Matt Birkhold, The Boggsian Challenge to Marxist Praxis

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Doing for Our Time What Marx Did forHis: Const itut ing the Boggsian Challengeto Marxist PraxisMatthew Birkhold

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Black Critiques of Capital: Radicalism, Resistance, and Visions ofSocial Justice

Doing for Our Time What Marx Didfor HisConstituting the Boggsian Challenge to Marxist Praxis

Matthew Birkhold

Illustrating why and how James Boggs and Karl Marxunderstood capitalism and revolution differently, this essayexamines the historical development of capitalism withinthe United States, specifically in Detroit. Showing that manyconstituting aspects of what Marx understood as the histori-cal tendency of capitalist accumulation existed within theUnited States, I also show that racism has been a constitutingelement of accumulations historical tendency in the UnitedStates. Consequently, the explanatory usefulness of Marxistpraxis toward historically understanding capitalism and rev-olution within the United States is limited. James Boggsunderstood this racial limitation of Marxism and produceda theory of revolution responding to Marxisms limitations.Because James Boggs wrote The American Revolution in aperiod designated by U.S. hegemony over the world-system,he observed that capitalist accumulation exhibited a very dif-ferent historical tendency than that observed by Marx. Whilethe period of capitalism described by Marx demonstrated anhistorical tendency toward increasing levels of misery

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

Souls

Souls 13 (3): 235255, 2011 / Copyright # 2011 The Trustees of Columbia Universityin the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2011.601693


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amongst working people, increased numbers of productionworkers, and proletarian revolution, in what I refer to asthe period of U.S. hegemony, according to Boggs, capitalismdemonstrated a historical tendency toward increased

consumption by working people, decreasing numbers ofproduction workers, and black revolution.

Keywords: Detroit, James Boggs, Marxism, race relations, racial capitalism,U.S. hegemony

Originally written as a document internal to CorrespondencePublishing Committee, James Boggss The American Revolution:

Pages From a Negro Workers Notebook finalized a split betweenBoggs and C. L. R James. James denounced the document anddeclared that the organization needed further education in Marxism.Boggs replied, stating that the organization did not need further edu-cation in Marxism but instead a serious study of the development of

American Capitalism, the most advanced capitalism in the world.1

James broke ties with all who supported Boggss position. Clearly,both men saw The American Revolution as a challenge to Marxistunderstandings of capitalism and social change.

A handful of activists and scholars have explored aspects of Boggsschallenge to Marxism, but we lack a comparative study of Boggss andMarxs thought as it relates to the development of capitalism as a his-torical system.2 Studying the ideas of these two men in relation to thehistorical evolution of capitalism is important because doing so canhelp us understand not only the differences between their ideas butalso capitalism as a historical system and strategies to move beyondit. To begin this process, in this essay I examine the historical devel-opment of capitalism within the United States, specifically in Detroit.

In so doing, I demonstrate that while many constituting aspects ofwhat Marx understood as the historical tendency of capitalistaccumulation existed within the United States, racism has also beena constituting element of accumulations historical tendency in theUnited States. Consequently, I argue that the explanatory usefulnessof Marxist praxis toward historically understanding capitalism andrevolution within the United States is limited and that James Boggsunderstood this racial limitation of Marxism.

I go on to suggest that because the historic relationship of racism

to capitalist accumulation within the United States had become afetter on accumulation by the period of U.S. hegemony over theworld-system, U.S. firms and the U.S. federal government workedtogether to reorganize production relations in a manner that lent a

236 ^ Souls July^September 2011


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very different historical tendency to capitalist accumulation than theperiod in which Marx wrote Capital. While the period of capitalismdescribed by Marx demonstrated an historical tendency towardincreasing levels of misery among working people, increased numbers

of production workers, and proletarian revolution, in what I am refer-ring to as the period of U.S. hegemony, according to Boggs, capitalismdemonstrated a historical tendency toward increased consumption byworking people, decreasing numbers of production workers, and blackrevolution. In other words, Boggs understood the temporal and raciallimitations of Marxs thought and developed a theory of revolutionbased on the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation in a periodcharacterized by U.S. hegemony.

Detroit, the HistoricalTendencies of Racial Capitalism, and the

Limitations of Marxist Praxis

Following the U.S. Civil War, the development of capitalism withinthe United States paralleled Marxs description of accumulations his-torical tendency in several ways. Immediately after the war, pro-duction was mechanized to increase deskilling, labor power perworker, and labor force homogenization. As Marx foresaw, the working

class expanded and grew more productive.3

Nationally, there were 2.7million production workers in 1879. By 1929 the number had grown to8.37 million. This growth in variable capital was accompanied bygrowth in constant capital. In 1880, single factories employed an aver-age of 1,500 workers. By the 1920s single factories employed, on aver-age, twenty thousand to sixty thousand workers at any given time.4

The combined growth of the industrial working class and the GreatDepressions devastating economic impact on workers created con-ditions in the Untied States similar to what Marx and Engels saw

in England, where the proliferation of machinery in production hadeliminated skill differences between workers thus making themeasier to replace. Combined with the impact of cyclical crises in therate of accumulation, tenuous employment, and fluctuating wages,the unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly devel-oping, [made] their livelihood more precarious.5 In response to thisgrowing instability, Marx and Engels argued, workers would formtrade unions to protect wages. Increasing with the size of the workingclass and utilizing the communication channels needed for pro-

duction, local workers unions would be able to centralize into onenational struggle, and into a political party.By the 1930s, increased mechanization had resulted in a largely

homogeneously skilled workforce plagued by precarious livelihoods

Black Critiques of Capital ^ 237


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made acute by the Great Depression. As Marx argued, U.S. workersformed militant local unions such as the United Auto Workers(UAW) that utilized strikes and work stoppages to gain recognition.These unions centralized into a national organization, the Congress

of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Because Fords assembly line bestrepresents the drive toward mechanization, skill homogenization,increased misery, andwith the birth of the United Auto Workers(UAW) therethe labor revolt produced in relation to mechanization,deskilling, and precarity, there is no place better suited to examineMarxs description of accumulations historical tendency in relationto capitalisms twentieth-century development as a historical systemthan Detroit. Because a historical relationship of race to accumu-lation is highly visible in Detroit, Detroit is also the best place to dem-

onstrate the limitations of Marxist praxis for understanding theUnited States and for understanding the alternative to Marxistpraxis developed by James Boggs.

