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Grady holds a B.A. in Liberal Studies from Regents College, University of the
State of New York, and an A.A. in TV Production from Los Angeles City College.
He has been a submarine sailor, aircraft sheet-metal worker, drywall carpenter,
semi-truck and bus driver, substitute and middle school teacher, member of the
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), playwright and
feature-film director. He is a non-active member of the Screen Actors Guild
(SAG).
Grady was born August 10, 1944 at Kennedale, Texas, a few miles southeast of Fort Worth. His mother, a housewife, was one-eighth Choctaw, his father, a construction contractor, one-eighth Cherokee. After completing fourth grade in Kennedale, his parents separated and he moved with his mother and five siblings into Ft. Worth. Without a father, alimony and child-support payments, his family suffered enormous hardship. He quit school in the 9th grade and went to work, first as a “bundle boy” in a clothing factory, then as a “bicycle delivery boy” in Ft. Worth.
Grady enlisted in the navy in 1961, and served his last two years aboard the U.S.S. Amberjack (SS522), a diesel-electric submarine stationed at Charleston, South Carolina. After honorable discharge, he moved in 1966 to California. Entering East Los Angeles College, he studied philosophy and theatre arts, with a goal of becoming a teacher.
In the 1968 election year he worked for Democratic Party peace candidates and soon attended his first anti-Vietnam War demonstration at MacArthur Park. Beginning to think of himself as a socialist, he was attracted to the group most active in promoting and organizing mass peace demonstrations. Upon declaring himself a Marxist, he assumed incorrectly that he would never be allowed to teach.
For a number of years Grady engaged in various political activities, especially helping to build mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He helped friends form Asian-Americans for Peace. He founded and led the April 22 Brigade in its “Easter march down the beach,” helping to build the massive 1972 anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles. The bureaucratic nature of traditional socialist groupings however, and their continual isolation from the people, bothered him profoundly.
Grady worked independently in the People’s Bi-Centennial Commission in 1976. In 1978 he worked in the United Farm Workers support committee in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles for the table grapes and Gallo wine boycotts. In 1979 he moved briefly to San Francisco, and marched frequently in the Mission District in support of the Nicaraguan Final Offensive against the dictator Somoza. Upon returning to Los Angeles, he was active against the Carter Administration’s 1980 boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympic Games. In 1980-81 he worked in support of one of the Salvadoran rebel groups, translating into English and subtitling the videotapes “Letter from Morazán,” “Sowing Hope,” and “Time of Daring,” and converted them to 16mm film for mass distribution.
Grady and his wife Marilyn (who is from the Philippines) began family life in the early 1980s. Their first child, Sandra Michelle, was born in 1983; their second, a son, Robin Odysseus, arrived in 1988; and their last, Christy Suzanne, came in 1994. The combination of family life, dismal isolation of the Left, and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union cut down markedly on his participation in progressive activities.
After a decade of relative political inactivity, Grady began to question the basic premises of the usual definition of socialism, yet he was not prepared to give up socialism as the alternative to monopoly capitalism. He recognized that big landlords, insurance companies, developers, and especially banks are more directly exploitative than industrial and commercial employers of labor. He knew that wage and salary gains are soon appropriated by exploiters at the community and consumer levels. He saw that Marxism and bread-and-butter trade unionism had left the people completely vulnerable to such predators. Grady reasoned that the traditional concept of class struggle was faulty, especially with regard to the direct struggle for socialist transformation. He began to think about employee-owned cooperatives, and the possibility that such ownership might be the basis of a “workable” form of socialism.
He came across two short films: Democracy in the Workplace, about employee-owned enterprise in the San Francisco Bay Area; and The Mondragón Experiment, a 1980 BBC production about the phenomenally successful, employee-owned industrial cooperatives in Spain. These films, especially the latter, led Grady to conclude that only a modern form of cooperative socialism can solve the problem of national and world socialist transformation. He concluded that the socialist movement, which originally had been cooperative, should have had a cooperative economic orientation all along.
Grady believes that the Marxian principles of socialist economy—set forth in the 1848 Communist Manifesto and accepted almost as holy scripture—are erroneous. He believes that the institutions of private property and the trading market can and must be retained and used—through cooperative/state co-ownership structures—for building “real” socialism. He advocates that the socialist vanguard must jettison Marxism, if it is ever to lead the people to a “workable” socialist republic—in the U.S. and in every country. He maintains that time is running out for humanity, and that only the cooperative rebirth of the socialist movement can defeat world monopoly capitalism, achieve the Cooperative Republic, and avoid environmental Armageddon.
