War & Peace Quote by C. L. R. James

Resentment doesn’t just exist; it gets steered. C. L. R. James is tracing a crucial post-World War I realignment: the working class had every reason to rage at the state that conscripted bodies, rationed life, and disciplined labor, yet the fury flowed more cleanly toward “Morgan, Wall Street and private capital.” That list isn’t incidental. By naming a banker, a street, and an abstraction, James maps how anger is made legible in public culture: personalize it (Morgan), locate it (Wall Street), then naturalize it (capital). The government, by contrast, recedes into the background as if it were merely a referee, not a co-author of the conditions that produced suffering.

The intent is diagnostic, almost surgical. James is less interested in moralizing about resentment than in showing how class consciousness can be redirected into a safer channel. Attacking finance and “private capital” offers a cathartic villain while preserving faith in government as potential protector or neutral arbiter. That’s the subtext: anti-elite sentiment can coexist with loyalty to the institutions that enforce the economic order, because those institutions are skilled at presenting coercion as necessity and policy as inevitability.

Context matters. The postwar years brought inflation, unemployment, strikes, and the Red Scare; they also brought a narrative opportunity for liberal capitalism to blame “speculators” and “profiteers” rather than the state’s partnership with industry. James, a Marxist with a journalist’s eye for who benefits from a storyline, is warning that where anger lands is never politically innocent.