Rene — Gilroy & bell hooks — Thinking About Capitalism
Topic(s): Interviews | Comments Off on Rene — Gilroy & bell hooks — Thinking About CapitalismHow many more Gilroy related texts can be put up is a question I will give up on for the next month, but this is yet another interesting text, this time a wonderful interview from 1996 with bell hooks – rg
Thinking About Capitalism
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/april96hooks.htm
A conversation with cultural critic Paul Gilroy
By bell hooks
Cultural critic, Paul Gilroy’s most recent books are The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness and Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures.
bell: Paul, we’ve both been rereading the work of Martin Luther King. I have been thinking a great deal about his critique of capitalism. How do you see this critique as you review his work?
Paul: The distrust of capitalism King expresses is rooted in his awareness that it is a source of misery. It is there in his later work. It is there in his growing interest in the politics of poverty on a global scale. It is there in the context of his death around the sanitation worker’s strike in Memphis where he talks about “we as Christian ministers; we’re God’s sanitation workers.” There is a sense of not being able to retreat into an uncontaminated space. There is a sense of an activist Christianity there. It was once said that it was harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. What would that feel like today when the romance of wealth and power seems to be such a complete mainstream feature?
There is no strong critique of capitalism emerging from the black church today. A critical link between the ministry of Farrakhan and black Christian ministers is an uncritical embrace of capitalism. This uncritical embrace comes at a time when the black left in the United States acts as though capitalism is a useless, boring word. I think, for example, of critics who have mocked my phrase white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It is ironic that people are willing to talk about white supremacy, they’re willing to talk about patriarchy. But when you put them together with capitalism, it becomes a term to ridicule.
Of course it isn’t only black intellectuals who have suffered a crisis of political imagination after the “alternatives” to capitalism, that were imperfect and obviously deficient in many ways, were destroyed five years ago. It is as though the problem of how to negotiate a future outside of capitalism is something that we cede to political communities in other parts of the world. We leave this question of which bits of capitalism we can live with and which bits we have to give up to the South Africans, for example, to sort out for themselves. We pass it to the people of Eastern Europe for them to negotiate. I think we can meet that pressing question head on; we can defend some speculative, almost utopian alternatives to capitalism because of the misery created by that system and the market relations it promotes. It is affecting their lives by trying to transform things which can’t be registered in economic terms into economic mechanisms.
A major reason contemporary black intellectuals and/or critical thinkers have been reluctant to push a critique of capitalism is that so many of us who are in the spotlight are well paid. But this is a confusion of what the struggle is about. The issue is about the use of resources, the imperialism of the wealthy. We have to make a distinction between labor, in which there are hierarchies of who’s paid more and who’s paid less, and the question of wealth and the kinds of political systems that support wealth and imperialism. A friend called me yesterday and said that she was reading about my “luxurious” apartment in New York City. I said, “You know if you consider my apartment in global terms it is luxurious, but not in terms of the U.S. or New York City.” What does it mean to try to negotiate, for those of us who live in the West, realms of privilege that are denied most people on the planet, and simultaneously situate that within a critique of capitalism? People feel coerced into silence. Particularly in this culture, where some black writers and intellectuals have been able to attain that which comes close to wealth, people feel they can’t critique anything that has to do with capitalism anymore.
Your comments raise two issues for me. One is a question of class and what it means to say that you can transcend your class location, that you don’t have to mechanistically act out what people imagine goes with the income you have. It’s very clear that class for me, well I think class has always been — in the Marxist versions of thinking about class — about something other than the amount of money you have. The two things are connected, but one is not the other. Marx was going to write a volume about class just before he died, and there are a few sentences of the manuscript remaining that he was never able to complete. One sentence I will always remember is that class is about more than the size of your purse. It is a self justification to some extent, but it is also an important truth for us to remember.
I think that early radical feminist thinkers, like Charlotte Bunch and other people, kept trying to say that. That class isn’t simply a question of money; that class has to do with attitudes and values. A lot of poor people who learn their class values and attitudes from television actually have a value system that does not correspond to their class. They can be dirt poor and yet think politically in a manner that allies them with the interest of the ruling class.
