james boggs, the “outsiders,” and the challenge of postindustrial society

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James Boggs, the “Outsiders,” and theChallenge of Postindustrial SocietyCedric JohnsonPublished online: 14 Sep 2011.

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Black Critiques of Capital: Radicalism, Resistance, and Visions ofSocial Justice

James Boggs, the ‘‘Outsiders,’’ and theChallenge of Postindustrial Society

Cedric Johnson

Obsolescence is the very hallmark of progress.—Henry Ford II

The dilemma before the workers and the American people is: How can we haveautomation and still earn our livings?

—James Boggs, The American Revolution

The immediate subject of James Boggs’s The American Rev-olution is the far-reaching transformation of American indus-try through automation and cybernetic command. He offers apolitical reading of these new forces of production that greatlydiminished the power of industrial workers on the shop floorand in U.S. politics more generally during the post–WorldWar II period. In light of the new social and economic terrainof postindustrial society, Boggs urges a rethinking of leftistrevolution. In this essay, I excavate certain aspects of Boggs’sformative critique of automation and its implications forworking-class life and politics and consider how well hisanalysis of the social contradictions produced under post-industrialism anticipates the emergence of the New Right.In contrast to Cold War liberals and latter-day purveyors ofunderclass rhetoric who emphasize alleged cultural dysfunc-tion to explain inequality, Boggs saw the new urban poor,those who face chronic unemployment under automation, as

Souls

Souls 13 (3): 303–326, 2011 / Copyright # 2011 The Trustees of Columbia Universityin the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2011.601705

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potential agents of social change and developed a novelconcept of cultural revolution whereby the ‘‘classless society’’could be achieved through a revolution in values rather thanthe pursuit of statist transition. Cooperatively organizedproduction might eliminate material need, deliver more lei-sure time, and enable a freer, more socially just order thanthat available under liberal capitalism. For Boggs, this wasthe profound, cultural challenge facing Americans underpostindustrialism.

Keywords: automation, culture of poverty, labor, postindustrial society, revol-ution, socialism

Teeming with powerful imagery and insight, James Boggs’s TheAmerican Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (1963)offered a pioneering political analysis of a nascent postindustrialism.This book is addressed to two revolutions. The first is the real,far-reaching transformation of American industry through auto-mation and cybernetic command, while the second is the imagined,potential revolution that might abolish capitalism altogether.Advanced by an alliance of capitalists, industrial engineers, scientistsand Cold War politicians, this technological revolution eliminatedjobs and, along with McCarthyism and the growth of bureaucraticunionism, greatly diminished the power of the industrial workingclass in the factory and U.S. politics more generally. In light of thenew social and economic terrain of postindustrial society, Boggs urgesus to rethink leftist revolution. He contends, in short, that the forcesof production have advanced to a degree where traditional Marxistnotions of state seizure and socialist transition are no longer neededto create a ‘‘classless society’’ in the United States. Boggs develops acritique of automation that highlights its pernicious social conse-quences and also the incredible social possibilities created throughthe technological reduction of what Karl Marx termed, ‘‘sociallynecessary labor time.’’1 As both Marx and Boggs understood, thereduction of socially required labor through managerial planningand machinery under capitalism ensured greater profits for the bour-geoisie (through reaping relative surplus value), but if marshaledunder cooperative arrangements, such technological advances har-bored emancipatory possibilities for living labor. In light of the newhistorical conditions produced by automation, Boggs calls for a socialrevolution that transforms core values, expectations, and practicesconcerning work, life, and economy in the United States.

304 ^ Souls July^September 2011

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Boggs’s critical perspective grew out of his unique journey—hisblack southern rural upbringing, his experiences as a migrant indus-trial worker and union man, and his participation in sectarian leftistpolitics. He was literate, politically engaged, and yet grounded withinthe actual experiences and the daily concerns of the urban, blackworking class. His marriage in 1953 to Bryn Mawr College philosophyPh.D. and activist Grace Lee Boggs had a profound impact on histhinking and politics.2 She would coauthor their subsequent books,but the arguments contained in The American Revolution also quiteobviously bear the imprint of her thinking and their countless infor-mal debates with friends and fellow travelers. In fact, elements of aprototypical critique of automation can be glimpsed in pages of TheAmerican Worker, a 1947 pamphlet that Grace Lee Boggs publishedwith Phil Singer, a young General Motors worker, under the pseudo-nyms Ria Stone and Paul Romano, as members of the Johnson-ForestTendency.3 Their involvement with the Johnson-Forest Tendency,with its critiques of Soviet state capitalism and keen appreciation ofnew social forces, also distinguished their intellectual and politicaltrajectory from other black leftists of the period, particularly thoseartists and activists such as Harold Cruse, Richard Wright, and JackO’Dell, among many others who had spent time within the ranks ofthe post–World War II American Communist Party (CPUSA).The fact that Boggs’s ideas evolved outside the parameters of eitherscientific socialism or Soviet doctrine may partially account forboth his relative obscurity when compared to some of his CPUSAcontemporaries and the originality of his insights.The American Revolution constituted one of the earliest critical left-

ist contributions to an American postindustrial literature. Although ithas been largely neglected in subsequent debates over postindustrialsociety and American leftist politics, the critical analysis of auto-mation, mass obsolescence, and the dogma of work found in TheAmerican Revolution anticipates Sidney Willhelm’s Who Needs theNegro? (1970), Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital(1976), Andre Gorz’s Adieux au Proletariat (1980), Stanley Aronowitzand William DeFazio’s The Jobless Future (1994), and JeremyRifkin’s The End of Work (1995), among others. Boggs’s The AmericanRevolution is essentially an autocritique of industrial unionism fromthe high tide of interwar CIO militancy to the entrenchment andreaction that increasingly defined the national labor movement afterthe 1955 merger. Whereas many writers and debates within the NewLeft condemned focus on workers’ rights and the struggle for commu-nism to the historical dustbin, Boggs offered a powerful analysisof changes within the labor process and an original rethinking ofrevolutionary possibilities in postindustrial America.

Black Critiques of Capital ^ 305

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In what follows, I excavate certain aspects of Boggs’s formative cri-tique of automation, its implications for working class life and poli-tics, and consider how well his analysis of the social contradictionsproduced under postindustrialism anticipates the political emergenceof the New Right. His discussion of the ‘‘outsiders,’’ those who facedchronic unemployment under automation, prefigures latter-daynotions of the ‘‘underclass,’’ ‘‘zonards,’’ and the ‘‘precariat,’’ whichname the conditions of wageless life, destitution, and vulnerabilityfacing increasingly large swaths of the world’s population.4 In con-trast to Cold War liberals and latter-day purveyors of underclassrhetoric who emphasize the alleged cultural dysfunction to explainsocial inequality, Boggs saw the new urban poor as potential agentsof social change and developed a novel concept of cultural revolutionwhereby society might be transformed through the circulation ofanticapitalist ideas and modes of being rather than the pursuit of con-ventional protests or vanguard party politics. He argues, howeverthat the obsolescence and destitution slowly filling formerly prosper-ous American cities belied the possibility of a more socially just distri-bution of goods and services envisioned by liberals and socialistsalike. Cooperatively organized production might eliminate materialneed, deliver more leisure time, and enable a freer, more egalitarianorder than that available under capitalism, yet the profound culturalchallenge facing Americans under postindustrialism was how torealize these possibilities. Understanding the contradictions thatmight result from the attempted realization of these possibilities,Boggs astutely observes that reaction to the structural location ofunemployed blacks in the wake of automation had the potential tofuel a grave political crisis, one that eventually materialized in theneoliberal politics of the New Right.

