Racial Rivalries and Plebiscitary Politics

After arriving in the West Indies for the inauguration of the Federal Parliament in April 1958, James was invited to deliver a speech on federation to Queen’s College in British Guiana. While British Guiana held observer status in the federation, the intention of the speech was to convince politicians and the populace of the political and economic benefits of formally joining the federation. Although he spoke to the necessity of federation from the perspective of the West Indies as a whole, James focused on the particularities of the political context in British Guiana, specifically the impact of percolating racial tensions between Africans and East Indians on the prospects for federation, which itself was closely tied to the shifting terrain of party politics.

At the time of James’s speech, Guyanese politics was driven by competition between two mass parties that fell along racial lines: the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP), led by the East Indian dentist Dr. Cheddi Jagan, and the Peoples National Congress (PNC), led by the Black lawyer Forbes Burnham. Together, Jagan and Burnham formed the PPP in 1950 as a deliberately multi-racial, mass party. By 1953, with the organizational acumen of Jagan’s wife, Janet, they united East Indians and Africans as well as the middle classes and working classes to mount a stunning victory in elections for the House of Assembly. In many respects, the PPP was itself a significant experiment in mass-based, participatory democracy that confirmed James’s own thesis about the capacities of the masses for self-mobilization. As George Danns writes, “The party was able to mobilize resources to contest the 1953 general elections, and to very rapidly put into place a well-organized and highly functional party machine based on the power of the people.”Footnote ¹⁰ Fearful of the socialist positions and mass appeal of the PPP, local planters and colonial officials suspended the constitution, forcing PPP leaders out of power. With Cheddi and Janet Jagan in jail, local elites exploited differences within the PPP, ultimately leading to its split into two mass parties with distinct ethnic constituencies. After Burnham launched a failed effort to replace Jagan as party leader, and after the constitution was restored in 1957, he later formed the PNC, leaving the mass democratic movement fractured along racial and ethnic lines.Footnote ¹¹

It was against this backdrop of shifting partisan alliances that James addressed his audience in British Guiana, imploring them to take up the cause of federation. Support for the federation largely fell along party lines, with Burnham and the predominantly Black PNC supporting the federation and the predominantly East Indian PPP in opposition. James wasted no time in his speech clarifying the nature of East Indian opposition to federation on racial bases. Hoping to establish “Indian domination of the colony,” East Indian leaders feared that federation would threaten their numerical majority, bringing “thousands of Africans (or people of African descent) from the smaller islands to British Guiana.”Footnote ¹² Indeed, Jagan admitted as much in a 1956 report to the PPP: “The Indians of British Guiana, feeling as they do a sense of national oppression are almost 100 per cent against federation.”Footnote ¹³ Conversely, “the African population of British Guiana was now eager for federation particularly for the reason that it would bring this reinforcement from the smaller islands [and] once more establish African numerical superiority.”Footnote ¹⁴ Because of this, James warned that such racial tensions were overdetermining debate over the federation in British Guiana.

Although East Indians in the PPP were largely in opposition to federation, James admitted that Jagan himself was not necessarily opposed. Even worse, he took no position at all. To navigate the situation, Jagan advocated for subjecting the question of federation in British Guiana to “the method of plebiscite or referendum.”Footnote ¹⁵ For Jagan, the racial situation in British Guiana was sui generis, necessitating a popular referendum that was not resorted to in places like Trinidad or Barbados. From the start of his speech, James challenged the belief that racial dynamics in British Guiana were wholly unique. Any colonial country going through the transition to national independence proceeds through two phases. In the first, “the progressive elements in the country begin by supporting the national independence movement.” In the second, however, the nationalist movement begins to splinter as different factions come to interpret national liberation in terms of their own interests. Referencing ethnic tensions in the Ghanaian independence movement, James posited that such racial and ethnic rivalries form a common element of all anticolonial struggles.Footnote ¹⁶

As far back as the 1953 general elections, Jagan’s official position was in support of a West Indies Federation, but “with the proviso that a referendum would be taken before entry.”Footnote ¹⁷ By taking the issues of federation out of the elections, party leaders were able to circumvent attacks from the East Indian Association that Jagan was capitulating to Burnham and Africans on the one hand, and from the League of Coloured People that Burnham was selling out to Jagan and the East Indians. By 1958, after the split between the PPP and PNC, the plebiscite became a means of keeping federation politics out of the precarious balance of electoral competition between two mass parties. As we will see later in the case of Norman Manley in Jamaica, the plebiscite often served as a means of attempting to ensure electoral fortunes by avoiding having to make overt decisions on such momentous issues. In Jagan’s case, subjecting the federation question to a plebiscite avoided the risk of alienating his mass base of support in East Indians out of fear of being integrated into a Black-dominated federation.Footnote ¹⁸

For James, these tactics were not simply cynical ploys of self-interested politicians. Rather, they touched upon broader issues of democratic theory regarding the relationship between the leaders and the people in mass movements. In James’s mind, resorting to the plebiscite over questions that were foundational to the polity was a profound “abdication of the responsibilities of political leadership” that is antithetical to a genuinely democratic mass politics. The sine qua non of mass leadership, for James, is seizing on the motion and energy of the people and directing it in a constructive direction (for James, it is never leaders that set the masses in motion). This, however, requires clear communicative exchange between the two, with political leadership clearly articulating the direction in which they are steering mass energies. To this end, “the political leader must say precisely where he stands and ask the people to decide on clear political positions.”Footnote ¹⁹ Leaders can only take political responsibility for mass movements when they articulate clear positions and programs, and when the masses they lead clearly understand the direction they are moving.

