Boggs Center Blog

Listen to The Next American Revolution Speech, by Grace Lee Boggs, presented at the Left Forum Closing Plenary, Cooper Union, in New York, on March 16, 2008. Find the text of this speech here.

By: Patrick Barry of LISC/Chicago’s blog

[check out other news and commentary about community development at LISC/Chicago's blog, http://communitybeat.blogspot.com, and the New Communities Program website at http://www.newcommunities.org]

I hang out with a lot of very smart people but tonight was different. Tonight I was in the presence of genius.

After spending the day with other community development practitioners at a LISC Learning Forum in Detroit, including a tour and workshop in the Morningside and East English Village neighborhoods, we were treated to a remarkable dinner presentation by 93-year-old civic activist Grace Lee Boggs.

She surprised us over and over again. First, this daughter of Chinese immigrants with a Ph.D. in philosophy, who later married African-American labor activist James Boggs, well, first she introduced an 11-minute rap video by the Detroit artist Invincible, a young woman whose words burn deeply as she spits them out against a backdrop of apocalyptic post-industrial Detroit. “Selective memory, convenient amnesia,” she chants, and a whole lot more. Read more »

Late Friday afternoon, approximately 50 members of Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR) sat down near the main gate of the Port of Olympia in Washington State. Two tractor trailers, one carrying two Stryker combat vehicles, another filled with military cargo, were blocked from exiting the port. Police arrived on the scene and after failing to persuade the demonstrators to allow one truck through, ceded control of the entrance. The 2 trucks were forced by these circumstances to back up — returning inside the port gate. At this point, OlyPMR controlled movement into and out of the port.

By Lydia Wylie-Kellerman
A College Commencement Talk

Today we each take a step into our life’s work. We’ve been told a million times we are entering the “real world.” But what is this real world? It is a world built on white privilege, on the prerogatives of wealth, on marginalization through homophobia, on the violence of patriarchy and militarism, and the addictive mechanisms of consumer culture. It is a broken, hurtful, and hurting world. In many ways, we are inheriting a world that is not worth inheriting. It is a broken world– that we didn’t break. Read more »

TO MICHAEL HARDT FROM GRACE BOGGS, 4/29/08
Many thanks for your little book on Thomas Jefferson which arrived yesterday. I’ve only had time to read the introduction, but I couldn’t wait to let you know how much I appreciate your analysis and the succinctness and clarity with which you have conveyed these powerful ideas.

You are so right on in insisting that both Lenin and Jefferson believed that “humanity can and must be transformed.” That’s why Lenin opposed anarchism and Jefferson was so interested in education.

Both made a distinction between the “event” of insurrection or rebellion and the process of Being transformed Through Practice in self-rule after the “event ” (Lenin’s Workers and Peasants Inspection, Jefferson’s “wards” or “little republics “).

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Michael Hardt, the author of Multitude and Empire talks about love, how can love function as a political concept, why love, the proper and improper ways love has functioned politically, love as activism, and evil and its relationship to love. Watch all six youtube segments here:

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By: Terry Dobson

A turning point in my life came one day on a train in the suburbs of Tokyo, in the middle of a drowsy spring afternoon.  The old car clanked and rattled over the rails.  It was comparatively empty—a few housewives with their kids in tow, some old folks out shopping, a couple of off-duty bartenders studying the racing form.  I gazed absently at the drab houses and dusty hedgerows.
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By: Rich Feldman

May 16, 2008

Dear Editor,

This is my open letter to the people of Wayne, Macomb and Oakland County. Obama’s recent visit to Michigan can be more than a politicians attempt to get votes. The Obama Campaign provides a tremendous opportunity for Michigan to begin to create a new American Dream for the 21 century. Along with the legitimate criticism of the Bush years, this is an opportunity for us to take responsibility as citizens to create local economies and local ethical politics that will provide security for ourselves and our children. Obama has challenged people to leave behind the categories, the labels, the boxes and small thinking that has divided us by race, technology and
economics. Our state is filled by fears, insecurities and hopelessness which leads to blaming others, the Unions, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the politicians rather than accept responsibility to change our thinking and engage with others to become citizens committed to a new economics and a new politics. Obama has inspired a new generation to think about what American can become. Michigan needs to become part of this opportunity. Democracy starts with compassion and citizenship. Democracy is about the public good and the recognition that security comes from community and inclusion, not blaming and whining.
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By: Will Copeland

We’re growing our organic activists

No Propaganda and No preservatives

We’re growing with the weeds and cabbages

Taking out the Neo-conservatives

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By: Rich Feldman

I have read about half of the book: “Blessed Unrest” by Paul Hawken.

Thanks, Grace and Shea, for pushing this book. It is the first book that begins to explain to me why so many of the young people in and around Detroit Summer have moved beyond the thinking of the New and Old Left. They have been raised in the closing decades of the epoch in human history that began with the destruction of indigenous people and the slave trade through industrialization (or the beginning of the destruction of the environment). They are coming of age at the beginning of the new era, moving beyond imperialism and the nation-state to corporate globalization, resistance to which entered a new era with the Zapatistas and the Battle of Seattle in 1999. Read more »