Dead Labor: Automation and the Defeat of the MassWorker

General Motors began experimenting with labor-reducing technol-ogies in the aftermath of the 1946 GM Strike. The term automationwas coined in 1947 through the creation of an ‘‘Automation Depart-ment’’ at Ford Motor Company.5 Automation, understood here simplyas the replacement of living labor with machinery or dead labor, wasnot a new idea. Boggs acknowledges as much in a veiled reference tothe Luddites, those nineteenth-century textile workers who resistedthe introduction of mechanical looms across the English Midlands.6

Charles Babbage and later Frederick Winslow Taylor both dreamedof fully automated assembly-line production as the penultimatemeans of achieving greater centralized control, efficiency, and lower


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labor costs.7 The growth and development of automation in the post–World War II period is significant because it was made possible by theconsolidation of different societal interests—capitalist, scientific–academic, political, and military=diplomatic—around a Cold Warnational growth trajectory.

Automation, according to historian Thomas Sugrue, was ‘‘the mostrefined application of the Fordist system of production.’’8 Automatedtechnologies were used by car manufacturers to replace assembly-linejobs such as ‘‘mankilling,’’ that is, the manual relocation of hot coilsprings from a coiling machine to a quench tank, as well as theequally hazardous task of loading and unloading metal stampingpresses used to craft the body of automobiles.9 Industry leaders andscientists lauded the advent of automation as unqualified pro-gress—new technologies would replace dangerous tasks, create great-er safety on the plant floor, bolster output, and increase profitability.New inventions in medicine, home economics, and industry were pre-sented as evidence of U.S. cultural superiority and as personal toolsfor achieving a higher quality of life. Daniel Bell’s The End ofIdeology, published two years before The American Revolution, isreflective of this broader mood and offers a rosy view of automation.

Although he flirted with leftist politics as a young man, Bellemerged as a harbinger of the postindustrial economy and a ColdWar defender of liberal capitalism’s virtues. In his youth, Bellbelonged to a socialist reading group at the City University of NewYork, ‘‘Alcove no. 1’’ with Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe,and Meyer Lasky.10 Bell helped to found Public Interest with Kristolin 1965, but eventually they parted ways because of the journal’sincreasingly conservative bent. The publication of The End of Ideol-ogy, however, announced his abandonment of any faith in the possi-bility of socialist revolution, with much of the waning chaptersdedicated to an exploration of the failures of Marxism as social theoryand statecraft. Bell’s view of technological change propheticallygrasped automation’s far-reaching benefits for capital, but conserva-tively assessed its negative social implications. Automation would lib-erate corporations from labor and allow capital mobility, ‘‘new plantscan be located away from the major cities and closer to markets or tosources of raw materials and fuels.’’ Bell concludes that automationwill have ‘‘enormous social effects,’’ and that the ‘‘rhythms of auto-mation will give a new character to work, living and leisure.’’ He issuspicious of any ‘‘wild fears’’ of large-scale displacement, however,and expresses a clear faith in Keynesianism to preempt potential dis-ruptions. ‘‘Even if automatic controls were suddenly introduced,regardless of cost considerations into all the factories that could usethem,’’ Bell claims, ‘‘only about eight percent of the labor force would


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be directly affected.’’ ‘‘Over the last decade and a half’’ he adds,‘‘Americans have learned, through a flexible tax and fiscal policyhow to regulate the economy and stimulate its growth. The govern-ment, as a gyroscope, can offset overproduction and underconsump-tion. The question is largely one of politics rather than economics,of the willingness of government to act when necessary.’’11

Bell foresees improvements in the manner of work, quality of life,and scope of leisure activities for Americans. He predicted automationwould create a new ‘‘salariat,’’ a class of highly skilled, well-paid tech-nocrats who would supplant the factory worker in importance withinindustry and society writ large. The very character of work would bealtered, according to Bell, in ways that would diminish the politicaltactics previously available to workers. Under automation, ‘‘menfinally lose the ‘feel’ of the work’’ and their capacity to control its flowthrough soldiering or sabotage. Automation would usher in a ‘‘newwork morality,’’ where worth will be defined ‘‘on the basis of planningand organizing and continuously smooth function of the operation.’’Anticipating the participatory-management schemes that wouldachieve currency during the 1980s, Bell asserts that ‘‘the team andnot the individual worker, will assume a new importance; and thesocial engineer will come into his own.’’12 Accordingly, Bell sees thedawning of postindustrial society and the more extensive deploymentof computerization and automated processes as the end of class strug-gle. Boggs, on the other hand, sees it as the latest stage of capital’sefforts to wrest control from labor and curtail the gains that had beenmade since the 1935 Wagner Act, the ‘‘Magna Carta of Labor,’’ whichlegally established the right to collective bargaining.

In contrast to Bell and later American futurists such as AlvinToffler, Boggs provides a political reading of automation, written fromthe vantage point of living labor.13 Understanding that, in the handsof capitalists, technology has long been an important weapon against‘‘that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier, man,’’ Boggs identifies howautomation furthered the decomposition of the industrial massworker in economic and social terms.14 Similar to how the Tayloriza-tion of production at the turn of the twentieth century helped todefeat the power of craft labor through deskilling, fragmentation,and standardization of work processes, the Cold War expansion ofautomated production helped tame the power of the mass worker.15

State investment, rather than that of private capital has been decis-ive in the development and application of automated technologies.Boggs notes this central contradiction where the working and middleclasses through their taxes now finance scientific development and byextension, their own economic displacement. ‘‘This is all done,’’ Boggswrites, ‘‘in the name of research and defense, but, whatever it is


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called, the benefits are as great to the capitalists as if they had putout the capital themselves.’’16 Under automation, the nature of workwas radically altered and modes of solidarity and organizationthat characterized the heyday of CIO activism were effectivelyundermined.

In his opening chapter, Boggs retraces the outlines of class struggleunder Fordist mass production and the defeat of radical elementswithin the union movement. McCarthyite anticommunism, the preva-lence of consumer ideology, and the advance of conservative leader-ship within the AFL–CIO were equally instrumental in the fall oflabor, but automation presented profound challenges to the securityof workers’ rights and the possibility of achieving democracy withinproductive relations. He argues that automation is ‘‘the greatest rev-olution that has taken place in human society since men stoppedhunting and fishing and started to grow their own food,’’ and that itis ‘‘capable of displacing as many productive workers from the workforce as have been brought into the work force since the inventionof the automobile at the beginning of this century.’’17 Boggs arguesthat after V-J day, the control of production and human relationsinside the plant that workers had achieved was now ‘‘shunted aside’’by the union. As the union and companies allied to end wildcatting,organized labor shifted away from struggles around questions ofpower and relations on the job to questions of economics—securinga share in profits and growth. Boggs laments that the UAW was for-merly ‘‘the most advanced, the most progressive, the model of thelabor movement that arose in the 1930’s.’’ After twenty-five years,Boggs writes, ‘‘the UAW has given back to management every rightover production won in the movement of the 1930’s and the waryears.’’ Although the level of material comfort and consumingcapacity for autoworkers had increased, Boggs saw worsening shopfloor conditions in relation to the union’s loss of actual power:

Today the workers are doing in eight hours the actual physical work they used todo in twelve. At 6:30, a half hour before the day shift begins, you can see workerssetting up their operations so that they will not fall behind during the hours forwhich they are paid. They are afraid to go to the toilet, to get a drink of water totake time off to go to a funeral of a relative. If they refuse to work overtime, theyare written up and sent home on a regular working day. They are afraid to walkaround with the newspaper in their pockets for fear that they will be accused ofreading on the job. Whenever the company wishes to work the men more than 40hours a week, all it has to do is ‘schedule’ overtime.18

For Boggs, automation is a crucial component of this defeat, but it isnot the single cause. Boggs argues that the entrenchment of theAmerican labor movement is consequence of an incomplete revol-ution—the failure to wrest ‘‘absolute power’’ away from capitalists.


