Claudia Jones & the Critique of Self-Determination: Toward Human Liberation

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jones wrote this autobiography in December 6, 1955 as a letter to Comrade William Zebulon Foster, who was then chairman of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Carole Boyce Davies, ed., Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment (Oxford: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Limited, 2011), 11.

2 Davies, Claudia Jones, 11.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., 14

6 Ibid.,8–10.

7 Ibid.,8–9.

8 Ibid., 9.

9 Jones is generally focused on the underclass—those exiled to the margins of society—such as blacks, women, and the poor working class.

10 Earl Browder wrote these comments in The Communist in 1944. Browder penned these thoughts when he was Chairman of the CPUSA, who would demit that office in 1945, a year following the publication of his article.

11 Cited in Davies, Claudia Jones, 65.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 70.

14 Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution (London: Verso Books, 2022), 185.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 185–186.

17 This citation is a continued, sustained discussion of Jones’ discussion article, “On the Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt” (1946). Davies, Claudia Jones, 70.

18 Davies, Claudia Jones, 70.

19 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 40.

20 Davies, Claudia Jones, 62, 64.

21 This essay was written in solidarity with, and for, International Women’s Day and its petitionary march in 1950. The specificity of the women’s struggle predicated itself on equality, concerning women’s working and labor conditions, alongside a broad, coalitional advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, in the comprehensive struggle for juridical rights for women. Finally, Jones sought to reposition the women’s question as only being resolved through a distinctly socialist approach, one that wholly opposes bourgeois democracy and its oppositional self-determination philosophies.

22 Davies, Claudia Jones, 99.

23 Ibid.

24 Jones’ description refers to the anti-black racism embedded within American Jim Crow, supported and institutionalized by the state itself. Jones offers this analysis of “anti-Negro violence” in her 1953 report to the Court, as she, alongside other communist comrades, were imprisoned and sentenced for her advocacy of anti-racism grounded in a socialist humanism inflected through her Marxist-Leninist communist philosophy, which, at the time, was a radical refutation of American anti-blackness. Davies, Claudia Jones, 38.

25 Walter Rodney, How Europe Undeveloped Africa (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1972), 223.

26 See Jones’ discussion article “On the Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt” (1946).

27 Rodney, How Europe Undeveloped Africa, 222.

28 Kris F. Sealey, Creolizing the Nation (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 33.

29 In this cautionary essay, “New Problems of the Negro Youth Movement” (1940), Jones inveighs against black separatism as a black nationalism (among other things), which she believes engenders and encourages racial balkanization due to influences of capitalist imperialism. Jones’ overall intent, of course, was to develop a radical political consciousness in black youths, anchored in Marxist-Leninist tents, vis-à-vis the race question. Davies, Claudia Jones, 49.

30 Davies, Claudia Jones, 49.

31 For example, Jones is exceedingly critical of World War II and the fight against Hitlerism. Davies, Claudia Jones, 70

32 Davies, Claudia Jones, 65–66.

33 Ibid., 160.

34 For a continued discussion, see Jones’ article, “American Imperialism and the British West Indies” (1958), where she attunes herself to the cultural and political needs of diasporic West Indians within British political society, as well as advocating for West Indians domiciled in the Caribbean against the hegemonic, colonial-imperial powers of the West. Davies, Claudia Jones, 160.

35 Davies, Claudia Jones, 161.

36 Amílcar Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization (London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd., 2016), 117.

37 Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization.

38 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 222.

39 Rodney, How Europe Undeveloped Africa, 69.

40 Ibid., 69.

41 Lewis R. Gordon, Freedom, Justice and Decolonization (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), 13.

42 Ibid.

43 There is a turn towards the reconstruction of the juridical in Jones’ work, where she makes plain the impact and execution of anti-black laws within the United States—i.e., “Jim Crow…lawlessness” (2011, 9). Moreover, she opposes the “Walter-McCarran Law widely known for its special racist bias towards West Indians and peoples of Asian descent” (2011, 17). A focus on juridical transformation, as opposed to bourgeois constitutionalization, is thus within her conception of political liberation.

44 See Derefe Kimarley Chevannes, “The Laboring of Black Politics: Decolonial Mediations on Claudia Jones,” Political Research Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2022): 76–88, account of Jones’ decolonial approaches to labor, which includes its political and existential textures.

45 See Jones’ essay, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace” (1950) for further reading. Davies, Claudia Jones, 93.

46 Jones’ theorizing of the relation between racialism and imperialism derives from a 1963 editorial published in the West Indian Gazette, a West Indian advocacy magazine, where she addressed the concretion and propagation of white supremacy in Britian, as witnessed with the organization and promulgation of the “Ku Klux Klan of Britain,” which attacked and vandalized the Gazette’s office; Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence & Wishart Limited): 130. Perhaps what’s most notable is that the Klan describes itself as both “an avowedly anti-communist and anti-Semitic”; Sherwood, Claudia Jones, 131. Given this reality, Jones’ explication of self-determination inherently moored in Marxist-Leninist philosophy as it is, necessarily means any meaningful, politically coherent articulation of the concept must be anti-racist and therefore, anti-Klan. The cultural specificity of her West Indianness, and broadly, her claims of national liberation within the diasporic currents of black British politics, gives a sui generis texture to her conceptualization of self-determination as being indivisible from, and foundational to, a cultural liberation program. These specific genealogical claims, as biographical and diasporic encounters, proffer something new to the Marxist-Leninist paradigm on self-determination.

47 Chevannes, “The Laboring of Black Politics.”

48 Rodney, How Europe Undeveloped Africa, 196.

49 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

50 .Ibid., 67.

51 Davies, Claudia Jones, 48.

52 See Jones’ essay, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace” (1950) for further reading. Davies, Claudia Jones, 101.

