The Political Ecology of James and Grace Lee Boggs

Abstract

James and Grace Lee Boggs have been recognized for their activism, their urban agriculture projects in Detroit, and their analysis of automation. However, the important connections between these have largely been neglected. This essay argues that there is a pressing need to return to their work because of its historically grounded theorization of the relationship between automation, land, and racialized distributions of the human. Their scientific Black Power rethought work and politics in the “cyber-cultural era” of the 1960s, which they argued was a contradictory conjuncture in racial capitalism, connected to histories of automated and mechanized “undevelopment” and organized scarcity. They argued that urban land, characterized by waste and toxicity in the aftermath of Fordist capitalism, must be the starting place for a remaking of human-being-in-the-world through postgrowth, postscarcity economies that recognize the links between historic forms of racialized dispossession and environmental destruction.