The problem with the plebiscite is that it short-circuits this kinetic exchange between leaders and masses. Instead of forcing them to take political responsibility through the clear articulation of political vision, the plebiscite allows political leadership to say, “On this issue I have no opinion exactly. I don’t know whether it is good or bad and therefore we must have a plebiscite and I leave to you to decide.”Footnote ²⁰ The issue with deciding the question of federation by popular referendum was that it was both profoundly abstract—it did not establish what kind of federation was up for debate or under what terms and conditions—and immensely political—with clear and identifiable stakes hanging in the balance. Together, the abstract and politicized nature of the question conspired to ripen racial rivalries, allowing them to run in any direction unhemmed by the limits of party leadership and organization. James explained that a proper response to such rivalries was “to present arguments and distinctive political positions so that the rivalry, the emotionalism, are met with reason and ideas. You counter one thing with the other and you place reasonable clear-cut decisions before the people to decide.”Footnote ²¹ Absent this clarity, the plebiscite gave racial rivalries “free play,” allowing them wider latitude to “run to extremes” than they would have otherwise been allowed had they been “met in the first place by the proper political actions of responsible political parties and leading individuals.”Footnote ²² Jagan expressed a clear program on virtually every issue—from fiscal policy to education to the question of independence itself—except for the question of federation, which he left to the people to decide.

In giving racial rivalries “free play” to run wild, plebiscitary politics allowed them to hang in the air and poison the political atmosphere, granting race a more determinative power as a political category than it would otherwise have. Responsible leadership, for James, would have involved confronting the issue head on and clearly addressing the concerns of both factions. In his 1962 book, Party Politics in the West Indies—itself a kind of post-mortem on the failures of popular politics and the federation in the Caribbean—James clearly sympathized with the concerns of East Indians being relegated to a minoritarian status in the federation. East Indians, James reassured, are an integral social component of the region, but they “are a section of the population forced to be on the defensive. Until that is corrected, no progress in race relations can be made.”Footnote ²³ The responsibility for this, however, lies with political leadership. The task of Jagan and other party politicians was to assume the primary responsibility of articulating a clear vision of the rights, responsibilities, and relations between the majority and the minority. James was clear that fault was not with East Indians for pursuing and protecting their power. Rather, it was with party leaders for failing to demonstrate how allowing racial rivalries to translate into a struggle for power reaped disastrous and unintended consequences for all.Footnote ²⁴

Yet, by hiding behind the plebiscite to avoid having to take defined positions, Jagan abdicated political responsibility, the need to act in tragic and at times impossible situations riddled with contingency, conflict, and uncertainty—that is, revolutionary situations. For James, “A leader is responsible not only for what he says but for what interpretation his followers give to what he says.”Footnote ²⁵ In other words, leaders bear responsibility for the interpretation the masses give to their words, an interpretation that often exceeds and is ultimately irreducible to their own individual intentions. In Jagan’s case, however, it was not mass interpretations given to what he said that were at stake, but what was not said. It was precisely by seeking to avoid having to navigate the racial rivalries of electoral politics that Jagan unleashed them without limit. As a socialist, Jagan built his political fortunes on carefully constructing a cross-racial, mass-based movement that united lower and middle classes through charismatic appeals to class rather than racial interests. If, early on, the avoidance of race is what held the PPP tenuously together, by 1958, this avoidance is what tore the mass movement in favor of federation apart. James had no uncertain praise for Jagan’s political talents: “Jagan actually achieved one of the greatest political feats in the West Indies—the unity of the masses of East Indians and Negroes in British Guiana.”Footnote ²⁶ By abdicating responsibility through the plebiscite, however, Jagan lost control of the power of the masses that so effectively made him the leader he was.

The Tragedy of Mass Leadership

It is notable that James did not accuse Jagan of turning to the plebiscite out of racial animus against Africans or out of fear of a “Black majority,” an old racial trope in the region stretching back to the nineteenth-century writings of Thomas Carlyle and James Anthony Froude. Rather, Jagan resorted to the plebiscite out of a desire to avoid having to incur the risk of allowing race prejudice to inflame mass politics. Declaring that “Dr. Jagan is no petty racialist,” James went on to say that Jagan’s politics were not in the least motivated by racial concerns and that his racial views were those of an “enlightened modern person,” i.e., free from prejudice.Footnote ²⁷ This characterization of Jagan as “enlightened” in the context of anticolonial politics bears remarkable similarity in argumentative style and structure to James’s account of the tragedy of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership in The Black Jacobins (1938).

