[News] Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon Jan 20 12:11:43 EST 2020
https://black-ink.info/2020/01/16/solidarity-is-not-a-market-exchange-an-interview-with-robin-d-g-kelley/
“Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange”: An Interview with Robin D. G.
Kelley
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/Rethinking Marxism <http://rethinkingmarxism.org/>/: It is
our great honor to be talking with Robin D. G. Kelley,
Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.
S. History at UCLA. Robin, let’s begin with your biography of
Thelonious Monk. It is quite an achievement and a pleasure for
us to read. Your in-depth narrative of Monk’s life is
informative and educational about how to listen to jazz. Your
biography provides an exciting, often nostalgic account of the
lives and times of many of the twentieth century’s “giants of
jazz.” Thank you for undertaking and completing this
fourteen-year project. That’s a lot of time! How did you
become interested in writing a biography of Monk? What was
the journey like for you?
Robin Kelley: The short version is I grew up in a household where music
was very important, especially jazz. My stepfather was a jazz musician,
so when I was in high school I picked up the piano. I played piano for a
while. I even thought about it as a possible career. He introduced me to
Monk’s music; I was 16 years old. And I was into way-out music, Cecil
Taylor, people like that. Monk was always in the back of my head. Not to
do any particular project; I never thought I would write a biography.
Then, all my work was driven by political considerations, what were the
emergencies at the moment. Writing /Hammer and Hoe/ was about being in a
Left movement and thinking about what self-determination actually means
on the ground. What does it mean for people of color, black people in
particular, to build a movement that has taken Marxism and tried to
transform it into something that made sense to them? So, I was doing all
this work, responding to emergencies all throughout the 80s and 90s, and
then I got really sick. And I was hospitalized with some kind of virus.
I remember being in the hospital and, believe it or not, I was reading
Skip Gates’s /Colored People/, his memoir, which is pretty hilarious. I
thought to myself, if Henry Louis Gates can write this book, I should be
able to write whatever book I want to write! So I was in the hospital
thinking, /I want to write a book about Monk/. I reached out to the
family through a very important friend named Marc Crawford. Marc wrote
about jazz. He also was very political. He grew up in Detroit, but he
ended up leaving the country for southern Mexico, and his home became a
place for a lot of people escaping the draft. I knew Marc because I was
on the Board of Governors for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; they had
asked me to write an introduction about African-Americans in the Lincoln
Brigade. So this was my pathway. Marc was the one who said, “You know,
you really need to work on this book on Monk.” He got in touch with the
family; the family was like, “No, we have that covered.” But, I didn’t
give up. I then spent years conducting research without the family’s
support, looking at publications, journals, whatever primary sources I
could get in every language possible. What I realized is that people who
write books about artists tend to work in one language or two. Look, I
can’t read Japanese, but I found every single Japanese article and had
it translated; Dutch, Portuguese, German, Spanish, all over the world.
I began to discover things about Monk; he would do interviews in other
languages that would be translated, and he would say things abroad that
he wouldn’t say at home. So I collected all this material. Fast-forward
five, six years later, and the Monk family started to put together a
website and a record label. And on one of those listservs with jazz fans
who are sometimes more dangerous than anybody else because they’re so
fanatical, the Monks starting pumping them for information. And I write
offline to Monk’s brother-in-law, “You know, I talked to Toot, Monk Jr.,
years ago, and I know that he has some other plans for a biography, but
I happen to have about ten boxes of materials that I’ve collected over
the years that he might want to use.” And he said, “Really?” “Yes.”
“Well bring it over.” So I drove to South Orange with all these boxes of
materials—just made copies of everything—and gave it to them. And they
realized …two things they realized. One, I was serious! I had stuff they
didn’t have. And, secondly, they didn’t know I was black! They assumed I
was white. When they saw me, they were like, “Oh, wait a second. You are
not who we imagined.” Jazz is music that people don’t engage critically
all the time. They’re either ethnomusicologists, who operate at one
level. Or journalists, who operate at another. The journalists tend to
be fans, and they tend to spend more time looking for the right
adjective to describe the music than to dig deep. So we spent, like, six
hours sitting at his house around the pool just talking about Monk. He
asked me: What’s my intention? What do I know? What do I think? And we
connected; I sort of made a promise: “I’ll write this book, but it
won’t be an official biography. I don’t want the family’s imprimatur
because I’m going to say things you may not like.” He agreed; I have to
give him credit for that. He said, “Look, whatever you find is the truth,
just deal with the truth.” That’s why there are things in the book that
don’t make Monk look like a grand figure; he’s a human being. So that
changed everything. And once I had access to the family, it changed my
perspective on where the music takes place. But that leads us into your
second question.
In your biography you describe Monk as a radical
individualist, a “rebel” whose life and music are part of a
tradition of “sonic disturbance.” But also an exemplar of a
creative black artist trying to live an “authentic life” in
postwar New York (we’ll circle back to this issue of
“authenticity” later). As you describe, Monk’s method of
teaching his music to bandmates, or his approach to
performance on stage or in the recording studio, was to adopt
a quasi-surrealist mode (perhaps without the whimsy). Here
we’re thinking of Monk’s constant nudging the jazz tradition
toward uncertainty, his striving for inexpressible hidden
chords beyond—within—the melody. Or Monk’s obsessive push
against attempts to confine or rein in his imagination. Is
there radical optimism, or political hope, within Monk’s
music, his habits of work, and specifically, in his willingness
constantly to disrupt and disturb? And does this willingness
reveal elements of what you describe as surrealist art? What
are the cultural and political implications of seeing Monk as
a surrealist?
So, I’m going to work backwards. On your very last question: Is Monk a
surrealist? Absolutely! Though he isn’t an artist who identified himself
as surrealist. (Yet in an interview in the late ’40s, he compares bebop
more generally with Salvador Dali; whether or not Dali was a real
surrealist is another thing). But Monk moved in that direction for the
same reason that people like Wifredo Lam, the painter, and Aimé Césaire,
the poet and activist, all moved to surrealism: it was a matter of
self-recognition. In other words, their lives were /already/ that. What
they saw, what Wifredo Lam saw in Santeria, for example—he says, “I
recognize surrealism.” What Monk heard in the music of the old stride
pianists he studied with, like James P. Johnson and Willie “the Lion”
Smith, was to take an instrument like the piano with fixed pitches and to
be able to bend notes. We can think of it as whimsy. But we can also
think of it as specific ways that notes can produce emotion through
dissonance and consonance, especially dissonance. The way that notes and
rhythm can produce a sense of /humor/. And for surrealists, /humor/ is
like the fundamental emotion. It’s a fundamental expression of
/everything/. In that sense, I think Monk is definitely surrealist.
There’s also a kind of radical optimism, political hope—I think you can
/hear/ that. Whether or not Monk intends it is a different thing. In
fact, what I argue in the book is that even though Monk’s music doesn’t
change significantly over the years, its meaning changes. So in the 1940s
there was something that was perceived to be very modern about the
music, despite the fact that in the 40s Monk spent as much time hanging
out with stride pianists at James P. Johnson’s house as he did with some
of the young bebop musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Joe
Guy. I make the case that he was Janus-faced: he took the tradition from
the past, he took the future, or paved the way for the future, and took
the present, and put them together in a way that musically made sense to
him. His aesthetic was never bound by time or place. Let me step back
for a second. A lot of people assume that what made Monk’s music so
creative, so whimsical, so free, was his lack of training. In other
words, that he was not a trained musician. This is the myth: that he
didn’t have lessons, that he had no knowledge of classical tradition.
Quincy Jones says this, Bill Evans says this, they all say it. And yet
Monk not only was well trained but he had classical lessons; he took
lessons from a black woman who lived in his neighborhood. He was
surrounded by other musicians in a very public culture where Alberta
Simmons—his piano teacher—and the heads of the Columbus Hill Community
Center all provided education for young musicians. In other words, it
was a whole community that helped him develop his aesthetic. That
community was the community he played for. So his music wasn’t out of
this world. How can it be out of this world if he played for dancers?
Dancers will not dance to music if you can’t play. So the /embeddedness/
of his music has more to do with being able to understand the politics
of it. He made music with, and for, and of the people: the people of his
neighborhood. There were no boundaries, which is why he would play
alongside the Calypsonians, like Lord Invader, and others; why walking
down the street in San Juan Hill, you listen to the radio, the
Victrolas, and you would hear Habanera, Cuban sounds; you hear
Trinidadian sounds, you hear Southern blues, you hear Northern blues,
you hear Duke Ellington, you hear Louis Armstrong. And that music
surrounded him. As well as the Irish music up on the corner; also the
Jewish cantors. There was no sound that wasn’t available to him. What
was amazing too was that he lived near Central Park when Goldman’s
Band—which is part of the public culture we’ve lost—would spend the
summer doing these free concerts: Tchaikovsky, John Philip Sousa,
Beethoven. His mom would take him to Central Park to sit there and
listen to this free music. Sometimes 20,000 people would come out for
these concerts! And it was free! And so you could actually be poor,
growing up on the west side of Manhattan, and have access to this rich
cultural palette of music and art. /That/ was the world that shaped him.
So when I talk about “authentic life,” I don’t mean opposed to
“inauthentic.” I mean he was a product of New York, and like so many
others who really absorbed everything, including the sounds of the
trains—that’s part of his sound. You hear the subway, you hear the main
trains dropping off cargo at the ports. And that was his life. Now, one
thing that is different about this book compared to others was that I
realized in talking to the family that it’s a mistake to limit the
spaces for his musical practice to the recording studio, to the stage,
to the clubs, when in fact so much of what happened was in the house
with his family, in rehearsing. It’s in his engagement with his
children. He was a really amazing father, despite the fact that bipolar
disorder eventually made it difficult for him to function “on the
everyday” all the time. For him, also, all the boroughs were available.
When you follow an artist, particularly black artists, and you look at
the black press and other sources, you discover that when the mainstream
press pretends he’s disappeared, he’s actually at all these other
places. Black-owned clubs in Brooklyn. In the Bronx. Or going to places
like Al Walker’s TV repair shop—
In the back!
Can you imagine what it meant for us to put that on the map of jazz?! Al
Walker’s TV repair shop was just a jam session all night long! Great
musicians would come through there. And they weren’t fixing TVs! But they
were jamming. And that’s what made this book a challenge /and/ a labor
of love, because I came away with a sense of the city, a deeper sense of
the music and where it takes place, and a deeper sense of the man, and
Nellie, his wife, and his children, and his extended family; because
without them, there would be no Thelonious Monk. I tried to break down
the myth of the isolated, individual “heroic genius.” That’s not the
case with Monk at all. Also, the politics come out more in the fabric of
everyday life. Following the money was really important. And, of course,
all the economists—/you/ know, since Amherst is the last place that
actually has an Economics Department: all the others are gone; there’s
no such thing as economics anymore, it’s just like “rational choice,”
and whatever. But following the money—being able to go through his tax
returns, his contracts—you realize that this man struggled even at the
height of his powers. He didn’t have enough money to have decent medical
care. Even when he made the most he ever made—in 1964—after paying out
everything, he only took home about $40,000. That’s the most he ever
took home in a year. And that’s good money for 1964. But then it drops
to $17,000 three years later, and he’s making almost zero. He leaves
Columbia Records in debt. So, in following the money, I was able to
reconstruct the exploitative structure of capitalism in the music
industry, even at the best record labels.
There’s a couple of things in what you’re saying. One is
public culture, and how important it was then and now. Because
it’s virtually gone. In work I do with guys who are locked up,
we do a lot of exploring household, streets, neighborhoods
that they came up in. So, “What’s the story of your life up to
the point of your current incarceration?” And what is so
striking again and again is the absence of a /public culture/
that can intervene in the way those free concerts in Central
Park intervened.
The way those concerts in the park intervened! The way his local
community center intervened! Can you imagine the role that these adults
played? Because they not only taught you music but they would be there
when you needed them. And they would give you advice. They had very
strict rules; you could lose your membership card if you go in there
cursing. That might seem harsh, but, man, those kids were so devoted to
that space!
That’s exactly right. In the long run, that’s helping you to
manage.
Exactly. And that’s gone now. It’s devastating.
That’s gone. And these guys … it’s part of the Insight Prison
Project to cultivate a recognition of that absence. So that
they see how society failed them in that respect. /Neoliberal/
society, I should say.
Exactly.
Yeah. Where did the /State/ go? Where did the /public/ go?
Where did the State go! Exactly.
I grew up in Philly. It was disappearing, but I came through
in the 70s. There was enough of it that I felt safe in the
streets. But I knew guys were moving to gangs, and then the
gangs were carving out their own private space that was
competing with public life, locally. And of course, the cops
were big problems in navigating that public.
Exactly. And if your only interaction with the State /now/ is repressive
force, that is, coercive force, then sometimes gangs make sense as a way
to defend yourself. And it’s unfortunate. It’s a combination of the
withdrawal of the State in one element and the expansion of the State in
another element, the coercive element. Which reminds me, one other thing
that’s in your question that I didn’t address, but which is tied to
this: the question of mentorship. As you mention, Monk had a way of
teaching music to his bandmates. And teaching music was really
important. I tell stories about how they would rehearse on the
bandstand. If you are paying money, and you’re in the Five Spot, you
don’t want to hear the same song over and over again. (There’s something
really performative about that.) But in a realm that is understood to be
deeply competitive—the term “cutting session” is a jazz term, which is
you “cut” somebody, and you blow them off the bandstand. Well, Monk
never did that. His thing was, if he heard someone struggling, even if
heard them when he’s sitting in the audience, he would go up to that
person and say, “You know what, you don’t know the changes. Come to my
house tomorrow at nine o’clock and I’ll teach them to you.” And
musicians would come to his house—a little tiny apartment: two bedrooms,
the piano was partly in the kitchen and partly in the living room. These
cats would show up. He would sit down with them and show them music. He
would show them tunes. A lot of those musicians were pretty unknown,
like Danny Quebec West. But he gave them a chance because he really
believed in them. Then people like Jackie McLean would show up. John
Coltrane would show up sometimes and learn some stuff. Sonny Rollins,
after high school, would head straight to Monk’s house. Monk was a
teacher! And his home became the center for cultivating the culture, but
also creating community. And the idea of creating community among
musicians is something that we don’t always recognize.
Collaboration and collective labor are other features of
Monk’s approach to jazz. Monk was a teacher who taught so many
not simply how to play “his music,” but how to find their own
voice in his music through practicing with him. Many big-name
musicians who began as sidemen, but became bandleaders,
describe how decisive it was to work with Monk. For them, Monk
dwelled in the uncertain space between the sheet music and its
expression by a specific ensemble. Monk was “open” to the
originality of each musician’s capabilities and commitments to
a “sound.” (By the way, this is what we learned from you! This
is our reading of what you taught us!) The long hours of
practice for which he is legendary were as much about Monk
learning how to play with them as them learning his music. How
do you think this approach to collaborative work is indicative
of the general jazz labor practices of his time? By modeling
collective cultural/aesthetic labor, was Monk a
“revolutionary” in this realm?