Detroit entered a new era in the 1920s. In 1913 Ford completed theassembly line, and Detroits black population increased 611 percentfrom 1910 to 1920. Before 1915, Detroit was 98 percent white, andits economy was broad-based. Detroit workers produced shoes,tobacco products, varnish, beer, pharmaceuticals, stoves, packagedseeds, ships, and railroad cars.6 With the centralization of the auto

industry after 1915, Detroit became the Motor City.7

As increasedcentralization of the auto industry occurred, the number of peopleemployed in Wayne County manufacturing firms increased fromabout 50,000 in 1900 to more than 250,000 in 1920.8 While reliablenumbers on auto industry employment before 1940 are difficult toobtain, there is little doubt that most of these jobs were related tothe auto industry, if not directly in auto production. Despite theoverall increase in workers, the percentage of blacks employed inauto did not rise above 4 percent until 1941 with the passage of

Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in defenseplants. Largely spurred by the demand for black labor during WorldWar I, Detroit was more than 9 percent black by the start of WorldWar II.9

The Great Depression had a radicalizing effect on Detroit workers.From 1929 to 1931, more than 200,000 Detroiters were laid off, and by1931 city relief was the sole source of income for 210,000 people, halfof whom were black. By 1932, Detroit was in debt $278 million andcut thousands of people from relief rolls. More than four thousand

children stood daily in bread lines, city employees went withoutpay, and Detroits welfare department received more than seventhousand calls each day about evictions.10 The desperation producedby these conditionswhat Marx and Engels described as precarious



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livelihoodand the lack of empathy Henry Ford exhibited for strug-gling people culminated in the 1932 Ford Hunger March, awell-publicized march through Dearborn demanding jobs and foodfrom Ford. The march ended with police firing point-blank at

nonviolent marchers, killing four. Witnessing this repression furtherradicalized Detroit workers, both employed and unemployed.In 1933 alone there were more than a hundred strikes in Detroit

auto plants, all of which were met with further repression. Parallel-ing strike activity, black residents engaged in struggles against evic-tions and police brutality, and in October black postal workerscreated the Federation of Negro Labor. In 1936, Midland Steel,Kelsey-Hayes, and a handful of Briggs, Fisher Body, and Chryslerplants in Detroit were all unionized after workers utilized sit-down

strikes. In 1937, General Motors recognized the UAW with asix-month contract after workers at Flint Buick Plants engaged insit-down strikes. In March, Chrysler recognized the UAW after allof its Detroit plants were closed by these strikes.11

Sit-down strikes were an effective means to gain union recognitionbecause production in auto plants was organized along assemblylines. This gave workers great control over the production processand sitting down inside the plant, in contrast to picketing, protectedworkers from police and firm violence. Moving assembly lines connec-

ted all the workers on one line to each other, and therefore when oneworker stopped the line, every worker necessarily joined thestrike.12 Thus, while the widespread unionization of Detroit plantsfrom 1936 to 1937 makes it appear as though average workers wereprofoundly militant, because stopping production and initiating asit-down strike could be accomplished by very few workers, only asmall number of militant autoworkers were needed to catalyzepro-union sentiment amongst the vast majority of apatheticworkers and give birth to the UAW, the leading union in the nation-

ally centralized CIO.13

Because of this, James Boggs, who was a mem-ber of a UAW goon squad, insisted that many more workers wereorganized into unions than joined voluntarily.14

Despite the effectiveness of sit-down strikes in assembly linedriven plants, Ford remained an open shop until 1941 because ofthe way production was racially organized there. Learning fromthe racial violence that plagued East St. Louis and Chicago followingblack migration, Detroit employers found ways to avoid racial con-flict and the accompanying lost labor hours.15 Instead of employing

blacks and whites together, an action that was sure to incite whiteworkers, most employers hired very few blacks, and when theydid, they segregated production plants and production activitieswithin plants by race. In the 1930s, 75 percent of blacks across the



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industry held unskilled positions compared to 25 percent of whiteworkers, while 12 percent of blacks had white-collar jobs comparedto 50 percent of whites.16 In every Detroit area plant but FordsRiver Rouge, black workers were concentrated in foundries, gener-

ally the most undesirable occupation in the auto industry. At RiverRouge, black workers were employed in foundries, on assembly lines,machines, presses, and as tool and die makers, the industrys mostskilled position. Because relatively small numbers of blacks wereemployed in most auto plants, organizing across racial lines waspossible despite white racism.17 At Ford, however, where more than54 percent of black workers in the auto industry worked99 percentof them at River Rougeorganizing across racial lines was muchharder.18

Organizing black workers into the UAW at Ford was also difficultbecause Fords segregation and skilling of black workers at RiverRouge tied black economic development to Fords open shop. Fordsblack workers were hired almost exclusively through recommenda-tions from anti-union black pastors.19 Consequently, black workersflocked to pastors with Fords ear, followed their anti-union rec-ommendation, and got hired into the only plant willing to promoteblack workers. Black churches that depended on Ford for member-ship agreed not to criticize it. To protect their relationships with Ford,

black preachers went so far as to silence Mordecai Johnson, thenpresident of Howard University, on a trip to Detroit because he urgedblack workers to join unions.20 In addition to using churches to fightunionization, Ford allegedly paid black workers $24 a day to not joinpickets during a 1941 strike that ended in unionization. To receivetheir wage, black workers had to claim that striking white workershad threatened their lives.21 While successful unionization requiredsome breakdown of racial barriers, among rank-and-file whiteworkers there was little commitment to racial equality.