One of the great themes of The Black Jacobins, as in much of James’s work, is the self-mobilization of the masses. In a 1971 lecture, “How I Would Rewrite The Black Jacobins,” James famously distanced himself from his heroic leader approach to history in favor of a history “from below” that would place more emphasis on the experiences of the enslaved, i.e., the Black sans-culottes.Footnote ²⁸ Nick Nesbitt, however, rightly detects a certain degree of “bad faith” in James’s speculation about how The Black Jacobins might have been rewritten. In James’s own powerful formulations, the primary subject of the text is not a hagiography of the heroic leader in the figure of Toussaint, but rather a materialist account of the dynamics of mass leadership.Footnote ²⁹ What made the Haitian Revolution what it was, in this materialist approach, was the combined efforts of both leader and masses to reciprocally build on the others’ energies in an attempt to seize and navigate the contingencies and revolutionary opportunities opened up by distinct historical conditions. With this approach, James departs from previous histories that cast the revolution as “almost entirely the work of a single man.” Instead, he takes as his subject the “transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day.” Emphasizing the self-action of the enslaved, James then notes that “Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth.”Footnote ³⁰

The whole truth, it becomes evident, is that if Toussaint was made by the revolution, he was also unmade by it as he tragically lost control of the velocity of the mass movement and the exigencies of the historical situation. It is beyond the scope of this essay to fully account for this, but there is one episode that is particularly relevant to understanding James’s critique of the plebiscite in British Guiana: the 1801 revolt led by Moïse recounted in the penultimate chapter of the book. After the 1801 Constitution secured the independence of Haiti (albeit under the aegis of the French Empire) and decreed the abolition of slavery, Toussaint focused his efforts on addressing what Getachew refers to as the postcolonial predicament, the disjuncture between de jure political independence and de facto economic dependence on foreign powers. Central to this predicament was the need to reconstruct the economic foundations of the former colony. As James put it, “The ultimate guarantee of freedom was the prosperity of agriculture,” which required preventing freed slaves from slipping back into subsistence farming.Footnote ³¹ To address this predicament, when he took over new districts, Toussaint instituted a “military dictatorship” that forced people into the countryside to labor by preventing them from claiming property and becoming peasant proprietors. Transforming an enslaved population “after years of license, into a community of free laborers” involved tying ideals of virtuous postcolonial citizenship to disciplined labor productivity, effectively continuing the plantation order under a different guise.Footnote ³²

For James, the problem arose because of how close Toussaint kept white advisors for their economic expertise and, in many cases, even appointed whites as heads of the plantations. Despite their exclusion from political power, white plantation owners were needed for their knowledge of agriculture and even granted important positions for purposes of reconstructing the colonial economy. Understandably, this riled the Black rank and file, who saw in Toussaint’s labor policies a restoration of plantation slavery. Racial categories had a material existence, and the inferiority complex that imperial powers foisted upon colonial peoples was deeply rooted in the structure of plantation society.Footnote ³³ In opposition not so much to the labor regime itself but to working for their former masters, Black laborers in the Northern provinces united under the leadership of Toussaint’s adopted nephew, Moïse. Angered at Toussaint’s protection of whites, Moïse and his followers cemented a plan to violently eliminate white owners and overthrow Toussaint’s rule. After the rebels massacred whites in the hundreds while crying “Long Live Moïse,” Toussaint had his nephew arrested and shot alongside revolting laborers.Footnote ³⁴ It was this central event that accelerated Toussaint’s failures of leadership, specifically his alienation of the Black laborers who composed his own power base.

It is in this context that James made his famous pronouncement on the intersections of race and class: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”Footnote ³⁵ Often read as an abstract judgment on the intersections of race and class, the immediate context for James’s pronouncement is Toussaint’s handling of the Moïse rebellion and his failure to communicate with the masses. For James, Toussaint’s struggle against slavery was at root a class struggle. To the extent that preventing the restoration of slavery required the reconstruction of the plantation economy and, as a result, collaboration with the white owner class, Toussaint’s labor policies advanced the anticolonial struggle. Yet, insofar as the plantation economy was highly racialized, race was always insinuated into the economic structure of (post)colonial society. By failing to carefully explain the purpose of this collaboration and each step of his plan to restore the Haitian economy, Toussaint allowed the racial resentment of Black laborers to fester.Footnote ³⁶ In hopes of preventing racial rivalries from overdetermining the revolutionary process (in effect becoming a race war driven by vengeance), Toussaint maintained a stance of silence and secrecy that led to “neglect of the racial factor.”

