The Next American Revolution

90 year old Grace Lee Boggs was one of the three leaders of the Johnson-Forrest tendency along with Raya Duneyevskaya and C.L.R. James.


The Next American Revolution

by Grace Lee Boggs
Left Forum Closing Plenary, Cooper Union, New York, March 16, 2008

I have decided to talk about the next American Revolution because I believe it is not only the key to global survival but also the most important step we can take in this period to build a new, more human and more socially and ecologically responsible nation that all of us, in every walk of life, whatever our race, ethnicity, gender, faith or national origin, will be proud to call our own.

I also feel that it would be a shame if we left this historic gathering in this Great Hall, at this pivotal time in our country?s history?when the power structure is obviously unable to resolve the twin crises of global wars and global warming, when millions are losing their jobs and homes, when Obama?s call for change is energizing so many young people and independents, and when white workers in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania are reacting like victims?without discussing the next American revolution.

Since it is hard to struggle for something which you haven?t struggled to define and name, my aim this evening, quite frankly, is to initiate impassioned discussions about the next American revolution everywhere, in groups, small and large.

I begin with some history. Forty years ago my late husband, Jimmy Boggs and I started Conversations in Maine with our old friends and comrades, Freddy and Lyman Paine, to explore how a revolution in our time in our country would differ from the many revolutions that took place around the world in the early and mid-20th century.

We four had been members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a tiny group inside the Workers Party and the Socialist Workers Party, led by C.L.R.James and Raya Dunayevskaya. Lyman, an architect, and Freddy, a worker and organizer, had been in the radical movement since the 1930s. Jimmy, an African American born and raised in the deep agricultural South, had worked on the line at Chrysler for 28 years and was a labor and community activist and writer.

I was an Asian American intellectual who had been inspired by the 1941 March on Washington movement to become a movement activist, and after spending ten years in New York studying Marx and Lenin with CLR and Raya, had moved to Detroit in 1953, married Jimmy Boggs and became involved in the struggles organically developing in the Detroit community.

Our mantra in the Johnson-Forest Tendency had been the famous paragraph in Capital where Marx celebrates ?the revolt of the working class always increasing in numbers and united, organized and disciplined by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production.?

In the early 60s when the working class was decreasing rather than increasing under the impact of what we then called ?automation,? we separated from CLR when he opposed our decision to rethink Marxism. Our separation freed us to recognize unequivocally that we were coming to the end of the relatively short industrial epoch on which Marx?s epic analysis had been based.

We could see clearly that the United States was in the process of transitioning to a new mode of production, based on new informational technologies, and that this transitioning was not only epoch-ending but epoch-opening, with cultural and political ramifications as far-reaching as those involved in the transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture or from Agriculture to Industry.

As movement activists and theoreticians in the tumultuous year of 1968, we were also acutely conscious that in the wake of the civil rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Rachel Carson?s Silent Spring in 1962, and the exploding anti-Vietnam war and women?s movements, new and more profound questions of our relationships with one another, with nature, and with other countries were being raised with a centrality unthinkable in earlier revolutions.

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