When Detroit firms converted to war production and the citybecame known as the Arsenal of Democracy, Detroits populationgrew from 993,675 to 1,623,452 and the percentage of African

Americans increased from 4.1 percent to 9.2 from 1920 to 1940.Because Detroit was made up of almost exclusively single-familyhomes, the population boom in Detroit spelled disaster for housingall of the citys new migrants.22 This housing shortage played out vio-lently during the winter of 1942, then carried over into racializedlabor strife and a full-scale riot in 1943. Between 1941 and 1944, only

1,895 units of public housing and 200 units of private housing wereconstructed in Detroit. Therefore, when a new public housing project,the Sojourner Truth homes, opened, demand among blacks andwhites was high. When the Detroit Housing Commission (DHC)



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announced in 1941 that the project would be white, blacks protested.In response, the DHC made the project black. When black residentsmoved in, whites started a riot in which 220 people were arrestedand 40 injured. Despite the fact that whites initiated the riot, 106

out of the 109 people held for trial were black.23

Paralleling theSojourner Truth riot, unionized white workers walked off jobs toprotest black upgrades.

Between 1941 and 1942, hate strikes were rampant in Detroit autoplants. From January to June 1943 there were twelve, the most ser-ious of which occurred at Packard from May to June. After whiteworkers shut down the plant in response to black upgrades, the localdemanded that black workers be demoted. In response, black workerswalked out and completely shut the foundry down for three days.

Conflict emerged between the international and local when the inter-national supported black workers. Based on rank-and-file whiteworkers opposition to black upgrades, local leaders ignored the inter-national. This series of hate strikes culminated when 25,000 whiteworkers walked out of the Packard plant, closing it until federalaction was taken to bring them back.24 Racial violence emerged city-wide when, later that month, blacks and whites began fighting onBelle Isle. After three days of rioting and looting, twenty-five blackswere killed, seventeen by police and eight by white mobs. Blacks

killed eight whites; 675 people suffered serious injuries, and 1,893were arrested.25

The events that culminated in the 1943 riot must be understood asa proletarian uprising in which two distinct proletarian populationsstruggled against the conditions created in relation to racial capital-isms historical tendency. Because nearly 500,000 people migratedto the Arsenal of Democracy during the initial war years, public ser-vices and housing resources, already strained by the Depression,were made more valuable and scarce. Adding to previously existing

racial tension was the reality that increases in Detroits black popu-lation meant that blacks had to move into historically white spaces,thereby further straining resources whites had historically con-sidered theirs. Therefore, as Domenic Capeci and Martha Wilkersonexplain, in 1943, longtime Detroiters responded to well-known racialconflicts exacerbated by three years of war migration, by organizinghate strikes, housing riots, attacking blacks, and finally rioting, loot-ing, and killing black migrants.26

Because blacks defended themselves in the name of race, wages,

and housing, the 1943 riot should be understood as an uprising inwhich two different proletarian populations battled each other andthe tendency of capitalism to immiserate workers. Thus, the 1943Detroit uprising demonstrates that in the United States, contrary



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to what Marx believed, the emergence of unions and a centralizedorganization did not mean that workers would cease competingagainst each other and turn toward struggling against the bour-geoisie. Instead, groups of workers of different races who belonged

to the same union struggled against each other. This makes the strug-gle of Detroit workers against the bourgeoisie more complicated thanwhat Marx envisioned.

Racial Capitalism, Proletarian Revolt, U.S. Hegemony, and the Racial and

Temporal Limitations of Marxist Praxis

Marx understood capitalism as a system in which the number of

people able to enjoy the advantages of capitalism was always decreas-ing. Therefore, as the number of people thrust into the ranks of theexploited grew, so did the number of people who experienced increas-ing amounts of misery. Because growing numbers of increasinglymiserable people was an inherent aspect of capitalist organized pro-duction, Marx and Engels believed the revolt of the proletariat wasa natural consequence of capitalism. The relationship of all these pro-cesses to each other constitutes what Marx described as the historicaltendency of capitalist accumulation.27 Marx saw nothing inherently

revolutionary about industrial workers. Instead, due to theirmaterialsocialpolitical relationship to the historical tendency ofcapitalist accumulation, Marx saw this sector of society as historicallyrevolutionary. As explained in The Communist Manifesto, tradeunions were a critical aspect of this development.

