Grace Boggs, Detroit and the next revolution

Grace Lee Boggs says she would like the chapter titles of her new book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, written with Scott Kurashige, to become buzzwords for progressive activists.

So I imagine "Detroit, Place and Space to Begin Anew" or "We Are the Leaders We've Been Looking For" on T-shirts, trying to fit them on for size in the coming era of struggle to rebuild Detroit and Michigan.

More than just buzzing around, Boggs wants people to really ponder the meaning and implications of those words. "What does it mean to start anew? What does it mean to say we are the leaders we've been looking for?" she asks me rhetorically. "I think instead of growing our budgets, we need to be growing our souls. What are the economics of happiness instead of gross national product? People of every race are beginning to think differently. They're beginning to recognize that life isn't just about making a living. It's about making a life."

Boggs is a political philosopher whose thought and activism have been reaching around the globe from her modest home near Mack and East Grand Boulevard. Last week, I sat down with her and Kurashige, a Boggs Center board member and director of AC Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan, to ask how her ideas relate to some of the tumultuous events taking place these days. The large, though not fancy, brick house is filled with books and papers. It's not an advertisement for the electronic age and predictions of a paperless society. Boggs, the daughter of Chinese-American restaurant owners, earned a Ph.D from Bryn Mawr in 1940, became a leftist, and married black autoworker-activist James Boggs. The Boggses collaborated with the Marxist historian and theorist C.L.R. James during the 1950s, and, starting in the 1960s, set their own course, writing several books either separately or together. These days, Grace, a widow recently turned 95, is the leader of the nonprofit Boggs Center, headquartered at her home, which is the hub around which a number of efforts — Detroit Summer, the Allied Media Project, Detroit City of Hope, the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality and others — maintain their philosophical grounding and connection to a broader, growing movement in Detroit.

Boggs' revolution is not a call to seize political power from the government. "A cultural revolution has begun to take place," says Boggs. "It's a phenomenon as historic and as far-reaching as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry. Now we're at the heart of a change from industry to a world where people work not so much at jobs. Work is something that we do to develop skills as much as to produce goods and services. We're so used to the idea that we work in order to make money, but that's not why people have worked throughout history and that's the kind of way we're going now. It provides a very different perspective of revolution. It's not about seizing state power to plan the economy.

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