The World of 2050 A.D. will be what you make it
By Grace Lee Boggs
NASCO Convention
Ann Arbor, Michigan
November 4, 2006
I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to keynote this convention. This is my first experience of a NASCO convention and I am delighted to be part of a gathering offering so many diverse workshops. I think it is a sign of the new reality that ever since the Battle of Seattle in 1999, when over a thousand groups, representing all walks of American society, closed down the WTO, a growing number of young people are beginning to believe that another world is possible and are creating their own ways and means to participate in the great transformation which people all over the world are now undergoing, not only economically, but psychologically, culturally, politically, in our relations with one another and in our concept of ourselves and our rights and responsibilities as human beings.
You will be playing more of a role in shaping this great transformation than I. The world of 2050 A.D. will be what you make it. But the movements of the 21st century which you will create are also an outgrowth of the movements of the 20th century in which it was my good fortune to participate.
Seventy years ago, when I was a student in my teens and early 20s, I never imagined that one day I would become so active in the Black Power movement in Detroit that FBI records would suggest that I might be Afro-Chinese. Or that my twilight years would center around rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit, the world symbol of de-industrialization, disinvestment and depopulation.
When I left academia in 1940, as you will be doing one of these days, my life began to change drastically because the world was changing and confronting me with choices that I had never anticipated.
I was born on top of my father's Chinese American restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island 91 years ago. My parents were immigrants from southern China. My mother, who was my father's second wife (he was still married to his first), never learned to read and write because there were no schools for females in her little village.
When we moved to New York in 1924, my father had to buy the land for our house in the name of his Irish contractor because of restricted covenants denying land ownership to people of color. Today the residents of that Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens are mostly Latino and Korean, and just up the street is one of the liveliest South Asian commercial centers in the U.S.
When I was an undergraduate at Barnard from 1931-35 there were only three students of color on campus - myself, another Chinese American and a Japanese American. Today Asian Americans make up 30% of the Barnard student body. When I was a graduate student at Bryn Mawr from 1935-40 (on scholarship), the only blacks on campus were the maids in crisp grey uniforms with white collars who cleaned our rooms and served our meals.
In college and graduate school I studied philosophy because I was trying to figure out the meaning of my own life. I wasn't concerned with how or whether it would help me make a living. The result is that when I got my Ph.D. in 1940, I hadn't the vaguest notion what I should do. There wasn't any chance of my getting a university job teaching philosophy. In those days even department stores would come right out and say "We don't hire Orientals." So I decided to go to Chicago, where George Herbert Mead, the social philosopher on whom I had written my dissertation, had taught and was lucky enough to get a part-time job in the University of Chicago Philosophy Library paying $10 a week.
Even though the cost of living was very low in those days (5c would get you a ride on the trolley or a glass of beer), $10 a week didn't go very far. So I jumped at the offer from a little Jewish woman to live rent-free in the basement of her house not far from the university. The only problem was that to get into the basement I had to face down a barricade of rats. This led me to the South Side Tenants Organization, a group organized by the Workers Party to fight rat-infested housing in the black community. It was my first contact with a black community. As a result, I began attending meetings of the March on Washington Movement, led by A. Philip Randolph, which was mobilizing so many tens of thousands of blacks to March on Washington to demand jobs in the defense industry that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to issue Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense plants.
The March on Washington was my first experience with a grassroots movement and it was so inspiring that I decided that becoming a Movement activist in the black community was the most meaningful thing I could do with my life.
In those days intellectuals who committed themselves to the struggle to change the system embraced (in one form or another) the socialist ideas developed by Karl Marx in the middle of the 19th century (the springtime of industrial capitalism), especially his conviction that the "working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united and organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production, would burst through the capitalist integument which had been a fetter on the mode of production and transform capitalist private property into socialist property."
So, like Richard Wright and others, I became a Marxist, joining the Workers Party and organizing the kinds of protest demonstrations that radicals still organize, but also working closely with C.L.R. James, the West Indian Marxist, in the little group inside the party known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency. As "Johnsonites," unlike most Marxists, we stressed the humanism of Marx. For example, I did the first English translation (from the German) of Marx's 1843-44 Economic Philosophical manuscripts in which the young Marx (he was in his early 20s) wrote a lot about alienation. My favorite passage from the Communist Manifesto (written when Marx was 29) was (and still is) the one which reads:
"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his conditions of life and his relations with his kind."
We also discovered and were inspired by Lenin's 1915 Notes on Hegel which deal a lot with the importance of vision.
