[lbo-talk] Imaginary convo with Angela Davis

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Wed Apr 1 13:04:01 PDT 2009


I went to listen to Angela Davis's lecture at UC Davis on YouTube. Old time religion. God I miss it. My time eaten away by labor. My own fate, to be turned into a welfare benefit gate keeper. Me become a cop. That wasn't the way it was supposed to be. And then to be brow beaten hourly for letting this or that suspected dollar get away. Horrible job. Every time I figured out a way around, the job was changed so I couldn't do that anymore.

So, it was great to listen to Davis again. Yes, the knowledge of labor makes a tremendous contribution to the imagination, on how to change the world. Wish I could talk with her for hours and hours and hours.

Well, I'll just imagine we are talking now. Sitting at the kitchen table...

The plans for healthcare reform are turned into the opposite of what the demand was, the opposite of what is needed. A human right turned into human bondage, the needs of life transformed to chains of death.

All the images, thoughts, insights, days gone, forgotten, then remembered. How current, how present you (Angela) sound. How can you always sound older and wiser, and you are two critical years younger than me? You were always older and wiser. And yet, you sound sweet, affectionate, fun. Reminds me that Malcome X was funny, so was Stokely Carmichael. There was humor in everything, especially at the darkest moments, the points of most fear and daring. To laugh on the gallows.

[Well, Davis is the example I want to use, to try to explain what made that decade important to history and what has been erased in the collective memory.]

She starts with her girlhood in Birmingham, Alabama, and her mother. I imagine them sitting at the kitchen table. I remember sitting at our kitchen table talking, well listening more like it, to our house keeper. She said something like, if you want to understand Malcom, you should start by reading Baldwin. You'll like it... I wish I could go back to that kitchen table. You were right. Thank you. Your gone now, probably. I'll never see you again.

Davis says it so well, ``What was solid and was unchangable, became maluable, in the minds of ordinary people.''

[The above is the single best explanation of why that decade was important. It has a collary. This maluability, the constructability and the destruction of all these orders, was also perceived by the power elite. They felt the earth liquify under them. This was the fear, this was why they fought so hard against it. This is what is going on right now ... and why they fear it.]

So, I am going back to pretend we are talking again.

``How to transmit habits of mind.''

This I have never figured out. I don't seem to be able to master this art.

``How to use knowledge (community, labor, worlds beyond academia) with the critical impulse.''

This I think I have figured out. But it took so long and was so hard, that now I am almost hopelessly lost. When I write about it, I sound like a raving loon. I can only do it best in quiet conversation.

``Nothing is permanent, simply because it is.''

Again, how well put. Plainly. Simple. But do the kids see? This isn't a theory. It is an awareness, a way of seeing the world.

``...erasing the contributions...''

Yes, the last forty years of struggle to keep it alive---that sudden understanding that all history is this process to cover up the power ordinary people hold in their collective.

Damnit. I had actually read the history of the bus boycott and forgot it. King was picked because he was from out of town. I was focusing on the idea of a network of churches and preachers who rode the circuit---like the circuit judges. The so-called leaders. The ladies auxillary were doing all the work. Mary Lou loaned me that book. She wanted me to see that, truth. I saw it, momentarily. I read it too fast.

``...the great leaders of history theory erases the rise of the ordinary ... not a story of heroic individuals ... individualism is really dangerous..''

This thought is immediately tied to the idea of how the ordinary collective forms to move history, be its engine. The understanding and unfolding of this idea as a concrete reality, that you could know only by feeling it. It is such a surprize to discover you can feel history. That feeling is what was radicalizing. History isn't books, it's life.

Now, I think, both Hegel and Marx must have had something like that experience themselves. That was the whole source of their inspiration. Then suddenly the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans ... well even we in the US ... felt it. I remember wondering could this be the road to revolution? It has to be. Suddenly, everything melts.

I always saw it as positive. God, can it turn out bad. Dangerous stuff. Just remember the dialectic. Whatever you use, can be used against you. Well, in my studies of Strauss and Weimar, I can just feel that liquid feeling, come right off the page. Then the nazis... But also all the great stuff coming out ... the science, the math, the philosophy, the literature, the politics ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc6RHtEbiOA&feature=related

More notes follow.

``The victories we win are not always the struggles we fought.''

``Amazing feat of the imagination (symbolic meaning of weapons--Panthers)''

``We can not leave it up to the state to make those meanings of social construction.''

Was it in vain (60s)?

``What we did manage to do was change the terrain.''

This is why I can't explain it. People don't know what it was like before and after. You had to live the heavy feeling of conforming closely to every order. Hating it all the time. You can't do this, you can't do that, blah, blah, blah. Why the hell not? And the shaming and the endless guilt, the self-recriminations, the punishments. Pain always pain. And Huey's demons too. Never joy. Never funny. Never laughter. Always hard, always discipline.

``...the word diversity has colonized differences that make no difference... better difference that makes difference... diversity provincializes our relation to the world...''

God, yes. All of that. Why do you always nail it? Well, it's your job isn't. I envy that. No, I mean I want to be like that. It's that ability to turn it around. Our idea of ``diversity provincializes our relation to the world.''

Really, that's genius stuff. How can I explain what that means, where it comes from. I'll try. The only way that I can see myself is through others, in my living relationship to others. That's where and how the difference arises. Example. I talk to my landlord who is from southern China. We work together sometimes. Like today, he brought the ladder so I could paint the windows. When we work together, it's like I was in China. He is a very good worker. He knows Labor. We share. I see my American-ness, my western-ness. That's the value. That is the way to overcome, if just for a few minutes my provincial-ness.

I mean it sounds so contradictory to put it like you (Angela) just did. But it is true. Just putting Chinese faces on billboards for milk is the colonialization ... because it hides the reality of something like me and Yim working on the building, learning from each other.

The other day, we were talking. Yim was complaining. Someone stole his bicycle. Never happen in old China ... Mao was the best president. I never knew before Yim was a communist! The communism of work. That's what I was learning from him. Hell no wonder we get along.

The lecture was from 2006, when Angela was 62. It's hard to explain, why that two year difference between us, was so important, and why Angela's awareness and articulation is so stunning ... for me. She mentions Huey Newton. The first time I heard his name, I was on a bus in Oakland going down to my draft physical to refuse induction. I was talking to a black kid and asking him where he was going. He said the Free Huey rally. He was expecting I was headed there too. I had to apologize. I couldn't because I had to go refuse induction... Just the weirdness of the period. I mean, it was funny. I can't go with you to overthrow the police state today, because I have an appointment to overthrow the military. So much was happening so fast ... history was spinning off its axis.

Getting back to now:

``This is not the way it is supposed to be, and things don't have to remain this way...''

Amen. [This is getting too long.] It all must sound like meaningless hippy babble now. That's because the meaning has been drained away and simultaneously erased ... replacement of the concrete (living memory) meaning. Which was? History is not written in stone. The forces we all feel caging us, holding us in place, can disappear, and in fact do disappear, can be made to disappear. Sometimes by fighting. Sometimes by hard resistance. But also sometimes by just imagining a different way of life. In order to imagine a different way of life, you have to have seen it, or felt it, or met it in some other person. That's what's so radicalizing about difference. That's what so important and valueable about it.

This forms a whole economy, a kind of communism of culture and life. So there's this whole other battlefield between endless capital attempts at reification, and people driven solidarity based on concrete difference... Another long post. Gotta stop. Go paint the windows.

CG



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