In 2008, while preparing a theoretic and programmatic book on modern socialism, he decided to put his ideas into a more popular form. His novel A Gladness in the Eyes envisioning a cooperative society was printed at employee-owned InkWorksPress in Berkeley (A Spanish-language edition will be available Dec. 2009.)
Grady was born August 10, 1944 at Kennedale, Texas, a few miles southeast of Fort Worth. His mother, a housewife, was one-eighth Choctaw, his father, a construction contractor, one-eighth Cherokee. After completing fourth grade in Kennedale, his parents separated and he moved with his mother and five siblings into Ft. Worth. Without a father, alimony and child-support payments, his family suffered enormous hardship. He quit school in the 9th grade and went to work, first as a “bundle boy” in a clothing factory, then as a “bicycle delivery boy” in Ft. Worth.
Grady enlisted in the navy in 1961, and served his last two years aboard the U.S.S. Amberjack (SS522), a diesel-electric submarine stationed at Charleston, South Carolina. After honorable discharge, he moved in 1966 to California. Entering East Los Angeles College, he studied philosophy and theatre arts, with a goal of becoming a teacher.
In the 1968 election year he worked for Democratic Party peace candidates and soon attended his first anti-Vietnam War demonstration at MacArthur Park. Beginning to think of himself as a socialist, he was attracted to the group most active in promoting and organizing mass peace demonstrations. Upon declaring himself a Marxist, he assumed incorrectly that he would never be allowed to teach.
For a number of years Grady engaged in various political activities, especially helping to build mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He helped friends form Asian-Americans for Peace. He founded and led the April 22 Brigade in its “Easter march down the beach,” helping to build the massive 1972 anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles. The bureaucratic nature of traditional socialist groupings however, and their continual isolation from the people, bothered him profoundly.
Grady worked independently in the People’s Bi-Centennial Commission in 1976. In 1978 he worked in the United Farm Workers support committee in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles for the table grapes and Gallo wine boycotts. In 1979 he moved briefly to San Francisco, and marched frequently in the Mission District in support of the Nicaraguan Final Offensive against the dictator Somoza. Upon returning to Los Angeles, he was active against the Carter Administration’s 1980 boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympic Games. In 1980-81 he worked in support of one of the Salvadoran rebel groups, translating into English and subtitling the videotapes “Letter from Morazán,” “Sowing Hope,” and “Time of Daring,” and converted them to 16mm film for mass distribution.
Grady and his wife Marilyn (who is from the Philippines) began family life in the early 1980s. Their first child, Sandra Michelle, was born in 1983; their second, a son, Robin Odysseus, arrived in 1988; and their last, Christy Suzanne, came in 1994. The combination of family life, dismal isolation of the Left, and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union cut down markedly on his participation in progressive activities.
After a decade of relative political inactivity, Grady began to question the basic premises of the usual definition of socialism, yet he was not prepared to give up socialism as the alternative to monopoly capitalism. He recognized that big landlords, insurance companies, developers, and especially banks are more directly exploitative than industrial and commercial employers of labor. He knew that wage and salary gains are soon appropriated by exploiters at the community and consumer levels. He saw that Marxism and bread-and-butter trade unionism had left the people completely vulnerable to such predators. Grady reasoned that the traditional concept of class struggle was faulty, especially with regard to the direct struggle for socialist transformation. He began to think about employee-owned cooperatives, and the possibility that such ownership might be the basis of a “workable” form of socialism.
He came across two short films: Democracy in the Workplace, about employee-owned enterprise in the San Francisco Bay Area; and The Mondragón Experiment, a 1980 BBC production about the phenomenally successful, employee-owned industrial cooperatives in Spain. These films, especially the latter, led Grady to conclude that only a modern form of cooperative socialism can solve the problem of national and world socialist transformation. He concluded that the socialist movement, which originally had been cooperative, should have had a cooperative economic orientation all along.
Grady believes that the Marxian principles of socialist economy—set forth in the 1848 Communist Manifesto and accepted almost as holy scripture—are erroneous. He believes that the institutions of private property and the trading market can and must be retained and used—through cooperative/state co-ownership structures—for building “real” socialism. He advocates that the socialist vanguard must jettison Marxism, if it is ever to lead the people to a “workable” socialist republic—in the U.S. and in every country. He maintains that time is running out for humanity, and that only the cooperative rebirth of the socialist movement can defeat world monopoly capitalism, achieve the Cooperative Republic, and avoid environmental Armageddon.
In 2008, while preparing a theoretic and programmatic book on modern socialism, he decided to put his ideas into a more popular form. His novel A Gladness in the Eyes envisioning a cooperative society was printed at employee-owned InkWorksPress in Berkeley (A Spanish-language edition will be available Dec. 2009.)