This neglect of race is, I argue, precisely what James meant in his well-known claim that “Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment.”Footnote ³⁷ David Scott has interpreted this as a sign of James’s tragic orientation, and specifically his understanding of Toussaint’s leadership in terms of the “tragedy of colonial enlightenment.” In Scott’s rendering, the tragedy of Toussaint was that he was in effect “conscripted” into colonial modernity, forced to seek freedom within the very political discourse that authorized his enslavement (i.e., “the Enlightenment”).Footnote ³⁸ Read alongside James’s later claim that Jagan used the plebiscite to evade having to take a defined position on the festering racial rivalries in British Guiana, and in doing so was acting as an “enlightened modern person” free from racial animosity, the claim about the “failure of enlightenment” suggests something much more mundane. Indeed, Scott completely neglects James’s suggestion that the “truly tragic character of [Toussaint’s] dilemma” places him in a “lesser category” than the great heroes of tragic literature such as Oedipus, Hamlet, and Ahab. The tragedy of Toussaint’s leadership was a kind of minor tragic dilemma: not the tragedy of a figure at the height of their powers combined with the lack of grand vision symptomatic of Oedipus or Ahab, but the tragedy of merely failing to communicate that vision to the masses. Toussaint’s “tragic flaw”—his hamartia—was a political flaw, a tactical and strategic failure.Footnote ³⁹ As Jeremy Glick puts it, “The tragic for James is a mark of revolutionary degeneration. It marks the point when the leader loses touch and stops communicating with his base.”Footnote ⁴⁰

A central part of this tragic flaw, for both Toussaint and Jagan, was a failure to confront the racial factor in revolutionary struggles and communicate how race fit into the grander vision of national liberation. As a result of their enlightened attitudes, their neglect paradoxically granted racial dynamics a heightened role in shaping historical circumstances. If Toussaint was a lesser tragic figure, then Jagan was even more minor. The tragedy of Toussaint stemmed from the fact that his very strength was at once the source of his downfall. In the early days of the revolution, Toussaint’s silence and aloofness instilled a sense of fear in his subsidiary leadership and in the rank and file, providing a much-needed sense of discipline.Footnote ⁴¹ By the closing years of the revolution, however, this silence drove a wedge between his tactics of leadership and the direction of the mass movement. Toussaint’s tragic error was simply the “neglect of his own people. They did not understand what he was doing or where he was going. He took no trouble to explain. It was dangerous to explain, but still more dangerous not to explain.”Footnote ⁴² Understood as a historically constituted, revolutionary situation, tragedy is marked by this failed mediation between protagonist and chorus, leader and masses.Footnote ⁴³

Jagan, for his part, made no decision to even explain or not but merely left the question of federation up to the people to decide in a popular referendum. On its surface, this appears as a democratic gesture, but it became a means of abdicating the responsibilities of political leadership that had the effect of de-mobilizing the masses and fracturing the mass movement in the struggle for the transformation of Caribbean colonial economies. Rather than entering the fray and assuming responsibility for having to address the uncertainties of the racial situation, Jagan used the façade of popular power to avoid articulating a clear vision of federation. To be sure, the circumstances and motivations of Toussaint’s revolutionary silence and Jagan’s constitutional silence differed. Yet, with the same effect as Toussaint’s silence, the plebiscite allowed Jagan to remain outside the contingent space of mediation between leader and mass. In both cases, the tragedy was not so much one of “colonial enlightenment,” but rather that both leaders cut off the reciprocal exchange of kinetic energy between leader and masses necessary for revolutionary movements. Likewise, this disconnection between leaders and masses stemmed from the enlightened desires of political leaders to prevent racial rivalries from becoming the driving force of political action. For this reason, the “indestructible racial antagonism” in British Guiana was “an effect, not a cause, of the unwillingness or inability of some leaders there to challenge the old colonial system.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Jagan’s resort to constitutional silence through the plebiscite reproduced the disintegrating effects of racial political rivalries, which in turn reinforced the continuation of the postcolonial predicament and continued neocolonial rule.

De-Territorializing Anticolonial Constituencies

When James spoke before Queen’s College, one of the primary criticisms he faced was that he was a stranger who had “no right to come here to discuss with the people of British Guiana the question of federation.”Footnote ⁴⁵ On the one hand, James saw such criticism as a diversionary tactic, simply a disguised means of registering one’s opposition to federation without saying so overtly. On a deeper level though, the accusation of being a stranger cut to the question of James’s authority to speak across the boundaries of proto-national, territorial constituencies. In a sense, such objections were symptomatic of a broader impoverishment of political discourse in the West Indies, in which deliberation occurred largely within nationalized public spheres. In a letter to Norman Manley of Jamaica, James lamented the unwillingness of speakers and audiences to cross the boundaries of their respective island polities: “What sort of federation is this in which you… have never found it possible to speak to the people of Trinidad, directly to them, on such a fundamental question, or [Eric] Williams to the people of Jamaica… What we need now is patient, unspectacular work, laying foundations.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The foundations that James hoped to lay were not simply political or economic. Rather, they were the foundations of a new sense of West Indian peoplehood. Despite the fact that the West Indies Federation was a transnational project that required transcending the limits of the nation-state, leaders continued to speak to national masses rather than transnational constituencies.

