James’s embrace of Trotskyism was paired with an intense survey of European philosophy and social thought. He studied Hegel in these years. He was also drawn to the larger canon of European thinkers interested in the concept of “freedom.” Marx in particular captured his imagination; it was in Marx that Hegel’s ideas of freedom became a sturdy theory of revolution based on the organization and self-assertion of workers, and it also led James to consider the plight of Black workers in particular.
The unifying thread that runs through James’s vast body of work was a focus on this proletarianized “race” and racialized working class whose objective position, he argued, made it the potential locomotive for revolutionary socialism, just as the unpaid workers of Haiti were the true engine of the overthrow of slavery. Adapting Lenin’s byword, James concurred that “Every cook can govern,” those of African ancestry not least.
Reading these European thinkers, however, James was also struck by the fact that, despite their interest in the political and moral progress of freedom, they had little to say about a deeper expression of this idea as embodied in the Haitian Revolution. This was true not only of Marx but of that icon of the American left, Thomas Paine. As the late Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes in his trailblazing Silencing the Past, this muzzling of the profundity of the Haitian Revolution was an important chapter in a larger narrative of global domination.
The Black Jacobins set out to correct this elision. In its riveting pages, James sought to make Africans active subjects of their own history rather than passive objects of others’ history. Building on James’s pathbreaking book, a new generation of scholars have argued that the Haitian Revolution precipitated a general crisis of the entire slave system in the Western Hemisphere—including in the United States—that could end only in its collapse, which I addressed in my book Confronting Black Jacobins. Not coincidentally, the struggle for the eight-hour workday and the drive to organize labor unions both accelerated in the United States post-abolition, suggesting the importance of the victory of unpaid workers in the Caribbean.