[Dialogue] On another topic, but not really . . .

[Ellie Stock]

Jim.
Good article-thanks for sending.  Seems to me ICA work, Awakening the Dreamer symposiums, Transitions Initiatives all work toward this.
Ellie


-----Original Message-----
From: James Wiegel <jfwiegel at yahoo.com>
To: Dialogue Listserve <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Tue, Jun 5, 2012 10:04 am
Subject: [Dialogue] On another topic, but not really . . .


Visionary or protest organizing?

Living by the Clock of the World: Grace Lee Boggs’ Call for Visionary Organizing

By: Matthew Birkhold

Date Published: 

April 17, 2012

In response to a question regarding advice for young activists, 96 year old 
movement veteran Grace Lee Boggs recently told Hyphen Magazine that activists 
should turn our backs on protest organizing because it “leads you more and more 
to defensive operations” and “Do visionary organizing” because it “gives you the 
opportunity to encourage the creative capacity in people and it’s very 
fulfilling.” This quote made its way around facebook, twitter, and tumblr, as 
fans of Grace reposted it like it was common sense while others thought the 
quote bordered on conservatism.

To better understand Grace’s call, we need to understand the historical 
perspective in which it’s rooted.  We also need to understand how visionary 
organizing differs from protest organizing, how Grace understands revolution, 
and that the way history develops means that ideas that were progressive or even 
revolutionary in one era, can become mental roadblocks to progress in another 
era. Although I largely agree with Grace, I write this to clarify her position, 
not merely endorse it. My hope is that we can debate these ideas in ways that 
contribute to the theoretical, reflective, and practical work that movement 
building requires.

Rebellion, Revolution & the Clock of the World

For Grace—as well as for her late husband James Boggs—the present is the 
culmination of thousands of years of human responses to structural conditions.  
These responses include consent to state policies, rebellion against them, and 
revolutions.  In the development of human history, the Boggses believed 
rebellions were important because, contrary to consent, they represented moments 
when oppressed people stood up to assert their humanity by protesting what 
society has done to them. They argued that rebelling masses “see themselves as 
victims and call on others to see them as victims and the other side as 
villains.  They do not yet see themselves responsible for reorganizing society, 
which is what revolutionary social forces must do.”  While rebellions disrupt 
society—questioning the legitimacy of existing institutions—they cannot lead to 
the reorganization of society.

In contrast to rebellions, revolutions create new societies because they begin 
with “projecting the notion of a more human human being” whose development has 
been limited by structural conditions.  Revolutions are not significant simply 
because they involve seizing state power but because they create societies more 
conducive to human development. A revolution is not for the purpose of resolving 
past injustice.  Rather, “the only justification for revolution is that it 
advances the evolution of man/woman.” Understanding revolution as “a phase in 
the long evolutionary process of man/woman,” that “initiates a new plateau, a 
new threshold on which human beings can develop,” the Boggses saw revolution as 
a period when human beings rapidly advanced.

In 1974’s Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, Grace and James 
asked, “What time is it on the clock of the world?”  They answered by 
visualizing 3,000 years of human history on a clock where every minute 
represented fifty years and argued that the age of revolutions was only four or 
five minutes old. Scientific revolutionary thinking, as represented by Marx and 
Engels, was just two minutes old, and the epoch of global revolution represented 
by the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s-60s was a mere thirty seconds old.  
In 1974, the US Civil Rights Movement began merely 15 seconds ago.

The Boggses stressed this long view of history because it’s necessary for 
thinking dialectically—understanding that things are always changing.  Because 
conditions change, if progressive ideas don’t change in ways that correspond to 
changing reality, they become limitations on human development.  As history 
develops, what was revolutionary in one period may not be revolutionary in 
another. From the American Revolution through the present, this premise was 
central to how the Boggses understood history and the changing nature of 
revolution.

