Miguel Mellino
Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” (miguel.mellino@gmail.com; Orcid: 0000-0002-1405-7986).
Abstract: The article reconstructs the Marxism-Leninism of C.L.R. James, highlighting its specific historical and political features. Though rooted in the Marxist tradition, James develops an autonomous conception of modernity as a product of global social struggles, rejecting both vanguardism and abstract universalism. Through a trajectory that extends from 1930s anti-colonial Pan-Africanism to activism in the United States and the break with Trotskyism, James elaborates an idea of organization based on mass autonomy and grassroots council practices. In his militant writings from the 1950s and 1960s (Facing Reality, Marxism for Our Times, You Don’t Play with Revolution), he reaffirms the primacy of class struggle against all statist tendencies, exalting Black proletarian protagonism within the global dialectic. His critique of capitalism, racism, and colonialism is tied to an emancipatory vision of modernity as a political construction rooted in revolutionary self-organization and the autonomous transformation of social relations.
Keywords: Black Marxism; Revolutionary Autonomy; Pan-Africanism; Modernity and Emancipation; Leninist Humanism.