Stuart Hall, Jordan T. Camp
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| Imagem: Jim Alexander, Stuart Hall Estate |
Em setembro de 1974, em um protesto em Londres, Stuart Hall proferiu um discurso em apoio ao intelectual radical caribenho Walter Rodney. Após receber uma oferta de cátedra na Universidade da Guiana, Rodney pediu demissão da Universidade de Dar es Salaam, na Tanzânia, para aceitar o cargo. Ao retornar para casa para se juntar à esposa Patricia e aos filhos na Guiana, Rodney foi informado de que a oferta havia sido rescindida sob pressão do governo do primeiro-ministro guianense Forbes Burnham. Uma versão revisada das declarações de Hall foi recentemente descoberta no Arquivo Stuart Hall da Universidade de Birmingham; elas são publicadas aqui pela primeira vez.
O protesto "Reinstate Walter Rodney Now!" em Londres foi apenas um episódio de um movimento global de solidariedade que eclodiu em apoio a Rodney, que àquela altura já havia conquistado reputação internacional após a publicação de "The Groundings with My Brothers" (1969) e "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" (1972). Seus estudos se concentravam na exploração pelo "sistema capitalista colonial". No entanto, Rodney também argumentava que a independência formal, incluindo a da Guiana, não era a concretização da luta anticolonial: pelo contrário, havia resultado na ascensão de uma classe governante — exemplificada pelo governo de Burnham — que falava a linguagem da libertação nacional e dos movimentos socialistas, ao mesmo tempo em que defendia interesses contrários aos dos trabalhadores e camponeses. A independência, advertiu Rodney, não havia alterado fundamentalmente o "mapa do mundo" nem alterado as condições materiais das massas.
O ano de 1974 foi um momento histórico crucial — ou, como diriam Hall e Rodney, uma conjuntura. Naquele ano, Rodney tornou-se membro da recém-formada Aliança dos Trabalhadores na Guiana, uma aliança de classe multirracial formada para resistir à ditadura de Burnham, apoiada pelos EUA. A organização desafiou as narrativas nacionalistas do regime de Burnham, que retratavam os conflitos raciais entre trabalhadores africanos e indianos como características inexoráveis da sociedade guianense. Por esse trabalho, Rodney e seus companheiros foram alvo de múltiplas prisões e perseguições.
Em 1974, Hall já era uma figura de destaque da Nova Esquerda Britânica há quase duas décadas, imerso na cultura política do "marxismo caribenho" em diálogo com outros intelectuais radicais como C. L. R. James. Nessas observações, Hall escreve que Rodney havia sido criminalizado pelos "zeladores do neoimperialismo" e alvo do regime de Burnham por suas ideias, que se estendiam "para fora do contexto estritamente acadêmico, porque ele insistia em conversar com pessoas comuns". Baseando-se nos escritos de Antonio Gramsci, recentemente traduzidos da prisão, Hall argumenta que Rodney era um "exemplo brilhante e marcante" de um intelectual revolucionário e orgânico.
Hall também compreendia a profunda ameaça que o trabalho de Rodney representava para a legitimidade do regime de Burnham e antecipou corretamente a força da reação do Estado. Em 13 de junho de 1980, Rodney foi assassinado por um carro-bomba em Georgetown, Guiana. Ele tinha apenas 38 anos. Levaria mais de quatro décadas para corroborar oficialmente o que a família, os colegas e os camaradas de Rodney sabiam na época: que o assassinato fora cometido por um agente da ditadura de Burnham.
Hoje, os legados de Hall e Rodney demonstram a necessidade imperativa dos intelectuais orgânicos de confrontar o nacionalismo autoritário e forjar a solidariedade global. Mais de meio século após o discurso de Hall e quarenta e cinco anos após o assassinato de Rodney, suas obras falam do nosso próprio momento de ressurgimento do fascismo com notável clareza.
O texto a seguir foi publicado com a permissão do espólio de Stuart Hall e com o generoso apoio do Professor Nick Beech, do Projeto Arquivo Stuart Hall.
—Jordan T. Camp
Lamento que as circunstâncias me impeçam de estar aqui hoje, para me juntar novamente às vozes de protesto levantadas contra as ações do Governo Burnham em relação a Walter Rodney. Mas tenho o prazer de ter a oportunidade de repetir, de forma resumida, as observações que tive o privilégio de dirigir à excelente reunião de protesto em Londres, organizada há duas semanas.
Naquela ocasião, pediram-me que dissesse algo sobre o trabalho e a posição de Rodney como intelectual negro radical e comprometido. Pode parecer estranho falar do trabalho intelectual de Rodney em um momento como este, pois é evidente que o embargo imposto pelo governo Burnham contra ele não é de origem intelectual, mas política. No entanto, não é fácil, nem mesmo correto, fazer essa falsa distinção entre trabalho intelectual e política. O próprio governo Burnham nos deu uma importante lição política a esse respeito. É, em primeiro lugar, por causa de suas ideias que o Governo teme o retorno de Rodney ao Caribe: porque conhece o poder das ideias críticas, expressas de forma contundente e convincente, de criar raízes entre as pessoas e levá-las à ação e à organização. É também porque ele tem uma visão especial do papel e da responsabilidade do intelectual que o temem: porque ele sempre assumiu a responsabilidade pela propagação de suas ideias fora do contexto estritamente acadêmico, porque ele insistiu em conversar com pessoas comuns.
