James, l'histoire, le nouveau - dialectique

Témoignage de Noel Ignatin, rencontrant James en 1968, premier retour aux Etats-Unis après explusion maccarthyste, conférence à South Side à Chicago :

His topic that night was the self-activity of the working class, and he took for his text the next to last chapter of volume I of Capital, with its familiar words about the new mode of production, which has 'sprung up and flourished along with, and under' the old. Familiar, yes, but how new was the reading he gave to them! out of this chapter he drew a vision if the working class striving inexorably toward the socialist society, not out of loyalty to this or that political programme but out of its position in capitalist society. 

Ce qui est lié de près à cette autre formulation manifestement marquante dans la postérité que Buhle rassemble - magnifiquement - dans ce collectif : autre point irradiant qui est la signature théorique de James, signature de la dialectique (dans Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity, JR Johson tendency, 1947)

the unending murders, the destructions of peoples, the bestial passions, the sadism, the cruelties and the lusts, all the manifestations of barbarism (...) But this barbarism exists only because nothing else can suppress the readiness for sacrifice, the democratic instincts and creative power of the great masses of people.

Ce qui est le social et le socialisme.