Revolution #171, August 2, 2009
West and Dix Open Up the Dialogue (version from print edition):
A Great Night in Harlem
On July 14, 650 people filled a Harlem auditorium completely, and an overflow crowd of at least 100 more gathered on the streets outside, to hear, “The Ascendancy of Obama… and the Continued Need for Resistance and Liberation: A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Carl Dix.”
In his promo video for the event—which has now been viewed more than 3,000 times on YouTube—Dix, a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, set unmistakably clear terms:
If you’re somebody who doesn’t want to hear straight talk on these questions, I suggest that you just stay your ass at home on July 14, and I feel sorry for you. But if you’re somebody who’s concerned about the state of humanity… if you hate the fact that these wars for empire continue whether it’s Bush or Obama in the White House... if you feel it in your gut every time that you hear that the police have killed another unarmed Black or Latino youth and gotten away with it… if it really bothers you that women in this so-called “best of all possible societies” face violence and sexual assault in horrific numbers… and you wonder what, if anything, can be done to deal with these and other problems that people face, then you need to be out on July 14, and you need to spread the word and challenge others to be there as well. It’s that important.
Hundreds Take a Clear Stand
With their presence at the Harlem Stage, at City College’s Aaron Davis Hall, the hundreds who turned out—whether or not they had literally seen the video clip—embraced the spirit of Dix’s challenge: Yes, they did want to hear the truth about Obama, and the crimes of their government. And no, they did not wish to accept the world as it is as tolerable.
Shortly after 7 pm, Sunsara Taylor—a writer for Revolution newspaper, and one of the two moderators for the evening—stepped to the podium. She noted, to applause from the audience, that the event was being broadcast live on local progressive radio station WBAI, before promising an informative and thought-provoking discussion, and then introducing her co-moderator Herb Boyd.
“Resistance and liberation—those have always been operative words in the African-American canon and lexicon,” Boyd said, adding that Dix and West were well qualified to address those topics. At that point, Boyd introduced the two featured speakers, and they walked onto the stage, hand in hand to loud applause; some members of the audience rose to their feet.
Dix Lays Bare the Crimes of Imperialism…and Obama’s Rebranding of Them
Dix was the first of the two speakers. “What we’re doing tonight is important,” Dix began. “We’re not gonna pretend Afghanistan is the good war.”
The crowd responded with delayed, yet sustained, applause.
“We’re not going to give Obama a pass for his Cosbyesque attack on poor Black people,” he continued. “What we are going to do is get at reality as it actually is, and as it needs to be transformed.”
And with that, a critical conversation happening virtually nowhere else was underway.
Early on his presentation, Dix addressed the underlying reason for the euphoria around Obama’s election; namely, that a country whose entire history has been one of vicious white supremacy had elected a Black president. Traveling with his family to the eastern shore of Maryland, which he described as “Mississippi further up north,” Dix had to listen to a white teenager frequently address his 40-year-old father as “boy.” He witnessed the city of Baltimore close down its swimming pool, rather than integrate it.
“I know about the white supremacy of this set up,” Dix said, “so I understand why people seeing a Black person elected president would get swept up.” However, Dix added that while he understood the excitement over Obama’s victory, he “did not and do not share it.”
Obama’s victory, Dix said, was serving to conceal the essence of this system of imperialism and the crimes it commits, and to solicit acquiescence to the system’s crimes from people who would not have accepted them under any other president. As an example, he referred to Obama’s recent speech in Ghana, during which the president demanded that African people and nations assume responsibility for rectifying their suffering. In so doing, Dix pointed out, Obama sought to mask the legacy of slave ships, the brutality of European colonists, the manner in which imperialism has consistently plundered Africa, and the murderous proxy wars carried out by the U.S. and other imperialist nations; the message Obama delivered, Dix said, was that the real cause of the plight of African peoples was that their governments were corrupt.
“This is a concentration of the role that he’s playing,” Dix said of Obama’s speech in Ghana.
