The incredible unexpected riots in London are a shocking display of how society can run amok at the face of disorganized rage among frustrated displaced masses. Looting and violence are all across London. In Chile, the protests this week are as intense and yet slightly more organized and much more focused on frustrations of students demanding changes in public education.
When the breaking point occurs in the US, will this be the similar image? Remember when Hurricane Katrina happened. The Bush-Cheney government waited so long to actually get involved. The only sign the federal government stepped in was initially to secure the oilrigs off the coast. But then when looting disrupted the city, the authorities entered. Most of mainstream media slandered the image of reckless looting but did not really show the scenes of the looting by people seeking basic needs such as food and clothing. One can only fear what will happen across the country if the stock market collapses.
I seek out the ideas of Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs to find a lesson for the recklessness. In her book Woman’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution, Raya reflects on her inspiration from Karl Marx: “Marx envisioned a totally new man, a totally new woman, a totally new form of life, in a word, a totally new society. But suddenly, Marx found it difficult to answer a simple question from Vera Zasculitch on the future of the Russian commune, in the manner in which it was debated between the Narodniks and the Marxists – that is to say, whether it could lead to communism without needing to go through capitalism and evidently without a revolution?” (RD). Will change happen without a revolution and without violence?
In the 21st Century, Marx’s economic and revolutionary concept of politics is no longer appealing for the youth. Dialectics seems to just be a term that is loaded with jargon and bore. Grace Lee Boggs claims that we must go beyond Marx and his assumptions. Grace and her husband during his lifetime continually grappled with the ideas of revolution.
She says, “Revolutions are made in order to advance the evolution of humanity, and require struggles not just against the enemy but also against the enemy within ourselves” (Boggs, Living for Change). Self-criticism and self-interrogation are essential to every movement, so that we do not just resort to looting. If all the Marxists and other revolutionary thinkers want to push the public to militancy just to seize power, then they have failed before they have even started.
If all we want is just more things, more consumer materialism, whether we need them or not, and seizing this opportunity only to evade responsibility, we have lost (Boggs).
Looting reflects our value over material things more than social ties. Part of our own irresponsibility comes from our own lack of self-will over acts of civil disobedience versus the easy route to selfish stealing and taking. But we all know whether we want to admit it or not, the nurturing of Corporate Capitalism, especially in the last hundred years has depreciated moral society. “Corporations have no commitment to the reforms that Americans have won through hard struggles” and will leave us as a whole, like the few have done in Detroit and Flint.
In James and Grace Boggs’ Revolution and Evolution, they assert that a new American revolution “must begin by our recognizing how down through the years we have retarded our” social evolution by “separating ethics from politics and by interpreting freedom as an evasion of political responsibility to ourselves and to the rest of the world” (Boggs).
Corporations will bail on the American people at all costs, because they have done this before and are doing it now. They have turned human relations into money relations. Grace Lee Boggs spent decades and still today in Detroit trying to build up community involvement, while the auto-industry jumped ship and built factories overseas and recklessly laid off thousands of American employees.
While the Lady screams in London that this is reality, we realize that if we resort to mindless looting and rioting, anger will only destroy our homes and not necessarily affect the actual source of power.
“Movements are not initiated by Revolutionaries. They begin when large numbers of people, having reached the point” of exhaustion and cannot take the way things are anymore, hope to improve their daily lives and begin to move on their own.
Raya Dunayevskaya reminds us that all the great revolutionary movements were made by the people and not just by theorists. All great revolutionary movements had women making the strongest shouts of reason and initiative for their cause. Louis Michel in France, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, in the Abolitionist Movement there was Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, in the Labor Rights Movement there was Mother Jones and Emma Goldman; even in Russia, the Bolshevik revolution did not take place until after the 50,000 women in the textile factories that February 1917 signaled the Russians were ready.
Reckless greed does not help gain what people need. This year marks the hundred years since the infamous Triangle Shirt Factory Fire in the New York garment district that killed over 100 women workers. But in the Spring 1908, the garment workers declared International Woman’s Day on March 8th, and the media called it the “Uprising of 20,000”.
Though Grace Lee Boggs and Raya Dunayevskaya worked closely together during the 1940’s and 50’s, for the last thirty years of Raya’s life they had branched into different circles. However, they grappled with the same issues of society. They both emphasize, “New paths to freedom are not easy to work out,” it’s an ongoing dialogue that cannot be shut up, and that individuals must be persistent in asking questions.
Boggs reflects, “Our ideas and actions will be judged on their merits in relation to advancing humanity, regardless of class,” creed, race, gender or sexual preference. Democracy is an ongoing process and not just attributed to elections every four years.
By choosing a language of extremes that are easily slandered and branded improperly through media’s propaganda, those who want to “fight together for a cause” whether it is Marxism, socialism, anarchism, or any other Left fraction, we limit our audience by hyper focusing on terminology. Our energies of organizing fail the attention spans and listening ears of Tea-Bag Rights as well as those claiming to be neutrally passive, accepting the current corporate political economy.
If we hyper focus, we increase the defensiveness and deafness of those super-patriotic or merely apathetic to the current crisis. “What we need to do,” shouts Grace at 96 years of age, “is to instead encourage groups of all kinds and all ages to participate in creating a vision of the future that will enlarge our inclusive humanity in devising concrete programs which we can work on together” (Boggs).
Looting is not the answer, and perhaps it is an immediate release of impulse, but it only makes the challenge harder. We do not want to be a Cool Hand Luke, someone who makes one petty crime, and wastes valuable energy sitting behind bars.
Grace’s friend Ping Ferry said, “It is not necessary to succeed in order to strive.”
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