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Souls
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Doing for Our Time What Marx Did for His: Constituting the Boggsian Challenge to Marxist Praxis
Matthew Birkhold Available online: 14 Sep 2011

To cite this article: Matthew Birkhold (2011): Doing for Our Time What Marx Did for His: Constituting the Boggsian Challenge to Marxist Praxis, Souls, 13:3, 235-255 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2011.601693

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Souls
Black Critiques of Capital: Radicalism, Resistance, and Visions of Social Justice

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Doing for Our Time What Marx Did for His


Constituting the Boggsian Challenge to Marxist Praxis

Matthew Birkhold

Illustrating why and how James Boggs and Karl Marx understood capitalism and revolution differently, this essay examines the historical development of capitalism within the United States, specifically in Detroit. Showing that many constituting aspects of what Marx understood as the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation existed within the United States, I also show that racism has been a constituting element of accumulations historical tendency in the United States. Consequently, the explanatory usefulness of Marxist praxis toward historically understanding capitalism and revolution within the United States is limited. James Boggs understood this racial limitation of Marxism and produced a theory of revolution responding to Marxisms limitations. Because James Boggs wrote The American Revolution in a period designated by U.S. hegemony over the world-system, he observed that capitalist accumulation exhibited a very different historical tendency than that observed by Marx. While the period of capitalism described by Marx demonstrated an historical tendency toward increasing levels of misery
I would like to thank Decoteau J. Irby for reading an earlier draft of this essay and providing comments that made it much better. Souls 13 (3): 235255, 2011 / Copyright # 2011 The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2011.601693

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amongst working people, increased numbers of production workers, and proletarian revolution, in what I refer to as the period of U.S. hegemony, according to Boggs, capitalism demonstrated a historical tendency toward increased consumption by working people, decreasing numbers of production workers, and black revolution.
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Keywords: Detroit, James Boggs, Marxism, race relations, racial capitalism, U.S. hegemony

Originally written as a document internal to Correspondence Publishing Committee, James Boggss The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Workers Notebook finalized a split between Boggs and C. L. R James. James denounced the document and declared that the organization needed further education in Marxism. Boggs replied, stating that the organization did not need further education in Marxism but instead a serious study of the development of American Capitalism, the most advanced capitalism in the world.1 James broke ties with all who supported Boggss position. Clearly, both men saw The American Revolution as a challenge to Marxist understandings of capitalism and social change. A handful of activists and scholars have explored aspects of Boggss challenge to Marxism, but we lack a comparative study of Boggss and Marxs thought as it relates to the development of capitalism as a historical system.2 Studying the ideas of these two men in relation to the historical evolution of capitalism is important because doing so can help us understand not only the differences between their ideas but also capitalism as a historical system and strategies to move beyond it. To begin this process, in this essay I examine the historical development of capitalism within the United States, specifically in Detroit. In so doing, I demonstrate that while many constituting aspects of what Marx understood as the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation existed within the United States, racism has also been a constituting element of accumulations historical tendency in the United States. Consequently, I argue that the explanatory usefulness of Marxist praxis toward historically understanding capitalism and revolution within the United States is limited and that James Boggs understood this racial limitation of Marxism. I go on to suggest that because the historic relationship of racism to capitalist accumulation within the United States had become a fetter on accumulation by the period of U.S. hegemony over the world-system, U.S. firms and the U.S. federal government worked together to reorganize production relations in a manner that lent a

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very different historical tendency to capitalist accumulation than the period in which Marx wrote Capital. While the period of capitalism described by Marx demonstrated an historical tendency toward increasing levels of misery among working people, increased numbers of production workers, and proletarian revolution, in what I am referring to as the period of U.S. hegemony, according to Boggs, capitalism demonstrated a historical tendency toward increased consumption by working people, decreasing numbers of production workers, and black revolution. In other words, Boggs understood the temporal and racial limitations of Marxs thought and developed a theory of revolution based on the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation in a period characterized by U.S. hegemony.

Detroit, the Historical Tendencies of Racial Capitalism, and the Limitations of Marxist Praxis
Following the U.S. Civil War, the development of capitalism within the United States paralleled Marxs description of accumulations historical tendency in several ways. Immediately after the war, production was mechanized to increase deskilling, labor power per worker, and labor force homogenization. As Marx foresaw, the working class expanded and grew more productive.3 Nationally, there were 2.7 million production workers in 1879. By 1929 the number had grown to 8.37 million. This growth in variable capital was accompanied by growth in constant capital. In 1880, single factories employed an average of 1,500 workers. By the 1920s single factories employed, on average, twenty thousand to sixty thousand workers at any given time.4 The combined growth of the industrial working class and the Great Depressions devastating economic impact on workers created conditions in the Untied States similar to what Marx and Engels saw in England, where the proliferation of machinery in production had eliminated skill differences between workers thus making them easier to replace. Combined with the impact of cyclical crises in the rate of accumulation, tenuous employment, and fluctuating wages, the unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, [made] their livelihood more precarious.5 In response to this growing instability, Marx and Engels argued, workers would form trade unions to protect wages. Increasing with the size of the working class and utilizing the communication channels needed for production, local workers unions would be able to centralize into one national struggle, and into a political party. By the 1930s, increased mechanization had resulted in a largely homogeneously skilled workforce plagued by precarious livelihoods