Right! This is an excellent question. Everything that you just said is
absolutely right, I think. Let me just address two very specific
questions which build on this description. What I’ve discovered in
talking to jazz musicians was that kind of collaboration was more common
than not. The idea of the “cutting sessions” and the idea of the
competitiveness—that makes good press. That’s not to say it didn’t
happen. But, if you look at most films about jazz musicians, and you read
the mainstream press, competition is sexier than collaboration. And yet
what all these musicians say—even if you’re doing so-called free jazz,
even if you’re doing something that’s much more experimental—the most
important thing to do is /not/ to play but to listen. You have to be
able to listen to each other, to be able to play with one other, to play
in response to one another. It’s like a set of conversations. Because
making music is not about virtuosity. It’s about being able to create a
kind of community voice in which each voice is individual and can
shine. Monk did some things in his arrangements which were unusual: in
the early Blue Note recordings, he would have the horns sometimes play
the melodic line, or the piano play the melodic line, with the horns
playing the piano chords underneath. And he would rethink which voices
would be the leading voices. But leading voices doesn’t mean “separate.”
A leading voice is in relationship to other voices. So he thought a lot
about collaboration. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. And a key word here
is “labor.” Labor in the world of capitalism is commodified. So sometimes
the question is how do you get paid for that labor? Collaboration
sometimes is collaborative /composition/, where someone’s name is going
to go on that music. And Monk wasn’t always the most generous. It wasn’t
always his fault; there are a couple of tunes he clearly didn’t really
write. He might have added two notes, but his name got on it. For Duke
Ellington it happened all the time, with Billy Strayhorn. That’s not
unusual. In those days, especially the days of bebop, it was important
to get published. So what artists would often do is take chord changes
of a standard song, like “All the Things You Are,” for example, or “I
Got Rhythm,” and then write a line over it, like a melodic line. Just on
the spot. And then they’d have an original composition, which means they
would get publishing rights. Monk, though, was unusual in that he
tended not to use other chord progressions; he made his own. When he
wrote a composition, it was his own, and deeply original. And because it
was deeply original, they were often difficult to play. Even if the
melody lines were fairly simple, the chord progressions were often
difficult for other artists. So this is where his role as a teacher
became very important—and this is part of your question too: he would
teach them by ear. Because he did not want people to read—you know, he
wrote everything out. But he wouldn’t share the sheet music. Because he,
like Charles Mingus, like Duke, felt like you can get a good feel of the
music if you hear it and play it. You don’t have to worry about how to
match the rhythms exactly, but /hear/ it. So he would do that. When you
ask the question, “Was this revolutionary?,” much of what he did was
pretty revolutionary at the time. The last thing I’ll say, to go back to
the question about money, because money is the bottom line: he’s trying
to raise his family, raise his kids—he ends up sending them to private
school. He wasn’t making much, and the critics really did not appreciate
his music until 1956. It was about the time when he began to sell
records, and yet, at the same time, he never compromised on his
aesthetic. He kept playing and writing /complex/ music. The tragedy is
he’s 40 years old by the time he really begins to make a living. Very
few artists after 45 or so are writing new music. They’re playing the
music they always played. And at the moment he reaches this sort of
pinnacle of fame—and he’s writing some new music—that’s when the critics
are saying, “Oh, he’s tired; he’s playing the same thing over and over
again; it’s not rock ’n’ roll; they need to do something to resurrect
his career.” And that was one of the tragedies. This happened
simultaneously with his bipolar disorder. The combination of these
things made it difficult.
So, thinking about the difficulty in earning a living and his
faithfulness to his understanding of his craft, economic
anxiety had to have pervaded his household, his life, extended
family—the patron was kind of important, but even before that,
sharing resources in his neighborhood. Are there things about
the economic anxiety, being a professional musician named
Thelonious Monk, in this time and place, that you didn’t put
in, that you thought: “That’s suffering from the economic
hardship”?
I put /everything/ in there. [/Laughter/] It’s a good question because
the essence of the question for me was, “How do you capture that
anxiety?” How do you capture it? And it’s hard because of two things.
One is that he had anxiety, but he also had Nellie. And Nellie always
worked. Nellie worked until that turning point around 1956, which was
the point when he started to sell some records, he started to get gigs.
Just before he’s about to get his cabaret card back for a moment; she
worked, she worked as an elevator operator, as a seamstress, a tailor;
she worked her butt off. Secondly, he was in the apartment that his
mother had. They didn’t leave that apartment until 1964. Totally rent
controlled, so rent was not an issue. And when they had fires—two times
they ended up living with family up in the Bronx—they had a whole
entourage of people to help them: nieces and nephews, his
brother-in-law, his brother, his sister. They all pitched in. When they
couldn’t keep the kids at home because he was going to go on tour, they
would stay at the aunt’s house. The irony is that the baroness—who is
supposed to be the great patron—she hardly gave Monk /anything/. She
didn’t have that much. She had a really nice car and she had a nice
house. But she didn’t have huge amounts of money to give out because she
was kind of cut off from her family. That’s one of the big myths. The
big myth is that “Oh yeah, we had this patron.” At one point, Monk
loaned /her/ money. Because she wasn’t always that responsible, but
that’s another story. The other part of it is that Monk always had
enormous confidence in himself. See, he never thought that the music he
was making was so out of the ordinary that he had to convince people; he
never thought of himself as “avant-garde.” He said, “I don’t do that
avant-garde shit! That’s not me.” He said, “I’m trying to get a hit.”
And he said this over and over again. He just assumed that a song like
“’Round Midnight” would be a hit. Like, it’s a perfect song! “Monk’s
Mood.” “Ruby My Dear.” Of course these should be hits! There’s a story
in the book about working with this singer named Frankie Passions—Frank
Paccione. He’s a local singer, he’s a crooner, sort of like Frank
Sinatra, trying to be Sinatra, but also like Perry Como. And Monk
actually does some arrangements for him. They go into the studio to make
this record. They cut two sides. And the arrangements are so wild! You
have to be an incredible singer to be able to follow. But for Monk it’s
perfectly logical! It’s the logic of the music in his own recognition
that it has all the things that a composition needs: balance, color, the
right rhythm, a sense of swing. He says, “I got all of that stuff. So
what else do you want from me?” He assumed at some point he was going to
make it. And eventually he did. He was right about that. But he never
saw himself as an outsider. He was on the inside of the music.
Moving on from the biography, we noted in our reading of your
work that you not only advocate “empathy” as a fundamental
condition of practice within shared political struggles, but
you also /practice/ it in how you write about your
biographical subjects (examples are Monk, Grace Halsell, the
African and American jazz artists featured in /Africa Speaks/,
race essentialists, student movements in the present, and so
forth). When you are led to critique or point out the flaws in
your subjects, you do so in a loving, generous, often gentle,
but also matter-of-fact way. That is, you avoid heavy-handed
browbeating, or writing them out of the struggle. Is this by
now a conscious method in your approach? Do you set out to
write “empathic” /critique/—often calling attention to nearly
absurdist contradictions in the lives and actions of your
biographical subjects—in your work? And how do you do this so
consistently?
That’s a good question. It’s funny because I’ve actually moved away from
empathy. Let me explain what I mean. I think what I’ve been calling
“empathy” was really, if you get down to it, /solidarity/. One thing
about empathy is that it often pivots around taking a singular story,
someone’s singular experience, and then, from that, projecting out. As
if that singular experience—empathizing with the individual—then allows
us to understand everyone who might be suffering from a particular set
of circumstances or struggles. It gets you into the problem of
“innocence.” That is, you empathize with victims and not so much with
understanding the people who are not identified as victims, not
“innocent,” but as perpetrators. I agree that what I try to do is to
understand /other/ positions. So to go back to your question of
identifying contradictions and engaging critique, I guess this is
old-school Marxism for me. It’s early Marx; it’s also “late” Marx. I
make a distinction between old-school Marxism and myself as a Marxist
/versus/ the sectarian organizations I was a part of. I don’t ever
remember reading in Marx about democratic centralism. I don’t know if
Marx ever wrote about it, but I’m sure it’s something that comes up
later. So I go back to Marx’s appreciation for Hegel—that is, that you
have the thesis and antithesis which produce a new synthesis. And I’m so
interested in new syntheses. Because I clearly don’t have all the
answers. I’m not interested in winning an argument; it has never really
been my objective. Trying to /understand/ has been, because I think the
questions we’re all struggling with are life-and-death questions. A
concrete example: recently I got myself involved in the whole Cornel
West/Ta-Nehisi Coates—
That’s our next question. As we have said, scholarly
generosity and empathy, kindness of/in ethical critique, are
real virtues that permeate your writing. That’s our
impression. So even if you have a different reading now on the
issue of empathy, we maintain our view that you are empathic
about your subjects, in the sense that you see flaws, but you
don’t then write twenty-five pages of evisceration.
Right, because, see, if I would do that, then I’d have to do
auto-critique! Because I could give you /fifty/ pages of self-evisceration!
[/Laughter/] Wait, no Robin! You are with two of the most
self-loathing people on the face of the earth. You can
interview us!
We are in the same club!
[/Laughter/] So in one recent moment that brought tears to my
eyes, you weighed in on the published critique that Cornel
West made of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Cornel is a personal friend and
former teacher of mine. When I read what he wrote about
Ta-Nehisi, I was struck by how right Cornel was, but also by
its coldness as boldness. When you weighed in, you spoke to
the need for compassion. You wondered why the cannibalistic
or eviscerative impulse tended to happen again and again. And
what’s so odd, as you point out, is that what Cornel said
about Coates bore some resemblance to Adolph Reed’s 1990s
critiques of West. (Michael Eric Dyson has more recently and
less effectively written in a similarly caustic way.) But you
were noticeably compassionate, gentle, no less sharp in
staking out a politics, but not hurtful. There are two parts
to this. How easy or hard is this approach for you? And where
do your edges show up?
Well, to go back to the context for this intervention, which I did not
want to get into—ironically, I felt the need to intervene because Cornel
was being attacked. It was the attacks on Cornel that disturbed me the
most. It was so messed up; even friends of mine, like Jelani Cobb and
others, began to attack Cornel as if it was simply personality, personal
hating.
Well, Cornel looked small. He’s also always a very expansive
guy, generous. But there he looked small. His critique was
great, but it was very worrisome.
I know that part of it has to do with what it means to be interviewed as
opposed to writing a long piece. Part of it has to do with these really
short pieces in the /Guardian/. I understand that. So, whatever Cornel
said, and I fundamentally agree with him … that’s why he called me out
in the piece. I never said I don’t agree with Cornel. I agree with him
on his critique of Coates. I also had read Coates’s book. And Coates and
I actually did a debate.
That debate’s up on YouTube. I did see that.
Yes, it’s up on YouTube, and it was at the L.A. Public Library. It
wasn’t really a debate. It was my asking him hard questions, /which he
appreciated/. As a result of that conversation, Ta-Nehisi’s followers
basically drove me off of Twitter! That’s why I’m no longer on Twitter.
This is why it’s so ironic. Ta-Nehisi goes off of Twitter as a result of
this; /I/ went off because of /his/ followers. And Ta-Nehisi doesn’t
know that; I never talked to him about it. But I asked some difficult,
challenging questions, talking about James Baldwin. They were serious
questions. I felt like his reading of James Baldwin was one I didn’t
recognize in Baldwin’s texts. And I was pushing him on some things. And
people who are his followers were writing me all this hate mail. Like,
“You had no right to speak; your job is just to interview him. You need
to shut your ass up. If you want a MacArthur, get your own MacArthur.”
As if somehow that had /anything/ to do with it! So I felt bad. The
pattern was Ta-Nehisi Coates/West became a spectacle like Dyson/West
became a spectacle. People were weighing in as if somehow it’s a
spectacle of the /fight/. Rather than the /political issues/ at hand.
Once the political issues are lost, then we’re lost. Ta-Nehisi reached
out to me because he was concerned I was joining the bandwagon against
him. I said, “Look, I’m not for or against anyone. I’m for liberation. I
don’t have time. I love everybody.” But liberation is a project that we
have to work on together. It doesn’t mean we agree. In fact, if we all
agree, we’ll never get there. You’ve got to be able to create thesis,
antithesis, synthesis. And so you need to be able to lay out exactly
what Ta-Nehisi is doing in his book, which didn’t come out in West’s
critique. I wanted to remind us that Cornel has a /long/ history, a
/long/ and /dedicated/ and /amazing/ history as a /revolutionary/
thinker. That’s why I went through this whole thing about his Marxist
background, the way that he tried to think through these things—he’s
one of the leading … he’s like my hero! And he still is, and will always
be. But then, my /main task/ was to get to Jackson, Mississippi. I
wanted to use this as a way to pivot, to say, “Look, here on the ground
in Jackson are people working out these ideas; it’s very hard, it’s not
easy, but they’re struggling through it.” What annoyed me the most after
that piece came out were people who wrote me and said, “Oh, you should
moderate a debate between Cornel and Ta-Nehisi in Jackson.” I’m like,
“/Did you read the piece?!/” That defeats the purpose. The people in
Jackson don’t need “Ta-Nehisi versus Cornel!” More spectacle?! Bring the
spectacle to Jackson?! That annoyed me. But I learned to be this way
because this is how my mother is. My mother’s always been like this; her
religion is Self-Realization Fellowship. Paramahansa Yogananda is her
guru, similar to Sonny Rollins. I grew up with that. And my sister,
Makani Themba—who’s an activist, longtime, she’s my older sister—she
trained me and raised me. And she’s always looking for opportunities for
dialogue, always looking for a way to wage critique that is open and
loving, but still critique. Because the flip side of this story is what
annoys me the most, and that is, whenever I’m giving a talk and people
start snapping their fingers, you know, they do this thing now [/snaps
fast/], I feel I must have said something wrong! Because it’s not my job
to /confirm/ what you already know. And that to me is the flip side of it.
The idea that people want speakers or want to read things that /confirm/
what they know rather than /challenge/ what they know. That’s where I
think, if I have edges that show up, that’s what I’m most critical of.
Because it’s tied to the opposite. The culture of ad hominem and the
culture of hating: the flip side of that is /confirmation/. Neither of
them is dialectical. Hating is banishment. Confirmation is nothing
changes. They’re two sides of the same coin. We’re raised politically to
think dialectically. Which is that we /need/ to have that
thesis/antithesis /constantly/. And you cannot separate them; they have
to be together, because those contradictions are drivers, they’re not
something to be afraid of.
Thinking back to my early background, I was part of a
community organization, a community center, back in East New
York in Brooklyn. The guy who ran it was a social worker who
had come out of the Communist Party, he had left the Communist
Party, and then in the 1950s and ’60s, he went to various
places, including Atlanta, and trained all these different
radical social workers. The thing that he was most about was
/conflict/: /conflict/ and /conflict resolution/. So we would sit
in meetings—we were fifteen years old, sixteen years old—kids
of different backgrounds, different racial backgrounds, we
were all mostly from the neighborhood. And he would just
/sharpen/ those differences, and make us have to deal with
each other and confront each other. And it was hard because
part of that process is that you’re getting ripped apart! On
the other hand, we knew, and there was a sense that, we were
involved in this process together, that there was a kind of
solidarity in that what we were working toward was trying to
figure out how to live together. So I think about that when you
ask, what’s our job? What is it that we’re about? In our
teaching, confirmation is not absent from what we need to do,
but it’s certainly not the project. It’s not the goal; but
sharpening contradictions …
Yeah, I think that’s really important. But the idea of conflict
/resolution/: I’ve always thought of it more as conflict /transformation/.