That’s true. The second thing that I was going to say relates to this question of the celebrity — of what the critique of capitalism and the market become, when you experience this process of being turned into a commodity for sale. This takes us back to the place we started with Martin Luther King, because he too has been turned into a commodity. In his case his image is charged with a certain kind of moral burden. In your case I think it is almost like a political commodity. I think this whole sense of identity which has circulated in political writings, so powerfully in the last few years, colludes with this idea. The ideas don’t matter because the person — the body of that person — is a kind of repository of values that you don’t need to go into; that you can almost imagine you know in advance; and that becomes a substitute for your own work, the difficult work of actually struggling with ideas. There is a short cut which is offered to you in the form of that icon. You can take that icon and you can use that icon. You can position it in relation to other icons; therefore, you don’t really have to think. The world becomes a smooth and easier place, and your own moral choices are lubricated.
In keeping with what you just said in representations of Malcolm X, the aspect of his politics that gets totally erased (whether we are talking about how he is represented in independent cinema or how he is represented in the mainstream) is his profound critique of capitalism. And we have also talked about the histories of contemporary African Americans writers like Amiri Baraka and Toni Bambara, and the ways their careers and the degree to which they are allowed or disallowed celebrity status, have been negotiated by the fact that both of these writers have sustained a critique of capitalism. Despite any other changes, that critique of capitalism was always present. There again, that becomes something about their work that simply does not get attention.
That’s right. You have mentioned the names of two people who stayed outside the glamour of power and wealth. In their work there isn’t just a critical commentary against capitalism, it is a righteous anger about the violence of that system and the way it delimits people’s choices. It’s curious for me to come here from Europe at a time when things are getting worse for so many people, and yet finding that the political possibility of a complete break with the economic and social institutions in this country is completely unimaginable. It is unthinkable. It isn’t just about people writing poetry or making films or a movement that was around 25 or 30 years ago that had a commentary on capitalism, because today those ideas, those images, those movements, those histories are still present, but they have actually been worked on so as to purge this sense of anti-capitalism. Look at what has been done to the black power movement.
This is true as well of the contemporary focus on W.E.B. Du Bois. His primary texts are ignored and he is evoked to support a kind of privileged.
…complacent elitism.
Absolutely. What we find in the work — as in his repudiation of his own concept of the talented tenth — was a critique of class. He has that beautiful moment when he says he imagined wrongly that black people would obtain certain privileges, and use those privileges (not unlike Amilcar Cabral when he talks about the willingness to die to ones class values and be reborn again in resistance) to support collective racial uplift, collectivity, the sharing of resources. Du Bois critiques the fact that he thought this would happen and it did not. He had to go back and critique class structure within black life. I see a real denial on the part of many black critical thinkers today who refuse to acknowledge class conflict in black life.
I was really amazed this past year when I was on a panel with several prominent black artists and I was the only person willing to argue for there being major class conflicts in black life and challenging the notion that being victims of racism solidifies us, so that we are not tearing one another apart on the basis of class. This is a popular fiction that denies the growing gap — not just between black people in privileged classes and those who are poor, but the differences and contradictory similarities in attitudes and values that are separating those groups.
It would be very difficult to sustain the idea that there is a sort of continuous culture which embraces all of these class differences where they don’t count for anything. What you said is right. It underlines how the privileged, the elite group, the group which is a bit like the neo-colonial petty bourgeoisie in a colonial country, that group is very heavily dependent on the poor for its cultural resources, for its vernacular, for its language, for its energy. It is interesting to see that kind of denial being played out.
That privileged group needs to deny class conflict in black life. That’s why we see a great deal of writing by contemporary black writers from privileged classes who work only with representations of poor vernacular culture. The focus on vernacular black popular culture becomes a way to invoke qualities of cultural allegiance that may have nothing to do with how you actually ally yourself politically.