Despite the development of successfully organized unions in theUnited States, black and white workers did not unite and fightagainst a bourgeoisie whose existence they saw as no longer compat-ible with society in a long-term way.28 Instead, working-class blacks

revolted against working-class whites because whites kept blacks outof jobs, in addition to revolting against not just a lack of services andhousing, which Marx saw as consequences of accumulations histori-cal tendency, but also against discrimination in services and housing,which, in contrast to Marx, Boggs understood as constitutive aspectsof accumulations historical tendency. Whites, on the other hand, alsorevolting against the usurpation of capitalist benefits by the bour-geoisie, were also revolting against the way their exclusive claim to

jobs, services, and housing had been threatened by a massive influx

of black workers, what Du Bois called their public and psychologicalwage.29 Because this rebellion caused more than $2 million in pro-perty damage and cost war industries over a million hours in labor,in order to continue appropriating surplus value, capitalists had to



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reorganize production.30 With the achievement of U.S. hegemonyover the world-system after World War II, the reorganization of pro-duction and consumption of produced commodities became matters ofworld-historical significance. According to Giovanni Arrighi, the con-

ditions that create world hegemonies exist in periods when surpluscapital [is] thrown back into commodity trade and production on asufficiently massive scale to create the conditions of. . . cooperationand division of labor within and among the separate governmentaland business organizations of the capitalist world-economy.31 Suchglobal cooperation is contingent upon the global material expansionof capital, resulting in consistently high profit levels for capitalistson a global scale. In order for U.S. firms to lead this expansion, peaceon domestic shop floors had to be secured, and U.S. residents had to

consume at unprecedented levels. The achievement of both meantthat in the postwar period capitalist accumulation exhibited tenden-cies different from what Marx observed in the nineteenth century.James Boggs developed a theory of revolution based on these specifi-cally postwar tendencies and what he understood as the relationshipof race to capitalist accumulation.

To solve the wartime housing shortage, immediately following thewar between 3.5 and 5 million new homes were built in the UnitedStates. Because of racist lending guidelines developed by the Home

Owners Loan Corporation and adopted by the Federal HousingAdministration, the residents of these new suburban homes werealmost all white.32 The GI Bill secured college educations for whitesafter the war as well, by which white suburban residents secured wellpaying jobs and filled their new homes with new furniture, appli-ances, and accessories. To get back and forth from suburbs to

jobs in cities, they also bought huge numbers of cars and drove themon newly built expressways, often built in the heart of blackcommunities.33

Accordingly, white Americans became the domestic bedrock of a glo-bal economic expansion fueled by the federal governments promise topromote maximum consumption so that levels of maximum employ-ment and production could be realized. With increased technical andmanagerial employment, a given member of the new postwar middleclass was the son or daughter of yesterdays worker, and due to therapid rate at which massive amounts of people experienced upwardclass mobility during this period, the question of who is in what classbecomes an ever-wider and more complicated question.34 The

Marshall Plan was designed to achieve similar results in Europe.35

Household construction stimulated demand for consumer durables.For example, the number of U.S. households owning mechanicalrefrigerators increased from 44 to 80 percent from 1940 to 1950.36



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When production was reconverted for civilian goods, magazines suchas Life and Brides told readers that when they bought, the dozens ofthings you never bought or even thought of before . . . you are helpingto build greater security for the industries of this country. . . . What

you buy and how you buy it is very vital in your new life [asnewlyweds]and to our whole American way of living.37 So greatwas the increase in the number of automobiles produced and con-sumed during this period that by 1963 one in every six Americanswas directly or indirectly employed by the auto industry.38 Thecentrality of the U.S. auto industry to the postwar economic expan-sion meant that managing its militant Detroit area workforce becamemore important than ever.

Because work stoppages decrease firms profits, maintaining U.S.

hegemony required that firms quell work stoppages by achievinghegemony over the CIO and the UAW in particular.39 This processbegan when the UAW agreed to a no-strike pledge at the beginningof World War II. To secure ongoing support for this pledge, the WarLabor Board (WLB), a coalition between capitalists and the federalgovernment, offered the UAW automatic dues deduction. To preventelectoral retaliation from the rank-and-file for the leaderships role ineliminating their ability to bargain with the union, it was written intothe agreement that elected union leaders had to remain in office

throughout the life of the contract.40

By 1945, the UAW began tonegotiate yearly wage increases corresponding to increased pro-ductivity in exchange for shop-floor control. In 1948 it agreed to givemanagement sole control over pricing policy, the organization of pro-duction, investment decisions, plant locations, and the right to intro-duce new technology to production as it desired.41 In 1950 the UAWagreed to a five-year contract with General Motors, preventingrank-and-file workers from developing any tactical hope for improvedworking conditions outside of wildcat strikes for at least five years.

When it became clear that wildcat strikes would not stop, firmsresponded with automation and plant relocation.According to Boggs, automation constituted a new stage of capital-

ist production that was capable of eliminating the social need for pro-duction workers.42 Boggs could have easily built his argument on datafrom Ford, which eliminated 4,185 jobs through automation in Detroitfrom 1951 to 1953.43 In 1950, all Ford and Mercury engines wereassembled by workers at River Rouge. Accordingly, a strike thereparalyzed the whole company. To gain more control over production,

Ford built an automated engine plant in Cleveland and shifted engineproduction there in 1954. Workers with seniority were transferred toCleveland or other plants, resulting in employment at the Rougefalling from 85,000 in 1945 to 30,000 in 1960. The automation of



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Cleveland meant that 41 workers produced 154 engines blocks perhour compared to the 117 workers it took to produce the same numberbefore automation.44 Decentralization was just as important to theelimination of work stoppages in Detroit as automation.

