The next American revolution: Sustainable activism for the twenty-first century

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

Volumn , Issue , 2012, Pages

  Boggs, Grace L ^b   Kurashige, Scott ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

^b NONE

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EID: 85171919955     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (117)

1. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 149.
2. Stating his pressing need to travel abroad and develop a new organization of his own, Malcolm declined.
3. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 133-36.
4. For instance, historian Stephen Ward has found records of a U.S.
5. William R. McCoy, a detective lieutenant from the Detroit Police Department, remarks about Grace, "I believe she is of Chinese and African descent." McCoy wrongly identifies her as Grace Lillian Boggs ("a housewife") and lists an incorrect birth date and PhD graduation date.
6. U.S. Senate, Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders: Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, pt. 6, 90th Cong., 2nd sess., March 21-22 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 1439-40.
7. For an introduction to Detroit history.
8. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
9. Detroit News, August 8, 1967.
10. Rebecca Solnit, "Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the Post-American Landscape," Harper's Magazine, July 2007, 73.
11. Alex Altman, "Detroit Tries to Get on a Road to Renewal," Time, April 6, 2009, 40-45.
12. John Huey, "Why Time Inc. Is in Motown," Time, October 5, 2009, 4.
13. John Reed, "The Travails of Detroit," Financial Times, March 6, 2009.
14. Jerry Herron, Afterculture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 9.
15. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power (New York: New Press, 2003).
16. This series of questions is similar to those posed in the article.
17. Grace Lee Boggs, "Thinking Dialectically toward Community," in Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interest, ed. Arif Dirlik (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 299-300.
18. Martin Luther King Jr., "A Time to Break Silence," in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 231-44.
19. Daniel Schorr, Come to Think of It: Notes on the End of the Millennium (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), 208.
20. Jack Lessenberry, "Crimes Low and High," MetroTimes, December 13, 2000.
21. Starhawk, "Only Poetry Can Address Grief: Moving Forward after 911," Starhawk's Tangled Web, www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/movingforward.html.
22. Alice Calaprice, ed. The New Quotable Einstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 9, 175.
23. New York Times, March 29, 1972.
24. Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Rachel E. Harding, "Radical Hospitality: How Kitchen-Table Lessons in Welcome and Respect Helped Sustain the Black Freedom Movement," Sojourners Magazine, July-August 2003, 42-46.
25. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 2.
26. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (New York: Viking, 2007).
27. Joanna Macy, "The Great Turning as Compass and Lens," YES! Summer 2006, www.yesmagazine.org/issues/5000-years-of-empire/ the-great-turning-as-compass-and-lens.
28. Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Knopf, 2006).
29. King, "Time to Break Silence," 242.
30. I am reminded of Che Guevara's oft-cited comment: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." As Mitchel Cohen further notes, "Che called upon radicals to transform OURSELVES into new, socialist human beings BEFORE the revolution, if we were to have any hope of actually achieving one worth living in."
31. "Revolution Guided by Feelings of Great Love: Learning from Che Guevara," CounterPunch, January 3-4, 2004, www.counterpunch.org/cohen01032004.html.
32. Exploring King's concept can help us understand why Che's statement has been so puzzling to traditional radicals and why Che lives on in the hearts of young revolutionaries.
33. Barbara A. Holmes and Susan Holmes Winfield challenge us to think more expansively about King's concept of Love as a foundational principle for social change.
34. "When we are confronted by the infrastructures of malignant social systems," they write, "love seems frail at best and irrelevant at worst. Yet, the lessons of history teach just the opposite. In defiance of our logic, love has sustained whole communities. With nothing more than love, besieged people confront radical evil, endure losses, bury their dead, and console each other during and after the devastation."
35. "For King, love is synonymous with ethics," Holmes and Winfield argue. "It is a moral principle that provides context, norms, rules of engagement, and a vision of moral flourishing." They conclude, "The strength of King's belief in the law, his abiding faith in love as praxis, and the force of his performative acts forged crosscultural alliances and inspired even the courts to interpret the laws in a manner that for a time changed the face of the nation. . . . Using love's untapped potential, he awakened a nation to its shortcomings and African Americans to the fullness of their humanity."