However, studying Marx and Lenin and using their writings to polemicize against the economism of other radicals was too much like what I had been doing in the university. I wanted to be part of a community in struggle. So I was delighted when in the early 1950s, we heard that black workers in Detroit like Jimmy Boggs, having been radicalized by their experiences in the plant during World War II, were looking for new forms of struggle going beyond the union. In response we created a newsletter called Correspondence to report the activities of blacks, rank and file workers, women and youth (whom we had identified as the new revolutionary social forces); and in 1953 I moved to Detroit to work on Correspondence for which Jimmy Boggs was already writing.
I found Jimmy very attractive. He was more rooted in his community and more secure in his identity as a human being than any man I had ever met. He was also completely different from me in almost every respect. I had grown up in the Big Apple. He had been born and raised in a little town called Marion Junction, Alabama, with only two stores on the main street. My knowledge had come mostly from books. He had never been to college, but his life experiences had taught him to think historically and to believe in the power of ideas. As Ruby Dee put it recently, he was "born with a Ph.D." He loved to write and had viewed himself as a writer ever since as a little boy he wrote the letters for his mostly illiterate community. I had never been part of a community. He was the person in the Chrysler-Jefferson plant and in his Detroit community to whom all kinds of people came for advice on matters of personal and political concerns. So when he asked me to marry him on our first date in 1953, I didn't hesitate for a minute.
During the first few years of our marriage I mainly listened and learned from Jimmy and his friends. It was a period when huge changes were taking place in the country, in Detroit and in the world. At the Bandung Conference in April 1955 Asian and African leaders had announced to the world that the struggle against colonialism and for political independence was in full swing. The lynching of 14-year old Emmet Till in Mississippi in September 1955 had aroused a new consciousness in blacks all over the United States. A few months later, in December 1955, blacks in Montgomery, Ala. began the year-long non-violent highly disciplined bus boycott launching the civil rights movement which would in turn trigger the women's movement, the ecological, anti-war and other great movements of the 70s and 80s. Under the leadership of 26-year old Martin Luther King Jr. a people who had been treated as less than human struggled against their dehumanization not as angry victims but as new men and women, representative of a more human society. American society would never be the same again.
Meanwhile, Detroit was also undergoing historic changes. The work force in the auto plants was shrinking instead of expanding, both because of Hi-Tech and because corporations were moving their plants to non-union Southern states. At the same time the white population of Detroit was declining relative to blacks because the construction of the Lodge freeway on the west side and of the Chrysler freeway on the east side, plus FHA mortgages , had made it possible for white flight to the suburbs. The result was that blacks were beginning to question why all institutions of Detroit, including the government , the police force and public schools, were still being run exclusively by whites.
It was out of these very real conditions that the Black Power movement emerged in Detroit in the early 1960s Energized by the civil rights movement in the South, middle class blacks, like Rev. Cleage, Milton and Richard Henry, Russell Brown, Ed Vaughn, Reginald Wilson, seized on Black Power as an achievable goal. Young blacks in their early 20s, like General Baker, John Watson, Charles Johnson and Charles Simmons were also inspired by the African struggle for Uhuru or Freedom to think more in terms of power than of rights.
By 1960 I had been living in Detroit and married to Jimmy for seven years. So even though I was not black, I felt pretty comfortable going to meetings and demonstrations. It was a very exciting time. We picketed places like the Apprentice Training School to protest against their refusal to admit more than a handful of blacks to be trained for skilled jobs. We organized the June 23, 1963 Freedom March down Woodward Ave. which mobilized over 100,000 people from Detroit and cities throughout the state. Two days after that march, when we picketed supermarkets demanding better jobs for blacks, management was ready to negotiate. In the summer of 1963, after Cynthia Scott, a black prostitute, was killed by a white cop, 5000 of us marched round and round Police Headquarters shouting "STOP KILLER COPS!" while dozens of officers, armed to the teeth, huddled behind locked doors and windows wondering whether or when we were going to attack. To avoid a massacre we diverted the marchers away from police headquarters to the corner where Cynthia Scott had been killed. Later, I was told by one of the demonstrators that even though she might have been killed she was sorry we had not allowed tensions to keep rising to the point of rushing the building.
A few months later, in the fall of 1963 I was one of the main organizers for the Grassroots Leadership Conference at which Malcolm made his famous speech distinguishing between "Field Negroes" and "House Negroes" and linking the black revolution with the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. After Malcolm broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964, I was in the small group (Max Stanford, William Worthy, Pat Robinson, Jimmy) who met with him in a Harlem sandwich shop to discuss whether he should come to Detroit to work with us. Less than a year later, in February 1965, six months before Watts erupted, he was gunned down. A few months after Malcolm's assassination we founded the Organization for Black Power at our house with Black Power activists from Chicago, D.C., Philadelphia and Cleveland and Detroit. In 1966 we organized the Inner City Organizing Committee which created a Parents Organization, a Student Organization and a Black Teachers Group to struggle for Community Control of Schools in Detroit.
