One of the better know figures in official “left” circles in Detroit
is Grace Lee Boggs, founder of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community
Leadership. Boggs, a long time Detroit resident, in collaboration with
Scott Kurashige, an associate professor of American culture and history
at the University of Michigan, has published The Next American Revolution, Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century.
Boggs
and Kurashige use Detroit as a focus to advance a right-wing agenda,
justifying the impoverishment of the working class and opposing any
collective struggle against capitalism.
One is struck in reading The New American Revolution
by the authors’ utter indifference to the conditions facing the working
class. Poverty, homelessness and unemployment are barely mentioned. The
problem, assert the authors, is not the capitalist system and the
conditions of mass misery that it is creating, but the American people
themselves, who are denounced as “self-centered and overly
materialistic.”
-- Shannon Jones, "The reactionary politics of Grace Lee Boggs" (WSWS).