Daily Inspiration Quote by C. L. R. James

The line opens like a classroom aside - "First of all" - but it’s really a gatekeeping move: James is policing the terms of debate before the critics can. In the early-to-mid 20th century, "Bolshevism" had become a catch-all insult in liberal and conservative mouths, a synonym for chaos, dictatorship, or foreign menace. James yanks it back to its engine: revolution, not caricature. He’s insisting that whatever you think of the Soviet state, the word names a method and a posture - organized rupture - and that you can’t argue honestly if you pretend it’s merely an ideology floating above material struggle.

The subtext is also aimed at reformists and moderates on the left. James, a Marxist steeped in anti-colonial politics, is reminding readers that emancipation doesn’t arrive as a policy upgrade; it arrives as conflict. By defining Bolshevism as "revolution and the revolutionary struggle", he shifts attention from the morality play of leaders and parties to the collective act: people contesting power. It’s a deliberately muscular definition, stripped of utopian garnish.

Context matters: James wrote as an observer of empire from the Caribbean, watching Europe export "order" while colonies lived under permanent emergency. For him, Bolshevism’s significance wasn’t Russian folklore; it was a proof of concept that the ruled could seize history. The phrase works because it’s both blunt and strategic: it makes revolution the premise, not the punchline, and forces the reader to confront the politics they’d rather keep abstract.