In the next section of Dix’s presentation, he took on the commonly-expressed sentiment that, even if Obama himself does not represent anything good, at least having a Black man in the White House will inspire Black youth to achieve. In actuality, Dix said, Obama’s victory will only suck youth into supporting a system that has condemned them to failure; the real doors that will open to young people of color, he said, are the doors to the military recruiting centers, the jails, and the courthouses. On top of that, Obama attacks the oppressed youth and blames them for their conditions. “It was bullshit when Cosby said it, and it’s bullshit now,” Dix said, to applause.
The final part of Dix’s speech focused on what kind of change humanity really needs to get beyond a system that thrives on torture and wars for empire, spawns massive disease and starvation, ravages the environment, violently subjugates women, and offers millions of youth no better fate than death or jail: revolution. Drawing on the RCP’s new statement, “The Revolution We Need, the Leadership We Have,” Dix told the crowd that the system of imperialism needs to be swept off the planet, with imperialist institutions replaced by revolutionary institutions. He explained that in past revolutionary societies, such as China under the leadership of Mao Tsetung, monumental and previously unthinkable advances had been achieved quickly under the guidance of a state that served the people; for instance, China went from a society where prostitution was pervasive to one in which the practice had basically been eliminated, and from a country in which hundreds of millions were addicted to opium to one in which there were essentially no addicts. Dix went on to say: “Now revolutionary power in China was overthrown when Mao Tsetung died. But Bob Avakian has taken up the understanding that Mao developed and led the Chinese revolution on the basis of, and developed it even further and that puts us in position to not only make revolution again but go farther and do even better with it the next time.”
Similarly, Dix said, youth in modern imperialist societies who are immersed in the poisonous waters of gangs, drugs, and religion need to be challenged to instead devote their lives to revolution, changing themselves in the process.
Dix finished by quoting the late Oscar Brown’s poignant poem, “The Children of Children,” and asking: “What is going to be our answer to the children of children all over the world?”
West Makes an Electrifying Appeal for Resistance
While he clearly did not share Dix’s revolutionary communist perspective, West united with his call for resistance, and repeatedly commended Dix for being a powerful voice for the oppressed who was willing to sacrifice his life to fulfill that role. “I am here,” West said, “because at this particular historical juncture, we have got to create a space for principled criticisms of the Obama administration.”
During an electrifying speech that often moved the audience to loud applause, as well as to appreciative laughter, West applauded Dix for driving home the message that humanity’s goal should not be to place a Black man at the head of an empire that continues to heap horrific suffering on the vast majority of people of color.
West said that it was his concern for the world’s oppressed that had compelled him to support Obama; he presented his decision as a tactical choice motivated by a desire to fend off the forces of fascism embodied in the McCain/Palin ticket and to end the age of Reagan-style conservatism.
He went on to say that the same factor that motivated him to support Obama—West’s concern for the fate of humanity’s downtrodden—moved him to be immediately critical of Obama after the election. For instance, West angrily ran down the list of Obama’s team of economic advisers.
“Here comes Larry Summers!” West said. “Here comes Robert Rubin and his crew!” West contrasted Obama’s $700 billion bailout to banks with his demand that the impoverished “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” And he condemned Obama’s foreign policy team—which he lambasted as a crew of “recycled neo-imperialists”—as well as Obama’s silence in the face of Israel’s massacre in Gaza.
One of the more stirring moments of the program came when West, after alluding to the vicious FBI and CIA repression of resistance and revolutionary movements in the 1960s, sarcastically acknowledged the likely presence of federal agents in the room—“We know the CIA and FBI are here; we welcome you,” he said, to thunderous applause and laughter—and then proceeded to put them on notice that the people in the room would continue to resist the crimes of their government, and would not be deterred. The moment provided the very sort of bold, unapologetic seizing of the political and ideological offensive that can give heart and courage to those who feel the world is intolerably unjust and wonder if they can really be empowered to change it.
“We end with a call to action,” West concluded, praising the young people in the front row who were part of the Revolutionary Youth Summer Project. “You have to make reform and revolution a way of life.”
