LIVING FOR CHANGE

THOUGHTS ON LABOR DAY

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, Sept. 9-15, 2007

Labor Day was once a civic holiday, a day when millions of American workers and their families gathered in downtowns across the nation to honor the struggles of workers and their contributions to the well-being and prosperity of our country.

Now for most workers it’s a day to shop at the mall, barbecue in the backyard, spend a last weekend at the summer cottage.

This privatization of Labor Day reflects the painful reality that the American people have allowed global capitalism to reduce us to consumers whose main concern is access to cheap goods, even though we know that this access has been achieved by outsourcing or the destruction of our identity as workers.

Down through the ages Work has been one of the most important means by which societies were civilized. Through Work we not only produced the goods and services needed to survive; we also formed our moral character. We developed our gifts and skills, discovered the causal relationship between effort and result, and disciplined ourselves. By cooperating with others, we overcame our inborn egocentricity.

That is why it has become so urgent to resist consumerism and create a new identity for ourselves, an identity that includes meaningful Work for everyone, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or national origin, and also the responsibilities of citizenship. Until a significant number of Americans accepts this challenge, our society will continue to deteriorate.

Fortunately, as we enter the 21st century, the interlocking crises of global warming. the illegal Iraq war, de-industrialized cities, disintegrating communities, a widening gulf between haves and have-nots, and the escalating joblessness and incarceration of inner city youth, are challenging us to begin building local economies and communities to resist destruction of our humanity and of life on earth by global capitalism.

We do not have to beg Ford and GM to give us back dehumanizing jobs - so they can lay us off again. Instead of allowing ourselves to be defined by them as only producers or consumers, we can redefine ourselves as active citizens, deciding by the local enterprises we create and our consumer choices what our communities and what our country should look like.

In the 19th and 20th centuries critical human values like community and self-government were neglected because the main objective of western societies was rapid economic development to overcome material scarcity. To achieve this objective, African Americans were enslaved and Native Americans exterminated.

In the process of production Work was replaced by Labor which bosses sought to de-skill and eliminate to increase profits. Workers struggled for shorter work hours and higher wages to compensate for their dehumanization in the workplace.

However, now that the achievement of material abundance has reduced us to consumers and also created a planetary emergency, the time is ripe to build a movement to create a new human identity for ourselves as active citizens and community-builders.

As Mike Wimberly explained last week in ‘Work We Can Put our Hearts Into,” it will take a profoundly spiritual movement like the civil rights movement to bring about this transformation.

We’ll need not only the soul-uplifting meetings and singing of the civil rights movement but highly-disciplined, non-violent prolonged struggles like the Montgomery Bus Boycott which told the world that the struggle against racism was not only a struggle for black rights but to take this country to a higher level of human relationships.

We’ll need exciting examples of how Work we can put our hearts into, as contrasted with Labor or Jobs done only for a pay check, transforms workers into citizens and thereby reverses our country’s decline into barbarism at home and abroad.

Before his assassination 40 years ago, Dr. King recognized that the crisis of the Vietnam War and the urban rebellions was rooted in our country’s pursuit of rapid economic and technological growth at the expense of participation and community. So he called for a radical revolution in values against racism, materialism and militarism. For example, he said, young people “in our dying cities” need direct actions that transform themselves and their surroundings at the same time.

That is why, fifteen years ago, we created Detroit Summer, an intergenerational, multicultural program/movement to involve young people in rebuilding, redefining, respiriting Detroit from the ground up.

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