Accordingly, a second key limitation of the anticolonial plebiscite was that it fixed the territorial boundaries of popular constituencies in advance of the construction of the federation itself. By subjecting the federation to popular referendum from within the boundaries of singular island states, the plebiscite upheld the primacy of the territorial state as the constituent unit of the federation. The federation would merely be a collection of sovereign nations rather than the institutional expression of a new, de-territorialized sense of West Indian peoplehood. In many respects, then, the plebiscite circumvented the transnational politics of peoplehood and the need to construct a new political identity. Put differently, if the plebiscite implies a “decree of the people,” it seeks to dissolve the boundary problem by resolving the question of the borders of the people through the territorial principle.Footnote ⁴⁷

Much of James’s efforts went into calling into existence a transnational conception of West Indian peoplehood. When James proclaims to his audience that the federation is the only means whereby “the West Indies can create the basis of a new nation” and secure “our place in the modern community of nations,” it is important to note the spatial scale of his audience.Footnote ⁴⁸ In referencing “our place in the modern community of nations,” James was speaking to a proto-national constituency—i.e., British Guiana—as a stranger while also pointing to post-national solidarities. To assume their place in the “community of nations,” peoples of the West Indies must reconstitute themselves as a “new nation” through the construction of federated, transnational associations. Decolonization, for James, is not only a process of worldmaking; it is also a process of people-making. Without constructing a new nation, national borders created by colonial powers would take precedence, leading to the perpetuation of the postcolonial predicament. James writes, “Freedom from colonialism is not merely a legal independence, the right to run up a national flag and to compose and sing a national anthem.”Footnote ⁴⁹ To preserve the borders of the anticolonial nation through the plebiscite is to leave colonial boundaries intact. Despite the attainment of independence, continuing to live in territories that still “bear the shape of the old colonial territories” inevitably leads to the perpetuation of the “colonial mentality,” the internalized sense of inferiority instilled by imperial powers in colonial peoples.Footnote ⁵⁰

James was operating in a period where the waning of nation-state sovereignty in the post-war period was not only evident but also seemed inevitable. In James’s account, nation-state independence rested on the imperial exploitation of colonies. As the connection between metropole and colony breaks up, national independence is being replaced by a de-territorialized, global economy marked by economic interdependence. In the past centuries of European history, James argues, nearly every significant war was fought over possession of colonial territories. With the initiation of formal decolonization in the twentieth century, the dominant form of imperial competition signifying the onset of “global war” between the United States and the Soviet Union is for “total control over the world market” rather than over territorial control of land and populations.Footnote ⁵¹ One of the consequences of the constantly expanding means of production under capitalism is that the political unit most suitable to this expansion is constantly being transformed and enlarged. That is, capitalism causes spatial units to steadily increase, for instance, from the city-state to the nation-state. If the nation-state is the political form most suited to capital accumulation in modernity, that partnership is coming into terminal crisis. Declaring “the final failure of the nation state,” James proclaimed that the territorial state is an “anachronism” no longer able to sustain demands for capitalist accumulation and expansion.Footnote ⁵² The capitalist system has outpaced the initial historical conditions that brought it into existence and has thus outlived the political form under which it grew into maturity (i.e., the nation-state).

In a radically transforming world in which the congruence between capitalism and the nation-state was sundering apart, federation emerged for James as a response to such a global crisis. To meet the challenge of these rapidly changing and novel historical conditions, James turned to the emergence of new post-national forms of political association in the post-war world. He specifically highlighted instances of federative belonging and collaboration in the form of proposals for a Franco-African Federation, the Benelux Union of Luxemburg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and the European Common Market. In many of these experiments, shared unions allowed smaller countries to address the changing historical conditions posed by the disjuncture of capitalism and the nation-state. While these examples represented attempts to provide for economic reorganization beyond the nation-state, they harbored significant limits. In the case of the Benelux Union and the European Common Market, James clearly recognized that although such experiments allowed different nations to overcome their economic differences, they remained mere economic unions rather than federations with shared political forms.Footnote ⁵³ In the case of the Franco-African Federation openly championed by anticolonial figures like Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire as an alternative to the sovereign nation-state, James charged that the transformation of French Caribbean and African territories into departments in a French federation strengthened relations of neocolonial dependence and domination, perpetuating the postcolonial predicament.Footnote ⁵⁴

For this reason, West Indians would need to improvise new political forms that fully confronted the persistence of the colonial mentality and the postcolonial predicament. If the nexus between capitalism and the territorial nation-state was being thrown into crisis, then former colonies would become free and independent at precisely the moment that nation-state sovereignty was becoming obsolete.Footnote ⁵⁵ Breaking their connections with imperialist powers did not result in unqualified sovereignty of former colonies. Confronting new forms of de-territorialized empire required constructing new forms of federative and transnational association: “But if we are breaking the old connections, we have to establish new ones.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Decolonization meant more than establishing newly independent states in the Caribbean. It meant replacing the “old colonial system” with new connections premised on the federative principle. The old colonial system was modeled on a spoke and hub conception where “insular economies” were tied to and dependent upon the “financial and economic capital in London.”Footnote ⁵⁷ These insulated territories had no connection to one another other than that mediated through the metropolitan center of the system. Under the federation, however, the primary lines of connection ran not from insular island economies to London, but rather between islands. To the extent that West Indian politicians such as Manley, Williams, and Jagan failed to cultivate these new forms of federative connection, they remained entrenched within the old colonial system itself.

