The Political Ecology of James and Grace Lee Boggs

Abstract

James and Grace Lee Boggs have been recognized for their activism, their urban agriculture projects in Detroit, and their analysis of automation. However, the important connections between these have largely been neglected. This essay argues that there is a pressing need to return to their work because of its historically grounded theorization of the relationship between automation, land, and racialized distributions of the human. Their scientific Black Power rethought work and politics in the “cyber-cultural era” of the 1960s, which they argued was a contradictory conjuncture in racial capitalism, connected to histories of automated and mechanized “undevelopment” and organized scarcity. They argued that urban land, characterized by waste and toxicity in the aftermath of Fordist capitalism, must be the starting place for a remaking of human-being-in-the-world through postgrowth, postscarcity economies that recognize the links between historic forms of racialized dispossession and environmental destruction.

Key Words:

• Automation
• Black Power
• James and Grace Lee Boggs
• Political Ecology
• Racial Capitalism, Degrowth

Notes

1 On “ecomodernism” see An Ecomodernist Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015).

2 Best known today as Detroit-based activists, James and Grace Lee Boggs had a unique relationship, especially for the United States in the mid twentieth century. Grace Lee Boggs came from a middle-class Chinese American family; in the 1930s she completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. James Boggs was from rural Alabama and moved to Detroit during the Great Migration, remaining an autoworker into the 1970s. They met through C. L. R. James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency and helped found the journal Correspondence. For more on their lives, see Ward (2017).

3 See Smith (2017a, 2017b), King (2017), and especially Johnson (2011).

4 For example, Grace Lee Boggs made the first English language translation of sections of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

5 This book and many of their essays from the 1960s were “authored” by James Boggs; however, in the 1970s they referred to all of this work as “theirs,” and my essay will largely follow that convention.

6 The extent and effects of automation have been debated consistently since the nineteenth century. According to Thomas J. Sugrue (2014), Ford set up an “Automation Department” in 1947. Numbers vary, but Detroit workers, and especially Black workers who were an increasingly large percentage of the postwar automotive work force, were hit hard by automation. Sugrue records that, from 1951–3, Ford factories in Detroit lost 4,185 jobs to automation (134), and overall employment at the Ford River Rouge Plant declined from 85,000 jobs in 1945 to 30,000 in 1960 (132). But though Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis is a valuable book on post–World War II Detroit, Grace Lee Boggs (along with Beth and Timothy Bates) critiqued it for largely leaving Black labor and Black political activism out of the story, and Origins only briefly mentions James Boggs (Bates, Bates, and Boggs 2000).

7 The Triple Revolution was sponsored in 1964 by the Center for Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, as a response to the perceived limits of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty.

8 On the connection between the Boggses and the Italian Operaists, see Pizzolato (2011).

9 For example, see the United States government report Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, on the increasing feeling of senselessness and disillusion with “work” in the early 1970s (Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 1972).

10 See Benanav (2019a, 2019b).

11 In Every Farm a Factory, Deborah Fitzgerald (2003, 3) argues that the “fundamental feature of twentieth-century agriculture” was the emergence of an “industrial logic or ideal.” One of this logic’s most significant features was the rhetoric and deployment of “mechanization,” beginning in the 1920s, in which the “ultimate meaning of mechanization” as “the idea of displacing farmers themselves with machines was the only rational outcome of mechanization” (92–3). On farm mechanization’s impacts on Black farm laborers in the 1940s, see “Mechanization in Agriculture,” from the Negro Year Book: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life, 1941–1946, in Pursell (2005, 260–4).

12 See James (1989).

13 For more on the legacies of the Republic of New Afrika in the contemporary political and cooperative movements in Jackson, Mississippi, see the Cooperation Jackson website, http://cooperationjackson.org.

14 This includes the likelihood, as contemporary scholars like Jackie Wang argue, that an exterior relationship to production would increase debt and Black “exploit[ation] as consumers” (J. Boggs 2011, 211).

15 See, for example, James Boggs’s (2011, 331–40) “Community Building: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” originally from 1987. Here, “community” is neither a preexisting given nor a corporate form but is instead an anticapitalist movement that must be “built.”

16 See “Detroit, Place and Space to Begin Anew” in The Next American Revolution (G. L. Boggs 2011, chap. 4).

17 On incarceration’s effects on Detroit at large and the Black labor movement specifically, especially in relation to prison labor, see Thompson (2010).

18 Dialectical humanism also has parallels with Sylvia Wynter’s project to critique and think otherwise the overrepresented “genre” of the human that she calls “Man.” There is not space here, however, to give her theories the attention they deserve. See, among others, McKittrick (2015).