James and Grace Lee Boggs have been promoting the concept of cultural revolution inherited from the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, since Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century was published in 1974. Affirming that the
revolutions cannot be copied and pasted to any country, including the US, James and Grace Lee Boggs have been pondering on the issue of the American version revolution. The US has long been confirmed as a country holding the ideology of capitalism opposite to communism.
However, the capitalism of accumulation and production-consumption relationship appears to come to its end in the twenty-first century when more and more economic and environmental issues are put forward. Detroit underwent the capitalistic wash from the overproducing industrial development in the 1930s to “today’s casino economy” in which financial ups and downs take control of people’s emotion and material life (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 4). While capitalism lost its charm as the economic miracles during post-war period, communism, from the eyes in the twenty-first century, is not the alternative, either. Martin Luther King Jr. points out
“[capitalism] encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered.” Communism, as it had been instituted by parties in state power, had reduced men to “a cog in the wheel of the state.” “Each represents a partial truth,” concluded King. “Communism fails to see the truth in individualism.
Capitalism fails to realize that life is social.” (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 3)
Beyond the traditional thought between capitalism and communism, King Jr. holds the belief in social democracy as a niche against communism, or totalitarianism in 1950s American social context.
In the twenty-first century, the choice between capitalism or communism is no longer the locus of debate, but Grace Lee Boggs further develops the concept of community-building and democracy by putting her philosophy in practice. As a philosopher, Grace Lee Boggs does not hold back and hide herself in the “ivory tower” (Introduction). Instead, she believes that
“through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts” will the good ideas be developed
(Introduction). Believing in the power of philosophy, Boggs thus puts the philosophy of community-building into action by bringing forward the old but meaningful and practical concept, namely, love and responsibility:
Love isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you do every day when you go out and pick up the papers and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they’re doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give ’em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than we are. In other words, Love isn’t about what we did yesterday;
it’s about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after. (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 3).3 The revolution in the twenty-first century is not a model that a group of people need to follow;
instead, it is a progressive process developed through the dialectical discussion and experiments among local community members. Love is never a slogan or gratis dictum that often ends up in nihilism. With Boggs’ detailed definition, the significance of mutual support and benefit among human beings reveals itself concretely in front of the readers.
In addition to love, as James and Grace Lee Boggs’s assertion in 1974, revolution is different from rebellion inasmuch as revolutionaries will take up the responsibilities to organize a community-to-be. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the event of recalling the Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Grace Lee Boggs kept promoting the concept of “responsibilities” to replace “rights” in this new epoch (Preface to the 2012 Edition, hereafter Preface 2012, italics in the original). Responsibilities require “more socially-minded human beings” and “more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy”
(Preface 2012). Not only do the group organizers have to be responsible but every citizen has
3 It has to be clarified that the love here is related less to faraway state administrative power, or called the patriotism, than to our “neighborhood.” Here the focus of revolutions has been shifted from the mass movements to daily-life changes.
to take up the responsibilities to take part in public affairs. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Grace Lee Boggs does crystalize her view on revolutions from the scale of a state to revolutions in local communities and grassroots power in everyday life. The idea of top-down static communism has been changed to the social empowerment from the ground up.4
Breaking away from the communism treating people as cogs, in the new era of revolutions, the essence of human beings reflects itself on the value of humanity, free will, and “souls.” In their 1974 publication, James and Grace Lee Boggs only devised the new idea of work that was helpful to the community, other people, and self (243). In the twenty-first century, Grace Lee Boggs elaborates on the concept of work further by citing Olga Bonfiglio’s response in the Reimagining Work Conference:
“Basically, work is about one’s calling in life and contributions to the community while jobs are more about the specific tasks people perform for an organization,” she remarked.
“‘Jobs’ have a dehumanizing effect as people fill interchangeable slots in a big machine.
In today’s global economy workers can be easily replaced with those willing to work for lower wages. So, transformation to any new system of ‘work’ must begin with one’s own personal discernment about identity and purpose in this life.” (Preface 2012)
Briefly speaking, work is relevant to personal development and social contributions, but jobs merely involve salary and daily expenses. On this topic, Orwell’s arguments can make the discourse more complete. In Down and Out in Paris and London, he already criticizes the meaning of “work.” He argues that “there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people” (190, italics in the original). For Orwell, the “trade” of a beggar is the same as other workers, such as a navy and an accountant, “quite
4 Again, the grassroots power is different from the revolutions directing to overturning a regime and funding a new state. The grassroots power is a counterweight to the gigantic capitalistic institutions.
useless, of course, but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless” (191). He even praises the beggars to be honest than “most patent medicines,” more high-minded than “a Sunday newspaper proprietor,” and more amiable than “a hire-purchase tout” (191). In such comparison, a tramp is “harmless parasite,” who is only a “bare living” in a community (191).
In short, Orwell criticizes the capitalism and consumerism’s conception of work, or “jobs” in Grace Lee Boggs’s sense—to measure the jobs according to their incomes. Nowadays, Grace Lee Boggs discusses the difference between work and jobs from the perspective of the post-industrial period, but overall in the same vein. Grace Lee Boggs and Orwell both want to get rid of the potential materialism latent in jobs, and unravel the light of humanity in “work.”