Breaking out of the old colonial system required more than pooling together the economic and political power of the region in order to overcome the postcolonial predicament. It required constituting a “nascent form of West Indian peoplehood” that stemmed from shared historical experiences in the region—experiences that revolved around the fact of being a highly modern and Westernized people in a plantation economy based upon coerced and enslaved labor.Footnote ⁵⁸ While James repeatedly referred to this form of peoplehood as a “new nation,” his conception of West Indian nationhood was distinctively non-territorial and multinational. When pressed as to whether a cohesive federation presupposed territorial contiguity and shared national identity, he insisted that the problem was made obsolete by innovations in communication and transportation. Whereas the distance between islands may have been a problem in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, technological means of communication enabled new forms of post-national political association that broke outside the limits of the territorial state.Footnote ⁵⁹ As such, he imagined the West Indian nation as a re-territorialized system of island states that could “facilitate movement along economic, financial, and intellectual lines that ran between islands rather than to one central state.”Footnote ⁶⁰ While the germ of this federation would start with the British West Indies, James envisioned it encompassing the whole region, leading to a multinational, multiracial, and multilingual people. “The people of the West Indies,” James wrote, “have the possibility (I believe the necessity) of a four-lingual state [English, French, Spanish, and Dutch]… It means that a future West Indian will have not only European and African elements, but will also have the Far East, India, and China, well represented among us.”Footnote ⁶¹

With this transnational conception of peoplehood in mind, James opposed the plebiscite as a means of settling the question of federation. Even if voters of specific islands decided in favor of the federation, they would be doing so as proto-national citizens, as people of Guyana or Jamaica rather than as citizens of a composite, West Indian nation. For this reason, much of the debate over federation revolved around the precise boundaries of the constituencies that provided popular legitimacy. In order to preserve the economic and political power of Jamaica (the largest entity in the federation in terms of population and economy), Manley advocated proportional representation in the lower chamber of the federal parliament based on population.Footnote ⁶² James, for his part, rejected this scheme of representation, writing that “I would not have spent a second on representation by population.”Footnote ⁶³ The question here is: what kind of collective subject would be addressing the question of federation in the first place? Would it be newly independent nation-states that correspond to the boundaries of former colonial possessions, or would it be a mass constituency of a newly constituted nation altogether? In the same manner as parliamentary representation by population, the voting population that provided the constituency for the plebiscite would correspond to the boundaries of the old colonial system. As such, priming territorial constituencies that upheld the colonial boundaries of nation-states would stall, if not entirely obviate, the self-constitution of West Indian peoplehood that James envisioned.

The Self-Mobilization of the Masses

If the plebiscite presupposed the boundaries of the anticolonial nation, other institutional mechanisms provided a more viable means of constituting such a de-territorialized popular constituency. Specifically, James called for the recreation of the federation through a constituent assembly based on popular and proportional representation. Eschewing any scheme of territorial representation based on proportion of population, however, he instead proposed that the seats in the assembly be divided according to the proportion that each party wins. On the one hand, the purpose of this rejection of territorial representation was to provide more viable avenues for the creation of a new sense of West Indian nationhood that would not be bound by the nationalistic sentiment implied in the plebiscitary system, where the majority of each island-state is the acting unit of constituent power. On the other hand, it was to ensure representation of a broader reach of thought and opinion. James argued, “In this way, you are certain to have representation of every type of political thought in the country because that is needed when a constitution is being discussed.” After a number of months of deliberation within the assembly, any constitutional settlement would then be subject via popular ratification. Such a process, James averred, is the only means by which the whole nation can the West Indies truly “begin its national existence.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The constituent assembly was a necessary vehicle for mass participation if the West Indian people were to constitute themselves as a self-governing people. James wrote, “I state that a Constituent Assembly is the only possible means now by which the masses of the people in the West Indies may be brought to participate and take their role in the establishment of a federal constitution not only for a federation but for an independent West Indies.”Footnote ⁶⁵ What mattered for James was not the mere presence of federalist institutions but also the constituent process and underlying democratic practices that led to their creation. Without opportunities for mass participation provided by a constituent assembly, the peoples of the West Indies would be unable to assume their place among the community of nations as an independent people.

