Changing Ideas for Changing Times: Revolutionary Praxis and the Political Thought of James Boggs

Abstract

James Boggs's American Revolution is best understood as both foundation and starting point of the patently Boggsian brand of revolutionary praxis that developed over the course of the five decades he engaged radical politics. Convinced that the ideas that inform political practice must evolve in concert with objective reality, Boggs's profound internalization of the Marxist method made it possible for him to avoid being shackled ideologically by a wholesale, dogmatic subscription to Marxist tenets. Today, as radical and Left-leaning blacks attempt to navigate what has been termed a “new nadir,” Boggs's revolutionary humanist ideal can inform the ways and means by which we mount resistance.

Keywords:

• black radical tradition
• dialectical humanism
• revolutionary theory

Notes

James Boggs's ideological debate with C. L. R. James is recounted in Grace Lee Boggs's autobiography Living for Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Robin D. G. Kelley, in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), dates the emergence of the black radical tradition in the north to the 1940s, while in his article “More Than Just a Politician: Harold Cruse and the Origins of Black Power,” Van Gosse contends that a “nationalist and anti-imperialist constituency began developing in the 1950's.”

William Jelani Cobb refers to blacks' membership in the Communist Party as a “brief entente between black liberals and the radical left that splintered with the onset of the Cold War.” See Cobb, ed., The Essential Harold Cruse (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Cedric Robinson provides an insightful analysis of black author and radical activist Richard Wright's contention with the Communist Party, much of it centered on the party's equating nationalism with “black chauvinism,” a position that Wright felt ignored the significance of black nationalism, which he saw as a legitimate expression of black workers' strivings in spite of its limitations. Muhammad Ahmad writes in We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2007) that Queen Mother Audley Moore resigned from the Communist Party after realizing its unwillingness to deal with questions related to African liberation. Robinson explains, “for some, like [George] Padmore, and later [Oliver] Cox, international communism was simply another deceitful Western invention; for others like [C. L. R.] James it was its own perversion.” Other notables to leave Communist Party with critique include Aimé Cesaire, Harry Haywood, and Harold Cruse.

For a brief history of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, see Loren Goldner's preface to C.L.R. James and Grace C. Lee, Facing Reality: The New Society, Where to Look for It & How to Bring It Closer (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2006).

James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook (Detroit: Leadfoot Press, 1963), 14–15.

Ibid., 33.

Ibid., 45.

First published in Monthly Review in 1963, this article is featured in James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 26–32.

Ibid., 30.

Ibid.

Grace Lee Boggs, Living For Change, 109.

See Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Cambridge: South End Press, 1998), 15–16. Here, Boggs is described as “highly respected” among the group. Inner City Voice featured a regular column by Boggs.

Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle, 172.

Ibid., 184.

Ibid.

Founded by journalist William Worthy and civil rights attorney and onetime Communist Party member Conrad Lynn, this was conceived as an all-black political party and launched during the summer of 1963, just as Martin Luther King Jr. and other major figures within the mainstream civil rights movement were planning the March on Washington.

Grace Lee Boggs attributes the development of dialectical humanism to Lyman Paine's struggles “with Marx's economic determinism” and his attempts to replace this philosophy with “an equally powerful new philosophy as well as an equally powerful but fundamentally different concept and scenario of revolution.” See Living for Change.

Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 171.

Ibid., 140.

Ibid., 195.

Ibid., 190.

William K. Tabb identifies four areas of crisis: Financial turbulence inside the U.S. economy; the discrediting of U.S. imperialism globally; the rise of new centers of power in “peripheries”; and depletion of natural resources.

Scholar Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua has identified characteristics of twenty-first-century racial politics as constituting a new nadir in U.S. race relations. Aspects of this nadir include extreme marginalization of black workers, astounding escalation in incarceration, colorblind racial ideology (or laissez-faire racism), extreme widening of income gaps, hypersegregation, and a continued wealth differential between black and white families. See Cha-Jua, “The New Nadir: The Contemporary Black Racial Formation,” The Black Scholar 40, no. 1 (2010): 38–58.

Ideas presented here are further developed in Samir Amin's Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2010).