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made acute by the Great Depression. As Marx argued, U.S. workers formed militant local unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) that utilized strikes and work stoppages to gain recognition. These unions centralized into a national organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Because Fords assembly line best represents the drive toward mechanization, skill homogenization, increased misery, andwith the birth of the United Auto Workers (UAW) therethe labor revolt produced in relation to mechanization, deskilling, and precarity, there is no place better suited to examine Marxs description of accumulations historical tendency in relation to capitalisms twentieth-century development as a historical system than Detroit. Because a historical relationship of race to accumulation is highly visible in Detroit, Detroit is also the best place to demonstrate the limitations of Marxist praxis for understanding the United States and for understanding the alternative to Marxist praxis developed by James Boggs. Detroit entered a new era in the 1920s. In 1913 Ford completed the assembly line, and Detroits black population increased 611 percent from 1910 to 1920. Before 1915, Detroit was 98 percent white, and its economy was broad-based. Detroit workers produced shoes, tobacco products, varnish, beer, pharmaceuticals, stoves, packaged seeds, ships, and railroad cars.6 With the centralization of the auto industry after 1915, Detroit became the Motor City.7 As increased centralization of the auto industry occurred, the number of people employed in Wayne County manufacturing firms increased from about 50,000 in 1900 to more than 250,000 in 1920.8 While reliable numbers on auto industry employment before 1940 are difficult to obtain, there is little doubt that most of these jobs were related to the auto industry, if not directly in auto production. Despite the overall increase in workers, the percentage of blacks employed in auto did not rise above 4 percent until 1941 with the passage of Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in defense plants. Largely spurred by the demand for black labor during World War I, Detroit was more than 9 percent black by the start of World War II.9 The Great Depression had a radicalizing effect on Detroit workers. From 1929 to 1931, more than 200,000 Detroiters were laid off, and by 1931 city relief was the sole source of income for 210,000 people, half of whom were black. By 1932, Detroit was in debt $278 million and cut thousands of people from relief rolls. More than four thousand children stood daily in bread lines, city employees went without pay, and Detroits welfare department received more than seven thousand calls each day about evictions.10 The desperation produced by these conditionswhat Marx and Engels described as precarious

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livelihoodand the lack of empathy Henry Ford exhibited for struggling people culminated in the 1932 Ford Hunger March, a well-publicized march through Dearborn demanding jobs and food from Ford. The march ended with police firing point-blank at nonviolent marchers, killing four. Witnessing this repression further radicalized Detroit workers, both employed and unemployed. In 1933 alone there were more than a hundred strikes in Detroit auto plants, all of which were met with further repression. Paralleling strike activity, black residents engaged in struggles against evictions and police brutality, and in October black postal workers created the Federation of Negro Labor. In 1936, Midland Steel, Kelsey-Hayes, and a handful of Briggs, Fisher Body, and Chrysler plants in Detroit were all unionized after workers utilized sit-down strikes. In 1937, General Motors recognized the UAW with a six-month contract after workers at Flint Buick Plants engaged in sit-down strikes. In March, Chrysler recognized the UAW after all of its Detroit plants were closed by these strikes.11 Sit-down strikes were an effective means to gain union recognition because production in auto plants was organized along assembly lines. This gave workers great control over the production process and sitting down inside the plant, in contrast to picketing, protected workers from police and firm violence. Moving assembly lines connected all the workers on one line to each other, and therefore when one worker stopped the line, every worker necessarily joined the strike.12 Thus, while the widespread unionization of Detroit plants from 1936 to 1937 makes it appear as though average workers were profoundly militant, because stopping production and initiating a sit-down strike could be accomplished by very few workers, only a small number of militant autoworkers were needed to catalyze pro-union sentiment amongst the vast majority of apathetic workers and give birth to the UAW, the leading union in the nationally centralized CIO.13 Because of this, James Boggs, who was a member of a UAW goon squad, insisted that many more workers were organized into unions than joined voluntarily.14 Despite the effectiveness of sit-down strikes in assembly line driven plants, Ford remained an open shop until 1941 because of the way production was racially organized there. Learning from the racial violence that plagued East St. Louis and Chicago following black migration, Detroit employers found ways to avoid racial conflict and the accompanying lost labor hours.15 Instead of employing blacks and whites together, an action that was sure to incite white workers, most employers hired very few blacks, and when they did, they segregated production plants and production activities within plants by race. In the 1930s, 75 percent of blacks across the

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industry held unskilled positions compared to 25 percent of white workers, while 12 percent of blacks had white-collar jobs compared to 50 percent of whites.16 In every Detroit area plant but Fords River Rouge, black workers were concentrated in foundries, generally the most undesirable occupation in the auto industry. At River Rouge, black workers were employed in foundries, on assembly lines, machines, presses, and as tool and die makers, the industrys most skilled position. Because relatively small numbers of blacks were employed in most auto plants, organizing across racial lines was possible despite white racism.17 At Ford, however, where more than 54 percent of black workers in the auto industry worked99 percent of them at River Rougeorganizing across racial lines was much harder.18 Organizing black workers into the UAW at Ford was also difficult because Fords segregation and skilling of black workers at River Rouge tied black economic development to Fords open shop. Fords black workers were hired almost exclusively through recommendations from anti-union black pastors.19 Consequently, black workers flocked to pastors with Fords ear, followed their anti-union recommendation, and got hired into the only plant willing to promote black workers. Black churches that depended on Ford for membership agreed not to criticize it. To protect their relationships with Ford, black preachers went so far as to silence Mordecai Johnson, then president of Howard University, on a trip to Detroit because he urged black workers to join unions.20 In addition to using churches to fight unionization, Ford allegedly paid black workers $24 a day to not join pickets during a 1941 strike that ended in unionization. To receive their wage, black workers had to claim that striking white workers had threatened their lives.21 While successful unionization required some breakdown of racial barriers, among rank-and-file white workers there was little commitment to racial equality. When Detroit firms converted to war production and the city became known as the Arsenal of Democracy, Detroits population grew from 993,675 to 1,623,452 and the percentage of African Americans increased from 4.1 percent to 9.2 from 1920 to 1940. Because Detroit was made up of almost exclusively single-family homes, the population boom in Detroit spelled disaster for housing all of the citys new migrants.22 This housing shortage played out violently during the winter of 1942, then carried over into racialized labor strife and a full-scale riot in 1943. Between 1941 and 1944, only 1,895 units of public housing and 200 units of private housing were constructed in Detroit. Therefore, when a new public housing project, the Sojourner Truth homes, opened, demand among blacks and whites was high. When the Detroit Housing Commission (DHC)

