The Look of 21st Century Revolutions


Grace Lee Boggs & Jimmy Boggs
By Grace Lee Boogs

This is an exciting time for movement activists. All over the world ordinary people are engaged in initiatives to make the places where they live, work and play safer, healthier, and more Life-centered.
In Subsaharan Africa tens of thousands of grassroots groups are organizing to end hunger, protect the environment and achieve self-reliance by planting trees, diversifying cereal, fruit and vegetable crops, and building village granaries. The size of the groups varies: 15-20 in some cases, 100-200 in others. Everywhere women are in the majority and providing the leadership. In Kenya alone there may be 15,000-25,000 women's groups. These groups are also changing centuries-old social relationships --not only encouraging women and young people to speak up but regulating dowries and other costly ceremonies celebrating birth, marriage and death.1
In Bangladesh Grameen banks (Grameen is the Bangla word for rural ) have been organized in thousands of villages with mostly women members. These banks are based on the idea that people's participation, not technology, is the key to socioeconomic development and that the best way to combat poverty is to act as a group. Small groups of Grameen members borrow money from the bank for all kinds of economic activities, such as manufacturing fans, boats and umbrellas or raising milk cows. The group collectively decides who gets a loan and for how much. Only after the first two members have demonstrated their readiness to make regular repayment are the next two eligible for loans. In this way members collectively nurture the four Grameen principles: discipline, unity, courage and hard work.2
In the United States communities of Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and Appalachian whites, organized in the Environmental Justice Movement, are struggling against toxic waste and polluting industries and beginning to face the challenge of creating alternative modes of production.3
In Detroit, since the new Mayor, Dennis Archer, took over in l994, there has been an explosion of community meetings all focused on the rebuilding of Detroit. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, attend the meetings called or sponsored by the new administration to discuss the Land Use Task Force Report, Empowerment Zone plans or how to create a Healthy Detroit. Other meetings, convened by local community groups to revitalize a particular area, are smaller but no less important. For example, Mack Alive meets regularly to explore how the seven principles of Kwanzaa (Unity, Self-Determination, Collective Work and Responsibility, Cooperative Economics, Purpose, Creativity and Faith) can help renovate an especially blighted strip in my east side neighborhood. The Detroit River Greenways Initiative meets to promote the aesthetic and recreational values of the river. Recently Detroit Summer met with Friends of Woodward Ave., a group committed to redeveloping a rundown section just below the Cultural Center.
Detroit Summer also hosts youth dialogues with civic, community and business leaders. Some meetings are just part of an ongoing search: friends start out discussing crime, shrinking incomes and what is happening to our young people and end up saying that we need to think differently about economics, not only to meet our basic needs for food, clothing and shelter but also to create the ties with one another across class and generational lines which once enabled blacks to survive as a people. On the east side a group of elders calling themselves "The Gardening Angels," plant pesticide-free community gardens to produce healthier food for themselves and to instill respect for nature and process in young people.
These groups share certain qualities. The most important is hope. In the last 15 months there has been a rebirth of the hope with which all movements begin. Individual hope was what once brought generations of Detroiters to the city to work in industry. Now it is becoming collective. City-wide meetings are mixed, reflecting the ethnic diversity of the city. Those meeting seem to understand that the rebuilding of Detroit will take time -- there is no quick fix -- andthat we cannot deal with issues in isolation. Community, environment, employment, education, culture, governance are all interconnected. There is a shared understanding that our basic needs are spiritual as well as physical. We need love and respect for one another and a renewal of our spiritual and civic lives, as much as we need a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. Our focus is Detroit, the local space for which we are responsible, but we are also aware that what we do in Detroit has national and even international implications. There is
more humility than in other groups struggling for fundamental change that I have known in the past, a recognition that the challenge we face is so monumental that no one individual, no one group has the answer; we need to listen to one another. Also in sharp contrast to the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 60s, women play a prominent role in almost all groups, and even those convened by corporate sponsors recognize the need for community input, e.g. the recent conference convened by the Michigan Economic and Environmental Roundtable to explore the revitalization of the inner city because urban sprawl threatens outlying suburbs with ground water pollution, shrinking farmlands and more neighbors of color.
Thus quietly but unmistakably out of the devastation created by de-industrialization and years of grasping at straws by an administration unprepared for corporate abandonment, a new concept of economics as if people, communities, nature and spirit matter is emerging in the center of the First World as it is emerging at the grassroots level in Africa and Bangladesh.

