The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook by James Boggs

The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook Reviews

• 
  Matthew

  really good
• 
  Devin

  An incredible read from Marxist/Third-Worldist auto worker and revolutionist James Boggs; at a time when the Black Power movement had not yet been launched and the Black liberation struggle was largely in the Civil Rights Movement, James Boggs lays out a foreshadowing of what was to come [and what is to come] regarding the union, the rise of automation, and Black Liberation. Then effortlessly, he connects all of these together, based around a thesis that Black people are the most oppressed in a rapidly automating world, and that it is Black people who will lead a world revolution.
  
  James Boggs was not afraid to take on the anti-Blackness of even white Marxists -- he correctly confirms that many white Marxists have throughout the last century, recognized the Black question as only a question of race, and of race, class, and nationality. He says that even white Marxists who claim Black-white worker solidarity have not fully considered the economic struggles that are unique to Black people, especially in the rise of automation, and how white workers are still part of the autocratic, white supremacist system and do benefit from that. And finally, that many white Marxists fear a Black-led Revolution for fear that it will make white workers turn against white Marxists, and that these fears arise from the belief of the social revolution should be white-led. The goal to render whitness as obsolete is a necessary component to Boggs' words, and he executes these theories incredibly, and I love it. It's a shame I don't hear about him as much as Fanon, Claudia Jones, CLR James, etc.
  
  For the first chapter or so, a decent knowledge of the AFL-CIO, UAW, and 1930s and 1940s union history would be helpful.
  
  ALSO, despite my high praise of Boggs, his Third Worldist approach disregards the USSR under Stalin as being "bureaucratic" and murderous; neither are true. But he was formerly a Trotskyist so i'm not too surprised ; though he thankfully denounced that later.
• 
  Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea

  An accessible and interesting account of labor and radical politics from the point of view of a socialist in the early 1960's. I read about Boggs while reading Grace Lee Boggs' autobiography "Living for Change." One thing that kept coming up was how similar Boggs' time was to our current situation with the economy, the wars, and the possibility for revolution.
• 
  Michael Skora

  Is certainly dated in some areas, but reckons with some seriously conundrums that those striving for revolution in the United States must take seriously such as the ubiquity of cheap consumer goods, how exploited labor is less and less socialized and the reactionary role that unions and liberal rights organizations can take in directing struggle.
  
  Radicals must always remain cognizant that “all organizations that spring up in a capitalist society and do not take absolute power, but rather fight only on one tangential or essential aspect of that society are eventually incorporated into capitalist society.” (25)
• 
  Annie

  prescient!!!
• 
  T

  I would highly recommend the seventh chapter of this book. It stands pretty well independently from the rest of the book, except for his argument’s dependence on the futility of organized labor, which is established elsewhere. In this chapter, Boggs points to the historic and contemporary Black struggle. This struggle is against an exclusionary way of life and for human rights, so it is beneficial to everyone, although it is necessarily led by Black people. This is a fact that is being continuously borne out (compare the moderate gains of BLM to empty-handed Occupy).
  
  Otherwise, this book is at its best when describing lumpenproletarianization and the consequent end of organized labor’s usefulness: automation has decreased the total amount of socially necessary labor, leaving former-workers without jobs, and unions only represent the employed, but even there they fail because they have been co-opted by capital. We have since seen a proliferation of nonessential labor in the US, which has kept unemployment low, but this can be Boggsian-ly treated as busy-work.
  
  Boggs also writes persuasively about the need to decouple the right to live from productivity, which I do not oppose, but am hesitant to accept the primary or total importance of. Boggs sees the efficiency of the factories and the abundance they produce. From this, he deduces that workers in the US need not work as much as they do and, moreover, US society could even become workless! However, this ignores the hidden, super-exploitative labor happening abroad that makes US luxury possible. I am not familiar enough with the history of globalized production to actually object to Boggs’ claims about what he saw in the 60’s, but one cannot argue in the 21st Century, “the US is wealthy enough to provide these things to citizens” without affirming the inhumane treatment of non-citizens. (On this I would refer readers to Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century by John Smith, which was also published by Monthly Review!) Boggs’ aforementioned argument for the primacy of Black liberation is not dependent on this, though, and it is a quick enough read that I would recommend it regardless.
• 
  Malik Newton

  Fascinating book. A fascinating man. James Bogg, a Black radical with a deep understanding of the structural position of Blacks in America. He understands, in a word, Black people are generally disregarded and always excluded. In this book he begins to chart the task of the present American revolution, a revolution led by those always excluded, a revolution that can not and refuses to accept the conditions set by a hegemonic, American way of life.
  
