It is a real honor and pleasure for the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company to bring out a new edition of this classic work by the great revolutionary historian, theorist and activist C.L.R. James. Originally issued in England in 1938, and expanded in 1969, the book has heretofore circulated almost in “underground” fashion. Hopefully this new Charles H. Kerr edition will help bring it the wider attention it very much deserves.
When Comrade James gave us permission to reissue two of his out-of-print works, it was his intention to write a new foreword for each. To the reissue of State Capitalism and World Revolution he contributed a foreword titled “Fully and Absolutely Assured,” which, despite its brevity, is an important amplification of his views. We sharply regret that our own financially driven delays in publication and C.L.R.’s 1989 death cause this edition to appear without such a foreword.
Fortunately, however, this new edition features a valuable introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor of History and Africana Studies at New York University. Author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists in the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990) and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Free Press, 1994), and co-author (with Sidney Lemelle) of Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (Verso, 1995), Kelley is a rare modern scholar whose breadth, clarity, and vision call James to mind.
In his introduction Kelley discusses the book’s previous publishers: the Independent Labour Party journal FACT, the shortlived Drum and Spear Press of Washington, D.C., and the Race Today collective in London. This seems to be an appropriate place to acquaint readers with the publishers of the current edition.
Founded in Chicago in 1886, a few weeks prior to the police riot at Haymarket Square, the Charles H. Kerr Company in less than a decade developed into the principal publisher of radical books and pamphlets in the United States. By 1900, the Kerr Company had rallied to the banner of international working class socialism. Through the first quarter of the twentieth century, “that struggling socialist publishing house in Chicago,” as Jack London called it in The Iron Heel, was the largest publisher of revolutionary literature in the English-speaking world.
Publication of the revolutionary classics was an early Kerr Company priority, and it has remained so ever since. In the years 1906–1909 Kerr brought out, for the first time in English, the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, and also published many other works by Marx and his co-thinker, Friedrich Engels. The Kerr Company’s standard edition of the Communist Manifesto has been continuously in print, through countless editions, since 1902. Antonio Labriola, Paul Lafargue, Eugene V. Debs, James Connolly, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, “Mother” Jones, William D. Haywood, Sen Katayama, Louis B. Boudin, Mary E. Marcy, and Austin Lewis are only a few of the many important revolutionary writers whose works were made available by Charles H. Kerr.
The Great Depression and the Cold War were an exceptionally difficult period for America’s pioneer working class publishing house, but somehow the fellow workers who kept it going managed to keep a good number of the socialist classics in print. When Fred Thompson and others helped get the cooperative back on its feet in the early 1970s, the Board of Directors resolved to do their best to reissue the out-of-print classics and, insofar as limited finances allow, to add new ones to the list.
A Note on the Text
Apart from Americanizing the spelling (labor instead of labour, maneuver rather than manoeuvre, today without a hyphen, etc.), and making a few minor corrections, the text of this edition follows that of its predecessors. Only twice have we dared to change a word. Writing for readers in the British Isles, James once (on page 63 of this edition) refers in passing to America’s Parliament; to avoid confusion, we have substituted Congress.
The second change appears in the Epilogue. James’s Epilogue was dictated, not written, and in the course of transcription part of a sentence was omitted in the Drum and Spear Press edition, and was not corrected in the Race Today edition. Since no manuscript of this text exists, and the present location of the tape-recording of it is unknown, we have taken the liberty of attempting to fill in the missing words to make the sentence comprehensible.