Beyond the Market and the State

Grassroots struggles have always been necessary to effect progressive changes at the state level. The 1935 Wagner Act guaranteeing unions the right to collective bargaining would never have been enacted had it not been for sit-down strikes in auto and rubber. At the beginning of World War II President Roosevelt only issued Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense industry hiring because hundreds of thousands of blacks were mobilized to march on Washington. The Civil Rights Acts of l964-65 were passed because mass sit-ins and demonstrations culminating in Mississippi Freedom Summer had already delegitimized racial segregation and discrimination.
Today's grassroots initiatives, however, are a new historical phenomenon. Going beyond rights, people are collectively and locally exploring new ways of meeting our material needs and at the same time living in harmony with each other and with nature. Therefore they have the potential for creating an alternative to both the state-controlled socialist economies which have manifestly failed and the competitive global economy which is proving so destructive of local communities and the natural environment.
When I became a movement activist more than half a century ago the only two economic systems competing for public support were capitalism and socialism. Capitalism maintained hegemony because of its tremendous productivity. But in the wake of two World Wars, the Russian revolution and the Great Depression, this hegemony was being challenged. In the 50s and 60s, most newly-independent Third World countries looked to the Soviet Union as a model because it had achieved rapid economic and technological development through state planning and control of the economy. In those days rapid industrial and technological development was the accepted goal; practically everyone assumed that it would resolve all problems. Native Americans, because they had not bought into the scientific rationalism of Western Civilization, were the only ones consistently warning of the threats to our communities and our planet from economic and technological development.4
Now, as we approach the 21st century, the Soviet Union has collapsed, the gulf between the rich nations of the North and the impoverished nations of the South has become a chasm, and life on our planet is threatened by global warming. All over the world, from the savannahs of Africa and the asphalt ghettoes of Detroit and Southcentral Los Angeles to rural communities in New England, people need a new dream, a new vision of how to make our livings in a way that will protect our local communities and our environment, empower us to make the decisions that are crucial to our daily lives, and help us raise our children to become useful and responsible citizens.
That is why progressive people all over the world resonated to the Chiapas revolt which began January 1, l994 in southeastern Mexico. The Chiapas revolt, according to Mexican political analyst Gustava Esteva, was "the first revolution of the 2lst century" because "unlike the revolutions of the 20th century [which] were contests for state power, the struggle of the indigenous people of Chiapas statewas for greater local autonomy, economic justice and political rights within the borders of their own communities. They did not call on their fellow Mexicans to take up arms against the state, but rather to join them in a broad social movement calling for the liberation of local spaces from colonization by alien political and economic forces."5