36. "King, the Constitution, and the Courts," in The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Boundaries of Law, Politics, and Religion, ed. Lewis V. Baldwin, with Rufus Burrow Jr., Barbara A. Holmes, and Susan Holmes Winfield (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 173-211.
37. Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999), 44-45.
38. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
39. Gertrud Lenzer, "Searching for the Present in the Past," review of The Modern World-System, by Immanuel Wallerstein, New York Times, December 29, 1974.
40. Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995).
41. Wallerstein, Utopistics; or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 1998), 31-32.
42. Wallerstein, The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
43. For a deeper discussion of the autobiographical issues addressed in this chapter.
44. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, esp. chs. 2-6.
45. In 1939 I decided to write my dissertation on "George Herbert Mead: The Philosopher of the Social Individual" because I needed to move beyond the university and create myself as a social individual, and he provided me with a philosophy that stated, "It is through interaction with other individuals that the self is created." For the published version of this dissertation.
46. Grace Chin Lee, George Herbert Mead: The Philosopher of the Social Individual (New York: King's Crown, 1945).
47. As an American philosopher who had studied in Germany and was a student of European philosophy (which was the only topic that courses in philosophy at U.S. universities taught in that period), Mead also understood that Americans are profoundly different from Euro peans. We Americans are conscious of our founding in a way that other peoples are not. Also, we can never evade the fact that contradictions were built into our founding. Therefore, we are constantly in the process of creating and re-creating ourselves. We can't believe, as Hobbes did, that the self is only selfish-or like Locke, that the self is naturally social. By hook or by crook, we are constantly challenged to believe, as Rousseau did, to act on the conviction that through communicating or covenanting with others, we can become both subject and sovereign; or as Kant did, that just as our minds give form to reality, we can re-create reality by acting as if our actions could become a universal law.
48. Mead was born in 1863, around the same time as John Dewey (1859) and Jane Addams (1860). Members of his generation, the generation of civic passions, gave birth to social democracy because they refused to accept a dichotomy between the True and the Good. In my twilight years I increasingly realize how lucky I am that I was introduced in my early twenties to social democracy in the person of Mead, then to Marxist-Leninism by way of C. L. R. James, and then to (r)evolution with Jimmy Boggs.
49. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint l'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial, 1939).
50. Grace translated three of these early essays by Marx from German into English for a publication, which the Johnson-Forest Tendency introduced as the first English translations of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1843-44.
51. Essays by Karl Marx, Selected from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (New York: Johnson-Forest Tendency, 1947).
52. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 476.
53. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 81.
54. Marx, "The Civil War in France," in The Paris Commune, ed. Lucien Sanial (New York: New York Labor News, 1902), 78.
55. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Kerr, 1906), 836-37.
56. James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review, 1963), 83.
57. In 2009 Monthly Review Press reissued this book with a new introduction by Grace Lee Boggs and commentaries by Shea Howell, Carl Edwards, Larry Sparks, Julia Pointer-Putnam, Jeanette Lee, and Rich Feldman.
58. James and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review, 1974), 16-17.
59. Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).
60. El Kilombo Intergalactico, Beyond Resistance: Everything, an Interview with Subcomandante Marcos (Durham, NC: PaperBoat, 2007).
61. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
62. Jan Carew, Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 36.
63. Vincent Harding wrote the first draft of MLK's April 4, 1967, historic anti-Vietnam War speech, "A Time to Break Silence." Years later, he discussed his role in writing King's speech and expanded the ideas in the 1984 pamphlet, A Way of Faith, a Time for Courage
64. Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).
65. We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Freedom Movement, ed. Peter J. Albert and Ronald Hoffman (New York: DaCapo, 1993), is a compilation of papers presented by an impressive group of scholars and activists.