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announced in 1941 that the project would be white, blacks protested. In response, the DHC made the project black. When black residents moved in, whites started a riot in which 220 people were arrested and 40 injured. Despite the fact that whites initiated the riot, 106 out of the 109 people held for trial were black.23 Paralleling the Sojourner Truth riot, unionized white workers walked off jobs to protest black upgrades. Between 1941 and 1942, hate strikes were rampant in Detroit auto plants. From January to June 1943 there were twelve, the most serious of which occurred at Packard from May to June. After white workers shut down the plant in response to black upgrades, the local demanded that black workers be demoted. In response, black workers walked out and completely shut the foundry down for three days. Conflict emerged between the international and local when the international supported black workers. Based on rank-and-file white workers opposition to black upgrades, local leaders ignored the international. This series of hate strikes culminated when 25,000 white workers walked out of the Packard plant, closing it until federal action was taken to bring them back.24 Racial violence emerged citywide when, later that month, blacks and whites began fighting on Belle Isle. After three days of rioting and looting, twenty-five blacks were killed, seventeen by police and eight by white mobs. Blacks killed eight whites; 675 people suffered serious injuries, and 1,893 were arrested.25 The events that culminated in the 1943 riot must be understood as a proletarian uprising in which two distinct proletarian populations struggled against the conditions created in relation to racial capitalisms historical tendency. Because nearly 500,000 people migrated to the Arsenal of Democracy during the initial war years, public services and housing resources, already strained by the Depression, were made more valuable and scarce. Adding to previously existing racial tension was the reality that increases in Detroits black population meant that blacks had to move into historically white spaces, thereby further straining resources whites had historically considered theirs. Therefore, as Domenic Capeci and Martha Wilkerson explain, in 1943, longtime Detroiters responded to well-known racial conflicts exacerbated by three years of war migration, by organizing hate strikes, housing riots, attacking blacks, and finally rioting, looting, and killing black migrants.26 Because blacks defended themselves in the name of race, wages, and housing, the 1943 riot should be understood as an uprising in which two different proletarian populations battled each other and the tendency of capitalism to immiserate workers. Thus, the 1943 Detroit uprising demonstrates that in the United States, contrary

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to what Marx believed, the emergence of unions and a centralized organization did not mean that workers would cease competing against each other and turn toward struggling against the bourgeoisie. Instead, groups of workers of different races who belonged to the same union struggled against each other. This makes the struggle of Detroit workers against the bourgeoisie more complicated than what Marx envisioned.
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Racial Capitalism, Proletarian Revolt, U.S. Hegemony, and the Racial and Temporal Limitations of Marxist Praxis
Marx understood capitalism as a system in which the number of people able to enjoy the advantages of capitalism was always decreasing. Therefore, as the number of people thrust into the ranks of the exploited grew, so did the number of people who experienced increasing amounts of misery. Because growing numbers of increasingly miserable people was an inherent aspect of capitalist organized production, Marx and Engels believed the revolt of the proletariat was a natural consequence of capitalism. The relationship of all these processes to each other constitutes what Marx described as the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation.27 Marx saw nothing inherently revolutionary about industrial workers. Instead, due to their materialsocialpolitical relationship to the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation, Marx saw this sector of society as historically revolutionary. As explained in The Communist Manifesto, trade unions were a critical aspect of this development. Despite the development of successfully organized unions in the United States, black and white workers did not unite and fight against a bourgeoisie whose existence they saw as no longer compatible with society in a long-term way.28 Instead, working-class blacks revolted against working-class whites because whites kept blacks out of jobs, in addition to revolting against not just a lack of services and housing, which Marx saw as consequences of accumulations historical tendency, but also against discrimination in services and housing, which, in contrast to Marx, Boggs understood as constitutive aspects of accumulations historical tendency. Whites, on the other hand, also revolting against the usurpation of capitalist benefits by the bourgeoisie, were also revolting against the way their exclusive claim to jobs, services, and housing had been threatened by a massive influx of black workers, what Du Bois called their public and psychological wage.29 Because this rebellion caused more than $2 million in property damage and cost war industries over a million hours in labor, in order to continue appropriating surplus value, capitalists had to

