The totality problem: C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones and critical theory

This article reconsiders C.L.R. James and Claudia Jones as theorists of totality whose work exposed foundational limits within mid-twentieth-century Marxism, liberal anti-colonialism and metropolitan feminism. Rather than treating race, class and gender as analytically separable or politically sequential problems, James and Jones insisted that capitalism, empire and heteropatriarchy form an integrated system whose contradictions can only be confronted through unified analysis and struggle. Reading them in dialectical relation, the article develops what we term the totality problem, that is, the persistent difficulty of accommodating such integrated critique within dominant traditions of political thought. Situating their work initially within the Caribbean experience and tracing its subsequent movement, marginalisation and partial incorporation during the second half of the twentieth century, the piece argues that James and Jones offer a method for analysing domination and imagining decolonial humanism beyond the limits of liberal universalism.