The Q and A: Points of Unity, Divergence Become Clearer
During the Q and A from the moderators, and then the audience, both the unity and differences between Dix and West came into sharper focus. Taylor began by asking each speaker to describe his views on democracy. West stated very bluntly that, while he agreed that the U.S. was an empire, he also believed in the “expansion of forms of democracy within the capitalist project.” Dix, on the other hand, referenced Bob Avakian’s statements that speaking about democracy in a society divided into classes was “meaningless and worse,” and that the key questions that must be posed in analyzing a given society are which class is ruling, and whether the democracy it employs reinforces, or works to eliminate, class divisions.
“America was founded on slavery and genocide,” Dix noted, “but it was also democratic.”
Dix elaborated that American democracy was based, from its origins, on the violent exclusion of entire groups of people, and that it was on that basis that democracy was extended to one particular group—white men. He also reminded the audience that the American form of government involves dictatorship, and not just democracy: when did the American people get to vote on ending the wars in the Middle East? he asked rhetorically. Dix further stated that the goal of revolutionaries was not to “perfect” the system of U.S. imperialism, which commits crimes all over the world; rather, their aim was to end that system.
Two of the five questions from the audience focused on the relationship between individuals transforming themselves and the overall transformation of society. In response to an evacuee from New Orleans who argued that “revolution takes place internally,” West largely agreed: After saying that talk of revolutionary overthrowing was “not my language,” West added, “First and foremost, we have to muster the courage to bear witness to the system of evils inside of us.”
Dix, on the other hand, essentially argued that West had the relationship between societal and individual change reversed: “It is through the course of resistance that we will change,” Dix said.
The next question, asked by a young Black woman, was simple but profound: “How do you resist?” Within both Dix and West’s responses was a sentiment that the decision to resist could come about in many different ways, and take many different forms. Dix said that the specific event which fills an individual with a strong sense of injustice and compels them to act could be global in scale, like the U.S. wars for empire, or it could be something more local and immediate, like seeing police harassing youth on the corner. As an individual resists, Dix said, their eyes start to open, and they often begin to realize that the atrocities they are fighting are not isolated acts, but rather systemic. Dix said his orientation was to resist on the basis of putting forth the understanding that revolution was the solution to the problems being fought, and to unite with others who were genuine about resistance even if they did not agree with that view.
West drew an analogy between becoming involved in resistance and falling in love: As one enters into either process, an old part of them dies and a new part of them is born. West said that people can resist in a lot of ways, including through art; he cited Nina Simone’s use of song and Talib Kweli’s use of hip-hop as forms of fighting the power.
Towards the end of the program, there were two moments that exemplified the spirit of unity amidst struggle (friendly struggle with one another, and fierce struggle against the crimes of their government) that characterized the evening. First, Dix broke out into a rendition of the Isley Brothers’ version of “Ohio.” The audience clapped in rhythm along with Dix and cheered when he finished. West leaned over and embraced him.
A moment later, West said that the reason he reads the works of Bob Avakian and wrestles with him is not because he is a communist but, “He is a certain kind of human being who has raised his voice and in his project that includes communism, I see some character, I see some quality of service to the poor, I see those who are concerned to sacrifice, I see a willingness to wrestle with deep issues that the mainstream does not want to wrestle with, including mainstream intellectuals.”
While it is, of course, crucial to win as many people as possible over to the need for communist revolution—and the need to take up Avakian and his work on that basis—it is also crucial to building a revolutionary movement that broad sections of people, including those who are not communists, support, engage, and defend Avakian. The fact that West, a prominent and influential Black intellectual, made the public statement that he did, even though it will likely make him the target of unprincipled attacks from reactionaries and some “progressives” alike, is a big deal, and potentially represents an important opening in creating a culture of appreciation, promotion, and popularization of Avakian and his work.
