In 1953, C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian historian and Marxist intellectual, publishes a book on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. This paper shows that this book takes its roots in James’s wider project of a study of « American Civilization ». James conceives of captain Achab as a prefiguration of the « totalitarian type » and argues that, in Moby Dick, resistance does not come from Ismaël, the « intellectual », but rather from the ship’s crew composed of « mariners, renegades and castaways » coming from all over the world. A century later, according to James, the crucial task of putting an end to totalitarism falls to the working and colonized masses.