Boggsian Realism
An introduction to James Boggs, the Detroit auto-worker and godfather of Operaismo who understood that rights, ultimately, are a question of what you make and what you take.
Hey all. Thought I’d share a little bonus Sunday long-read.
The following is an introduction to one of America’s greatest organic intellectuals. Reading his work radically altered the way I think about this thing we call the political, and many British leftists could stand to benefit from heeding his words – particularly during a juncture in which electoral avenues for change have been closed to us, and where we are forced once more to face reality and ask the most difficult question of all: how to make the revolution we truly desire – that kind of revolution that is never given freely.
“I am a factory worker but I know more than just factory work. I know the difference between what would sound right if one lived in a society of logical people and what is right when you live in a society of real people with real differences. It may sound perfectly natural to a highly educated and logical person, even when he hears people saying that there is going to be a big riot, to assume that there will not be a big riot because the authorities have everything under control. But if I kept hearing people say that there was going to be a big riot and I saw one of these logical people standing in the middle, I would tell him to get out of the way because he sure was going to get killed.”
Ten days after James Boggs wrote those lines, riots broke out in Birmingham, Alabama. They followed a bombing campaign targeted at leaders of the city’s civil rights movement including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his brother, the Reverend Alfred Daniel Williams King. This was not the first instance of civil unrest to erupt in America in the 1960s, nor would it be the last. They were fomented by overlapping contradictions of race, class, and gender inequality which had begun to boil over following the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, in which racial segregation in public schools was finally ruled unconstitutional. The US would go on to pass the country’s first Civil Rights bills in 1957 and 1960, provoking growing resistance from white majorities throughout the country in the years that followed.
There were going to be riots – logical people be damned.
Boggs knew this because he was from Alabama. He also knew this because he was Black. He was born in a small town called Marion Junction, about fifteen miles west of Selma. If you search for the town on Google Images, the first pictures you’ll see are of a cemetery for fallen Confederate soldiers, yellowed photographs of Black Americans in cotton fields with large woven baskets slung over their shoulders, and pristine white plantation houses, many now converted into venues for weddings and other idyllic ceremonies.
Like many Black Americans growing up in the south at that time, in his late teens Boggs migrated north in search of employment. Detroit, like other cities in what is now known as the Rust Belt, was rapidly industrialising, propelled by a growing auto manufacturing industry and, later, lucrative war contracts. The development offered some of the first opportunities for aspirant Black workers to find lasting employment, stable careers and a shot at upward economic mobility.
From 1940 to 1963, Boggs worked on the manufacturing lines for Chrysler, becoming embedded in the city’s labour union and civil rights struggles along the way. With his wife Grace Lee, collaborating with the renowned Trinidadian Marxist scholar C. L. R. James, Boggs would participate in numerous organizational and journalistic projects, including the influential left-wing newspaper Correspondence. In it, they would provide trenchant commentary on issues both local and global. Reports on MLK’s 1957 March on Washington. Decolonial struggles in the Congo. Late-night visits from FBI agents. Ruminations on questions of citizenship, community, and childrearing. And proposals for better understanding the race and class composition of a country whose mythology insisted that class had been transcended and race was irrelevant – or vice-versa.
That Boggs would identify with thinkers like Karl Marx is unsurprising, given his life trajectory. He was the grandson of a formerly-enslaved woman growing up in the wake of a failed Reconstruction following the Civil War. Boggs knew, firsthand, the centrality of labour exploitation and economic inequality to capitalist production, and how the technology of race could be used to inscribe that inequality in human flesh and social relations alike. Between the American Dream’s clarion call of equality and opportunity for all, and the necessity of winners and losers in a system where some earn more for working less and vice-versa, it’s not hard to figure which narrative would resonate more.
Boggs combined his deft command of theory with cold, frank insights about the world in which he lived and the people who populated it. He didn’t just speak about the moment. He listened to what it was saying back: “It is not a question of whether socialism can or cannot be imported. It is only the specific conditions of a country at a particular time that make people struggle.”
This markedly pragmatist spirit, which would come to define much of Boggs’ writings, would bring him into direct conflict with other Marxists, such as his former collaborator C.L.R. James. An internationally-renowned Marxist scholar, James was rigidly orthodox. According to this position, the proletariat (people who are forced to sell their labour for a wage to live, and are therefore locked into a daily, existential struggle against capitalist forces designed to extract maximum value at minimum cost) were the only true agents of history. This would eventually produce irresolvable contradictions between those who have to sell their labour in order to survive and the capitalists who exploit that labour, culminating in a revolutionary moment in which the workers would seize power, ushering in a societal transition from capitalism to socialism.
