41 | James Boggs and the Problem of Rights under Capitalism

What's Left of Philosophy

In this episode we discuss James Boggs’s 1963 The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. We talk about Boggs’s materialist conception of rights as “what you make and what you take.” In Boggs we find a novel conception of rights that are grounded in social power. We delve into the dangers automation and structural unemployment present to rights to life and happiness while wondering if a “workless” society would truly be a better one. In the end, we extend a figleaf to egalitarian liberals and offer to heal their psychic distress by showing them that they are already revolutionaries (comrades, join us: the water's fine!).

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References:

James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, with a New Introduction by Grace Lee Bogs and Additional Commentary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).

James Boggs, “Toward a New Concept of Citizenship,” in Pages from A Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, ed. Stephen M. Ward, with an Afterword by Grace Lee Boggs (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011).

C.L.R. James, “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States,” at https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1948/07/meyer.htm

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com