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The end of the CIO, he contends, ‘‘is due to the fact that all organiza-tions that spring up in capitalist society and do not take absolutepower, but rather fight only on one tangential or essential aspect ofthat society are eventually incorporated into capitalist society.’’‘‘There was no revolution, no destruction of the state power,’’ andtherefore, Boggs argues, the union movement became ‘‘incorporatedinto all the contradictions of the capitalist system and is today fulfil-ling the same functions for the American state as the Russian tradeunions do for the Russian state.’’19

The enduring analytical power of The American Revolution doesnot rest in its description of new productive forces—Boggs does littleof this, and later writers such as Braverman were more adept at offer-ing a detailed, textured portrait of how automation and computeriza-tion were transforming traditional factory labor and white-collarworkplaces alike.20 Boggs’s gift is his perceptive analysis of the socialimplications and latent possibilities of high technology capitalism.For Boggs, automation initiated powerful economic, political, andsocial changes. More specifically, it transforms the nature of work,the position of power, and leverage previously used by workers tosecure their rights in the plant, and it threatens the basic means ofself-preservation for vast swaths of society. He contends, ‘‘It is notsimply a question of retraining or changing from one form of workto another. For automation definitely eliminates the need for a vastnumber of workers, including skilled, semi-skilled, unskilled andmiddle-class clerical workers.’’21

Boggs illustrates how the prospect of obsolescence precipitates thepolitical cannibalization of labor on the shop floor. The introduction ofcybernetic command and automated technologies intensifies latentdivisions on the shop floor and aggravates generational tensions.‘‘At this point,’’ Boggs writes, ‘‘the class consciousness of the workerstends to shift from what has traditionally been considered its mainquality, hostility to the class enemy outside, and to focus on antagon-isms, struggles, conflicts among the workers themselves.’’22 Racialand ethnic prejudices threaten solidarity, and those who demandmore from the entrenched union bureaucracy are labeled ‘‘nuisances’’and ‘‘troublemakers.’’ These political tensions are compounded by theprocess of class recomposition initiated by automation—the creationof new jobs, new chains of command, and modes of consciousness.

His analysis of the new ‘‘salariat’’ is more trenchant than Bell’s.Boggs notes that new strata of better-trained workers who are ‘‘dee-ply involved in automation’’ are pitted against the old strata. Thesenew technical workers, according to Boggs ‘‘start at salariesmuch higher than the old skilled workers ever dreamed of attaining.But they do not think like the old workers in terms of job


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classifications . . . they welcome constant changes in production as achallenge to their ability, knowledge and ingenuity . . . . This interestin their work also makes them quite unconscious of the effect thattheir work is having on the old workers.’’23 These new knowledgeworkers, however, suffer from one of the same fatal flaws as theirindustrial predecessors. ‘‘In their attitude to work and in the processof their work they have invaded management to the point of actuallycontrolling the flow of production itself,’’ but, as Boggs explains,‘‘these new workers are leaving the political direction of their work,the purposes for which it is intended to the old management.’’24

Despite their highly evolved skills and the extent of their partici-pation in production, Boggs laments that they lack experience ofstruggle and that it is unlikely that any new initiative will come fromtheir ranks. In addition to the immediate impact that automation willhave on struggles within the plant, Boggs also explores its effectsbeyond the factory walls in a manner that connects these changesin industry to the looming urban crisis.

The Outsiders: Obsolescence and the Urban Crisis

The first wave of postwar industrial decline was manifest in theloss of thousands of entry-level jobs. African Americans and other lessskilled, less senior workers were especially vulnerable in those indus-tries that contracted with the peacetime military demobilization. By1960, the rate of joblessness for young black men in Detroit was stag-gering. During that year, among all male eighteen-year-olds, 15percent of whites were not in the labor force, while some 41 percentof nonwhites were not. This gap persists among nineteen-year-olds(8.9 percent of whites compared to 35.3 percent nonwhites),twenty-year-olds (7.8 percent whites to 41 percent of nonwhites),and twenty-one- to twenty-two-year-olds (4.9 percent of whites to20.5 percent of nonwhites).25 At various points in The AmericanRevolution, Boggs contemplates what will happen in particular tothose youth who now find factory doors shuttered and the path tolower middle-class stability cut off. The welfare state and entry intothe U.S. military provided temporary solutions, but for Boggs, ‘‘thisgrowing army of the permanently unemployed is the ultimate crisisof the American bourgeoisie.’’26 Boggs variously describes these blackunemployed youth as ‘‘outsiders,’’ ‘‘expendables,’’ ‘‘castaways,’’ and‘‘untouchables.’’ He senses a novel condition for African Americans,with grave consequences for life, citizenship, and survival. Blackshad long endured material poverty and hyperexploitation, first dur-ing the stage of antebellum chattel slavery; then, after emancipation,


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in the near-slavery of debt peonage throughout the South; and finally,as low-skilled, itinerant workers in the industrial North and Westduring the twentieth century. Boggs held that under automationmany blacks faced the prospect of permanent obsolescence ratherthan exploitation.

Boggs saw these outsiders, the unemployed young people heencountered on the streets of Detroit and other rusting cities likeCleveland and Buffalo, as a potentially revolutionary social force.They lacked the same allegiances and aspirations as those blackswho experienced some nominal integration under Fordism. At onepoint, he even describes their plight and sensibilities in colonialterms: ‘‘Being workless, they are also stateless. They have grownup like a colonial people who no longer feel any allegiance to theold imperial power and are each day searching for new means to over-throw it.’’27 This younger generation that was increasingly excludedfrom wage labor through deployment of high technology faced anew set of basic economic and political challenges. His view of thenew urban poor as revolutionary political agents capable of usheringin a postcapitalist society stands in sharp contradiction to his contem-poraries and the notions of the ‘‘underclass’’ that have become domi-nant within American public life since the urban crisis of the 1960s.

