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

A “striking development” isn’t the stock-market crash itself, but what the crash does to the American imagination: it turns faith into doubt. C. L. R. James frames the Great Depression not just as an economic collapse but as an ideological event, a mass shift in belief. The phrase “profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society” is carefully chosen. He doesn’t say people were angry, hungry, or frightened (they were). He says they questioned the future of the society they’d been told was the future: modern, self-correcting, permanently ascending.

James’s intent is diagnostic and political. By spotlighting skepticism, he identifies the real danger to the status quo: when ordinary people stop assuming the system will eventually work out, they become available to new explanations and new movements. “Large sections of the American people” matters, too. This isn’t the grumbling of radicals at the margins; it’s a legitimacy crisis spreading across the mainstream, the kind that makes labor militancy, insurgent politics, and sweeping policy experiments seem thinkable rather than fringe.

The subtext carries James’s Marxist sensibility without turning the line into a slogan. He implies that capitalism’s promise is psychological as much as material: it survives on confidence, on a future story. The Depression punctures that narrative. Writing as a journalist and anticolonial intellectual looking at the U.S. with a cool, unsentimental eye, James treats 1929 as a moment when “contemporary society” becomes visible as an arrangement - contingent, improvable, and possibly replaceable. That’s the real shock he wants you to notice.