O governo teme Rodney porque sabe do poder que ideias críticas têm para levar as pessoas à ação.
It may be worth saying a word about this question of the relation between the intellectual and politics: it is a relation which is frequently misunderstood, not only abroad but amongst our own people, and perhaps especially by intellectuals themselves. Intellectuals are formed by their education, their training, the situations in which they work, the dominant definitions of intellectual work which they pick up like bad habits. Black intellectuals from the West Indies, in my experience, are especially prone to believe that intellectual work is, by definition, an elite activity—for other intellectuals only: and that it is only worth doing if it is done—as they say, “objectively,” in a framework of “value neutrality,” without the intrusion of commitments, biases, personal feelings or opinions: neutral men, standing outside history, judging and commenting on it in a way which leaves him free of the judgements he makes and of the things he finds out. This is a disastrous and crippling view. It utterly mistakes the role of the intellectual and the nature of intellectual work in its relation to politics.
Value neutrality, false objectivity of this sort may be possible in the natural sciences (though of course what one does with the things one finds out about nature cannot be “neutral”). But this sort of neutrality, I am convinced, does not belong within the human and historical sciences—whether your particular branch is history, economic, political science, literature or sociology. I say this particularly because so many of our gifted young men and women go into economics and the law, especially, and inhabit those professions as if they guaranteed them protection against the winds of politics and political controversy.
Of course, given the way educational chances are distributed in our society, only a very few men and women—and more men than women—ever get the chance to become full-time intellectuals. Often, these men and women work in schools, colleges, universities—in the academic world—and they tend to confuse the jobs they hold, the careers they are carving out for themselves, the whole restricted universe of Academia—for serious, critical intellectual work. They equate the restricted route they have been privileged to take to knowledge, with the functions of knowledge itself, with its production. Let me insist that “the academic” and “the intellectual” are not interchangeable terms: they are not the same thing: they may even be at the opposite ends of the scale. The academic life can actually prevent intellectuals [from] doing serious intellectual work. The academic world certainly encourages us to cut ourselves off from the transmission of ideas into action, the propagation of knowledge among the people. The fact is that, as Gramsci, the great Italian revolutionary and theorist once said, “all men are intellectuals,” though only a few are paid to do such work. All men, in so far as they think about what they do, apply thought to action, becomes self-conscious of their actions and their consequences, are intellectuals. If, then, we “full-time” intellectuals restrict our knowledge to those who have been fortunate enough to get full-time education and to work in universities, we are simply reproducing, by our own efforts, the unequal distribution of knowledge and education in our societies. We are simply contributing to the perpetuation of the “knowledge” of the few, and the ignorance of the many. Academics may be satisfied with that role: revolutionary intellectuals cannot be.
It is not possible, in my view, to study human societies, to study historical movements and developments, in a “value-neutral” framework. Knowledge is always from a certain point of view. It is always for this group or that. It always, either tells the story from the top downwards—making firmer the orthodox and prevailing interpretations of history—or it tells history from the bottom up, and thereby disrupts, displaces, challenges and subverts the dominant definition of things. There are lots of things we don’t know about slavery and the plantation: but there is no invisible point of “true objectivity” between a history of slavery told from the perspective of the slave-owner and the history of slavery told from the perspective of the slave. Of course, this does not mean that the intellectual is free to say whatever he likes, according to his personal beliefs. He has a commitment to the truth. He has a commitment to the complexity of events. He has a commitment to discover things we did not know, to expand the range and reach of our common knowledge. His commitment to the truth, to the complexity of historical reality, however, is not due to the fact that he must obey certain canons of academic scholarship. He has a commitment to the truth because we need to know, because we need to be right about the past and the present, so that we can actively take hold of history and shape the future for ourselves. Sometimes, then, the intellectual must tell us unpalatable truths—things we would much sooner not have heard. He must not bow before these difficulties. On the other hand, he must never confuse commitment to the truth with value-neutrality, with standing outside of history.