Boggs, however, was unable to reconcile this theory with the world unfolding around him. In the factories, automated machines were producing an abundance of goods and rapidly negating the need for workers. As machines replaced workers, a growing underclass of unemployed or never-employed emerged, many of them Black. According to Marx, this ‘lumpenproletariat,’ a disengaged and depoliticized underclass, were at best a hindrance to revolution, and at worst an active threat, both a disorganized rabble and a bargaining chip bosses could wield against workers – “Don’t you dare complain. There are plenty more where you came from.”
Furthermore, America’s militant labour force was fracturing, buckling over issues of race, prejudice, and loyalty to union leaders who, since the war, had been willingly collaborating with a growing Military-Industrial Complex, building bombs to be dropped on the wretched of the earth in exchange for decent wages and cheap consumer goods. It turned out to be a Faustian bargain, keeping workers in line as the unions gradually bargained away the few gains they had previously won. The unions were formed to combat the dominance of capital. Instead, they had become its enablers.
Perhaps it was the ancestral memory Boggs carried as the grandson of a formerly-enslaved woman, and the image this conjured when he articulated it in Marxist terms. Human beings, sold as commodities, being put to use producing other commodities like cotton and tobacco to enrich their white owners. Perhaps he moved out of the structural abandonment of Black southern life, up into the industrial north, only to find himself working in factories alongside other workers, Black and white, assembling automobiles and war armaments. Perhaps these sedimented experiences sat with him as he watched lines of auto-workers being replaced by massive machines that performed the same jobs at the push of a button, their labour and humanity removed from the equation entirely – and with that, their predestined historical stake in the coming revolution.
Perhaps he also remembered the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition – the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, Nat Turner, Harper’s Ferry, Harriet Tubman, slave rebellions – and refused to believe that this Black underclass he saw growing around him, discarded once more, was really nothing more than an obstacle to change. Instead, Boggs saw a people with a consciousness inherent to their existence, a people who didn’t necessarily need revolutionary theory to affirm their revolutionary potential.
Marxism calls for a rigorous analysis of the concrete, material facts of history. How, and why had it failed to recognize Black people’s historical role as a people who, despite having scarcely been recognized as humans – let alone ‘workers’ – had produced so much change through sheer force of will?
In The American Revolution, a short but powerful book, Boggs unloads twenty years’ experience from the production lines, working with and fighting against Black and white workers, union bosses, corporate boards, racist police, and even machines. He unfurls a flurry of statistics about America’s changing workforce: The growing working population, women’s entry into the workforce, and the rise of technology. He rolls into a poignant history of the labour movement that’s ruthless and brisk. He also predicts America’s eventual transition from industrial manufacturing to managerial and service work. He documents the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, their merger with the American Federation of Labor to form the AFL-CIO, and that union’s steady decline as it became a PR man for America’s transition “from a welfare state to a warfare state.”
Most striking is his documenting of the rise of automation in industrial manufacturing, and the prescience with which he traces where these developments might, and did, lead. Looking at the contradictions between a welfare state built to support the vulnerable, and a technologizing economy that was rendering human labour obsolete, he sees a future in which American workers grow tired of supporting the unemployed, culminating in a taxpayer revolt and a right-wing backlash. This prediction would become reality in industrial hubs like California, where an insurgent governor named Ronald Reagan rose to stardom promoting “common sense” economic programmes that favoured “hard-working, American families”.
Despite his criticisms, Boggs remained staunchly committed to a leftist vision of change. His critiques were rooted in acknowledging the possibility that Marxist theory and ideology were as susceptible to sedimentation and stagnation as the economic order they wished to overthrow. One of Marx’s central concepts was dialectical materialism, the idea that material developments in the world (like the rise of machines) produce a tendency that pushes back against them (like a growing underclass), and that history happens when one side defeats the other. In this sense, Boggs’ criticisms were perfectly dialectical. Marx’s analysis was based on the experiences and observations of his time. Times had changed. It was time to adapt and adjust theory to better reflect the situation on the ground. Of course, the point is to change the world. But first, you have to understand it.
It’s this commitment to what might be called ‘Boggsian Realism’ that led Boggs to his most cogent critiques. He noted how the fracturing of workforces and work itself would produce a new individualism that the political forms of yesteryear might struggle to corral. The old ideal of a collective mass, organized from above, was no longer viable – indeed, events in Europe that culminated in WWII had long raised questions over whether such an approach was even desirable. Collective action remained key, but it now required a coming-to-consciousness of individuals, as individuals, discovering both their individuality and their power to mobilize as a multitude. By 1968, between the Civil Rights Movement and social revolutions erupting in cities around the world, politicians and theorists would come to similar realizations, with different prescriptions.