That’s probably what it is. You know, what we were trying to
do, to be blunt, was trying to figure out ways kids in the
neighborhood were not outside in the streets fighting with each
other, sometimes even pulling weapons on each other. We were
trying to figure out an alternative to that.
Yeah, because you wanted to stop fighting.
It wasn’t because we were trying to /evaporate/ the conflict;
it was let’s bring it inside and use it to figure out how we
could all continue to live.
Exactly. One of the people who really pressed me to have to think
dialectically, who was also a teacher of mine, was Grace Lee Boggs.
Grace was a /huge/ influence. I first met her in 1991 or ’92—I know it was
before Jimmy Boggs passed away. And I know that before he died, the last
thing he was reading was /Hammer and Hoe/. I really appreciate that; she
told me that. Every time I wrote something and Grace disagreed—and she
/disagreed!/—she would write me letters, back before emails, telling me
all the things that were /wrong/. And we’d go back and forth. Her thing
was to think dialectically and /not/ to be locked in the old debates,
the old Marxist debates. To really push Marxism—her thing was to push
/beyond/ Marxism. To push beyond Leninism. And this is the person who
did the first translations of Marx’s /Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts/; it was Grace! People give Erich Fromm all the credit, but
it was actually Grace who did the first translations from the German. So
she knows what she’s talking about. But she’s also like, “You need to
think dialectically,” meaning, “Think dialectically where you are
/now/.” “What time is it on the clock of the world?,” she’d always say.
“And what is it /now/ we’re dealing with?” She said the genius of Lenin
is that he wasn’t back in the late nineteenth century trying to have
debates. He’s like, “At this moment, what are we doing right /now/? What
is our plan /now/?” So, I learned that from her. And this idea of not
wanting confirmation—part of the reason I wrote “Black Study, Black
Struggle,” that /Boston Review/ piece, was because it went against the
grain. In fact, at first, people were very upset with me about that
piece. A lot of students felt I was critiquing them and not being
supportive. I said, “Yeah, I was critiquing some things.” But that’s
the whole point. The point is that we have to ask really hard questions.
Not so much, what do students want the university to do for them? Let’s
ask the bigger question. What kind of world are we trying to build? Why
turn to the university administration to give you things rather than
demand and take the things that you want? And why do we think of
education in such narrow terms as, again, /confirmation/? They were
demanding reading lists that would /confirm/ their humanity as black and
brown people, as queer people. I said, well, look, we can confirm that,
but then what do you do after that? We can’t stop there; we have to be
able to push into auto-critique because otherwise what we end up doing
is adopting a political position in which all black people, including
those who signed, sealed, and delivered legislation that is putting us
in prisons, become “oppressed.” /Equally/. We’re all like equally
oppressed. We’re all equally under the gun. And antiblackness becomes
the /only/ way to conceive of the global nature of oppression today. How
do you push beyond that? So I’m trying to push them hard.
I’m starting to get a sense of why you’re moving away from
/empathy/ to /solidarity/. That makes sense. Empathy tends to
be inside a therapeutic, psychological discourse about
self-improvement and “I’m OK.” And in that /Boston Review/
essay, you’re challenging students to political maturity. Like
you said, what comes after you’ve affirmed that your identity
belongs on this campus or in this class? So, solidarity is the
thing …
Right, and empathy also requires identifying with the person you’re
empathizing with. And sometimes you only identify with those whom you
recognize. That’s a problem because part of /solidarity/ is the people
you /don’t/ recognize. The people who you /don’t/ see yourself in. And
we’re raised in this particular era of liberal multiculturalism to see
ourselves in others. When in fact I tell my students, “Look, not only do
you not see yourself in others, but if we’re talking about enslaved
people in the eighteenth century, I’m sorry, none of y’all can know what
that means.” We can begin to understand not by simply imposing our own
selves but by stepping /outside/ of ourselves and moving into different
periods of history. Understanding the constraints and limitations of
people’s lives that are not us, as opposed to those who are /like/ us.
The fallback is always, “Well, if it were me,” or, “I can see how other
people feel,” as opposed to, “Let me step outside myself.”
That is partly what led Serap Kayatekin and me to read
Emmanuel Levinas; the reason why we wanted to read Levinas was
the issue of “radical otherness.” What do you do when there is
no identification? It’s not like /you/ adopt that position;
you’re not standing in others’ shoes. So now what? Now what do
you do with /that/? What is the ethics of dealing with a
/radical/ other?
Right, exactly! I was wrestling with that. While I was attaching the
adjective “radical” to “empathy,” that was my way of struggling to get
to that point. Until finally I realized that it could only get me so far.
Solidarity, which is also a tricky thing, will get us much closer to
what I’m trying to wrestle with. Now, the problem is we’re at a
political moment where it’s hard to talk about solidarity, at least in
the circles I’m around, among a lot of my students. I remember being in
a meeting about a year ago with some activists, and I was talking about
the traditions—the black radical traditions—of /abolition democracy/
that DuBois discusses. Newly freed black people, freed from chattel
slavery, still struggling with other forms of unfreedom, were opening up
the possibilities of free universal education for /all/ people, of
democratizing the /whole/ nation, of saying, “Look, we’re going to
transform this world as we know it.” And suddenly I got this pushback
from some young people who were like, “Well, that was their mistake;
they should have just been fighting for their own.” I said, “That doesn’t
make any sense.” “Well, but what did they get out of it? They got
lynching and ….” “They had to endure lynching and violence /precisely/
because they were fighting for democratizing America.” And so the main
takeaway was that in an era of antiblackness we need to be fighting just
for our own. And there’s no possible way you can transform or win
others. To go back to Ta-Nehisi, Ta-Nehisi’s position is that you can’t
win over white people, so just forget it. It’s some kind of
Afro-pessimism—he’s not an official Afro-pessimist, he’s more like an
existentialist. And that’s not where my politics are, because we don’t
really have a choice. I’m much closer I think to Dr. King in this when
he talks about what /agape/ actually means. The constant struggle to
create community. /Constant struggle!/ You can’t stop fighting. And
creating community means creating community with those you don’t like.
And people who don’t like you. And trying to figure how to move forward
to something better. Not to the point of, as King would put it,
/sentimental/ love. But a /hard/ love, a hard love that’s /in/ struggle.
I can’t think of another path to go; it’s inconceivable to me. But
that’s not necessarily a very popular thing right now. And I can
understand it.
Within the black community.
Oh yeah, within the black community. I can understand why, because these
are painful times. They’ve always been painful times. The difference is
that these painful times are up now on YouTube!
Robin, moving on, in your writings, the terms “authenticity”
and “purity” appear. They appear as descriptors of positions
and identities, but they are also often, seemingly, used
ironically or self-critically. This is not only in terms of
how the words are used but also in your examples. So you note
in /Africa Speaks/ that jazz purists often could not accept
some contemporary African music as “jazz, proper.” Likewise,
you indicate that Sathima Bea Benjamin’s insistence on singing
American jazz classics during the period of anti-apartheid
uprisings, in which she played an important part, and not more
“tribal-derived” protest music, like Miriam Makeba, was
something that held her back professionally and also brought
suspicion on her commitment to the struggle. In a different
vein, you remark how Babatunde Olatunji’s first “Drums of
Passion” group in the United States—purportedly “introducing”
African drums and rhythms to America—paradoxically had three
non-African drummers, and himself (who only learned to play
while at Morehouse). You do something similar with Guy Warren,
who you say was greeted with suspicion and suffered
professionally for being neither “authentically” a jazz
musician nor a pure African musician. And the same with the
oud-playing jazz musician Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who described
himself as Sudanese and claimed Middle Eastern/North African
music as his heritage, but whom you show to have had only
Caribbean forebears and who was born in Brooklyn! Yet you are
gentle in your treatment, do not chastise anyone for these
seeming transgressions against so-called authenticity and
purity (which we liked!), and instead evaluate their efforts
on the grounds of their commitments and achievements, both
musically and politically. How do you connect your views here
with the very heated similar debates today over “cultural
appropriation,” especially pertaining to who can, should,
does, etc. play and perform music that originates with a
specific racial or ethnic or gender group, etc.? Are there
analogies here with your examples? What are the obligations of
artists who violate or transgress “the authentic”?
Well, you’re absolutely right that I tend to use terms like “tradition”
and “authenticity” ironically. Basically to signal the fact that they’re
all constructions. And they’re all /constructions/ created in the
twentieth century by those who have the most influence over commercial
elements of the music. What makes something “authentic” often has to do
with the marketplace. It’s not even about what are the various elements
of it. Part of the Olatunji story is that Columbia Records saw him as
more “African” than Guy Warren. Now, as you know, they’re both from the
continent of Africa. The difference is that Guy Warren trained at West
Africa’s most important music school: Achimota College. Olatunji had no
training. So if you were to think of a really concise definition of what
it means to be an authentic musician—not to say that this is even
true—then part of it might be were you trained in your instrument, in
your discipline, as opposed to self-taught? To me, that’s not criteria.
But just say, for the sake of argument, it is. Then one would think
that Guy Warren would have been the ideal person! What does it mean to
be an African musician? Well, to be an African musician! And it should
be that, but that’s not how it works. Because in the end, Columbia
Records is interested in selling records. Sathima Bea Benjamin—because
she doesn’t sound like African-American singers and because she’s not
sounding like Miriam Makeba—there’s no niche for her. And that is part
of the problem. So one of the things that that book tries to do is
challenge the idea that, in this age of decolonization, artists were
actually atavistic in that they were trying to go back to some ancient
past, that they were trying to resurrect ancient Africa. When they all
were creating this /modern/ music! Even Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who is taking
the oud and playing it differently, played music that laid the
groundwork for much of what we think of as “Free Jazz” or “Avant-Garde
Jazz.” So I kind of disrupt the notions of “tradition” and
“authenticity”—/I /don’t do it, the /artists/ do it. They’re
responsible. They’re doing all this disruption. Even Randy Weston’s
story of finally getting to African soil, finally getting to Nigeria, his
dream—his father called himself an African; his dream was to be on the
continent. He gets there, and he’s like in the bush, trying to find
authentic music. And what does he find? He finds Highlife music! In the
city of Lagos! He finds other jazz musicians there! And he discovers a
whole new world opening to him. And he comes back home and records
Highlife music. And this is hip, this is modern, this is new. At a time
when, for Africans on the continent, for anyone involved in
decolonization—or like for Frantz Fanon!—Africa /is/ the future! It’s
not the past, it’s the /future/. And so, of course, the future is going
to create /future music/. Jazz in South Africa was the music of the
future. It was the music of progress. It was only after you get South
African musicians coming to Europe, into the U.S., that their
“authenticity” as Africans had deeper political meaning. And I’m not
saying that anything is more or less “political,” just that there are
different kinds of political articulations. Think about someone like
Hugh Masekela, who comes out playing like Clifford Brown, listening to
Miles Davis—he makes a decision after Sharpeville: “Look, I’m going to
go back to township music, I’ma play this music!” And it is still
/modern/, it is /still/ music for the times, but it’s resurrecting a
form that is connected to the people, a more democratic form. So for
me, the project of understanding music and politics is to discard
notions of “tradition” and “authenticity,” /except/ in the way that it
frames the work, the way it frames the commercial limitations and
possibilities and constraints, the way it frames how critics write about
it, the way it frames even the way musicians think about the music. And
I don’t want do deny. Like when Randy says, “I play traditional music,”
I know what he means by that. It’s not to say that I’m having an
argument with Randy; but again, it is inseparable from commodification.
So when we get to the question about “cultural appropriation,” to me, I
can never separate the issue of “appropriation” from the issue of the
market.
So copyright matters.
Yeah, it matters. There’s copyright, but there’s also who is
accumulating money capital as a result of taking someone else’s
social/cultural capital. This is the classic case of Elvis Presley and
rock ’n’ roll, the classic case of Pat Boone. Going and saying, “I’m
going to take this music and I’m going to make a record.” I don’t think
that there’s any crime in one person, two people, a thousand people, a
million people borrowing from, drawing from, recreating forms of
cultural practice or art from another. It’s when you translate that
into cold cash.
Livelihoods.
Livelihoods! When you’re denying one group of people a livelihood, or
you’re milking them for everything. To me, that’s when it matters. The
whole history of culture and art has been one of appropriation. You can
hardly find examples where that’s not true. Modern art cannot have
emerged—/cubism/ could not have emerged—without the discovery of African
sculpture. And everyone knows that, and no one’s paying reparations to
those artists. For /stealing/. But theft is only theft when it’s a
commodity. To me, it is so common—so if you think of something as basic
as music from the Caribbean. Many elements of Caribbean music come from
different sources. Some of the sources are Indian. Or Asian. Some of the
sources are British hymns. There are many sources. And yet it’s still
creative, /original/ music. Even the idea of the pan, that is, you make
music out of an oil drum. One could say, “Well, the oil companies, they
need to get credit for that.” This is about creating new forms of
culture in a way in which the world becomes your creative palette. It’s
the /translation/ to money that’s really the problem. Now, people don’t
agree with me on that. Because some people say cultural appropriation
is appropriation.
I tend to think closer to how you describe it.
Nonappropriation is unimaginable. I don’t understand that at
all. But I do understand the problem of livelihoods, and a
commodity is going to be sold, and who it is that’s going to
be receiving the royalties on it, and for what reasons. So if
somebody signs their name over a formation that they are very
conscious that they’ve borrowed, but, “Here’s my
interpretation of it, and now I’m signing my name over it,”
that’s very troubling.
Or even just not /acknowledge/—what you say in the last part of your
question. To even /acknowledge/ where these things come from. That’s
basic, but we don’t always do that.
More about how you’ve thought about and analyzed authenticity
in black culture. In /Yo Mama’s DisFUNKtional!/, you use the
early experiences of wearing Afros by people like Andrea
Benton Rushing (at Amherst College, right?) and Helen Hayes
King to criticize social-scientific and pop-cultural tropes of
“real” authentic blackness. But you also point out the
pervasive masculinism (and, we might add today, gender
binarism and heteronormativity) of so much “race man”
knowledge as authentic blackness. That tendency persists to
this day, although #metoo originated in the work of Tarana
Burke. And Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse
Cullors—three queer women—started the #blm movement, the
plight of black women’s economic and social realities. And in
our time queer people of color, particularly in carceral
settings or homelessness on the streets—those conditions as
spaces of blackness often remain an afterthought, or a
footnote. In your teaching and writing, how do you enact your
feminism and your commitment to the primacy of /black women’s/
material subjective experiences?