Well, I know it’s a trivial example, but I have always been struck by the things that many privileged African American male intellectuals have said about their experience of catching a cab on the streets of New York. It is interesting to me how the idea that you can’t catch a cab becomes the special site of enforced racism in your life.
Yes, it is used in a way to deny the quality of class privilege that can intercede in the system, because those folks can use car services and other kinds of things that allow us to intervene on the practice of racism. This then forces us to acknowledge the very interrelatedness of structures of reality that Martin Luther King evoked in using that term, which is to say that however fierce racism is in this culture, it is mediated for some by class power. We begin to increasingly inhabit a social world where the interest of black people of privilege is antithetical at times to the interest of the poor. There is a kind of vulgar wisdom within capitalism that we are all vulnerable to the seduction of greed, of being allowed unprecedented forms of economic power within a system that has historically denied any group on the margins, but particularly African Americans, certain positions in place.
I think we can go further. We can say that we are more vulnerable to that opportunity precisely because of the denial. That means it is not about blaming individual people who succumb to that particular form of temptation, from a moralistic point of view, but in recognizing how the histories of what we were, and the ways in which our choices, our opportunities have been restricted in the past, leave us vulnerable to the promise of their fulfillment and that seduction.
I think that it’s dangerous, if not another form of cultural genocide, for privileged black leaders and thinkers to act as though black salvation in the United States lies in embracing capitalism. It’s this evocation of a non-realistic myth of plenty available to all who work hard that leads to the demonization of everyone who is poor and destitute. Progressive insurgent black intellectuals must articulate the disservice that is being done to poor and underclass black people. When privileged class blacks act as though there is no possibility of a life of integrity in poverty, this group becomes part of the kind of mechanism of a culture that would have everyone believe value is only found in materialism, in what you have, as opposed to what you become. Here we are not denying the importance of economic self-sufficiency or even desires for luxury. I desire to live a materially secure and self sufficient life in many ways, and I believe participatory economics offers the hope of a world of shared resources.
If we are going to think about the claims of class-based dynamics and solidarity in our lives, these aren’t just issues for the poor. These are issues for privileged groups too. I think it is also a point for people who earn their living from working with words and ideas, although they might not normally think of themselves as being part of the same class as people in the entertainment industry or other areas of the cultural industries. There is some sense that we won’t do this as effectively as we could if we divorce the experience of black academics and writers, often too much, from other very privileged people. I would like to see people in the entertainment and sports industries, privileged people who actually feed the fantasies of iconization and the idea that you too can be a sports hero if you develop the right relationship to your body, the people who circulate those images and make vast amounts of money from their circulation in the culture, not only to other black people, but also to large numbers of whites and other people of color, as well. I would like to see those people put on notice about the kinds of accountability that flow from endorsing those particular fantasies at this stage in American history.
I would like to take that further and say that while I thought it was useful for cultural critics to point out the nihilism of the black underclass, I think that there is a way that we can talk about the nihilism of the black privileged classes that names itself through greed and a sense of hopelessness that says: “Political struggle is hopeless, therefore I may as well sell my product to the highest bidder, or to change my story, change my tune, whatever I need to do to get the largest sums of money.” I think we have to talk about that as a form of nihilism that is much more insidious than the nihilism of those people who are without certain forms of hope in their lives. Because this kind of nihilism sends the message that no matter how much you possess there is no reason to engage in political struggle, that there is never any place of comfort from which one can take a political stand. This way of thinking is much more life threatening to black political struggle in this society than the despair of the underclass.
Yes, and how do we raise community around those questions again, to ask people to feel free enough to speculate about the kind of world they want for themselves and for their future.
It’s significant that the longing to engage a critique of capitalism within a context of continued commitment to global liberation in the black Diaspora and elsewhere has compelled us to dialogue with intellectuals working outside this country, especially black British thinkers.
The emergent forces of resistance to capitalism have to globalize into new patterns that are rather hard to see right now.
That recognition of the need for new visions and strategies is certainly a critical step, moving us towards the formation of global solidarity among progressive thinkers who are grappling with issues of race and class.