We must be the change
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Feb. 9-15, 2003
Part III
In his civil rights years King had drawn mainly on Gandhišs ideas of
non-violence. After 1996 he still emphasized non-violence but he began to
draw more on Gandhi's profound critiques of Western civilization.
In 1888, when he was the age of many of you here today, Gandhi's family, like
most of yours, wanted him to succeed in the system. So they sent him to London
to study law. Eager to justify the sacrifices his family was making on his
and their behalf, Gandhi tried to transform himself into an English
gentleman. He signed up for a dancing class, bought himself a silk hat and
spent ten minutes every day before a huge mirror, watching himself arrange his
tie and parting his hair in the correct fashion. In a passage from his
autobiography, amazingly similar to the one in which Malcolm X describes
pouring lye on his kinky hair to make it as straight as any white manšs,
Gandhi writes: "My hair was by no means soft, and every day it meant a regular
struggle with the brush to keep it in position."
However, after returning to India with his law degree and finding it
difficult to make a living, Gandhi decided to try his luck in South Africa
where there was a sizable community of Indian workers imported to do the
menial work below the dignity of Europeans. As he experienced racist
violence against himself and witnessed it against Indian workers and blacks,
he began to identify with the most oppressed, conquered his feelings of
inadequacy and his fear of the system, recognized the moral bankruptcy of
those in power, and separated himself from their values.
In this process, which continued after he return to India, Gandhi created a
new form of struggle based not on physical violence but on the spiritual power
of Truth and Love (which he called satyagraha) and developed personal habits,
such as celibacy and vegetarianism, that enabled him to experience the
freedom and power that come from self-discipline. He also arrived at
amazingly prescient critiques of Western civilization and Western strategies
for revolutionary struggle.
The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an awareness
of our interconnectedness with one another and with the universe, according to
Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological
development over human and community development. Advanced technology has made
it possible for people to perform miracles but it has impoverished us
spiritually because it has made us feel that who and what we are is
determined by outside forces. Traditional societies lacked our material
comforts and conveniences. But individuals had more Soul, or a belief in
the individual's power to make moral choices, because these societies valued
the community relationships which they depended on for survival.
Because modern societies, capitalist or communist, are committed to
unlimited growth, Gandhi anticipated that they would eventually become so
gigantic and complex that human beings would be reduced to masses,
dependent on experts, serving machines instead of being served by them.,
Moreover, the abundance created by pursuing unlimited economic growth would
make it almost impossible for people to distinguish between Needs and Wants,
so that we/they would end up being enslaved by the temptations of material
wealth and luxuries, a form of bondage he considered even more cruel than
physical enslavement.
For similar reasons Gandhi rejected Western strategies for revolutionary
struggle that depend upon constantly agitating the masses and increasing their
anger, militancy and rebellion. Struggles of this kind, he said, can only
end up with political leaders who are preoccupied with prestige and power
and with states dominating rather than serving society. The struggle for
independence from Britain, he insisted, should not be mainly a struggle for
state power but should revolve around going to people at the grassroots,
encouraging them to transform their inner and outer lives, helping them to
think for themselves and to create self-reliant local communities based on
Work that preserves rather than destroys skills and encourages cooperation
rather than competition, and Education whose goal is the building of
community rather than increasing the status and earning power of the
individual.
When Gandhi was developing these ideas and organizing these struggles nearly a
hundred years ago, they seemed idealistic and far-fetched. But as I
reflect on the last century and recall how it began with high hopes in mass
production, in the Russian revolution and in Third World struggles for
political independence, and ended up with the de-industrialization and
devastation of cities like Detroit , the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
seemingly endless violence in post-colonial nations, I believe that Gandhišs
critique of Western civilization, which was also King's, can help us build a
21st century movement to create post-industrial societies in which
governments derive their power from self-reliant grassroots communities.
We will never know how King would have developed had he lived to see the
21st century. What we do know is that in the thirty-five years since his
death,. our communities have been turned into wastelands by the Hi Tech
juggernaut and the export of first, factory and, now, computer jobs overseas
so that global corporations can make more profit with cheaper labor. We have
witnessed and shared the suffering of countless numbers of young people in
our inner cities who, in their struggle to survive, have resorted to hustling
and ended up in prisons. We have watched our young people shooting baskets
24/7, with dreams of making it in the NBA. We donšt know whether to weep or
rejoice as we watch others, like Tupac, struggling to make it in the Hip Hop
world.
Like King after 1966 we have wondered what we should say to the 40/50% of
inner city youth who reject the pleas and promises of the establishment and
their parents to stay in schools and get their diplomas so that they can get
a good job, make a lot of money and move out of our disintegrating
communities. And it is not only inner city youth. Suburban schools are
riddled with substance abuse and haunted by fears of another Columbine. On
campuses young people with bacheloršs degrees, unable to find meaningful work
and unwilling to accept work without meaning, linger on to become
professional students.
The 9/11 terrorist attack was a terrible crime against humanity but it was
also a wakeup call, challenging us to take Gandhišs and Kingšs critique of
Western civilization seriously. As Wendell Berry pointed out so
perceptively in his Thoughts in the Presence of Fear, written a month later.
"We can no longer accept uncritically the belief that economic growth and
technology are only good....We now have a clear inescapable choice. We can
continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited free trade ...but
now recognizing that such a system will have to be protected by a hugely
expensive police force that will be effective precisely to the extent that it
oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation. Or we can
promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to
every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods."
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