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

Abstract

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.