53 Davies, Claudia Jones, 101.

54 Ibid., 117.

55 Jones offers these comments in her essay, “We Seek Full Equality for Women” (1949). Here, Jones espouses Marxism-Leninism to “fight to free woman from household drudgery…[to] fight to win equality for women in all spheres.” Such a progressive struggle is a “fight for the full, economic, political and social equality of the Negro woman [which] is in the vital self-interest of white workers, in the vital interest of the fight to realize equal for all women”; Davies, Claudia Jones, 87, 88). Thus, Jones’ theorizing of self-determination is not disconnected from her radical egalitarian program (on the woman question and others) but foundational to it; Davies, Claudia Jones.

56 See Jones’ discussion article “On the Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt” (1946) for further reading. Davies, Claudia Jones, 67.

57 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 110.

58 See Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by L. Gordon and J. Gordon (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 144, critique of Western universalist discourse that collapses into European particularism.

59 Davies, Claudia Jones, 88.

60 Ibid., 62.

61 Gordon, Freedom, Justice and Decolonization, 12.

62 Ibid.

63 See Jones’ “We Seek Full Equality for Women” (1949) for further reading. Davies, Claudia Jones, 88.

64 Davies, Claudia Jones, 101.

65 Ibid.

66 Eric Williams argued that “The Negro in the Caribbean is at the mercy of an agricultural autocrat whose rise and fall in the world market has little effect on the picture of unrelieved misery which sugar has always produced in the islands” (Eric Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (Hunlock Creek, PA: Eworld Incorporated, [1942] 2012), 19). This argument illuminates the sheer concentration of wealth that had no trickle-down impact on the vast majority of black laborers within the Caribbean. Capitalism was therefore not only exploitative but fatally brutal to the livelihoods of West Indians.

67 Taken from her essay, “Lift Every Voice – For Victory” (1942), Jones’ offers a juxtaposition between the false liberty of Aryan, Nazi supremacy and a revolutionary socialist program of liberation. This universal socialist fight against Hitlerism becomes sublimated in the persona of Joe Louis, a black boxer who prevailed in the boxing ring against his Nazi-backed opponent, Max Schmeling, for the championship title. Therefore, much like in the boxing arena, so too, will the anti-racist, Marxist-Leninist struggle be triumphant over American white supremacy in the political arena. As such, blacks will seize the moment for self-determination in aiding the defeat of Hitlerism. In her later formulations of black participation in American wars, Jones championed black inclusion in the fight against Nazi fascism, which she believes represent a genuine “democratic war” to protect the interests of all human beings: blacks, whites and women (Davies 2011, 54). Davies, Claudia Jones, 53.

68 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader, edited by Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett, and Mayanthi Fernando (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

69 See Jones’ essay, “Jim Crow in Uniform” (1940). Here, Jones details the institutionalized and systemic anchoring of anti-blackness within the American state. Therefore, self-determination is not merely a question of struggle against fascism aboard, but also fascism within—lodged within the American consciousness. This is to say, while America was fighting Nazi fascism abroad, Jim Crow fascism thrived at home. To illuminate the enormity of American hypocrisy, Jones cited the lynching of blacks, “over 240 Negroes died – the pyres of charred bodies which is symbolic of the half-slave, half-free Jim Crow oppression which Negroes in America still suffer from, economically, politically and socially” (Davies, Claudia Jones, 27, 38).

70 Davies, Claudia Jones, 38.

71 See Jones’ “Jim Crow in Uniform” (1940) for further reading. Davies, Claudia Jones, 28.

72 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 15.

73 In “The Caribbean Community in Britain” (1964), Jones articulates the reality of the vast emigration of West Indians to Britain and the social, economic, cultural and political implications therein. Given these diasporic concerns, Jones contends West Indians in Britian have been polarized into atomized, insular identifies of being exclusively Jamaican, Barbadian, Trinidadian, etc. Yet, the problems faced by West Indians in Britian are collective, egregious and grievous. As such, she espouses a form of diasporic self-determination, borne out of the struggle of national liberation, which requires the consolidation of West Indians into what she declared to be a “‘the search for a national identity’” in order to confront “colonial-capitalist-imperialist relations” in Britian and in the Caribbean (Davies, Claudia Jones, 168, 180).

74 See Jones’ “Ben Davis: Fighter for Freedom” (1954), as she theorizes and clarifies the program of radicalism as being grounded in a struggle against Jim Crow normativity, which she defines as “conformity.” Jones heralds the work of Ben Davis, a communist civil rights agitator and litigator who was later jailed and prosecuted by the American McCarthyist state, as a paradigmatic example of such radicalism for black freedom. Davies, Claudia Jones, 147.

75 Davies, Claudia Jones, 181.

76 Cited by Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

77 Jones’ essay, “A People’s Art is the Genesis of their Freedom” (1959), offers a cultural-aesthetic paradigm on which to build a sense of cultural identity necessary for national liberation within Britain. The revolutionary import of Caribbean Carnival is both a question of social and political consciousness necessary for a collectivized Caribbean national identity, “[a] pride in being West Indian is undoubtedly at the root of this unity; a pride that has its origin in the drama of nascent nationhood…[which] is the genesis of the nation itself” (Davies, Claudia Jones, 166). Therefore, the celebrations and revelries of Caribbean carnival is not a trite, trivial affair, but function as one of the many anchors through which self-determination may be achieved in diasporic terms.

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Derefe Kimarley Chevannes

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Memphis, who specializes in Africana Political Theory. Chevannes’ research interests center on issues of black liberation and black radical thought in the modern world. He writes at the intersection of Political Theory, Africana Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Disability Studies. He may be reached at [email protected].