REBUILDING
By James Boggs
Public Speakout, 1st
Friday, June 24, 1988
Monday night I went to the graduation for one of my
grandsons in Ford Auditorium at which Mayor Young was the main speaker. The
student who introduced Young said, with a smile, that he was the only Mayor she
had ever known. Young then said in the same joking vein that maybe some students should come back in ten years and
run for Mayor because by then he would probably have retired. Everyone laughed,
but it is no joking matter. The sad truth is that his honor has been Mayor for
so long he thinks he owns the town and seems to have forgotten that the people
elected him and may one day retire him before his vision of
Coleman Young was elected Mayor of
Detroit fifteen years ago because the city was majority black and the time had
come for a black mayor. Also blacks were furious with STRESS, the decoy system
that the Gribbs administration had created to catch street criminals. When he
was elected, Young had no program for stopping crime. All he could propose in
his inaugural speech was that the criminals should hit 8 Mile road. But he did
have a dream, the dream that he could get the corporations to stay in
Today Young’s dream has turned into a nightmare.
Crime has not hit 8 Mile road, but industry has. Parke-Davis, Strohs, the Mack Ave. Chrysler
plant are all gone. Young promised us 6000 jobs if we allowed him to bulldoze
1500 homes, 600 businesses and 6 churches for a new GM plant in Poletown. Today
our taxes are still going to pay for Poletown, but there have never been more
than 2500 workers at the Poletown plant and most of those are from GM plants
which have been closed down in other parts of the city, creating a wasteland in
once thriving communities, especially on the southwest side of the city. At the
same time the east side around the Chrysler Jefferson plants has been bulldozed
so that it looks like a moonscape. Despite protests small businesses have been
forced to leave, as in Poletown.
The reason Coleman Young’s dream has turned into a
nightmare is that it was based on the illusion that we can bring back the good
old days when Detroit was the auto capital of the world and hundreds of
thousands of workers came to the city to do manufacturing jobs at the decent
pay which had been won though the organization of the union. But today cars are
being built all over the world, not only in Japan and West Germany but in South
Korea and Yugoslavia, and multinational corporations have exported
manufacturing jobs to the Third World where they can make more profit through
cheaper labor. Coleman Young knows, as we all do, that large-scale industry is
not coming back to Detroit. That’s why he is now calling casinos gambling an
“industry” and trying to force it down our throats, promising us it will bring
50,000 to 80,000 jobs as the auto industry once did.
The workers, who came to Detroit during World War
II, particularly from the South, had a lot of hope. They also brought with them
a sense of family and a sense of community or of people living in harmony with
one another. Working in the plant, they developed a sense of solidarity, at the
same time earning enough money to buy homes and raise their families. As a
result, Detroit became known as one of the best organized and disciplined
cities in the United States, with the highest percent of working class
homeowners north of the Mason Dixon line.
Today, however, the great majority of Detroiters no
longer have any hope or solidarity with one another. Born and raised in the
city, they have no experience of the culture which was second nature to those
who had lived close to the land in small Southern communities. At the same
time, they can no longer look forward to the well-paying manufacturing jobs
which enabled their parents and grandparents to buy their own homes and raise
their families. So rather than accept the minimum wage jobs which offer no hope
for the future, an increasing number of our youth are attracted to the fast
money and big bucks which come from selling dope. The result is that instead of
being the auto capital of the world, Detroit has become the murder capital of
the world.
However,
instead of calling upon Detroiters to embark on a collective
reassessment and exploration of how to rebuild Detroit, Young is becoming more arrogant and more
stubborn every day. We, the people, he is convinced are too dumb to know what’s
good for us. So he set up a commission stacked with his friends and appointees
to study casino gambling. Unable to win a majority in the city for casino
gambling, he created his own majority.
Today a person has to be really socially-conscious
and farsighted to care about the people of Detroit or for that matter the
people of any of our big cities. I emphasize this because we are living today
in a society where most people only care about the here and now. To rebuild
Detroit we need a long-range perspective and not just a quick-fix solution. We
need to think of human beings as more than just bodies to be clothed and housed
or bellies to be filled. Most of all, we need a philosophy which gives young
people the basis for the kind of hope that their grandparents had: the
philosophy that people and the relationships between people are more important
than material things and instant self-gratification and the confidence that we
can create a better tomorrow if we live by this philosophy. We know that the
welfare state has failed to give them this perspective. We also know that big
industry is not coming back, and that from now on, large-scale industrial jobs
will be done in the developing countries or the Third World.
Historically, capitalism has always made sure that the
people on the bottom get the leavings, and in this day and age the large-scale
industrial jobs are the leavings and the people in the Third World are at the
bottom. We also know that a free marketplace economy only serves the interests
of the capitalists and that the capitalists are in business not to serve the
human needs of working people but to make profit. Therefore when we think about
rebuilding Detroit, we have to think of a new model of production which is
based upon serving human needs and the needs of the community and not any
get-rich-quick schemes.
The question which Detroit and other industrial
cities are now facing is “What is the purpose of a city?” Up to now, because it
has been our historical experience for the last 75 years, most Americans have
thought of the city as a place to which you go for a job after you have been
driven off the land by mechanization. But now we know that the large industrial
corporations are not going to provide those jobs in our cities.
