The American Wasteland: Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs on the Ecology of Racialization

ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen an increasing recognition of the necessity to historicize and conceptualize ecological degradation in relation to capitalist and racist regimes of exploitation, epitomized by the popular concept of the “racial Capitalocene.” While constituting an important effort to move beyond a color-blind environmentalism and class analysis, many of these accounts tend to abstract away from the place- and time-determined specificities of contemporary racial capitalism. This paper reconstructs the ecological thought latently present in the work of revolutionary theorists, activists, and life-long partners Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs to explore an alternative analysis. It shows that, as part of their analysis of automation of the capitalist production process, the Boggses developed a powerful account of environmental harm alongside social deprivation. Extrapolating their concepts of social and material “waste” and “wastelands,” this paper argues that James and Grace Lee Boggs saw racist exploitation and ecological harm as intimately tied to the capitalist processes of valorization and devaluation. It shows that there emerges from their conjunctural analysis a novel theory of ecological racialization as well as some concrete implications for anti-capitalist, antiracist, and ecological struggles.

KEYWORDS:

• James and Grace Lee Boggs
• racial capitalism
• Anthropocene
• automation
• political ecology

Acknowledgments

This paper was first developed in Eric Porter’s seminar on Black ecological thought. I am grateful for his detailed commentary and encouragement. Banu Bargu, Darien Acero, Stefania Cotei, and Ariella Patchen patiently read various drafts and provided crucial feedback. Ecem Sarıçayır was a perfectly critical reader of every revision. Emile Ike and Elio Baldi were important interlocutors, as always. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers for their time and generous feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Grace Lee Boggs, born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, was one of six children to Chinese immigrants. She attended college, completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, and collaborated regularly with Marxist theorists C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. James Boggs was born in 1919 in Marion Junction, Alabama. Like many other Black Southerners, he left the South in search of a job in the booming industry of the urban North. For many years he worked at a Chrysler auto plant in Detroit and – especially after the publication of his 1963 pamphlet The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook – he became a well-known revolutionary theorist. Grace Lee and James Boggs met through C. L. R. James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency and remained life-long partners, co-authors, and Detroit-based community activists. For good accounts of James and Grace Lee Boggs’s lives and theory, see Ward (2016) as well as King (2017).

2 While I use the term “post-industrial” in this paper, it is not without hesitation. It is useful insofar as it points out the relative decline of manufacturing over the past decades alongside the creation of “post-industrial cities” like Detroit, abandoned by state and capital investments alike. It can be misleading insofar as it suggests that the global engine of economic growth has almost entirely shifted away from manufacturing.

3 In the remainder of this paper, I will likewise use the term with this double connotation.

4 While recycling processes allow for the “ongoingness of economic life” even after a commodity has been discarded, this is merely a process of separating waste from the valuable resources still contained within the discarded commodity (Herod et al. 2013). See also Schindler and Demaria (2020).

5 Ferdinand (2022, 148), for instance, highlights the conspicuous absence of marronage in mainstream ecological thought. Maroon communities developed a specific political ecology rooted in resistance and emancipation and pointing towards a possible line of flight from dooming ecological devastation. See also Roberts (2015); White (2018); and Hosbey and Roane (2021).