I want to suggest here that James’s prioritization of the constituent assembly over the plebiscite as a means of popular authorization cuts to a key feature of his political thinking throughout the 1940s and 50s: what he refers to as “the self-mobilization of the masses.” In The Invading Socialist Society, written with Raya Dunayevskaya as part of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT), a faction that splintered away from the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the 1940s, James elaborated how in genuine socialist movements the proletariat “mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations” rather than through a vanguard party.Footnote ⁶⁶ In a bold, revisionist reinterpretation of Leninism, James and Dunayevskaya argued that the signifying feature of Lenin’s leadership was not vanguardism but rather harnessing the revolutionary potential of the democratic self-activity of the people, most visibly evident in the form of the soviets. In his Trinidad lectures in 1962, James developed these themes, noting that the Soviet workers’ councils emerged not at the direction of a vanguard party, but rather, spontaneously through the instinctive and quotidian activity of the mass of workers themselves. Of the soviet, James said, “Nobody invented it. Nobody organized it. Nobody taught it to the workers.”Footnote ⁶⁷ While Lenin and the Bolsheviks may have given direction to the creative energy of the workers, they were not the creators of the mass movement or the soviet as an altogether new political form.

This notion of the self-action of the masses reflects an enduring concern of James’s political thought with the question of how to account for popular agency in mass politics. James and Dunayevskaya proclaimed, “The self-mobilization of the masses is the dominating social and political feature of this age.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Any strategic political action oriented toward the future would need to take this historical feature of the present moment into consideration, a feature no less pertinent in the West Indies. Indeed, mass mobilization was one of the primary characteristics of West Indian politics in the debates over the federation in the 1950s:

While James implored party leaders to be aware of and further develop this theoretical insight, the tragedy of mass leadership in the West Indies was that they were more likely to cut the people out. James routinely castigated West Indian politicians for their consistent “disregard for the public” and neglect of “any idea of what democracy demanded of them.”Footnote ⁶⁹ What exactly democracy demanded of mass leaders was clear: popular leaders must submit themselves to the judgment of the masses. As James said of Kwame Nkrumah’s imposition of a one-party democratic state in Ghana, democracy is “a matter in which the official leaders and an opposition [are] on trial before the mass of the population.”Footnote ⁷⁰

As in his critique of Jagan’s resort to the plebiscite, James faulted West Indian politicians for failing to put themselves on trial before the people by clearly communicating their visions. According to James, public officials routinely met amongst themselves to discuss plans for federation without ever submitting a clearly articulated program to the masses. As a result, the debate surrounding the federation became a technical negotiation over issues of economic development among governments.Footnote ⁷¹ While James undoubtedly saw these issues as important and engaged in these debates himself, the failure of politicians like Eric Williams and Norman Manley was their inability to translate these economic debates into terms relevant to mass publics. When politicians like Williams did speak to the people, they spoke in the manner of a teacher to a pupil, reflecting a blatant disregard for the political capacities and judgment of the masses: “his conception of the legislature is essentially that of a lecturer instructing uneducated (and rather stupid) students.” This conception of politics as a lecture room reflected a more insidious political style where the masses of people supply the power while “the party supplied the brains.” While the masses get “whipped up” to grant leaders authority, the demand for mass action quickly recedes as governments and parties do all the work.Footnote ⁷² Without opportunities for participation and action, the role of the people remains as a passive fount of legitimacy.

This marginalization of the people became particularly acute in the actions of Jamaican Premier Norman Manley, who hoped to settle the question of federation through the plebiscite. While supportive of the federation, Manley advanced plans to authorize Jamaica’s entry into the federation through the plebiscite in response to looming electoral pressures from his longtime political opponent, Sir Alexander Bustamante, the head of the antifederalist Jamaican Labor Party.Footnote ⁷³ Confident that the populace would vote in favor of federation, Manley agreed to hold a referendum in order to buoy his own electoral fortunes. In an openly published letter to Manley prior to the referendum, James chastened this confidence and foresaw that the plebiscite would spell the death of the federation.Footnote ⁷⁴ To the dismay of many political allies, James focused his criticism on Manley rather than Bustamante for sacrificing the federation on the altar of electoral politics. For James, Manley’s turn to the plebiscite was symptomatic of a broader degeneration of West Indian politics spurred by the tragic failures of mass leadership. It was a clear “corruption of the democratic process” for a mass leader to say, “not that he will put it to the people in the election but that after the election he will decide.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In this case, the absence of a programmatic vision of federation clearly presented to the people gave opponents the upper hand. Convinced that the movement of history and popular opinion was on the side of federation, James worried that Manley’s electoral tactics failed to force opposition politicians like Bustamante to have to explain themselves, to put themselves on trial before the people, as it were. As with Jagan’s resort to the plebiscite, the tragedy of mass leadership in Manley’s case was the failure to bring the people in when they were, so to speak, “ready to go.”Footnote ⁷⁶

From this perspective, the plebiscite displaced rather than carved out a central role for the people in deciding the federation question. By failing to “[make] the people the centre of what they were thinking and doing,” the resort to the plebiscite had depoliticizing and demobilizing effects. In September of 1961, 54% of the Jamaican people voted against the federation, leading to its dissolution and Manley’s defeat in the general elections less than a year later. The 60% turnout for the referendum, in the words of one historian, was “dishearteningly low.” As a result, as John Mordecai puts it, “The federation was killed not by active hostility but merely by indifference… In an ironic twist, the date recently set for the independence of the West Indies Federation, 31 May 1962, became the date of its formal dissolution.”Footnote ⁷⁷ James took the result of the referendum not as a verdict on federation but rather as opposition to the specific version of federation on offer. In a published address to the Jamaican people, he wrote, “I know that you did not vote against federation with other West Indians, that you were as anxious as any for all of us to unite as one. What you voted against was a particular Federation of which you had had some experience, which had promised you little enough and given you less.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Nevertheless, while not blaming the Jamaican people, James did insist that they made a mistake and bear responsibility, along with all West Indians, for the collapse of the federation.

