A rebellion is something that is developing as an explosion coming out of the righteous grievances of a community of people. Grace Lee Boggs More Quotes by Grace Lee Boggs More Quotes From Grace Lee Boggs When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another. Talk about Paleolithic and Neolithic. Grace Lee Boggs transition russia thinking We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967. Grace Lee Boggs prison-population cities law Some people are afraid of gentrification, but what I see is young people want to live in a different world. And they see possibilities here. They see that rents are relatively cheap compared to places like New York and California. Grace Lee Boggs california new-york people Really, people are not a school of fish. Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis. Grace Lee Boggs giving people school The struggle we're dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity? Grace Lee Boggs humanity struggle thinking I think at the time, my radicalization was not through growing up Chinese, but through the role that the black people were playing at the beginning of World War II, when they had started the "Double V for Victory" movement - for democracy at home as well as abroad. Grace Lee Boggs growing-up home war I think when every household in almost every neighborhood can produce what it needs without going through the market, we're going to undergo a huge change in the elevation of the community to the center of the city, and the elimination of the factory. Grace Lee Boggs neighborhood community thinking When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another. Grace Lee Boggs revolution victim thinking I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived. And a revolution has some sense of a long time frame, millions of years that we've been evolving on this planet. Grace Lee Boggs long years thinking In every crisis, people do not respond like a school of fish. Some people become immobilized. Some people become very angry, some commit suicide, and other people begin to find solutions. And visionary organizers look at those people, recognize them and encourage them, and they become leaders of the future. Grace Lee Boggs suicide people school The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by community organizer Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking. But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn't work. Grace Lee Boggs government strong ideas The standardization and specialization of industrialization was being undermined by globalization. When people in Bangladesh could produce things much more cheaply than anybody could produce them in Detroit, we no longer were the world capital of industrialization. Grace Lee Boggs industrialization people world I think most people do not imagine how things can change. In Detroit, there are community gardens that are only an indication that the country is coming back to the city. And that is something that actually is necessary to stop the real imminent danger of the extermination of our planet. Grace Lee Boggs garden real country I think we have to understand that the nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization. Grace Lee Boggs powerful light thinking I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived. Grace Lee Boggs rebellion arise thinking When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air it would hit an autoworker on its way down. A few years after that, if you threw a stone in the air it'd hit an abandoned house or a vacant lot on its way down. And most people saw those vacant lots as blight. But meanwhile during World War II, blacks had moved from the South to the North. And they saw these vacant lots as places where you could grow food for the community. And so urban agriculture was born. Grace Lee Boggs agriculture air war Wage work is disappearing. I didn't make the jobs disappear, but they have disappeared. And people are forced to be looking for other alternatives. Grace Lee Boggs alternatives jobs people The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists - as starting revolutions - does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much America was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments. Grace Lee Boggs america ideas thinking The Vietnam War was taking place, which was raising all sorts of questions in the United States, and it was forcing Asian-Americans to stop thinking of themselves as model minorities and to identify themselves more with world revolution, which was very important in my development. Grace Lee Boggs important war thinking We have to think in a very different sense than the way we think now. We think in terms of quick fixes, that solutions will come out of a few protest demonstrations, and calling upon the government to do something. And we can keep trying to do that, and it won't work. Grace Lee Boggs government trying thinking