A Life Committed to Visioning

Jimmy Boggs, my husband and comrade in struggle for 40 years, died July 22, l993. In one of his last published articles he wrote: "We have to change our thinking about jobs. Instead of asking how we can make a living, we need to ask ourselves how we can make our living in a way that will also enhance the way we live with one another and with Nature."6
Jimmy never stopped asking this question of himself and others. Soon after he started working at the Chrysler-Jefferson plant in 1940, he aligned himself with the various radical groups in the union, welcoming their anti-capitalist, anti-racist stands, admiring their willingness to take risks, learning from them but always wondering why they had such difficulty explaining to American workers why they should be socialists. The answer, he decided, had to be in Marx's concept of Socialism. So he went back to Marx and discovered that the founder of scientific socialism, developing his vision in l9th century societies of scarcity, conceived socialism as the stage between capitalism and Communism when the workers, having taken power, used their control of the state to rapidly develop the productive forces in order to create the abundance necessary for Communism, i.e., the classless society in which each gives according to his abilities and receives according to his needs. In 20th century U.S.A., however, the abundance for a classless society has already been created under capitalism. No wonder American radicals couldn't explain to American workers why they should be socialists! ( "The American Revolution: Pages From A Negro Worker's Notebook", Monthly Review, 1963).
Having discovered why socialism did not appeal to American workers, Jimmy resolved to do for 20th century America what Marx had done for l9th century Europe: create a vision of an alternative to capitalism that would inspire ordinary people, while at the same time participating in and projecting concrete struggles that would take us towards that goal.
Thus, throughout the l960s when other Black Power advocates were projecting Black Power chiefly as the replacement of white faces for black ones, Jimmy insisted that Black Power be viewed "as the key not only to black liberation but to the introduction of a new society which would economically emancipate the masses of the people in general." ("Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time has Come" 1967, in Racism and the Class Struggle, p. 60). Two years later in the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party he spelled out "How Black Power Will Revolutionize America" including proposals for the transformation of production, distribution, transportation, education, Work, Welfare, the role of women, elders, youth, housing, health etc.
In May l972, when Detroit was getting ready to elect its first black mayor, Jimmy warned participants in a Black Consciousness Conference at the University of Detroit that "Today's cities are on their last legs, decaying, dilapidated, plain worn-out. So that even when black politicians, black teachers, black administrators, black workers take over positions or jobs in the cities, whether these jobs are high or low, they are simply playing once again the scavenger role which blacks have always played in this country. Every black politician, every administrator who takes over a city or an institution, takes over a city or an institution in decay, disintegration and crisis. Every black policeman who joins the police force is from the very outset compelled to play the role of occupation army in the ghetto, no matter how anxious he may be to build the confidence of the community in him as a guardian and servant to the people." ("Blacks in the Cities: Agenda for the 70s," The Black Scholar, November l972)
Pointing out how automation and cybernation were making black workers, and especially black young people, superfluous, he challenged conferees to face some hard questions: "What kind of future do we hold out for these black youth? Do we view them, as white society views them, as a threat to law and order, and to our very lives and property?. Do you turn sympathetic liberal black faces to them, accepting their uselessness as human beings or as contributing citizens, but trying to make their uselessness more palatable by demanding that white folks provide better jails and prisons, higher Welfare payments?"
Unless we create a new more human reason to Work, he warned, we are going to find ourselves overwhelmed by black hustlers and criminals. "Capitalist society is unlike any previous society in that it has reduced all Work to Laborhas given to Work only the material or economic value in the form of wage or salary that you get at the end of the week or the month. At the same time it takes all the profits that are made from labor and invests them into machines which make the labor of millions of people increasingly unnecessary." Meanwhile, it "has corrupted most human beings to the point that they believe they should only engage in productive activity for individualistic materialistic reasons. At the same time more goods are obviously being produced every day than anyone needs or can use. So that the black masses who have no jobs and who have only materialistic reasons for working (to get money to buy goods) will end up hustling, if in that way they can get the same goods which were the only motivation this society gave them for working in the first place."
That is why we must reject the capitalist road and begin taking steps on to another road. To do this, we need to embrace certain principles:

  • put human beings first, rather than material goods or profits;
  • Put the interests of the collective, of the cooperative, of the community, first, over selfish, individual, egotistical, opportunistic interests or ambitions;
  • Develop creativity, resist becoming a cog in the machine;
  • Live by your convictions, don't be a hypocrite or an opportunist, A short-term gain just for oneself will almost always mean a long-term failure for the community. Don't just 'get mine';
  • Develop control from below, from within the community;
  • Be self-reliant and encourage self-reliance of the community;
  • Don't depend on government or on others to do things for you.

    Politically conscious Blacks, Jimmy insisted, must create a new vision of the city which gives hope to our young people, because the "sense of total frustration, of total uselessness as human beings, of total lack of hope in any future for black people in this country, is the basic human cause of the decay and decline of our cities." "Instead of the cities being what they are now -- the burial grounds of the hopes of the black masses -- they must become the organized cooperative form which people can use to serve one another more effectively. We must face the challenge of building the city as a new form where people can relate to each other on the basis of what they give each other in the form of service and where they can make decisions together to benefit the community. Instead of the city being the place from which profits are taken to expand technology outside the city, it must become the place where decentralized communities decide what should be done with any surpluses, always bearing in mind that the main goal of all our decisions is to enable more of our people, and particularly more of our young people, to contribute their energies, their imaginations, their creativity to the building of the community."