That’s an excellent question! When I wrote /Freedom Dreams/, that
chapter on black feminism was really important to me, and that was
because I was trying to make the point that black feminists—particularly
of that second or third wave— offered the best challenge to those who
were critiquing what was then considered /identitarianism/. That’s
another story; whether or not it was identity politics as we know it
today versus what it was then, is different. So anyone who really
believes in eradicating all forms of oppression and exploitation has to
begin there, as Anna Julia Cooper said: “When and where I enter, the
whole race follows.” So I didn’t really have much of a choice. In terms
of my own teaching and activism, certainly I try my best to support
feminism writ large and try to live and function in ways in which I
understand both the /pleasures/ of difference but also the /constraints/
and the /limitations/ of difference—that to be queer is an assertion of
identity, but what also come with it are certain dangers, certain
constraints. I’m always harping on the idea that the identities that we
always think of as identities are more than that. That race and gender
and sexuality are also sites of oppression and marginalization. That
difference is not just for difference sake, but difference is produced;
we need to make a difference. So as Opel Tometti, Alicia Garza, and
Patrisse Cullors know, when they say Black Lives Matter, they are saying
ALL black lives matter, every single black life matters, and therefore,
that means that ALL black lives are under /threat of elimination/. That
second part is extremely important because it asks how do we defend our
communities from this kind of violence, particularly violences that
within our communities we actually enact and defend and protect? To talk
about what it means to have a queer politics or a feminist politics is
to recognize that class and race alone—both sites of intense
struggle—can also be used as ways to mask, hide, occlude forms of
heteropatriarchy, heteronormativity, denying people identifications and
freedoms based on those sets of differences. To me, that’s very
important. And in my teaching, I’m always struggling with how can I be
better. I’m teaching a course right now in modern African American
history. We’re talking about the 1870s to the present. And I decided to
use no textbook, but only biographies and autobiographies. So I’m using
Assata Shakur; I’m using Keith Gilyard’s book on Louise Thompson
Patterson; I’m using Jeanne Theoharis’s book on Rosa Parks, /The
Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks/ (which is a great book); I’m using George
Lipsitz’s book on Ivory Perry and Mia Bay’s book on Ida B. Wells. So
four black women and one black man as a way to tell the narrative of
African American history. And ALL organizers, ALL activists. The
emphasis is not just on the everyday lives of black people in this
period but really who were the ones struggling to try to transform this
world. So it becomes intellectual history, it becomes history of
philosophy, history of social movements. But the point is that four
black women and one black man can be the foundation for telling the
story. And that kind of threw the students because they’re like, “Got so
many black women …”
Is that right?
Yeah. It’s my experiment. I’ve done it in the past when I’ve used
textbooks; I’ve used Paula Giddings’ book /When and Where I Enter/,
which is a history of African American women, as the textbook. And then
fill in with lectures. It’s not enough, but I’m trying to figure out how
to do that and be better at it. So in “This Battlefield Called Life”—
Right, in “This Battlefield Called Life,” your essay on black
feminism, you write, “Radical black feminists have never
confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women
or women in general, or all black people for that matter.
Rather, they are theorists and proponents of a radical
humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing
social relations across the board.” Key to this claim—with
which we agree—is what you say in the same paragraph: that
black radical feminist theory and social engagement is not
about identity politics. (/How do we get our students to move
beyond this immersion point?/) Here again a theme so prominent
in your work emerges. Historically, black radical feminists
occupy a historical, cultural, and socioeconomic position or
experience that has necessarily been more expansive, more
inclusive, more fundamentally oppositional to the status quo.
Sounds somewhat like materialist standpoint theory. It is, and
it isn’t. Or it begins there, but it leads elsewhere, goes
elsewhere. In this brilliant essay, you refer to the important
“choice” in the late 1970s by Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier,
and Beverly Smith to be revolutionary rather than
accommodationist in their politics because they recognized
intersectionality, complexity, contradiction in/as identity.
Identity is descriptive and may, as a point estimate, offer a
snapshot of who, what, where we are. But
/intersectionality/—the fluidity and indeterminacy of
identity—is how we live our experience. We refer to this
important understanding in terms of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion
of intersectionality mostly these days. It allows us to see
that quests for a pure, ancestral community within ourselves
and in the form of our families or communities or versions of
“us” are mythical quests for Eden. But given the multifaceted
and dynamic forms of social movements (think Combahee River
Collective and its insistent class focus on resource
deprivation for black women and black families) in the
twentieth century, this concept /intersectionality/ also
reminds us that nonviolent (military, domestic, imperial),
nonracial, nonsexist, nonhomophobic social relations in the
family, community, schools, public life are not possible in a
capitalist society! That is a profound vision of
/revolutionary/, not reformist, radical black feminism. At the
end of the essay, you frame the question as follows: “Can we
all get along long enough to make a revolution?” Rather than
these fits-and-starts reforms.
I forgot I wrote that [/laughter all around/].
So I guess what we’re trying to get at in that question has to
do with radical black feminism’s /revolutionary insistence/ as
a challenge to us.
Exactly. You know, it’s so /interesting/ that you bring that out. The
women that I end up writing about, like Barbara Smith, for example, and
Angela, they are in some ways—what they are arguing for is the antidote
to Afro-pessimism. Because for them there’s no question about the
rapaciousness of capitalism. They begin there. They call themselves
socialists. The Combahee Collective, they don’t play. They say, we’re
socialists, but we’re not /just/ socialists. Socialism is part of our
agenda, but they’re also saying that if we’re able to seize the state on
this day and simply implement a form of state socialism, that would not
resolve the contradictions of heteropatriarchy, the contradictions of
racism. These things have to be struggled through because they’re all
coconstitutive; they emerge together. And have to be eliminated
together. Even our definition of freedom can’t be limited to basic
biological needs. Freedom is also about freedom of sexuality, freedom to
be with the partners we want, freedom to rethink our social relations
all together. And that makes them /deeply/ revolutionary,
ironically—tied to the “young Marx” in some ways. They also were
advocates of a solidarity politics. They felt like they needed to build
alliances with other groups, other movements, whether it’s movements
around reproductive rights, welfare rights, the labor unions. And that
goes against the grain of narrower thinking, saying, you know, the
concerns of our community are the only concerns that we have to be
apprised of. And they were internationalists as well! There’s another
group I write about in that chapter, which is still somewhat of a
mystery, but they were an amazing group of women based in Mount Vernon
who put out a book called /Lessons from the Damned/—we’re trying to get
that reprinted actually. Verso is trying to do it. /Lessons from the
Damned/ is this book that is black feminist practice /laid out/
<https://734blackink.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/lessons_from_the_damned.pdf>.
In the clearest terms possible. These were black women working in the
community, a low-income community, around housing rights, welfare
rights, and they got together everyone they’re working with—young kids,
elders, people of all ages, all poor people—and said, look, write about
the oppressions you’re dealing with, write about what you want to see.
Without an author, per se.
“The Damned.”
/The Damned/. The Damned is the author. You can’t get more radical than
that! Because that’s an example of /praxis/. That is, groups of people
coming together to theorize their condition, to think through what’s the
next step, and then to write it down in ways that are full of
contradictions, but contradictions that are not resolved or disappear,
but open up new possibilities. And that is the best because, to go back
to the question of intersectionality, intersectionality is used a lot
today; I’m not always clear what people /mean/ by that. Oftentimes,
intersectionality is treated as compound identities. That is, I’ve got
this list of identities … but there’s no intersections taking place!
But intersectionality, from what I understood, from not just Kim
Crenshaw, but the people who preceded her … when the Third World Women’s
Alliance was formed, and people like the woman who wrote /Triple
Jeopardy/—Fran Beal! So Fran Beal, who’s a long-distance runner, who is
one of the central figures in the Black Radical Congress years later;
Fran Beal, who’s someone who comes out of the Left, comes out of
SNCC—the way she and others were thinking about “triple jeopardy” is
that not only are we dealing with these compound oppressions, but those
oppressions are, again, coconstitutive, codetermining, they are
inseparable from each other. We need to build deeper alliances in order
to fight them all, to develop a political framework, a political
critique, that can address all of them together. Because they don’t
operate separately, like as a list. They operate as one. That’s the idea
I think behind “triple jeopardy.” We’ve got to figure out a way to get
back to that. “Can we all get along long enough to make a revolution?”
That requires what we were calling an “empathic leap” or a “leap of
solidarity.” That is, for those who are not black women to basically
/not/ claim to walk in their shoes, but to /listen/. To hear things and
take them at their face value. That the issues around reproductive
rights, reproductive rights defined by having the freedom to actually
have children rather than facing forced sterilization; to be safe in the
streets, so that when we have the force of the State and individuals
treating us as vulnerable—and therefore, as vulnerable to sexual
violence and other forms of violence—these are the things that are
urgent. And if women and queer people say these are the urgent issues,
then we’ve got to stand behind them and support in solidarity /fully/ as
/comrades/, instead of /allies/.
That’s good. We have that conversation too; one of us says, “I
don’t think of myself as an ‘ally,’ but I certainly do think
of myself as a comrade: always.” But that’s a whole other
thing. Shall we move on?
We read online that your current book project is a biography
of Grace Halsell, the white woman from Texas who worked as a
journalist, served as a speechwriter for President Johnson,
and was famous for her book about racial passing, /Soul
Sister/. You’ve written eloquently about why her career
interests you. In the essay we found online about this
project, you describe how you first learned of her existence,
and then much later why you decided to write a biography of
her life and work. You write, “In Grace Halsell I found my
life’s work—”
I didn’t know whether that was hyperbole or not.
Yeah, that was hyperbole [/laughter/].
[/continuing/] “—the perfect subject to tell a profoundly
American and global story about four forces that shaped our
modern world: race, sex, war, and empire.” Later you say, “I
am still searching for Grace Halsell, whose truths and fears,
lives and loves lay fragmented in a vast sea of archival boxes
awaiting reconstruction. As I work through the pieces of her
life I am reminded of the considerable impact Grace has had on
me,” and then you go on to talk about your first trip to
Palestine “where what I witnessed fundamentally changed my
life.” How did being in Palestine researching Grace Halsell
change your life fundamentally? How is freedom struggle—the
quest for human dignity and justice—“global”?
I wrote that piece for a particular journal for an organization that she
was very much a part of—yes, some of that is hyperbole. But when I said
“life’s work,” I was thinking that much of what she ends up doing
connects a lot of things I’m interested in. I’m interested in indigenous
struggles and decolonization; I’m interested in black movements in
modern ghettoes in the 1960s; cold war politics. So she ends up being
kind of my Zelig. Going to all these hot spots. At first it was a book
about following her to tell a larger story—that’s why I call it “An
Intimate History of the American Century.” But then her own personality,
which is kind of complicated, I have to say—it’s not always a happy
story—gets in the way of me telling that story. The punchline, though,
is that she goes from being a New York Times bestseller and a very
well-known journalist to being persona non grata, all because of
Palestine. When I went to Palestine in January 2012, I didn’t go there
to research Grace. That was just a side trip. I went there because I was
part of a delegation; I’m on the board for the U.S. Academic and
Cultural Boycott of Israel. I’ve been involved with them for a while.
While I was there, I did interview some people who knew her. So there’s
two things I can link to the trip to Palestine in terms of your
question: “How is freedom struggle—the quest for human dignity and
justice—‘global’?” One is that writing the book on Grace gave me an
intimate, bird’s-eye view of the Asian theater in the postwar period,
Latin America after 1959, the ghettoes and reservations and barrios of
North America—she hit them all. Ghettoes, reservations, barrios, and the
border are these hot spots not only of day-to-day drudgery,
dispossession, and violence, but hot spots for revolutionary
possibility. Like celebrations around 1968, it made me realize in doing
this work and revisiting that time that the movements that erupted in
these spots were revolutionary movements; they were not interested in
reform. Reform was not their agenda. And part of it has to do with the
fact that their main opposition was to /liberals/. It was /liberals/ who
waged the war in Vietnam; it was /liberals/ who were overseeing under
Lyndon Johnson the invasion of the Dominican Republic and what was
happening in Indonesia; it was /liberals/ who were waging a war on
poverty that did not consider the structural dimensions of capitalism
and, instead, thought that education and programs would somehow solve
that problem. The National Welfare Rights Organization that emerges,
they’re fighting liberals. It was liberals. It reminds me of the
importance of capturing that radical sense of possibility. The
struggles that we think of as identity struggles, like the American
Indian Movement, the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, the Black
Panthers—they actually were working together. That level of solidarity
across the board: Japanese-Americans coming out in solidarity with the
people occupying Alcatraz Island; the Black Panthers supporting
Palestine and Iranian students who can’t return home as a result of the
Shah; /socialist/-feminists who are taking an antiracist position; as
if, somehow, ALL the white people are just, like, worthless. And so much
of socialist-feminism in Chicago, the Socialist-Feminist Union—and these
organizations, they’re thinking about alliances across the board. To
remind us, they were all basically anticapitalist— they were not for
fixing the system. And for all of them it was global. It was Native
Americans and indigenous people around the world; it was black people’s
struggle along with what was happening in Africa and the Caribbean.
Visiting Palestine was important for me. And this is the second point.
Because in this particular era, where people begin talking about
decolonial or decolonialization as a metaphor, you cannot go to
Palestine and see a set of metaphors, it’s not a metaphor …
There’s nothing metaphorical about the last 2–3 weeks [April
2018], holy shit!
Right? Not at all! You see straight colonial violence. You see
dispossession. We were visiting people in East Jerusalem who were being
forced out of their homes. For no other reason than pretexts, like, if
you decide to build another room, that’s a violation of a housing code,
and they just evict people. They’re bulldozing olive trees! And now
they’re just shooting Palestinians from 300 yards away: snipers. It’s
just the cost of elimination.
Exploding bullets. And think about it. At a fence?!
Yeah, and that was shocking!
And talk about liberals! Our liberal press simply won’t even
acknowledge it. It won’t even make the news. We’ve been
following this.
Right, and so to me, Palestine is one example, but Palestine is a very
important one to remind us of ongoing colonialism, the violence that
people are experiencing on an everyday basis, both in Gaza and also the
West Bank. And again, I return to what I feel like is a very dangerous
trend, a kind of withdrawal, at least from my community, of people
saying, “Well, you know we don’t really have time to fight for Palestine.
Palestine is 7,000 miles away. And, besides, Palestinians harbor
antiblackness, too, so therefore we shouldn’t be in solidarity.” Now,
I’ve heard that more than once.
Is that right?