In the decade after the publication of The American Revolution,various political camps in Great Society–era America advanced cul-turalist arguments about poverty. Cold War liberals, social demo-crats, and black nationalists all developed explanations ofcontemporary urban inequality rooted in notions of putative culturaldysfunction and proffered solutions that focused on the rehabilitationof the poor through some combination of state activism or social tutel-age. During the early 1960s, liberal academics and antipoverty advo-cates often made the case for state relief on behalf of racial minoritiesand the poor by referring to the psychological and social pathologiesthey endured. Some, like Oscar Lewis, a social anthropologist andauthor of Children of Sanchez, saw the poor as ‘‘badly damagedhuman beings’’ who developed pathological behavior as a means ofsurvival and adaptability.28 Social Democrat Michael Harrington’sThe Other America, published shortly before Boggs’s AmericanRevolution, offered the ‘‘culture of poverty’’ thesis as a pretext forgovernment action.29

Harrington hoped to upset the celebratory mood of postwar pros-perity with his passionate expose of poverty. He argues that the poorhave been rendered invisible within American life by these popularnarratives of boundless opportunity, but equally by the spatial andcultural realities of midcentury U.S. society. Urban renewal projectswhich gutted older city neighborhoods in favor of expressways and


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office towers and the concomitant process of postwar suburbanizationsegregated the mostly minority, inner-city poor from white middle-class residents. Harrington concludes that ‘‘the very development ofthe American city has removed poverty from the living, emotionalexperience of millions upon millions of middle class Americans.’’30

As well, mass consumer apparel provided a form of class camouflage,the removal of the most stark, outward indicators of working classstatus. ‘‘Clothes make the poor invisible too,’’ he contends, addingthat it is ‘‘much easier in the United States to be decently dressedthan it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.’’31

Like Boggs, Harrington is concerned about the social impact ofautomation. He refers to those whose outmoded skills or lack of skillshave made them obsolete as ‘‘the rejects’’ and briefly describes theemerging world of low-wage, part-time, insecure work that wouldcome to define labor flexibility on the bottom end of the postindustrial‘‘hour-glass’’ economy.32 The Other America is imbued with com-passion for the poor and the young Harrington’s description of the‘‘culture of poverty’’ is intended to inspire outrage among more afflu-ent citizens. ‘‘The poor are sick in body and in spirit.’’ According toHarrington, ‘‘Disease, alcoholism, low IQ’s, these express a wholeway of life. They are, in the main, the effects of an environment,not the biographies of unlucky individuals. Because of this, the newpoverty is something that cannot be dealt with by first aid. If thereis to be a lasting assault on the shame of the other America, it mustseek to root out of this society an entire environment, and not just therelief of individuals.’’33 His emphasis on the poor as damaged humanbeings and interpretative focus on changing ecology rather than econ-omy are important Cold War accommodations of the American left.The culture of poverty in Harrington’s work and that of his contem-poraries surrenders the broader, systemic critique of capital anddemands for power at the point of production which animated inter-war union militancy, in favor of an interpretative and policy focuson the reformation of the New Deal state to address those populationsthat were not fully integrated into the labor–management accord.Although the memory of Great Society liberalism is vilified bylatter-day Republicans, the culturalist arguments that became a cor-nerstone of New Right politics were immanent in the discourses thatshaped and propelled the welfare statism of the late 1960s.

All of these culturalist interpretations of poverty supported thesocially liberal public policies of the Great Society era—the antidiscri-mination laws embodied in civil rights, voting rights and immigrationacts of the mid-1960s, the Model Cities Initiative, the creation of thefederal food stamp program, VISTA volunteers program, and, ofcourse, the creation of local Community Action Agencies that enlisted


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the most articulate strata of the urban working class and poor todesign and administer antipoverty efforts. Such programs were mod-estly redistributive in the sense that they provided federal support tothe poor and the marginalized but did not overturn standing econ-omic and social practices. Although the implementation of communityaction at the local level provided black activist elements with a meansof circumventing entrenched, white-led political machinery in somelocales, the overarching purpose of the War on Poverty was to bringthe urban poor in line with the systemic prerogatives of Cold War lib-eral capitalism.34 At the time, some activists criticized the socialengineering dimension of the War on Poverty and its limitations asa means of achieving racial equality, but the cultural mission thatstood at the heart of Johnson-era reforms has been truncated in morerecent reminiscence of Cold War liberalism. Like Boggs’s work,Sidney Willhelm’s equally forgotten 1970 book Who Needs the Negrocast doubt on these efforts to solve the deeper problem of technologi-cal unemployment—or more accurately, ‘‘nonemployment,’’ inWillhelm’s terms—with job creation or more training.

Willhelm wades into the tough civilizational questions raised byautomation in a chapter titled ‘‘The Creative Effort’’ in which hedeclares that ‘‘neither Adam Smith nor Keynesian economics providesa sensible orientation to the new productivity.’’ Like Boggs he sees theinherited ways of thinking about politics and economics as increas-ingly outmoded and ill suited to the emergent conundrum of surviv-ing in a world where wage labor, the dominant means ofself-preservation and rights under capitalism, has been devalued.‘‘For the first time in man’s history,’’ Willhelm claims, ‘‘economic pros-perity separates employment for the entire society, not just the elite.’’Willhelm contends that ‘‘it will be incumbent for a society relying onautomation and dedicated to the well-being of human beings to accepta new economic gauge, namely: services are to be rendered and goodsproduced, distributed and consumed in keeping with a designatedstandard of living.’’35

Both Boggs and Willhelm call for large-scale societal transform-ation, a new social compact that might accommodate the fact of obsol-escence and wageless life. Willhelm’s narrative, however, reflects aManichean perspective on race relations and as such offers little indi-cation of how deep-seated racial conflicts might be surmounted.Although separated by less than a decade, Boggs’s and Willhelm’sindividual experiential histories and the decidedly different contextsof their writing might partially account for their varying sense ofpolitical optimism. Boggs’s The American Revolution bears theimprint of his involvement with the UAW, the Johnson-ForestTendency and Correspondence Publishing Committee, and his


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long-standing commitment to interracial leftist politics. The sense ofpolitical possibility that defined the Kennedy years as the southerncivil rights movement crested is clearly reflected in the optimistictone that fills the pages of The American Revolution. Willhelm’s nar-rative, on the other hand, was penned during the Nixon years, on theheels of six years’ worth of urban rebellions and a swelling backlashto school desegregation and Great Society reforms. Consequently,his work reflects some of the realpolitik of the Black Power era andthe growing suspicion of the utility of interracialism that permeatedsome corners. Overall, Willhelm’s political conclusions are more dys-topian than critical. Rather than grounding the politics of automationin discrete conditions of intra-industry competition, Cold War scien-tific investment by the U.S. state, and the social control objectivesof certain sectors of the ruling class, Willhelm, reflecting the blackpower sensibility of the times, develops a metanarrative of economicracism to understand not only the midcentury expansion of auto-mation but most of African American history as well. He views racismas a ‘‘dominant, autonomous social value.’’ Boggs is not naıve andoffers sharp criticism of racism on the shop floor and throughoutsociety, but it is clear that, unlike Willhelm, he sees these problemsas historical and surmountable.

