Thinking and Acting Dialectically

THINKING AND ACTING DIALECTICALLY.

This little book came into my life. I read every word of it, and it opened my mind. When I read it, I said, ’Yes, of course. Amen. Even I could have thought of that. Immensities of thought reduced to images so simple that coming away from the book I was indeed born again. I was recharged, my batteries were full; and I was able to go back to the struggle carrying this book as my banner. Ruby and I bought up copies and mailed them to all the civil rights leaders: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Whitney Young. We thought all of them should have the opportunity to be born again.

-Ossie Davis[i]

The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook is even more timely today, when people in all walks of life are discussing “Socialism,” than when it was first published by Monthly Review nearly fifty years ago.

That is because Jimmy Boggs had a visionary concept of the continuing evolution of humanity that was deeply rooted in his life experiences. A black American, he was born and raised in Marion Junction, Alabama, a tiny agricultural community with two stores on the main street and more pigs than people. After graduating in the 1930s from a high school in Selma, he migrated to Detroit and, while doing WPA and odd jobs, joined the picket lines of striking auto workers. Working on the line at Chrysler during the World War II and post-World War II years, he was not only a rank and file activist, but an avid learner. From the end of the war in 1945 to the early 1960s, he watched day in and day out how what was then called “automation” was systematically replacing human beings with robots, not only de-industrializing Detroit but rendering the unions helpless. He could have bemoaned this loss of jobs and decline of the labor movement as the end of history. Instead he viewed it as a challenge. It was our opportunity, he decided, to liberate ourselves from the dehumanizing Labor or Jobs that we do only for a paycheck and evolve to a higher stage of humanity, based on doing useful Work and assuming responsibility as citizens for our communities, our country and the world.

That was Jimmy, refusing to think like a victim, always making a way out of no way. As a little boy, responsible for writing the family letters for his mostly illiterate community, he decided that he was a writer. In the process of writing and reading these letters, he became conscious of the importance of language. So, even though he spoke what he called “Alabamese” (scholars call it “Black English”) and had never studied Chinese philosophy, he shared Confucius’ view that “If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.”

An activist in his community, Jimmy was always helping fellow workers, friends and neighbors, fixing cars, filing income tax returns, etc. At the same time, like many of his peers, he attended Communist and Trotskyite Party meetings. But even as he was being inspired by the radical ideas of Karl Marx, he also recognized that Marx had developed these ideas a hundred years ago in the springtime of the industrial revolution, when the working class was constantly growing in numbers, and he felt challenged to do for our time, when the working class is constantly shrinking, what Marx had done for his.

As a result, he began to think dialectically. That is: to recognize that, in everything, there is the duality of both the positive and the negative, and that things are constantly changing and creating new contradictions so that ideas that were once liberating can become fetters on our imagination. It is by refusing to remain locked in these old ideas that we discover the power within ourselves to create new, more transformative ideas and begin creating the world anew.

Like every true revolutionary, Jimmy was always a “work in progress.” Thus, after having been active in the labor movement in the 30s and 40s, he recognized its limitations in the 50s. After having been active in the early 60s in the Detroit Black Power movement, which culminated in the election of Detroit’s first black mayor, by the end of the 60s he recognized the pitfalls of Black Nationalism and urged blacks to “Think Dialectically, not Biologically.”[ii] One month before he died of lung cancer on July 22, 1993, he wrote the following letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press:

“It is no longer useful to look at the racial climate of this country only in terms of black and white. People from more than 100 ethnic groups live here. By 2040 both African Americans and European Americans will be among the many minorities who make up the United States. Blacks in Detroit are a majority. They need to stop thinking like a minority or like victims. Both should be thinking of how to integrate with Detroiters of Latino and Arab descent.”

Thus, it was not arrogance, but a self-confidence achieved through awareness of how he had, himself, developed over the years that empowered Jimmy to say to a class of University of Michigan students in 1991, “Nobody knows more about running this country than me.” When the students responded with nervous laughter, he continued ”You better think that way. You need to stop thinking of yourself as a minority because thinking like a minority you’re thinking like an underling. Everyone is capable of going beyond where you are, and I hope that everyone in this room thinks that way.” [iii]

In my first year of graduate school I had been introduced to the dialectical way of thinking that the German philosopher Hegel created out of his experience of the new and more challenging contradictions that had emerged during the French revolution. But it was not until I married Jimmy and became his partner in struggle for forty years that I felt I really understood Hegel’s statement that Freedom is not achieved “like a shot out of a pistol but through the labor, patience and suffering of the negative.”[iv]

Jimmy’s life and works are an inspiring example of why it is so important for revolutionaries to think dialectically.