66. Lee Boggs, "Thoughts on the Black Radical Congress," Michigan Citizen, May 10, 1998.
67. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 10.
68. Mahatma Gandhi, Selected Political Writings, ed. Dennis Dalton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 7.
69. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Community or Chaos? (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 156.
70. These quotes from King, as well as additional quotes and paraphrased readings of his works that follow in this chapter, were previously incorporated.
71. Grace Lee Boggs, "Thinking Dialectically toward Community," 301-5.
72. King, Where Do We Go, 171-72, 185-86.
73. King, "Time to Break Silence," 231-44.
74. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
75. King, Trumpet of Conscience, in Testament of Hope, 641, 644.
76. King, "Our Struggle," in Testament of Hope, 76.
77. Yusef Shakur, The Window 2 My Soul: My Transformation from a Zone 8 Thug to a Father & Freedom Fighter (Detroit: Urban Guerrilla Entertainment, 2008). To order this book, go to www.yusefshakur.org/.
78. "Demands of the Detroit Coalition against Police Brutality," www.detroitcoalition.org/about.
79. Sugrue, Urban Crisis, 259.
80. David Fastenfast, "Community Politics and Urban Redevelopment: Poletown, Detroit, and General Motors," Urban Affairs Review 22 (September 1986): 101-23.
81. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 218.
82. James Boggs, "Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come," in Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review, 1970), 60.
83. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 231-32.
84. Kyong Park, ed., Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond (Hong Kong: Map Book, 2005).
85. Curt Guyette, "Down a Green Path," MetroTimes, October 31, 2001.
86. Grace Lee Boggs, "Detroiters Point Way for Twenty-First-Century Cities," Michigan Citizen, November 25, 2007.
87. Solnit, "Detroit Arcadia," 73.
88. Michele Owens, "The Emerald City," O Magazine, April 2008, 256-59, 274 (quote on 274).
89. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
90. Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy (London: Zed Books, 2000).
91. Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993).
92. Grace Lee Boggs, "Education: The Great Obsession," in Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized World, ed. Institute of the Black World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 1974), 61-81.
93. Alvin Toffer, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980).
94. Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine, Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1991)
95. Education on the Edge of Possibility (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1997).
96. Martin S. Dworkin, ed., Dewey on Education (New York: Teachers College, 1959), 39-40.
97. Richard L. Johnson, ed., Gandhi's Experiments with Truth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 111-12.
98. Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 2000), 50, 56.
99. Boggs, Revolution and Evolution (1974), 17-19.
100. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).
101. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Delacorte, 1969).
102. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989).
103. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899).
104. Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte, 1982), esp. 77-119.
105. George Siemens writes with a focus on education and learning in the digital age. Most of his writing is distributed digitally on the Internet.
106. Web site at www.elearnspace.org/.
107. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, "Following the Call," Veterans of Hope Pamphlet Series 1, No. 4 (Denver: A Center for the Study of Religion and Democratic Renewal, 2000), 12.
108. Rob "Biko" Baker, "Last Night I Waved an American Flag," August 29, 2008, http://theleague.com/last-night/.
109. Special thanks to Biko for permitting the authors to reprint significant portions of this Web posting.
110. Democracy Now! "Novelist Alice Walker and Activist Grace Lee Boggs React to Obama's Inauguration," January 21, 2009, www.democracynow.org/2009/1/21/novelist_alice_walker_and_activist_grace.
111. Grace Lee Boggs, "What Do We Do Now?" Michigan Citizen, February 1, 2009.
112. Vincent Harding, "Midwifing a New America," OneLife Institute News (Autumn 2008): 3-4.
113. "Principles of Environmental Justice" adopted in October 1991, www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.
114. Ethan Miller, "Independence from the Corporate Global Economy," YES! Winter 2007, www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1545.
115. Gar Alperovitz, America beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).
116. Information on new economic institutions' locations and advice on how to organize and learn from their experiences can be found on the Web site of the Democracy Collaborative, www.community-wealth.org/.
117. New York Times, October 1, 2008.