The Great Turning... and a Most Peculiar Genealogy

 

By Gregory E. Doukas

 

Responsibility like genealogy can be traced to its source. As I finished my manuscript on political responsibility I found unique connections between the German-Jewish existentialism of Hannah Arendt and her mentor from Heidelberg, the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, and the U.S. and Caribbean Black Radical Tradition, particularly the thought of James and Grace Lee Boggs who were philosopher-activists in their beloved city of Detroit, Michigan. To begin, Jaspers, in Die Schuldfrage, or the “guilt question,” argued that political responsibility was an obligation we all share, whereas criminal, moral, and metaphysical responsibility must be faced separately, alone, as individuals. The difference is political life could demand things of us moral, legal, and metaphysical life never could. Political responsibility in this sense is how the famed autoworker turned Black revolutionary James Boggs describes the actions we must take to produce a better world. And yet I discovered during the writing of this manuscript the associations I was making were not strictly thematic but were grounded in a most peculiar genealogy. James and Grace Lee Boggs were using Jaspers’ ideas, although nobody in the literature has ever acknowledged Jaspers’ impact on their thought. One need only follow the citations to unearth this odd and most unexpected discovery.

Perhaps the most pathbreaking scholarship on Boggsean thought was penned in 2015 by Stephen M. Ward, who is a historian in University of Michigan’s Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and the Boggses’s “official” biographer. [1] His book, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs, traces the evolution of Boggsean thought from their work with C.L.R. James as part of the renegade faction of the Trotskyist Fourth International (Communist Party), and their work as editors of the globally circulated journal Correspondence, all the way through their split with James, the death of Jimmy Boggs, as well as Grace Lee Boggs’ solo writings, which she produced toward the end of her century-long life. Ward emphasizes how an evolution in thinking regarding what it means to engage in social struggle led ultimately to the concept of “visionary organizing” which was a phrase Grace used increasingly frequently toward the end of her life. However, despite the comprehensiveness of his account, the genealogical linkage between Jaspers and the Boggses was absent. Nobody knew about this genealogy, not even Ward! In the midst of my research, I found myself on the precipice of a genuine scientific discovery within the domain of intellectual history in the Black Radical Tradition (and European existentialism). Could it be that the Boggses were using Jaspers’ ideas without having read his work?

The Boggses were non-traditional Marxist dialecticians in that their thinking was shaped by a consciousness of racialized chattel slavery and global Blackness encompassing Jim Crow and racial apartheid in South Africa, as well as colonization in Latin America and Southeast Asia. As their thought evolved from participating in automobile plant union organizing, to becoming Black Power advocates, to later something much more closely resembling anarchists, a common thread running through their work was an anthropological preoccupation with production as a human activity that puts people in intimate relations with place, land, planet, and the idiosyncratic resources offered by one’s unique regional consciousness.

For instance, in “Rebuilding Detroit: An Alternative to Casino Gambling” (1988), James Boggs explained that the city he so beloved did not have to sell out under the leadership of its first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young, who was bent on inviting Wall Street in when its citizens were strapped for cash, facing endemic joblessness, and were struck with feelings of social superfluity and uselessness. Instead, the city and its people should tap into the region’s Great Lakes to develop its fishing market. This would put people to work building docks and cleaning facilities that would provide the entire state with fresh fish. Michigan also has some of the finest sands in the world. Historically used in foundries, this sand could be used to produce glass for energy saving windows to heat homes during wintertime as well as greenhouses where communities could grow their own food year round. Suggestions such as these were inspired by Boggs’ reflections on what efforts to revolutionize cities could be possible if activists were open to learning from the region’s Indigenous and First Nation peoples. Though he also thought native Detroiters should transform the abandoned lots left over from a bygone era of automobile plants into urban gardens, twenty-first century schools, and community centers. They could even house sustainable fashion and clothing centers, as Boggs thought it was a travesty most of Detroit’s Black artists routinely fled to New York and Los Angeles, thinking  Detroit had nothing to offer them and no place to develop their talents.

