"As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study"
About this Quote
A prediction masquerading as a dare: Marxism, James suggests, won’t arrive in America through seminar rooms or party catechisms, but through pressure. The verb choice matters. “Sharpens” implies a blade being honed, not a cloud drifting in. Class conflict isn’t a theory to be introduced; it’s a material condition that, once it cuts deep enough, forces people to go looking for the language that explains the wound.
James’s subtext is an argument about American exceptionalism without ever naming it. The U.S. likes to tell itself it’s a classless nation of aspiration, where “middle class” functions as both identity and alibi. James bets that story collapses when inequality becomes too naked to euphemize. Then Marxism becomes “popular study” not because Americans suddenly become doctrinaire radicals, but because everyday people start auditing reality: wages, rent, debt, strikes, policing, the way “the economy” is invoked to discipline workers while protecting owners.
The phrase “come into its own” is also a corrective to Cold War caricature. James is not selling Marxism as imported dogma; he’s framing it as a toolkit waiting for its proper occasion. That fits his broader project as a Trinidadian-born anti-colonial thinker who treated Marxism less as scripture than as a living method, attentive to race, empire, and labor’s self-activity.
Contextually, it reads like a long-view wager from someone who watched capitalism produce both abundance and crisis. The line doesn’t romanticize struggle; it claims struggle makes analysis inevitable. When the contradictions stop being background noise, people start reading.
James’s subtext is an argument about American exceptionalism without ever naming it. The U.S. likes to tell itself it’s a classless nation of aspiration, where “middle class” functions as both identity and alibi. James bets that story collapses when inequality becomes too naked to euphemize. Then Marxism becomes “popular study” not because Americans suddenly become doctrinaire radicals, but because everyday people start auditing reality: wages, rent, debt, strikes, policing, the way “the economy” is invoked to discipline workers while protecting owners.
The phrase “come into its own” is also a corrective to Cold War caricature. James is not selling Marxism as imported dogma; he’s framing it as a toolkit waiting for its proper occasion. That fits his broader project as a Trinidadian-born anti-colonial thinker who treated Marxism less as scripture than as a living method, attentive to race, empire, and labor’s self-activity.
Contextually, it reads like a long-view wager from someone who watched capitalism produce both abundance and crisis. The line doesn’t romanticize struggle; it claims struggle makes analysis inevitable. When the contradictions stop being background noise, people start reading.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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