Jimmy was involved in this 24/7 Black Power organizing but he was also writing and speaking in an effort to get Black Power activists to understand the depth of the crisis that had been created not only by the black movement but by Hi-Tech and therefore the need for Blacks to go beyond just replacing white power with black power and begin grappling with the challenges of a society in which large numbers of human beings were no longer needed in production. In his little book, The Åmerican Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook, published in 1963, he pointed out how Marx's concept of Scientific Socialism had been developed in an era when the working class was expanding and when the challenge was to increase productivity. Now, however, technology had advanced to the point where productivity was increasing by leaps and bounds while the working class was declining in numbers. So our challenge was no longer to increase productivity but to develop more responsible relationships with one another. That meant going beyond Dialectical Materialism to Dialectical Humanism.
Then on July 20, 1967, while Jimmy and I were on vacation in California, Detroit cops raided a blind pig on 12th St., now Rosa Parks Boulevard, and all hell broke loose. Thousands of young people poured into the streets and began looting stores and setting large sections of the city on fire. Before it was over the National Guard had been called in and 43 people had been killed. The media called (and still call) it a "riot" but Detroiters called it a "Rebellion" because , as Thomas Sugrue points out in Roots of the Urban Crisis, it was an understandable response by young people to the mostly white police force which they regarded as an occupation army and also to their growing sense that they were being made expendable by Hi-Tech.
More than any picketing or marching or Black Power agitating that we did, it was this spontaneous explosion of young Detroiters which ensured the election of Coleman Young as Detroit's first black mayor in 1973 because it told the Establishment that white political power could no longer maintain law and order in the city.
As the Mayor of Detroit, Coleman could do a lot to remediate racism by appointing blacks to the administration and by changing the racial composition of the police and fire departments. But even though he was one of this country's brightest and most skilful politicians (some people say that if he had not been black, he could have been elected president), he was helpless in the face of the de-industrialization and outsourcing which were gaining momentum in the 1970s.
Young tried valiantly to reverse the tide of deindustrialization. For example, in 1980, with the cooperation of the UAW and over the highly-organized resistance of residents, he bulldozed 1500 houses, 600 businesses and six churches in Poletown to provide GM with the land for a plant that it promised would provide 6000 jobs (it has never provided more than 3000). But jobs continued to disappear, and when crack came to Detroit in 1985 young people started saying, "Why stay in school with the idea that one day you can get a good job and make a lot of money when you can make a lot of money right now rollin?" So by the thousands they began dropping out of high school , creating a drug economy which brought with it escalating crime and violence.
Faced with this deteriorating situation, Coleman became increasingly desperate to the point that in 1988 he proposed a casino industry to replace the jobs that the auto industry no longer provided. We joined a very broad coalition of Detroiters called DETROITERS UNITING and were able to defeat his proposal. But during the struggle, he called us a bunch of naysayers and demanded to know "What is your alternative?"
It was a very good question because it challenged us to recognize that we were at one of the great turning points in history. Detroit's de-industrialization , devastation and depopulation had turned the city into a wasteland but it had also created the space and place where there was not only the necessity but the possibility of creating a new kind of city based not on expanding production but on new values of sustainability and community. Instead of investing our hopes in GM, Ford and Chrysler and becoming increasingly alienated from the Earth and from each other, we had been granted an opportunity to begin a new chapter in the evolution of cities, a chapter which global warming and corporate globalization had made increasingly necessary. In its dying Detroit could also be the birthplace of a new kind of city.
As Detroiters we were very conscious of our city as a "movement city." In the first half of the 20th century it had pioneered mass production. In the 1930s it spearheaded the labor movement.. During World War II it had been the arsenal of democracy. Now it could become known the world over as the city where out of the ashes of industrialization, a 21st century city is rising, a city which is both rural and urban and which attracts people from all over the world because it understands the fundamental need of human beings at this stage in our evolution to relate more responsibly to one another and to the Earth.
So in November 1991 we convened a group of community organizations in a PEOPLES FESTIVAL to create a Multigenerational, Multicultural Celebration of Detroiters putting our hearts, minds, hands and imaginations together to redefine and recreate a city of Community, Compassion, Cooperation, Participation and Enterprise, in harmony with the Earth.
