James Boggs, the “Outsiders,” and the Challenge of Postindustrial Society

Abstract

Abstract The immediate subject of James Boggs's The American Revolution is the far-reaching transformation of American industry through automation and cybernetic command. He offers a political reading of these new forces of production that greatly diminished the power of industrial workers on the shop floor and in U.S. politics more generally during the post–World War II period. In light of the new social and economic terrain of postindustrial society, Boggs urges a rethinking of leftist revolution. In this essay, I excavate certain aspects of Boggs's formative critique of automation and its implications for working-class life and politics and consider how well his analysis of the social contradictions produced under postindustrialism anticipates the emergence of the New Right. In contrast to Cold War liberals and latter-day purveyors of underclass rhetoric who emphasize alleged cultural dysfunction to explain inequality, Boggs saw the new urban poor, those who face chronic unemployment under automation, as potential agents of social change and developed a novel concept of cultural revolution whereby the "classless society" could be achieved through a revolution in values rather than the pursuit of statist transition. Cooperatively organized production might eliminate material need, deliver more leisure time, and enable a freer, more socially just order than that available under liberal capitalism. For Boggs, this was the profound, cultural challenge facing Americans under postindustrialism. Keywords: automationculture of povertylaborpostindustrial societyrevolutionsocialism Notes Marx writes: "The value of a commodity is certainly determined by the quantity of labour contained in it, but this quantity is itself socially determined. If the amount of labour time socially necessary for the product of any commodity alters—and a given weight of cotton represents more labour after a bad harvest than after a good one—this reacts back on all the old commodities of the same type, because they are only individuals of the same species, and their value at any given time is measured by the labour socially necessary to produce them, i.e., by the labour necessary under the social conditions existing at the time." Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 318. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Stephen Ward, "Introduction: Making of a Black Revolutionist," in Pages from a Black Worker's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, ed. Stephen Ward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 1–34. This pamphlet consist of two parts—the first section is drawn from Singer's (a.k.a., Paul Romano) diary of his experiences on the shop floor, while the second part comprises a speculative essay by Grace Lee Boggs (Ria Stone). In a section that explores the significance of new productive technologies, she writes, "Today, the knowledge, science, etc. of the means of production have reached a new stage. With the development of electric power and electronics, completely automatic production is possible and necessary. The units of production can now incorporate complete flexibility, power, precision, freedom of movement and ease of control. But what is required from the workers on such production units is equal flexibility, precision, freedom of movement and ease of control. The workers must themselves become complete masters of the productive power developed in the instruments of production … . There may be vulgar materialists whose conception of completely automatic production provides only for robot operators. They betray the typical empiricism and naïve realism of those intellectuals who have only contemplated the world and are therefore unable to understand that the world develops through the practical activity of man. Let them ponder the description of the actual design of 'machines without men' developed by bourgeois engineers." See, Paul