The Dialectics of Liberation

David Cooper, David Cooper, David Cooper

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781781688922
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

The now legendary Dialectics of Liberation congress, held in London in 1967, was a unique expression of the politics of dissent. Existential psychiatrists, Marxist intellectuals, anarchists, and political leaders met to discuss key social issues. Edited by David Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation compiles interventions from congress contributors Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Paul Sweezy, and others, to explore the roots of social violence.Against a backdrop of rising student frustration, racism, class inequality, and environmental degradation-a setting familiar to readers today-the conference aimed to create genuine revolutionary momentum by fusing ideology and action on the levels of the individual and of mass society. The Dialectics of Liberation captures the rise of a forceful style of political activity that came to characterize the following years.

Black Power | Stokely Carmichael

We had intended to prepare a written speech for this Congress, and had started to prepare it three weeks before the trip, but the US government thought that as I was starving it would be better if they saw to it that I got some meals every day, so they confined me to their prison system, and I lost all the notes. So I tried to get another one together.

Now since I’ve been at the Congress from Saturday I’ve been very confused, because I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, I’m a political activist and I don’t deal with the individual. I think it’s a cop out when people talk about the individual. What we’re talking about around the US today, and I believe around the Third World, is the system of international white supremacy coupled with international capitalism. And we’re out to smash that system. And people who see themselves as part of that system are going to be smashed with it – or we’re going to be smashed.

So that I’m not going to centre on the individual – I’m not even going to talk about him at all. I want to talk about the system. I want to use some quotes to back up my feeling about talking of the system, and the first one comes from one of my patron saints: Frantz Fanon. His quote is that

Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. It is a question of socio-diagnostics. The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the problem of Negroes living among white men, but rather of Negroes exploited, enslaved, despised by the colonialist, capitalist society that is only accidentally white.

But since it is accidentally white, that’s what we talk about – white western society.

Now the other reason that I don’t talk about the individual is that I feel that whenever you raise questions about racial problems to white western society, each white man says ‘Well don’t blame me, I’m only one person and I really don’t feel that way. Actually I have nothing against you, I see you as an equal. You’re just as good as I am – almost.’ And to try and clear that up I want to point out the difference between individual racism as opposed to institutionalized racism.

It is important to this discussion of racism to make a distinction between the two types: individual racism and institutional racism. The first type consists of overt acts by individuals, with usually the immediate result of the death of victims, or the traumatic and violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded on TV cameras and can frequently be observed in the process of commission.

The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts, but is no less destructive of human life. The second type is more the overall operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus does not receive the condemnation that the first type receives.

Let me give you an example of the first type: When unidentified white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the world. But when in that same city, Birmingham, Alabama, not five but 500 black babies die each year because of lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities; and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutionalized racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighbourhood, and it is stoned, burned or routed out, the latter is an overt act of individual racism, and many people condemn that, in words at least. But it is institutionalized racism that keeps the black people locked in dilapidated slums, tenements, where they must live out their daily lives subject to the prey of exploiting slum landlords, merchants, loan-sharks and the restrictive practices of real-estate agents. We’re talking now about the US, but I think you can apply a little of it to London. But the society either pretends it does not know of institutionalized racism, or is incapable of doing anything meaningful about the conditions of institutionalized racism. And the resistance to doing anything meaningful about institutionalized racism stems from the fact that western society enjoys its luxury from institutionalized racism, and therefore, were it to end institutionalized racism, it would in fact destroy itself.

O.K. then, now I want to talk about de-mystifying human beings, and I’m talking about the Third World, I’m not talking about the white West. I think that the Third World are the people whom, at least in the US, black people are concerned with. The white West has been able to do very well for itself. I want to talk, then, very specifically about a number of things under that.

The first is the importance of definitions. The second: we want to talk about cultural integrity versus cultural imposition. And then we want to talk about the US, specifically the cities and the rebellions (as opposed to ‘riots’ as they are called by the white press) that are occurring in the US, which are going to lead to guerrilla warfare. And we want to talk about violence because the West is always upset by violence when a black man uses it. Yeah.

I want to start off with definitions by using a quote from one of my favourite books, which is Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. In the book there’s a debate between Humpty Dumpty and Alice around the question of definitions. It goes like this:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘It means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘who is to be master. That is all.’

