Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left Book

Contemporary Trotskyists outside James little group regarded this as virtual madness, but the New Left and Black nationalists who recovered James from American obscurity some twenty years later recognized something of his accomplishments: his prescient use of Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as a means to identify fundamental social alienation, on the one hand and his belief in autonomous Black revolutionary potential on the other. They were too late or perhaps too early, to accept the corollary: James' discovery of autonomous work-cultures whose members had instinctively developed their own patterns of resistance and mobilization, not in the interest of any socialist revolution but with their own immediate needs in mind. However limited this tendency might prove, it offered the hope of industrial democracy from the bottom up, out of the lives of ordinary people rather than the plan of experts. (204)