Bringing the People In: CLR James and the Anticolonial Plebiscite

• In Event: Moving Law Otherwise

Abstract

Despite his support for the creation of the West Indies Federation in the late 1950s, CLR James expressed reservations regarding the process that led to its creation. In a series of lectures and letters on federation, he targeted the practice of subjecting the question of whether or not to federate to a popular referendum. Given his consistent advocacy for direct expressions of popular agency and participatory democracy, James’s skepticism of the plebiscite is puzzling. While his criticisms are brief, this paper reconstructs a Jamesian critique of the plebiscite as a means of anticolonial self-determination. Situating his discussion of the plebiscite in the broader arc of his political thought from the 1930s to the 1960s, I identify three specific lines of critique.

First, drawing on his discussion of the tragic flaw of Toussaint’s leadership during the Haitian Revolution, James argued that the plebiscite enabled popular leaders to skirt their responsibility to effectively communicate with the revolutionary masses. Like the Haitian Revolution, the disconnect between leaders and masses allowed racial dynamics to overdetermine the process of decolonization. Second, James feared that the plebiscite fixed the principle of territorial sovereignty in place in advance of the process of decolonization by tethering popular authority to clearly bounded, territorial constituencies. In his search for a transnational, de-territorialized popular constituency, he sought to combat nascent anticolonial nationalism by constructing a new sense of West Indian peoplehood. Third, by giving the people a simple choice between two options, James worried that the plebiscite would undermine radical processes of democratic self-constitution, what he referred to as “the self-mobilization of the masses” or “the self-activity of the people.” In place of a plebiscite, James preferred a constituent assembly as a means of “bringing the people in” and providing avenues for popular participation in the creation of the federation. Against conventional liberal critiques of the plebiscite as a means of consolidating dictatorial power under the guise of vox populi, James offers a radical democratic critique of the plebiscite for undercutting the enactment of popular agency in colonial contexts.

Author

• Adam J. Dahl, University of Massachusetts, Amherst