– Grace Lee Boggs

Grace Lee Boggs, who recently passed away at age 100, spent much of her life in what she described as the “great humanizing movements of the past seventy years- the labor, civil rights, Black Power, women’s, Asian American, environmental justice and antiwar movements.”

Grace Lee Boggs was a research associate of radical Caribbean Marxist CLR James, organizer among Socialists, activist for black Detroit Auto Workers, a colleague of Malcolm X, facilitated and promoted a network of small scale community gardens across abandoned neighborhoods in Detroit, organized youth leadership programs called “Detroit Summer,” and came to argue for a people oriented vision of radical, deep engagement in one’s community to create connections and tangible good.  Born in Providence, educated in New York City, she lived, married, organized and passed away recently in her beloved Detroit, Michigan.

After being born in Providence, Grace Lee Boggs’ family moved to New York, and she grew up in Queens. Providence’s Chinatown was mostly eradicated by the urban renewal and highway construction programs of the 1950s and 1960s. Lee Boggs studied at Barnard College on a scholarship, and earned a PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. Discrimination and prejudice limited her ability to work as an university academic, and she took a job as a research librarian. She became a collaborator with CLR James and Raya Dunayveska, Marxists who were critical of both of the Soviet Union and United States (not a popular position in Cold War politics).

In a Cold War era book she helped write with James and Dunyaveska, “State Capitalism and World Revolution,” Lee Boggs described the types of violence perpetuated against ordinary people around the world by both the “stranglehold of Stalinism” and the United States. In the 1950s, she and her peers wrote:

“Whether democratic or totalitarian, both types of society are in permanent decline and insoluble crisis. Both are at a stage when only a total reorganization can lift society a stage higher. It is noteworthy that in the United States the capitalist class is aware of this, and the most significant work that is being done in political economy is the desperate attempt to find some way of reconciling the working class to the agonies of mechanized production and transferring its implacable resistance into creative cooperation. That is of educational value and many of its findings will be used by the socialist proletariat. In Russia this resistance is labeled “remnants of capitalist ideology” and the whole power of the totalitarian state is organized to crrush it in theory as well as fact.”

In her last book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century, she writes, “I came to Detroit in the early 1950s because as a Marxist I wanted to be part of a revolution in which the workers n the auto factories would take the struggles of the 1930s to a higher level by struggle for worker’ control of production in the plant. My main difference with traditional Marxists was my belief that blacks, women, and young people, and not only workers, would play pivotal roles in this revolution.”

She noted, “Living with Jimmy Boggs (her husband, Alabama born, African American autoworker and labor organizer) it was not long before I realized that my ideas had come mostly out of books and that my expectations had little or no relationship to the reality that was rapidly changing around me. When I began living in Detroit in 1953, Jimmy, a member of the United Auto Workers, was still mainly engaged with his fellow workers in struggles in the plant against automation and speed-ups (which workers in the plant called man-o-nation). ”

Jimmy came to see that high-tech automation was changing the industry, and that the role of workers in car production would be irrevocably different. He and Grace became active in Black Power circles, seeking to mobilize young people. When the riots (or rebellions) of the late 1960s broke out, both came to reflect that militant organizing in itself was not a path to broad social transformation, even if real expressions of oppression and  frustration.

As she wrote, “…our main responsibility as revolutionaries was to go beyond protest politics beyond just increasing anger and outrage of the oppressed, and concentrate instead on projecting and initiating struggles that involve people at the grassroots in assuming responsibility for creating new values, truths, infrastructures, and institutions.”

She saw many movement leaders become establishment politicians. She felt that without actually, creatively challenging and changing the rules, habit and structures of governance, the same interests would be promoted, by design, and regular people would be harmed. She saw political figures in Detroit spend huge amounts of time, money and energy working to hold onto a rapidly automating auto-industry, and little in creative thinking for building alternatives and opportunity for the actual people left behind by automation. Much of her later life was spent founding community organizations and ways for people to organize and build a future themselves, different from the one so often dictated to them.

