The Next American Revolution
A review by John Repp
Looking for ideas of hope, I picked up this book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-first Century by Grace Lee Boggs (before the Occupy Wall Street movement). It is a small book that is very rich in ideas and hope.
Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for over 70 years, living in Detroit since 1953. She is now 95 years old with the energy of a 25 year old. When seen on Democracy Now she always has a big smile on her face. She is Chinese-American who got a PhD in philosophy in 1940 but could not get a job in academia. She became a political activist after seeing the success of A Philip Randolph’s 1941 March on Washington. Just the declaring the intention and starting the organizing of the march prompted FDR to issue the order to integrate the defense factories, to allow African-Americans to get jobs in Detroit and other northern cities. They didn’t actually need to march to get their desired result.
Grace Lee Boggs was a Marxist-Leninist when she was young but soon realized that an American Revolution would have to be very different than the Russian Revolution, because our economic development was so different from Russia’s. She writes that “learning [is] arguably the most important qualification for a movement activist” And she has continued to learn throughout her long life.
In 1950 Detroit had 2 million people, 80% of them whites. In the next 40 years, 1,400,000 whites left the city, building all the suburbs with the help of Federal government funds. The suburbs now surround an 80 % Black city of 900,000. Today there are whole parts of Detroit that look rural, some even look like a wilderness with boarded up factories and abandoned lots.. Globalization and white flight have left the city in ruins. That is the historical context of Grace Lee Boggs redefining of revolution. I have to ask: Is that our future? Is Detroit a vision of our future? What if Boeing and Microsoft left our area? What if the world economy collapsed? What if peak oil stopped most world trade?
Grace Lee Boggs writes a lot about how one of the most important things the capitalist system and the dominant culture has destroyed is a sense of mutual responsibility, or what we call community. And conversely that is what we need to try to rebuild. It became a necessity in Detroit. She and many others have been creating new forms of community-based institutions: opening community and school gardens, forming cooperative businesses to meet local needs, developing “Peace Zones”, getting kids out of school to help the community solve problems, painting community murals and hosting hip-hop events.
The other context for Grace’s redefinition of revolution is the Detroit rebellion of 1967. This was a five day event that changed the city forever. It was the biggest insurrection in the US since the anti-draft riots in New York during the civil war. Grace and her husband Jimmy afterwards thought deeply about the difference between rebellion and revolution. They learned revolution is reorganizing society, making a new beginning, and if rebels take state power without first empowering the oppressed they cannot succeed in making fundamental change. After all her years of activism, Boggs’ idea of revolution looks more and more like Martin Luther King’s vision outlined in his anti-Vietnam war speech in New York in 1967. It must be “a radical revolution of values against racism, materialism and militarism.” It must be the building of a beloved community.
As a post-script, there is a good chapter on Malcolm and Martin, specifically about how they both changed towards the end of their lives and how Malcolm just two months before he was killed explored working with Martin. This chapter is worth the price of the whole book.