Editor's note: Author/activst Robin D. G. Kelley teaches at Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe and Freedom Dreams. He is currently working on a book on musician Thelonius Monk.

PA: How has your politics informed your study of history, and your study of history shaped your politics?

RK: I came to history because of politics. I chose this discipline when I was in college. I was reading in those days, in addition to C.L.R. James and Du Bois, Chancellor Williams, George M. Janestone [of the Marcus Garvey Institute of Ancient Research], and I was also interested in ancient research and proving people of African [descent] have a long and noble history. In doing that, I began to realize these issues were informed by politics. What I was interested in was not resurrecting a romantic past, but charting a new future. So I began to read more of the history of 20th century social movements and became interested in the Communist Party, and I discovered Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg and Antonio Gramsci. At the same time, I became interested in being active. I went from the Black Student Union to being in the Communist Workers Party, reading more Marxism-Leninism and trying to figure out historically how had people of color, particularly Black people and Africans, understood Marxism and its promise.

The core of the question was for me “what does self-determination look like?” Not so much what does the nation look like – I wasn’t so much trying to prove the Black-belt existed – but what happened when people tried to make it a reality. In the process I learned a whole lot from meeting people like Hosea Hudson and Lemon Johnson, who totally turned my head around. I went there trying to find their reading of Marxism, and found something much deeper. They brought an understanding of their particular history and legacy, the church, grassroots organizations, the legacy of Reconstruction: this was the lens through which they read.

I began to try to figure out what is the history of people you can’t see. What of the people who struggle every day, who sometimes join movements, and most of the time don’t – because most are convinced it won’t do anything. How do we write their history and understand it in the context of class struggle? I wrote Race Rebels to do that. Yo' Mama’s Dysfunktional! was really an attempt at intervention in public policy. My main concern in regard to its relationship to Marxism was what do the current labor-based urban movements look like? We were living in an era when everyone is saying “if you only had the movement of the 1960s,” “if you only could go back to the 1930s.” Everyone was talking about the past, but meanwhile all this stuff was popping up here and there: women of color organizing in cities and labor organizing emerging with people of color at the forefront.

The second question I was trying to get at goes back to this idea of cultural hegemony. How does the ideology of the dominant culture convince us that the ghettos of America are full of criminals, lazy Black youth, welfare mothers? What damage does that do, not to the self-esteem of those residents but to organizers, to struggles, to public policy, to voters?

Freedom Dreams came out of giving a series of lectures on social movements. Depending on how you read it, some might see it as a kind of retreat from Marxism. I actually disagree with that. I think it is very much a Marxist text, but it is a Marxist text in that I try to recover the early Marx, the romantic Marx, the Marx who was really shaped by the 1838 revolution, as opposed to the political economy Marx. Not that they are disconnected, but later in life he was really trying to [do] Capital. In trying to resurrect that [early Marx], I am also trying to resurrect the spirit of the romantic socialists in England in the 19th century, the people whom Engels called the utopians. There is something going on there that it is really interesting.

I came to surrealism in the last chapter [of Freedom Dreams] by way of Marxism, because the surrealists joined the French Communist Party around 1927. They were committed Communists for a while and then they broke off. Some didn’t – Louis Aragon and people like that. I am interested in what surrealism has to offer that Marxism could not, not because it is incapable but because that wasn’t the focus.

I think Marxism is not something that just sticks to the body of the text. You need to experience the struggle in relationship to what we know and read. Even though I get jibed about the surrealism chapter, it really is an attempt to figure out how we think about the unconscious and understand that, to understand culture, religion and spirituality, not as false consciousness but as part of people’s desires.

PA: It seems the challenge of developing and applying Marx creatively has gone unfulfilled. What’s the problem?

RK: This is not inherent to Marxism, but many Marxists and Communist organizations coming out of the factory-concentration movement in the 1970s and 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union kind of lost their way and the organic connection between working-class creativity, imagination and new ways of moving forward. That became harder to see, because they were bound by the texts, bound by the history. When I was in the CWP, we wasted a lot of time reading over and over about Mao’s Long March, Stalin’s crimes, the problem of state and revolution. These were important issues in 1948 or in 1956, but where do we go now? Who is writing the analysis for the future? The CWP did something I thought was a mistake, which was why I left. They decided to concentrate their efforts on the petite bourgeoisie and people with technical skills. They saw the future as an emerging technocratic society and decided to take Communist out of the title.

