Matteo Battistini
C.L.R. James – historian of black movements and Pan-Africanism – was a pioneer in cultural studies, often forgotten, but important for his political and intellectual influence on anti-colonial uprisings, the Black Power movement and workers’ struggles between the 1940s and 1950s, as well as his legacy in the movements of the 1960s, both in the United States and in Europe and Africa. The research project focuses on his US moment (1938-1968) to show how the history of American capitalism is marked by institutional and organizational trends, economic changes and social movements that are part of transnational processes – economic, political and cultural. Within the twentieth-century framework of European imperialism and the global Cold War, these processes cross national and international blocs and connect subjects – workers, blacks and women – within the hierarchies of the world market that American capitalism contributes to outline: “only connect” is his transnational thinking. The significance of C.L.R. James US moment is relevant to highlight his conflictual – and non-consensual – view of American capitalism after World War II. For James, the United States is the fundamental junction of a transnational thought that, after his Caribbean education and English intellectual experience, he builds in a critical confrontation with the American economic and social sciences and political philosophy of the second half of the 20th century. The aim is to show how his analysis of sociological and managerial literature – from Elton Mayo to Peter Drucker – and his critique of the rise of a “counter-revolutionary philosophy” and the extreme right – with particular reference to Richard Weaver – brings to light the historical role of the black masses in the anti-colonial uprisings and in the United States, and of the continuous working class self-activity: the autonomous activity of workers to control the work process, in its potential connection with the mobilizations of blacks and women.