While Ford led the way in automation, GM led the way in decentra-lization. Beginning just a year after the recognition of the UAW, GMsecured an engine plant in Buffalo to reduce its reliance on Detroitand Flint.45 In the postwar period, this process continued with GMspending $3.4 billion on new plants and facilities between 1946 and1956 allowing them to greatly limit workers workplace bargainingpower in old plants by spreading production out to multiple plants.46

Following GMs lead, from the end of the war until 1957, Ford spent$2.5 billion on nationwide expansion and reducing workers workplace

bargaining power in its plants throughout the country. During the1950s GM and Ford not only successfully limited the workplace bar-gaining power of workers in single plants but succeeded in effectivelylimiting the workplace bargaining power of the entire state ofMichigan. Due to contracts that gave the UAW automatic duescheck-off and wage increases, if rank-and-file workers became toomilitant, GM and Ford could leave town. Thus, while in 1950, 56percent of all automobile employment in the United States was inMichigan, by 1960, that figure had fallen to 40 percent.47

As Marx predicted, automation and decentralization further centra-lized auto production because Packard and Studebaker, the smallermanufacturers, could not keep up with larger ones and folded. Conse-quently there emerged a big threeFord, GM, and Chrysler. Of thebig three automakers, Chrysler has always been the least successful.Compared to the amounts of money spent by Ford and GM in decen-tralization projects, Chrysler spent only $700 million.48 Consequently,while other plants in dispersed geographic locations could make upthe difference in schedule and produce closer to the market place,

Chrysler jobs stayed in Detroit. To keep up with Ford and GM, asThomas J. Sugrue writes, Chrysler sped up production dramaticallyin the 1950s, laid off thousands of workers, and relentlessly used over-time to increase output without dramatically increasing laborcosts.49 Because all of these changes were predicated on the UAWswillingness to relinquish power in the plants, Boggs pronounced thedeath of the CIO. Constituting the historical basis of his challengeto Marxist praxis, which assumed that unions would create politicalparties, Boggs declared that the CIO fell because

All organizations that spring up in a capitalist society and do not take absolutepower, but rather fight only on one tangential or essential aspect of that societyare eventually incorporated into capitalist society. The fact, the key to the present



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situation, is that from the beginning the union did not take absolute control away

from the capitalists. There was no revolution, no destruction of the state power.The union itself has therefore become incorporated into all the contradictionsof the capitalist system.50

As Boggs relates, because the CIO was incorporated into capitalismscontradictions, it had no power to respond to the impact of automationon workers. Consequently, in the twenty-six years James Boggs lived inDetroit before publishing The American Revolution, the number of pro-duction workers employed in Detroit-area manufacturing plants increa-sed from just under 300,000 to 382,318 at its peak before dropping to186,891 in the year of the books publication.51 On a national scale,car and truck production in the United States rose from 4.8 million unitsin 1947 to 9.1 million in 1963, while the number of production workers

in the auto industry decreased from 540,000 to 461,800.

52

In the electri-cal industry, national employment dropped from 925,000 to 836,000from 1955 to 1960. This occurred despite a 21 percent increase in pro-duction. Productivity also rose in steel, canning and preserving, leatherproduction, and meat production throughout the 1950s. All these indus-tries increased production with fewer workers.53 This increase in laborpower relative to the number of workers employed on one hand confirmsMarxs predictions.54 On another hand, as Boggs pointed out, such adrastic increase in labor power relative to the number of workers

employed meant that historical capitalism would not tend toward work-ers revolution in the postwar period.

Toward a BoggsianTheory of American Revolution

Despite what Boggs understood as the inadequacies of Marxism forthe twentieth-century U.S. context, he had respect for Marxs under-standing of capitalism, centralization, the creation of new jobs, and an

expanding workforce. Commenting on the rate at which new techno-logical introductions to production changed the workforce, Boggswrote, So fast has this industrial revolution been developing [inthe United States] that 60 percent of the jobs held by the workingpopulation today did not even exist during the First World War, while70 percent of the jobs that existed in this country in 1900 dont existtoday. Not only have work classifications been fundamentally altered,but the work force has multiplied from 20 million in 1900 to 40 millionin 1944 to 68 million today.55 Yet in contrast to the cyclical unem-

ployment that Marx saw as constituting accumulations historicaltendency, Boggs argued that automation meant that unlike mostearlier periods, the displaced men have nowhere to go. The farmersdisplaced by the mechanization of the 20s could go to the cities and



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man the assembly lines. As for the work animals like the mule, youcould just stop growing them. But automation displaces people, andyou dont just stop growing people even when they have been madeexpendable by the system.56 Boggs made this argument because, in

contrast to the period of British-led economic expansion that informedMarx, he was informed by the largest economic expansion in capital-ist history, a period in which the production workforce in the U.S.contracted. Because new manufacturers were automated, the pro-duction workforce shrank and a greater number of workers in Detroitwere employed in service industries than in production as early as1961.57

Automation therefore resulted in the creation of a new sector ofpopulation Boggs called the outsiders. He called them that because,

in addition to hundreds of thousands of workers recently displacedfrom the productive process, there existed millions of people whowere outsiders to begin with. These millions have never been andnever can be absorbed into this society at all. They can only beabsorbed into a new type of society whose first principle will haveto be that man is the master and not the servant of things.58 Recog-nizing that Americans had historically identified their worth ashuman beings with their ability to work and produce, Boggs saw thatmillions of unemployable people would appear to the rest of society as

a burden and that questions over whether to let them starve or pro-vide welfare for them would constitute a great political crisis for theUnited States. Sidestepping this question entirely, Boggs argued thata new society must be created in which it is not only believed thatevery person has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happinessbut also, because our productive machinery has been developed tothe point that it can do the tasks which have heretofore been doneby men, everyone, regardless of class, regardless of background, isentitled to the enjoyment of the fruits of that development, just as

all men are entitled to warm themselves in the heat of the sun.59

Because of this, providing welfare or letting people starve was nolonger a relevant question and defining humanity by ones ability toproduce had become asinine. Alternatively, the new standard ofmeasuring a persons value should be his or her humanity.