    For Lack of a Vision

    In January 1974 Coleman Young became the first black Mayor of a large industrial city. Young was born in the South in l918 but grew up on the rough streets of Detroit. Quick-witted and confrontational, he distinguished himself in countless struggles against racism and for labor unity, was an organizer for the National Negro Labor Council and the National Negro Congress, and became a hero in the black community in l952 when he accused HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) of itself being Un-American and declared that "If being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I am a Communist." In l964 he was elected to the Michigan State Senate as a Democrat.
    When Young became Mayor, the main contradiction facing Detroiters was racism, especially the racism of STRESS, the decoy scheme used by the police to trap (and often kill) blacks. Young's immediate steps to transform the police and other city departments created a new spirit of enthusiasm and hope in the city. Few people realized that we had entered a new economic era in which multinational corporations, with no loyalty to any community, city or even the nation, would be turning Detroit into a wasteland by exporting jobs overseas and replacing human beings with robots.
    By l980, however, so many corporations had abandoned Detroit that the administration was getting desperate. So Young offered millions in tax abatements to GM and, overriding widespread community opposition, bulldozed 1500 homes, 600 small businesses, sixteen churches and two hospitals so that GM could build the Poletown plant which it said would create 6000 jobs.7
    Jimmy vehemently opposed the Poletown deal. "We should know by now that the men who run GM have no allegiance to our communities," he wrote. "How long will we allow multinational corporations to have this power over us?. Let us begin to think and discuss our future as citizens of communities and of our country who are no longer content to be slaves and subjects." (What's Good for GM is Not Good for America, August 1980)8 A few months later he called on Americans to "refuse to accept the slot of Labor and Job Holder to which capitalism has reduced us." Instead, "as human beings and as citizens we can take responsibility for the struggles necessary to create a new economy, an economy which serves our deep human need for the kind of Work that develops our skills, encourages our cooperation and enables both men and women to work and share in building strong families and communities and in making political decisions for our communities and country." (A Job Ain't The Answer, February l981).
    By the mid-80s so many young people had given up hope of factory jobs paying enough to raise a family that a drug economy began to flourish in inner city neighborhoods. The result was increased crime and violence. Young's answer was to propose a Casino Industry which, he said, would provide 50,000 jobs. He called his opponents "Naysayers" and asked "What is your alternative?"
    Jimmy welcomed the challenge. "To rebuild Detroit," he replied, "we have to think of a new mode of production based upon serving human needs and the needs of the community and not on any get-rich-quick schemes." "If we are going to create hope especially for our young people, we have to stop seeing the city as just a place to which you come for a job or to make a living and start seeing it as the place where the humanity of people is enriched because they have the opportunity to live with people of many different ethnic and social backgrounds."
    "The foundation of our city," he continued, "has to be people living in communities who realize that their human identity or their Love and Respect for Self is based on Love and Respect for others and who have also learned from experience that they can no longer leave the decision as to their present and their future to the market place, to corporations or to capitalist politicians, regardless of ethnic background. We, the people, have to see ourselves as responsible for our city and for each other, and especially for making sure that our children are raised to place more value on social ties than on material wealth."
    "We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale production for the national and international market. We have to begin thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods and services for the local market, that is, for our communities and our city. Instead of destroying the skills of workers, which is what large-scale industry does, these small enterprises will combine craftsmanship, or the preservation and enhancement of human skills, with the new technologies which make possible flexible production and constant readjustment to serve the needs of local customers."
    "In order to create these new enterprises we need a view of our city which takes into consideration both the natural resources of our area and the existing and potential skills and talents of Detroiters."
    "We also need a fundamental change in our concept of Schools. Since World War II our schools have been transformed into custodial institutions where our children are housed for 12 years with no function except to study and get good grades so that they can win the certificates that will enable them to get a job. We have to create schools which are an integral part of the community, in which young people naturally and normally do socially necessary and meaningful work for the community, for example, keeping the school grounds and the neighborhood clean and attractive, taking care of younger children, growing gardens which provide food for the community, etc. ("Rebuilding Detroit: An Alternative to Casino Gambling," Public Speakout, June 24, l988).
    Thus, throughout the l980s, Jimmy was challenging Mayor Young on the most basic and most immediate issues. Young's position was that "Education, drugs, homelessness, unwed mothers, crime, you name itevery social issue is about jobs." "Jobs built Detroit, and only jobs will rebuild it."9 Therefore jobs should be created by any means necessary. Jobs brought us to the city, Jimmy countered, but Hi-Tech and global corporations are eliminating jobs. Therefore, especially for the sake of our young people, we need a new vision of the city as the organized cooperative form which people can use to serve one another more effectively. The only way we can reduce crime, he insisted, is by creating a new spirit of hope in young people based on a new attitude to Work and redefining or "re-civilizing" the city as a collection of communities. Meanwhile, as a step towards that goal he focussed on organizing in the community, participating in weekly neighborhood anti-crackhouse marches organized by We The People Reclaim Our Streets (WE-PROS) and developing a program, in the tradition of Mississippi Freedom Summer, to encourage youth volunteers to be of use in rebuilding Detroit communities. This program, now in its fourth year, is known as Detroit Summer. The current upsurge of Alternative Spring Break programs in universities all over the country shows the yearning in young people to reconnect with communities.

