Observing Properly Changing Forms of Spontaneity and Organization: Creative Conflicts in C. L. R. James’ Hegelian Dialectics and Political Philosophy

C. L. R. James’ Notes on Dialectics and his other meditations on Hegelian philosophy are less about categories of cognition than on how to apply them to changing forms of spontaneity and organization in historical freedom movements. Reflecting creative conflict in his own politics, James uses them to condemn vanguard parties and theorize the propagation of the destruction of hierarchy. Reminding middle-class intellectuals, not working people, how to think, James also interprets dialectics to preserve Leninism at the expense of his evolving politics of direct democracy. James places dialectical analysis in conversation with the Puritan, French, Russian, and Spanish Revolutions, as well as with the African American freedom movement. He is also usefully considered in relation to Herbert Marcuse and Albert Camus. Characterized as a Hegelian romantic idealist, James’ historical and political speculations in fact were inconsistent in tracing out direct popular self-management as the meaning of the future socialist society.