Yes. And I’m like, okay, how does that make any sense? So you’re saying
that Palestinians shouldn’t ask support from black people because there
are some blacks who harbor Islamophobia? And trust me there are a lot of
folks who are Islamophobic! So does it go both ways? Our support and
solidarity with people who are struggling for human dignity and justice
should not depend on their knowing anything about us! /Solidarity is not
a market exchange/. It’s not, /you/ need to give us /your/ love and
we’ll give you /ours/! Whether it’s the Rohingya, whether it’s the Roma,
whether it’s the Palestinians, we’ve got to be able to say, this is not
acceptable! And I’ll give you a really good example of this. I’ll never
forget when Obama was debating Romney, it was the second campaign. At
one point, Obama said something like we shouldn’t be exporting jobs and
buying commodities from China because labor is so cheap. So his point
was that the Chinese pay workers slave wages, and therefore we shouldn’t
buy from them. /Nothing/ about it’s /unacceptable/ for /anyone/ around
the world to receive slave wages! It wasn’t even an issue. The issue was
China is bad; we’re not going to deal with them. Let /them/ pay the
slave wages. And it wasn’t even about paying American workers higher
wages. It was, we’re not going to do business with them. I remember
talking to my students about this: there is something called the
International Labor Organization, the ILO, which is totally weak. But
the idea that there should be an international standard: /that/ should
be the position of labor! There should be an international standard. Not
that we’re going to “bring jobs back home,” but /a living wage for the
world/ should be our fallback position! That should be basic. But that
is inconceivable even among progressive people I know. And that gets at
the essence of what it means to fight at the global level for human
dignity and justice.
The Palestinian situation is … I have no words for it. But one
thing which relates to your last point. My family is Jewish.
My father was a Sephardic Jew who grew up in that part of the
world before he came to the United States. And it’s
/inconceivable/ to /me/ that any Jew in this world would not
be pro-Palestinian. You can’t go through the experiences that
Jews have gone through and not understand. And that’s what’s
so shocking. Because some of what you say is exactly right.
Some say, “Arabs hate us”; so fucking what? Or, “They don’t
recognize the Holocaust.” They don’t recognize the Holocaust,
therefore you withhold your solidarity? What?! It is really
clear what role the State of Israel plays in relationship to
Palestinians. /That’s/ what matters. That’s what counts. The
rest of it isn’t the point.
Exactly. And the State of Israel also had to shore up its support from
Sephardic Jews because they were the oppressed under Ashkenazi
leadership. The Sephardic or Arab Jews were considered Arabs. They were
in line with the Palestinian Christians. You know, like, “We’re all
second-class citizens.” And you probably know this already, but the
Black Panther party of Israel was Sephardic Jews; they weren’t
Palestinian Muslims. They were Arab Jews. They were formed in ’71; there
were laws passed that targeted Sephardic Jews that treated them as
second-class citizens. ’67 happens, and right around that time—the Black
Panther party originally was formed after that, but it’s also the time
that the Israeli state realizes that they need to shore up support. So
they begin to incorporate Sephardic Jews more and more into the
ruling—not the higher, but the middle ruling group, as police officers;
same thing they do with the Ethiopians.
And they become some of the most reactionary elements in Israel.
It’s a really interesting question, a really interesting history. But,
as time is short, let’s jump into another question.
We can jump to Cedric Robinson. Are you working on a biography
on him?
Here’s the thing: I was asked to. His widow, Elizabeth, was open to me
doing it. At first I was, “Oh yeah, I’d love to.” But then I thought to
myself: /I got so many obligations/. I could deal with his life story
because I’ve done a lot of research on that. It’s all the other stuff
I’m not smart enough to do because that dude was one of the smartest
people I’ve ever encountered. So I’m trying to convince someone to do
it; I was going to do it with someone, but that fell through. But it’s
going to be done at some point. I jotted down notes on “racial
capitalism”; it occurred to me, I don’t typically use that term.
You don’t typically use it, but we saw some talks on YouTube,
and that struck us.
There’s a story behind that, but let’s get into the question.
So we regard you as one of the most important radical
historians of our time. This is our view; hey, man, we read
your stuff! For readers who may not be as familiar with your
work, what would you say is Marxist about your work? How is
your work influenced by Marxian tradition? Are there specific
Marx-inspired thinkers other than Cedric Robinson who have
influenced you? There’s a history that you just explained about
your involvement in the Communist Workers Party, but in any
event, it would be useful for anybody reading this journal to
know what your connection is to Marx.
Thanks to my sister Makani Themba, I came up /reading/ Marx. My pathway
wasn’t through anyone except I remember one summer, 1980, when I read
/Capital/, volume 1, just by myself. Just went to the library every day
and read half a chapter a day and got through it. Of course, I read the
/Communist Manifesto/, and then I was reading the /Critique of Political
Economy/, I started reading volume 2 [of /Capital/], read the early
/Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts/, read the /Eighteenth Brumaire/ …
You did this on your own? Did you play sports at all?
[/Laughter all around/.] Good god!
And this is the transition from high school to college. My sister was
reading this stuff, and she would tell me what to read. When I got to
college, I became involved with different organizations. Of course, I
took my first black studies course. Like most people who take black
studies for the first time, you’re incensed with all the things you don’t
know. Now, I had grown up in a household where I knew some things, but
in the context of college, it’s a little bit different. And then I end
up hooking up with a brother who was the local organizer for the
All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party.
Where are we? L.A.?
This is 1980 in Long Beach. Cal State, Long Beach. At the time, tuition
was $90 a semester. So I did a study group with him. He was the only
person. He was trying to organize, but nobody else would join him. We
did a study group, and we were reading Nkrumah, Fanon, some Marx. And
then my college history teacher—I had two teachers who were very
important to me. One, Jack Stuart, who was a former Trotskyist and had
known Bayard Rustin—you know, Rustin’s lover was a leading Trotskyist at
some point. Jack Stuart went to Columbia University, got a Ph.D., and
wrote about socialists. And then another professor, Leo Rifkin, who had
become a Rockefeller Republican but came out of the Communist Party and
was still sympathetic. He was a Republican /and/ sympathetic about the
Communist Party because he had nostalgia. In fact, he had one glass eye,
so he reminded me of the guy from /Invisible Man/, Brother Jack, who has
this one eye. But these are two Jewish radical scholars at a state
university who took me in. And when they saw I was interested, they
began to introduce radical stuff to me. And it was Jack who said, “I
have a study group you should go to”: it was the Peace and Freedom Party
in Long Beach. So imagine: I am nineteen years old, I am the only black
person in the room, and everyone there is over 60! I’m not making this
up! So my introduction is a very unusual one. I’ve got my All-African
Peoples Revolutionary Party study group over here, and I’ve got my Peace
and Freedom Party study group over there. And we’re reading Marx, and
we’re reading some Lenin. So, as a result, I began to read as much as I
could and got deeply involved. As to who I was reading, I was reading
Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky, because the idea of “permanent
revolution” made perfect sense to me. I didn’t even know enough to know
that there was a beef! I thought that, well, Trotsky’s one of the great
thinkers. I only later figured it out. And then it became Raya
Dunayevskaya, then Grace Lee Boggs, and then C. L. R. James. And soon,
everything I can get I identified with Marxism. Because, for me, Marxism
was not a set of laws. It wasn’t a set of principles. It was a set of
ideas rooted in three things. One, the idea of historical materialism—
that is, that people make their own history, but under particular
material conditions that constrain and limit possibility. But also,
within that, the working classes, the oppressed classes—by working
classes I meant all forms of labor, from the enslaved to the serfs to
the proletariat—they are making history in motion, they are the motive
force. Class struggle is the motive force. So, yeah, historical
materialism; two, class struggle is the motive force. And the third
thing was simply thinking dialectically. What does it mean to think
dialectically, for contradictions not to be resolved, but possible
nuggets for revelation? For revelation to understand where things are
moving, not to predict the future, but to understand how things
unfolded? And how things unfolded—thinking of these three things: class
struggle, historical materialism, and dialectical processes —all reveal
what is /hidden/ from public view. So Marxism was my path to history.
Because it became my way of understanding that to study history is to
try to reveal what you can’t see.
Those things that are hidden.
Those things that are hidden! That was key for me. And ALL this before
/Black Marxism/ came along! So we’re talking about a period from about
1979; ’83, /Black Marxism/ is published. And to go to the foreword of
/Black Marxism/, I talk about the impact that /Black Marxism/ had on me.
By the time I got the book, I was the book review editor at Ufahamu,
which was a graduate student journal—I did my B.A. in three years, so I
was very young. I was twenty-one years old when I started graduate
school, and was reading as much as I could. I remember reading Rosa
Luxemburg’s /Accumulation of Capital/ at the time. So in pops /Black
Marxism/, which I received as a book to review. I didn’t know Cedric
Robinson. And I read it; it took many times reading it to grasp what he
was getting at, because it was quite a radical interpretation, which is
actually a /critique/ of Marxism. He comes out of it less a Marxist than
someone who is trying to think dialectically but sees Marxism, again,
not as a set of principles or laws that are airtight, that people
debate, but rather as a way of thinking about the world. So his critique
of Marxism is a way of advancing the basic principles of dialectical
thinking but then also shifting historical materialism, into which he
incorporates or at least acknowledges other dimensions—cultural
dimensions, spiritual dimensions. He also argues /against/ the idea of
the proletariat as the universal subject. So that threw me; that made me
think really hard about what was I doing, and why. By the time I got to
that book, I had already begun to think about /Hammer and Hoe/ as a
project. My original project was a comparative study of the Left in
South Africa and the U.S. South. That was my original plan. And I
couldn’t do it because I couldn’t get into the country; it was 1985–6.
So /Black Marxism/ became a working model for writing /Hammer and Hoe/.
But Ididn’t understand the book well enough for it to be a full working
model. So reading Cedric did not lead to my abandonment of Marxism. It
just meant a more critical stance towards certain contradictions in what
was becoming Marxism. And I was in an organization at the time—like all
these antirevisionist organizations that all claimed to be the pure,
true, authentic Marxist group. The way you measure … because … you
remember those days …
Oh yeah.
The way you measure your fidelity to Marxism is how close you are to
Lenin. The idea of being antirevisionist, saying we’re not going to
revise because we’re close to Lenin. So the Maoists: “No, we’re closer
to Lenin.” The Trotskyists: “No, we’re closer to Lenin.” Everybody’s
trying to be close to Lenin. And so, of course, we’re reading Lenin. And
then I realize at some point, wait a second, this is hemming me in too much.
Let me ask you about that. When I first started working on
Marxism, it was pretty orthodox, but I did become aware in the
late ’60s that there were different traditions. As you say,
orthodoxy existed then and had fairly strict ideas—you could
be an orthodox Trotskyist, you could be an orthodox Maoist,
and so forth. But there was also the idea that there were
“traditions” and there were options. And that not all Marxisms
were economic determinist, and not all of them believed that
culture didn’t matter. Some of them in fact emphasized
culture. That’s what I was interested in. When you were
reading Cedric Robinson, was it also in your head that there
were traditions that still called themselves Marxist that were
alternative options?
Yeah. Exactly. It was an interesting time, though. It is true—because I
was reading all kinds of stuff. I was reading Eurocommunism. There’s a
wing of the British Labor Party—what’s his name, the father …
Miliband.
Ralph Miliband was writing stuff I was reading. There were traditions
coming out of Latin America. There was also the moment when liberation
theology was actually very popular. Especially living in L.A. where a
lot of our work was in the sanctuary movement. So all these things
existed, and I was really interested in them. But I had certain
blinders. And I’ll tell you what they were. I was at that point a
/nationalist/. In the old-school way. So part of coming to /Hammer and
Hoe/ was trying to figure out, what does it mean to be a black
communist? Are there movements that incorporate both black nationalism
/and/ Marxism? So I was familiar with different traditions, but I was
trying to figure out what does a /black nationalist Marxism/ look like?
Part of my attraction to the CWP and to Workers Viewpoint was that they
had more people of color than other organizations. It was ironically a
kind of identity politics—the limitations of that—which drew us, my
sister and I, to the organization. Come to discover that our decision
to join had everything to do also with this idea that you can’t just
talk Marxism, you gotta join a party! Even if the party is not perfect,
you can’t be an armchair Marxist. So I ended up joining a party, and,
for all the limitations and contradictions, the CWP was the one I
joined. This was a crucial moment when joining a party seemed
fundamental. And it made perfect sense, because think about the
trajectory. You have ’68, ’69, the revolutionary youth movement splits.
And a bunch of people say, “We’ve got to become Marxists, go work in the
factories.” So you’ve got the industrial concentration movement in the
1970s happening. More parties are being formed. The Greensboro massacre
happens in ’79, which then steels people to think, hey, we’re in a
fascist moment. So we definitely need an /underground/ party. The
election of Reagan, the Greensboro massacre, the failure of the
industrial concentration movement, meant that we’ve got to build
parties, and the best way to do it is through antirevisionist
organizing. So /that/ became a kind of fetter on all the openings that
were taking place. And the irony for all the people who talk bad about
the academy—and I’m not one, because I think there’s much of value in
the academy (though I talk bad about some things)—was that it was
stepping out of the antirevisionist organizations and returning back to
a deeper reading of Marxism and critiques of Marxism, which included
Cedric Robinson’s book, that opened up the path for me to even deeper
thinking about some of these things …
Throughout your work, there are numerous examples that take
the form of your pointing to seeming contradictions, often in
your telling of an event or feature in the lives of your human
subjects. How would you describe your use of contradictions or
perhaps paradox in your writing? Do you regard it as a
necessary component of historical narrative unfolding? Are
contradictions decisive nodal points in the lives of your
subjects? Is contradiction a fundamental principle of
discursive construction and legibility? Do you use it to call
attention to the frailty of all human actions? Do you see
contradiction as part of a broader commitment to write history
“dialectically”?
Contradiction is central to all of my work, partly because of my own
reading and training as a Marxist to think dialectically. My own
political work when I was in my late teens and early twenties compelled
me to try to make sense of Hegel by way of Marx and Engels, Lenin, and
C. L. R. James. But before I talk about this, I have to say that the
discovery of contradiction was also intuitive—the result of both my
experience growing up as a young kid in Harlem, single mother, poor, and
thus living every day in an antagonistic relationship with the
institutions surrounding us: schools, police, social workers, etc. These
were not just everyday contradictions—my first-grade teacher forcing kids
who acted up in my predominantly black and Latino class to stand in the
wastepaper basket and say “I am garbage” as punishment, or the daily
treatment we received from cops, school security guards, store owners,
who treated seven-and eight-year-old kids as if they were about to
commit a crime. More than that, my mom, sister, and I seemed like we
were always at some demonstration protesting those very institutions. I
have vivid memories of marching around during a cold evening in front of
P.S. 28 chanting “Overcrowded! Overcrowded!” to draw attention to the
condition of our school. Many parents did not show up; some teachers
felt embattled but did not have the support of parents for various
reasons—having to do with fear, race (many white teachers), time (had to
work long hours), and the school’s failure to engage the community.
These all pointed to contradictions whose resolution led to new
strategies, new coalitions, and new problems.
