New Work, New Culture
Technology and the shrinking job market could liberate us from meaningless work and allow us to do things we care deeply about.
An interview with Frithjof Bergmann, by Sarah van Gelder
According to philosopher and community catalyst Frithjof Bergmann, we are less free than we think, surrounded as we are by endless trivial choices. We will only really be free when we have the option of doing things with our lives that we care deeply about. The current job crisis, in which thousands find themselves unable to work in their fields, is forcing many people to reconsider what they want to do with their lives. Frithjof Bergmann started New Work to encourage that exploration at the deepest levels and to teach the skills that will enable people to make their dreams a reality. If many people were empowered to make these kinds of choices, the ripple effects would be felt throughout the culture. Frithjof Bergmann has worked with individuals and communities in the US, Canada, and Germany on developing positive strategies for dealing with the changing nature of work. He is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, author of On Being Free (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) and founder of the Center for New Work., 2200 Fuller Road, Suite 1204B, Ann Arbor, MI 48105. Continue Reading »
LFC
OUR VISIT TO ATLANTA
By Grace Lee Boggs
April 7-14, 2012
Last week’s overnight visit to Atlanta by Shea Howell, Invincible and myself gave me a lot of food for thought.
Wednesday evening we spent three hours in a large auditorium in the Atlanta University Center Historic District with a panel of Vincent Harding’s Morehouse College students and about a hundred other people from the community.
Invincible performed two lively raps while scenes of Detroit’s devastation were flashed on a large screen in the background. Continue Reading »
Thinking for ourselves
Democratic pretense
By Shea Howell
April 3, 2011
In the unfolding efforts of the State Governor to take over the city of Detroit the ruling from Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Joyce Draganchuk is welcome. The Judge ordered the state’s financial review team not to meet or vote on any issues until there is an April 11 hearing. The hearing will rule on a lawsuit filed by union leader Robert Davis who argues that the financial review team would violate state law by meeting beyond the 90 day period of its authority which expired March 26.
Such legal maneuvering is an important interruption to the efforts of the state to steamroll the council into a vote on an agreement that has remained unchanged in its core since it was first introduced to the city. Continue Reading »
Solutionaries
By Grace Lee Boggs
March 31 – April 7, 2012
In the last year a growing number of individuals and groups has been visiting the Boggs Center to learn more about what we’re doing in Detroit to create the world a new and also share the story of their own efforts.
Until recently, these discussions were taking place about once or twice a month. Last weekend, however, we hosted three such meetings in two days.
Last Friday morning Maya Soetero Ng shared with the Boggs Educational Center — a Detroit group of parents and teachers preparing to open a community-based school — the principles and processes she has used for this purpose in New York City and Hawaii. Continue Reading »
Thinking for ourselves
Reading truth
By Shea Howell
March 27, 2012
Amidst all of the pressing issues facing Detroit, it is understandable how the mainstream media missed a very important article about adult literacy published this week by Data Driven Detroit. The article challenges the oft repeated statistic that 47% of Detroit’s adult population is functionally illiterate. The statistic, and the so-called “new study” that produced it, is neither “new” nor true.
The notion that half of the adults in Detroit cannot read swept through the media like a tornado. Local media outlets, CBS, Fox, NPR, and Huffington Post all reported some version of the “alarming new study” that said “nearly half of Detroiters can’t read.” Continue Reading »
Solutionaries
By Grace Lee Boggs
March 31 – April 7, 2012
In the last year a growing number of individuals and groups has been visiting the Boggs Center to learn more about what we’re doing in Detroit to create the world anew and also share the story of their own efforts..
Until recently , these discussions were taking place about once or twice a month. Last weekend, however, we hosted three such meetings in two days.