Now I think that Lewis Carroll is correct. Those who can define are the masters. And white western society has been able to define, and that’s why she has been the master. And we want to follow up with a lot of those examples, because I think that the white youth of my generation in the West today does not understand his own subconscious racism, because he accepts the writings of the West, which has destroyed, distorted and lied about history, so that he starts off with a basic assumption of superiority which is not even recognizable.

Frederick Douglas, the great black leader of the 1800s, said that when a slave stops obeying a master, then and only then does he seek his liberation. Camus said the same thing 100 years later on the first page of The Rebel, when he said that when a slave stops accepting definitions imposed upon him by his master, then and only then does he begin to move and create a life for himself. That’s very important, because what the people of the Third World are going to have to do today is to stop accepting the definitions imposed on them by the West. Let’s give some examples.

The first one is that the history books tell you that nothing happens until a white man comes along. If you ask any white person who discovered America, they’ll tell you ‘Christopher Columbus’. And if you ask them who discovered China, they’ll tell you ‘Marco Polo’. And if you ask them, as I used to be told in the West Indies, I was not discovered until Sir Walter Raleigh needed pitch lake for his ship, and he came along and found me and said ‘Whup – I have discovered you.’ And my history began.

But let us examine the racism in that statement Let us examine it very closely. Columbus did not discover America. Columbus may be the first recorded white man to have set foot in America. That is all. There were people there before Columbus. Unfortunately, those people were not white unfortunately for the white West, fortunately for us, they weren’t white. But what happens is that white western society never recognizes the existence of non-white people, either consciously or subconsciously. So that all around the world, the peoples of the Third World never did anything until some white man came along – and that’s why China’s non-existent, because Mao won’t let no white folk in there. Yeah. And pretty soon Hong Kong is going to be non-existent because they’re going to kick them out.

So that the situation you have is that history has been written – but indeed it has been so distorted. One of the biggest lies, I think, that western society could have told was to name itself Western Civilization. And now all through history we were studying Western Civilization, and that meant that all else was uncivilized. And white kids who read that today never recognize that they’re being told that they are superior to everybody else because they have produced civilization. At best, that’s a misnomer, at worst, and more correctly, it’s a damn lie. Yes. Western Civilization has been anything but civilized. It has been most barbaric, as a matter of fact. We are told that Western Civilization begins with the Greeks, and the epitome of that is Alexander the Great The only thing that I can remember about Alexander the Great was that at age twenty-six he wept because there were no other people to kill, murder and plunder. And that is the epitome of Western Civilization. And if you’re not satisfied with that, you could always take the Roman Empire. Their favourite pastime was watching men kill each other or lions eating up men. They were a civilized people. The fact is that their civilization, as they called it, stemmed from the fact that they oppressed other peoples. And that the oppression of other people allowed them a certain luxury, at the expense of those other people. That has been interpreted as ‘civilization’ for the West, and that is precisely what it has done. The only difference is that after the Roman Empire, when the British Empire – on which the sun never used to set, but today it sets, sometimes it don’t even rise – began to exploit non-white people, what they did was they let colour be the sole choice of the people they would exploit.

Now that’s very important because as we go along you can see one of the best examples you can see today. You see, because you’ve been able to lie about terms, you’ve been able to call people like Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist, when in fact he was a murderer, a rapist, a plunderer and a thief. But you call Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist because what he did was that after he stole our diamonds and our gold, he gave us some crumbs so that we can go to school and become just like you. And that was called philanthropy. But we are renaming it: the place is no longer called Rhodesia, it is called Zimbabwe, that’s its proper name. And Cecil Rhodes is no longer a philanthropist, he’s known to be a thief – you can keep your Rhodes Scholars, we don’t want the money that came from the sweat of our people.

Now let us move on to present times. I’m always appalled when some white person tells me that ‘progress is being made’. I always ask him ‘progress for whom? And from whom?’ Progress for white people might be made, because I would say that since World War II they have learned a little about how to get along with people of colour. But I don’t think there’s been progress for the black people, there’s not been progress for the people of colour around the Third World. And progress will not be measured for us by white people. We will have to tell you when progress is being made. You cannot tell us when progress is being made, because progress for us means getting you off our backs, and that’s the only progress that we can see.