American Contradictions, American Revolution

By analyzing history dialectically the Boggses concluded that every movement in 
the history of this country has been incorporated into the capitalist system 
because they have all ended up internalizing capitalist values. While 
progressive, the American revolution also initiated a contradiction between 
economic development and political underdevelopment.  By eliminating slavery 
from the constitution for the sake of national unity, the founding fathers 
pursued economic development at the expense of black humanity.

Similarly, while Northern industrialists and abolitionists were progressive for 
their position on slavery, their actions also furthered the contradiction 
initiated by the founding fathers.  After the Civil War, Southern forces agreed 
to support Northern capitalist presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes if 
Northern politicians agreed to recognize “state’s rights.”  This 1877 compromise 
dismantled the Freedman’s Bureau and led to the creation of Jim Crow.  Placing 
economic interests first, black humanity was again forsaken and the 
contradiction between economic development and human underdevelopment became a 
rewritten law.

In the 1930s-40s it appeared as though a strong, integrated labor movement might 
be able to resolve this contradiction, but its consistent willingness to 
compromise shopfloor conditions and the rights of black people for wage 
increases simply furthered it. Seeing a historical pattern, James Boggs 
concluded, “all organizations that spring up in a capitalist society and do not 
take absolute power, but rather fight only on one tangential or essential aspect 
of that society are eventually incorporated into capitalist society.”

The labor movement’s ability to secure wage increases was related to 
international factors.  Following WWII the United States was the world’s sole 
hegemonic power which allowed US transnational corporations to keep wages 
outside the US lower than in the US.  Using profits made abroad, US firms were 
able to subsidize annual wage increases for US workers. Because others were paid 
less, US workers became the highest paid workers in the world.

A raising standard of living in the US was also made possible by industrial 
automation. While before the war, food, clothing, and shelter were scarce, after 
the war, automation developed manufacturing capacities to a very advanced stage. 
Not only were human needs being met, but there was such an abundance of products 
that particular brands developed varying prestige. For the first time in 
history, working people were able to derive status and identity from the 
consumer products they bought.

Rise of the Welfare State

With global economic growth following WWII, the tax base governments drew upon 
to provide services also grew.  Thus, when social movements emerged to press for 
more access to benefits, states had the means to meet those demands and welfare 
states took hold throughout the industrialized world.  As global economic growth 
continued, new jobs were created, higher wages were paid, and both the working 
and middle classes enjoyed vast increases in their standard of living.  Because 
this economic growth provided the basis for the state sponsored poverty programs 
of the 1960s and 70s, many activists working on these issues developed an 
unintentional economic stake in maintaining US hegemony.

In the midst of such abundance and global economic factors, the Boggses 
concluded that revolution had to be rethought. While third world revolutionaries 
could organize around basic needs, American revolutionaries had to “discover the 
purpose of a socialist revolution in an advanced country like the United Sates 
where material abundance and technological advancement already exist, where more 
is stolen in the ghettoes everyday than is produced in most African countries 
during an entire year, and where many of the oppressed have a higher standard of 
living than the middle classes in most countries.” The Boggses decided that 
socialism in the US meant putting political and social responsibility in command 
of economics.

Because the Black movement almost universally prioritized the question of what 
it meant to be a human being over economic demands in the 50s and 60s, it looked 
as though it would resolve the contradiction between economic development and 
human underdevelopment.  However, according to James Boggs, after the urban 
rebellions from 1965-1968, when concessions were granted to blacks and crime 
increased in black communities, the black movement became incorporated into the 
capitalist system because leaders “made no serious effort to repudiate the 
bourgeois method of thought on which U.S. capitalism is based, which involves 
each individual or group just getting more for itself.”  Refusing to acknowledge 
“that blacks are an integral part of the 5 percent of the world’s population 
living in the United States and using up 40 percent of the world’s energy 
resources for their big cars and their new appliances, just as whites are 
doing,” Boggs argued that the black movement stopped thinking about projecting a 
vision of new man/woman and began fighting for a bigger slice of the American 
pie.