Boggs’s response to the coming of automation and the postindus-trial society is neither Luddite nor welfare statist. Neither of thesestrategies harnesses the revolutionary egalitarian potential of thenew forces of production. ‘‘Whereas the old workers used to hope thatthey could pit their bodies against iron and outlast the iron,’’ Boggsnotes, ‘‘this new generation of workless people knows that even theirbrains are being outwitted by the iron brains of automation andcybernation.’’ Instead of trying to outwit the machines, Boggs arguesthat this new generation, the outsiders, should focus on ‘‘the organi-zation and reorganization of society and of human relations insidesociety.’’ Their revolution will be ‘‘a revolution of their minds andhearts, directed not toward increasing production but toward themanagement and distribution of things and toward the control ofrelations among people, tasks which up to now have been left tochance or in the hands of the elite.’’ Boggs also eschews job trainingand tutelage in bourgeois citizenship as viable antidotes to the unfold-ing postindustrial urban crisis. In response to the continual talk of‘‘new training programs,’’ he says emphatically that training is notthe answer. He recounts the historical fate of the draftsmen whohas been made redundant under new forces of production as evidenceof the futility of such efforts. ‘‘In the very period when individuals arebeing trained,’’ Boggs concludes, ‘‘new machinery is being introducedwhich eliminates the need for such training.’’36


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Only embryonic at the time of Boggs’s writing, computerization andadvanced robotics have either completely eliminated or greatlyreduced the workforce of some historical occupations, such as manualtypesetters in newspaper offices, pattern cutters in industrial gar-ment factories, and spot welders on the automotive assembly line.The nature of white-collar work has also been transformed, subjectingoffice workers to forms of surveillance and managerial discipline thatwere previously confined to the shop floor. Even among the skilledand semiskilled sectors of the service economy, new technologies suchas automated banking machines, ‘‘touchless’’ carwashes, digital audiosynthesizers, word processing and accounting software, self-checkoutcounters, and the like have rendered some jobs more vulnerable andincreasingly obsolete.37 Although job training will enable some work-ers to achieve a measure of security and self-preservation, as Boggsnotes again and again, the postindustrial economy entails a quanti-tative reduction in productive labor. Under high-technology capital-ism, Boggs argues that productivity ‘‘can no longer be the measureof an individual’s right to life.’’38 What is needed, he argues is ‘‘anew Declaration of Human Rights to fit the new Age of Abundance.’’39

No amount of countercyclical interventions will halt the generaldynamic already set in motion. As Boggs warns, ‘‘America is headedtowards full unemployment, not full employment.’’ For Boggs, thetechnological changes in U.S. capitalism demanded a revolution invalues and an abandonment of the dogma of work that informed left-ist thinking as much as that of conservatives in the United States.

Despite these revolutionary changes in production, too manyAmericans still cling to the assumptions of mass industrial society.Boggs asserts, ‘‘many people still think in the same terms. They stillassume that the majority of the population will be needed to producematerial goods and that the production of such goods will still remainthe heart of society. They have not been able to face the fact that evenif the workers took over the plants they would also be faced with theproblem of what to do with themselves now that work is becomingsocially unnecessary.’’40 Unlike the culture of poverty rhetoric thattook shape during the War on Poverty initiative that emphasizedthe putative cultural dysfunction of the poor, Boggs’s argumentsabout culture called for broader societal change rather than targetedbehavioral rehabilitation for the most dispossessed.

The ‘‘Classless Society’’ and Boggs’s Revolutionary Politics

Like the work of his contemporaries such as Herbert Marcuse andCruse, James Boggs’s masterwork should be understood as part of a


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broader effort to rethink American leftist radicalism in the context ofthe Cold War.41 Such vast changes in U.S. society and in particular,within the forces of production, necessitated new thinking in therealm of revolutionary politics and strategy. ‘‘Marxists have contin-ued to think of a mass of workers always remaining as the base ofan industrialized society,’’ wrote Boggs. Therefore, a new theory ofrevolution had to be developed that corresponded to a new economicand social context where the proletariat was becoming obsoletebecause of cybernetic command and automation.

Boggs offers a brief but poignant rethinking of Marxist ideas aboutsocialist transition and explores how technological development andthe end of the struggle to meet necessity have renderednineteenth-century theories of socialism inapplicable to the late-twentieth-century United States. He argues that midcenturyadvances in the forces of production have made it possible to achievecommunism, ‘‘a classless society’’ without the kind of socialist tran-sition that stalled out in the state capitalist Soviet Union. The UnitedStates, he argues, contains ‘‘all the necessary material ingredientswhich could make socialism possible.’’42 Following Marx, Boggsasserts that real freedom will begin when the struggle to meet necess-ity is effectively ended and cooperative production will create newmodes of life and freedom that have been hitherto suppressed bycapitalism. Once they are ‘‘released from the necessity to work,’’ heargues, ‘‘men and women would come up with new ideas for increas-ing productivity that would astonish the world.’’43

Boggs contends that unlike the leftist revolutionary movementsthat have developed in Europe, ‘‘it is impossible for an AmericanMarxist movement to build itself on the ideas of mass poverty andthe abolition of private property.’’ Poverty has not been eliminatedin the United States, but ‘‘it is so dispersed and scattered among vari-ous segments of the population that it does not constitute a funda-mental and unifying issue to mobilize the masses of the people instruggle.’’ In the United States, Boggs adds, ‘‘the forces of productionhave already been developed to the point where there could be theclassless society which Marx said could come only under commu-nism.’’44

‘‘A social revolution in the United States,’’ Boggs argues ‘‘has tomean control of production by the producers . . .production for theuse of those who need it.’’ For Boggs, a classless society—‘‘a societyin which the antagonisms and divisions between classes, races andpeople of different national backgrounds are eliminated and peoplecan develop among themselves civilized and cooperative rela-tions’’—is possible in postindustrial America ‘‘because there need nolonger be any problem of scarcity of material goods and services.’’


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The historical problems of scarcity have now been ‘‘outmoded by thetechnological advances of production.’’ He cautions that the path torevolution in the United States is ‘‘more difficult and vicious thananywhere else in the world’’ because of the warfare state and theaccumulated ‘‘corruption of class society’’ that resides inside eachAmerican to varying degrees. Emphatically, Boggs argues that thesolutions to the problems of mass obsolescence will not come from alabor movement that has become increasingly integrated in themachinations of mainstream American industry and politics. Boggsconcludes that organized labor will not serve as the leading socialforce because it shares ‘‘the concerns of employers to keep productiongoing.’’45 The workless society can only be brought into being by‘‘actions and forces outside the work process.’’

‘‘What is man’s greatest human need in the United States?’’ asksBoggs in the closing pages. He answers: ‘‘It is to stop shirkingresponsibility and start assuming responsibility.’’ Americans havebeen incredibly innovative in developing productive capacity, but lessimaginative in addressing the social contradictions of modern life andcreating a truly democratic order. ‘‘Americans today’’ Boggs adds,‘‘are like a bunch of ants who have been struggling all summer longto accumulate a harvest and then can’t decide how to distribute itand therefore fight among themselves and destroy each other to getat the accumulation.’’ Advances in the forces of production are madepossible through the social power of living labor and as such, shouldexist for the shared benefit of society. Material comfort and theillusion of freedom militate against the full realization of these tasks.In the United States more than any other nation, ‘‘every man is apoliceman over himself, a prisoner of his own fears.’’ This prevailingmood of Cold War patriotism, the middle-class consumer lifestyle, andthe attendant growth of the ‘‘military-economic-police bloc’’ are themajor barriers to the advancement of leftist revolutionary politics inthe United States. The struggle to create a more socially just order‘‘requires that people of every stratum of the population clash not onlywith the agents of the silent police state but with their own preju-dices, their own outmoded ideas, their own fears which keep themfrom grappling with the new realities of our age.’’46 Americans must‘‘insist upon their right and responsibility to make political decisionsand to determine in all spheres of social existence—whether it isforeign policy, the work process, education, race relations, communitylife.’’ His more expansive notions of social responsibility andradical democracy, however, were eclipsed by the reassertion of indi-vidual responsibility and the primacy of market freedoms by bothGreat Society liberals and, more decisively, by the rise of the NewRight.


