Socialist History online public meeting
19 May 2025 at 7pm
Speaker Kevin Morgan
https://ucl.zoom.us/meeting/register/5swIUNc-QRm6y-55cdFwBQ

In October 1956 Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the French communist party in an open letter to the PCF’s leader Maurice Thorez. Better known as a writer and co-architect of the concept of negritude, Césaire was a communist of eleven years’ standing and one of two PCF deputies representing Martinique in the French national assembly. The story of his break with communism has been told many times; his letter to Thorez is deservedly famous and its declaration that ‘Marxism and Communism should serve the Black people, not the Black people serve Marxism and Communism’ quoted countless times. This talk revisits the episode from the perspective of Martinique’s ‘other’ communists: some 3,500 of them in 1956, with sixty per cent of the popular vote and a remarkable group of political intellectuals of whom René Ménil is perhaps best-known. Césaire had not informed them that he was breaking with his party; they have rarely been considered since. Nevertheless, they held on to several of their strongholds on the island and made important contributions to the writing of a Martinican history from below and ideas of créolité. In seeking to recover something of this overlooked history this talk will also offer fresh light on the better-known trajectory of Césaire himself.

Kevin Morgan is a former editor of Socialist History who has written mainly on communist and British labour movement history. He is preparing a book of essays on the French and British left and became interested in how Césaire’s repudiation of Stalinism and writing of a book on Toussaint Louverture compared with that of C.L.R. James. Through first-hand accounts and digitised source materials he stumbled into this fascinating history that seems to have had very little exposure in English and deserves to be better-known.