Grace Lee Boggs, born in Providence, wrote, “…we need to recognize that the aptitudes and attitudes of people with BAs, BSs, MBAs, and PhDs bear a lot of the responsibility for our planetary and social problems… [the challenge is] creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher Humanity instead of a higher standard of living dependent on Empire.”

Much of this remembrance gratuitously quotes from Grace Lee Boggs’ “The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century.” Please check out her work.

This all makes sense and I can appreciate the importance.  Fundamentally, when local dollars are spent locally, they recirculate in the economy.  Or to put it conversely, every dollar that is spent outside of the state is a net loss of overall wealth for Rhode Island.  Similarly, every dollar spent at a national chain (even if local) suffers from leakage as our economic system peels off layers of surplus value to pay shareholders, CEOs, advertising, etc. that drains wealth from a community.  You get the picture.

While I support the whole concept of buy local, it is really low impact and based more on the individual consumer’s purchasing decisions.  “Should I get my tools and supplies at Mt. Pleasant Hardware, or should I go to Home Depot?  Should I get my copy of Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility at Symposium Books downtown, or should I just order it from Amazon?”  Many people choose the latter in these scenarios.  With limited take-up of “buy local,” the benefits remain small.

What can work much better is strategic sourcing from large local institutions.  This can include universities, hospitals, large corporations (I’m looking at you CVS, Fidelity, and GTECH), and city and state governments. [Note: it’s important to remember that all this can be done without a local purchasing preference policy which Rhode Island policymakers rejected a few years ago at the request of large contractors due to the danger of reciprocity in other states.]

A lot of my work involves strategic sourcing and when done right the results are hugely beneficial for local, small, minority, and women owned businesses.  And it benefits the state too as more purchasing done locally = more tax revenue.  It’s not easy to do (nothing is), but if one looks at a hospital (or system like Lifespan), the amount of money they spend in any given year is huge, similarly for universities, for city governments, and for corporations.

The state can be a partner in the strategic sourcing process by helping identify local businesses that can serve as vendors for large institutions that currently buy large quantities of goods and services out of state or overseas.  Imagine if the RIEDC RI Commerce Corporation convened a roundtable of all the executive leadership from each of the state’s hospitals, sought to understand their purchasing needs, identified mutual pain points, and proactively identified, recruited, and scaled local businesses to serve the needs of these institutions.  Linking local suppliers to local buyers is a low cost way to boost the economy.

Sounds far-fetched, but I do this often at work.  Recently, I assisted with Johns Hopkins University’s initiative to increase their local spend by 10% in Baltimore, developed a local sourcing plan for a Los Angeles Hospital, and analyzed the success of Source Detroit, a program to transfer a portion of the $1.6 billion dollars spent annually by Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Center, and the Henry Ford Health System to locally owned businesses.

The process is basically to find out what an institution buys and then identify local businesses that can supply it instead.  There are challenges, however.  First and most importantly, you need commitment and buy-in from the senior executive leadership at the institutions.  There are lots of good ideas out there and quick-win solutions that would boost the state’s economy, but without the commitment, nothing is going to happen.

Second, not everything can be sourced locally so you need to be selective.  This is the fundamental difference between a generic buy local campaign and strategic sourcing.  Identifying the high-spend categories that are available in the local market is important and will make the process flow smoother.  Not everything is made here, and if it’s not made here, it can’t be purchased here.  Luckily though, Rhode Island still makes a lot of stuff.

Third, you have to overcome the existing practices of the purchasing managers.  Relationships take time to build, and switching to a new vendor can involve some risks.  These risks can be partially alleviated by starting slow and by identifying quality local supplies used by other institutions.  There is a process that works to change the purchasing habits and long-standing relationships, but it takes time.

Fourth, sometimes local suppliers don’t have the cheapest per product cost.  When businesses operate with a shortsighted focus on low prices, local suppliers lose even though they may still have the lowest overall cost.  There are many hard and soft procurement costs that are often ignored such as transportation fees, legal fees, late deliveries, damaged product, etc. that would not accrue from local vendors.