To the philosophical aspect: when I was nineteen and a rising sophomore,
I spent an entire summer just reading Marxist stuff and precedents (like
Hegel) on my own. I had just decided to change my major to history, so I
was obsessed with understanding what was later called the “materialist
conception of history.” I kept spiral notebooks, so I’m now drawing on
these to convey what I learned: Marx’s reading of Hegel’s dialectic
provided a radical way of understanding historical change that was not
linear or evolutionary but revolutionary. This was based on two
premises: that all things are contradictory in themselves, as Hegel
would put it, and that “contradiction is the source of all movement and
life.” Dialectics for Hegel was a means to think through opposing
conceptions or ideas—“thesis” and “antithesis”—in order to move to a
higher and deeper level of analysis, a new “synthesis.” This is not
about coming to some middle ground, as in contemporary liberalism, but
the outcome generally results in a radical break from old ideas. Perhaps
more importantly, for me at least, was Hegel’s lessons that when we look
at individual things and phenomena, we see only the differences between
them, and they stand as discrete entities. But looking dialectically, we
can see how they are all part of the same process; they acquire meaning
once we see them in dialectical tension, as moments in a process of change.
Of course, for Marx the point of dialectical method was not to
understand the battle of ideas, as if philosophy were above the material
world, but rather to comprehend reality, society, the historical
development of classes and social relations. This is not to say ideas
don’t matter, but rather they are shaped by (I wouldn’t say determined
by) the material conditions of people and their relation to one another.
For Marx, the problems of philosophy cannot be solved by passive
interpretation of the world as it is but only by remolding the world to
resolve the philosophical contradictions inherent in it. Struggle
against/within one’s reality produces the possibility of new philosophy;
action changes reality, which then demands analysis, which in turn has
material force. Even more than his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, I was
influenced by this quote from Marx’s /Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of
Right”/: “The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism
of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But
theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses”
(Marx, 1970, 137).
In part 1 of this interview, we asked if you would trace your
own historical connections, as you see them, to Marxist
intellectual traditions. In addition, we asked if there were
writers not necessarily connected to Marxism whose work you
felt was foundational and influential to your own thinking and
writing. We found your answers in part 1 edifying and
illuminating. Would you be so kind as to fill in a few more of
the remaining gaps for /RM/’s audience?
My response to your previous question above begins to answer this one.
To put it bluntly, my historical work has always been about class
struggle in the modern world—mostly in the United States. A modern world
is necessarily a racial and gendered world. There are too many
influences to name all, but there was a point when I tried to read as
much as I could in Marxist theory, and I wasn’t concerned about
ideological camps. This isn’t evident explicitly in my historical
writing since I made a concerted effort to draw on theory to understand
the movement of people, the conditions of their lives, and the horizon
of possibility rather than to use stories to engage theoretical debates.
So much of that is submerged.
I can, however, point to the chief Marxist authors and texts that shaped
my own thinking, besides Marx and Engels and Lenin. I had taken to Rosa
Luxemburg, /The Accumulation of Capital/ (specifically her insights into
imperialism); Antonio Gramsci, /Selections from the Prison Notebooks/;
C. L. R. James, too much to name, but notably /Notes on Dialectics/ and
essays in /Spheres of Existence/ and /Facing Reality/ (coauthored with
Grace Lee Boggs and Cornelius Castoriadis), among other things. Grace
Lee Boggs and James Boggs, with whom C. L. R. James worked in the 1950s
and early 1960s, were also both very important in my own thinking. I got
to know Grace very well, and she became both an interlocutor and tutor.
I’ve discussed her influence on me in my introduction to the reissue of
Grace’s memoir, /Living for Change/, so I won’t repeat that here.
As I think back, my introduction to Marxism is partly indebted to Jack
Stuart, my history professor at Long Beach State. A former Trotskyist
who taught a wonderful course on the history of Western Marxism, Jack
hipped me to the /Monthly Review/ crowd. Besides becoming a regular
subscriber (I also had a subscription to the /African Communist/, the
journal of the South African Communist Party!), I read Paul Sweezy and
Paul Baran (/Theory of Capitalist Development/; /Monopoly Capital/,
etc.), Harry Braverman, and Harry Magdoff; Walter Rodney, /How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa/, which opened up to me a whole lot of
underdevelopment and dependency theorists—Samir Amin, Andre Gunder
Frank, and so on. In fact, it is worth mentioning that I went to
graduate school at UCLA with the intention of studying the political
economy of colonialism in Africa, specifically commodity production in
Mozambique. I’d written a prize-winning undergraduate thesis at Long
Beach State titled “Structural Change and Underdevelopment in Niger,”
about the transition to groundnut production and its impact on the economy.
And there were others, notably historians whose work became models for
me: W. E. B. Du Bois’s /Black Reconstruction/, C. L. R. James’s /The
Black Jacobins/, and Walter Rodney’s /How Europe Underdeveloped Africa/
were the holy trinity of texts and drove me into the discipline and into
the revolution.
Actually, there were many texts whose impact was equally profound and
deeply grounded in what might be considered a black Marxist tradition.
We sleep on the late 1970s and early 1980s, but I’m fortunate to have
come of age politically during a renaissance of radical work. From 1980
until 1983, I was taking black studies in college and for a brief period
participated in a study group organized by the All-African People’s
Revolutionary Party. I was a Black socialist in the making, trying to
navigate between my commitment to a politics of black
self-determination, a Marxist critique of political economy, and a kind
of fuzzy recognition that there is something more than material
conditions and exploitation driving our movement. Of course, we read
Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah and Kwame Ture, Amilcar Cabral, and others. On
my own I read Aimé Césaire, Michael Löwy, Stuart Hall, Oliver Cox,
Clarence Munford, and Chinweizu’s still underappreciated text, /The
West and the Rest of Us/.
There is Cornel West and his entire body of work. But, for me, /Prophesy
Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity/ proved
formative for understanding the ways in which working-class African
Americans melded Marxism and prophetic Christianity, which laid the
ideological and cultural basis for the Party—especially in rural
Alabama. This deeply historical and incredibly powerful book engaged
questions of spirituality and black ontology in the context of slavery
and racism in the United States. Like Cedric Robinson—he begins with an
exegesis on the emergence, development, and decline of European
modernity and then examines the consequences of excluding Native
American and African culture and thought from the formation of American
social order. He then considers the contours and meaning of the
emergence of a unique Afro-American culture and its engagement with
modernity and postmodernity. The core of the book, however, is his
brilliant examination of a dialogical encounter between black prophetic
Christianity and Marxism, producing in the end what he deemed an
Afro-American revolutionary Christianity.
Manning Marable’s impact, as a Black Marxist and engaged intellectual,
cannot be overstated. I first read /Blackwater: Historical Studies in
Race, Class Consciousness, and Revolution/ when it came out in 1981. The
essays in it explored the history of black struggles for freedom,
tracing the roots of contemporary social movements to slavery and
Reconstruction, to black faith communities and battles for land and
economic independence, all the way through the civil rights movement and
urban rebellions. This was no academic book; Marable proposed what he
called a “Common Program for a Third Reconstruction” rooted in a
politics of transformation as distinct from (or perhaps the dialectical
synthesis of) integration (civil rights) and separatism (black
nationalism). But it drew on the history of the Bolshevik Revolution!
It was modeled on the mass of workers and soldiers represented in the
Petrograd Soviet and the middle-class parliamentary opposition in the
Provisional Government. This analogy of “dual power” that he envisioned
might emerge under a Third Reconstruction, as a transitional stage to
dismantling the racist state under socialism. That futuristic,
imaginative move always stuck with me, and rarely do Marable’s admirers
return to that early text.
The work that left the biggest impression on me was /How Capitalism
Underdeveloped Black America/ (1983), a critical treatise on the
ravages of late capitalism, state violence, incarceration, and
patriarchy on the life chances and struggles of black working-class men
and women. That book, I would contend, influenced an entire generation to
focus our energies on the terrain of the prison-industrial complex,
anti-Klan work, labor organizing, alternatives to black capitalism, and
challenging patriarchy—personally and politically. Just reading the
preface stopped me in my tracks: “The intellectual who makes a public
commitment to transform society, to smash white racism and the
inherently exploitative system laughingly described as ‘free enterprise’
by its defenders, cannot plead his/her case in muted grey tones. For the
Black masses to ‘return to their own history,’ we must begin by
rewriting that history—but not in the language, style or outlook of the
system” (Marable 2015, xlvii).
And then there was Angela Davis, the thinker, not the icon. Her book
/Women, Race, and Class/ was standard reading in my black leftist study
groups. The essays examined the intersection of race, gender, and class
and taught me/us a great deal about the barriers to building a
class-conscious, antiracist feminist movement over the past century. She
also looks at the intersection of forces oppressing women, including
various forms of sexual violence. It was important to read Davis at that
time since her insights into reproduction became an entrée into the
debates that were raging in the 1970s around reproduction, class, and
patriarchy among Marxist feminists, notably Silvia Federici, who is one
of my biggest influences, but also Marlene Dixon, Shulamith Firestone,
Maria Mies, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Lise Vogel, Juliet
Mitchell, Heidi Hartmann, Michèle Barrett, Zillah R. Eisenstein, and
others I can’t recall now.
A number of historians working within a Marxist framework directly
shaped my own work, many of whom published in /The History Workshop
Journal/, /Radical History Review/, and /Science and Society/. Among
them were E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and the like. But
of that next generation, the most important for me were David Roediger
(/The Wages of Whiteness/) and Peter Linebaugh (/The London Hanged/ and
many other books, including /The Many-Headed Hydra/, which he coauthored
with Marcus Rediker, another influence). I’ve written about Linebaugh in
several places, most notably in an essay in /Monthly Review/, titled
“Dead Labor,” back in 1993, which demonstrated how his book /The London
Hanged/ turned my entire understanding of history and historical method
upside down.
Finally, I have to mention the late George Rawick, who became a mentor
to me in the spring of 1987 while he was visiting at UCLA. He sat with
me for hours and schooled me in ways to interpret working-class
movements, culture, and resistance, and he introduced me to some of his
groundbreaking essays, such as “The Historical Roots of Black
Liberation” (1968), “Notes on the American Working Class” (1968), and
“Working-Class Self-Activity” (1969). By paying greater attention to
Rawick’s concept of “self-activity,” Alabama’s Communists opened up
another world of politics, since I found that most of the people the
Party fought for did not join insurgent organizations. They fought back
as individuals or groups, often using strategies intended to cover
their tracks. Rawick also insisted I read /Class and Culture in Cold War
America: A Rainbow at Midnight/ by George Lipsitz. Published in 1981,
the book argued that the postwar period was not the death of labor’s
struggle but one of the most active, militant periods of working-class
opposition in U.S. history. He acknowledged the defeat of the postwar
strike wave but revealed expressions of militancy through popular
culture. But Lipsitz’s 1988 book on a St. Louis organizer, /A Life in
the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition/, gave me the
framework I needed to understand the local political culture and to
help me see the Alabama Communists and their supporters as organic
intellectuals. Once I did that, I could see the cultural and ideological
bases of their own way of seeing alternatives to the status quo. I came
to understand why the Bible was more important in challenging the
dominant ideology than, say, Marx or Lenin.
You write in the foreword to /Black Marxism/ that Cedric
Robinson’s ambitious critique of both Western Marxian
traditions and black radical traditions fundamentally
transformed your life, your sense of mission, your approach to
history and revolutionary politics. Can you summarize the
impact Robinson’s work has had on your own?
I can never sufficiently explain the impact Cedric’s work and tutelage
have had on my development as a historian, as an intellectual, and as
one who identifies as a revolutionary. I hope it is clear in most of what
I’ve written over the past thirty years. To be clear, Cedric and I were
not personally close, despite the fact that he served on my dissertation
committee and we remained in touch on and off since 1984. While I never
took a class with him (he was teaching at UC-Santa Barbara and I was at
UCLA), I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that no person I’ve
personally encountered in my lifetime has had a greater intellectual
impact on me besides my mother. His ideas—or at least my interpretation
of them—thoroughly shaped my first book on the Communist Party in
Alabama. I initially framed the problem as why the “white” Left had
failed to mobilize the black working class, but reading /Black Marxism:
The Making of the Black Radical Tradition/ (1983) made me realize that
my question was wrong. It was never about a failing in the “Left’s”
ability to mobilize black people but our conceptual failure to recognize
what Cedric identified as a “Black Radical Tradition” critical of, and
illegible to, a Euro-American Left formed by the logic of Western
Civilization. When this tradition found its way into Left movements—in
Africa, Latin America, the United States—it brought its own unique
vision, historical sensibility, and set of resistance strategies to the
Communist movement and, in doing so, altered the Party. In other words,
I was initially stuck arguing against scholars who tried to prove that
Communism was alien to black people; Robinson compelled me to ask what
black people brought to the Left to make it their own. The presumed
objects of Communist machinations became subjects and agents in making
their own history.
But Robinson’s influence continued to shape my thinking in unique ways,
which I hope is evident in all of my subsequent work. For the past three
decades, I have continued to return to /Black Marxism/, his essays in
/Race and Class/, and his later books, /Black Movements in America/
(1997), /An Anthropology of Marxism/ (2001), and /Forgeries of Memory
and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film
before World War II/ (2007). I should say something about his first book,
/The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership/
(1980), although it wasn’t the first thing of his that I read. In fact,
I tried to read it in graduate school and, quite frankly, I couldn’t
understand it because I hadn’t read enough (it wasn’t a matter of
language, by the way). But once I understood it, Robinson forced me to
come to terms with the limits of Marxism—even while acknowledging the
variety of /Marxisms/ I’d encountered. His thesis demolished the Western
presumption that mass movements reflect social order and are maintained
and rationalized by the authority of leadership. Critiquing both liberal
and Marxist theories of political change, Robinson argued that
leadership (the idea that effective social action is determined by a
leader who is separate from or above the masses of people) and political
order are essentially fictions, and he proved it with examples of radical
democracy that break with Eurocentric models of Greco-Roman diffusion.
He concludes that it is not enough to reshape or reformulate Marxism to
fit the needs of Third World revolution, but we must reject all
universalist theories of political and social order. That made me go
back to /Black Marxism/, yet again (which inspired me to push the
University of North Carolina Press to bring it back into print in 2000).
There was much I didn’t appreciate the first time around—namely, the
thoroughness with which he took on Marxism, though from an astutely
radical position. For example, Robinson directly challenges the Marxist
idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism, arguing
instead that capitalism emerged within the Western feudal order in
societies that were already racialized. Capitalism and racism, in other
words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to
produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on
slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. He lays out in great
detail how the first European proletarians were /racial/ subjects (Irish,
Jews, Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and how they were victims of
dispossession (enclosure), colonialism, and slavery /within Europe/. I
had missed this since I wasn’t so concerned with Europe in my early
twenties.
Part of his point, of course, was that capitalism was /not/ the great
modernizer, giving birth to a modern proletariat as a universal subject.
Indeed, the proletariat was not a universal subject. Just as the Irish
were products of very different popular traditions born and bred under
colonialism, the “English” working class was formed by Anglo-Saxon
chauvinism, a racial ideology shared across class lines that allowed the
English bourgeoisie to rationalize low wages and mistreatment for the
Irish. The other shock, which he elaborates in his book /An Anthropology
of Marxism/, is that it was in this dynamic, unstable feudal order that
socialism was born as an alternative bourgeois strategy to deal with
social inequality.
