[Marxism] Hip-Hop on C.L.R. James

[Krisna Best <kcbest0737@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, you opened this link I imagine because you relate with hip-hop as music 
and culture, but you don?t know who the hell C.L.R. James was and what his 
relation to hip-hop is and you want an immediately satisfactory answer. If you 
bear with me, just for a minute, maybe I can make this relation understandable, 
concrete, valid, and relevant.

I?ll attempt to keep your interest by stating an absolute. If it weren?t for 
the West Indies, hip-hop would never have been. How could this be, you ask? 
Because of the mobile DJ movement which began in Jamaica in the 1940s with 
personalities like Coxsonne Dodd and Prince Buster. These DJs would drive 
around Kingston and other parts of Jamaica blasting native Ska music from their 
sound systems. It began as a viable means for folks to socialize and hear new 
music.

When many West Indians, Jamaicans included, began to migrate to the States, 
many settled in New York City where they joined native marginalized people of 
color. These newly arrived foreigners assimilated into their new lives, and 
American blacks and Latinos assimilated to theirs. If you want to dig further, 
you should check out an appendix in a book called RAP WHOZ WHO by Steve 
Stancell.

James was a native of Trinidad in the West Indies were this culture started and 
he spent a great deal of his mature years in the States. This was approximately 
between the years 1938-1953, right along the same time as the DJ movement is 
developing in Jamaica.

Cool. Now we have a partial relation established. Are you still with me? Aight, 
let?s continue beyond loose association.

James, during the last few years of his stint here, spent some time writing a 
manuscript which he then called NOTES ON AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. In this 
manuscript he outlays his ideas on the American struggle for life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness; the mantra all Americans are familiar with from 
primary school forward. This is his contribution in a nutshell, and this is 
where it becomes concretely relevant to all hip-hop heads and exactly why they 
should read the book AMERICAN CIVILIZATION:

The struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a struggle 
which is not complete or motionless, but always in conflict. Throughout 
history, and America is no exception in this case, we develop art and culture 
which relate to the degree and level of struggle of the corresponding period. 
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, our unique, American fashion, 
reaches higher stages in relation to the particular struggles of American 
people. Whether these struggles take the form of women?s suffrage, eight-hour 
workdays, civil rights, emancipation, reconstruction, etc., a form of culture 
develops which gives expression to these seemingly disparate internal struggles 
within various sections of the working class, for they are all class struggles.

For example, the struggle for emancipation among black slaves beget a culture 
and music which reflects that particular struggle. The struggles of industrial 
workers in the 1930s beget a respective art which gave it context and 
relevancy. The Black Power movement developed a language, culture, and art 
unlike any other time in history.

The struggle of our period is as diverse as ever in history. The working class 
of the 21st century is in a struggle with itself to eliminate homophobia, 
socially and institutionally, to grant amnesty to our Latino immigrant brothers 
and sisters coming to our country to lend their culture of struggle and so we 
may lend our forms to them, to redefine the meaning of class in a 
deproletarianized, that is deindustrialized, non-factory worker society where 
service workers and cube slaves are developing a culture of resistance of their 
very own, to engage in struggle with the various sections of the Right who are 
largely winning the hearts and mind of American people, etc., etc., etc.

What medium of expression more clearly reflects this struggle than hip-hop? 
Where in the country does racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, politics, 
and class life more acutely find context than our hip-hop culture? This is it, 
dear readers. This is why James is relevant. If you have made it this far, my 
hopes is that you have the made leaps in consciousness I have recently went 
through when reading this book.

Think you can hang for an added dose? Dope! I knew I could count on you! Hang 
on readers, this might get a bit more hairy.

James writes in AMERICAN CIVILIZATION about the ?universality? of culture in 
modern society; about the potentials modern society sets in motion for an 
integration of work life and cultural life. Up to our time, there was such a 
separation between production; the aspects of life which satisfies human needs, 
and artistic life; the way people express their particular form and level of 
production.

He saw the limitations of film; while they satisfied the mass desire for 
individuality and a break of the ?mechanization?, the routinization, if you 
will, and sameness of life in factories?which up til the past twenty years or 
so, was the main form of American production?they did not fulfill the degree of 
universality that, he says, the drama of ancient Greece fulfilled for its age.

However, he acknowledges that while the drama of ancient Greece had a larger 
degree of universality, that the American film, radio, comic strip, television 
of the mid-20th century is creating the possibility for a medium which more 
intensely amalgamates, mixes, and integrates, work and cultural life in a much 
more democratic and accessible fashion and which does not limit itself to the 
most elementary of desires of human beings today. Hip-hop more accurately 
conveys the level of humankind?s ?dislocation? in society, their disgust with 
the mundane routine of Monday-Friday or whatever shift they work, their boring 
sex life, and lack of excitement in general, etc.

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION is book that was never written. That is, the actual book 
was never written because of his expulsion from the country 1953 due to 
McCarthyism. His manuscript was finally released in 1993, nearly five years 
after his death in 1989.

I call this article Hip-Hop on C.L.R. James, because James never wrote about 
hip-hop, partially because when he died it had not reached the level of 
development we have 17 years later. Not to say that hip-hop had not reached a 
beautiful summit in the late 80s, but maybe he was just too old then to 
continue writing, or maybe he just didn?t know about it. Hell, I don?t know, 
but I do know had he had the time, he would have seen, quite possibly, that 
hip-hop was the fulfillment of all his work. And, since I write from the 
perspective of hip-hop, I write on C.L.R. James and his relation to it. 
Congratulations, you made it, dog. Now go buy that shit.

I welcome any historical, bibliographical, etc. corrections and of course any 
and all criticisms. Peace.

  Krisna Best

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