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In an especially prophetic passage, he outlines the very politicalfault lines that have defined American public debate in thehalf-century since this work first appeared when he writes:

As automation spreads, it will intensify the crises of capitalism and sharpen theconflicts among various sections of the population, particularly between thoseworking and those not working, those paying taxes and those not paying taxes.Out of this conflict will grow a counter-revolutionary movement made up of thosefrom all social layers who resent the continued cost to them of maintaining theseexpendables but who are determined to maintain the system that creates andmultiplies the number of expendables. This in turn will mobilize those who beginby recognizing the right of these displaced persons to live and from there areforced to struggle for a society in which there are no displaced persons.47

Boggs anticipates the conservative political response to the problemsof unemployment and material poverty produced by deindustri-alization. A year after the publication of The American Revolution,Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a staunch opponent of unionismand civil rights reforms, secured the GOP presidential nomination.Although he would be defeated in the 1964 general election, hisunsuccessful presidential bid—and those of Alabama GovernorGeorge Wallace—helped to popularize the core ideological tenets ofthe New Right bloc. A central feature of Nixon’s successful use ofthe ‘‘Southern strategy’’ to win the 1968 presidential election wasthe mobilization of resentments that Boggs described: ‘‘This antagon-ism in the population between those who have to be supported andthose who have to support them is one of the inevitable antagonismsof capitalism.’’48 The ascendancy of the New Right was built on thisvery antagonism, a new axis of conflict that pit the dominant classes,racists, social conservatives, and the more economically secure sec-tors of the electorate against students, immigrants, the urban poor,the unemployed, public sector unions, the aged, and others whodepend on public spending, regulation, and amenities to subsist.

The project of neoliberalization entails both the rollback of socialgoods and rollout of punitive measures, such as workfare, more exten-sive policing, and surveillance and upward redistribution of wealththrough corporate subsidization, regressive taxation, regimes ofindustry self-regulation, and the privatization of social provision.49

Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and fiscal austerity were cen-tral weapons in the GOP’s electoral and governing strategy that tookaim at the reproductive dimensions of the state: public schooling,health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, public works pro-jects, housing, and so forth. This programmatic emphasis on regress-ive taxation and balanced-budget conservatism helped to fracture theold New Deal coalition and effectively unite the disparate interests ofredundant industrial workers, the anxious middle class, and an


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investor class looking to emancipate itself from public responsibilityand state regulation. Increasingly, ruling elites responded to thenew contradictions and instabilities of the postindustrial economyduring the 1970s and 1980s with disciplinary measures and financia-lization. The buildup of the penal state evolved as an alternativemeans of managing the poor and placating middle-class anxietiesabout property crime in a context of dwindling social provision. Aswell, the growth of consumer credit during the Reagan years enabledAmericans to maintain high levels of personal consumption despitefalling real wages, thus protecting the cultural expectations of post-war consumer society even as the labor–management accord that cre-ated the middle class was torn asunder through deregulation andantilabor politics.50

The architects of the New Right crafted their own notion of the‘‘classless society,’’ where traditional leftist visions of the social good,working-class affinity, and progressively redistributive politics arebanished from the realm of acceptable public debate and policymak-ing. In fact, in a context where older modes of working-class con-sciousness and self-activity have been diminished, the interests ofthe dominant classes attain a mystique of universal progress and assuch, are difficult to contest. Latter-day notions such as George W.Bush’s ‘‘ownership society’’ reassert the myth of the American dreamin an age of mounting insecurity and thus promote the belief thatunlimited mobility for all who abide by the cultural script of hardwork and individualism is true for all corners of society.51

In this context of New Right political ascendancy and the process ofdomestic neoliberalization they have initiated, civil rights and laboractivists have fought a rearguard action. Surely there havebeen small and important victories, but since the Reagan era, theAmerican Left has failed to develop a popular movement capable ofsecuring the hard-fought gains of earlier struggles, let alone advanc-ing the kind of society envisioned by Boggs and others where the basicright to self-preservation is no longer connected to wage labor andwhere socially produced wealth is enjoyed in common. Those radicaland progressive left organizations that helped to circulate a criticalperspective on the American economy during the late 1960s and1970s were defeated through state repression, sectarian infighting,and the cultural triumph of neoliberal politics.52 ContemporaryAfrican American political culture has been crippled by culturalistarguments that neglect broader structural forces shaping and con-taining black life and restrict questions of responsibility to the pur-suit of bourgeois citizenship. Boggs offers a more expansive view ofculture and responsibility than we have become accustomed to inrecent political debates often dominated either by multiculturalism


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as the new default horizon of social justice activism in the workplaceor by ‘‘underclass’’ discourse which in the age of workfare, serves as ameans of low-intensity war against the black urban poor and what-ever basic right to redress and subsistence they might demand.Although the political strength of workers in the industrial sectorunderwent dramatic decline through NAFTA maquiladorization andconcomitant offshoring to China and other nations, unionism hasnot died in the United States. Contemporary struggles among publicsector employees, teachers, and service industry workers often pro-vide flashpoints of militancy and may constitute a beachhead fortwenty-first-century struggles to defend workers rights under a resili-ent, global capitalism. Sadly, the struggle to fundamentally transformsociety and create genuine autonomy and self-governance forworking people that animated the era of CIO organizing has beeneclipsed by a life-and-death struggle to secure basic services, rights,and survival.53

Conclusion

When James Boggs died in 1993, the collapse of ‘‘actually existingsocialism’’ was still new, digital compact discs had just recently over-taken analog cassettes as the most popular commercial music formatin the United States, and only a privileged few Americans made use ofelectronic mail and cell phones. In the years since his passing,high-technology capitalism has experienced explosive growth in waysthat confirm and confound his formative examination of automationand cybernetic command. In particular, information-age capitalismhas displayed an incredible capacity to absorb various forms of oppo-sition from environmentalists, labor, indigenous rights groups, andpoor people’s movements to the sundry pirates that troll the highseas, urban bazaars, and cyberspace. Many transnational firms haveachieved renewed vitality, market reach, and political insulation byembracing the rhetoric and symbols of capital’s antagonists throughgreen-washing, charitable campaigns, cool-hunting, and other mar-keting strategies.54 Consequently, new questions must be asked, suchas, ‘‘What challenges does this new form of ‘do-good’ capitalism posefor the kind of cultural revolution that Boggs urges?’’ Furthermore,given the tentacular power of multinational corporations, it is worthasking if the true democracy in ‘‘all spheres of social existence’’ thatBoggs called for can really be achieved without the abolition of privateproperty.

