James Boggs, the “Outsiders,” and the Challenge of Postindustrial Society

Abstract

The immediate subject of James Boggs's The American Revolution is the far-reaching transformation of American industry through automation and cybernetic command. He offers a political reading of these new forces of production that greatly diminished the power of industrial workers on the shop floor and in U.S. politics more generally during the post–World War II period. In light of the new social and economic terrain of postindustrial society, Boggs urges a rethinking of leftist revolution. In this essay, I excavate certain aspects of Boggs's formative critique of automation and its implications for working-class life and politics and consider how well his analysis of the social contradictions produced under postindustrialism anticipates the emergence of the New Right. In contrast to Cold War liberals and latter-day purveyors of underclass rhetoric who emphasize alleged cultural dysfunction to explain inequality, Boggs saw the new urban poor, those who face chronic unemployment under automation, as potential agents of social change and developed a novel concept of cultural revolution whereby the “classless society” could be achieved through a revolution in values rather than the pursuit of statist transition. Cooperatively organized production might eliminate material need, deliver more leisure time, and enable a freer, more socially just order than that available under liberal capitalism. For Boggs, this was the profound, cultural challenge facing Americans under postindustrialism.

Keywords:

• automation
• culture of poverty
• labor
• postindustrial society
• revolution
• socialism

Notes

Marx writes: “The value of a commodity is certainly determined by the quantity of labour contained in it, but this quantity is itself socially determined. If the amount of labour time socially necessary for the product of any commodity alters—and a given weight of cotton represents more labour after a bad harvest than after a good one—this reacts back on all the old commodities of the same type, because they are only individuals of the same species, and their value at any given time is measured by the labour socially necessary to produce them, i.e., by the labour necessary under the social conditions existing at the time.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 318.

Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Stephen Ward, “Introduction: Making of a Black Revolutionist,” in Pages from a Black Worker's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, ed. Stephen Ward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 1–34.

This pamphlet consist of two parts—the first section is drawn from Singer's (a.k.a., Paul Romano) diary of his experiences on the shop floor, while the second part comprises a speculative essay by Grace Lee Boggs (Ria Stone). In a section that explores the significance of new productive technologies, she writes, “Today, the knowledge, science, etc. of the means of production have reached a new stage. With the development of electric power and electronics, completely automatic production is possible and necessary. The units of production can now incorporate complete flexibility, power, precision, freedom of movement and ease of control. But what is required from the workers on such production units is equal flexibility, precision, freedom of movement and ease of control. The workers must themselves become complete masters of the productive power developed in the instruments of production … . There may be vulgar materialists whose conception of completely automatic production provides only for robot operators. They betray the typical empiricism and naïve realism of those intellectuals who have only contemplated the world and are therefore unable to understand that the world develops through the practical activity of man. Let them ponder the description of the actual design of ‘machines without men’ developed by bourgeois engineers.” See, Paul Romano and Ria Stone, The American Worker (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1972), 48–53. For discussion of the Johnson-Forest Tendency's origins and history, see Boggs, Living for Change; Grace Lee Boggs, “C. L. R. James: Organizing in the U.S.A., 1938–1953,” in C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 163–172; Raya Dunayevskaya, For the Record: The Johnson-Forest Tendency or the Theory of State Capitalism, 1941–1951: Its Vicissitudes and Ramifications (Detroit: News and Letters Committee, 1972); Kent Worcester, C. L. R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (November–December 2010): 79–97; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006); Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Loïc Wacquant, “Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America,” Daedalus (Summer 2010): 74–90; Louis Waite “A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?” Geography Compass 3, no. 1 (January 2009): 412–433.

Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 130–135.

Boggs writes, “The question before Americans is whether to be for the technological revolutions of automation despite all the people who will be displaced, or to be opposed to this advance, sticking with the old workers who are resisting the new machinery, as workers have done traditionally since the invention of the spinning Jenny.” James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review, 1963), 39.

Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1832); Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998 [1911]).

Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 130.

Ibid., 130–140; James M. Rubenstein, Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress, 1903–2003 (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).

Malcolm Waters, Daniel Bell (London: Routledge Press, 1996), 14.

The quotations in this paragraph are from Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1961), 267–268. Bell's views on automation were widely shared by many in the intellectual and ruling elite. In a special symposium of Public Interest dedicated to the “Great Automation Question,” Robert M. Solow doubted the fact of widespread technological unemployment and expressed faith in Keynesianism to remedy any possible displacement: “The Great Automation Question, as I have phrased it, is not only unanswerable, it is the wrong question. The important point is that, to a pretty good first approximation, the total volume of employment in the United States today is simply not determined by the rate of technological progress. Both theory and common observation tell us that a modern mixed economy can by proper and active use of fiscal and monetary policy weapons have full employment for any plausible rate of technological change within a range that is easily wide enough to cover the American experience.” In his contribution to this same symposium, Robert Heilbroner shares Solow's skepticism of clear causal relation between new technologies and unemployment, but he expresses some concern over the ways that computerization promises to transform the culture of white-collar workplaces: “In other words, I do not see the threat of automation in any unusual characteristics possessed by modern day ‘factory’ technology. What I do suspect, on the other hand, is that the new technology is threatening a whole new group of skills—the sorting, filing, checking, calculating, remembering, comparing, okaying skills—that are the special preserve of the office worker. Moreover, it is not just complicated computers that are threatening to take over functions in this hitherto sheltered area of work, although no doubt the new technology is conducive to more complex administrative tasks.” “The Great Automation Question,” Public Interest 1 (Fall 1965): 17–36; For other period assessments of new industrial technology, see John T. Dunlop, ed., Automation and Technological Change (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962).

