For a recent study and intellectual history of Boggs’s extraordinary life and his personal and political relationship with Grace Lee Boggs, see Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
James Boggs, “Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come,” in Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 51–62.
This historical perspective of Black Power necessitated a study of working-class formation and capital accumulation in the US, in particular the constitution of internal divisions within the working class along racial lines through the legacy of slavery—a perspective which was to also be advanced by the theorists of “white-skin privilege.” See Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev) and Theodore W. Allen’s 1967 pamphlet The White Blindspot (published in 1969 by SDS’s Radical Education Project), available online at →. Another essay in Racism and the Class Struggle, “Uprooting Racism and Racists” (146–60), discusses debates tracing “the parallel between the rise of capitalism and the rise of racism”: “The historical fact is that without African slavery the class struggle between capitalists and workers could not even have been joined in the first place. For the capitalist, it served the functions of primitive accumulation. That is, It provided both the initial capital and the labor force freed from the means of production which is a prerequisite for the process of capitalist accumulation inside the factory.”
Not to mention their involvement in the formation of the Freedom Now Party in Detroit in 1964, and their role in organizing the 1963 Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in the same city, where Malcolm X gave his famous “Message to the Grassroots” speech.
See A. Muhammad Ahmad, “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers: A Historical Study” →. See also Dan Georgakas’s eloquent recollection of Boggs and his influence: “The person who made the strongest immediate impression on us, particularly among the Blacks who would become the nucleus of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, was James Boggs. He had been through numerous rank-and-file movements and racial initiatives within unions, and he spoke eloquently about his experiences. Although Marty and others in the group also worked in factories, Boggs was the only one who seemed to be the kind of militant who spoke and acted in terms that had immediate application. When he spoke about workers, he described the kind of people we all knew rather than the idealizations projected by other radical groups and even other members of his own circle. Boggs was especially intriguing when he enumerated the shortcomings of the class and its internal problems, emphasizing underdevelopment among Black as well as white workers. Later, of course, he and his wife would develop these ideas more fully in a number of writings.” Dan Georgakas, “Young Detroit Radicals, 1955–1965,” Urgent Tasks 12 (Summer 1981) →.
James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1963). The text was originally released as a double issue of Monthly Review in the summer of 1963, and was published as a separate pamphlet later that year. The complete text of The American Revolution has been collected along with many of Boggs’s other important writings in Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, ed. Stephen M. Ward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011).
Boggs, The American Revolution, 53.
See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 275. Sugrue also traces the effects of automation on employment in the auto industry over the course of the 1950s and ‘60s (130–35).
For a comprehensive account of the divergence between Boggs and James on the question of Black Power, see Stephen M. Ward, “An Ending and a Beginning: James Boggs, C.L.R. James, and the American Revolution,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 13, no. 3: 279–302. For James’s definitive statement on the independent validity of black struggles for civil rights in the US, see C. L. R. James, “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States,” C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question,” ed. Scott McLemee (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996) 138–47 →.
James and Grace Lee Boggs, “CLR James: A Critical Reminiscence,” Urgent Tasks 12 (Summer 1981).
James famously suggested that James and Grace Lee Boggs needed to take “education classes in Marxism” if they believed Marx had not grasped the link between automation and unemployment in capitalist development, one of the central arguments of chapters 15 and 25 in volume 1 of Capital. See Nicola Pizzolato, “The Revolutionary Task of Self-Activity: A Note on Grace Lee Boggs,” Viewpoint Magazine, January 4, 2016 →.
Boggs, The American Revolution, 85.
Paul Romano (Phil Singer) and Ria Stone (Grace Lee Boggs), The American Worker (New York, 1947) →. Other pertinent texts include Charles Denby (Si Owens), Indignant Heart: A Black Workers’ Journal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978); Marie Brant (Selma James) and Ellen Santori (Filomena D’Addario), A Woman’s Place (Detroit: Facing Reality, 1970), later republished in a famous pamphlet alongside an essay by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (London: Falling Wall Press, 1972).
For a thorough account of this theoretical lineage, see Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi, “Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy,” Viewpoint Magazine 3 (2013) →.
For a careful presentation of the concept of class composition, see Salar Mohandesi, “Class Consciousness or Class Composition?” Science and Society, vol. 77, no. 1 (January 2013): 72–97.