Decline

As the Black movement shifted its focus, a global economic crisis emerged and 
the welfare state began unraveling.  Unable to keep increasing wages, US based 
firms laid off thousands of US workers to deal with increased competition from 
British and Japanese based Transnational Corporations.  A domestic backlash 
calling for drastically smaller government and lower taxes also emerged, fueled 
by white resentment towards African Americans and other oppressed groups who had 
been engaged in very successful sustained protests. With increased unemployment 
creating a smaller tax base than what existed before 1968-1974 and with an 
increasing number of tax expenditure limitations passed at the state level after 
1974, the economic base of the welfare state in the United States crumbled.

In the midst of this crisis the Boggses saw that US based exploitation of the 
global South had created such abundance that even the most oppressed people in 
the US were able to advance themselves economically at the expense of the rest 
of the world.  Accordingly, they concluded that the fundamental contradiction in 
the US lay between its economic/technology overdevelopment and human/political 
underdevelopment. While racism, sexism, and poverty are important 
contradictions, they can be explained as a consequence of the tendency of 
Americans to prioritize economic development and individual gain over political 
and social responsibility. Having become more politically inhumane the more 
technology advances, Americans have become “a people who have been 
psychologically and morally damaged by the unlimited opportunities to pursue 
material happiness provided by the cancerous growth of the productive forces.”

Because these technological and economic advances have become a danger to the 
physical survival of the rest of the world, demanding more things—regardless of 
who demands them—has become a fetter on developing a revolutionary movement. 
Therefore, the Boggses argued, “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 things.”

Because it would be incredibly difficult to organize protests whose aim is 
material sacrifice, Grace believes organizing and joining “massive protests and 
demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face.  They 
may demonstrate that we are on the right side politically, but they are not 
transformative enough.  They do not change the cultural images or the symbols 
that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are.”  Visionary 
organizing can play this role.

A Radical Revolution of Values

It is within this understanding of historical development and revolution that 
Grace has called on young activists to “do visionary organizing,” and to “turn 
your backs on protest organizing.” Visionary organizing demands not only 
“repudiating the bourgeois method of thought on which U.S. capitalism is based, 
which involves each individual or group just getting more for itself,” but also 
developing alternative institutions and communities that facilitate doing “the 
work of re-imagining our selves,” and helping us “think beyond capitalist 
categories.”  Because we have all internalized the values of this racist, 
sexist, capitalist system to some extent, we must all transform ourselves by 
undergoing what Martin Luther King called “a radical revolution of values” 
allowing us to become person, rather than thing oriented, if we are to 
participate in a revolution that makes material sacrifices.  Rather than relying 
on protest to achieve this personal transformation, visionary organizing 
facilitates this transformation by re-imagining institutions that can facilitate 
new cultural images and symbols, molding us into new kinds of people.

Because capitalism is a system that flourishes when people think they can’t live 
without it, capitalist institutions work to convince human beings we can’t 
create alternatives. Having consented to this coercion, most of us have not 
developed the creative capacities necessary to project alternatives to the 
capitalist world.  Instead, we make demands that corporations and the government 
fix things they’ve broken.  Alternatively, by placing an emphasis on creating 
re-imagined spaces and institutions in which healthy relationships with people, 
nature, and our selves can be built—by creating beloved communities—visionary 
organizing heals us from capitalist dehumanization and restores an awareness of 
people’s innate ability to create.

Beloved communities should not be seen as a means to build unity so that we may 
better build a protest movement.  As communities in which King’s “concept of 
love as the readiness to go to any length to restore community” is primary, 
beloved communities are spaces where people can be nurtured and heal the damage 
our racist, sexist, capitalist world has done, giving us a foundation to develop 
identities outside of capitalist categories and consumption, while creating a 
base for political power stemming from the creation of alternative institutions, 
or dual power structures.  Beloved communities thus serve as a transmission belt 
for the radical revolution of values needed for a revolution in which we have to 
sacrifice material things.