In Boggs’ writing, you see a member of the Old Guard emerging onto new terrain, tirelessly working to make sense of it on its own terms. He does away with redundant hypotheticals and the soothing balm of counterfactuals. James and Grace Lee Boggs’s works make forceful reference to an eternal struggle between our individual and collective desires, and a cold, hard reality that we’ll only ever understand if we’re ruthlessly objective with the facts and with ourselves (In 1958, Grace Lee would co-author a book with C. L. R. James and Pierre Chaulieu titled Facing Reality). No more ‘what ifs’. The situation is this. It was produced by these elements, factors, and circumstances. One question remains: What is to be done?
Boggs foresaw a coming “Age of Abundance,” an era in which automation would make the necessities of life so plentiful that the idea that an individual’s value should be measured against their productivity would no longer be tenable: “Now that man is being eliminated from the production process, a new standard of value must be found. This can only be man’s value as a human being.” Where the Marxists saw a population of unemployed who, as non-workers, could never be part of the struggle against capital, and where reactionary politicians saw a workshy mass of undeserving layabouts (a later generation’s ‘Welfare Queens’ and our generation’s ‘shirkers’), Boggs saw a multitude of individuals conscious of their situation the forces that created it, regardless of the words they used to express it. He called them “the outsiders,” and in them, he saw “more of a threat to the present ‘American way of life’ than any foreign power.” Choice words, given he was saying this at the height of the Cold War, mere months after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The question Boggs asked was radical in ways that are both mundane in light of the developments that have happened since, and profound considering its continued resonance today: If it is true that society has developed to a level in which all our immediate needs can be met by machines, rendering human labour increasingly redundant, shouldn’t our next objective be the liberation of humanity from the wage, and a transition to a society in which people are truly free to develop themselves in every aspect of life – creatively, romantically, socially, culturally, intellectually, and not just financially?
Anticipating the cultural turn that would follow 1968, Boggs advocated a programme that championed our individualism, not as individual consumers with unique tastes and desires to be satisfied by commodities (valid as that all might be), but as individuals with the capacity to think about our situation; to engage with our lives and the world around us; to take responsibility for our role in our communities and our histories, and to produce radical change.
Ultimately, the American Revolution of which Boggs spoke was not a historic event in 1776, nor was it a manifesto for a concrete revolution to come. Boggs’s American Revolution is one that exists, even only potentially, in the hearts and minds of every citizen of the world, so long as we’re willing to be honest with ourselves about that world and our capacity to change it. It wasn’t even an American Revolution that Boggs was building, but American Revolutionaries. As Grace Lee Boggs put it herself:
“It was not arrogance, but a self-confidence achieved through awareness of how he had, himself, developed over the years that empowered Jimmy to say to a class of University of Michigan students in 1991, ‘Nobody knows more about running this country than me.’ When the students responded with nervous laughter, he continued, ‘You better think that way. You need to stop thinking of yourself as a minority because thinking like a minority you’re thinking like an underling. Everyone is capable of going beyond where you are, and I hope that everyone in this room thinks that way.’”
In the writings that followed The American Revolution, James and Grace Lee continued to grapple with their vision of a new individual. At times, they struggle against the capitalist individualism that neoliberalism had been nurturing within the populace, as in James’ masterful 1969 article, “The Myth and Irrationality of Black Capitalism”. At others, such as in his Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, he critically engages with movements like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, MLK’s peaceful protest movements, and the militancy of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, carving a path through and between each faction to propose a revolutionary movement, led by Black Americans, which could unite and lead the entire country.
In 1978, along with two activist friends, Freddy and Lyman Paine, they published Conversations in Maine, a collection of semi-verbatim transcripts of conversations between the four friends on Maine’s Sutton Island throughout the 1970s as they reflect on the social movements of the 60s – successes and failures – and try to imagine what might come next. Printed in prose, it’s often unclear which of the four is speaking at any time, and it reads the way you’d expect a series of conversations between four elder activists to read. Sometimes they’re esoteric and theoretical, other times unapologetically frank. Sometimes they’re bitter about the complacency of younger generations, and other times they’re in awe of the innovative ways those younger generations think. Sometimes they engage in serious discussions about the political ramifications of “The Bomb,” while other times they’re immersed in drawn-out tangents about the transcendence of Duke Ellington’s Concert of Sacred Music. What endures, throughout, is an unwavering belief that the world we live in is a product of human encounter with nature, and that the same humanity that made this world has the capacity to make it differently.
Later in their lives, James and Grace remained in Detroit, continuing to turn theory into practice, launching and collaborating with numerous community initiatives that continue to this day. Whatever else might be said of their theory, they lived it, building movements from the ground up through human encounters. They became respected elders of the Detroit activism scene, their house becoming a pilgrimage site for organizers across the country, an organizing hub within so many local networks, and a sanctuary for anyone they called friend, comrade, accomplice, companion – whatever. On July 22, 1993, James Boggs died of lung cancer. Grace Lee would go on to live to the age of 100, passing on October 5, 2015.
