded it as a model for direct democracy, which could inform workers' self-management, and the search for identity among colonized people. These intellectual legacies began in Correspondence, an obscure Marxist journal in the US of the 1950s, and became the subject of global debate in the 1960s and 1970s. At the centre of the dispute was James's insistence, to Black Power audiences, that classical Athens was the greatest civilization the world had ever known. Objections that classical Athenian civilization was characterized by slavery and exclusions of women obscure the fact that James always acknowledged the limits of Athenian society and implored his audiences to question their own elitism and improve on the direct democratic model for modern politics. Increasingly, the clash of so-called Western civilization and the Third World in the post-colonial era undermined the potential of James's Athens as a productive thought experiment, although African American and Caribbean activists did try to grapple with this argument, and some found it valuable.