Turning Our Backs or Understanding Limitations?

The current time on the clock of the world is incredibly complex.  We in the 
United Sates are experiencing a crisis in our standard of living, something the 
Wisconsin labor protests, the movement to defend education, and the occupy 
movements have all emerged in response to. Yet, little of this organizing 
reflects an understanding that the US empire supported welfare state made that 
higher standard of living possible in the first place. Despite this, because 
rebellious protests have combined with the current economic crisis to bring the 
legitimacy of existing institutions into question, people in the United States 
are more willing to envision what new men and women should look like than at any 
point in my lifetime. These conditions lend themselves to the possibility of 
building a revolutionary movement based on what men and women could be. Thus, 
Grace believes relying solely on protest is a fetter on creating a revolutionary 
movement.

Because we are a nation of people who have been damaged by the way we’ve 
endlessly consumed, in order to take advantage of this crisis we must heal. We 
must wage what James Boggs called a “Two-Pronged Struggle,” and combine the 
struggle against the internal enemy with the struggle against the external 
enemy. As unemployment rises, homes get foreclosed, education and health care 
get cut, and state sanctioned violence against all people who are not straight 
white men continues, people have immediate needs that must be met and 
traditional protest movements can help meet some of these immediate needs.  We 
must recognize that there is a difference between meeting the immediate needs of 
human beings in a society that is destroying the world and meeting needs that 
will allow people to create a new society with a vastly more human relationship 
to the world. These are two different sets of needs and building the next 
American revolution requires we put the satisfaction of our immediate needs in 
the service of satisfying the needs that allow us to create a new world.

Resolving the complex dilemmas of the current moment requires immense creativity 
and imagination.  While we must absolutely stop home foreclosures, we must also 
understand that home ownership, as it currently exists, cannot be separated from 
global finance and the destruction of the global South.  This means we can’t 
only stop foreclosures but have to also re-imagine housing.  Rising unemployment 
and individual states’ inability to extend unemployment insurance means people 
have to find ways to survive. Because the current jobs economy is so closely 
interconnected with the exploitation of the global South, simply protesting to 
demand more jobs will continue destroying the world.  Accordingly, we need to 
create and utilize neighborhood time banks and skill shares as a way to meet 
some of our immediate needs without money.  We also need to create businesses 
that reflect the values of beloved communities.  Protesting various laws that 
create barriers to business creation might be useful here.

These dilemmas pose incredible challenges. We are lucky to have two upcoming 
events that might help us better learn how to do this.  From July 1-15 2012, the 
Boggs Center is organizing a gathering called “Detroit 2012: Re-imagine the 
World, Transform Ourselves, Fight for the Future,” where delegates from all over 
the US can come to Detroit for two weeks and be trained in visionary organizing 
while sharing their work with people in Detroit.  If you can’t make it to 
Detroit, in New York the Foundry Theatre is organizing a weekend-long event 
featuring Grace Lee Boggs on the opening night, April 20, in Cooper Union’s 
Great Hall.  The entire gathering, titled “This Is How We Do It: A festival of 
Dialogues About Another World Under Construction,” is in many ways inspired by 
Grace’s concept of visionary organizing and features innovative practitioners 
from throughout the US as well as from South Africa, Argentina and Brazil. For 
those unable to make it to New York, the event will be live streaming at: 
www.thefoundrytheatre.org

Matt Birkhold is a Brooklyn based writer, visionary organizer, and co-founder of 
Growing Roots, a work group dedicated to re-imagining ourselves, building new 
economies, and creating new communities.  He is currently writing a book on the 
evolution of visionary organizing in Detroit and can be reached at Birkhold

 



Jim Wiegel
Jfwiegel at yahoo.com

I can't say as I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.  
Daniel Boone

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