LFC for the January 1 , 2012 issue
2011 – A YEAR TO REMEMBER
By Grace Lee Boggs
12-31-2011 – January 7, 2012
2011 opened with the Arab Spring when the people of North Africa decolonized themselves, thrilling the world with their nonviolent gatherings, ousting the dictators the United States has supported to secure its access to Mideast oil.
The world’s eyes next focused on the struggle to defend the collective bargaining rights of Wisconsin public workers against the right-wing attacks coordinated by Governor Scott Walker. The growing mobilization swelled to tens of thousands of union members, their families, and supporters.
By the fall of the year hundreds of thousands had participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its offshoots throughout the nation and across the globe., We./they were righteously and rightfully protesting corporate domination of our culture and the suffering that it is producing.,
“We/They were also taking back our government, taking back our humanity, ”
as Danny Glover put it at the Oakland Mall, on October 15.
The ongoing struggles of 2011, from the Arab Spring to Wisconsin and the Occupy/Decolonize movement and our current crises, were rooted in the decline of the empire which made possible the middle-class standard of living and the welfare state with its thousands of public employees to take care of tasks for which we, the people , must become increasingly responsible.
With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of Rights. We have entered the epoch of Responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy. Continue Reading »
Thinking for ourselves
Sacred Sacrifices
By Shea Howell
December 19, 2011
This is a sacred season. Ancient traditions celebrate the turning of the earth and the darkest of nights. For others it is the festival of lights, the beginning of the Christian year, and the celebration of African wisdom. For all of us, this is the first time in nearly a decade when the U.S. will no longer be officially at war in Iraq. Under cover of darkness, the last combat troops convoyed out of Iraq, bringing to an end one of the most deadly and destructive military efforts ever mounted by the U.S. Continue Reading »
ReImagining Organizing, Movements, and Leadership – 1
By Adrienne Maree Brown
Over the December 9-10 weekend we hosted ReImagining Organizing, Movements, and Leadership gatherings in Detroit.
We had been planning the weekend ever once we heard that Margaret Wheatley author and organizational development consultant, was going to be in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and wanted to come to Detroit.
Wheatley’s best-selling book Leadership in the New Science:: Discovering Order in a Chaotiic World was written 20 years ago, the same year Detroit Summer was founded.
When Wheatley came down with pneumonia, we were disappointed, but we adapted.
On Friday evening, we had an intimate dinner with leaders from various networks across Detroit. Saturday afternoon we held a large public event at the Cass Corridor Commons, followed by a youth-focused evening at the Furniture Factory. Continue Reading »
Thinking for ourselves
Doing different things
By Shea Howell
December 17-24- 2011
Something new is emerging in Detroit. In quiet, patient, persistent ways people in our city are developing a culture of strength and compassion. Far from the media glare and the often cynical notions of elected officials, Detroiters are probing deep questions of our humanity and how we will live together.
Last week the Coalition Against Police Brutality held its annual holiday party at the international institute. About 60 people came together to celebrate with one another and to draw support from a deepening sense of community. At first glance, this was a gathering like many at holiday times. There was music, people danced the hustle, told stories, and played with children. There was wonderful food, and warm, festive decorations. But this was a gathering of people who had experienced almost unimaginable loss. Children taken from life by thoughtless moments, or lost to us in the course of senseless anger. Opening to the pain of parents was central the gathering. Continue Reading »
Thinking for ourselves
Turning To Instead of Against Each Other
By Gloria Lowe
December 6, 2011
We live in difficult times. Stories of corruption, violence and down right evilness surround us. Trying to make sense to this state it sometimes seems easier to close it all out, becoming numb to our pain and the pain of others. Often we pretend things will somehow get better tomorrow.
Many of us come to this holiday season with fear. What do we say to our children and our friends, when there is no money for the ‘things’ they have come to expect from us? What do we do when we cannot buy our way out of pain?
Many of us have been chasing the American Dream, trying to consume our way to our image of the ‘middle-class American’. We have come to believe we are what we can buy. Continue Reading »
This week’s LFC
The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit
A review by Rich Feldman
December 10-17 2011
Rich Feldman, an auto worker and union activist at the Ford truck plant for 30 years, is a member of the BCNCL board (Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership).