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This little book, like everything written by Jimmy, came out of a struggle in real life.

In the early 1950s, the little grouping led by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency inside the Socialist Workers Party, recognized that the labor movement was no longer a revolutionary social force and that the social forces who would create the next stage of revolutionary ferment were rank and file workers, blacks, women and youth. To give these new social forces a voice, we decided to publish a new kind of radical newspaper, written and edited by members of these four groups,

To make clear that our newspaper, unlike other radical publications, would be based on dialogue with the grassroots, we named it Correspondence. To put us in continuing contact with rank and file workers and blacks, we moved our headquarters from New York to Detroit. In Detroit, Jimmy Boggs, attracted by the opportunities Correspondence, offered to write and carry on a dialogue with his fellow workers and people in the community, joined the organization and, before long, became chairperson of the board. That is how we met.

In 1953, after C.L.R. James was forced by the immigration authorities to return to England, I moved to Detroit to work on Correspondence. Soon after that, Jimmy and I were married.

Nearly ten years later, in 1962, Jimmy sat down to write the annual State of the Organization, State of the Nation document for convention discussion.

The document began by describing the death of the union because of its inability to grapple with the question of automation. It went on to say that the rapid development of the productive forces by capitalism, and the diminishing number of workers resulting from high technology, demanded that we go beyond Marx because Marx's analyses and projections had been made in a period of scarcity rather than one of abundance. So the time had come for revolutionaries to begin struggling for a new concept of what it means to be a human being in order to transform the many millions no longer needed to fill jobs from “Outsiders” into “Insiders,” i.e., into contributing and valued members of society.

While Jimmy was writing the document, we had a discussion that I often refer to as an example of the process by which Jimmy sharpened his ideas. One morning, out of the blue, he asked me to explain Marx's concept of Socialism. I replied that in the 19th century, when individual capitalists were competing with one another instead of rapidly developing the productive forces, Marx conceived Socialism as the seizure of state power by the workers in order to rapidly develop the productive forces and create the abundance needed for Communism, or the classless society, in which everyone contributed according to his talents and received according to his needs.

Hearing this, Jimmy immediately had his answer to the question that had been worrying him ever since he became interested in radical politics. What he had never been able to understand, he said, is why Marxists in the plant go blank when a worker asks them, "What is Socialism and why should I fight for it?" His answer is spelled out in chapter 3 of The American Revolution, titled "The Classless Society.” In it he writes:

“Marx in the 19th century said that there would have to be a transitional society between the class society of capitalism and the classless society of communism. This transitional society, which he called socialism, would still be a class society but instead of the capitalists being the ruling class, the workers would rule. It was this rule by the workers which, for Marx, would make the society socialist. As the ruling class, the workers would then develop the productive forces to the stage where there could be all-around development of each individual and the principle of ‘to each according to his needs’ could be realized. At this point there could be the classless society or communism.

“In the United States, however, the forces of production have already been developed to the point where there could be the classless society which Marx said could come only under communism. Yet ever since the Russian Revolution all kinds of socialists have differentiated themselves from the Communists in terms of political policy and political organization but have never tackled this question of Marxist theory that socialism is just a transitional society on the way to communism and that only under communism can there be a classless society.”

This passage reveals Jimmy's unique and, I believe, exemplary relationship to Marx and Marxists. He respected Marx as a revolutionary theoretician. But unlike most Marxists, he did not revere Marx's ideas as the truth for all time. Recognizing, instead, that Marx was developing his ideas at a particular time in history and that our reality is not Marx's, Jimmy was ready to assume the awesome responsibility of doing for our time what Marx did for his.

As usual, we sent the manuscript to C.L.R. James in London for his comments. CLR's immediate response was to denounce the document and to declare that what the organization needed was education in Marxism. Toward this end he proposed that Correspondence publish a series of articles by him on Marxism. Jimmy replied that what the organization needed was not a reaffirmation or education in Marxism but a serious study of the development of American capitalism, the most advanced capitalism in the world. To reach that goal he offered a resolution that "CLR's articles on Marxism and his views be discussed inside the organization along with other documents before the organization.” CLR's response was an ultimatum: "From henceforth," he declared, "I break all relations, political and personal, with all who subscribe to this resolution."

