Boggs sees Detroit as the forefront of changes sweeping the industrialized world. Once the front line of industrialization, Detroit could be the model of what the future of the deindustrialized world looks like. That thought has led her to work on seemingly small projects in Detroit neighborhoods. For instance, she sees urban gardening as the beginning of a major shift in the way we feed ourselves as well as a way to connect generations in a widely inclusive movement.
Excerpted from a profile in the Metro Times on the occasion of her new book, The Next American Revolution Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. Grace Boggs is a famous activist, now 95. See also the wonderful video lecture below.
(here is another background article about what is happening in Detroit)
Excerpts from Larry Gabriel:
“Grace, a widow recently turned 95, is the leader of the nonprofit Boggs Center, headquartered at her home, which is the hub around which a number of efforts — Detroit Summer, the Allied Media Project, Detroit City of Hope, the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality and others — maintain their philosophical grounding and connection to a broader, growing movement in Detroit.
Boggs’ revolution is not a call to seize political power from the government. “A cultural revolution has begun to take place,” says Boggs. “It’s a phenomenon as historic and as far-reaching as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry. Now we’re at the heart of a change from industry to a world where people work not so much at jobs. Work is something that we do to develop skills as much as to produce goods and services. We’re so used to the idea that we work in order to make money, but that’s not why people have worked throughout history and that’s the kind of way we’re going now. It provides a very different perspective of revolution. It’s not about seizing state power to plan the economy.
“The new focus of work is to develop one’s ability and one’s capacity to do a whole lot of things. For example, we’re going into a period where, instead of people doing mass production line stuff, people will think much more of craftsmanship, which involves the development and expansion of the human being.”
Indeed, that is a turn away from the revolutionary ideals of the past few centuries. Boggs has witnessed revolutions, rebellions and plain old social upheaval, and struggled with the idea of what those things mean. She was here and took part in the hope and euphoria that accompanied Coleman A. Young’s election as mayor of Detroit.
But over time she saw that having a black mayor wasn’t enough to change the larger economic order, as she writes in Next:
But even though he was one of this country’s brightest and most skillful politicians, he was helpless in the face of the deindustrialization and outsourcing that were gaining momentum in the 1970s. Because he had failed to think seriously about the profound changes taking place in the economy, he had no idea how to deal with the new information technology and the massive export of jobs overseas that was making it impossible for young people to find meaningful paid work in the city. All Coleman could do was react, and he was ultimately driven to desperate measures to try to replace the jobs that were gone for good.
Boggs sees Detroit as the forefront of changes sweeping the industrialized world. Once the front line of industrialization, Detroit could be the model of what the future of the deindustrialized world looks like. That thought has led her to work on seemingly small projects in Detroit neighborhoods. For instance, she sees urban gardening as the beginning of a major shift in the way we feed ourselves as well as a way to connect generations in a widely inclusive movement.
“Detroit, because we have this position in the history of the country and the world, is creating that alternative — not in words but in action,” she says. “There’s a group on the east side called Feed ‘Em Freedom Growers; if you don’t have food you can’t be free. Detroit has over 1,000 community gardens. Urban agriculture started very simply with some African-American women seeing some vacant lots. That’s how big changes take place, with small changes. Important changes always start from the bottom up. We think they come from the top, or start with millions of people. No, they start when some people respond to the historical context and do what needs to be done. That’s how revolution takes place.”
This revolution is a turning away from the capitalist ideals of more and more, and bigger and bigger. She says that we are in the end days of capitalism as we have known it for the past few centuries. And the new order is being fought over in places like Madison, Wis., and Lansing, in North Africa and even in the way Japan responds to man-made and natural disasters.
Anyone who has paid attention to Boggs’ ideas in the past will see that the narrative of Next builds upon ideas she has been developing for some time. She cites a section from Jimmy Boggs’ Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century: “The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things.”
Does that sound like anything that is going on around you these days?
It’s the sense that things predicted in Next are already engulfing us that makes it so compelling. And the sense that we have a hand in the outcome rather than being swept along on the sea of change that makes it vital.
Boggs tasks each individual with building the world we want. Some months ago a friend asked me who I thought would succeed her as leader of the Boggs Center. To take the message of Next to heart, that leader would be all of us.”
2. Watch the video:
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