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reorganize production.30 With the achievement of U.S. hegemony over the world-system after World War II, the reorganization of production and consumption of produced commodities became matters of world-historical significance. According to Giovanni Arrighi, the conditions that create world hegemonies exist in periods when surplus capital [is] thrown back into commodity trade and production on a sufficiently massive scale to create the conditions of . . . cooperation and division of labor within and among the separate governmental and business organizations of the capitalist world-economy.31 Such global cooperation is contingent upon the global material expansion of capital, resulting in consistently high profit levels for capitalists on a global scale. In order for U.S. firms to lead this expansion, peace on domestic shop floors had to be secured, and U.S. residents had to consume at unprecedented levels. The achievement of both meant that in the postwar period capitalist accumulation exhibited tendencies different from what Marx observed in the nineteenth century. James Boggs developed a theory of revolution based on these specifically postwar tendencies and what he understood as the relationship of race to capitalist accumulation. To solve the wartime housing shortage, immediately following the war between 3.5 and 5 million new homes were built in the United States. Because of racist lending guidelines developed by the Home Owners Loan Corporation and adopted by the Federal Housing Administration, the residents of these new suburban homes were almost all white.32 The GI Bill secured college educations for whites after the war as well, by which white suburban residents secured well paying jobs and filled their new homes with new furniture, appliances, and accessories. To get back and forth from suburbs to jobs in cities, they also bought huge numbers of cars and drove them on newly built expressways, often built in the heart of black communities.33 Accordingly, white Americans became the domestic bedrock of a global economic expansion fueled by the federal governments promise to promote maximum consumption so that levels of maximum employment and production could be realized. With increased technical and managerial employment, a given member of the new postwar middle class was the son or daughter of yesterdays worker, and due to the rapid rate at which massive amounts of people experienced upward class mobility during this period, the question of who is in what class becomes an ever-wider and more complicated question.34 The Marshall Plan was designed to achieve similar results in Europe.35 Household construction stimulated demand for consumer durables. For example, the number of U.S. households owning mechanical refrigerators increased from 44 to 80 percent from 1940 to 1950.36

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When production was reconverted for civilian goods, magazines such as Life and Brides told readers that when they bought, the dozens of things you never bought or even thought of before . . . you are helping to build greater security for the industries of this country. . . . What you buy and how you buy it is very vital in your new life [as newlyweds]and to our whole American way of living.37 So great was the increase in the number of automobiles produced and consumed during this period that by 1963 one in every six Americans was directly or indirectly employed by the auto industry.38 The centrality of the U.S. auto industry to the postwar economic expansion meant that managing its militant Detroit area workforce became more important than ever. Because work stoppages decrease firms profits, maintaining U.S. hegemony required that firms quell work stoppages by achieving hegemony over the CIO and the UAW in particular.39 This process began when the UAW agreed to a no-strike pledge at the beginning of World War II. To secure ongoing support for this pledge, the War Labor Board (WLB), a coalition between capitalists and the federal government, offered the UAW automatic dues deduction. To prevent electoral retaliation from the rank-and-file for the leaderships role in eliminating their ability to bargain with the union, it was written into the agreement that elected union leaders had to remain in office throughout the life of the contract.40 By 1945, the UAW began to negotiate yearly wage increases corresponding to increased productivity in exchange for shop-floor control. In 1948 it agreed to give management sole control over pricing policy, the organization of production, investment decisions, plant locations, and the right to introduce new technology to production as it desired.41 In 1950 the UAW agreed to a five-year contract with General Motors, preventing rank-and-file workers from developing any tactical hope for improved working conditions outside of wildcat strikes for at least five years. When it became clear that wildcat strikes would not stop, firms responded with automation and plant relocation. According to Boggs, automation constituted a new stage of capitalist production that was capable of eliminating the social need for production workers.42 Boggs could have easily built his argument on data from Ford, which eliminated 4,185 jobs through automation in Detroit from 1951 to 1953.43 In 1950, all Ford and Mercury engines were assembled by workers at River Rouge. Accordingly, a strike there paralyzed the whole company. To gain more control over production, Ford built an automated engine plant in Cleveland and shifted engine production there in 1954. Workers with seniority were transferred to Cleveland or other plants, resulting in employment at the Rouge falling from 85,000 in 1945 to 30,000 in 1960. The automation of

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Cleveland meant that 41 workers produced 154 engines blocks per hour compared to the 117 workers it took to produce the same number before automation.44 Decentralization was just as important to the elimination of work stoppages in Detroit as automation. While Ford led the way in automation, GM led the way in decentralization. Beginning just a year after the recognition of the UAW, GM secured an engine plant in Buffalo to reduce its reliance on Detroit and Flint.45 In the postwar period, this process continued with GM spending $3.4 billion on new plants and facilities between 1946 and 1956 allowing them to greatly limit workers workplace bargaining power in old plants by spreading production out to multiple plants.46 Following GMs lead, from the end of the war until 1957, Ford spent $2.5 billion on nationwide expansion and reducing workers workplace bargaining power in its plants throughout the country. During the 1950s GM and Ford not only successfully limited the workplace bargaining power of workers in single plants but succeeded in effectively limiting the workplace bargaining power of the entire state of Michigan. Due to contracts that gave the UAW automatic dues check-off and wage increases, if rank-and-file workers became too militant, GM and Ford could leave town. Thus, while in 1950, 56 percent of all automobile employment in the United States was in Michigan, by 1960, that figure had fallen to 40 percent.47 As Marx predicted, automation and decentralization further centralized auto production because Packard and Studebaker, the smaller manufacturers, could not keep up with larger ones and folded. Consequently there emerged a big threeFord, GM, and Chrysler. Of the big three automakers, Chrysler has always been the least successful. Compared to the amounts of money spent by Ford and GM in decentralization projects, Chrysler spent only $700 million.48 Consequently, while other plants in dispersed geographic locations could make up the difference in schedule and produce closer to the market place, Chrysler jobs stayed in Detroit. To keep up with Ford and GM, as Thomas J. Sugrue writes, Chrysler sped up production dramatically in the 1950s, laid off thousands of workers, and relentlessly used overtime to increase output without dramatically increasing labor costs.49 Because all of these changes were predicated on the UAWs willingness to relinquish power in the plants, Boggs pronounced the death of the CIO. Constituting the historical basis of his challenge to Marxist praxis, which assumed that unions would create political parties, Boggs declared that the CIO fell because
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. The fact, the key to the present