Now then, we want to talk about cultural integrity versus cultural imposition, because that stems from definitions. Because the white West felt somehow that it was better than everybody else – I remember when I was a young man in the West Indies, I had to read Rudyard Kipling’s The White Maris Burden. I thought the best thing the white man could do for me was to leave me alone, but Rudyard Kipling told them to come and save me because I was half savage, half child. It was very white of him. What has happened is that the West has used force to impose its culture on the Third World wherever it has been. If a few settlers left England to go to Zimbabwe, there was no reason for them to rename that country after themselves, Rhodesia, and then force everybody to speak their language, English. If they had respect for the cultures of other people, they would have spoken the language of those people and adopted their religions. But what in fact happened was because the West was so powerful – that’s the word nobody wants to talk about, power. It was only power that made people bow their heads to the West, you know. They didn’t bow it because they liked Jesus Christ, or because they liked white folks. No, Machiavelli said a long time ago that ‘people obey masters for one of two reasons. Either they love them, or they fear them.’ I often ask myself whether or not the West believes the Third World really loves them and that’s why they’ve obeyed them. But it’s clear that they feared them. The West with its guns and its power and its might came into Africa, Asia, Latin America and the USA and raped it. And while they raped it they used beautiful terms. They told the Indians ‘We’re civilizing you, and we’re taming the West. And if you won’t be civilized, we’ll kill you.’ So they committed genocide and stole the land, and put the Indians on reservations, and they said that they had civilized the country.

They weren’t satisfied with that. They came to Africa and stole Africans and brought them to the USA, and we were being brought there to be ‘civilized’, because we were cannibals and we ate each other, and they were going to give us a better life, which was, of course, slavery.

Now I want to make just one clear distinction, before I move on, in terms of cultural integrity. Inside the countries of the West there was democracy for the whites, at least some form of it. But that democracy was at the expense of non-white people. While Britain surely enjoyed her papers, and her Parliamentary nonsense about constitutionality, she was suppressing all of Africa. The same thing holds true for France, and De Gaulle still suppresses Somaliland, I would like to inform him; and the same thing, of course, is true today for the US.

White people are very funny, you know. De Gaulle got out of Vietnam a few years ago, and now he’s gotten very broad-minded. But he’s still in Somaliland.

So what the West was able to do is impose its culture and it told everyone ‘we are better, we are civilized’. And because of its force, all of the non-white countries began to try to imitate Europe and to imitate its ways, and to try and copy it because nobody wanted to be uncivilized.… Our ancestors had recognized that they knew what civilization was long before Europeans even got out of their caves, and that they should have stuck to their way of life. Had they done that, perhaps we shouldn’t be in the shape we are in today.

So that all other non-western people have been stripped of their own culture. They have been forced to accept a culture that does not belong to them. And so messed up are the minds of people of colour around the world, that in certain sections of Vietnam today, and in Japan certainly, women who have slanted eyes are cutting their eyes so that they can get round eyes to look like the West. Needless to say what black people have been doing to their hair, especially females: they have been putting hot combs in their hair, straightening it, attempting to look like white people, because the West has defined beauty as that which was theirs – the white woman, who was supposed to be taboo.

And so the non-white world begin to copy and to imitate, began to do all of the things of the West. I think what is happening in the world today is that there’s a fight for cultural integrity. Each group of people wants to retain its own integrity, and say ‘To Hell with the West and its culture. Let it keep it. We want ours.’ I don’t propose to speak for the Red Guards, but I would assume that that’s part of the fight that they’re waging. It’s a healthy fight and it needs to be waged. I know in the US that one of the fights that we’re waging is the fight for our own cultural integrity. We want to be able to recognize the contributions that the non-white peoples of the world have made. It’s amazing that, when you do some reading, you find out that they did most of what the white people claim that they did. They just distorted history. Pythagoras didn’t give you geometry, the Egyptians gave it to you.

I have something against England, I really do. Because when I was young I had to read all that rot about how good England was to Trinidad, while she was raping us left and right. And all I used to read about London when I was small was the beauty of London, and how peacefully everybody lived, and how nice life was – at my expense. And I used to say ‘I sure would like to get to London and burn it down to the ground.’ But that’s violence!

Now the trouble with the West is that it feels it has the right to give everybody their independence. That’s totally absurd. You can never give anyone their independence. All men are born free. They are enslaved by other men. So that the only act that the men who enslaved them can do is, not give them their independence, but stop oppressing them. There’s a very important difference, and I don’t think people make that distinction all the time. I’m amazed when I pick up the paper and read that ‘England today decided to give independence to the West Indies.’ Who the hell is England to give me my independence? All they can do is stop oppressing me, get off my back. But it sounds so much nicer when they say, ‘We’re giving you your independence. You’re ready for it now.’ Rather than for them to admit to themselves ‘We’re going to s...