Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition by Cedric J. Robinson;

Author:Cedric J. Robinson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10: C. L. R. James and the Black Radical Tradition

Black Labor and the Black Middle Classes in Trinidad

In the warm Caribbean Sea, where colonies of African labor were compressed on to the Antilles—the tropic archipelago that serpentined its way from the open claw of the Yucatan and Floridian peninsulas of Central and North America to the northern crowns of Venezuela and Colombia in South America—the same Black antilogic extended itself into the twentieth century. In the earlier century, it had destroyed the plantation economy upon which the momentum of African slavery rested.1 But the Africanization of the islands—their transformation from forced labor into peasant economies where daily life was mediated by the cultural syncretisms of the diaspora—had been incomplete. Political power had been transferred from the venal order of the plantocracies to an uneasy accommodation between the imperial bureaucracy at the metropoles and the highest strata among the entrenched white minorities. Even Haiti, to employ the language of Rainboro again, was witnessing the destruction of democracy by property in fear of poverty.2 In the British possessions, racial arrogance assumed the posture of trusteeship over the islands’ Black populations and determined its proper structure should be that of the system of crown colonies.

The Colonial Office soon realized . . . that the West Indies were quite unsuited for self-government. How could assemblies so blatantly unrepresentative of the bulk of the population be granted responsibility, asked the veteran civil servant, Sir Henry Taylor? As the islands were fast becoming financial liabilities, the old representative constitutions became a bar to good government. The new free populations could never by “represented” under existing conditions. Thus the idea took root that the West Indies should be persuaded to reconsider their constitutions and become crown colonies.

By 1875 all the Caribbean colonies except Barbados (to which might be added the Bahamas and Bermuda) agreed to give up their old constitutions and become Crown colonies. In 1868 the colonial secretary announced that the new legislative councils would all have a basic feature: “that the power of the Crown in the Legislature, if pressed to its extreme limit, would avail to overcome every resistance that could be made at it.” In other words, the British government had stepped into the West Indies to protect the population from the power of the former slave-owning class.3

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