In this mind-opening book University of Michigan Architecture Professor Andrew Herscher shows us in words and photos how Detroit’s “massive devaluation of real estate has made space available for other value systems unreal from the perspective of the market economy.”
For more than 5 years I have been telling this story in the tours I give local residents and visitors from across the country and the world. Local residents have included members of the Riverfront Eastside Congregational Initiative (RECI). Visitors have been mainly news and film makers, including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, and social activists attending the annual Bioneers and Allied Media Conferences.
My tour is about time, history, and our challenge to leave old ideas behind. It is my way to show that we have moved from the first half of the 20th century which was committed to “growing our Economy” to the first decades of the 21st Century as we embark on the journey to “Grow our Souls.”
I begin my tour with a visit to the Packard Motor Plant and the GM Hamtramck Assembly Plant (Poletown).
The Packard Motor Plant, designed by Albert Kahn, began production in 1906 and was the first building in this country to use reinforced concrete. This complex is the size of seven Cobo Halls, 47 buildings on 38 acres. In peacetime it produced luxury automobiles. During WWII it produced Rolls Royce Fighter Plane Engines.
During the 1943 race riots white Packard workers went on strike to protest working with African Americans. When production ended in 1956, it had expanded to 74 buildings covering 80 acres,
Today it is difficult to imagine that these ruins once represented the American Dream, a vision of hope, progress and success to generations of Americans who came to the big city from the small towns and farms of the south and upstate.
The Packard Plant embodied the conviction that industrial jobs and automobiles were the solution. It was the era when unions were born. When we close our eyes , we can imagine 10,000-15,000 workers walking to and from the plant.
At the time more than 85,000 people worked at the Ford Rouge Plan alone. Today, altogether , there are fewer than 100,000 GM, Ford and Chrysler autoworkers in the UAW.
Today these remains, these ruins represent the end of the old American Dream . They also remind us of the cost to our humanity of that dream. We sold our souls for the chance to make the dollar, to become cogs in a machine.
From the graffiti to the abandoned boats, to the doorless and windowless façades of cement and brick, where all the copper and steel has been removed by scavengers, the Packard Plant is a reminder of the pain, obsolescence and soullessness of 20th century production and its dream of consumption.
I then drive less than a mile to the current home of the GM Volt and the electric car at the Hamtramck Assembly Plant (Poletown) which was built in 1980. In the parking lot we can see the solar panels and the 21st century automobile.
I pull out a copy of Poletown: Community Betrayed by Jeanie Wylie and tell the story of this space and this plant.
This was once an African American and Polish neighborhood covering 465 acres with 4200 residents, 1500 homes, 12 churches, 16 schools, 143 small business and a hospital. In the 1940s my wife’s mother drove here from Flint to buy her wedding dress.
In those days people believed “a job was the answer” to all our problems. It was an idea deeply rooted in the founding of our nation when Europeans believed that economic/ technological advancement was the road to progress and success . So, in the name of progress. we massacred Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, stole land from Mexico and destroyed the Earth.
Old ideas die slowly.
Following the urban rebellions of the 1960s and the historic election of African American Mayor Coleman Young, people continued to believe that the old industrial model based upon mass production was going to save Detroit. Young, a friend of labor and of radicals, believed in mass production, the power of unions, and the economic American Dream.
So, despite the opposition of residents, he supported the demolition of the community to build the Poletown plant because he thought that a new GM plant would save Detroit. He joined with the UAW and GM to support more than 350 million in tax abatements and used eminent domain (i.e. the public removal of human beings from their homes, businesses , community for corporate profit and economic growth). The Poletown plant represented the conviction that jobs are more important, more real, than community.
Today, in Andrew Herscher’s Unreal Estate Guide, we see new unrealities emerging, challenging us to re-imagine our city, to see critical connections, place- based organizations and commitment to community with no market value, as more real and valuable than well-paying jobs.
This is our city, this is our history. It can help us create our future.
