Turbulo:
> I have read "Black Jacobins" and other things by C. L. R. James. He
writes passionately and is very much worth reading. He cannot, however,
hold a candle to Trotsky as a > historian, theoretician or writer of prose (and I am only able to read Trotsky in translation!). He doesn't even
come close! Trotsky was one of the towering figures of the
> twentieth
century. He should not be judged by the idiocy and narrowness of his
epigones in contemporary sects..
I'd say that C.L.R. James and his circle (thinkers like Martin Glaberman or George Rawick) were much more important in terms of attempting to sketch an outline of a Marxist analysis of the history and conditions of the United States of America, a comprehensive Marxist analysis that included analyzing the central meaning of the African-American experience and the Civil War for the United States, the unique tradition of American labor militancy embodied in the IWW and CIO, and uniquely American cultural forms such as the comic strip/comic book and Jazz music. Both James' and Glaberman's influences were considerable upon the Detroit League of Revolutionary Black Workers, an organization that Fredric Jameson correctly referred to as the single most important political movement of the 1960s.
To that extent, I'll take James and his circle over any single figure from the Approved Pantheon of Dead Russians and Germans. And I say that as someone who quite enjoyed reading both Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, as well as Isaac Deutscher's biography.
But inasmuch as all these figures were participants in a historical labor/socialist movement that no longer exists, not even residually, I don't even see the point of this kind of chest-thumping comparison. The social conditions these days are vastly different from anything in the historical constellation that gave rise to Social Democracy and its Communist off-shoots, so that all of these figures are at best useful as inspiration, rather than as any kind of practical guide to action. What endures from that period of history are abstract theoretical works of enduring relevance precisely due to their level of abstraction (Marx's _Capital_ being the towering example here).