Living
For Change
Grace Lee Boggs, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998
"If the future is to be lived the past must be understood." With
this paraphrase of Kierkegaard, Grace Lee Boggs ends her effort to
provide an account of both her own past and that of an American left.
For those seeking to make sense of the contradictory and confusing
world of left- wing politics in the US over the course of this
century, it is often useful to have a guide. Grace Lee Boggs'
recently published autobiography Living for Change is the story of a
first generation Chinese-American woman's ongoing journey in politics
and community in 20th century America. In highly readable prose Grace
Lee Boggs, records her fascinating account of growing up Chinese in
America, her involvement in the dissident Trotskyist Workers Party
and the "Minority" within it, her break with Trotskyism and later
break with CLR. James, as well as her work with her husband James
Boggs in community organizing in Detroit from the 1950's to the
present day.
Grace Lee Boggs was born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island. Her
family name was Chin, but the family often used Chin Lee or Lee as a
surname. In 1924 the family moved to New York city where Grace's
father owned what was to become one of the biggest and most popular
Chinese restaurants in the city, Chin Lee's on Broadway. Grace
recounts once being stopped by a Police Officer for an illegal turn
and being released after the cop realized she was Chin Lee's
daughter!
Grace won a scholarship to Barnard in 1931 and began college at
age 16, studying philosophy. Although initially attracted to Kant,
Hegel proved to be of greater use as part of her "own struggle for
meaning as part of the continuing struggle of the individual to
become part of the universal struggle for freedom." In 1940 Grace Lee
received her doctorate, writing on George Mead. After moving to
Chicago a few months later, she got a job at the University of
Chicago library, where a chance encounter led her to a group called
the South Side Tenants Organization. This group was affiliated with
the Workers Party.
The Workers Party appeared in 1940, after a split in the American
Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers Party, over the nature
of the Soviet Union. Soon after she joined the WP Grace met CLR James
and became part of the opposition grouping within the party known
internally as "the Minority." The Minority was to become better known
as the Johnson-Forest Tendency after the pen names of its most
prominent spokespersons C L R James (JR Johnson) and Raya
Dunayevskaya (Freddie Forest). That the tendency became best known as
Johnson-Forest is perhaps unfair, given that James and Dunayevskaya
were but part of a pool of talented comrades.
The 1940's were an extremely fruitful and productive decade for
Johnson-Forest. Bursting with energy and innovative theoretical
writings, they produced literature on Hegel and the dialectic, the
economics of state capitalism and critiques of Trotskyism, both the
orthodox version and the heretical' version as represented by
the Workers Party. In the course of their investigations Johnson-
Forest were to break with the idea of the vanguard party focusing
instead on the creative abilities of working people. In addition
Johnson-Forest were the first to publish an English translation of
Marx's writings of 1843-44 in 1947. Moreover, it was Grace Lee who
translated three of the essays from the original German into English
which served as the basis for publication. Also in this period Boggs'
wrote the second essay, on philosophy, for the J FT publication The
American Worker under the pen name Ria Stone. A name which had
apparently been given to her by Martin Abern of the Workers
Party.
In 1956 the Johnson-Forest, by now known as Correspondence, after
their newspaper, and an independent organization, split. Raya
Dunayevskaya. formed her own organization News & Letters and took
over half the membership of the organization with her. Boggs'
comments that Dunayevskaya was the most powerful woman she ever met,
and suggests one of reasons for the split was that James treated her
like a subordinate, never realizing Dunayevskaya saw herself as a
co-leader. Dunayevskaya was also enough of an "old Bolshevik" never
to forget where everyone stood on the split. Boggs recalls
Duneyevskaya looking right past her, whenever their paths crossed in
the years after the split.
In 1962 Correspondence split again. This time it was Grace Boggs
together with her husband James, as well as Lyman and Freddy Paine
who launched their own organization taking the paper Correspondence
with them. In the document that was to provide the theoretical
justification for the breech with the rest of the group and later
published as The American Revolution, James Boggs argued that Marx
had envisaged socialism under the rule of the workers creating a
surplus for everyone; however, in the US capitalism had already
developed the means of production to this extent. As a result the
working class no longer necessarily had that primary role. In her
book Boggs' argued that it was James who broke relations with them.
James' account, which centres on the refusal of Boggs to print
certain articles in Correspondence, as well as new line James Boggs
was developing, can be found in the Facing Reality pamphlet Marxism
& The Intellectuals.
From that point, while socialist themes and values were always a
part of the Boggs' world view, other ideas such as spiritual rebirth,
justice and community also came to figure prominently in their
writings. As a result sympathetic references to Mao and Castro, and
even Louis Farrakhan can be found in the book, because in their own
way they too strove redevelop the communities of which they were a
part. Living for Change is a virtual who's who of American
radicalism, and despite the political weakness of the latter part of
the book, it is a marvellous account of a life in struggle. As a
concluding thought I might add that early in 1998 I helped build a
tour with striking newspaper workers from Detroit in Western Canada.
At that point I had never been to Detroit, but I tried to think of a
name the speaker might know. "Grace Boggs?" I offered. The response,
needless to say, one of recognition.
N. F.
Originally published in Red & Black Notes, #7,
Winter 1999
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