By linking the development of productive capacities with the needto define human worth separate from the sphere of productive labor,Boggs profoundly challenged the Marxist conceptualization of bothsocialism and communism. According to Marx and Engels, in order

to realize communism, or a society in which the free developmentof each is the condition for the free development of all, scarcity hadto first be eliminated. Because Marx believed that only capitalistsusurped the benefits of capitalism, in order for working people to



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enjoy the benefits of capitalisms increased productive capacities,a period of socialism had to be practiced where the capacity ofproductive forces were developed as rapidly as possible.60 Once pro-ductive forces were developed to a point where scarcity was elimi-

nated, class distinctions marked by differing degrees of politicalpower and consumption abilities could also be eliminated.In contrast to Marx and Engels, Boggs saw that accumulations his-

torical tendencies under U.S. hegemony involved the development ofproductive forces to the point where communist social relations couldbe practiced under capitalism. Accordingly, Boggs says that a socialrevolution in the United States means not only control of productionby the producers and production for the use of those who need it, butalso the creation of a society where divisions between races, classes,

and nationalities are eliminated and people of different backgroundscan develop cooperative relations. Acknowledging the world-historical significance of racism and colonialism to enabling capitalistaccumulation and implying that capitalism had always been racialcapitalism, Boggs saw a materialist basis for this transformationbecause, all the problems of scarcity which up to now have requiredthe exploitation of various races and immigrant groupings have nowbeen outmoded by the technological advances of production.61

According to Boggs, the revolutionary leadership needed for the

transformation of human relations could not come from organized labor,Marxists, or the peace movement. Organized labor had become a reac-tionary social force in the face of technological change and was not cap-able of making the intellectual and ideological adjustments necessary tomeet the challenges of an American Revolution because it continued tocherish the idea that man must work in order to live, in an age when it ispossible for men to simply walk out on the streets and get their milk andhoney.62 Consequently, instead of figuring out how humans wouldexist in a world where production labor would become socially unnecess-

ary, they were talking about how to create full employment. Similarly,because American Marxists still assumed that the majority of the popu-lation would still be needed to produce under socialism, Marxists wereunable to face the fact that even if workers took over the plants theywould also be faced with the problem of what to do with themselvesnow that work is becoming socially unnecessary.63

On the other hand, the peace movement, who understood that newsocial relations between human beings had to be the basis of society,could not provide the leadership to create such a society because it

refused to face the inhumanity that exists inside this country towardother racial and national groupings, and that exists in the relations ofthis country to other races and nations.64 Because the existence ofthe atomic bomb meant that all of humanity could be destroyed with



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the press of a button, the fear the bomb produced allowed the peacemovement to avoid the red-baiting that plagued organized labor.However, like organized labor and Marxists, the peace movementfailed to see that the path to revolution in the United States was more

difficult than anywhere else in the world for two interrelated reasons.The United States was a warfare state, and while the peace move-ment was willing to challenge the general premise of war, it wasunwilling to challenge workers in war-related production to stopworking. This was the case, according to Boggs, because within every

American, from top to bottom, in various degrees, has been accumu-lated all the corruption of a class society which has achieved its mag-nificent technological progress first and always by exploiting theNegro race, and then by exploiting immigrants of all races.

Revolutionary leaders in the United States therefore had to be will-ing to challenge the consumption habits of everyone and struggle torid themselves and each other of the accumulated corruption, gainedat the expense of black peoplea struggle, according to Boggs, thatwas going to be more painful and violent than any struggles overpurely economic grievances have been or are likely to be.65Anticipat-ing aspects of dependency theory by arguing that Latin Americanrevolutions would cause an existential crisis in the United Statesbecause they would force Americans to begin facing the fact that

their luxurious standard of living had been won, in part, at theexpense of the peasants and workers in Latin America, Boggs calledon black people to lead the American revolution.66

Similar to Marxs reasoning for working-class revolution, Boggssaw nothing inherently revolutionary about blacks but saw them asa revolutionary social force based on their historical relationship tothe development of capitalism. Accordingly, Boggs argued that whilethe nation celebrated the Civil War as the end of slavery, to blacks itwas a war that enabled U.S. industrialization because it allowed

Southern landowners to use black sharecroppers on cotton planta-tions and subsidize Northern industrialization with capital from cot-ton exports.67 Because black labor was central to capitalist industrialdevelopment,

The Negro question in the United States has therefore never been purely a ques-tion of race, nor is it purely a question of race today. Class, race, and nation areall involved. The American nation has become the giant of industry that it istoday on the backs of Negroes. The working class has from the very beginningbeen divided. The white workers were an aristocracy which benefitted first andalways from the exploitation of the Negroes, and in between by the exploitation

of each new wave of immigrants.68

Here, Boggs clarifies that the contradictions that existed in theDetroit uprising of 1943 were inherent to the history of capitalism



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within the United States and that arguments concerning the histori-cal tendency of capitalist accumulation had to be revised to reflectthis history.

Building on the inherent nature of this contradiction, Boggs

briefly illuminates a history of black struggle against racial, econ-omic, and national injustice, arguing that when blacks revoltedagainst anything, radicals always dismissed it as a racial strugglebecause of the profound racialization of U.S. culture. Racializationin the United States resulted in the failure of Marxists to recognizethat blacks had more economic grievances than any other section ofU.S. society; moreover, and more important, it blinded Marxists tothe fact that economic grievances alone could not create a revol-utionary struggle in a land of abundance. Instead, what made blacks

a revolutionary social force was that the strength of the Negrocause and its power to shake up the social structure of the nationcomes from the fact that in the Negro struggle all the questions ofhuman rights and relationships are posed.69 Because of this, Boggssaw black people as the social force best suited to create the typeof society able to absorb the outsiders, those most affected byautomation.