I would have disagreed if they had said, “We just need to go back and do more factory concentration.” You need to come up with something different. One thing that is different is you have this whole population of urban youth who are just ripe for organization. None of the organizations I knew were really doing a lot of work with youth in a way that is on their terms. We need to have new theory.

I wouldn’t say that Marxism failed, as much as the Marxist-Leninist left was kind of wavering at that moment, and you needed to move to something else: something else that is not liberalism, or has not given up that dream. Because one thing I can never imagine is giving up the dream of socialism. Socialism is utopian; it has to be. Otherwise, it is just another form of state capitalism where people can just can get things they need. We need to dream much further and do the thing science fiction does so well: produce a vision of society where people can actually be happy.

PA: There was a moment when there was more organic relationship to the working class and popular culture. It seems the left has difficulty finding its way back. Is that the problem? Or has the Communist movement never developed working-class intellectuals?

RK: I actually think the Communist Party developed organic intellectuals who did play critical roles in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, you can attribute to the left the opening of forms of public education like City College, which allowed working-class communities to have access to higher education.

Regarding the first part of your question there was an organic relationship between popular culture and working-class communities, both as producers of that culture and consumers. After the Cold War popular culture changed and become more corporate. Every single thing working-class communities invent is picked up, marketed and sold back to them before they have a chance to claim it. Think about community theater, the Federal Writers’ Project, popular film. As you move into the 1980s and 1990s, with the formation of hip-hop culture the working class had all kinds of possibilities. As it became a marketable commodity, it was picked up. Break-dancing was on all major television programs; people made money teaching it.

The other problem – and this is just speculation – what was identified as the radical politics of the 1960s was so generation-bound, whereas the radical politics of the 1930s was cross-generational. Unfortunately, the counterculture movement became the heart of radicalism in the 1960s, when what should have been radicalism in the 1960s, I think, was the cross-generational character of Black radicalism.

PA: What lessons can be learned from the uses and abuses of culture?

RK: Every left movement has tried to produce a popular culture, tried to create a culture organically out of what movement leaders, activists and theorists thought of as the needs and desires of working people. They have always tried to do something, whether it’s Joe Hill’s songs of labor or the civil rights movement, which I think is part of that left thrust, although not entirely. Also, movements have influenced the larger corporate popular culture. There was a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s where you had to have a movement song, or you had to have a song critical of the ghetto – Curtis Mayfield, the Ojays, everyone had a hit. Even corporate forces said “you know, this sells!” And why does it sell? It doesn’t sell because suddenly people are waking up. It sells because there are social movements providing it for people, making them desire this kind of music as a reflection of their situation.

One of the things I think leftists have a history of is suppressing aspects of the culture they think are not revolutionary enough. There are specific examples, but you can point to them generally. Sometimes there are self-proclaimed arbiters who see themselves as culture critics and the culture police. The late 1930s is a good example. There was a big debate in Masses & Mainstream where you had really progressive Black radicals saying “this be-bop music is retrograde; Charlie Parker is the worst thing that has ever happened; what we need are more Paul Robesons.” Meanwhile, Paul Robeson started listening to Charlie Parker. He loved Charlie Parker. It becomes a debate where they are sort of deciding what is authentic working-class culture and what’s derivative and oppressive. Sometimes these things merge, and I think as activists we have to be really good listeners. If there is a sudden flurry of music or literature about urban violence, and it seems like it is romanticizing it, there may be something else going on we have to pay attention to. We should listen and figure out what they are trying to say. What are people afraid of? What is the ultimate lesson in some of this music?

The second thing is why do we always listen to or read things in a very literal sense? Sometimes these could be amazing metaphors showing off the literary skills of a particular artist, even if the metaphors are violent and retrograde. The history of African American culture has had that stream too – the bad-man story, that can have a didactic element to it, and that didacticism always centers on “this could happen to you. I think you need a more complicated reading.

PA: You pay a lot of attention to women’s struggles and even say we once had the view that socialism would solve the problems of women’s oppression, but maybe it is the case that the struggle for women’s liberation will help make socialism possible.