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situation, is that from the beginning the union did not take absolute control away from the capitalists. There was no revolution, no destruction of the state power. The union itself has therefore become incorporated into all the contradictions of the capitalist system.50

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As Boggs relates, because the CIO was incorporated into capitalisms contradictions, it had no power to respond to the impact of automation on workers. Consequently, in the twenty-six years James Boggs lived in Detroit before publishing The American Revolution, the number of production workers employed in Detroit-area manufacturing plants increased from just under 300,000 to 382,318 at its peak before dropping to 186,891 in the year of the books publication.51 On a national scale, car and truck production in the United States rose from 4.8 million units in 1947 to 9.1 million in 1963, while the number of production workers in the auto industry decreased from 540,000 to 461,800.52 In the electrical industry, national employment dropped from 925,000 to 836,000 from 1955 to 1960. This occurred despite a 21 percent increase in production. Productivity also rose in steel, canning and preserving, leather production, and meat production throughout the 1950s. All these industries increased production with fewer workers.53 This increase in labor power relative to the number of workers employed on one hand confirms Marxs predictions.54 On another hand, as Boggs pointed out, such a drastic increase in labor power relative to the number of workers employed meant that historical capitalism would not tend toward workers revolution in the postwar period.

Toward a BoggsianTheory of American Revolution


Despite what Boggs understood as the inadequacies of Marxism for the twentieth-century U.S. context, he had respect for Marxs understanding of capitalism, centralization, the creation of new jobs, and an expanding workforce. Commenting on the rate at which new technological introductions to production changed the workforce, Boggs wrote, So fast has this industrial revolution been developing [in the United States] that 60 percent of the jobs held by the working population today did not even exist during the First World War, while 70 percent of the jobs that existed in this country in 1900 dont exist today. Not only have work classifications been fundamentally altered, but the work force has multiplied from 20 million in 1900 to 40 million in 1944 to 68 million today.55 Yet in contrast to the cyclical unemployment that Marx saw as constituting accumulations historical tendency, Boggs argued that automation meant that unlike most earlier periods, the displaced men have nowhere to go. The farmers displaced by the mechanization of the 20s could go to the cities and

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man the assembly lines. As for the work animals like the mule, you could just stop growing them. But automation displaces people, and you dont just stop growing people even when they have been made expendable by the system.56 Boggs made this argument because, in contrast to the period of British-led economic expansion that informed Marx, he was informed by the largest economic expansion in capitalist history, a period in which the production workforce in the U.S. contracted. Because new manufacturers were automated, the production workforce shrank and a greater number of workers in Detroit were employed in service industries than in production as early as 1961.57 Automation therefore resulted in the creation of a new sector of population Boggs called the outsiders. He called them that because, in addition to hundreds of thousands of workers recently displaced from the productive process, there existed millions of people who were outsiders to begin with. These millions have never been and never can be absorbed into this society at all. They can only be absorbed into a new type of society whose first principle will have to be that man is the master and not the servant of things.58 Recognizing that Americans had historically identified their worth as human beings with their ability to work and produce, Boggs saw that millions of unemployable people would appear to the rest of society as a burden and that questions over whether to let them starve or provide welfare for them would constitute a great political crisis for the United States. Sidestepping this question entirely, Boggs argued that a new society must be created in which it is not only believed that every person has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also, because our productive machinery has been developed to the point that it can do the tasks which have heretofore been done by men, everyone, regardless of class, regardless of background, is entitled to the enjoyment of the fruits of that development, just as all men are entitled to warm themselves in the heat of the sun.59 Because of this, providing welfare or letting people starve was no longer a relevant question and defining humanity by ones ability to produce had become asinine. Alternatively, the new standard of measuring a persons value should be his or her humanity. By linking the development of productive capacities with the need to define human worth separate from the sphere of productive labor, Boggs profoundly challenged the Marxist conceptualization of both socialism and communism. According to Marx and Engels, in order to realize communism, or a society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, scarcity had to first be eliminated. Because Marx believed that only capitalists usurped the benefits of capitalism, in order for working people to