Last Friday morning Maya Soetero Ng shared with the Boggs Educational Center — a Detroit group of parents and teachers preparing to open a community-based school — the principles and processes she has used for this purpose in New York City and Hawaii. Continue Reading »
Thinking for ourselves
Reading truth
By Shea Howell
March 27, April 31, 2012
Amidst all of the pressing issues facing Detroit, it is understandable how the mainstream media missed a very important article about adult literacy published this week by Data Driven Detroit. The article challenges the oft repeated statistic that 47% of Detroit’s adult population is functionally illiterate. The statistic, and the so-called “new study” that produced it, is not neither “new” nor true.
The notion that half of the adults in Detroit cannot read swept through the media like a tornado. Local media outlets, CBS, Fox, NPR, and Huffington Post all reported some version of the “alarming new study” that said “nearly half of Detroiters can’t read.” Continue Reading »
LFC We’re going to Atlanta
By Grace Lee Boggs
March 24-31, 2012
I’m looking forward to going to Atlanta next week with other members of the Boggs board.
We’ve been invited to speak to Vincent Harding’s Morehouse College class on “The Last Years of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of America.”
Dr. Harding created this class in order to introduce Morehouse students and other members of the Atlanta community to the direction that MLK was taking in his post March-on-Washington years, especially his continuing call for “a revolution of values” and the struggle against the “triple evils” of racism, materialism and militarism.
He has invited speakers whom he views as seeking to carry on the unfinished work of King in creating a multiracial democratic American nation.
His guests this semester have included urban planner Emmanuel Pratt and his Sweetwater Foundation co-workers in Milwaukee and Chicago; Bob Moses and his daughter, Maisha, sharing their work with the Algebra Project and the Young Peoples Project; Nelson and Joyce Johnson from the Beloved Community Project in Greensboro, N.C.; Phillip Jackson from the Black Star Project in Chicago; James Douglass, major historian of the assassinations of Gandhi, Malcolm and King;
Robert Franklin, president of Morehouse; Michelle Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow, and Sister Helen Prejean, leading death penalty abolitionist.
They have also included Zoharah Simmons, Harding’s long-time co-worker from SNCC, the American Friends Service Committee and Nation of Islam experience. Zoharah, a SNCC volunteer in the 1960s when she was a teenager, is now a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, a member of a Sufi Moslem community and a historian of the Freedom Movement.
The class challenges Morehouse students and other Atlanta citizens to consider their role in the creaion of a new future for our nation.
As Detroiters who organized last October’s historic gathering on Re-imagining Work in the Motor City, we will be sharing the Visionary Organizing we have been doing to help Detroit, a majority African American city, become the national and international symbol of a 21st Century post-industrial society.
We will be emphasizing the important role that the new informational technology can play in helping local communities produce for our own needs, thus becoming self-reliant and freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the factory assembly line and globalization.
This is a mode of production whose time has come because it can play a significant role in bringing about the radical revolution of values advocated by MLK .
About 30 young men are registered in Dr. Harding’s class but we will be speaking to a larger and more diverse audience because he has opened the class up to interested members of the Atlanta community as well as to students and faculty from other institution. The setting will be interactive and dialogical. .
Invincible is coming with us to convey, as only a rap artist can, the excitement of a city in {r} evolution.
Early this month we were in the Bay Area. Last weekend Detroiters participated in the New Left Forum meeting in New York City.
In April we’ll be in New York again, speaking at Cooper Union and the New School.
Thus, step by step, we’re sharing what Detroit is contributing to the Next American Revolution and also getting a sense of what is taking place in other regions of our country .
Thinking for ourselves
State of siege
By Shea Howell
March 20, 2012
Detroit is under siege. Slowly but surely the right wing forces in the state are tightening their grip. Whatever the outcome of negotiations among the Mayor, City Council and the State over the next few weeks, it is clear that Lansing politicians intend to run the city. They intend to eliminate the political power of Detroit residents. They intend to transfer public resources into private hands. They intend to destroy unions. They intend for their consultant friends and contributors to make money in the process.
