60 years ago, CLR James and a small circle of collaborators set forth a revolutionary critique of industrial civilisation. So insular was the political context that the documents of the signal effort never reached public view. Happily, times have changed. Readers have discovered much, even after all these years, to challenge Marxist (or any other) orthodoxy. They will never find a more succinct version of James' general conclusions than State Capitalism and World Revolution. In this slim volume, James and his comrades successfully predict the future course of Marxism.
In the West Indies C.L.R. James is honored as one of the fathers of independence. In Britain he is feted as a historic pioneer of the black movement. He is generally regarded as one of the major figures in Pan-Africanism, and a leader in developing a current within Marxism that was democratic, revolutionary, and internationalist. His long life and impressive career played out in Trinidad, England, and America. For the last years of his life, he lived in south London and lectured widely on politics, Shakespeare, and other topics. He died there in 1989.
Raya Dunayevskaya, who died in 1987, was a highly respected and influential philosopher, political activist, and feminist. She was the founder of Marxist Humanism in the United States.
Grace Lee Boggs (born June 27, 1915) is an author, lifelong social activist and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. She eventually went off in her own political direction in the 1960s with her husband of some forty years, James Boggs, until his death in 1993. She is still active at 97 with the recent book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, written with Scott Kurashige and published by University of California Press.
Paul Buhle is a retired Senior Lecturer at Brown University and author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the U.S. and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes.
Martin Glaberman (1918-2001) was an influential American Marxist, teacher, and autoworker.