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enjoy the benefits of capitalisms increased productive capacities, a period of socialism had to be practiced where the capacity of productive forces were developed as rapidly as possible.60 Once productive forces were developed to a point where scarcity was eliminated, class distinctions marked by differing degrees of political power and consumption abilities could also be eliminated. In contrast to Marx and Engels, Boggs saw that accumulations historical tendencies under U.S. hegemony involved the development of productive forces to the point where communist social relations could be practiced under capitalism. Accordingly, Boggs says that a social revolution in the United States means not only control of production by the producers and production for the use of those who need it, but also the creation of a society where divisions between races, classes, and nationalities are eliminated and people of different backgrounds can develop cooperative relations. Acknowledging the worldhistorical significance of racism and colonialism to enabling capitalist accumulation and implying that capitalism had always been racial capitalism, Boggs saw a materialist basis for this transformation because, all the problems of scarcity which up to now have required the exploitation of various races and immigrant groupings have now been outmoded by the technological advances of production.61 According to Boggs, the revolutionary leadership needed for the transformation of human relations could not come from organized labor, Marxists, or the peace movement. Organized labor had become a reactionary social force in the face of technological change and was not capable of making the intellectual and ideological adjustments necessary to meet the challenges of an American Revolution because it continued to cherish the idea that man must work in order to live, in an age when it is possible for men to simply walk out on the streets and get their milk and honey.62 Consequently, instead of figuring out how humans would exist in a world where production labor would become socially unnecessary, they were talking about how to create full employment. Similarly, because American Marxists still assumed that the majority of the population would still be needed to produce under socialism, Marxists were unable to face the fact that even if workers took over the plants they would also be faced with the problem of what to do with themselves now that work is becoming socially unnecessary.63 On the other hand, the peace movement, who understood that new social relations between human beings had to be the basis of society, could not provide the leadership to create such a society because it refused to face the inhumanity that exists inside this country toward other racial and national groupings, and that exists in the relations of this country to other races and nations.64 Because the existence of the atomic bomb meant that all of humanity could be destroyed with

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the press of a button, the fear the bomb produced allowed the peace movement to avoid the red-baiting that plagued organized labor. However, like organized labor and Marxists, the peace movement failed to see that the path to revolution in the United States was more difficult than anywhere else in the world for two interrelated reasons. The United States was a warfare state, and while the peace movement was willing to challenge the general premise of war, it was unwilling to challenge workers in war-related production to stop working. This was the case, according to Boggs, because within every American, from top to bottom, in various degrees, has been accumulated all the corruption of a class society which has achieved its magnificent technological progress first and always by exploiting the Negro race, and then by exploiting immigrants of all races. Revolutionary leaders in the United States therefore had to be willing to challenge the consumption habits of everyone and struggle to rid themselves and each other of the accumulated corruption, gained at the expense of black peoplea struggle, according to Boggs, that was going to be more painful and violent than any struggles over purely economic grievances have been or are likely to be.65 Anticipating aspects of dependency theory by arguing that Latin American revolutions would cause an existential crisis in the United States because they would force Americans to begin facing the fact that their luxurious standard of living had been won, in part, at the expense of the peasants and workers in Latin America, Boggs called on black people to lead the American revolution.66 Similar to Marxs reasoning for working-class revolution, Boggs saw nothing inherently revolutionary about blacks but saw them as a revolutionary social force based on their historical relationship to the development of capitalism. Accordingly, Boggs argued that while the nation celebrated the Civil War as the end of slavery, to blacks it was a war that enabled U.S. industrialization because it allowed Southern landowners to use black sharecroppers on cotton plantations and subsidize Northern industrialization with capital from cotton exports.67 Because black labor was central to capitalist industrial development,
The Negro question in the United States has therefore never been purely a question of race, nor is it purely a question of race today. Class, race, and nation are all involved. The American nation has become the giant of industry that it is today on the backs of Negroes. The working class has from the very beginning been divided. The white workers were an aristocracy which benefitted first and always from the exploitation of the Negroes, and in between by the exploitation of each new wave of immigrants.68

Here, Boggs clarifies that the contradictions that existed in the Detroit uprising of 1943 were inherent to the history of capitalism

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within the United States and that arguments concerning the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation had to be revised to reflect this history. Building on the inherent nature of this contradiction, Boggs briefly illuminates a history of black struggle against racial, economic, and national injustice, arguing that when blacks revolted against anything, radicals always dismissed it as a racial struggle because of the profound racialization of U.S. culture. Racialization in the United States resulted in the failure of Marxists to recognize that blacks had more economic grievances than any other section of U.S. society; moreover, and more important, it blinded Marxists to the fact that economic grievances alone could not create a revolutionary struggle in a land of abundance. Instead, what made blacks a revolutionary social force was that the strength of the Negro cause and its power to shake up the social structure of the nation comes from the fact that in the Negro struggle all the questions of human rights and relationships are posed.69 Because of this, Boggs saw black people as the social force best suited to create the type of society able to absorb the outsiders, those most affected by automation. Within the United States, as Boggs understood it, the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation was constituted by not just the existence of labor power in inverse ratio to exchange value, but also by racial slavery and racial exclusion from everything.70 While capitalists certainly reaped more of the benefits of capitalism than any workers, black people were the only section of the American working class to not be assimilated into the American way of life, consumption and all. This exclusion, according to Boggs, gave the black struggle to transcend race, class, and nationality a distinct revolutionary character. For when Negroes struggle for a classless society, they struggle that all men may be equal, in production, in consumption, in the community, in the courts, in the schools, in the universities, in transportation, in social life, in government, and indeed in every sphere of American life.71 Because the black struggle was, at its core, about creating relationships among equals across every section of U.S. society at a moment when automation and material abundance had made redefining human relations what Boggs called the chief task of human being, it was up to the rest of the United States to join and support the black led struggle for a classless society. Boggs saw it as a tragedy that not all Americans recognized this and saw an even deeper tragedy in their opposition to such a question, let alone black leadership in response to it. Yet, opposition to black leadership and the question of how human beings should relate to one another by whites is what made the black struggle revolutionary because,

