Jul. 14, 2010 - Issue #769: Musician’s Survival Guide

Change in the heart of decay

Detroit hosts the second US Social Forum

Detroit's a city ravaged by downsizing, outsourcing and de-industrialization. It's gone from a population of two million people and half the global automotive workforce nearly a century ago to a mere 800 000 people orbiting a decaying core today. But it's this Detroit that hosted the American pro-democracy movement, delivering 15 000 people to 1062 workshops at the United States Social Forum, proving not only that another world is possible, but that Motor City know-how could help construct it.

"It's literally ground zero for the neoliberal crisis," says Lester Kenyatta Spence. A 41-year-old Detroit native and award-winning assistant professor of Political Science at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, Spence's work has appeared everywhere from The Washington Post to The WEB Dubois Review. He's been a guest on C-Span, PBS and National Public Radio.

"If another world is possible," Spence explains, "what that world looks like is going to be ferreted out first in cities like Detroit."

Despite his hometown love, Spence agrees with certain Mexican USSF delegates that Detroit looks shockingly like a Mexican city, given its stunning collapse.

"The centrepiece of Detroit, architecturally, is a building called the Renaissance Centre," which Spence says seemed designed to wall it off from the rest of the city, specifically, Spence believes, to wall the city off from the Black population. Looking at the fortress when it was built, Spence immediately was reminded of the structures that housed the Morlocks, the devolved, feral humans of Wells' post-apocalyptic Time Machine. "Morlocks," says Spence, "are exactly how the power structure views African-Americans. And that's when Detroit looked like it was on the way back [economically], when it had well over a million people, and you didn't have blocks upon blocks upon blocks of empty land. Now it's a lot worse." Detroit's graduation rate is the lowest in the country from a school system that still trains workers for an industrial base that long since abandoned Detroit.

It's this blight and betrayal, Spence says, that offers attendees at the social forum the chance not only to witness neoliberalism at work, but to glimpse a heroic history: a city of unionization and labour radicalism, of anarchist cells, and as Spence describes a “really, really, really rich history of black nationalist and black radical organizing. So Detroit has historically been a hub of attempts to figure out the best set of institutional arrangements that would provide the best benefits for the largest number of people. And that, to me, is what the USSF is about."

The US Social Forum, only in its second year, offers an opportunity not only to discuss and witness problems, but to actually create change. "This huge group of young, radical leftists—they not only believe in this other world, they're actually working to create it." Spence describes. "It was one of the most astounding experiences I've had in the last 10 years."

Workshops focused on the transformation of protest and mobilizing citizens to political action. "Nationally, when we think of protest politics, we tend to think of these tired tactics that are holdovers from the civil rights movement, like marches, rallies and boycotts. Boycotts actually work in some limited cases, but the marches and rallies, what they really are effective in doing is bleeding energy off. So the energy that you'd have to organize around an issue, once you go to that march and rally and get caught up in the spirit, after that it dissipates."

From global movements to local growth, an unsuspecting revolutionary topic was found in urban gardening. While for the average citizen, urban gardening doesn't exactly conjure the spectre of Che Guevara, hundreds of USSF delegates attended workshops on it. Spence isn't surprised. "Detroit is in the middle of what we call a 'food desert.' Even though the population is about 800 000 on the books, I think there are maybe only one or two major grocery stores in the city."

Despite this Detroit has advantages to urban gardening. Unlike in larger urban centres like New York, residents can access resources for urban gardening. "Even if you're living in public housing, you’ve got enough land in your back yard to plant a garden. So, it's about creating public gardens that can both fulfil a material need, but also can get people to work the land together, [and] create a shared political consciousness ... to wean them off of the State and these corporate institutions, to learn how to provide for themselves."

Despite all of this momentum, the US Social Forum flew largely under the radar for all media. "I was on a liberal-to-left black talk show in Chicago, and they hadn't even heard of it," says Spence. Instead right and left media focus on the Tea Party, "a really, really, really small group of seemingly disenfranchised, well-off white men ... They had this idea of what America was, and they had this bill of goods that was their entitlement, and that thing is being taken away from them. That actually is a story, but it’s not as big of a story as the attempt to generate alternatives, and it’s really just a sign of how backward our media is that these guys get way more coverage than the literally thousands upon thousands of young political organizers who are really interested in making the world a better place." V 

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