LIVING FOR CHANGE
ANOTHER U.S. IS POSSIBLE
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, May 6-12, 2007
On June 27 thousands of social justice activists from all over the country will gather at the first U.S. Social Forum (USSF) in Atlanta, Ga.
This gathering, like other regional, national and international Social Forums in the last six years, was inspired by the first “Another World is Possible” World Social Forum in Puerto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. Since that 2001 gathering of about 20,000, much larger gatherings have been held, in Puerto Alegre (2002, 2003, 2005) and in Mumbai, India (2004), Caracas, Venezuela (2006), Nairobi, Kenya (2007).
European Social Forums have also been convened in Athens, London and Paris; and regional U.S. Social Forums in the Midwest, in Boston, and in Durham, N.C.
Like other Social Forums, the June 27-July 1 USSF will include hundreds of workshops, music, drama, parades and plenary sessions. You can get a sense of the excitement and energy at these forums from a 20 minute video produced by Moving Images/www.movingimages.org/
I wish I could attend but June is turning out to be a very busy month. From June 22-24 the 9th annual Allied Media Conference, organized by a team of activists including the Detroit Summer Collective, takes place at Wayne State University. This year's theme is developing participatory media that empowers the producer and receiver, transformative media that breaks silence and builds movements. I have agreed to take part in three sessions.
Detroit-City of Hope is also organizing an event to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Rebellion, and a ”Raise the Roof” party is being planned to celebrate my 92nd birthday by raising the money to repair the Boggs Center roof.
If I went to Atlanta, I’d make sure to connect with YES magazine and the Positive Futures Network (PFN) staff. They host several sessions, including one with David Korten, author of “The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.”
I also recommend the “Another Politics Is Possible: Living the Vision from Below and to the Left." panel being convened by Eric Tang, a New York-based Asian American organizer.
In his invitation to me to be on this panel, Eric writes that it “will focus on models of organizing and movement building that work off the premise that we must learn how to once again live the vision, to adopt a ‘revolution of values’(as you've noted vis-a-vis MLK) that re-grounds our politics in a person-oriented society. Interestingly, there is a new generation of organizers promoting these very ideas in labor and community organizing. Your participation on the panel would certainly shed some light on how such ideas have long been discussed in the US social justice movement. “
These Social Forums provide great opportunities for activists to imagine, project and struggle for serious alternatives to global capitalism. In an important little book Immanuel Wallerstein calls this “Utopistics” as contrasted with Utopias. Utopias, he says, tend to breed illusions and therefore inevitably disillusion. But Utopistics involves the “sober, rational and realistic evaluations of human social systems, the constraints on what they can be and the zones open to human creativity.”
The first thing we need for Utopistics is to think holistically, consciously reuniting Science, Politics and Morality, and including a sense of social timing. We need to heal the philosophic split between the True and the Good, between the Technical and the Ethical, which, beginning with Cartesian rationalism in the 17th century, elevated scientists into our intellectual masters and gave capitalism free rein with no concern for the human and environmental destruction inherent in limitless expansion.
Now that capitalism’s chickens are coming home to roost, we need to create a vision of an alternative to capitalism so that we can begin moving towards it, recognizing that there is no guarantee of victory but taking maximum advantage of the “free will factor” in a period of transition.
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