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according to Boggs, it takes two sides to struggle, the revolution and the counter-revolution.72 After demonstrating that the emergence of black revolutionary leadership and dehumanization brought about from consumption were aspects of accumulations historical tendency Boggs laid out a basis for revolutionary transformation. Boggs insisted that because of the abundance produced by automation and the consumption that followed, Americans ceased to identify freedom with politics because they identified it with consumption. Accordingly, Boggs believed average Americans refused to engage politically because doing so would mean jeopardizing their economic and social status. Furthermore, because of the centrality of the militaryindustrial complex to capitalism within the United States, confronting the economic system of the postwar period, according to Boggs, necessarily involved also confronting the entire police state, the FBI, the CIA, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Thus, the ability of Americans to engage politically hinged upon a willingness to clash with agents of the police state as well as with themselves, their prejudices, their out-of-date ideas, and their own fears which keep them from grappling with the new realities of our age. Instead of a revolutionary struggle over material goods, the American revolution was going to be a struggle to take political power out of the hands of the few and put it into the hands of the many. But in order to get this power into the hands of the many, it will be necessary for the many to not only fight the powerful few but to fight and clash amongst themselves as well.73

Conclusion
The world-historical relationship of racism to the accumulation of capital renders the usefulness of Marxs ideas to understanding the United States quite complicated. While many aspects of what Marx understood as the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation help us better comprehend the development of capitalism within the United States, racial contradictions inherent to capitalism force us to reconsider much of what Marx argued. In part, because of the historical relationship of race to accumulation, during the period of capitalism marked by U.S. hegemony over the world-system, capitalism underwent many changes that produced increased amounts of commodities, increased levels of consumption, and fewer workers needed to produce consumable goods. During this period, production capacities increased so greatly that, according to Boggs, producing goods for human survival ceased to be

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the chief task of human beings. Instead, the chief task of human beings became redefining human relations in ways that were not premised upon exploitation. Because the historical relationship of black people within the United States to racial capitalism led the black movement to raise questions and lead struggles around what constituted appropriate human relationships, Boggs understood black people as a revolutionary social force because they were in the vanguard of creating a world based on what he saw as the chief task of human being. Because James Boggs saw radicals ignore these changes in the chief task of human being and the relationship of black people to it by continuing to rely on a version of Marxism that emphasized the categorical struggle of workers, at the expense of Marxs historical method of investigation and analysis, he took it upon himself to develop a theory of revolution that corresponded to these changes in capitalist development, and therefore in revolutionary strategy. In The American Revolution, by employing Marxs method, Boggs reached the conclusion that the development of productive capacities within the United States meant that the historical basis for historical materialism had been exhausted and that questions about human subsistence had been solved. Accordingly, the revolutionary questions for his time would not only center on economic grievances but had to also consider how human beings should relate to one another. James Boggs thus moved beyond historical materialism into the realm of dialectical humanism. By so doing, he did for his time what Marx did for his.74 In the 1970s, after witnessing the results of black electoral power and large numbers of blacks support Jimmy Carter, Boggs and the organization of which he was a member, the National Organization for an American Revolution (NOAR), concluded that blacks had become a special interest group fighting primarily for inclusion into the American socialeconomicpolitical structure.75 Consequently, the historical relationship of the black movement to the historical tendencies of capitalist accumulation had changed. In response, Boggs once again played a role in developing a theory of revolution to correspond to new conditions.76 Before passing in 1993, James Boggs continued to organize different sections of Detroits population in response to changes in capitalism. This included seniors, communities against drug dealers, communities against casino gambling, and finally young people participating in urban agriculture. Boggs had a keen understanding that the human condition changed greatly as capitalism evolved and believed that the strategies and ideas of revolutionists had to change in ways that corresponded to changes in the world around us. As the twenty-first century proceeds and

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the human condition grows more uncertain on a global scale, understanding how ideas develop and change in relation to a changing world is more important than ever. The American Revolution provides important insight into how to develop revolutionary ideas in a rapidly changing world.

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Notes
1. Quoted in Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 109. 2. See ibid., especially 107116; Martin Glaberman, An Introductory Statement, in C.L.R. James, The Destruction of a Workers Paper (1962), http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1962/ destruction-paper/introduction.htm; Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Boston: South End Press, 1998), 36; Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 1517; Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell Stanford Jr.), We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black radical Organizations, 19601975 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Press, 2007), 1821. 3. On these developments in the United States, see David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On the historical tendency toward increases in labors productivity under capitalism, see Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and edited by Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Press, 1906), 681683. Debates abound among Marxists regarding the quality of the Moore translation in comparison to the Ben Fowkes translation of 1976. My citations for Marx throughout this paper correspond to Moores 1906 translation because that was the English translation most widely available in the United States during the time Boggss understanding of Marx took shape; on the historical tendency toward expansion of the working class under capitalism, see Marx, Capital, 689703. 4. Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, Segmented Workers, 128135. 5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx and Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 98137. 6. Charles K. Hyde, Detroit the Dynamic: The Industrial History of Detroit from Cigars to Cars, Michigan Historical Review 27, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 5773. 7. In 1909, 272 car-producing firms existed in the United States. By 1941, there were nine. Steven Klepper, Disagreements, Spinoffs, and the Evolution of Detroit as the Capital of the U.S. Automobile Industry, Management Science 53, no. 4 (April 2007): 616631. 8. Statistics concerning the number of workers employed in Detroit and Detroit area plants throughout this essay are from the U.S. Census Bureau. Readers can access this information at http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu. On the relationship of centralization to capitalist accumulations historical tendency, see Marx, Capital, 684689. 9. Herbert R. Northrup, Negro Employment in Basic Industry: A Study of Racial Policies in Six Industries, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); see also Harold M. Baron, The Demand for Black Labor: Historical Notes on the Political Economy of Racism (Somerville, Mass.: Radical America Press, 1971), and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 10. B. J. Widick, Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 4357. 11. Ibid. See also Wilber C. Rich, Coleman Young and Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power Broker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 6190. 12. Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 128. 13. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Times Books, 1977), 255. 14. James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook (New York: Monthly Review, 1963), 17. On James Boggss involvement in UAW goon squads, see James Boggs, in Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroits African American Community, 19181967, ed. Elaine Latzman Moon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 149156. 15. On racial violence following World War I, see Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011).