This focus on producing oneself through the production of one’s environment and one’s food, energy, and interpersonal resources at local and regional levels was James Boggs’ answer to the solidification of corporate globalization and the commodification of every feature of our human and social relationships, including our imaginations, by entities that treat citizens as passive consumers rather than active and responsible human beings. This included the problem of joblessness which was of particular relevance to Black men in Detroit since the capitalist economy and its new technologies had, for half a century at least, been unrelenting in putting people out of work. When Mayor Young proposed building casino-style gambling in Detroit to replace the many thousands of jobs lost when automobile manufacturers abandoned the city, Boggs had the courage to note that these jobs were gone forever. In place of capitalist labor, a revolutionary philosophy of work (and community and institution building) was needed to produce a world where Detroiters felt they had a place to belong again and to which they felt responsible.

These ideas evolve through the Boggses many writings. For example, they appear in Grace Lee Boggs’ capstone text The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (2011), where she argues that urban gardens in Detroit were where Black people, queers, environmental activists, teachers, the old and young grew not only food but also their souls. Growing souls is what she imagines it means to take responsibility for confronting society’s deepest contradictions, or what I call Dialectical Political Responsibility, which is my book’s title. Dialectical political responsibility goes beyond Jaspers’ notion of political responsibility, which describes the virtues of exemplary citizenship and instead highlights what it means to confront the contradiction of technological overdevelopment and political (i.e. human) underdevelopment in Global Northern society.

For Grace Lee Boggs, the Haitian slave rebellions and Montgomery Bus Boycott were two of the first examples in human history of a dialectical or “two-sided” model of social transformation where people endeavored to create new institutions and new, more politically responsive and empathetic human beings. Boggs saw a direct line running from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the novel kind of organizing around food, art, and education native Detroiters began doing in the 1990s and 2000s. She thought this new movement was indisputable evidence that humanity had entered a period of revolutionary change that promised to be as profound as 10,000 years ago when our species exited the neolithic revolution and entered the pre-industrial age. Today, we are now exiting 10,000 years of pre-industrial and industrial society and are experiencing a species-wide transition she calls the “Great Turning,” where thousands if not millions of humans have decided to stop thinking of themselves as victims, go beyond protest politics, and grow their souls by building towns and cities through acts of increasingly elevated local and regional consciousness. There is no telling whether the Great Turning will take hold in time for humanity to survive planetary catastrophe caused by climate change and fascism, but for Boggs, this transition has already begun.

The idea of a Great Turning is, importantly, not Boggsean in origin. It derives from a set of white intellectuals, most prominent among them Buddhist writer Joanna Macy and religious historian Karen Armstrong, whose work was influential on the Boggses. Readers may be unsurprised to learn these writers were introduced to the concept of a “Great Turning” through the writings of Karl Jaspers, specifically his existential-anthropological critique of G.W.F. Hegel’s racist philosophy of history, where Jaspers presents his Axial Age thesis. In The Origin and Goal of History, Jaspers argues that human Reason did not develop in stages, as Hegel suggests, but rather burst onto the historical scene all at once during the same, albeit very elastic, historical period. After the neolithic revolution, developments in agriculture and the use of bronze supported greater populations and therefore more powerful societies than ever before. Our ancestors began to live in cities and empires. In such contexts, quintessentially human activities such as religion, politics, philosophy, and medicine were invented in the forms most recognizable today, as were visionary intellectuals associated with these traditions. There, according to John Boy and John Torpey in “Inventing the Axial Age,” arose the Pharaohs and philosophers of ancient KmT, or present-day Egypt and Sudan, as well as “Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Buddha and the authors of the Upanishads in India, the Hellenic philosophers and poets, and historians in Greece, the Hebrew prophets in Palestine'' (242). These religious and intellectual figures all rose to prominence during a moment in time Jaspers calls the “axis” of world history, which for him marks an awakening: the beginning of our species’ collective existential journey toward ever more politically responsible societies.