A few months later , in June 1992 we founded Detroit Summer, an intergenerational multicultural youth program that would model a new kind of schooling in which school children would be engaged in rebuilding their communities as a natural and normal part of the curriculum from K-12 rather than only in classwork that prepares them to take their places in the existing system.
Recalling how the Freedom Schools of Mississippi Freedom Summer had engaged children in the civil rights movement, we asked Detroiters to just imagine how much safer and livelier our neighborhoods would be almost overnight if we reorganized education along the lines of Detroit Summer; if instead of trying to keep our children isolated in classrooms for 12 years and more, we engaged them in community-building activities with the same audacity with which the civil rights movement engaged them in desegregation activities 40 years ago: planting community gardens, recycling waste, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, rehabbing houses, painting public murals. By giving our children and young people a better reason to learn than just the individualistic one of getting a job or making more money, by encouraging them to make a difference in their neighborhoods, we would get their cognitive juices flowing. Learning would come from practice which has always been the best way to learn.
Instead of trying to bully young people to remain in classrooms structured to prepare them to become cogs in the existing economic system, the time had come, we said, to recognize that the reason why so many young people drop out from inner city schools is because they are voting with their feet against a system which sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them like products of a factory. They are crying out for another kind of education that values them as human beings and gives them opportunities to exercise their Soul Power.
Detroit Summer began in 1992. In the last two years it is being led by a multi-racial collective of 20-something young people who have been a part of past Detroit Summers. As Jenny Lee and others will explain in the workshop on Community Now, the Collective engages young people and artists in addressing city's educational and drop-out crisis. On the second Thursday of every month, they sponsor a Potluck using food, music and poetry to bring different generations of Detroit youth together.
Detroit Summer is part of a loose and growing network of groups that have been emerging in the last 15 years to rebuild and redefine Detroit. This network includes
These groups are local examples of the many thousands of groups being formed in this country and all over the world to create new ways of living to resist the destructiveness of global capitalism and redefine what it means to be human in the 21st century. One estimate (by Paul Hawken, environmental activist and author) is that there may be as many as half a million of these self-healing civic groups, most of them small and barely visible, in every country around the world.
One of the most exciting things about these groups is that in order to get started they do not need big leaders or huge funds. All that is needed are a few people who are motivated by a desire to humanize some important aspect of their daily lives.
In the course of creating these groups, all kinds of people are engaged in creating a new form of Democracy which is much more participatory, deliberative, cooperative and consensual, more rooted in community and more horizontal than the representative democracies that were struggled for and achieved within 19th and 20th century nation-states but are now increasingly ineffective,and unresponsive.
In two widely-discussed books, Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize the singularity or diversity of these groups and how they connect through networks rather than fusing into some unity like "the people" or the "workers of the world," as imagined by the radicals of the early 20th century, or joining centralized organizations like the 2nd`or 3rd Internationals. What they have in common are the values of social and environmental justice, each imagining and creating the new social identities, the new political subjects that will take the place of the cogs and consumers to which global capitalism is seeking to reduce us.
That is how I visualize revolution emerging in the 21st century, not by concentrating on the seizure of political power as we projected it in the early 20th century but by re-creating our selves.
As organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley puts it, "That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously, from people working where they are, with problems that we can get our arms around."
"From a Newtonian perspective," she writes in Leadership and Modern Science, "our efforts often seem too small, and we doubt that our actions will contribute incrementally to large-scale change. Step by step, system by system, we aspire to develop enough mass or force to alter the larger system.
"But a quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently.
"Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. I have learned that in this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections."
Together, it seems to me, these groups are creating answers to the questions that become increasingly urgent every day. How do we begin living more simply for our own survival, the survival of planet earth, and so that others may simply live? How are we to achieve reconciliation with the two-thirds of the world that increasingly resents our economic, military and cultural domination? Out of our new vulnerability can we recognize that our safety now depends on our loving and caring for the peoples of the world and for the Earth as we love and care for our own families, i.e., developing "a new concept of global citizenship" or a "loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best " in our society?
When I decided to become a "Movement activist" 65 years ago, most radicals didn't view our role as creating answers to increasingly urgent questions. As Gar Alperovitz explains in America Beyond Capitalism, we thought our only choices were Reform , i.e. cleaning up around the edges of existing systems) or overthrowing the whole system through an insurrection. In the 21st century, however, because of the critical movements of the 20th century, especially the "beloved community" ideas of Martin Luther King , the feminist movement and the ecological movement, we are able to think of Change as Transformation, i.e. "the steady building a mosaic of entirely different institutions in a manner that is both peaceful and evolutionary."
From the workshops at this NASCO convention, it seems to me that is what young people like yourselves are now engaged in doing.