What then is going to happen to the one million
people who still live in Detroit, half of them on some form of public
assistance; not only blacks but Chicanos, Arab-Americans, Asian and poor
whites? For most of them, Detroit is the end of the rainbow. They can’t go back
to the farms from which their parents and grandparents came because these have
been wiped out by agribusiness. There are no new industries coming for
Detroiters. So if we are going to create hope especially for our young people,
we are going to have to break with most of the ideas about cities that we have
accepted in the past and start with new basic principles.
To begin with, we have to stop seeing the city as
just a place to which you come to get 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. In other words, we have to see that our capital is in the people
and not see people as existing to make capital for production or dependent on
capital to live.
The foundation of our city 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
experiences 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. Actually, our experiences over the last 75 years has demonstrated that
large-scale production, because it is based on a huge separation between
production and consumption, makes both producer and consumer into faceless
masses who are alienated from one another and at the mercy of economic forces
and the mass media. Instead, 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 for 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 consumers.
In order to create these new enterprises, we need a
view of our city which takes into consideration both the resources of our area
and the existing and potential skills of Detroiters.
Detroit itself is in the Great Lakes region, so we
should think of how we can take advantage of this resource. We can start by
developing a fishing fleet. This would mean training young people to fish for a
living as they do in New England and along the West and East coasts. It would
also mean building docks and cleaning facilities along the river bank in order
to supply fresh fish for the whole area.
Michigan also has the best sand in the world. In the
past this sand has been used mostly in foundries. We can use it to produce
glass; glass to replace the broken windows that we see all around us; glass for
the storm windows which will enable us to save energy and use the sun to heat
our homes and our water. We can also use glass for greenhouses all over the
city, so that we can grow vegetables for the local market all year round.
During the spring and the summer we should “Green Detroit” by planting gardens
in the thousands of vacant lots all over the city.
Every day on the expressway we see hundreds of
trucks and vans equipped with ladder, electrical tools and lumber, bringing
carpenters electricians and other skilled workers into Detroit to do the work
of repairing Detroit homes. Meanwhile, inner city youth, black and white, stand
around doing nothing and waiting for the dope man. Our community colleges
should be organizing crash programs to train our youth to use their hands and
heads so that they can be doing this work to improve our communities and our
city instead of depending on suburbanites.
Detroit has raised many talented clothes designers,
but they have all left for New York or California because we have only been
able to think in terms of large-scale industry and haven’t recognized that
Detroit could become a clothes-producing center for the state of Michigan.
Over the years Detroiters have become locked into
the mentality that a party store is the only small business that the average
person can create and that shopping malls in the suburbs are where you go to
buy most things. We need to be creating all kinds of locally-owned stores in
our communities so that we can not only buy our necessities locally but so that
our young people can see stores not just as places where you spend money to buy
what you want but as places where people
are working to meet the needs of the community. In every neighborhood there
should be a bakery where families can purchase freshly baked bread and children
can stop by after school to buy their sweets. In every neighborhood there
should also be food shops where working people can purchase whole meals to take
home to eat together, instead of living off McDonalds and Kentucky Fried
Chicken. This has been a common practice in other countries.
We also need a fundamental change in our concept of
schools. Since the World War II our schools have been transformed into
custodial institutions where our children are warehoused for 12 years, with no
function except to study and get good grades so that they can win the
certificate that will enable them to get a job. What kids learn from books in
school has little if any relationship to their daily lives. While they are
growing up, they are like parasites doing no socially useful work, spending
their time playing and watching TV. Then when they become teenagers, we blame
them because they have no sense of social responsibility. We have to create
schools which are an integral part of the community, in which young people
naturally and normally do social 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. etc. Connections should be created between schools
and local enterprises so that young people see these as an integral part of their
present and future. Our goal should be to make Detroit the first city in the
nation to use our schools to support the community rather than as places where
our young people are upgraded to leave the community.
Because of our declining population many school
buildings in Detroit have been abandoned or are about to be abandoned. These
schools can be turned into day care centers to care for the children of working
mothers and fathers. They can be developed into political and cultural centers
for the community; the place for town meetings or for a local museum where the
arts and crafts are proudly exhibited.
These are only a few examples of the kinds of things
we can do to rebuild Detroit once we realize that we can no longer depend upon
the corporations or the politicians to save us and begin thinking for ourselves
about what we can do and must do. At this point, what we need to do is to begin
discussing how we are going to rebuild our city, in every block club, every
church, every school, every organization and every home --because for the rest
of this century and most of the next, the major question in this country is
going to be "How will we live in the city?" Up to now we have come to
the city expecting somebody else, meaning the corporation, to provide us with a
livelihood. Now we are stuck here and we can't run or hide anymore. We can't go
back to the farms, we can't keep running from city to city. We must put down
our roots where we are and put our hearts, imagination, minds and hands to
work, so that we can empower ourselves
and one
another to create an alternative to casino gambling. Coleman Young's
crisis is our opportunity. Let us start the discussion here tonight.