Grace Lee Boggs R.I.P.

In a speech titled “THINKING/ACTING DIALECTICALLY: C.L.R. JAMES, THE AMERICAN YEARS”, Boggs remarks that the working class is no longer the (or at least the only) locus for social change and revolutionary transformation[i]. Her context for such a shift is that, while she was waiting for the working class to build a renewed revolutionary movement, the Black movement sprang forth flowing with all the promise for the kind of change not found in the contemporary struggles of the working class which she characterizes as merely a “paper tiger”. While this is a visibly Maoist phrase it more substantively exemplifies a crucial collapse in her view of the working class today.

The weakness in her assessments is manifold, but particularly in her failing to locate Black folks as part of and central to the struggles of the working class.

For Boggs, the Black struggle functioned outside of the working class. The Black Power movement of the 1960s was somehow external to the general struggle of working people which she saw as white, male, and blue collar. She confounded the question of race and class by subordinating the latter to the former, instead of the other way around.

In Boggs’s vocabulary, what most activists engage in—protests, marches, demonstrations and the like—is “rebellion.” Rebellions are moments of protest that attack the legitimacy of society’s dominant institutions. Rebellions, however, “cannot lead to the reorganization of society” because people still “see themselves as victims. . .and the other side as villains.” “Revolutions,” on the other hand, project a new “notion of a more human human being” and “create societies more conducive to human development.”

So-called “visionary” (or sometimes “transformative”) organizing is therefore a “revolutionary” strategy which seeks to break people from “the bourgeois method of thought on which US capitalism is based” by developing alternative institutions and communities—such as community gardens, small businesses, and free schools—that facilitate doing “the work of re-imagining ourselves” and helping us “think beyond capitalist categories.”

One of the better known figures in official “left” circles in Detroit is Grace Lee Boggs, founder of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. Boggs, a long time Detroit resident, in collaboration with Scott Kurashige, an associate professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan, has published The Next American Revolution, Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century.
Boggs and Kurashige use Detroit as a focus to advance a right-wing agenda, justifying the impoverishment of the working class and opposing any collective struggle against capitalism.
One is struck in reading The New American Revolution by the authors’ utter indifference to the conditions facing the working class. Poverty, homelessness and unemployment are barely mentioned. The problem, assert the authors, is not the capitalist system and the conditions of mass misery that it is creating, but the American people themselves, who are denounced as “self-centered and overly materialistic.”
The authors oppose any notion that revolution should involve the improvement of the lives of working people or a redistribution of wealth. They write, “The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world.” (p. 72)
Boggs advances the retrograde view that technology itself, not its misuse under capitalism, is the cause of the problems facing society. She writes, “It has also been my good fortune to live long enough to witness the death blow dealt to the illusion that unceasing technological innovations and economic growth can guarantee happiness and security to the citizens of the planet’s only superpower.... At this point in the continuing evolution of our country and of the human race, we urgently need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and to recognize that we must each become a part of the solution because we are a part of the problem.” (p. 29)
As for the schools, Boggs writes, “We are not going to solve the crisis of public education with more money, more computers, new buildings...” (p. 144)
What Boggs proposes is that the working class accept a huge lowering of its living standards. From this standpoint, the impoverishment of the working class is not an evil to be opposed, but a welcome development that should serve as a model. To call this right wing does not do it full justice.