The revolutionary task of self-activity: a note on Grace Lee Boggs

In the postwar years, Grace Lee Boggs developed her defining contribution to Marxist social theory within a tight group of theorists and activists dissenting from the official doctrine of Stalinism and, later, of Trotskyism: the Johnson-Forest Tendency (later Correspondence). Named after its initiators, CLR James (Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest), this Trotskyist splinter group elaborated an original theoretical position that soon forced them to sever their ties with the Old Left and anticipate some of the themes of the New Left. While the figure of James usually looms large in historical accounts of the group, their political position was borne out of intense internal debate, one in which the political contribution of its women is not often highlighted.This short essay lends a renewed focus to those arcane debates, as they constitute the core of Grace Lee Boggs’s contribution to a version of Marxism, one both humane and emancipatory in its vision.