That is how the split with CLR took place. Faced with CLR’s ultimatum, only four members, Freddy and Lyman Paine, Filomena Daddario, and I, were ready to support Jimmy's resolution that CLR’s views be discussed inside the organization on a par with those of other members.

It all happened within a few weeks, but in retrospect it became clear that the tensions had been developing ever since CLR left the country. No longer in continuing contact with the members of the group, but still trying to run the organization from a distance, CLR responded to Jimmy's document, not as a serious effort to come to grips with changing reality, but as a personal challenge to his leadership and an ideological betrayal of Marxism. Under the impact of the rapid changes taking place in American industry and American society in the 1950s and 1960s after CLR left the country, the differences between the revolutionary intellectual whose ideas came mostly from books and the organic intellectual whose ideas were rooted in the ongoing struggle and the realities around him became antagonistic, culminating in a break that was probably inevitable.[v]

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After the split, Jimmy never attacked CLR personally but continued to speak and write about him respectfully for his role in “creating the new, different and challenging ideas without which no mass uprising can go beyond rebellion to revolution.” CLR's contradiction, he said, was that "his only roots were in Trinidad which was too limited an arena for his fantastic talents.”

I have often marveled at Jimmy’s “cool” as that split with CLR nearly fifty years ago was coming to a head. I now recognize that this “cool” was rooted in Jimmy’s thinking dialectically; his understanding that in the course of a self-developing movement, one inevitably divides into two. In other words, movements usually begin in periods of profound social crisis when people from many different walks of life and with very different views come together to envision and create another way because it is obvious that those in power are incapable of resolving the crisis. However, in the process of creating this other way, the differences among the people, or the different tendencies within the movement, inevitably emerge and a split must take place if the movement is to continue self-developing, If unity is given priority, the movement comes to an end.

Unfortunately, few movement activists understand the significance of this dynamic. For example, Malcolm’s split with Mr. Muhammad at the November 1963 Grassroots Negro Leadership conference (where he distinguished between “House Negroes” and “ Field Negroes”) meant that Black Nationalism, or Black Unity, had divided into two and that Malcolm was on his way towards a new revolutionary ideology that was not based upon color. Similarly, MLK’s decision to come out openly in opposition to the Vietnam war and his call for a radical revolution of values, not only against racism, but against materialism and militarism in his 1967 Time To Break the Silence speech was a historic rupture within the civil rights movement, the significance of which has yet to be recognized.

In the 1950s and 1960s, splits had to be expected because the concept of revolution itself was undergoing a sea change – from one-sided change, or only changing institutions, to two-sided transformation, or changing both ourselves and institutions. Ten years later, in the chapter on Dialectics and Revolution in Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, Jimmy would explain the significance of this sea-change for the next American revolution.[vi]

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We had not envisioned Jimmy’s document being published as a book. But one day in the spring of 1962, when I was in Los Angeles visiting Freddy and Lyman Paine, Freddy and I decided on the spur of the moment to take a copy of the manuscript to W H. (“Ping”) Ferry, who was then Vice President of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, which he had cofounded with Robert Hutchins. Earlier I had sent Ferry some copies of Correspondence and he had responded by sending me a few clippings about grassroots activities. I didn't know it at the time, but Ferry had recently written Caught on the Horn of Plenty in which he warned that "conceptions of work" and "economic theories adequate for an industrial revolution are not good enough for the conditions of the scientific revolution.” Delighted that Jimmy had come to similar conclusions based on his experiences as a worker at Chrysler, Ping got in touch with Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, the editors of Monthly Review, who decided to publish Jimmy's manuscript, first as the combined July-August 1963 Summer issue, then as a book on its own, each time with a different cover.

I am not sure who chose the title: The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook. It wasn’t Jimmy (although he had a gift for coming up with memorable titles such as, The City is the Black Man’s Land and A Job Ain’t the Answer). For me, the title recalls The Fire This Time, which the nation was experiencing in the summer and fall of 1963. In his June 1963 speech, President Kennedy had referred to the Negro [sic] struggles as "the American Revolution.”