–
James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership
Dear Friends,
We are writing to ask for your support as we come to the close of an amazing year. The hope of Arab Spring, the courage of Wisconsin, and boldness of the OWS movement have inspired all of us. At the same time the decades of patient, persistent work of the Boggs Center has escalated. The publications of The Next American Revolution by Grace Boggs and Scott Kurashige and The James Boggs Reader: Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, edited by Stephen Ward, have introduced us to a much wider audience with speaking tours, interviews and book signings. Daily we find ourselves talking with people about the fundamental differences between rebellions and revolutions, changing ourselves to change our world, and looking beyond jobs to the creation of real and meaningful work.
We hosted three major gatherings this year. In June Vincent Harding, Michelle Alexander and Bob Moses came to Detroit to talk with us about the importance of resisting mass incarceration in the midst of a dying Empire. In October we joined several organizations to hold ReImagining Work, bringing together grassroots activists who are creating new ways of living with national and international thinkers Vandana Shiva, Gar Alperovitz, and Frithjof Bergman.
(Grace and Friends at the ReImagining Work Gathering)
You can read a wonderful account of the gathering written by Olga B on our web site. In December we also hosted ‘ReImagining Organizing, Movements and Leadership’ bringing together organizers, artists and activists to develop ways to converge network efforts to create a larger movement–something Margaret Wheatley calls, “emergence.”
Meanwhile the Center remains a focal point for local organizing as Detroit has captured the national imagination both for our possibilities and our discontents. Approaching her 97th birthday, Grace continues to write, speak, meet and challenge our thinking about “what time it is, on the clock of the world.”
This spring we are planning to engage young people in Detroit 2012: A Summer of Hope. We anticipate bringing together 250 young people from in the city and around the country to work with emerging leadership, deepening community ties through peace zones, urban gardens, creating new practices of work, place-based education models, reclaiming homes and learning from one another and the spirit of change in our city.
Please send your still tax-deductible contribution by clicking the yellow DONATE button on our website, or send a check directly to the Boggs Center at 3061 Field Street, Detroit, MI 48214.
And plan to join us in Detroit in June!
In love and struggle,
Rick, Ron, and Shea for the Boggs Center.
RE-Imagining Leadership
By Grace Lee Boggs , with Adrienne Brown
December 3 – 10 2011
I am often asked why we began rebuilding and redefining Detroit from the ground up ourselves–instead of waiting for experts or politicians to lead us.
I think Ii’s because in Detroit we believe deep in our hearts and minds that “we’re the leaders we’re looking for.”
This conviction began to take root in the early 1990s when we founded
Detroit Summer, a multicultural, intergenerational program/movement to involve young people with elders in rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit. Continue Reading »
Thinking for oursleves
Beyond unequal distribution
By Shea Howell
December 3 -10, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street movement is fading quickly from the headlines. As winter approaches in much of the country the tents and tarps have been forcefully removed or quietly taken down. The energy and excitement of the autumn uprisings have given way to smaller gatherings, sometimes of lone individuals, carrying on the last of the efforts to hold public space. Even the horrific images of people being viciously attacked by police calmly wielding pepper spray have been eroded by reports of the pepper spraying shopper in the Los Angeles Wal-Mart who injured more than a dozen other people in search of a deal on Xbox games.
None of us know what the future will bring. But thanks to the OWS efforts we have a new opportunity to decide together what kind of people we should become. For the OWS actions have already achieved a critical shift in consciousness. Author and activist Arundhati Roy captured this new opportunity when she spoke at the People’s University in Washington Square in mid November, “What you have achieved … is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language into the heart of empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies.” Continue Reading »
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Reimagining Organizing Movement Leadership
Grace Lee Boggs Meg Wheatley Invincible Jenny Lee
Reflect on the ways we apprach the work of transforming ourselves. Detroit, and the world. Enlarge in conversation about networks, webs, new forms of organization and leadership. Redefine change from criticla mass to critical connections, from growing our economy, to growing our souls, from represenative democracy to participatory self-governing communities. Connect comunities working for change within Dtroit, to one another and to communities around the world. 4605 Cass Avenue Detroit, Michigan
STORE
NOW AVAILABLE AT THE BOGGS CENTER STORE The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (2009 edition)Revolution & Evolution in the Twentieth Century (2008 edition)
Living for Change (Signed by Grace Lee Boggs)
Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nations Future
Let's Talk About Malcolm & Martin
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