Within the United States, as Boggs understood it, the historicaltendency of capitalist accumulation was constituted by not just the

existence of labor power in inverse ratio to exchange value, but alsoby racial slavery and racial exclusion from everything.70 While capi-talists certainly reaped more of the benefits of capitalism than anyworkers, black people were the only section of the American workingclass to not be assimilated into the American way of life, consumptionand all. This exclusion, according to Boggs, gave the black struggle totranscend race, class, and nationality a distinct revolutionary charac-ter. For when Negroes struggle for a classless society, they strugglethat all men may be equal, in production, in consumption, in the com-

munity, in the courts, in the schools, in the universities, in transpor-tation, in social life, in government, and indeed in every sphere ofAmerican life.71 Because the black struggle was, at its core, aboutcreating relationships among equals across every section of U.S.society at a moment when automation and material abundance hadmade redefining human relations what Boggs called the chief taskof human being, it was up to the rest of the United States to joinand support the black led struggle for a classless society. Boggs sawit as a tragedy that not all Americans recognized this and saw an even

deeper tragedy in their opposition to such a question, let alone blackleadership in response to it. Yet, opposition to black leadership andthe question of how human beings should relate to one another bywhites is what made the black struggle revolutionary because,



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according to Boggs, it takes two sides to struggle, the revolution andthe counter-revolution.72

After demonstrating that the emergence of black revolutionaryleadership and dehumanization brought about from consumption

were aspects of accumulations historical tendency Boggs laid out abasis for revolutionary transformation. Boggs insisted that becauseof the abundance produced by automation and the consumption thatfollowed, Americans ceased to identify freedom with politics becausethey identified it with consumption. Accordingly, Boggs believed aver-age Americans refused to engage politically because doing so wouldmean jeopardizing their economic and social status. Furthermore,because of the centrality of the militaryindustrial complex to capit-alism within the United States, confronting the economic system of

the postwar period, according to Boggs, necessarily involved also con-fronting the entire police state, the FBI, the CIA, and the HouseUn-American Activities Committee. Thus, the ability of Americansto engage politically hinged upon a willingness to clash with agentsof the police state as well as with themselves, their prejudices, theirout-of-date ideas, and their own fears which keep them from grap-pling with the new realities of our age. Instead of a revolutionarystruggle over material goods, the American revolution was going tobe a struggle to take political power out of the hands of the few

and put it into the hands of the many. But in order to get this powerinto the hands of the many, it will be necessary for the many to notonly fight the powerful few but to fight and clash amongst themselvesas well.73

Conclusion

The world-historical relationship of racism to the accumulation of

capital renders the usefulness of Marxs ideas to understanding theUnited States quite complicated. While many aspects of what Marxunderstood as the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation helpus better comprehend the development of capitalism within the Uni-ted States, racial contradictions inherent to capitalism force us toreconsider much of what Marx argued. In part, because of the histori-cal relationship of race to accumulation, during the period of capital-ism marked by U.S. hegemony over the world-system, capitalismunderwent many changes that produced increased amounts of com-

modities, increased levels of consumption, and fewer workers neededto produce consumable goods.During this period, production capacities increased so greatly that,

according to Boggs, producing goods for human survival ceased to be



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the chief task of human beings. Instead, the chief task of humanbeings became redefining human relations in ways that were not pre-mised upon exploitation. Because the historical relationship of blackpeople within the United States to racial capitalism led the black

movement to raise questions and lead struggles around what consti-tuted appropriate human relationships, Boggs understood blackpeople as a revolutionary social force because they were in the van-guard of creating a world based on what he saw as the chief task ofhuman being. Because James Boggs saw radicals ignore thesechanges in the chief task of human being and the relationship of blackpeople to it by continuing to rely on a version of Marxism that empha-sized the categorical struggle of workers, at the expense of Marxshistorical method of investigation and analysis, he took it upon him-

self to develop a theory of revolution that corresponded to thesechanges in capitalist development, and therefore in revolutionarystrategy.

In The American Revolution, by employing Marxs method, Boggsreached the conclusion that the development of productive capacitieswithin the United States meant that the historical basis for historicalmaterialism had been exhausted and that questions about humansubsistence had been solved. Accordingly, the revolutionary questionsfor his time would not only center on economic grievances but had to

also consider how human beings should relate to one another. JamesBoggs thus moved beyond historical materialism into the realm ofdialectical humanism. By so doing, he did for his time what Marxdid for his.74

In the 1970s, after witnessing the results of black electoral powerand large numbers of blacks support Jimmy Carter, Boggs and theorganization of which he was a member, the National Organizationfor an American Revolution (NOAR), concluded that blacks hadbecome a special interest group fighting primarily for inclusion into

the American socialeconomicpolitical structure.75

Consequently,the historical relationship of the black movement to the historical ten-dencies of capitalist accumulation had changed. In response, Boggsonce again played a role in developing a theory of revolution to corre-spond to new conditions.76 Before passing in 1993, James Boggs con-tinued to organize different sections of Detroits population inresponse to changes in capitalism. This included seniors, communi-ties against drug dealers, communities against casino gambling,and finally young people participating in urban agriculture. Boggs

had a keen understanding that the human condition changed greatlyas capitalism evolved and believed that the strategies and ideas ofrevolutionists had to change in ways that corresponded to changesin the world around us. As the twenty-first century proceeds and



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the human condition grows more uncertain on a global scale, under-standing how ideas develop and change in relation to a changingworld is more important than ever. The American Revolution pro-vides important insight into how to develop revolutionary ideas in a

rapidly changing world.