Most Detroiters know that the use of the emergency financial manager law has nothing to do with concern for the financial health of the city. It is a legalized power grab to disempower citizens and take public resources.
People in Lansing and around the state rub their hands with glee as they claim the financial crisis of Detroit is proof we are incapable of running our own city. They refuse to look at the structural problems they have helped create, or to acknowledge their debt to the city. Nor have they acknowledged that Emergency Managers have yet to solve any of the problems that justified their creation.
In a recent article in the New York Times, David Firestone, removed from the Detroit bashing of Lansing, observed, “Muscling the city aside would clearly be undemocratic, and it is not even clear how effective it would be. The state took over Detroit’s schools in 2009, and has little to show for it yet except for more closed schools and a continuing exodus of students and teachers.”
Firestone concluded the article noting, “The solution may be in the suburbs that have siphoned off Detroit’s money and jobs and talent for decades. A true emergency manager, as many people here have suggested, would have the power to begin merging the tax base of the city with that of suburban counties in hopes of saving the region.”
Any Consent Agreement that does not include the power tax the surrounding suburbs is a sham.
We need to support every effort to challenge this law. We need to encourage the Mayor and the Council to insist on their authority to make decisions. If the state is unwilling to protect the elected officials, we encourage the city to declare bankruptcy. Such a process would not be pleasant, but over the last few years, the court system has proven more sensitive to the democratic right of the citizens of the city than has Lansing.
The thoughts of putting Detroit in its place and getting their hands on all of our assets are blinding the powers in Lansing to the very real rage that is smoldering in the city. As they narrow the political space that Detroiters have to redress our grievances, to come together to resolve our problems and to discuss our own future, the right wing forces in Lansing are pushing people toward more and more desperate measures.
This assault on our basic rights and dignity is especially evident to Detroiters who are engaging in real democratic actions all over the city. As Wayne Curtis of Feedem Freedom Growers said this weekend in New York City at the Left Forum, “Growing our gardens is about making decisions that matter. It is a process that challenges our marginalization and gives us control over our lives.” All across Detroit, people are recreating a new kind of direct democracy, making decisions about planting gardens, protecting parks, running churches, establishing peace zones, creating activities for children, supporting elders, and finding ways to recreate communities ties.
Lansing is playing a dangerous, losing game. Most Detroiters know that the world is changing, challenging those who abuse people and use power for their own gain. The long, deep struggle to control our own lives on principles that value ourselves and one another will not be taken over or given up.
THIS WEEK’S LIVING FOR CHANGE
Changing Concepts of Revolution
By Grace Lee Boggs
In 1941, inspired by the success of the March on Washington movement led by black labor leader A.Philip Randolph, I decided to join the radical movement.
At the time the concept (or paradigm) of revolution generally accepted inside and outside the radical movement came from the 1917 Revolution in Russia. Not only the oppressed but millions of others around the world had been inspired when the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin, had been able to take state power because it had mobilized the workers and the peasants and organized them into Soviets around the demand for “Bread, Peace and Land.”
The Boggs Center
NOW AVAILABLE AT THE BOGGS CENTER STORE
The Next American Revolution (Signed by Grace Lee Boggs)
ON Being Krista Tippet
Becoming Detroit
January 19, 2012
We travel to Detroit to meet the civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs. We find the 96-year-old philosopher surrounded by creative, joyful people and projects that defy more familiar images of decline. It's a kind of parallel urban universe with much to teach all of us about meeting the changes of our time.
boggscenter.org
The Boggs Center was founded in 1995 by friends and associates of James Boggs (1919 -1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915 - ) to honor and continue their legacy as movement activists and theoreticians.Our aim is to help grassroots activists develop themselves into visionary leaders and critical thinkers who can devise proactive strategies for rebuilding and respiriting our cities and rural communities from the ground up, demonstrate the power of ideas in changing ourselves, our reality, and demystify leadership.
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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