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

James lands a classic dialectical punch: American capitalism arrived late to the full-scale factory regime, and that very timing both lit a fire under workers and kept them from becoming a coherent political force. The sentence is built like a trapdoor. “Stimulated and retarded” refuses the comforting storyline that exploitation automatically produces class consciousness. Instead, James is pointing at the U.S. as the weird exception that radicals have to explain, not romanticize.

Context matters. James is writing in a century when Europe’s mass parties and labor movements made “the working class” feel like history’s engine, while the United States looked like an outlier: enormous industry, periodic insurgencies, but no enduring labor party. His phrasing suggests why. Late industrial consolidation can “stimulate” by concentrating workers, standardizing grievances, and making the boss more legible. But it can also “retard” by arriving after other shock absorbers are already in place: higher frontier wages (for some), ethnic and racial segmentation, a two-party system eager to co-opt demands, and a consumer culture selling private mobility as a substitute for collective power.

The subtext is almost accusatory: the absence of a unified working-class politics isn’t proof of American harmony; it’s evidence of a more sophisticated containment. James, a Marxist with a journalist’s ear for concrete reality, is warning against importing European templates. U.S. labor militancy can be explosive, even visionary, yet structurally discouraged from hardening into an independent political instrument. That tension - heat without lasting architecture - is the story he’s compressing into one sentence.