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16. Baron, Demand for Black Labor. 17. On organizing across racial lines despite white racism, see Discussion on the Labor Movement, in Moon, Untold Tales, 127137. 18. Herbert R. Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 186196. 19. Ibid. See also Baron, Demand for Black Labor; August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 20. Northrup, Organized Labor, 192197. 21. Ibid., 196. 22. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis. 23. Ibid. 24. Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 162174; see also Northrup, Organized Labor, 199203. 25. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Dominic J. Capeci and Martha Wilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991). 26. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, 182. 27. See Marx, Capital, 834837, and Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. 28. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 119. 29. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 1992), 700. 30. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, 87. 31. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1994), 298. 32. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 33. On the denial of college education to black Americans, see Edward Humes, How the GI Bill Shunted Blacks Into Vocational Training, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 53 (Autumn 2006): 92104; and Sarah Turner and John Bound, Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the GI Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 9044 (July 2002). On expressway construction see, George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and the White Problem in American Studies, American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 369387; see also Robeson Taj Frazier, this issue. 34. Boggs, The American Revolution, 13. 35. On the relationship of the Marshall Plan to U.S. hegemony, see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century; Thomas McCormick, Americas Half Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Thomas Ehrlich Reifer and Jamie Sudler, The Interstate System, in The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 19452025, ed. Terrence K Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Zed, 1996), 1337. 36. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003). 37. Quoted in ibid., 119. 38. Ibid.; Boggs, The American Revolution; Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. 39. I use the term hegemony here explicitly to stress the consensual nature of the process that is described in the section. In the late 1940s and 1950s the UAW regularly exchanged shop-floor control for increased wages because they perceived very real benefits from doing so. As consumption of consumer goods became part of what it meant to build greater security for U.S. industries and expanded job opportunities, it is arguable that trading control of the shop floor for increased wages and therefore power to consume constituted a Gramscian form of common sense that, as Gramsci insisted, was always a product of history and part of a historical process. As the desire to consume gradually began to constitute American common sense, there would have been little need for firms to coerce the UAW into ceding shop-floor control if the UAW believed that doing so made sense. Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 514, 321326. For a world-historic exploration of the relationship of quelling wage workers resistance to the emergence of world hegemonies, see Beverly J. Silver and Eric Slater, The Social Origins of World Hegemonies, in Chaos and Governance in the Modern World-System, ed. Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 151216. 40. Boggs, American Revolution. 41. Ibid.; Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Labor Movements and Capital Migration: The U.S. and Western Europe in World-Historical Perspective, in Labor in the Capitalist World-Economy, ed. Charles Bergquist (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publishers, 1984), 183216. 42. Boggs, American Revolution, 39. 43. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 134. 44. Ibid, 132.

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45. Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 46. Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis. 47. Ibid., 128. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 135136. 50. Boggs, The American Revolution, 28. 51. U.S. Census Bureau. 52. Seymour Melman, Profits Without Production (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). 53. 87th U.S. Congress, 1st Session, 1961. 54. On the relationship of increased labor power to the relative number of workers needed to employ its mass, see Marx, Capital, 681689. 55. Boggs, American Revolution, 13. On the cyclical nature of unemployment, see Marx, Capital, 689703, esp. 691695. 56. Boggs, American Revolution, 36. 57. Michigan: Decline in Detroit, Time, October 27, 1961; Don Beck, Detroit Is Changing, but not Declining, Detroit Free Press, October 29, 1961. 58. Boggs, American Revolution, 50. 59. Ibid., 47. 60. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 127. 61. Boggs, The American Revolution, 45. 62. Ibid., 53. 63. Ibid., 41. 64. Ibid., 68. 65. Ibid., 45. 66. Ibid., 73. 67. Ibid., 75. 68. Ibid., 76. 69. Ibid., 85. 70. On the relationship of labor power to exchange-value, see Marx, Capital, 672. 71. Boggs, American Revolution, 86. 72. Ibid., 87. 73. Ibid., 93. 74. On dialectical humanism and James Boggs, see James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review, 1974), esp. the introduction by Grace Lee Boggs in the second edition published in 2008; James and Grace Lee Boggs, Freddy Paine, and Lyman Paine, Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nations Future (Boston: South End Press, 1978); Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), esp. 7071; Nyanza Bandele, Changing Ideas for Changing Times: The Political Though of James Boggs, this issue. 75. Boggs, Living for Change. 76. For the development of these ideas, see Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century and Bandele, Changing Ideas for Changing Times.

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