Finally, many small businesses need help building their capacity to be able to handle the procurement needs of a large institution.  Here is another role for the state and partners to play to ensure that the local businesses can effectively provide the goods and services needed by large institutions.  Small business support organizations like the Small Business Development Center and SCORE can offer the training and resources needed.

Why is strategic sourcing important for the state?  There are three key reasons.

1. It benefits the local community.  When institutions source locally, local revenues increase, resulting in higher tax revenue for the state, and the increased demand may lead to the creation of new jobs.  By identifying minority and women-owned firms, or firms located in low-income areas of the state, strategic sourcing can have profound positive impact for some of the most economically marginalized folks among us.
2. It benefits the institution.  Local goods and services can reduce delivery times, allow for lower overhead costs (you don’t need to store as much when the supplier is 15 minutes away), and reduce potential disruptions in the supply chain.
3. It strengthens the entire business community.  By shifting spend to local vendors, large institutions improve the local business ecosystem and generate a more robust and competitive network of suppliers.  Having local suppliers also means interactions are easier and quicker, and the partnerships can develop new ways to identify and rectify supply chain problems, create new products and processes, and add innovation to the whole system.  Also, by shifting to local purchasing, local vendors become more adept, more responsive, and more stable over the long-term.

If I was a Mayor or Governor, I would create a position in my administration specifically tasked with building and supporting these relationships.  There is a net benefit to the state with the minimal cost of an FTE position in the budget.  The benefit to a city is less, although new business expansion would provide additional property tax revenue.  To do it right, you need someone competent who can facilitate these connections, hold conferences and convenings, and identify the local businesses that can act as vendors.

Alternatively, this could be done outside of government by any trusted third-party (i.e. RI Foundation, Chamber of Commerce, RI Black Business Association, etc.).

This is the 2nd in my ongoing economic development series called “Rebuilding Rhode Island’s Economy.”

Personally, I lay a lot of the blame on NAFTA, the Clinton-era free trade agreement that promised economic growth but delivered depression for the Rust Belt and bigger bottom lines for corporations and CEOs. But Earl makes a good case that the problem started long before a globalized economy took its toll.

Also, please read this report I wrote in 2011 about Occupy Detroit’s efforts to pick up where the economy and then the public sector had failed…

As the right wing dances gleefully on the fresh grave of the motor city, trading clever epithets to carve on the once great city’s tombstone, many economic truths lay buried beneath the soil in the motor city’s tomb. Already the comparison has been made to Rhode Island and whether the fate of our own, small state, can be divined by the default of the enormous debt owed by the industrial city once known as the Arsenal of Democracy.

The easy propaganda, eulogizing the economic demise of Detroit is that the socialist, liberal, welfare experiment has failed miserably and any economy that even slightly resembles Detroit’s will suffer the same cancerous fate. These voices will have one believe that unions killed Detroit; social welfare killed Detroit; taxes killed Detroit; pensions killed Detroit; etc. Furthermore, the example set forth by the city’s landslide into chapter 9 is quickly becoming rhetorical ammunition for the conservative argument against government employees’ retirement security, private and public sector unions and social safety-net programs for those below the poverty line.

These oversimplified condemnations of political philosophies are merely excellent distractions to factual history and the series of events that led to the critical condition in which Detroit currently finds itself. If by liberal failures, one actually means negative economic impact of race riots due to black disenfranchisement during the civil rights conflicts of the 1960s, then they are absolutely right.

In the summer of 1967, five days of race riots hit the city. Over the course of those days, 43 people died. There were 467 injured, including 167 Detroit police officers, 83 Detroit firefighters, 17 National Guard troops, 16 State Police officers and 3 U.S. Army soldiers. The economic ramifications proved to be a permanent and crippling injury. 2,509 stores looted or burned, 388 families rendered homeless or displaced and 412 buildings burned or damaged to the point of requiring demolition. The total monetary damage was estimated to be between $40 and $80 million. The aforementioned permanent damage was the flight of the emerging middle-class population from the city to the suburbs.