Boggs’s The American Revolution remains terribly prophetic andyet in many ways, timebound. For instance, his chapter ‘‘The Decline


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of U.S. Empire’’ reflects the heady confidence generated by post-Bandung anticolonial revolutions, but read today after the compre-hensive defeat of the postcolonial project in Latin America, Africa,and Asia through counterinsurgency, structural adjustment, and pri-vatization, such period optimism is inspirational but quaint. Today,the logistical revolution in transnational shipping has created globalcircuits of capital accumulation that are more flexible and sociallypernicious than those of the late colonial age. The deeper culturalissues he explores remain with us, however, with ever more powerfulconsequences. The entire edifice of American middle-class consumer-ism rests on relations of dispossession and exploitation of Third Worlddenizens. Business schools and NGOs continue to promote ‘‘patientcapitalism,’’ micro-lending, fair trade agriculture, and other formsof corporate responsibility that assuage the consciences of Americanswho have grown uneasy about their relation to new global inequal-ities, but these measures help to further the reach of neoliberal gov-ernmentality. Like the job-training mantra of Great Societypolicymakers, such strategies for addressing global poverty are politi-cally effective but practically outmoded. Contemplating the specter ofmass obsolescence at the dawn of postindustrial society, Boggs wrote,‘‘this is the dilemma of our time in the United States, and as of nowonly for the United States.’’55 The problem of wageless urban life hedescribed a half-century ago has enveloped the globe. Contemporarywriters like Mike Davis talk of ‘‘surplus humanity’’ when describingthe millions who crowd squatter settlements and shantytowns in cit-ies such as Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Mumbai, and Mexico City.56

Others such as Kevin Bales write of those who endure predation,insecurity, and hardship in the new transnational economy of slaveryas ‘‘disposable people.’’57 The conditions that Boggs foresaw for blackyouth who had been made obsolete by new productive technologieshave become a defining feature of global capitalism.

The American Revolution still provides us with a powerfulinterpretative and moral compass. This book should be read today,debated and appreciated because it models a critical, dialectical read-ing of the labor process in particular and American social develop-ment more generally that is still useful for understanding thenature of their progression and the historical possibilities containedwithin postindustrial society. The challenges we face, in postindus-trial America, are profoundly political challenges—how will we dis-tribute the incredible material and social resources amassed in themost ethical and just manner? There is much to learn from Boggs’sformative assessment of postindustrial society, but we should notembrace his work as a way of shirking our responsibility of comingto terms with the unique character and challenges of our times.


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Notes

1. Marx writes: ‘‘The value of a commodity is certainly determined by the quantity of labour con-tained in it, but this quantity is itself socially determined. If the amount of labour time socially necessaryfor the product of any commodity alters—and a given weight of cotton represents more labour after a badharvest than after a good one—this reacts back on all the old commodities of the same type, because theyare only individuals of the same species, and their value at any given time is measured by the laboursocially necessary to produce them, i.e., by the labour necessary under the social conditions existing atthe time.’’ Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (London: Penguin Books,1976), 318.

2. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1998); Stephen Ward, ‘‘Introduction: Making of a Black Revolutionist,’’ in Pages from a BlackWorker’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, ed. Stephen Ward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,2011), 1–34.

3. 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 GraceLee Boggs (Ria Stone). In a section that explores the significance of new productive technologies, shewrites, ‘‘Today, the knowledge, science, etc. of the means of production have reached a new stage. Withthe development of electric power and electronics, completely automatic production is possible and neces-sary. The units of production can now incorporate complete flexibility, power, precision, freedom of move-ment and ease of control. But what is required from the workers on such production units is equalflexibility, precision, freedom of movement and ease of control. The workers must themselves becomecomplete masters of the productive power developed in the instruments of production . . . . There maybe vulgar materialists whose conception of completely automatic production provides only for robotoperators. They betray the typical empiricism and naıve realism of those intellectuals who have only con-templated the world and are therefore unable to understand that the world develops through the prac-tical activity of man. Let them ponder the description of the actual design of ‘machines without men’developed by bourgeois engineers.’’ See, Paul Romano and Ria Stone, The American Worker (Detroit:Bewick Editions, 1972), 48–53. For discussion of the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s origins and history,see Boggs, Living for Change; Grace Lee Boggs, ‘‘C. L. R. James: Organizing in the U.S.A.,1938–1953,’’ in C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 163–172; Raya Dunayevskaya, For the Record:The Johnson-Forest Tendency or the Theory of State Capitalism, 1941–1951: Its Vicissitudes and Rami-fications (Detroit: News and Letters Committee, 1972); Kent Worcester, C. L. R. James: A PoliticalBiography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

4. Michael Denning, ‘‘Wageless Life,’’ New Left Review 66 (November–December 2010): 79–97; MikeDavis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006); Loıc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociologyof Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Loıc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The NeoliberalGovernment of Social Insecurity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Loıc Wacquant, ‘‘Class,Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America,’’ Daedalus (Summer 2010): 74–90; Louis Waite‘‘A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?’’ Geography Compass 3, no. 1 (January2009): 412–433.

5. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 130–135.

6. Boggs writes, ‘‘The question before Americans is whether to be for the technological revolutions ofautomation despite all the people who will be displaced, or to be opposed to this advance, sticking withthe old workers who are resisting the new machinery, as workers have done traditionally since the inven-tion of the spinning Jenny.’’ James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’sNotebook (New York: Monthly Review, 1963), 39.

7. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity, 1832); Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Mineola, N.Y.:Dover, 1998 [1911]).

8. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 130.9. Ibid., 130–140; James M. Rubenstein, Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the

U.S. Automotive Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Douglas Brinkley, Wheelsfor the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress, 1903–2003 (New York: PenguinBooks, 2003).

10. Malcolm Waters, Daniel Bell (London: Routledge Press, 1996), 14.11. The quotations in this paragraph are from Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free

Press, 1961), 267–268. Bell’s views on automation were widely shared by many in the intellectual and


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ruling elite. In a special symposium of Public Interest dedicated to the ‘‘Great Automation Question,’’Robert M. Solow doubted the fact of widespread technological unemployment and expressed faith in Key-nesianism to remedy any possible displacement: ‘‘The Great Automation Question, as I have phrased it,is not only unanswerable, it is the wrong question. The important point is that, to a pretty good firstapproximation, the total volume of employment in the United States today is simply not determinedby the rate of technological progress. Both theory and common observation tell us that a modern mixedeconomy can by proper and active use of fiscal and monetary policy weapons have full employment forany plausible rate of technological change within a range that is easily wide enough to cover theAmerican experience.’’ In his contribution to this same symposium, Robert Heilbroner shares Solow’sskepticism of clear causal relation between new technologies and unemployment, but he expresses someconcern over the ways that computerization promises to transform the culture of white-collar workplaces:‘‘In other words, I do not see the threat of automation in any unusual characteristics possessed by mod-ern day ‘factory’ technology. What I do suspect, on the other hand, is that the new technology is threat-ening a whole new group of skills—the sorting, filing, checking, calculating, remembering, comparing,okaying skills—that are the special preserve of the office worker. Moreover, it is not just complicatedcomputers that are threatening to take over functions in this hitherto sheltered area of work, althoughno doubt the new technology is conducive to more complex administrative tasks.’’ ‘‘The Great AutomationQuestion,’’ Public Interest 1 (Fall 1965): 17–36; For other period assessments of new industrial tech-nology, see John T. Dunlop, ed., Automation and Technological Change (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice-Hall, 1962).