Foreseeing this crisis, James linked the fate of the federation to the means by which it acquired popular authorization, specifically, the constituent assembly. As early as 1958, James wrote to George Padmore that he intends, upon his return to the Caribbean, “to take part in the undoubted crisis which the Federation faces. My view is that nothing can save [it] but the independence with a constitution to be decided by a constitutional assembly and not handed down either by the Colonial Office or a Federal Parliament.”Footnote ⁷⁹ By 1962, James reiterated, “I haven’t the slightest doubt that if that policy of a Constituent Assembly had been initiated, the Federation would be alive today.” If the constituent assembly held promise for the survival of the federation, the plebiscite was the primary cause of its demise. It is in this way that James’s prioritization of the constituent assembly appears as a response to the tragic failures of mass leadership in the West Indies and as a means of “bringing the people in” where other means such as the plebiscite fell short.Footnote ⁸⁰ In this way, James clearly distinguishes the effects of the plebiscite and constituent assembly on the resolution of the postcolonial predicament. Instead of equating distinct expressions of popular agency under the heading of “plebiscitary democracy,” James’s critique of the plebiscite forces us to disaggregate these mechanisms and think through the conceptual logics of different expressions of constituent power that, at times, even come into conflict with one another.Footnote ⁸¹

What was vital about a constituent assembly was how it addressed what Nazmul Sultan calls “the problems of colonial peoplehood,” the “developmental incapacity for political sovereignty” imposed by imperial discourses that prevents colonized populations from claiming rights of democratic rule.Footnote ⁸² In order for the people to come into existence as both agent and subject of popular democracy, they would first need to overcome imperial representations of colonial peoples as unfit for self-rule. By providing avenues for mass participation in the creation of a new federal constitution, James hoped that a constituent assembly would allow for the self-constitution of a new sense of West Indian peoplehood and would bring the masses to a greater self-consciousness of their creative capacities for democratic self-rule free from imperial powers. Without a constituent assembly, the colonial mentality would remain deeply ingrained in the West Indian political psyche.

Part of the reason for this was the contradictory way in which the initial plans for federation emerged. The historian Eric Duke has insightfully argued that “the idea of federation purported to be the answer to contrasting and competing goals, existing simultaneously as a tool of colonial control and as a means to achieve varying degrees of liberation and empowerment within or outside the British Empire.”Footnote ⁸³ While many radicals and diasporic activists saw federation as having symbolic value in affirming capacities for Black self-rule in the region, as early as the 1940s the Colonial Office advanced federative arrangements as a means of managing imperial decay and asserting control over the decolonization process. By 1956, the Federal Constitution was all but imposed from above by the Colonial Office, compounding the problem of the marginalization of the people from the constitutional process. James wrote, “The last Constitution came like a thief in the night. Some people went abroad and some experts wrote and then suddenly the people were told: “This is the Federal Constitution.”Footnote ⁸⁴ To become a genuine force for decolonization, the federation needed to be reconstituted through a popularly composed constituent assembly. As James reflected in a 1986 interview before his death, the federation “must come from below, not from above,” whether that above is colonial administrators or native elites. Where the plebiscite would continue this imposition from above while conveying the image that it was decreed by the people themselves, a constituent assembly would grant the federation a real foundation in mass-based, popular authority.

For a people to be self-governing, their political forms would need to be a product of their own self-activity, which would also lead to new self-conceptions that overcame imperial discourses of colonial peoplehood. Democracy, James wrote, “is not a carefully doled out concession that rulers make to the people, but an inherent part of their conceptions of themselves.”Footnote ⁸⁵ A democratic self-conception of the people is not granted by rulers but is rather the result of the instinctive activity of the people. Yet seeking mass participation through the plebiscite is a form of organization solely for the purpose of seeking votes, which undercuts the need for the people to discover their own capacities through independent action. James’s critique of the plebiscite and embrace of the constituent assembly thus reflects his radical democratic disposition, which Andrew Douglas characterizes as “an almost religious faith in the creative capacities of ordinary citizens and a more nuanced attentiveness to democratic uncertainty.” In this conception of politics as an activity and experience, James shares in Sheldon Wolin’s conceptualization of democracy as being about the “continuing self-fashioning of the demos,” the self-constitution of the people as the subject of collective activity.Footnote ⁸⁶ Without such a process of radical self-constitution, James feared, the problem of colonial peoplehood and the perpetuation of the colonial mentality would persist.