Doing for Our Time What Marx Did for His: Constituting the Boggsian Challenge to Marxist Praxis

Abstract

Illustrating why and how James Boggs and Karl Marx understood capitalism and revolution differently, this essay examines the historical development of capitalism within the United States, specifically in Detroit. Showing that many constituting aspects of what Marx understood as the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation existed within the United States, I also show that racism has been a constituting element of accumulation's historical tendency in the United States. Consequently, the explanatory usefulness of Marxist praxis toward historically understanding capitalism and revolution within the United States is limited. James Boggs understood this racial limitation of Marxism and produced a theory of revolution responding to Marxism's limitations. Because James Boggs wrote The American Revolution in a period designated by U.S. hegemony over the world-system, he observed that capitalist accumulation exhibited a very different historical tendency than that observed by Marx. While the period of capitalism described by Marx demonstrated an historical tendency toward increasing levels of misery amongst working people, increased numbers of production workers, and proletarian revolution, in what I refer to as the period of U.S. hegemony, according to Boggs, capitalism demonstrated a historical tendency toward increased consumption by working people, decreasing numbers of production workers, and black revolution.

Keywords:

• Detroit
• James Boggs
• Marxism
• race relations
• racial capitalism
• U.S. hegemony

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Decoteau J. Irby for reading an earlier draft of this essay and providing comments that made it much better.

Notes

Quoted in Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 109.

See ibid., especially 107–116; Martin Glaberman, “An Introductory Statement,” in C.L.R. James, The Destruction of a Workers' Paper (1962), http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1962/destruction-paper/introduction.htm; Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Boston: South End Press, 1998), 36; Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 15–17; Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell Stanford Jr.), We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black radical Organizations, 1960–1975 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Press, 2007), 18–21.

On these developments in the United States, see David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On the historical tendency toward increases in labor's productivity under capitalism, see Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and edited by Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Press, 1906), 681–683. Debates abound among Marxists regarding the quality of the Moore translation in comparison to the Ben Fowkes translation of 1976. My citations for Marx throughout this paper correspond to Moore's 1906 translation because that was the English translation most widely available in the United States during the time Boggs's understanding of Marx took shape; on the historical tendency toward expansion of the working class under capitalism, see Marx, Capital, 689–703.

Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, Segmented Workers, 128–135.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 98–137.

Charles K. Hyde, “‘Detroit the Dynamic': The Industrial History of Detroit from Cigars to Cars,” Michigan Historical Review 27, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 57–73.

In 1909, 272 car-producing firms existed in the United States. By 1941, there were nine. Steven Klepper, “Disagreements, Spinoffs, and the Evolution of Detroit as the Capital of the U.S. Automobile Industry,” Management Science 53, no. 4 (April 2007): 616–631.

Statistics concerning the number of workers employed in Detroit and Detroit area plants throughout this essay are from the U.S. Census Bureau. Readers can access this information at http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu. On the relationship of centralization to capitalist accumulation's historical tendency, see Marx, Capital, 684–689.

Herbert R. Northrup, Negro Employment in Basic Industry: A Study of Racial Policies in Six Industries, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); see also Harold M. Baron, The Demand for Black Labor: Historical Notes on the Political Economy of Racism (Somerville, Mass.: Radical America Press, 1971), and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

B. J. Widick, Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 43–57.

Ibid. See also Wilber C. Rich, Coleman Young and Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power Broker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 61–90.

Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 128.

Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Times Books, 1977), 255.

James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review, 1963), 17. On James Boggs's involvement in UAW goon squads, see “James Boggs,” in Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit's African American Community, 1918–1967, ed. Elaine Latzman Moon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 149–156.

On racial violence following World War I, see Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011).

Baron, Demand for Black Labor.

On organizing across racial lines despite white racism, see “Discussion on the Labor Movement,” in Moon, Untold Tales, 127–137.

Herbert R. Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 186–196.

Ibid. See also Baron, Demand for Black Labor; August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Northrup, Organized Labor, 192–197.