12. Bell, The End of Ideology, 270–271. See also Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, The New Spirit ofCapitalism (London: Verso, 2007).

13. Daniel Bell, ‘‘Notes on the Post-Industrial Society,’’ Public Interest 6=7 (1967); Daniel Bell, TheComing Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York:Bantam, 1970); Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980). Nick Dyer-Witheford offers anexcellent, critical overview of the mainstream ‘‘postindustrial society’’ literature of Japan, NorthAmerica, and Europe in Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 15–37.

14. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 526–527.15. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth

Century (New York: Monthly Review, 1974).16. Boggs, American Revolution, 38.17. Ibid.18. Ibid., 27.19. Ibid., 28.20. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; Andrew Zimbalist, ed. Case Studies in the Labor Pro-

cess (New York: Monthly Review, 1979); David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Indus-trial Automation (New York: Knopf, 1984); David Noble, Progress Without People: New Technology,Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995).

21. Boggs, American Revolution, 35.22. Ibid., 34.23. Ibid., 35.24. Ibid., 36.25. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 147.26. Boggs, American Revolution, 30–31.27. Ibid., 52.28. Oscar Lewis, Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Vintage Books,

1961); Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York(New York: Vintage Books, 1966); Oscar Lewis, ‘‘The Culture of Poverty,’’ in On Understanding Poverty,ed. Daniel P. Moynihan (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

29. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan,1962). See also Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row,1965). In addition to social democrats and liberals, modern black nationalists have often offered similarassessments of black life albeit with different imagery, motivations, and aims. Citing the prevalence ofurban social ills found in mainstream liberal literature, black nationalists during the 1960s often deridedthe ‘‘slave mentality,’’ or, in Black Power parlance, the ‘‘colonized mind’’ as the source of blackself-loathing and destructive behavior. Generally, they held that the solution was some admixture of per-sonal rehabilitation, cultural recovery and in some Black Power radical circles, politicization. See DarylMichael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Adolph Reed Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Poli-tics in the Postsegregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999); Alice O’Connor, Poverty


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Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Michael B. Katz, ed., The Underclass Debate: Views from History(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

30. Harrington, The Other America, 4.31. Ibid., 5.32. Ibid., 12–13, 19–38.33. Ibid., 11.34. See Kent B. Germany, New Orleans After the Promises (Athens: University of Georgia Press,

2007); Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare(New York: Vintage Books, 1971); Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics andThought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to RaceLeaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota, 2007); Barbara Cruikshank, Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Adolph Reed Jr., ‘‘Sources of Demobilization in the New BlackRegime: Incorporation, Ideological Capitulation and Radical Failure in the Postsegregation Era,’’ inStirrings in the Jug, 117–161; Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power and the Making of AmericanPolitics, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

35. Sidney Willhelm, Who Needs the Negro? (Hampton, Va.: U.B. & U.S. Communications, 1993[1970]), 202–203. The emphasis is in the original.

36. The quotations in this paragraph are from Boggs, American Revolution, 39 and 52. Boggs addshere: ‘‘Take, for example the draftsman. With the old methods the engineer used to present his ideasto a draftsman who would make a rough sketch of these ideas which would then be given to anotherdraftsman to refine. A third draftsman then drew the final blueprint, incorporating in it the exact size,the appearance, and the correct fittings to be millionth of an inch. Today all that this same engineer hasto do is talk his ideas into a tape recorder which plays into a computer and the ideas are transformed intoa design; the design in turn is fed into a developer and, once developed, can be handed over to the workforeman for building. The three draftsmen have been eliminated from the work process, and only theengineer and the toolmaker remain, each having to know more than before about the other’s job.’’

37. Lynn Peril, ‘‘Do Secretaries Have a Future?’’ New York Times, April 26, 2011.38. Boggs, American Revolution, 46.39. Ibid., 47.40. Ibid., 41.41. See Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of

the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967); Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (NewYork: William Morrow, 1968).

42. Boggs, American Revolution, 43.43. Ibid., 59.44. Ibid., 43–44.45. The quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 44–45, 54.46. The quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 90–93.47. Ibid., 37.48. Ibid.49. See Jaime Peck, Workfare States (New York: Guilford, 2001); Wacquant, Punishing the Poor;

Wacquant, ‘‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America’’; Neil Smith, ‘‘RevanchistPlanet: Regeneration and the Axis of Co-Evilism,’’ in The Urban Inventors (2009); Christian Parenti,Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 2008).

50. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America(New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Judith Stein, The Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Fac-tories for Finance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 2010); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital andthe Crisis of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

51. In their most progressive manifestations, both golden-age rap music of the late 1980s and early1990s and the ‘‘hood films’’ genre of that same era spun cautionary tales of street violence and offeredsoft social criticism, black consciousness, and cultural rehabilitation as antidotes to urban social misery.As these forms proved their commercial viability through the middle 1990s, however, the very image ofthe urban outsider was appropriated in countless films, television programs, videogames, and corporatehip-hop music in ways that lent an air of street credibility to conspicuous consumption and Horatio Algermyths of bootstrap self-help. Such representations are ideological in the worst sense, simultaneouslyescapist and didactic. On one hand, in the cliched narrative conclusion of urban dramas, such as Boyzin the Hood (1991), New Jersey Drive (1995), and Set It Off (1996), where at least one at-risk protagonistfinally departs the inner city for college, safety and the possibility of a middle-class existence, we arereminded that despite tough conditions, for worthy, virtuous individuals, class is ephemeral. On the


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other hand, we are instructed through these same films and other pop cultural depictions of inner-citylife that class hierarchy can be surmounted by some combination of middle-class mentoring, e.g., GoodWill Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester (2000); a dose of tough love and paternal discipline, e.g.,Coach Carter (2005) and Take the Lead (2006); or the development of a strong work ethic (all of theabove). These representations have been as instrumental in popularizing and maintaining the hegemonyof neoliberal politics as the scores of white papers produced by right-wing think tanks since the 1970s.

52. Robinson, Black Nationalism; Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders, 131–215; Reed, ‘‘Sourcesof Demobilization in the New Black Regime,’’ 117–161; Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radi-cals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (New York: Verso, 2002).

53. Nelson Lichtenstein, The State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2002); Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism(New York: Verso, 1997); Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Orga-nized Labor and a New Path to Social Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); MikeDavis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class(New York: Verso, 1999 [1986]).

54. I discuss this phenomenon of ‘‘do-good capitalism,’’ and the role of humanitarian and charitableorganizations in furthering privatization, particularly in the Global South, in Cedric Johnson, ‘‘TheUrban Precariat, Neoliberalization, and the Soft Power of Humanitarian Design,’’ Journal of DevelopingSocieties 27, nos. 3 & 4 (September 2011): 445–476. See also Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce(London: Verso, 2009); Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and theRise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism(London: Pluto, 2009); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty(Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2006).

55. Boggs, American Revolution, 39.56. Davis, Planet of Slums, 174–198.57. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999); Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter, The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking andSlavery in America Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Barbara Ehrenreich and ArlieHochschild, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York:Henry Holt, 2002).


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james boggs, the “outsiders,” and the challenge of postindustrial society

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