Grace Boggs

American author, feminist, social activist Grace Boggs at 94 - thoughts worth pondering. Excerpted, compiled, edited by Carolyn Bennett

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it, and responsible for changing it.

'If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, rain without thunder and lightning' [Frederick Douglass].

For most people including myself this oft-quoted passage from Frederick Douglass sums up all that we had to learn from him. We viewed revolutionary struggle mainly as the oppressed standing up, rebelling against an external enemy, and (not yet) as two-sided transformation. Thus revolutionary leadership meant only agitation and mobilization.

Douglass was a revolutionary leader who developed beyond agitation and mobilization.

A young man in 1840 Frederick Bailey had been brutally beaten for rebelling. He taught himself (and others) to read, bought a book on oratory and developed his skills in public speaking, worked in Baltimore for wages he was required to turn over to his master; he decided the time had come to take a train north and free himself from slavery.

In the 20 years following 1840, he changed his last name to Douglass and established contact with William Lloyd Garrison and (mainly white) Abolitionists. He inspired American and English audiences with the story of his degradation as a slave and his struggles to reclaim his humanity. He wrote different versions of his autobiography, decided to purchase his freedom rather than continue to risk capture as a fugitive slave, married and fathered four children, and established his independence from Garrison and the Abolitionists by publishing his own newspaper.

In making these hard choices, Frederick Douglass matured and transformed himself. By the time of Lincoln's presidency and the Civil War had begun, Douglass was no longer only a black leader.

He had evolved into the kind of Citizen leader needed by all Americans, a leader who was not mainly a politician like Lincoln (or Obama), but one who recognized that in order to free ourselves, Americans had to fight the Civil War not only as a war to preserve the Union but as a war to abolish slavery. In so doing, we/they would not only be freeing blacks, We/they would be acknowledging the terrible damage we/they have done to our own humanity by enslaving African Americans, taking the land from Native Americans, and exploiting peoples all over the world.

Frederick Douglass was unsuccessful in converting Lincoln but by sticking to his principles and by recruiting 200,000 blacks to fight on the side of the North, he had won Lincoln's respect and helped push him towards issuing the January 1963 Emancipation Proclamation.

Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future ... A revolution is not merely for correcting past injustices. A revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future... It begins with projecting the notion of a more 'human' human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have „Ÿ creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.

Don't 'diss' the political things but understand their limitations. It takes a whole lot of things. It takes people doing things. It takes people talking about things. It takes dialogue. It takes changing the whole lot of ways by which we think.

People think of evolution mainly in terms of anatomical changes. I think that we have to think of evolution in terms of „Ÿ very elemental human changes; we are evolving both through our knowledge and through our experiences to another stage of 'human' „Ÿ humankind. [Thus] revolution and evolution are no longer so separate.

I think we have to rethink the concept of 'leader' [because] 'leader' implies 'follower'. c I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.

The struggle we are dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 1960s represented, is how do we define our humanity?

In order to grapple with the interacting and seemingly intractable questions of today's society, we need to see ourselves not mainly as victims. But as new men and women who, recognizing the sacredness in ourselves and in others, can see love and compassion, not as some [as Martin Luther King put it] 'sentimental weakness but as the key that somehow unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality'

How are we going to make our livings in a society becoming increasingly jobless because of hi-tech and outsourcing?

Where will we get the imagination to recognize that for most of human history the concept of Jobs did not exist? Work (distinguished from Labor) was to produce needed goods and services, develop skills and artistry, and nurture cooperation.

What will move us to care for our biosphere instead of using our technological mastery to increase the speed at which we make it uninhabitable?

How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner city children do not drop out of school thus ensuring that millions end up in prison?

Can we build an America in which people of all races and ethnicities live together in harmony, and Euro-Americans, in particular, celebrate their role as one among many minorities constituting the multiethnic majority?

How do we achieve reconciliation with the two-thirds of the world that increasingly resents our economic, military, and cultural domination?

Each of us is called upon c to embrace the conviction that despite the powers and principalities bent on commodifying all our human relationships [turning intrinsic values into commodities bought, sold and wagered upon as pounds of tea], we have the power within us to create the world anew.

We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems „Ÿ not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.

More than a hundred years ago, Marx and Engels in
The Communist Manifesto were talking about constant revolutions in technology.
On the subject they "ended that paragraph by saying,
'All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man/woman is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.' We are at that sort of turning point in human history."

Sources
http://boggsblog.org/
http://boggsblog.org/2009/03/27/michigan-chronicle-profiles-grace-lee-boggs/
Boggs on Democracy Now Thursday September 17, 2009, http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/17/philosopher_grace_lee_boggs_and_sociologist
http://www.betterworld.net/heroes/pages-b/boggs-quotes.htm
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Posted by Bennett's Column at 5:56 PM 0 comments

Labels: defining leaders, evolution, Grace Boggs, Frederick Douglass, revolution, society and humankind

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