According to Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, “The heaviest casualty,however, was the city. Detroit’s losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money.

The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.

Since then, the city’s urban population has consistently declined. Demographically speaking, the least financially secure have been the population that remained, while the more financially contributory citizens have continued to avoid residency within the city limits. Less tax revenue and more financial insecurity has proved a recipe for unsustainable, fiscal liability. This is an easily arguable example of what is known as “the new Jim Crow.” So, a founding principle of the state of the city is a race based economic decline.

Perhaps, though, the liberal failures of which those who exploit the unfortunate bankruptcy of a city that helped to birth the backbone of America’s economic prowess. Detroit has also been a historically union city and necessarily so. In the 1920s, a Protestant minister trained at Yale Divinity School by the name of Reinhold Niebuhr, earned national attention by criticizing the auto industry in an era when Henry Ford was considered an American icon. He preached the Social Gospe, attacking what he considered the brutalization and insecurity of Ford workers. He became an outspoken critic of Ford and allowed union organizers to use his pulpit to expound their message of workers’ rights. Niebuhr attacked poor conditions created by the assembly lines and erratic employment practices.

The demonization of collective bargaining is a historically recent generational ideology. The mindset that one man builds his own kingdom by grasping his proverbial bootstraps and hoisting with all his might. Those who fail to prosper lack the fortitude by which to defy the gravity and, thereby, earn their meager places as the stepping-stones for the strong. However, the reality of the creation of the middle class, through which America has attained its precarious position at the top of the world’s economic food chain, was possible only with the rise of the labor unions. In fact, without the living wage set as a standard by the labor movement, those masses who provided the purchasing power for the very products that rolled off the assembly lines of the golden-era Detroit automobile plants would have been a commodity for those landed gentry who often fabricated the bootstrap mythology as their American heritage.

But, since the one percent progressively seized more and more power from the working class citizens, the history has been re-written to focus only on the small corner of corruption within the story of the labor movement in Detroit and elsewhere. This same agenda has conveniently ignored the corruption of the fabulously wealthy coalitions such as ALEC, and Wall Street and the Republican Party when stealing election rights, deregulating the banking industry to the point of economic collapse and starting multi-trillion dollar wars for profit.

And that brings the discussion of Detroit, full circle, to current conversation. As one outspoken and sensationalist holy man residing in the fantasy land United States of Glen Beckistan summarized, “Detroit’s demise hasn’t been good for either of the two parties that are often set against one another – taxpayers and unionized government employees – whenever government grows beyond its appropriate size and leftists begin to use state power to redistribute private wealth.”

Leftists begin to use state power to redistribute private wealth? Actually, one can take that particular point and dismantle it with a single proper noun: Mitt Romney. If, in fact, the situation in Detroit hasn’t been good for either party then why did the 2012 Republican Presidential nominee so enthusiastically endorse the bankruptcy of the auto industry – much of which was notoriously based in Detroit? Could it be that the fall of the industry that has been under Republican attack for decades would result in enormous profit for Romney and the company in which he held an enormous “blind trust” (come on now, really?) stake? One that yielded he and his wife upwards of $115 million? That seems to be a prime example of the polar opposite of redistribution of private wealth. In fact, that seems to be encouraging the hard earned wages of those working class Americans in pursuit of a middle class American dream to funnel into a financial wormhole with a small group of already overstuffed wallets open and waiting at the other end.

Detroit is not Central Falls. Detroit is not Providence and Detroit is certainly not the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. One can find comparisons between apples and oranges. Both are round. Both are fruit. One can find comparisons between the Tour de France and NASCAR. Both are races with wheeled vehicles. One can find comparisons between Humans and possums. Both are mammals separated by a surprisingly small percentage of DNA. However, legalities aside (states cannot declare bankruptcy by law), Detroit is not the canary in the coalmine for the future of the State of Rhode Island. And, as exemplified by its very unique history, is more than just an easily exploited cautionary tale for progressive political ideology.