Politics & Power Quote by C. L. R. James

Listen to the way James smuggles a revolution into a sentence that sounds like a committee memo. "Surest signs" is doing double duty: it’s empiricism as persuasion, the posture of someone reading history the way a doctor reads symptoms. He’s not guessing about the American working class; he’s diagnosing it. That clinical calm is the point. For James, consciousness isn’t an inspiring slogan. It’s a measurable force that shows up, concretely, in what people ask for and what they no longer settle for.

The key move is the pivot from "proletariat" to "leadership". He’s tracking mass political development through the mediated space of demands, which are never neutral. Demands are where grassroots pressure meets organizational strategy, where the horizon of the possible is negotiated in public. By focusing on "the character" of demands, James signals that content matters less than orientation: are these requests for reforms that stabilize the system, or demands that expose its limits? He’s inviting the reader to read labor platforms like tea leaves - but with stakes.

The subtext is both hopeful and suspicious. Hopeful, because changing demands imply a working class learning fast, pushing beyond older, narrower bargains. Suspicious, because "leadership" can lag behind or domesticate that shift, translating insurgent energy into safe, legible asks. Writing as a Marxist intellectual deeply attentive to mass action, James is warning against mistaking official rhetoric for popular consciousness - while insisting that even official demands inadvertently reveal what the rank and file is becoming capable of.