Notes

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

2. See ibid., especially 107116; 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),1517; Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell Stanford Jr.), We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black radicalOrganizations, 19601975 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Press, 2007), 1821.

3. On these developments in the United States, see David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and MichaelReich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On the his-torical tendency toward increases in labors productivity under capitalism, see Karl Marx, Capital Vol.

1, translated by Samuel Moore and edited by Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Press,1906), 681683. Debates abound among Marxists regarding the quality of the Moore translation in com-

parison to the Ben Fowkes translation of 1976. My citations for Marx throughout this paper correspondto Moores 1906 translation because that was the English translation most widely available in the UnitedStates during the time Boggss understanding of Marx took shape; on the historical tendency towardexpansion of the working class under capitalism, see Marx, Capital, 689703.

4. Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, Segmented Workers, 128135.

5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx and Engels Selec-ted Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 98137.

6. Charles K. Hyde, Detroit the Dynamic: The Industrial History of Detroit from Cigars to Cars,Michigan Historical Review 27, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 5773.

7. In 1909, 272 car-producing firms existed in the United States. By 1941, there were nine. StevenKlepper, Disagreements, Spinoffs, and the Evolution of Detroit as the Capital of the U.S. AutomobileIndustry, Management Science 53, no. 4 (April 2007): 616631.

8. Statistics concerning the number of workers employed in Detroit and Detroit area plants through-

out this essay are from the U.S. Census Bureau. Readers can access this information at http://mapser-ver.lib.virginia.edu. On the relationship of centralization to capitalist accumulations historicaltendency, see Marx, Capital, 684689.

9. 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).10. B. J. Widick, Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,

1989), 4357.11. Ibid. See also Wilber C. Rich, Coleman Young and Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power

Broker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 6190.12. Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Cen-

tury (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 128.

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

14. James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook (New York:

Monthly Review, 1963), 17. On James Boggss involvement in UAW goon squads, see James Boggs,in Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroits African American Community,

19181967, ed. Elaine Latzman Moon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 149156.15. 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).



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16. Baron, Demand for Black Labor.17. On organizing across racial lines despite white racism, see Discussion on the Labor Movement,

in Moon, Untold Tales, 127137.18. Herbert R. Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944),

186196.19. 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).20. Northrup, Organized Labor, 192197.21. Ibid., 196.22. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.23. Ibid.24. Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 162174; see also Northrup,

Organized Labor, 199203.25. 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).

26. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, 182.27. See Marx, Capital, 834837, and Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.28. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 119.29. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 1992), 700.

30. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, 87.31. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1994), 298.32. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the

Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).33. 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):92104; and Sarah Turner and John Bound, Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects ofthe 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, AmericanQuarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 369387; see also Robeson Taj Frazier, this issue.

34. Boggs, The American Revolution, 13.

35. On the relationship of the Marshall Plan to U.S. hegemony, see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Cen-tury; Thomas McCormick, Americas Half Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995);Thomas Ehrlich Reifer and Jamie Sudler, The Interstate System, in The Age of Transition: Trajectoryof the World-System, 19452025, ed. Terrence K Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Zed, 1996),1337.

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

37. Quoted in ibid., 119.38. Ibid.; Boggs, The American Revolution; Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying.39. 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 controlfor increased wages because they perceived very real benefits from doing so. As consumption of consumergoods became part of what it meant to build greater security for U.S. industries and expanded job oppor-

tunities, it is arguable that trading control of the shop floor for increased wages and therefore power toconsume constituted a Gramscian form of common sense that, as Gramsci insisted, was always a pro-duct of history and part of a historical process. As the desire to consume gradually began to constituteAmerican 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 Fromthe Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publish-ers, 1971), 514, 321326. For a world-historic exploration of the relationship of quelling wage workersresistance to the emergence of world hegemonies, see Beverly J. Silver and Eric Slater, The Social Ori-gins 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), 151216.40. Boggs, American Revolution.

41. 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), 183216.

42. Boggs, American Revolution, 39.43. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 134.

44. Ibid, 132.

254 ^ Souls July ^September 2011


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

46. Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis.47. Ibid., 128.48. Ibid.49. Ibid., 135136.

50. Boggs, The American Revolution, 28.51. U.S. Census Bureau.52. Seymour Melman, Profits Without Production (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

1983).53. 87th U.S. Congress, 1st Session, 1961.54. On the relationship of increased labor power to the relative number of workers needed to employ

its mass, see Marx, Capital, 681689.55. Boggs, American Revolution, 13. On the cyclical nature of unemployment, see Marx, Capital,

689703, esp. 691695.

56. Boggs, American Revolution, 36.57. Michigan: Decline in Detroit, Time, October 27, 1961; Don Beck, Detroit Is Changing, but not

Declining, Detroit Free Press, October 29, 1961.58. Boggs, American Revolution, 50.

59. Ibid., 47.60. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 127.61. Boggs, The American Revolution, 45.

62. Ibid., 53.63. Ibid., 41.64. Ibid., 68.65. Ibid., 45.66. Ibid., 73.

67. Ibid., 75.68. Ibid., 76.

69. Ibid., 85.70. On the relationship of labor power to exchange-value, see Marx, Capital, 672.

71. Boggs, American Revolution, 86.72. Ibid., 87.73. Ibid., 93.

74. On dialectical humanism and James Boggs, see James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolutionand 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 Nations Future (Boston: South End Press,1978); Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-FirstCentury (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), esp. 7071; Nyanza Bandele, Changing Ideasfor Changing Times: The Political Though of James Boggs, this issue.

75. Boggs, Living for Change.76. For the development of these ideas, see Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century and

Bandele, Changing Ideas for Changing Times.


Matt Birkhold, The Boggsian Challenge to Marxist Praxis

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