LESSON FROM GRACE LEE BOGGS:

Like my recent discovery of the 78 year old activist, Frances Fox Piven, and her emphasis on The Nature of Disruptive Power, where social actions of ordinary people rise up to propel against falsely determined structures; I more recently discovered the power of Grace Lee Boggs.

At 95, she proves to the Hippy generation that activism doesn’t stop when you retire at 65. Her latest book is entitled: The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism in the 21^st Century. Though she was born at the time of Emma Goldman and Mother Jones, notorious Human Rights Activists during the early 20^th Century, Grace Lee Boggs has been able to share her lessons from that era with us today.

Grace Lee wants us to grow our souls. She believes now is the time for the next great American Revolution. In an interview on June 3, 2011 between her, Tavis Smiley, and Cornel West, she spoke of grassroots and self-reliance. “We have to call upon more than just governance and elections to change society. You cannot find a thermometer to tell us the temperature of the people, but we see the beginnings of trying to make a way out of our current No-Way.”

Like Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte, both in their 80’s, she brings a sharp dispute that age is no excuse for failing to make noise in regards to the failures of our current system to provide for human dignity. “Jobs have disappeared. We have to re-imagine our concept of work.” How we have made our living over the last thirty years is quite different than how American’s made their living during the Great Depression. We now have to re-imagine how we make a living in a different way. Before we have the political and social revolution, we need to start by having a personal revolution. We need to, according to Boggs, change our personal agendas and not focus on monetary wealth or self-gain, especially when it is at the cost of others. The competitive nature of our culture is unhealthy.

Sustainable Activism takes the suffering of the negative and turns it into a tool to gain progress. Much like Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialects, a negative such as Auschwitz, becomes a valuable history lesson so that we are responsible enough to never let it happen again. Boggs notes that we should not preoccupy ourselves with just the negative but emphasize the positive as well, “Connect the negative to make new positives. Love and Hope still exist,” even if it has been smeared in political campaign dialogue.

She iterates that the differences between the Great Depression and the current Recession, is that the 1920’s was during the hay-day of mass-production. The different forms of work today make the lifestyle of the 1920’s no longer feasible, especially with computers, internet, cellular phones, and the nature of office work. Work can no longer be the main focus of people’s lives.

This is a creative struggle for those who work for it, and being a Revolutionary means being a Solution-ary. Authentic simpler living, “We must live simple so that others have the opportunity to live. Live with each other.”