Bell, The End of Ideology, 270–271. See also Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007).

Daniel Bell, “Notes on the Post-Industrial Society,” Public Interest 6/7 (1967); Daniel Bell, The Coming Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1970); Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980). Nick Dyer-Witheford offers an excellent, critical overview of the mainstream “postindustrial society” literature of Japan, North America, and Europe in Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 15–37.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, 526–527.

Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review, 1974).

Boggs, American Revolution, 38.

Ibid.

Ibid., 27.

Ibid., 28.

Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; Andrew Zimbalist, ed. Case Studies in the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review, 1979); David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Knopf, 1984); David Noble, Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995).

Boggs, American Revolution, 35.

Ibid., 34.

Ibid., 35.

Ibid., 36.

Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 147.

Boggs, American Revolution, 30–31.

Ibid., 52.

Oscar Lewis, Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Vintage Books, 1961); Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1966); Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” in On Understanding Poverty, ed. Daniel P. Moynihan (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962). See also Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). In addition to social democrats and liberals, modern black nationalists have often offered similar assessments of black life albeit with different imagery, motivations, and aims. Citing the prevalence of urban social ills found in mainstream liberal literature, black nationalists during the 1960s often derided the “slave mentality,” or, in Black Power parlance, the “colonized mind” as the source of black self-loathing and destructive behavior. Generally, they held that the solution was some admixture of personal rehabilitation, cultural recovery and in some Black Power radical circles, politicization. See Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Adolph Reed Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Postsegregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999); Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Michael B. Katz, ed., The Underclass Debate: Views from History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Harrington, The Other America, 4.

Ibid., 5.

Ibid., 12–13, 19–38.

Ibid., 11.

See Kent B. Germany, New Orleans After the Promises (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1971); Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007); Barbara Cruikshank, Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Adolph Reed Jr., “Sources of Demobilization in the New Black Regime: Incorporation, Ideological Capitulation and Radical Failure in the Postsegregation Era,” in Stirrings in the Jug, 117–161; Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

Sidney Willhelm, Who Needs the Negro? (Hampton, Va.: U.B. & U.S. Communications, 1993 [1970]), 202–203. The emphasis is in the original.

The quotations in this paragraph are from Boggs, American Revolution, 39 and 52. Boggs adds here: “Take, for example the draftsman. With the old methods the engineer used to present his ideas to a draftsman who would make a rough sketch of these ideas which would then be given to another draftsman to refine. A third draftsman then drew the final blueprint, incorporating in it the exact size, the appearance, and the correct fittings to be millionth of an inch. Today all that this same engineer has to do is talk his ideas into a tape recorder which plays into a computer and the ideas are transformed into a design; the design in turn is fed into a developer and, once developed, can be handed over to the work foreman for building. The three draftsmen have been eliminated from the work process, and only the engineer and the toolmaker remain, each having to know more than before about the other's job.”

Lynn Peril, “Do Secretaries Have a Future?” New York Times, April 26, 2011.

Boggs, American Revolution, 46.

Ibid., 47.

Ibid., 41.

See Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967); Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow, 1968).

Boggs, American Revolution, 43.

Ibid., 59.

Ibid., 43–44.

The quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 44–45, 54.

The quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 90–93.

Ibid., 37.

Ibid.

See Jaime Peck, Workfare States (New York: Guilford, 2001); Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; Wacquant, “Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America”; Neil Smith, “Revanchist Planet: Regeneration and the Axis of Co-Evilism,” in The Urban Inventors (2009); Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 2008).

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Judith Stein, The Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 2010); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

In their most progressive manifestations, both golden-age rap music of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the “hood films” genre of that same era spun cautionary tales of street violence and offered soft social criticism, black consciousness, and cultural rehabilitation as antidotes to urban social misery. As these forms proved their commercial viability through the middle 1990s, however, the very image of the urban outsider was appropriated in countless films, television programs, videogames, and corporate hip-hop music in ways that lent an air of street credibility to conspicuous consumption and Horatio Alger myths of bootstrap self-help. Such representations are ideological in the worst sense, simultaneously escapist and didactic. On one hand, in the clichéd narrative conclusion of urban dramas, such as Boyz in the Hood (1991), New Jersey Drive (1995), and Set It Off (1996), where at least one at-risk protagonist finally departs the inner city for college, safety and the possibility of a middle-class existence, we are reminded that despite tough conditions, for worthy, virtuous individuals, class is ephemeral. On the other hand, we are instructed through these same films and other pop cultural depictions of inner-city life that class hierarchy can be surmounted by some combination of middle-class mentoring, e.g., Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester (2000); a dose of tough love and paternal discipline, e.g., Coach Carter (2005) and Take the Lead (2006); or the development of a strong work ethic (all of the above). These representations have been as instrumental in popularizing and maintaining the hegemony of neoliberal politics as the scores of white papers produced by right-wing think tanks since the 1970s.

Robinson, Black Nationalism; Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders, 131–215; Reed, “Sources of Demobilization in the New Black Regime,” 117–161; Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (New York: Verso, 2002).

Nelson Lichtenstein, The State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1997); Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path to Social Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999 [1986]).

I discuss this phenomenon of “do-good capitalism,” and the role of humanitarian and charitable organizations in furthering privatization, particularly in the Global South, in Cedric Johnson, “The Urban Precariat, Neoliberalization, and the Soft Power of Humanitarian Design,” Journal of Developing Societies 27, nos. 3 & 4 (September 2011): 445–476. See also Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009); Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2009); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2006).

Boggs, American Revolution, 39.

Davis, Planet of Slums, 174–198.

Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter, The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).