An Ending and a Beginning: James Boggs, C. L. R. James, and The American Revolution

Abstract

This essay describes the evolution of James Boggs's thinking during the decade leading up to the publication of his book The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook in 1963. The essay focuses on ideological differences between Boggs and C. L. R. James when they were leaders of Correspondence, a small political organization that James had founded. These differences, which revolved around Marxist theory and the revolutionary agency of the American working class and the black struggle during the 1950s and early 1960s, reveal Boggs's increasing challenge to Marxism and articulation of new theoretical spaces that would undergird his unique analysis of Black Power and mark the next stage of his intellectual and political career. The essay begins by outlining the organizational and political context in which these debates between James Boggs and C. L. R. James occurred. Then it examines the two primary moments of their debate—the first in 1956–57 and the second in 1961–62—revealing both the theoretical and political contexts out of which Boggs produced The American Revolution. In tracing Boggs's thinking in relation to and in conflict with C. L. R. James, the essay also helps to situate James Boggs and his contributions to black thought within the larger history of black radicalism.