  I'm thinking this work as it relates to the ideas of Sylvia Winter and Frantz Fanon, to know what it means to think the world and what it means to be (create) human, anew. This book is forward looking. Boggs is constantly pursuing the elaboration of a theory to build politically and organizationally conscious modes of living (as opposed to just modes of production, in the Marxian sense).
  
  I've appreciated his approach to Black Power which refuses reactionary and ahistorical politics in favor of historically rooted, scientific analysis of time, place and conditions. Indeed, James Boggs calls himself a revolutionist (and not a revolutionary).
  
  All of his analysis I can't see myself fully agreeing with, primarily because I, too, understand our time and place and conditions have changed. As such, to speak of a society that is nearing full unemployment, as he does, seems hyperbolic. As metaphor, however, it captures an essential truth about the tiered and layered presence of Black suffering and death.
  
  I want to re-read this book, for sure. As I said, it and he is fascinating. If for no other reason than his confident approach to theorizing, I want to continue to think about how his politics informs and is informed by a Black radical tradition.
• 
  Shanel Adams

  Powerful. Powerful. Powerful read. The late James Boggs critique of the American education system is both ingenious and fascinating. All of his observations and ideologies is exactly what the world is missing. What I found most interesting though is that he came home and wrote these essays after long days working at a Chrysler plant. How many people today working would come home to be an activist, teacher and writer for the sake of other people? All of his writing is still relevant today. Him and his late wife Grace were civil rights pioneers and geniuses humbly amongst us. Proud to have been exposed to their legacy and work.
• 
  Doreen

  Can I say read twice? The first time I rather carelessly rushed through this slim book so I renewed my library copy and read again. Published in 1963, the book's main currents still remain relevant even more so in a post-Occupy US where economic demands highlighted the errors of capitalism most specifically its free market economy that has congealed power in the few rather than the many. Current politics on both sides of the aisle are fed by corporate interests and if not for Bernie Sanders even bringing up the US is becoming an oligarchy, we all would still be blindsided by incrementalism as a political philosophy that brings little or perhaps just surface change.
  
  How I digress.
  
  Boggs provides a brilliant dissection of contemporary American political life covering topics from the death of unions and the rise of automation (since this book was published we live in a world where we impatiently wait for more services and labor to be automated, from auto-driving cars to digital waiters in large cities such as NY, self-banking as duh, self-promotion of our commodities, art, and labor a given, and in my own profession, bot grading), the US as a warfare and police state, the need for a universal basic income, the exploitation and dehumanization of African Americans under Jim Crow, American imperialism, and a critique of American Marxism--all of this done well, done thoroughly in 80 pages.
  
  His understanding of American empire, especially its use of exceptionalism to cloak the horrors that lurk within "The white workers were an aristocracy which benefited first and always from the exploitation of Negroes," and beyond,its borders,"it was obvious that the economic and political life of Latin America revolved around the Yankee sun," is applicable today when we consider the rise of state violence and the militarization of police being used against primarily African Americans as well as Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and currently Venezuela, for instance, as it was when he was writing on the eve of the US involvement in Vietnam as well as ramping up its military to quell any social and economic unrest in the Caribbean as well as South and Central America.
  
  Even as Boggs paints a grim portrait of contemporary politics with no mincing of caustic words directed at the American left who excluded African Americans and the question of race from their agenda, the unions, esp. AFL-CIO that were bought out by management, and the peace movement whose interests he argues were not interested in confronting racial inequality in the US and abroad as well as the war economy that fuels American imperialism, he does stress there is the possibility for change. That change he claims lies within each of us, "to assume responsibility"... and "to use as much creative imagination in politics as up to now they have used in production." His claim we are mired in our love of things, of commodities and that in buying those things, we also buy into the American illusion of freedom seems very much still a part of our consumer ethos that 55 years later wants things ever cheaper thanks to globalization and its attendant offshore, cheap labor.
• 
  Matthew

