<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 9.00.8112.16443"></HEAD>
<BODY style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 10pt" id=role_body
bottomMargin=7 leftMargin=7 rightMargin=7 topMargin=7><FONT id=role_document
color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>
<DIV>Thank you for sharing this, Jim. Really revolutionary, it seems to me. Is
anyone you know going to Detroit in July? What an opportunity for young(er)
facilitators.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Jann</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 6/5/2012 8:04:59 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
jfwiegel@yahoo.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" color=#000000 size=2
face=Arial>Visionary or protest organizing?<BR><BR>Living by the Clock of the
World: Grace Lee Boggs’ Call for Visionary Organizing<BR><BR>By: Matthew
Birkhold<BR><BR>Date Published: <BR><BR>April 17, 2012<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Rebellion, Revolution & the Clock of the World<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>American Contradictions, American
Revolution<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.”<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Rise of the Welfare State<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Decline<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.”<BR><BR>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.”<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>A Radical Revolution of
Values<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Turning Our
Backs or Understanding Limitations?<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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<BR><BR>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<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>Jim Wiegel<BR>Jfwiegel@yahoo.com<BR><BR>I
can't say as I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
Daniel
Boone<BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Dialogue
mailing
list<BR>Dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net<BR>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net<BR></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>