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According to Boggs, capitalism was to be understood as the progressive alienation of humanity’s natural powers into the things it produces. Eventually, however, this process will reach a point where all of humanity, all of its social essence, has been fully alienated into the means of production. But this thoroughgoing dehumanization of the indiviual, she argues, is at the same time the potential humanization of the world in its entirety. It is at that point that the objective conditions will finally be ripe to reclaim those powers, recover human essence, and definitively reconstitute the individual as a universal being. In her words, “Abstract labor reaches its most inhuman depths in machine production. But at the same time, it is only machine production which lays the basis for the fullest human development of concrete labor.”12

Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy

Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi September 27, 2013,

VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE

#workers inquiery #Viewpoint #Grace Lee Boggs #Johnson-Forest Tendency #abstract labour

In 1951, after breaking from Trotskyism altogether, the Johnson-Forest Tendency formed Correspondence, with a newspaper of the same name.6 Correspondence, whose first issue was released that November, was to be a new kind of paper. Principally written, edited, and distributed by workers themselves, it was intended to serve as a forum in which workers could share their own experiences. Reflecting the Tendency’s continued emphasis on the primacy of autonomous needs, each issue was deliberately divided into four sections – for factory workers, blacks, youth, and women – so that each sector of the broader working class would have its own independent space to discuss what concerned them most. The hope was that in writing about their lives, workers would come to see that their problems were not personal, but social. A 1955 editorial titled “Gripes and Grievances” stated the purpose of the paper: “When millions of workers are expressing the same gripe about their job, the foreman, the union, and the company, it is no longer a gripe, it becomes a social problem. That gripe or grievance no longer affects just this or that individual, it affects all of society.”7 The objective of the paper, then, was to make people realize the universality of their seemingly particular experiences, by providing a space where they could be disseminated. Drawing an analogy to polio, which, they claimed, was once considered a personal problem before being accepted as a social concern, the editors argued that the whole point of Correspondence was to change public attitudes on decisive questions. The goal of the workers’ paper, to put it another way, was to raise consciousness.

Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy

Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi September 27, 2013,

VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE