“I take the liberty of sending you a work of my own … a study of the dialectic of Hegel, not explanations of the dialectic but directly the dialectic itself,” C.L.R. James reportedly wrote upon completing his manuscript, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, in about 1948. “I regret to say that it is the only direct study of the dialectic that I know.”[i]

C.L.R. James turned to the study of Hegel’s dialectic, focusing on The Science of Logic, soon after he and Raya Dunayevskaya formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the Socialist Workers Party. The return to Hegel represented an effort, along with Grace Lee Boggs, to rethink the foundations of Marxism.

In this segment, we turn to CLR James’ inversion of Hegel and what it might contribute for us today.

Core Readings

C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1948), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/dialecti/index.htm.

Raya Dunayevskaya 1972: On C.L.R. James’ Notes on Dialectics: https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1972/misc/james.htm.

Additional Readings

C.L.R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Facing Reality. The New Society: Where to Look for it & How to Bring it Closer (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2006)

C. L. R. James papers, 1933-2001, at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript, https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/archives/cul-6910705; as well as Grace Lee Boggs and Raya Dunayevskaya (collections at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Brent Edwards, “Black Radicalism and the Archive,” the Du Bois Lectures at Harvard (2015)

Evgenia Ilieva, “Notes on Dialectics: C. L. R. James’s Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin, 2024;45(1):144-165. doi:10.1017/hgl.2024.12.

John H. McClendon, C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).

Additional Resources

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003) (last chapter includes discussion of International African Opinion, the journal CLR James edited in London with George Padmore and others in the late 1930s).

Notes

[i] Quoted in Raya Dunayevskaya, “On C.L.R. James’ Notes on Dialectics” (1972), note 1, available here https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1972/misc/james.htm.