Clyde Young on the Critical Role of Revolutionary Theory
In between questions from the moderators and the audience, Clyde Young of the Revolutionary Communist Party delivered a moving and convincing argument for the critical importance of revolutionary theory in general, and Revolution newspaper in particular.
Since the event was a fund-raiser for not only Revolution Books, but also the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund (PRLF), Young placed particular emphasis on the impact that spreading revolutionary consciousness can have within the nation’s penitentiaries.
Young recalled digging into the works of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, and immersing himself in revolutionary theory, while serving a 17-year prison sentence. At the time, he said, Revolution newspaper did not exist, so he had to break down and interpret works like the Communist Manifesto on his own. ”Today,” Young said, “Revolution is a lifeline for many, many prisoners behind walls.”
Young said that Revolution newspaper had the potential to powerfully transform people, and the way they viewed the world; forging unity, rather than needless division, among different sections of the oppressed.
“What we have to do is change the world,” Young said. “But to change the world, we have to understand it.”
At the close of his presentation, Young informed the crowd that the newspaper subscriptions of 400 prisoners were due to expire at the end of the month. He asked if anyone in the crowd was willing to donate $500. One person raised their hand to indicate they would be willing if two others stepped forward as well. Huge applause erupted from the crowd when a third donor stepped forward.
The Crowd Leaves Feeling Fired Up
After the program ended, it was clear that people of many different strata and perspectives had been energized, inspired, and stimulated by the event; they had been provoked to think about new questions, and to think about old questions in new ways. Audience members expressed appreciation that they had the opportunity to hear frank, critical discussion of Obama’s presidency, and blunt exposure of the reality that his ascendancy had not altered the imperialist system or halted its crimes.
“It was amazing!” a middle-aged white woman said of the program. “I’m new to this,” she continued. “I’m not a revolutionary. I’m not a communist. I found them [the speakers] both very articulate and very real and true. I was surprised how much I agreed with them.”
Asked to elaborate on why she said she was “surprised,” the woman responded, “I’m a very centrist kind of person.”
A young Black bank employee who was born and raised in Newark, and who described himself as a “freethinker,” was likewise very enthusiastic about both speakers. “It’s so appropriate, what they’re saying in terms of our view of Obama,” he said, “the euphoria of a Black man in the White House, but the bottom line is he presides over a very racistand oppressive system.”
“It’s definitely timely,” another young Black man said of the dialogue, “since Obama’s been in office for more than six months now. It’s good to have people who are out there thinking critically about ‘How is Obama being the first African-American president going to address the issues that are systematic within the United States and capitalism?’”
He added that he was unfamiliar with Carl Dix before the event, and said he very much enjoyed hearing a person of color put forth a communist viewpoint. “I think I never really thought of the communist party as being relevant in American politics, to be honest with you,” the man said. “I had nothing to disagree with them, it just seems like a relic of the past. It’s kind of refreshing to see that there are people who are trying to create a paradigm shift, essentially, and not just look within the system and try to tinker with things, but really say the system is inherently structured to perpetrate everything we are against.”
Jose, a 21-year-old Latino student at Baruch College, said the roughly two-and-a-half hour event had held his attention the entire time. “It was very stimulating and thought-provoking in the exchange of views that was shared by the audience, and of course Cornel West and Carl Dix,” Jose said. Jose, too, said he was already quite familiar with West—but not Dix—heading into the program. “But I’ll start looking into him after the show,” Jose added.
“It was exhilarating,” a 22-year-old white woman said after the program. “It was awesome. I got chills so many times just listening to people speak with so much passion about things that they really believe in. To hear other people say that they would die for something that they believe in, and to be talking about a poor working class, is a conversation that most people don’t even consider because they don’t belong to it. And I feel like I very much belong to it.”
A few moments later, the woman spoke powerfully to the impact a program like this could have on those in attendance, as well as those who learn about the event after the fact.
“I think that for people to be talking about this stuff,” she said, “versus all the trivial, superficial shit that goes on in everyone’s daily lives—to find other people who want to have a conversation that’s meaningful—is refreshing.
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