The creation of a European proletariat, he argues, was only one part of
the formation of a world system. At this very moment, African labor was
being drawn into the orbit of the world system through the
trans-Atlantic slave trade, just as indigenous people were being drawn
in through invasion and dispossession. Thus, to understand the dialectic
of African resistance to enslavement and exploitation, he insists we
look outside the orbit of capitalism and into the cultures of West and
Central African culture. The first waves of African New World revolts
were governed by a total rejection of enslavement and racism, with a
commitment to preserving a past they knew, and were more inclined to
escape: creating maroon settlements, fugitivity, etc. But with formal
colonialism, settlement, and the incorporation of black labor into a
more fully governed social structure came a native black bourgeoisie
that occupied a contradictory role as victims of racial/colonial
domination and tools of empire, since they were educated in the colonial
system. A portion of this class revolted, becoming the radical black
intelligentsia, who in so many instances turned to what Robinson
identified as the most dynamic oppositional ideological tendency in the
twentieth century: Marxism. It was through their engagement with Marxism
that figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright
confronted black mass movements, compelling a revision of Western
Marxism and a break from some of its most basic tenets. In other words,
black Marxist intellectuals were /not/ the Black Radical Tradition;
rather, it was through their engagement with the Left and Marxist ideas
that they discovered the Black Radical Tradition.
Are there any other thinkers who have been as influential as
Robinson in guiding your work? If so, who and how?
Besides the many I already mentioned above, there are many historians
and other scholars and activists whose work has been formative in my own
writing, especially on black radical movements. Some are of my
generation—Tera H. Hunter, Elsa Barkley Brown, Earl Lewis, Michael
Honey, Joe W. Trotter, Farah Griffin, Gerald Gill, and others you will
find in my book acknowledgements. For the sake of space, I will highlight
two more senior figures: Nell Irvin Painter and Barbara Smith. Painter is
the author of several influential books, including /Exodusters/;
/Standing at Armageddon/; /Southern History Across the Color Line/;
/Sojourner Truth/; and /A History of White People/. But the text that
had the greatest direct impact was /The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His
Life as a Negro Communist in the South/. That book set me on this
journey to Alabama to find the Communist Party. Nell Painter spent all of
her professional life trying to figure out how subjugated people tried to
rebuild democracy in their own interest. Sometimes that democracy was
public and national, sometimes it was community-based and local, and
other times it was at the level of the household.
I came to Barbara Smith’s work first through her coedited anthology, /All
the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave:
Black Women’s Studies/ (1982), edited by Smith, Gloria T. Hull, and
Patricia Bell Scott. More than anything I had read before about black
studies, Smith and Hull’s introductory statement made the strongest case
for critical analysis as a mode of praxis, insisting that there has to
be a deep, organic, dialectical link between black women’s studies and
the black feminist movement and that black women’s studies must
necessarily be “feminist, radical, and analytical.” Looking back, it is
pretty clear now that /But Some of Us Were Brave/ contributed so much
more than making black women visible. By calling for a critical analysis
of race, gender, and sexuality, Smith anticipates so much of the
scholarship that now falls under the rubric of queer studies and
critical race theory.
Race features centrally in nearly all that you write about. To
help clarify some of the discussion here, and to help us
understand where one critical concept ends and another
possibly begins, can you tell us: what do you mean by race?
What is race? This is a hard question since it is often conflated with
“racism” and “racialization.” The dictionary definition of race still
includes things like groups of people that share “genetically
transmitted physical characteristics,” despite the fact that there is
no biological basis for race. It is a social construct. Racial
categories are contradictory, contingent, and reflect power relations
more than scientific research. Race is socially produced categories of
difference with the intention to subordinate, exclude, denigrate, etc.
This is why there is no such thing as race without racism. Race isn’t
simply an “identity” but is a structure of power, or a means of
structuring power, through “difference.” /Skin color is not an essential
feature of racism/. Racism is an ideology based on the idea that race
determines, or can explain, human traits and capacities and that racial
differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular “race.”
Finally, I invoke Cedric Robinson’s definition of a “racial regime”:
“Racial regimes are constructed social systems in which race is
proposed as a justification for the relations of power. While necessarily
articulated with accruals of power, the covering conceit of a racial
regime is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable.”
Racial capitalism is the term Robinson theorized. It has
become quite current in contemporary historical and social
analyses of the plight of marginalized people within global
capitalism. What is your understanding of racial capitalism?
The term racial capitalism merely signals that race/racial categories
and capitalism are co-constitutive, a point central to Cedric Robinson’s
/Black Marxism/, as I mentioned in an earlier response. Capital
accumulation occurs through various “racial projects that assign
differential value to human life and labor,” as Andy Clarno so
eloquently put it in his book /Neoliberal Apartheid/. The phrase
originated in South Africa during the mid 1970s and is sometimes
attributed to Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe, among others like
Bernard Magubane. It emerged as an analytical framework to understand
how the apartheid state structured relations of race, class, and
accumulation. In the South African context, it made sense to add the
adjective “racial” to capitalism, not to distinguish it from other kinds
of capitalisms but rather to pose a political question: whether
dismantling apartheid /without/ overthrowing capitalism would leave in
place structures that reproduce racial inequality and the
superexploitation of nonwhite workers. Or put differently, would a
postapartheid nation be able to eliminate the very structures that
reproduce deep racial, class, and gender inequality without dismantling
capitalism?
Today, we tend to associate the term with Cedric Robinson, who—building
on the work of sociologist Oliver Cox—argues not only that
race/racialism preceded capitalism but that racialization begins in
Europe itself as part of colonial processes of invasion, settlement,
expropriation, and racial hierarchy. The takeaway here, then, is that
“racial capitalism” is not merely a type of capitalism, say as opposed
to nonracist capitalism. The term simply signals that capitalism
developed and operates within a racialized and gendered order.
Robinson’s critique of Marx begins with the observation that
white supremacy as a racial “regime” predates capitalism and
is entrenched in the process of primitive accumulation, yet
Marx never sees or analyzes it. White supremacy as a feature
of European feudalism was reconstituted in the transition to
capitalism but was not critically engaged by Marx and other
anticapitalists. Robinson sees this as a kind of cultural or
ethnocentric bias. In the context of global labor, what is
incomplete in /Capital/? How does Robinson’s insight, and/or
yours, regarding Marx’s neglect of already existing white
supremacy invalidate or transform Marx’s conception of class
and the appropriation of surplus labor from productive
workers, which Marx calls “exploitation”?
I can’t possibly do justice to this question without producing a small
book, but let me try to begin to answer. First, I don’t think Robinson’s
critique of Marx and Engels pivots around his observation that white
supremacy predates capitalism. I think he would say racialism predates
capitalism—which is to say, the production of racial difference and
hierarchy emerged within European society itself, /before/ the kinds of
encounters that would give rise to “whiteness” as a category. But by
examining, say, the shifting and increasingly violent character of the
English colonization of Ireland in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, he demonstrates that there were other
antagonisms or contradictions that disrupted any tidy analyses that put
class and class struggle at the center. What happened in Europe was
similar to the racialization of indigenous peoples by dispossession.
Those who are not killed are dispersed, often ending up as indentures on
ships to the New World or as migrant labor on the English mainland.
Robinson observes that it was these historical experiences that shaped
Irish nationalism and determined its relationship with its English
working-class counterparts. And he goes on to show how the Irish came to
be understood as “an inferior race.” The main point, as Robinson puts
it, is that “the tendency of European civilization through capitalism
was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional,
subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”
In other words, Marx and Engels argued that bourgeois society would
rationalize social relations and /demystify social consciousness/, but
the opposite occurred precisely because of the ways in which race
shaped the development of capitalist society and its attendant social
ideology. Racism or racialism permeated the base and superstructure,
creating hierarchies, allegiances, and identifications that /did not/
lead to a unified proletariat or social consciousness. Robinson’s point
is that what Marx and Engels could not grasp at the time was how
racialism (and subsequently nationalism) actually affected the class
consciousness of workers in England.
Robinson takes Marx and Engels to task on so many issues—too many to
recount here. In his preface to the 2000 edition of /Black Marxism/, for
example, Robinson wrote, “Fully aware of the constant place women and
children held in the workforce, Marx still deemed them so unimportant as
a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and
peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist,
noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation.” Robinson is not alone in
arguing that Marx’s formulation of so-called primitive accumulation is
misplaced in that these forms of exploitation were not archaic or did
not prefigure the extraction of surplus value from the proletariat but
rather were coconstitutive, and that forms of unfree labor actually
expanded with capitalism, not the other way around. But perhaps the most
important critique of Marx and Marxism has to do with liberation
movements, not exploitation. Again, from his preface, Robinson wrote,
“But Marxism’s internationalism was not global; its materialism was
exposed as an insufficient explanator of cultural and social forces; and
its economic determinism too often politically compromised freedom
struggles beyond or outside of the metropole.” Yes, Marx wrote a lot
about India; yes, he wrote about the United States and Russia; yes, Marx
excoriated slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—anyone who says he
ignored these things is lying; yes, Marx himself never claimed to be
doing anything beyond understanding the processes of capitalist
development in Western Europe. But what he missed was the significance
of revolt in the rest of the world, specifically among the enslaved,
corvée labor, coolie labor, and the like. These people were humans,
exploited, but ripped from “superstructures” with radically different
beliefs, morality, cosmology, metaphysics, intellectual traditions, etc.
So Robinson tries to push beyond Marx to imagine how we might advance a
radical interpretation of liberation movements by examining their
rebellions not as expressions of precapitalist people or examples of
primitive accumulation but as modalities of struggle against the world
system of capitalist exploitation. Because neither Marx nor Engels
considered the colonies, plantations, or the countryside central to
/modern/ capitalist processes, resistance in these places was always
regarded as underdeveloped or peripheral. Moreover, this resistance did
not resemble the secular radical humanism of 1848 or 1789, so it was
incomprehensible. And Marx’s argument that the export of capitalist
forms to the colonies was a good thing in the long run since it sped up
the development of the productive forces and accelerated class struggle
(in this case, India) revealed significant lapses, in my view, but more
importantly reinforced the illegibility of forms of struggle that were
rendered backward or primitive.
In /Freedom Dreams/ you examine radical black movements for
their visions and desires. You do so to examine not only what
problems and “unfreedoms” they identified (and which gave rise
to them) as /critique/ but also to remind readers of the
possible or alternative worlds they imagined, dreamed of one
day inhabiting, but which did not yet exist. Indeed, this
powerful idea occurs throughout all of your work, and
certainly up through and including /Africa Speaks, America
Answers/. You encourage your readers not to despair or embrace
cynicism but to see the impossibility of the present as a
symptom, as a shared element of what drove earlier black
freedom seekers. And you point readers to previous ways that
black radicals turned impossibility into the seeds of
possibility. Would you call this dream- or visionwork
“utopian”? Or is utopian thought, in your view, specifically
Eurocentric, visions based upon nineteenth-century European
ideas of socialism and communism? What do you see as the main
visionary impulses or desires in black radical traditions? Or
emerging in the present challenges facing contemporary black
radicals transnationally?
I go back and forth on the term “utopian,” which I use in Freedom Dreams
a few times but not always positively. Utopian technically means
“nowhere,” which implies impossibility, and this may actually be true
since what might be collectively conceived as possible is conceivably
better than “nowhere.” Utopia is also what Fascists were trying to
achieve, so I’m cautious about that term. I’m also cautious because I’m
not one to quickly dismiss Engels’s iconic essay “Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific.” While I might question the scientific claims and the
implication of inevitability, the third chapter of that text, which
explains the dialectical relationship between social and economic
struggles and the possibilities that open up for revolution, grounds a
vision of socialism in actual social movements rather than just the
movement of capital.
I begin here because I often fear that /Freedom Dreams/ is misread, not
just by critics but by those most inspired by the book. They like the
idea of “visionwork” as you call it, but too often divorce that work
from critical analysis, the thinking that emerges directly from social
movements, the challenges of solidarity, and a much deeper understanding
of the mechanisms of oppression that generate the conditions for new
modes of analysis. So the book emphatically argues that it is not enough
to imagine a world without oppression (especially since we don’t always
recognize the variety of forms or modes in which oppression occurs), but
we must also understand the mechanisms or processes that not only
reproduce structural inequality but make them common sense and render
those processes natural or invisible. I was trying to write about people
in transformative social movements, how they moved/shifted their ideas,
rethought inherited categories, tried to locate and overturn blatant,
subtle, and invisible modes of domination. In other words, they were
never in a dream state but a kind of struggle state. Of course, there
are many examples of work that unveils these processes and that
interrogates categories that we continue to take for granted: what is
human, race, power, gender, sexuality, security, capital, the law,
crime, leadership, and freedom. Just off the top of my head, there is
Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter, Beth Richie, Denise da Silva, Erica
Edwards, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Fred Moten, Roderick Ferguson, Asfanah
Najmabadi, Alexander G. Weheliye, James Ford, Chandan Reddy, Mishuana
Goeman, Sara Ahmed, Jodi Byrd, and too many others to name.
I’m not sure I can identify the main visionary impulses in black radical
traditions outside of historical context. I agree with Cedric Robinson’s
account of the era prior to emancipation, in which he located those
impulses first in West and Central African culture. The first African New
World revolts were more intent on preserving a past than transforming
Western society or overthrowing capitalism; they created maroon
settlements, ran away, became outliers, and tried to find a way home even
if it meant death. These impulses have changed over time, and right now
some of the central impulses center on sexual freedom and liberation
from gender oppressions, bodily integrity in a state that deliberately
seeks to destroy black bodies in so many ways, and the continual
question of land—that is to say, a place to exercise self-determination
(like present-day Jackson, Mississippi, or Newark, New Jersey) and the
preservation of the earth against capital’s environmental catastrophe.
This is not to say that the desires of working people not to be
exploited have diminished, but to recognize how freedom from everyday
misery and precarity is realized in so many subjugated black communities
through a neoliberal optic. This we might call neoliberal “capture” of
the culture, where one emphasizes net worth, social capital, one’s
“brand,” getting paid by whatever means necessary, instead of the old
discourse around black charity, lifting as we climb (elites assisting
the poor), etc. Revolution is not part of this.
And yet there is something very revolutionary about the struggles around
sex and gender, in part because they reveal something I wrote about in
/Freedom Dreams/: “Another problem, of course, is that such dreaming is
often suppressed and policed not only by our enemies but by leaders of
social movements themselves. The utopian visions of male nationalists
or so-called socialists often depend on the suppression of women, of
youth, of gays and lesbians, of people of color. Desire can be crushed
by so-called revolutionary ideology.” Again, this reinforces my point
that understanding the struggle is the only way to understand the
“freedom dreams” as the collective product of movement and contradiction.
You also expand on your reflections in /Freedom Dreams/ in a
more recent essay on student movements on campuses and in the
streets. In the /Boston Review/ essay “Black Study, Black
Struggle,” you highlight the intersectional nature of what it
is to engage in black radical movement formation in our time.
