Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century by James Boggs

Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century Reviews

• 
  zara

  3.5 stars. This book offers a fantastic overview of the revolutions in Russia, China, Guinea, and Vietnam with the goal of imparting the lessons learned from those revolutions to apply to building a revolution in the United States. The primary argument is that we can't replicate revolutions that occurred in other times and other places, and rather: we have to study those revolutions and study our own specific context to be able to build the revolution that's needed here and now. James and Grace Lee Boggs are also careful to distinguish rebellions from revolution; a rebellion is an uprising, and a revolution is an ongoing process that might involve several rebellions but more-so involves groundwork to develop a new vision for society alongside and with the support of the masses. Through rebellion, we reject old ways, and through revolution, we build new ways. I recommend skipping chapter 10, and possibly also chapter 11. In Chapter 10, the Boggs' make some alarming statements about "welfare mothers" that seem to conflict with a lot of the teachings that I've taken away from reading Grace Lee Boggs' work. In these chapters, they also talk about divisions between the movements without much clarity on how to heal those divisions, or a strong analysis of why those divisions exist. The book was initially published in 1974, which is the same year that the Combahee River Collective was founded, and I believe the Combahee River Collective statement released in 1977 effectively addresses many of the questions that the Boggs' posed in those final chapters.
• 
  Imani ♥ ☮

  Great text. Well worth reading in the twenty first century and beyond.
• 
  George Schmitz

  Fantastic book. Still topical and relevant to today’s struggles. This should be required reading for those interested in revolutionary history.
• 
  Eavan Wong

  “……we have tried to restore for our readers a sense of time by dealing with the dialectical development of man/womankind through the evolutionary and revolutionary process. We have also tried to impart a new appreciation of the critical role which revolutions play in the evolutionary process of humanity." (168)
  
  Before reading it, I was most interested in the historiography the Boggs assumed/configured. As revolutionary leaders/cadres, how did they reckon with past failures? This question itself was dissolved once I encountered their concept of "mistake", "criticism and self-criticism", "contradiction", and "dialectical development". “Failure” was almost a non-existence in their lexicon insofar as it denotes a sense of determinism. While contradiction (either in the form of mistake or hindrance, either internal or external) is a necessary/inevitable evolutionary phenomenon emerging in every stage of change, it is human agency that ultimately matters in understanding, reflecting on, and transforming the contradiction toward progresses.
  
  There are certainly many points in the text that, in a hindsight, are misjudgments of histories (esp. re: the Chinese revolution & post-1949 trajectory). But what struck me is something else. The text itself has this seductive quality that is almost theological. The promise of evolution and new ethics, if you may, is a transcendental ontology in the future that provides unlimited refill of meanings and profundity. Me as a sympathetic reader easily vacillate between critical stance and the temptation to immerse myself a part of the project.
  
  What is most intriguing to me now is this: the Hegelian teleological totalization particular to the Boggs’ account might be able to set itself apart from 1). the CCP’s version of progress expressed in red dramas like The Awakening Age (《觉醒年代》); and 2). the melancholic/traumatic historical experience of post-revolution. Theirs is a temporality of the yet-to-come or repressed quite distinct from 1). the CCP’s mythical construction of the achieved modernity (with Chinese characteristic ofc), thereby an open-ended teleology that can only be discovered through praxis (not dogma); and 2). the lack of a “positive” that could negate the negative in today’s mass historic-temporal experiences (something that David Scott talks a lot about), thereby a counter-melancholic sensibility.
  
  But I am afraid that the theological force thereof is suspended at the experiential/ phenomenological level. That is, this action-oriented text’s performative capacity might have decreased over time. How does this dialectical approach compete with the triumphant end-of-history narratives of either cosmopolitan liberalism or modernist-nationalism, which have their deep psychological and politico-theological bases? How is it able to deal with the fundamental detachment from Hegelian historiography (both teleology and totalization) in contemporary social movements beyond moralistic and ethical Darwinist admonishment? In other words, how do people believe in the efficacy of revolution, when they are not only damaged spiritually (as the Boggs criticized) by capitalist individualism, but also disillusioned by the corruption (not just oppression) of past (often glorified) revolutions themselves?
  
  Having said that, I do think their analysis of the (futurist) American revolution is insightful, and that specific kind of teleological totality, as human evolution through revolutionary praxis, is indeed necessary for putting forward their controversial criticisms of 1). unionism and welfare politics; 2). black-nationalism and pan-Africanism (and the lack of an “American” identity as escapism, which, I believe, derives from Americans’ ontological debt on other parts of the world); 3). the old left and new left in the US; and 4). orthodox Marxism as anti-political. Many of the skeptics of these criticisms miss their central point of “evolution”, for which they clarified: “We are not talking about objecting to welfare or objecting to unions. We are talking about how one frees oneself from being so wound up with and imprisoned in the past that one can't think about the future, about a new way to live, a new way to care”(231). In this sense, they could be read more as revolutionary ethicists & philosophers & theologists than strategists.
• 
  sube

  The first 5-6 chapters talking about the Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution, Vietnamese Revolution and the Revolution in Guine and the first chapter which has a brilliant distinction of revolution and rebellion and their differences are all great and make the book worth reading. However, the other half of the book is less interesting, and is mostly rooted in discussions of the concept of humanity and its continued expansion of it, which to me shows the limit of Marxism-Humanism, with it even putting its heritage with the American Revolution! The book is worth reading for the first half, the second half isn't really that useful.
• 
  Aldric

  Dense and a bit outdated. This is for someone doing heavy thesis research who wants to get in the weeds, not for the simply curious reader.