Grace Lee Boggs R.I.P.

Interesting observations as always. I've always found the later "New American Revolutionary" Grace Lee Boggs rather liberal, curious as to the comments about class struggle.

Although I have little politically in common with Grace Lee Boggs, let me take a moment to salute her 100 years of life. There are few people who stick with the movement a lifetime, she was one.

For some of youse left commie types:

"Significantly, as late as 1953, Pannekoek was in dialogue with Cornelius Costoriadis of the French ex-trotskist tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie. The correspondence also involved the US "Johnson-Forrest Tendency" of the Fourth International, then led by CLR James (Johnson), Raya Dunayevskaya (Forrest) and Grace-Lee Boggs."

"Lenin's Philosophy and the Council Communist Non-alternative" https://www.marxists.org/refe.../archive/hegel/txt/black.htm

From her Trotskyist years: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/boggs/index.htm

Sojourner Truth Organization - 1969-1983 - Urgent Tasks - Number 12 - A Critical Reminiscence
When most American radicals think about a revolution in the United States, they visualize the oppressed masses, workers, Blacks, women, rising up to sweep away the bourgeoisie and institute a new socialist society. So preoccupied are they with the social forces — which are necessary for any revoluti…

https://www.marxists.org/.../sojournertruth/criticalrem.html

The Grace Lee Boggs of the last 30 years was basically an honest, decent, non corrupt 501(c)(3) not for profit social service agency executive - basically not that different than Geoffery Canada (except he never pretended to be a leftist)

Even the early "revolutionary" Boggs was an identity politics leftist, opposing the class struggle in the auto plants and counterposing a classless Black nationalist struggle in it's stead.She also had this technocratic idea that automation in industry would somehow end the class struggle - an idea that workers in today's computerized offices and factories would find astonishing

The last decades of her life, as she went from radical to corporate grant funded liberal, Boggs completely renounced the idea of struggle. She blamed all of the problems of the working class in general and Black workers in particular on "immorality" - a position not that different than the Republican Party

I don't know why so much of the left is mourning her - I'm sure she was a nice person, but politically she was terrible (so was her husband when he was alive - he didn't live long enough to politically degenerate to the degree that she did)

Some more accurate takes on Boggs' politics:

https://aintwhereyafrom.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/2007-critique-of-grace-lee-boggs/

In a speech titled “THINKING/ACTING DIALECTICALLY: C.L.R. JAMES, THE AMERICAN YEARS”, Boggs remarks that the working class is no longer the (or at least the only) locus for social change and revolutionary transformation[i]. Her context for such a shift is that, while she was waiting for the working class to build a renewed revolutionary movement, the Black movement sprang forth flowing with all the promise for the kind of change not found in the contemporary struggles of the working class which she characterizes as merely a “paper tiger”. While this is a visibly Maoist phrase it more substantively exemplifies a crucial collapse in her view of the working class today.

The weakness in her assessments is manifold, but particularly in her failing to locate Black folks as part of and central to the struggles of the working class.

For Boggs, the Black struggle functioned outside of the working class. The Black Power movement of the 1960s was somehow external to the general struggle of working people which she saw as white, male, and blue collar. She confounded the question of race and class by subordinating the latter to the former, instead of the other way around.

http://isreview.org/issue/89/defense-struggle-what-visionary-organizing-cannot-see

In Boggs’s vocabulary, what most activists engage in—protests, marches, demonstrations and the like—is “rebellion.” Rebellions are moments of protest that attack the legitimacy of society’s dominant institutions. Rebellions, however, “cannot lead to the reorganization of society” because people still “see themselves as victims. . .and the other side as villains.” “Revolutions,” on the other hand, project a new “notion of a more human human being” and “create societies more conducive to human development.”

So-called “visionary” (or sometimes “transformative”) organizing is therefore a “revolutionary” strategy which seeks to break people from “the bourgeois method of thought on which US capitalism is based” by developing alternative institutions and communities—such as community gardens, small businesses, and free schools—that facilitate doing “the work of re-imagining ourselves” and helping us “think beyond capitalist categories.”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/07/bogg-j02.html