Ibid., 196.

Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.

Ibid.

Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 162–174; see also Northrup, Organized Labor, 199–203.

Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Dominic J. Capeci and Martha Wilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991).

Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, 182.

See Marx, Capital, 834–837, and Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 119.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 1992), 700.

Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, 87.

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1994), 298.

Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

On the denial of college education to black Americans, see Edward Humes, “How the GI Bill Shunted Blacks Into Vocational Training,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 53 (Autumn 2006): 92–104; and Sarah Turner and John Bound, “Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the GI Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 9044 (July 2002). On expressway construction see, George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and the White Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 369–387; see also Robeson Taj Frazier, this issue.

Boggs, The American Revolution, 13.

On the relationship of the Marshall Plan to U.S. hegemony, see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century; Thomas McCormick, America's Half Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Thomas Ehrlich Reifer and Jamie Sudler, “The Interstate System,” in The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945–2025, ed. Terrence K Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Zed, 1996), 13–37.

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

Quoted in ibid., 119.

Ibid.; Boggs, The American Revolution; Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying.

I use the term hegemony here explicitly to stress the consensual nature of the process that is described in the section. In the late 1940s and 1950s the UAW regularly exchanged shop-floor control for increased wages because they perceived very real benefits from doing so. As consumption of consumer goods became part of what it meant to build greater security for U.S. industries and expanded job opportunities, it is arguable that trading control of the shop floor for increased wages and therefore power to consume constituted a Gramscian form of “common sense” that, as Gramsci insisted, was always a product of history and part of a historical process. As the desire to consume gradually began to constitute American common sense, there would have been little need for firms to coerce the UAW into ceding shop-floor control if the UAW believed that doing so made sense. Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–14, 321–326. For a world-historic exploration of the relationship of quelling wage workers' resistance to the emergence of world hegemonies, see Beverly J. Silver and Eric Slater, “The Social Origins of World Hegemonies,” in Chaos and Governance in the Modern World-System, ed. Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 151–216.

Boggs, American Revolution.

Ibid.; Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, “Labor Movements and Capital Migration: The U.S. and Western Europe in World-Historical Perspective,” in Labor in the Capitalist World-Economy, ed. Charles Bergquist (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publishers, 1984), 183–216.

Boggs, American Revolution, 39.

Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 134.

Ibid, 132.

Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis.

Ibid., 128.

Ibid.

Ibid., 135–136.

Boggs, The American Revolution, 28.

U.S. Census Bureau.

Seymour Melman, Profits Without Production (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

87th U.S. Congress, 1st Session, 1961.

On the relationship of increased labor power to the relative number of workers needed to employ its mass, see Marx, Capital, 681–689.

Boggs, American Revolution, 13. On the cyclical nature of unemployment, see Marx, Capital, 689–703, esp. 691–695.

Boggs, American Revolution, 36.

“Michigan: Decline in Detroit,” Time, October 27, 1961; Don Beck, “Detroit Is Changing, but not ‘Declining,’ ” Detroit Free Press, October 29, 1961.

Boggs, American Revolution, 50.

Ibid., 47.

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 127.

Boggs, The American Revolution, 45.

Ibid., 53.

Ibid., 41.

Ibid., 68.

Ibid., 45.

Ibid., 73.

Ibid., 75.

Ibid., 76.

Ibid., 85.

On the relationship of labor power to exchange-value, see Marx, Capital, 672.

Boggs, American Revolution, 86.

Ibid., 87.

Ibid., 93.

On dialectical humanism and James Boggs, see James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review, 1974), esp. the introduction by Grace Lee Boggs in the second edition published in 2008; James and Grace Lee Boggs, Freddy Paine, and Lyman Paine, Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation's Future (Boston: South End Press, 1978); Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), esp. 70–71; Nyanza Bandele, “Changing Ideas for Changing Times: The Political Though of James Boggs,” this issue.

Boggs, Living for Change.

For the development of these ideas, see Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century and Bandele, “Changing Ideas for Changing Times.”