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NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2008
Review of Living for Change
Living for Change: An Autobiography is the autobiography of Grace Lee Boggs, one of the three co-leaders, along with C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, of the Johnson-Forest Tendency and of Correspondence, the organization from which News and Letters Committees originated. Grace Boggs, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a Ph.D. in philosophy. A Hegel scholar, she made solid contributions to the Johnson-Forest Tendency's exploration of Hegel's philosophy, yet by 1953 began to move in a different direction from Raya Dunayevskaya's development of Hegel's Absolute Idea.
Dunayevskaya contrasted the reaction of Boggs to Stalin's death in 1953 to that of production worker Charles Denby, the longtime editor of News & Letters. While Denby wrote of workers comparing Stalin to their foreman, Boggs said that the women workers to whom she spoke were more interested in hamburger recipes.
Boggs refers to Dunayevskaya's critique of her hamburger recipe account as an example of what was wrong with the old Left. However, Dunayevskaya's critique was prophetic. Boggs and her husband James Boggs remained with C.L.R. James when News and Letters Committees arose from Correspondence in 1955. Seven years later, the Boggses split with James and abandoned Marxism. The impetus for the split was a book written by James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook, in which he disparaged the revolutionary potential of the American working class. Grace and James Boggs thereafter moved toward a Third Worldist perspective and became apologists for various Third World dictators.
Today, Grace Boggs is a community activist living in Detroit. To her great credit, she cares about the City of Detroit and has done many positive things, such as advocating community gardening on the ever-increasing open fields in Detroit. She founded Detroit Summer, a youth program.
Unlike all too many self-styled community activists, Grace Boggs is not motivated by self-interest. But tragically, she long ago lost the vision that another world is possible, one that goes far beyond making life under capitalism tolerable.
--Dan B.
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