SELF-ORGANIZATION: RESTORING SANITY
Grace Lee Boggs: A Lifetime of Movement Building
Grace Lee Boggs was a lifelong activist and philosopher for social justice from 1951 to her death in 2015 at age 100. She worked with unending dedication to foster the “Next American Revolution,” developing a theory of (r)evolution and putting it into practice especially in Detroit, where she worked with her husband, the activist James Boggs.19 In the early 1970s, she wrote a piece, “Organization Means Commitment,”20 in which she described a very different concept of revolutionary organization and leadership, developed from many long years of patient and protracted theoretical and practical struggles.
“We committed ourselves to transformational organizing, which does not mainly denounce and protest oppression or mobilize Americans to struggle for more material things, but challenges us as Americans to evolve or transform ourselves into more human human beings.”
She defined the work of leadership with these key behaviors:
1. The organizational structure must develop every member as a leader and not depend on a few charismatic leaders.
2. Leaders of revolution, in contrast to rebellion, must make a philosophical leap and become more human human beings. In order to change/transform the world, they must change/ transform themselves.
3. Leaders must learn to think dialectically, because reality is constantly changing; what is progressive at one point can turn into its opposite at a later point. And in everything there is both the positive and negative. The responsibility of revolutionary leadership in times of crisis is not just to denounce or protest oppression but to project a vision that encourages grassroots creation of positive alternatives
When asked to comment on Occupy Wall Street at its beginning in the fall of 2011, Grace thanked everyone for breaking the silence but warned them several times that they were in for a long hard struggle.21 They needed to notice how they were part of the culture that they were opposing and, therefore, were susceptible to behaving in old ways. Most important, they needed to understand that they had the chance to create something new; therefore, they needed to be thinking about values, not just abuses.22
Challenges for Leaders of Social Change
As with any pattern, these behaviors are bound to occur, no matter the social cause or the individual leader. So it’s wise not to take these too personally; they are unavoidable and predictable. The leader’s task is to notice them and then resolve them.
People no longer work from a commonly held identity.
Devotion to cause becomes fundamentalist or orthodox.
People disagree on tactics; internal opposition arises; relationships fracture.
Dominant culture still influences people, and the new values get subsumed by the old ones.
People take on the tactics of the opposition, especially as those intensify.
Egotism grows as the leader receives admiration and devotion.
The leader feels defeated by slander, misrepresentation, attacks, personal exhaustion, and despair.
Leadership changes because of internal revolt, persecution, death, illness.
They tried to bury us.
They didn’t know we were seeds.23