  In the 'The American Revolution', Boggs presents a new critical way of thinking, based upon his experiences as a black autoworker in Detroit and a member of the 'Correspondence Publishing Committee', that theorises about the decline of industrial USA and the effect that will have on the revolutionary subjects of today. Parts of this book are breathtaking, given it was written in 1963, in how he predicts some of the social and technical changes that would occur later in the 20th Century, and his theory of the class of 'outsiders', made up of black Americans, women and the un/underemployed, as being the new revolutionary subject, is an interesting one. However, whilst I see the revolutionary potential and importance of the struggles of these groups as constituting autonomous parts of the global class struggle, I believe Boggs too quickly rejects the working-class as a relevant social force in society, and comes to some conclusions around automation that have proven incorrect in the years since he wrote this text. However, overall this is a fantastic book that still has a lot to give us today.
• 
  Lilly Irani

  Prescient about how automation transforms the relationship between workers, the company, and critically the union. Foreshadows what politics might look like if it recognizes that most of the world's people are well beyond what organized capital needs to accumulate profit. Also recognizes early on the way the tech workers who manage the tech orient to their work differently than other workers in the plant.
• 
  Nico

  What the author lacks in theory they make up for in their rich knowledge of history, particularly of the American labour movement and it's relationship with African diaspora which constitutes it's most advanced revolutionary strata.
• 
  Tiana Reid

  "However, Marx is dead [...]"
• 
  Jeff McLeod

  presents the problems of automation and the Black struggle in a very coherent way as challenges for American Marxists to respond to
• 
  Kyle

  Complicated. I appreciate Boggs’ tone and style throughout, and really enjoyed reading a Detroit-based update on Marxist theory in the heart of an industrial consumer society. It feels like it both “gets something,” and misses something - and I suspect that’s a dialectic within my own self consequent my nagging sense that the nature of the Boggs’ separation from James, Dunayevskaya, and the communists has resonated with me historically as a little opportunistic.
  
  It’s not that it was, it’s just that as a Detroiter I feel a bit of resentment for the lack of solidarity expressed by local radicals with the communist formulations of the postwar left. This work can just feel a little optimistic, in its focalization of revolution and possibility within a consumer society, about the possible course of things and the opportunities available to change. And I had this experience while reading of knowing it wasn’t a conformist text, knowing and seeing it’s deeply revolutionary and original witnesses, but still feeling stung, maybe as a reader in an era era and locale in which international solidarity feels like the greatest possible gift and where the “radical” politics of hyper localization has played out in such isolating effects, incapable of managing broader systemic resistance to the hegemonic capacities of empire - anyway, feeling stung that this iteration of the shift in historical possibility can feel itself like a form of American exceptionalism, at least to readers in an era in which we have suffered so much from a lack of organized international solidarity, and in which localized projects of resistance can feel so self-serving. Honestly this all sounds so negative - but I loved the book. It IS one of my favorites, in other ways - the clarity of its perception of the present moment, the practicality of its implicit assessment of the shortcomings of contemporary Marxist formulas and theories - and the courage and audacity to break from those forms. It’s just, these are the flavors that sit with me over time - and I guess, characterize what feels most relevant about it from where I’m at today.
  
  So, this is more a review of me reading the book than maybe the book itself. But it reminds me, as a Detroiter, of an experience you have a lot watching the Lions play. They never win, obviously, it’s brutal - I mean, BRUTAL. But there so frequently seems to be that one hero on the team - the person of remarkable, nearly unprecedented capacity and composure - Barry Sanders, or Jason Hanson, who is just a beauty and a marvel to watch, even though the team can’t support them to any wins. In a way, that just makes their marvelousness the more heroic, a greater testament to their fortitude, discipline, generosity, and humility. In a way, that’s how I feel reading this book - so much deep admiration for the author, for his honesty, his clarity of perception - the power of his writing and maneuvers. And an overall depressing awareness that, writ large, this is not a winning team, or really even a team capable of playing the game - insofar as the game is political, and the political designates that sphere of actionable possibility, dialectically conceived. Or it could just be that the cover of my edition is a lighter blue which reminds me of Honolulu blue and I’m just free associating. Whatever. We still haven’t gotten to a post capitalist utopia, so I guess no one is right yet.