Boggs, The American Revolution, 32. In some sense, the encounter between Boggs and Italian workerism did take hold at the level of practice. As writers including Nicola Pizzolato, Steve Wright, and Michael Staudenmaier have demonstrated, there was a robust exchange and circulation of ideas, texts, and experiences of struggle between the radical milieus of Detroit and Italy during the 1960s. In 1968 Boggs embarked on a lecture tour of Italy, organized by Roberto Giammanco, which coincided with a wave of campus occupations in the cities of Milan, Turin, and Trento. He and Grace Lee Boggs provided reports and analyses of the Black Power movement and the Detroit political scene, and this visit made a lasting impression on Italian activists. See Nicola Pizzolato, Challenging Global Capitalism: Labor Migration, Radical Struggle, and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 85, 132–33; Michael Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986 (Oakland: AK Press, 2012), 44–45, 279–80. Nicola Pizzolato, “Transnational Radicals: Labour Dissent and Political Activism in Detroit and Turin (1950–1970),” International Review of Social History 56 (2011): 1–30; Sergio Bologna, “Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism: A Review of Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven,” trans. Arianna Bove, Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics, vol. 16, no. 2 (2003). John Watson of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers would also travel to Italy in 1968, to speak at a conference on anti-imperialism.
For representative texts: Roman Alquati, “Organic Composition of Capital and Labor-Power at Olivetti” (1961), trans. Steve Wright, Viewpoint Magazine 3 (2013) →; Raniero Panzieri, “Socialist Uses of Workers’ Inquiry” (1965), trans. Arianna Bove, eipcp (2006) →; Mario Tronti, “Lenin in England” (1964), in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis: Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Practice of a Class Movement: 1964–79 (London: Red Notes, 1979) →.
Boggs, The American Revolution, 14–16.
Ibid., 52.
James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, “The City is the Black Man’s Land,” in Racism and the Class Struggle, 50.
Paolo Carpignano, “U.S. Class Composition in the Sixties,” Zerowork 1 (1976): 7–32.
Boggs, “The City is the Black Man’s Land,” 46.
The literature on the Black Power movement has exploded in recent years. For an overview of the movement at the local level, see Rhonda Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search For Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015). For an enduring examination of the stakes of campaigns for community control and empowerment, and the problems with confronting entrenched municipal regimes and social welfare programs, see Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 215–55.
James Boggs, “The American Revolution: Putting Politics in Command,” in Racism and the Class Struggle, 187.
Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Boggs, “The American Revolution: Putting Politics in Command,” 183.
See the still-relevant line in “The City is the Black Man’s Land”: “Because Afro-Americans were the first people in this country to pose the perspective of revolutionary power to destroy racism, I have been using the word ‘black’ as a political designation … It should not be taken to mean the domination of Afro-Americans or the exclusion of other people of color from black revolutionary organization” (50). For his criticisms of cultural nationalism, see his essay “Culture and Black Power,” in Racism and the Class Struggle, 63–69.
Boggs, “The American Revolution: Putting Politics in Command,” 182–85.
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 69.
Donna Murch, Living For the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 179.
The best history of the LRBW remains Dan Georgakas and Martin Survin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998 (1971)). See also James A. Geschwender, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). On its decline, see Ernie Allen, “Dying from the Inside: The Decline of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,” in They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee: Seven Radicals Remember the ’60s (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 71–109. For a strong recent account, see Elizabeth Kai Hinton, “The Black Bolsheviks: Detroit Revolutionary Union Movements and Shop-Floor Organizing,” in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, eds. Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 211–28.
James Boggs, “The Future Belongs to the Dispossessed,” in Racism and the Class Struggle, 99. In addition to being a mentor of sorts to the future core leadership of the League, Boggs was a regular contributor to Inner City Voice, a newspaper that catalogued RUM activities and other community struggles in Detroit, and which functioned as a central coordinating tool. For a detailed account of the importance of Inner City Voice as the “focus of a permanent organization … a bridge between the peaks of activity,” see John Watson’s 1968 interview with Radical America, “Black Editor,” recently republished by Viewpoint Magazine →.
Georgakas and Survin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 36. The authors’ description of the RUM strategic approach is worth examining: “More like the IWW of an earlier generation of radicals than like a trade union, DRUM had many aspects of a popular revolutionary movement that could go in many directions.”
See “To the Point of Production: An Interview with John Watson of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,” reprinted in The Movement, 1969 →. For an excellent recent study of the League’s “radical imagination,” from their reading of social conditions in Detroit to their robust legacy of cultural production, see Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 43–67.
See Adolph Reed Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 117–62. See also Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). The experience of the Congress of African People, the Black Power group led by Amiri Baraka, in supporting the election of Kenneth Gibson as the first black mayor of Newark, New Jersey is an exemplary case of the dynamics at work in the ascendancy of the black political class and the abandonment of the radical perspective of Black Power. See Komozi Woodard, Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
For a clear presentation of Boggs’s account of “postindustrial” society, see Cedric Johnson, “James Boggs, the ‘Outsiders,’ and the Challenge of Postindustrial Society,” Souls, vol. 13, no. 3 (2011): 303–26. On the historical and structural relationship of unemployment and wage labor, see Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (November–December 2010): 79–97.
To start: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Donna Murch, “Paying for Punishment: The New Debtors’ Prison,” Boston Review, August 1, 2015 →.
See →.