Special Delivery: The Letters of C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948 Book

This book is definitely not timeless and becomes less relevant as time moves on. The author is trapped in his own time period and drivels into superficiality and irrelevance as hindsight slowly deadens his points of emphases within the book. There’s fundamental change happening as the author is writing but he just can’t seem to wrap his thoughts around it. The third volume of Henri Lefebreve’s ‘Critique of Everyday Life’, the volume on ‘Information Age’ understood what was going on in networking and data as knowledge and why it was so important for understanding who we were and what we were becoming and he wrote that in 1981 before this book and Castell would have been better to follow Lefebreve’s approach.

It’s a real danger to understand the world within its own terms and by its own paradigms while uncritically accepting the lies that are constantly being foisted on to us as if they were true within and for themselves. The world has changed in the 20 or so years since this book was first published and his now (circa 1999) that he is describing is hued by the selective tones he chooses to share with the reader. The turn that the world has made since then has made his presentation for the most part irrelevant for the reader of today, 2019.

While I clearly didn’t think this book worked 20 years after it was written, I’m looking forward to the next volume in this series on identity because I suspect it will not suffer from an over emphasis on the now of the time period he was writing about, but I’ve already noticed he’s not really understanding the fundamental change that was happening around religion and once again is not able to see the reality from the appearance since he is getting bogged down in accepting everything around him within the paradigms of the time period. There’s a data point he quotes that will illustrate my point: ‘only 29% of people surveyed saw a need for downloading video’. Almost nobody in the year 2000 would have even understood that there would be a need for that before it happened. To understand the world we live in sometimes we have to lose our old paradigms before we can replace it with something that will be better in every single way. Old farts don’t change; the young people just ignore them and shut up and download and the world fundamentally changes and creates a different version of itself that is not obvious unless one takes a step out of what was and looks at what will be.