From Class Struggle To Identity Politics

Grace Lee Boggs(1915-2015)is a Chinese American revolutionary who devoted her entire life to the black movements and the community building of Detroit.Starting off as a Marxist,she drifted away from traditional Marxism and grew closer to American-born identity politics but remained different from the both.Despite her uniqueness,she has drawn limited academic attention,and relatively more of the existing studies are biographical accounts.Within the restricted amount of studies on Grace's thoughts,there is still room for a complete review of her philosophical development and a systematic comparison of her ideas with other related theories.Hence,Grace's distinct trajectory of thoughts has not been explained sufficiently.Given that enabling an American revolution is a central theme of her publications,this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach of intellectual history to examine a plausible explanation:Grace's philosophy of revolution is an outcome of the Americanization of the European-born Marxist-Leninist revolution.In order to discern Grace's special way of Americanizing Marxism,this thesis first reviews Grace's thoughts from 1940 to 2015,then compares them with both the logic of Marxist-Leninist class struggle and that of identity politics.It contends that Grace's earlier idea of the American revolution can be summarized as a"colored" humanistic class struggle that guards against dogmatism.Although,in her redefinition of revolution,she sided with identity politics on the advocacy of non-violence,she maintained the principle of traditional Marxism because her concern for the whole humanity transcends that of an identity group,and her ultimate pursuit was to fight against capitalism.Besides,instead of collective actions against the "other" based on a static identity,Grace proposes self-transformation in small-scale and decentralized movements in local communities.This thesis further concludes that Grace's modification of Marist-Leninist revolution and differences from identity politics are due to the assessment of America's temporal position in the development of human civilization,the awareness of American characteristics,and the attempt to solve American problems.It locates Grace's thoughts in the larger intellectual background and reveals her insights for the transformation of the political and social environment in today's America.