It’s tempting to conclude by reflecting on the Boggs’ legacy in cold, theoretical terms — what they got right and wrong, where theory failed reality, where reality discredited theory, and so on. One place where their work had surprising purchase was in 1960s Italy, where political theorists like Mario Tronti incorporated their theories into the concept of operaismo (workerism), which held that as long as workers continue to negotiate with capital, they are doomed to a fate of junior partnership, rescuing capital from its self-generated crises by breathing new life into it. From this, Tronti created his “strategy of refusal”, in which continual dissent and rebellion might finally bring the entire system to its knees, forcing our collective imagination to find a new approach.
Other Italian theorists, like Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Antonio Negri, would develop operaismo into autonomia (autonomism), in which communities refuse the fait accompli of representative democracy, instead taking active control of their everyday lives and truly deciding for themselves. A utopian ideal? Perhaps, but it’s one that lives within the rolling mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, the George Floyd Rebellions, campaigns of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and recent news stories of underpaid essential workers calling it quits, closing up shop, and heading home. Sometimes, politics is what happens when you put the ballot down and hit the tarmac.
One might note, in hindsight, how optimistic Boggs’ vision of an ‘Age of Abundance’ was. During the decades that followed we’ve learned that, far from embracing the actual possibility of abundance for all living beings, capitalism has proven happy, even determined, to create more and more territories of production, distribution, labour and consumption to ensure that ‘abundance’ is only ever a relative concept. The service industry, and now the technological industries, are hard at work creating new products, concepts, platforms, and mediums, each creating new jobs to do and, with them, new workers to do the jobs and, with them, new reasons why those workers have to struggle so the CEOs can have more money to spend (or not spend, as often appears to be the case).
What Boggs called (and what in many ways was) an Age of Abundance turned out to have been a historical rarity. One need only remember the economic conditions of America and Britain in the 19th century, of developing nations around the world, and the downward mobility of young workers even in the ‘developed’ world today, to see that scarcity has been more constant in capitalism than abundance ever was. And what abundance there was, was often delivered on the backs of exploited labour in developing countries, and insured by a Military-Industrial Complex that defended American prosperity with missiles pointed toward every corner of the globe. Automation and technologization continue today, but where Boggs’ phase created a mass of abandoned lives, our phase has created a mass of precarious workers stretched so thin that even individualism has become a somewhat fragile concept.
The post-war consensus of welfare and social uplift promised to reduce conflict through abundance. Now, with the dismantling of the welfare state, deindustrialization, and the privatization of nationalized industries, abundance is being foreclosed as communities struggle to claim what few scraps remain. As Boggs himself said, “Marx is dead and one cannot continue to quote him as an all-time solution for social problems brought on by the development of production. A new theory must be evolved and it is likely to meet as much opposition as Marx’s has met.”
To be objective, however – to face reality – doesn’t mean abandoning theory altogether. Thinking dialectically doesn’t mean discarding the old with each emergence of the new. Old ideas lay dormant, sedimented within history, only to emerge once more in new formations. New ideas take flight down old, forgotten paths. Even old ideas, in the present, are never truly old. Time passes between each encounter, and they develop patinas, unique shades of history, reflecting a different light each time they catch the eye.
Because the other side of facing reality is to know that there are truths that hold. That what was true for one figure, standing astride history in 1848, was as true for another interpreting his own historical moment over a century later, and as true for us amidst our own epochal shifts today.
You can’t always count on history to play out exactly as predicted. But you can always count on history.
“The struggle for black political power is a revolutionary struggle because, unlike the struggle for white power, it is the climax of a ceaseless struggle on the part of Negroes for human rights. Moreover, it comes in a period in the United States when the struggle for human relations rather than for material goods has become the chief task of human beings. The tragedy is that all Americans cannot recognize this and join in this struggle. But the very fact that most white Americans do not recognize it and are in fact opposed to it is what makes it a revolutionary struggle. Because it takes two sides to struggle, the revolution and the counter-revolution.”
This piece was originally published in Issue 5 of Carhartt WIP’s in-house magazine for Winter 2021. Thanks again to Calum Gordon for commissioning the piece. Aside from being an incredibly talented writer, editor, and friend, Calum is one of those rare individuals not afraid to put radical ideas in front of readers who might not otherwise encounter them. If you ever have an interesting story about Detroit, American labour, or those rare parts of culture where the world as it appears begins to shudder and shake, don’t hesitate to reach out to him.
Accompanying imagery was produced by Kyle Kobel, another close friend and co-conspirator whose seemingly-endless talents never cease to amaze. Check his work out here.
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