RK: These are things I learned reading Barbara Smith and from all the women I talk about in the Combahee River Collective. Those Black women radical theorists considered the whole of life. To them it wasn’t just the public fight in the streets; it wasn’t just the public fight for representation; nor was it just socialism defined as providing resources in a very public way – decent jobs, collective labor.

It was about the way Black women’s labor was commodified and sold as domestics. There was household labor. As much as you don’t want to believe there is patriarchy in Black households, there is.

The analysis they came up with is one that made connections between production, reproduction, household labor, the exploitation of children, the sexual violence and physical abuse that women deal with, which never end up getting placed on the agenda of a lot of Black nationalist organizations or some socialist ones. I think for that reason Black feminist analysis ends up being a lot deeper.

PA: Dr. Du Bois was one of the great dreamers, perhaps the greatest dreamer of the 20th century. In an article entitled '100 Years of Negro Freedom' he sharply criticizes the nation thesis, and puts forward the idea of a radical democratic America where Black and white labor create a new society founded on a rigorous affirmative action program. How does that legacy hold up? In your book you do a fascinating study of the Black liberation movements in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, but there is a section that you do not address: the section that grew out of the civil rights movement, that was in SCLC and SNCC and the NAACP. It was a different kind of freedom dream.

RK: I agree with Du Bois’ vision. I think that Du Bois’ vision of radical democracy is really the only thing that could move us some place that would be mass participatory. But I think there are two problems: one is the perennial problem that Du Bois identified in Black Reconstruction. One of the biggest barriers to radical democracy is this investment in whiteness. Not by all white people – there has been a willingness by many to commit their lives to the anti-racist struggle, but most don’t. I think even with the current response to the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, there is so much anger among whites, who somehow still don’t understand it. The mere fact they think that, the mere fact that you even have plaintiffs who are making a whole case around Black people who allegedly took their spot at the university, when most people who took their spot were white, who had lower test scores, who were legacies means we have a lot of work to do.

And yet all those moments, and this is a thing that is often forgotten, were moments of promise. We actually did have interracial cooperation and struggle. People were transformed by the prospect. The promise was always there.

Reconstruction didn’t fail because whites refused to come out, it failed because they did come out and then retreated. They came out in the 1930s and ended up retreating. In the 1950s and 1960s, they came out and then retreated again.

When we get to the second problem: what happened with the NAACP, SCLC, CORE – these are the organizations that had, for the most part, a radical democratic vision. I think they ended up losing that vision through institutionalization. By the mid-to late-1960s, a lot of the leadership of these organizations, with the exception of King and others, really fell back. We did achieve the end of Jim Crow, but they forgot what they were there for in the first place.

But one of my regrets, is that I didn’t do a whole thing on SNCC, the Poor People’s Movement and Ella Baker. And the reason was very simple: there was so much scholarship on them. But the more I thought about it I could have still talked about them in the context of RAM and other organizations. They were the heart of the movement to democratize America.

PA: You critique the concept of white privilege. On the one side there’s the appearance of a benefit, and on the other side there is downward pressure on wages because of racism. Objectively, is it in the interest of whites if in fact there is downward pressure? How do you deal with that?

RK: My take on this is that racism simply is not in the interests of the working class. No matter how much privilege is gotten, it’s not as great as the privilege of a society where everyone is paid fairly and gets the benefits and fruits of their labor. This is the bottom line. And this is one of my problems with some of the whiteness literature, that nowadays makes it seem as though white working-class privilege drives society, that somehow to dismantle racism would mean the white working class giving up a lot of privilege. I don’t think they would have to give up that much privilege. I mean they would actually get more in the end. Therefore it is really important to always press for a return to this question – that there literally is no benefit for anyone except for big capital from racism, and that white privilege is a reality but it’s like peanuts. Du Bois solved the problem for me, because he talks about the wages of whiteness in terms of the psychological wage. The psychological wage was significant because it allowed white workers to feel like they had a chance to move up in the world. As long as you had that dream, then you continue to let yourself be exploited. As long as you make 10 cents more than the colored people do, then it’s okay.

There are two ways to win people. One is to say, if we were able to eliminate capitalism all together, this is what life could be like. But the second thing, and this is one of things that I am trying to grapple with, is that you have to be able to make the case without always putting the emphasis on self-interest. In other words, there is a moral case for it politically, and that is that we do not want to live in a world where there are oppressed and exploited people. Why is that in anyone’s interests?