Today, the “robots have replaced workers on assembly lines,” but at the same time, they also replace the “fragmenting and inhuman” jobs we perceived in the industrial age (Grace Lee Boggs Preface to the Paperback Edition, Ch. 5). Hi-Tech (high technology) on the one hand might result in the globalization of dehumanized management of human resources by exporting the factories and production lines, but on the other hand, with the help of robots, human beings have the opportunity to mitigate the unnecessary labor and exploitation (Grace Lee Boggs Ch.
3). The debate between Hi-Tech and humanity, and the discussion of values between work and jobs derive from philosophy and dialectical thinking. In consistence with her claim in 1974, Grace Lee Boggs still believes that philosophy can cultivate people’s souls and help achieve self-determination. Grace Lee Boggs enforced her philosophical practice and recorded her revolutionary life in Detroit to confront what Martin Luther King Jr. found hard to dissolve:
“the giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism”. (Introduction).
The movements against racism, militarism and materialism promote the ideal of humanitarianism. In American context, “the ‘arsenal of democracy’ to defeat Hitler and Tojo was now clouded by the recognition that militarism was a profitable enterprise” (Grace Lee Boggs Introduction). The military forces evilly conspire with the capitalistic elements, bringing
out the weird logic that going to war is equivalent to making money. In regard to earning a living, the international enterprises control our everyday life from production to consumption, and the “ideals of work became factory oriented” (Preface 2012). Precisely speaking, people work in factories in order to earn money instead of wholeheartedly doing something to benefit their communities. The act of working is thus alienating people’s bodies from their minds. The laborers work for the purpose of meeting their physical needs, but the jobs themsleves is meaningless to their souls. Furthermore, in the Hi-Tech era, people are accelerating the speed of consuming the resources, which makes the “planet uninhabitable for other species and eventually for ourselves” (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 1). Citing the example of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, Grace Lee Boggs claims that the goal of this movement is not only to desegregate the buses but to desegregate and create “the beloved community” (Ch. 1). The forces of racism, militarism, and materialism together direct to the inhuman reality, and this is why Grace Lee Boggs constantly appeals to humanity as the turning point to change the speedy process of exploitation and alienation under the new era of information technology.
Grace Lee Boggs takes Wayne Curtis and Myrtle Thompson Curtis’ Feedom-Freedom Growers project as example. Faced with the deindustrialization and industry offshoring, Detroit kept losing job opportunities over the years. Not hoping to retrieve the jobs, Mr. and Mrs.
Curtis started the community project in 2009 featuring the slogan “grow a garden, grow a community” in Manistique, Michigan. In the community project, Mr. and Mrs. Curtis aim at eliminating the influence of capitalism by growing foods, holding artistic activities, and mentoring the youth to build relationship among residents (Feedom Freedom Facebook page).
The farms in the community thus become “a gathering place for meetings of minds, a place where history lessons and education about all things connected to life are shared” (Curtis).
Grace Lee Boggs herself also took part in the community-building activities and launched the “City of Hope campaign” in Detroit which
involves rebuilding, redefining, and respirating Detroit from the ground up: growing food on abandoned lots, reinventing education to include children in community-building, creating co-operatives to produce local goods for local needs, developing Peace Zones to transform our relationships with one another in our homes and on our streets…. (Ch. 2) Overseas, the Zapatistas in Mexico represents a more radical version of grassroots movement.
Grace Lee Boggs claims that the “Detroit-City of Hope campaign has more in common with the revolutionary struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas than with the Russian Revolution of 1917” in that both of them put emphasis on the development of local community, self-production and self-consumption, and communication among community members. Through education, health care, and participatory democracy in the community, the Zapatistas breaks out the political control from Mexican government and the financial threat from giant enterprises.
Still, each case of local revolution varies from one another, and therefore cannot be simply
“cut and pasted.” The Zapatistas is a radical form of the examples, which even involves the military force of guerilla troops. We ought to consider the diversity of revolutions and community-building projects in different local contexts. Without a model of revolution to follow, the uncertainty becomes the norm. However, according to Immanuel Wallerstein, it is
“uncertainty rather than certainty about the future provides the basis for hope” (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 2). In the conversation with Grace Lee Boggs, Wallerstein pointed out that the system of capitalism has “an endless accumulation of capital,” whereas “to live well is not necessarily to endlessly consume” (Grace Lee Boggs Afterward). Philosophy, dialectics, and negation from within thus help escape the treadmill of capital accumulation in the world of entire commodification. The “contradictions or negatives” arises in the process of dialectical discussion to “break free from views that were at one time liberating but had become fetters
because reality had changed” (Ch. 2). This is what Grace Lee Boggs calls the Hegelian negative, the process of negating the originally correct, as the apocalypse in the new era.
The community projects in Detroit echo Orwell’s proposal in the early nineteenth century to grow a farm and build a kitchen in the workhouse in England. At first, Orwell’s idea was inspired by the suffocating atmosphere of boredom and the inefficient job system in the workhouse, but regarding his hatred of the sordid environments and the tormenting regulations in the workhouse, the community-building-like concept is pioneering from today’s viewpoint.
The reality of dehumanization has come around since imperialism in Orwell’s era to the racism, militarism, and materialism in the US nowadays. Revisiting the possibility of community-building can thus serve as few of the solutions to the restless society.