    Looking Forward

    In l993, after twenty years as Mayor, Coleman Young announced on the eve of the primary election that he would not run for a sixth term. Dennis Archer's subsequent election has engendered the hope, excitement and explosion of community meetings described at the beginning of this article. Archer's enthusiasm, energy and optimism are infectious. He is obviously a man who is respected by Establishment figures and who wants to reach out to the grassroots. Whether he has the imagination, the vision and the audacity to meet the daunting challenges of this period remains to be seen. Politically close to Clinton, he is a fairly conventional Democrat. Like Young he insists that jobs are the answer to crime. Nothing he says suggests that he has any misgivings about the global economy and its impact on communities. He is always expressing his confidence that Detroit can become a "world-class city" which is broad enough to accommodate the dreams of practically anyone. If he understands that the post-war years when Americans enjoyed a constantly rising standard of living are gone forever because we are no longer the only economic superpower, he hasn't shared that understanding with Detroiters.
    Archer acknowledges that his most serious mistake thus far was the failure to mobilize tens of thousands of community people to cut down on Devils Night arson and violence in l994, as Coleman Young did in the last few years of his administration. Thousands of Detroiters were ready to come out, just as thousands want to be engaged in the ongoing work of rebuilding Detroit, not just for one day or one week but week in and week out, not as a job but because they love Detroit and know that maintaining and rebuilding a city, like maintaining a house and neighborhood, takes ongoing care and work. Archer still has to demonstrate that he is a Movement leader, i.e., that he can create programs that meet the need of people to be of use and thereby stretch their humanity in the process of working hard for something they believe in.
    Nobody knows what the future will bring. It is going to take time, lots of time, to make Detroit into a 21st Century city. Five hundred years ago capitalism was emerging in the interstices of European feudalism, but it wasn't called capitalism or even recognized it as an "ism" until socialism emerged as an alternative system at the beginning of the 19th century. As we struggle to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit, we need to think in terms of decades, perhaps centuries, even as we plan our activities and actions for tomorrow and next week and next year--because the future depends on what we do in the present.

    Grace Lee Boggs has been a Movement activist since l940 when she left the university. With her husband, James Boggs, she co-authored Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, 1974. Currently she edits the Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD) Newsletter and works with Detroit Summer, Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice and Healthy Detroit.

    Notes

    1. See P. Pradervand, "Listening to Africa", Developing Africa from the Grassroots, New York l989.
    2. Andres Fuglesang & Dale Chandler: Participation as Process, "What we can learn from Grameen Bank Bangladesh", Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation l986.
    3. See Southern Exposure, Winter l993, for the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice adopted by the First People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, October l991. The Environmental Justice Movement includes such diverse groups as: Jesus People Against Pollution, Columbia, MS; People for Recovery in Chicago, IL; Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, Red Lake MN; Southwest Organizing Project, Albuquerque NM; Asian Pacific Environmental Network, San Francisco CA.
    4. See John Mohawk, "Deconstructing Utopia", The Permacultural Activist, August 1992.
    5. See David Korten, "A New Day's Coming", In Context #40.
    6. See The Northwest Detroiter, March 15, l993.
    7. See Jeanie Wylie, Poletown: Community Betrayed, University of Illinois Press, l989. Actually, until very recently the Poletown plant never employed more than 4000, mostly high seniority workers laid off from other shutdown GM plants.
    8. See Hard Stuff: The Auto-biography of Mayor Coleman Young, Viking l994, p. 249.
    9. See Young, ibid. pages 238 and 8.

    Articles and speeches by James Boggs can be obtained at a nominal cost from New Life Publishers, 161 W. Parkhurst, Detroit 48203.

    Back to the Index