One of the better known figures in official “left” circles in Detroit is Grace Lee Boggs, founder of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. Boggs, a long time Detroit resident, in collaboration with Scott Kurashige, an associate professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan, has published The Next American Revolution, Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century.
Boggs and Kurashige use Detroit as a focus to advance a right-wing agenda, justifying the impoverishment of the working class and opposing any collective struggle against capitalism.
One is struck in reading The New American Revolution by the authors’ utter indifference to the conditions facing the working class. Poverty, homelessness and unemployment are barely mentioned. The problem, assert the authors, is not the capitalist system and the conditions of mass misery that it is creating, but the American people themselves, who are denounced as “self-centered and overly materialistic.”
The authors oppose any notion that revolution should involve the improvement of the lives of working people or a redistribution of wealth. They write, “The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world.” (p. 72)
Boggs advances the retrograde view that technology itself, not its misuse under capitalism, is the cause of the problems facing society. She writes, “It has also been my good fortune to live long enough to witness the death blow dealt to the illusion that unceasing technological innovations and economic growth can guarantee happiness and security to the citizens of the planet’s only superpower.... At this point in the continuing evolution of our country and of the human race, we urgently need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and to recognize that we must each become a part of the solution because we are a part of the problem.” (p. 29)
As for the schools, Boggs writes, “We are not going to solve the crisis of public education with more money, more computers, new buildings...” (p. 144)
What Boggs proposes is that the working class accept a huge lowering of its living standards. From this standpoint, the impoverishment of the working class is not an evil to be opposed, but a welcome development that should serve as a model. To call this right wing does not do it full justice.

Kind words from POTUS ....

Statement by the President on the Passing of Grace Lee Boggs

Obituary in yesterday's Morning Star.

Warts and all, comrades. Can't ignore the warts. CLR James had them, Grace had them, Stokely had them (smartest guy I ever met), John Lewis (bravest guy I ever met) has them.

Just because the WSWS etc etc. give the usual rigid formulaic blah,blah, blah,-- that's doesn't change the appearance or the reality of the warts.

The decay of the urban centers in the US doesn't mean the class struggle is no longer possible, or extant, it just means the bourgeoisie have been winning.

Decay...

Hieronomous - that's some good high quality straw man arguing there ("trotskyite propaganda mills")

What you forgot to mention was the extensive quotes from Boggs IN HER OWN WORDS expressing her reactionary ideas - especially her contempt for the class struggle - and her actual record in Detroit as a not for profit social services agency executive - plus all the praise she got from the Michigan capitalist class upon her death.

Yes, Detroit's population has shrunk - but does that mean that the folks remaining are somehow magically not in the working class?

Also Boggs "strategies" were dead ends like urban gardening - do you see that as a way forward, brother? Seriously?

As for "how can you have the class struggle" - does the City of Detroit not have public employees? Does Detroit not have an airport with lots of workers in it? Are there not auto plants and auto parts plants in and around Detroit? (I'll give you the answer to that one - Fiat Chrysler Jefferson Av, GM Poletown, Ford Rouge, and all the parts plants) Hell, are there not casinos in your city?

There's your proletariat right there, brother

Boggs has no interest in their struggles - and that's why the bourgeoisie mourned her death

Maybe she was a friend of yours - so if you're mourning her personally you have my condolences - but POLITICALLY her politics were reactionary and I can't mourn that

Tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are

Gregory A. Butler

Tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are

I have no friends. That way, I remain a cypher.

Describing Grace Lee Boggs' reactionary politics accurately isn't "talking shit"

At her best, she was a narrow nationalist (ironically enough for my nationality - which she's not a member of). She spent the last three decades of her life as a not for profit social service agency reformist, defending the capitalist system on behalf of and funded by the Democratic Party machine in Wayne County, Michigan.

In that context, its odd that you call Boggs' critics "counterrevolutionary"

You might want to choose another phrase.

In any case, it says volumes that the only way you can criticize three separate articles, written by people who disagree with each other as much as you and I disagree, that accurately diagram Boggs' politics and her political degeneration, is to resort to ad hominem attacks on the organizations that the authors of those articles belong to.

Here's a sympathetic liberal account of Boggs and her politics - including her two decades running a charter school (for folks outside the US, the charter school movement is a corporate sponsored campaign to destroy public schools and break teachers unions in the US - part of a broader neoliberal attack on public benefits and public employee unions in this country - the fact that Boggs was a part of that movement speaks volumes about her and her politics)

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/27/417175523/grace-lee-boggs-activist-and-american-revolutionary-turns-100

I guess National Public Radio are "counterrevolutionary sectarian dogmatists" too?

The bottom line is, "revolutionaries" who get eulogized by President Obama.... probably aren't really revolutionaries