Both Macy and Armstrong argue that we are entering a second or third Axial Age, which they call a Great Turning. For Armstrong, there is much that remains mysterious about all Axial periods, but they each embody the conditions for quantum leaps in consciousness of human suffering caused by techne-logos or scientific rationality and how the instrumentalist attitude can encroach upon our relations with one another. Thus, there are always periods where human beings struggle to achieve forms of disalienation because they are dissatisfied with the notion of being human that the hegemonic society has projected onto them. Today, Armstrong argues in A Short History of Myth that expanding our concept of humanity will require embracing the fact that we are myth-producers and meaning-makers, not simply cogs in an economic machine intelligible to a particular form of Euro-modern scientific rationality (80, 119). For better or worse, this is the version of Jaspers’ idea informing the Boggses’s freedom dreams; the one occasioning this most peculiar genealogy which I here bring to you. Central to understanding its stakes is this. During the first Axial Age, some visionary leaders had to take dialectical political responsibility for rethinking what it means to be a human being. During each subsequent Great Turning event, our notion of being human was expanded beyond what was previously thought possible.

Today, as we are in a post-pandemic period confronted by overlapping existential and planetary challenges, some within our ranks will have to muster the courage to lead. We will have to prove humanity is not doomed to be dominated by corporate globalization and fascism, and that we will struggle to forge the kinds of social and political relationships that disalienate while providing that utterly fragile yet powerful experience so vital to our survival called belonging. This might mean inventing new traditions, myths, and forms of institutional life. 

The human being of the future is more responsible and empathetic, open to both the world and to shouldering the dialectical relationship between local and global, people and planet. The Great Turning is a reality, at least in the Global North. Do we have the courage to do what Grace Lee Boggs called for over a decade ago, which is to simply get on board? In centuries past, Marxists created vanguard parties and sought to build centralized mass movements. Today, at least in Detroit, they struggle to grow souls, which involves more than politics as usual but the arts, music, a new model of education encompassing community schools that hark back to the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, and urban gardens. Efforts to grow their own food is made possible by the ancestral knowledge Black people in the U.S. have developed through their experiences with enslavement on plantations and as sharecroppers, which makes Detroit’s food revolution deeply ironic. But Detroiters have plugged into the Great Turning for good reason: they have too.

Due to the rising cost of food produced in California on factory farms and environmental racism in Detroit and its neighbor Flint—where residents are forced to contend with poison rain, brownfields, and lead contaminated water—human beings have joined a quiet revolution. Through the Great Turning, they have begun an experiment in utopian post-industrial urbanism that, at least on the surface, looks eerily similar to the sharecropping past their parents and grandparents sought to escape. However, this labor is something much more.

Growing souls has, thanks to Jaspers and the Boggses’s visionary work, become a vital part of what it means to be revolutionary. It defines the modalities of political activism that will shape what the Boggses call the next American revolution. [2] And it does so to address the existential challenges our species will continue to face in the twenty-first century all around our planet. Thus, participating in the Great Turning involves acts that reflect a planetary consciousness and an appreciation of “deep historical time” always inspired by a sense of political responsibility.


Notes

[1] I call Ward the Boggses “official” biographer because he wrote what I consider the authoritative account of their time working on the Correspondence journal and because he is on the board of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center for Nurturing Community Leadership. This is not an official appointment, as far as I am aware.

[2] See James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs. Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008.

References

  • Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. New York, NY: Canongate. 2005.

  • Boggs, Grace Lee and Scott Kurashige. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012.

  • Boggs, James. “Rebuilding Detroit: An Alternative to Casino Gambling.” Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Ed. Stephen M. Ward. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011.

  • Boy, John D. and John Torpey. “Inventing the Axial Age: The Origins and Uses of a Historical Concept.” Theory and Society 42:3 (2013): 241-259.

  • Jaspers, Karl. The Question of German Guilt. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2000.

  • Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. New York, NY: Routledge. 2021.

  • Ward, Stephen M. In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2016.

Cover Photo Credit: Madjeen Isaac, “In the Palm of Our Hands,” 2020.

Gregory E. Doukas is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy and Society at Babson College. His forthcoming monograph is entitled Dialectical Political Responsibility. He is also a fellow at the Academy for Advanced African Studies in Bayreuth, Germany, where he will be completing a second monograph on decolonial theory and West Africa called How Not to Decolonize.

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