Grace Lee Boggs, founding member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (where her party name was Ria Stone), has died at the age of 100 in Detroit. She was born on June 27, 1915 and passed away today, October 5, 2015
Here's the obituary in the Detroit Free Press.
When she was 96 I saw her at an event, entitled "Building the Next American Revolution: A Celebration and Tribute to Grace Lee Boggs," in March of 2012 at the Chinese Cultural Center in San Francisco's Chinatown, where she gave a passionate speech. The huge room was packed with San Francisco's political establishment, including city supervisors: two were Chinese-American (one of whom represents my district and considers himself a Marxist), three were Chicano, and other was Korean-American (the progressive caucus at City Hall). Yet Grace was the most radical speaker there -- and probably among the most articulate advocates of revolutionary change in the whole room.
I don't remember much of the fluff in the introductory comments before she spoke, but it was typical glad-handing compliments and statements about how deeply Grace influenced these politicos when they were college activists (which I found only partially believable). These supervisors praised Grace as an "American revolutionary," then showed the emptiness of that when they declared March 3rd "Grace Lee Boggs Day" in San Francisco by a city proclamation.
Grace talked about things that no one else did, namely:
- 1. class struggle
- 2. Hegel's philosophical insights, but in a totally accessible way
- 3. the usefulness of Marx's critique of political economy as a tool for revolution
Since I first read about the Johnson-Forest tendency in Harry Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically, I've always had a respect for Grace, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Marty Glaberman, James ex-wife Constance Webb, Si Owens (Charles Denby's real name, author of Indignant Heart). But I'd grown skeptical of the slavish idolatry the contemporary News & Letters group for Dunayevskay. Also, reading Constance Webb's memoir, Not Without Love, I saw a side of the group that's worthy of the tawdriest soap opera. But hearing a 96-year-old correct the sycophantic -- and social democratic -- comments of her presenters was truly refreshing. Additionally, I heard on the radio an interview she'd done the day before in Berkeley with Angela Davis. Grace actually interrupted Davis to point out that some of her ideas were reformist nonsense. I guess being a nonagenarian has its perks.
Additionally, in the late 1930s Grace and Dunayevskaya found some interesting texts in German collections of Marx's works. They started translating them, using a typewriter and making carbon copies. They were the first ever English-language translations of what we now call the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
Grace Lee Boggs, who took her surname from her long-deceased black autoworker-revolutionary militant husband Jimmy Boggs, will be sorely missed.
So I say, Grace Lee Boggs—presente!
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Interesting observations as always. I've always found the later "New American Revolutionary" Grace Lee Boggs rather liberal, curious as to the comments about class struggle.
Thanks and I agree about the liberal orientation of some of her later writings. Also, she and Jimmy became too black nationalist. Glaberman, as the upholder of the Jamesian legacy, certainly didn't as much.
Since she was so spirited and passionate at age 96, I was swayed more by the good than the bad..
Although I have little politically in common with Grace Lee Boggs, let me take a moment to salute her 100 years of life. There are few people who stick with the movement a lifetime, she was one.
For some of youse left commie types:
"Significantly, as late as 1953, Pannekoek was in dialogue with Cornelius Costoriadis of the French ex-trotskist tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie. The correspondence also involved the US "Johnson-Forrest Tendency" of the Fourth International, then led by CLR James (Johnson), Raya Dunayevskaya (Forrest) and Grace-Lee Boggs."
"Lenin's Philosophy and the Council Communist Non-alternative" https://www.marxists.org/refe.../archive/hegel/txt/black.htm
From her Trotskyist years: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/boggs/index.htm
Sojourner Truth Organization - 1969-1983 - Urgent Tasks - Number 12 - A Critical Reminiscence
When most American radicals think about a revolution in the United States, they visualize the oppressed masses, workers, Blacks, women, rising up to sweep away the bourgeoisie and institute a new socialist society. So preoccupied are they with the social forces — which are necessary for any revoluti…
https://www.marxists.org/.../sojournertruth/criticalrem.html
The Grace Lee Boggs of the last 30 years was basically an honest, decent, non corrupt 501(c)(3) not for profit social service agency executive - basically not that different than Geoffery Canada (except he never pretended to be a leftist)
Even the early "revolutionary" Boggs was an identity politics leftist, opposing the class struggle in the auto plants and counterposing a classless Black nationalist struggle in it's stead.She also had this technocratic idea that automation in industry would somehow end the class struggle - an idea that workers in today's computerized offices and factories would find astonishing
The last decades of her life, as she went from radical to corporate grant funded liberal, Boggs completely renounced the idea of struggle. She blamed all of the problems of the working class in general and Black workers in particular on "immorality" - a position not that different than the Republican Party
I don't know why so much of the left is mourning her - I'm sure she was a nice person, but politically she was terrible (so was her husband when he was alive - he didn't live long enough to politically degenerate to the degree that she did)
Some more accurate takes on Boggs' politics:
https://aintwhereyafrom.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/2007-critique-of-grace-lee-boggs/
http://isreview.org/issue/89/defense-struggle-what-visionary-organizing-cannot-see
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/07/bogg-j02.html
Gregory, in all due respect, posting disses on Grace Lee Boggs from Trotskyite propaganda mills doesn't suffice for an honest critique. To the the wooden and irrelevant 4th International ideologues at WSWS and the SWP, Grace is a heretic for having broken with the counter-revolutionary ideas of Trotsky and like most disingenuous Trotskyite boilerplate, they're not beyond calumny and lying.
What I respect about her is that she planted roots in Detroit and lived her dying breath there, for better or worse. While I don't always agree with how she approached struggling in a dying deindustrialized city, the questions she provoked are crucial for other hollowed out places where rebellion has recently broken out. Detroit peaked out nearly 2,000,000 residents. Today it's around 680,000. Very similar conditions exist in other decaying depopulating cities with many African Americans once having lived in their cores, like Baltimore (minus 35% in population), New Orleans (-25%), Cleveland (-17%), Cincinnati (-10%), Pittsburgh (-8%), Toledo (-8%), St. Louis (also -8%, but with a knock-on decay to its its surrounding suburbs, like Ferguson), east Oakland, and many, many others.
While I'm all for class struggle, how can you have that when workers are laid off en masse as sites of mass production are shuttered and the population is driven away in droves, let alone with those who are trapped and can't leave? Those are sincere questions. I think Grace grappled with them, despite whatever flaws she might have had. To me, that's her lasting legacy. Greg, read her earlier autobiography Living for Change and critique it yourself. Don't depend on the dogma and lies of counter-revolutionary Trotskyites.