Visionary Organizing in Detroit
Last Saturday’s celebration of Dr. King’s birthday at the Church of the Messiah in Detroit was an instructive example of the visionary organizing we need at this point in the continuing development of the next American revolution.
The Boggs Center members and friends who planned the program recognized that finding a job is now the main concern of Detroit’s young people. Also that for most young Detroiters, Dr. King and the civil rights struggle are nearly as remote as the 19th century struggle of Frederick Douglass against slavery.
The program began with a video montage of small groups growing their own food and building community in Detroit. This was followed by a power point presentation of excerpts from King’s speeches. I especially welcomed the following excerpt from his 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech:
“To get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”
Our main speaker was philosopher and community catalyst Frithjof Bergmann. Bergmann explained that one of the main reasons we are a thing-oriented rather than a person-oriented society is that most jobs in our industrial society turn us into appendages to machines.
So in order to compensate for our dehumanization on the job, we struggle for higher wages that enable us to buy bigger cars and fancier clothes. We become consumers and materialists, more concerned with our possessions than with community or our relationships with each other.
However, this job system, Bergmann said, is only a few hundred years old and is rapidly being made obsolete by HiTech and globalization.
HITech eliminates jobs, he said, but it also enables us to produce locally most of our real needs ( e.g. for clothing, housing, transportation, energy) with the same ease with which writers and filmmakers now use HiTech to produce magazines, books, and films.
Therefore, instead of marching, occupying, demonstrating for Jobs that are not coming back, as many radical and community organizations are doing, we need to take advantage of HiTech to grow our communities and make them more self-reliant.
We should not be trying to bring back a job system, which not only dehumanizes us but also has jeopardized all life on our planet by poisoning our air and our waters.
Participants broke up into small groups to share our thoughts, activities and questions.
Church of the Messiah’s Pastor Berry told us how his congregation has quadrupled since the church created neighborhood housing programs and self-help work programs for young people.
In my closing remarks I suggested that participants go to the Boggs Center website to learn more about Bergmann’s ideas and New Work.
I also recommended The Third Wave, the best selling book by Alvin Toffler which describes the pre-consumer local economy that HiTech makes possible.
Published in the 1980s the paperback edition is readily available in second hand bookstores.
