David "Dave" Renton is a British academic historian and barrister.
He was born in London in 1972. His great aunt was the marxist historian, Dona Torr. His grandfather was the shoe designer Kurt Geiger. One uncle was an activist in Equity, the actors' trade union, while another was the Conservative MP Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry. He was educated at all-boys private boarding school Eton College where he became a member of the Labour Party. He then studied history at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Renton received his PhD from the University of Sheffield for a thesis on fascism and anti-fascism in Britain after the Second World War (The attempted revival of British Fascism: Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1945-51) that was turned into the book Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the 1940s. He also became an academic historian and sociologist, teaching at universities including Nottingham Trent, Edge Hill and Rhodes University and Johannesburg University in South Africa.
Since 2009 Renton has practised as a barrister at Garden Court Chambers in London and has represented clients in a number of high-profile cases, especially concerning trade union rights and the protection of free speech.
He was for twenty-two years (1991-2013) a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and he has published over twenty books on fascism, anti-fascism, and the politics of the left.
C.L.R. James is one of that very small group of writers and activists for whom the breadth and depth of their written work is properly intimidating by being awe-inspiring. His oeuvre, ranging across fiction and children’s stories, literary criticism, Marxist theory, political studies, history and cricket (as well as the known unfinished manuscripts) point to that often misused term, a renaissance man. James is better able to be understood as a classically educated, late Victorian writer-scholar who apart from a brief period as a school teacher lived off his writing; he also happened to be a Trinidadian great-grandson (if I’ve counted up correctly) of slaves and one of the most significant leftist political theorists of the 20th century, resolutely Marxist with a strained relationship with various Trotskyist tendencies.
He is mostly known for his work on cricket, most especially Beyond a Boundary from 1963, often properly held to be the best book about cricket and arguably the best sports book there is. It’s not really only about sport though, it is autobiographical, it is a history of British cultural impact in the West Indies, it is a sociological analysis of cricket in colonial cultural relations in Trinidad and the Trinidadian politics of skin colour and it is about the Black liberation struggle of the 20th century – largely seen through a book about cricket, where the epigraph is ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’.
For others he is known for his history of the anti-colonial slave revolt in San Domingo (now Haiti), The Black Jacobins (from 1938) and its betrayal by revolutionary France. This is a history of an anti-colonial struggle that took place well before de-colonization was even on the agenda, a study of the politics of race and class in slave society and the overthrow of that system while it was still legal to transport enslaved human cargo across the Atlantic: this was a story of slaves who by their own political struggles became citizens against the global odds overcoming not only San Domingo’s slave society but invasion by British forces seeking to defeat both Haiti’s revolution and the dangerous republicanism taking hold in France.
I mention these two in some detail because for most an awareness of one of these books is accompanied by ignorance of the others – James is seen as a cricket writer with an oddly Marxist side or a leftist theorist and activist who made a living for much of his life writing about that most arcane of English games, cricket but whose leftist dissidence and non-conformity meant that much of the Marxist/leftist writing is passed over. Accordingly, Dave Renton’s critically sympathetic biography should fill a gap for many who know only one of the many James.
It is an engaging, fast, entertaining read: Renton does well to explain the context of James’s various incarnations – the Trinidadian student, teacher and later activist and newspaper editor, the British-based cricket writer, activist, critic, commentator and public intellectual, the US-based Trotskyist sectarian and the friend/colleague/comrade of anti-colonial activists including at least two heads of state (Eric Williams in Trinidad & Tobago and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana). What is more, Renton outlines the political contexts of James’s work (he is good on the labyrinthine world of US Trotskyism of the 1940s and early 1950s) although he does rather skip over the UK left of the 1970s and 1980s, but then his message is that by this time James was to a large degree marginalised by other political tendencies. As a result, we get a very good sense of James’s life, of his political, personal and social contexts and of his place as theorist, commentator and activist; we see a man struggling with broad global changes throughout the 20th century, with anti-colonial struggles, with global questions of class struggle and the fraught world of Marxist politics and the significance of the Soviet Union and with personal and political relationships that often overlapped in all sorts of complex ways. This is a human and humane exploration of James’s life – a life where we can see the complexities in the fact that he was a Trinidadian Marxist theorist and activist and cricket writer who has a blue plaque marking his house in Brixton (south London) and a Hackney Council library named for him in Dalston Lane (east London); surely this marks a man of complexity and intrigue.
I have two concerns about the book. The first is that I’m not quite sure who the book is aimed at – if it is the leftist readers of Black Jacobins the rudimentary explanations of dialectics and elements of Marxism seem unnecessary; if it readers of Beyond a Boundary there is an awful lot of that book here, understandable given the biographical elements of BaB. This problem might be a consequence of the many James’s Renton has had to grapple with. The second problem is that there are places where Renton seems unable to stop himself from correcting James’ analyses of Trotskyism (I assume Renton is linked to one of the UK’s Trotskyist tendencies, but don’t know enough about them to be sure or hazard a guess which one). That is, of course, an author/biographer’s prerogative but in places it jars, especially in the section dealing with James’ meetings with Trotsky.
These are, however, minor irritations; this remains a good introduction to James and valuable no matter what path a reader might have taken to get to a biography of James – but remember that it is one of a growing number of critical, friendly and not-so-friendly but mainly friendly, discussions of James (1901-1989), one of the 20th centuries most complex and most interesting intellectuals and activists. It’s well worth the time to read.
First the full title: C.L.R. James: Cricket's Philosopher King .
This is quick, fun, serious little book. Renton is a scholar of marxisms. He is also a fan of cricket. The book covers the overlap of James' life, James writings on cricket, and a history of James's interventions within marxist thought.
James is a bit of a hero of mine having written one of best books I have ever read, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution about one of the most important and least know event of the modern period, namely the Haitian Revolution. (Michel Rolf-Touillot's Silencing the Past is an utterly brilliant examination of why this event remains silent in "history.")
What I didn't realize was how much James wrote about cricket, how much he wrote about everything else, how influential he was on the likes of Eric Williams (his student and prime minister of Trinidad), Kwame Nkrumah (his advisee and prime minister of Ghana), E.P. Thompson, and Tarik Ali (academic and activist admirers of his). He also kept company with the likes of Trotsky, Paul Robeson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and some of the great West Indian cricketers.
Renton uses James' writing on cricket and James' amazing life across three continents to teach us a little bit about debates on the left.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and plan to read more by both Renton and James.
He wrote the finest ever book on cricket. But he was also a man of remarkably versatile talents and personalities. Dave Renton pries open the life of Cyril Lionel Robert James and what is revealed is a kaleidoscopic variety of accomplishments.
A Trotskyite, a Marxist for life, intellectual, magnificent orator, statesman, a fervent advocate of African and Black rights, philosopher, author and cricket fanatic, James represents one of the most influential characters defining some of the most landmark events illumining the modern milieu.
Dave Renton does ample justice to a highly distinguished career in this condensed but carefully crafted book. James's dalliances with feminist intellects, his alliance and break-ups with Trotsky, Nkrumah and Eric Williams, his nurturing friendship with the West Indian cricketing stalwarts such as Learie Constantine, and Frank Worrell, his incarceration in the United States for being an avowed communist all make for some stirring reading.
C L R James thoughts belong with equal relevance to the past, present and future!