Building your analysis on a “mantra” to “love, study,
struggle,” you encourage students (in colleges and
universities, in prisons, in the streets) to deepen their
awareness of the responsibilities of subject formation, of
the need to recognize and cultivate forms of agency that are
comprehensive, that are informed by their collective (not
individual) dreams of freedom. What are the specific practices
within which intellectuals and activists “learn” and nurture
such collective dreams of freedom? Do they also include
“economic” ones, and if so, what exactly are they?
What a hard question! I don’t have a precise list of practices in part
because I’m suggesting that what’s most important is that we proceed
collectively, critically, and by erasing the boundaries between those we
think of as either intellectuals or knowledge workers and the rest of
us. So an essential element of that piece is about the relationship
between students, faculty, and university waged labor—that we love,
study, and struggle together as a much bigger (and oppressed) community.
I highlighted those student groups that included campus worker issues in
their overall demands. Indeed, the university’s liberal conceits have
long masked its history of exploitative labor policies—antiunion
practices, outsourcing, and refusal to pay fair wages to janitors,
groundskeepers, clerical staff, food services employees, and
increasingly, adjunct teachers, who make up between 70 and 75 percent of
faculty in higher education. University and college CEOs are quick to
blame fiscal austerity for keeping wages low, breaking unions, and
outsourcing labor from private companies, despite the evidence that
living-wage increases constitute a miniscule percentage of their overall
budgets. Universities are corporations that have amassed huge
endowments, dominate much of the U.S. economy, employ a workforce more
likely to be female and black and brown, and, as land-grant
institutions, enjoy massive tax breaks. Yale University is New Haven’s
largest employer, and the Yale-New Haven Hospital is the city’s second
largest employer. Both institutions have a history of union busting,
cutting health and retirement benefits, and subcontracting with outside
firms in order to use nonunion labor to perform clerical, food, and
maintenance work. Years of experience and deepening ties between
organized labor and the community led to the formation of the
Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE). The CCNE became a powerful
force against the gentrification of working-class neighborhoods, rising
rents, declining wages, deportations and protections for undocumented
workers, and the hospital’s planned expansion that would have displaced
a section of New Haven’s black community. From this powerful labor
community, they not only strengthened organized labor but built New
Haven Rising, a significant political movement to contest Yale’s power in
the electoral arena. To me, this is one model of the “specific
practices” you asked me about.
So underlying that piece is a kind of skepticism toward the university
and a critique of its role in the neoliberal order, and that means
resisting university roles in R&D that promotes militarism,
exploitation, environmental destruction, etc., as well as creating
institutions outside of campuses altogether to give our communities
critically free, quality education that the communities themselves help
design.
And finally, I make a case for the classic study group (not to pass an
exam but to read and debate toward movement building). All of this
requires a qualitative leap from our current atomizing neoliberal
culture of market thinking. We are all pushing back against this idea
that we’re individual actors at the university in a competitive world
and that the point of education is to enhance our social capital, our
value, improve our “brand,” etc., which plays into the general assault
on any kind of collectivism and social solidarity. This has been the
cornerstone of neoliberal thought, and it plays out in the language of
“self-care” and “selfhelp” and entrepreneurialism as the proper
response to everything.
Coming back to the important contributions of Robinson’s work
and of your own, you should know that both of us were deeply
affected, perhaps for different reasons and contexts, in the
early to mid 80s by the book /African Philosophy: Myth &
Reality/ by the Benin philosopher Paulin Hountondji. You
probably know this book. Hountondji had been a student of
Louis Althusser, and we dare say that our work, and that of
many of those connected to the journal /Rethinking Marxism/,
was likewise indebted to Althusserian ideas and concepts.
Hountondji, writing in the late 60s and 70s, was adamant
against what he described at the time as a destructive
mythological notion of the “unanism” of Africa, a common
epistemological outlook and a common ontology from which that
epistemology derived. He called this “ethnophilosophy,” and he
believed its emphasis on a shared negritude and collective
African values stood in the way of the free thought and
expression needed to continue developing diverse strands of a
scientific African philosophy. In your work, you often cite
Robinson and others who, in contrast to Hountondji, refer to a
shared epistemological and ontological outlook and set of
experiences from which these “African” collective values grow.
Yet in /Africa Speaks/, you also often come down on the side
of experimentation (as with jazz) and freedom of expression
in music, culture, and politics, perhaps within but also in
conflict with existing “tradition.” We wonder if you might
comment on what we see as this tension in your work?
I remember hearing Hountondji speak at the African Studies Association
meeting in Los Angeles in 1984, the year /African Philosophy/ was
selected cowinner of the Herskovits award. Then it was very
controversial, not only for his critique of the ethno-philosophers but
because he was (wrongly) perceived as imposing Euro-centric
epistemological and ontological frameworks on Africa. What I remember
about the book puts him more in line with Cedric, who I don’t think was
a proponent of ethno-philosophy. I think he was doing something
different, which will take a minute to explain.
First, one of Hountondji’s main complaints about ethno-philosophy wasn’t
just the assertion of a unity of beliefs but that their “philosophy” is
only evident in cultural practice; they don’t need to “think” and
reflect since it is embedded in everyday life. Cedric, too, had issues
with this presumption. He was influenced in grad school by W. E.
Abraham’s /The Mind of Africa/, which examines the Akan and can probably
fall under the category of ethno-philosophy. But in a paper he wrote
assessing the book for an African politics course he took at Stanford,
Cedric insisted on the historical specificity for modes of indigenous
thought, while being skeptical of the idea that core belief systems
change in correspondence with institutional changes. He wrote:
/The exaggeration of the importance of institutional differences is a
perversity that arises from the conception of method as being concerned
with the immediately overt, and from the conception of explanation of
all societies as the apotheosis of its quite static and inertia-ridden
institutional framework as its essence, as that in terms of which,
rather than simply by reference to which, striking features of the
society must be explained. The effect of this is to treat the
institutions as though they were self-mandated, and were only subject to
an internal evolutionary principle/ (Robinson 1969).
So despite his assertions about the unity of African culture, he was not
claiming cultural or philosophical sameness or timelessness but was
rather rejecting all universalist theories of political and social
order. Robinson drew on the evidence he had available of how Africans
responded to the Middle Passage, to plantation life, to revolts and
marronage. And what he drew from the evidence were actions and thoughts
and ways of being that don’t correspond with Western rationalism; ideas
and practices that place the collective “we” above the “I,” as well as
that challenge axiomatic assumptions by political theorists about
authority and leadership. What he observed was a /shared epistemology
among diverse African people/. The first waves of African New World
revolts were not governed by a critique structured by Western
conceptions of freedom but were a total rejection of enslavement and
racism as it was experienced. All of this cut across lines of
ethnicity/nationality in the African diaspora, and Robinson proves it
through specific examples (the details of which are often buried in a
long footnote). However, with the advent of formal colonialism and the
incorporation of black labor into a more fully governed social
structure, there emerged a native bourgeoisie, more intimate with
European life and thought, assigned to help rule. Their contradictory
role as victims of racial domination and tools of empire compelled some
of these men and women to revolt, thus producing the radical black
intelligentsia, whose critiques tend to be more legible to Western
political theory. In other words, Robinson’s entire argument is
premised on listening to the so-called “subaltern,” on recognizing that
people think, and that they think about their freedom, the world, and
their place in it.
Robinson’s discussion of Tonga consciousness in his book /The Terms of
Order/ is a brilliant case in point that I can’t summarize here, but I
urge your readers to check out. His main takeaway is that the Tonga—a
group in Southern Africa—embraced the principle that “all are equally
incomplete.” Therefore, they require each other and all of life itself,
land, animals, plants, to become complete. The result is a metaphysics
of the relatedness of things, of the indivisibility of life. Now,
Robinson suggests that such a metaphysics was not alien to the West
and, in fact, flashed up on occasion, but usually as a “transitional
function for the political or an antagonistic relationship to [the
political].” What he meant were things like collective revolutions or,
say, what the anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued about the instinct of
mutual aid developing into a stage of ethical morality, etc. Studying
the Tonga or African “consciousness” in general became a way for Cedric
to critique Western political theorists’ failure to comprehend notions
of political authority that don’t look like what emerged in Europe. It
is more than ironic that intellectuals can speak so confidently about a
“Western tradition,” teach millions of students about this tradition
along the way as if it is a thing with a few countervailing
(counter/veil/ing?) tendencies, but can’t do the same anywhere else. But
he points out: (1) the construction of a Western tradition also obscures
thought within Europe deemed heretical; (2) most importantly, it sees
the world through a limited epistemology grounded in European
history/thought. As he puts it, Western social thought is not merely
ethnocentric but epistemocentric as well. And here, I think, he has more
in common with Hountondji and Mudimbe. In one of his first essays, he
took the Scottish historian George Shepperson to task for ignoring
native cultural and ontological bases for John Chilembwe’s rebellion in
Malawi in 1915 and imposing a European (specifically a Scottish
nationalist) lens masquerading as universal. Robinson wrote wryly,
“Chilembwe was not a Cromwell; he never could be. But most importantly
he never had to be. His movement had its own quite special and
remarkable integrity.”
Finally, for Robinson, trying to determine indigenous epistemologies and
ontologies is more than an intellectual practice but is a matter of
life and death for the victims of colonial domination. One of his
biggest critiques centers on the nation-state, which he sees as a
peculiar and specific product of European modernity whose main function
is as an instrument of power and repression. Nationalism is inextricable
from the state and is potentially lethal. He wrote an essay in 1996
titled “In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth,” which made a
distinction between what he called political Pan-Africanism and cultural
Pan-Africanism, privileging the latter as a more authentic expression of
people’s struggles and the former a dangerous by-product of Western
hegemony. I apologize for doing this, but his insights are so valuable
for your question, he is worth quoting at length:
/Even a casual glance through our historical era will confirm that the
domestic political cultures of nation-states are animated by irrational
impulses which tend toward ethnic domination or in the extreme ethnic
cleansing; and their most constant external impulse is expansionism.
This deceit was the second modernizing mission appropriated by political
Pan-Africanism, so it should not be surprising that we can now add the
names of numerous African tyrants to the list of their Western
counterparts. But it is clear that political Pan-Africanism was an
insufficient if not mistaken mission, so no matter the particular
perversions of the Charles Taylors [former Liberian dictator] of today,
more profoundly they are the heirs of a flawed, misconceived past. Our
contemporary rapacious hyenas are not blameless but they did not
organize the feast … the black middle class has hybridized freedom with
material ambition. They possess no cultures grounded in the historical
struggles against oppression, only the costume of political independence
… In an historical moment which is no longer than an instant, they are
necessary to the struggle, but because they are the darker-faced
familiars to those forces which extract wealth and life from Africa, the
West Indies and the exiled communities, the black middle classes have an
unnatural duration … For just as the destiny of all nation-states
appears to be the descent into militarism and barbarism, the black
modernists seem fated to spawn men and women of insatiable greed/
(Robinson 1996).
Now, I know you asked about these tensions in my own work, but, if
anything, my work is modeled on Cedric’s insights—which is to say,
recognition of historical dynamics generating ideas and identities,
antiessentialism, and decentering Western epistemologies as the only way
to see these processes. So, in /Africa Speaks/, I do speak of a
particular African or Third World modernity—an alternative to a specific
form of European modernity (which itself is not unified but whose
outlines are pretty clear). If anything, the cultural actors in my book
are also the authors of their conception of modern jazz and its
relationship with Africa and its diasporas, but we don’t take their
theorizing of modernity seriously (which is why I wrote that book).
Let’s talk about diaspora and its histories, futures.
Diasporic communities are not natural ones. Rather, to talk
about a black diaspora is to talk about the history of a
particular kind of human vulnerability and then to seek to
understand the conditions of life of those who experience
that human vulnerability as “their problem.” In her essay
“Race and Globalization: Racialization from Below,” Leith
Mullings argues,
/Four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade and the
racialized subordination of people of African descent
produced a construction of race throughout much of the world.
As a result, many regions of the world were dominated by what
one could call a racial mode of production—involving not only
exploitation of labor, but also the skills of Africans and
their descendants—to build the modern world system. In many
areas of the world race became a world-view that rationalized
domination and privilege, on one hand, and dispossession of
land, labor, wealth and rights, on the other. Scientific
racism, which emerged in the 18th century, provided a
pseudoscientific patina for a set of beliefs that categorized
people into different races, each endowed with unequal
capacities, and alleged not merely that biological and social
differences were fixed, inheritable and unchangeable, but also
that races could be ranked hierarchically, with the white race
as the pinnacle of civilization/ (Mullings 2008).
Clearly, Mullings would agree with Robinson that white
supremacy is already in existence and part of the feudal order
that gives way to nascent capitalism, making racial capitalism
from the beginning. And Mullings grounds “diaspora” in/as the
historical and material experience of Europe’s impact on “the
rest” by treating white supremacy as a cultural and material
export good that accompanied all trade, conquest, and
appropriation. Diaspora is a political and historical
community rooted in resistance. White supremacy is an element
of the form of the racial regimes of European colonizers and
settlers that diasporic communities formed to oppose, resist,
survive. Diaspora, then, might be constituted as well in the
cultural and material experience of racialization from below.
Unanism isn’t natural or preexisting. It is made in the rise
of global capitalism. Your thoughts?
Despite the insistence on denaturalizing diaspora, there
remains the risk of reductionisms or essentialisms that elide
important differences of place and time, setting up failed
alliances. Help us clarify your understanding of diaspora and
community among those who, racialized from below, respond to
the challenge to remake our world anew?
I think I answered some of this in my above response. Of course, I agree
with Mullings, and her essay is right on point. I tend not to use
diaspora much anymore, and when I did, I often made a kind of Marxist
distinction between “diaspora in itself” and “diaspora for itself”—the
former is a structural relationship based on migration and forced
dispersal, the latter is when those populations form political and
social movements recognizing a shared plight and shared identity. I
think an African Diaspora framework, as capacious as it is, cannot
account for the full range of black identities and transnational
histories—especially those that do not fit within a Pan-African
imaginary. In some of my earlier writings, I challenged prevailing
identity politics that treated identities as matters of culture—or,
worse, matters of biology and/or inheritance—when, in fact, some of the
most dynamic and transnational identities originated in the realm of
politics: i.e., in the way people seek alliances and political
“identifications” across oceans and national boundaries. Instead, I
argued that by focusing on these kinds of identifications and their
international contexts, we can discern the contingent, malleable nature
of identities and the limits of a diasporic framework that centers
primarily on Africa and African dispersal. Expanding our sights from
Africa-centered movements of racial solidarity to multiracial,
transnational, and international political identifications opens fresh
paths for constructing a new global history. I think such an approach
opens up new possibilities for writing a world history from below. In
other words, as useful as the Diaspora might be as an analytical
framework and as a metaphor for understanding black world experience,
it can still be used to erect boundaries rather than topple them.
Africa—either real or imagined—is not the only concept that has been a
source of “black” internationalism, even for those movements that
embrace a nationalist or Pan-Africanist rhetoric. This, too, I learned
from Cedric Robinson.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interview conducted by Jack Amariglio and Lucas Wilson for
/Rethinking Marxism/, vol. 30, issue 4 (2018)
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20200120/3fe8edeb/attachment.htm>
More information about the News
mailing list