In this respect, Walter Rodney has set us a shining and striking example—his whole life, so far, has been a living testimony to the points I have been trying to make. Long ago, he set out to find out and to tell as fully and truthfully as he knew, the facts about the relationship between Caribbean society and its African heritage. I need hardly tell you how deeply this whole story has been buried, how falsely the history about it has been reconstructed for us over 400 years by our intellectual masters and mentors—what a labour of discovery, a labour in the “archeology of hidden knowledge” this story of Africa and the Caribbean has been. I need hardly tell you the courage it requires, even now, to assent and assert “the African connection.” Walter Rodney’s works in this field of Caribbean and African history have been models of historical scholarship: but that is not the point. That is only to say that, as an intellectual, he did his work well. What is more important, Rodney recognized from the very outset the political and cultural consequences of telling the African story anew to Caribbean audiences. He knew how deeply we had all, collectively, repressed that “African connection.” He knew the depths of collective forgetfulness which have marked our culture, which have led us black men and women to scorn and repress and look away from the truth about our past which history, properly told, has to tell us. He knew the depths of collective self-disgust and self-mistrust over which we had constructed a heavy historical veil. To open up the dark corners of history, not only to rewrite “white” history in “black terms” but to enable black men to see for themselves who they were and where they came from, is, in our present circumstances, to trigger the deepest emotions, to touch off a historical time-bomb with [a] short fuse. The connection, then, between Rodney’s intellectual work and politics in the Caribbean were not externally imposed—imposed from the outside. The connections were internal to the story itself—the intellectual and the political work were one and the same. To do one, given our past, was inevitably to do the other. To assert that our societies in the Caribbean are connected to world history through the history of black civilizations, as well as of Asians, is to pose the question, at the same time, of how this connection ever got lost: who told the story the wrong way round? and why? and what consequences follow when we destroy the old historical myths and falsifications and begin to reconstruct history along different lines? That is a critical and subversive intellectual task—political because it is intellectual. It constitutes his first “crime” in the eyes of the governments which protect and defend the status quo in our home societies. The fact that some of those governments are themselves composed of black men is only one of the many paradoxes which his unfolding story discovers—and explains.
To do revolutionary intellectual work, then, on the black, African past of present Caribbean societies was itself, in the eyes of the powers that be, a “crime”: a political crime. We should not at all underestimate the pressure and the constraints, the harassments and surveillance which go on and have gone on over the last two decades, pressuring black intellectuals at work in the Caribbean to conform: Walter Rodney, after all, has himself already been a victim of precisely such pressures, exerted—to my shame—by the then Government of my own country, Jamaica.
A "revolução negra" nunca foi sobre aqueles homens que tinham pele negra, mas sobre mudar os termos do poder em si.
To this first “crime,” however, Walter Rodney added a second. He refused the invitation, so to speak, to limit his work to academic circles and audiences only. He was determined to go out beyond the walls of the universities, to speak to ordinary people, to organize classes and meetings and discussions with them, to make his ideas and his knowledge live among them. If it is a “political” act to do certain kinds of intellectual work, to take one’s commitments seriously, and to follow the path of critical knowledge, it is considered even more so to break the boundaries of Academia and to try to reach and work alongside the masses in their struggle. This is the point where the intellectual takes upon himself the full political responsibility of his work, his role—and thus the point at which he most directly encounters the repressive mechanisms of the State. Rodney’s career is also a clear testimony to this harsh fact not once, but now thanks to the Burnham Government—twice.
It has never been easy in the Caribbean setting to follow the intellectual vocation—as I’ve tried to outline it—right through to its logical conclusion. But in earlier days, when the lines of power and influence were simpler, more starkly drawn, it was easier to know one’s enemies, and to foresee where the crunch would come. It is not so easy today. Almost everywhere in the Caribbean [where] political independence has been “won,” “black people” have won a measure of political, economic and educational influence and power in these societies. Not only this: often, in the name of the nationalist revolution, in the name of “independence,” even in the name, God help us, of “black power,” Governments have appropriated and incorporated the national figures of the past, the history of the past, and erected them into symbols and totems which feed and support their own power. The statues to slave leaders, to black nationalists, to Maroons and leaders of rebellions go up everywhere; the names are woven into the nationalist rhetoric; the stamps and coins are printed; the power of their names and actions are b[r]ought over. How comes it, then, that black men, in power, ruling in the name of a nationalist revolution, and with the symbolic power of a Garvey or a Gordon behind them, fear to hear the truth about black men and Africa from a black intellectual who is also their own countryman? If “black power” is in command, how can “black history” subvert?
This is a paradox: and the Walter Rodney case demands that we confront it honestly and openly, and discover its truth. The truth is that the “black revolution” was never about those men who happened to have black skins: it was never about black men slipping into white men’s shoes; it was never about black men inheriting the mantle of power which white men had laid aside. It was always about the dispossessed of the earth, about changing the terms of power itself, about creating new societies—not about inheriting the old. The truth is that, though the trappings and emblems and sometimes the “colour” of power in the Caribbean has changed, the structures have not. Those things which kept some men and women in chains while others were free, and then kept some men in power while others were powerless, are still at work keeping some men rich and powerful while others—the great masses of the people, wait at the gate, “the wretched of the earth.” Structures are more powerful than men. Men with good or bad intentions enter into structures they have not revolutionized—and are tamed by them. They take over the structures of exploitation and power: they internalize the beliefs, the justifications, the rationalizations, the motivations of power and privilege: they begin to think of “the dispossessed” as them; and of those who take up the struggle alongside the dispossessed as—the enemy. For some of these men—the caretakers of neo-imperialism, those who manage the “over-development of under-development” in the Caribbean—Walter Rodney has become the enemy. We must not, for a moment, misunderstand what this means, or what its consequences are.
Saúdo Walter Rodney. Se o que ele tentou fazer é o ato de "um inimigo", então somos todos inimigos. Quando as linhas de luta são traçadas dessa maneira, os homens não podem ficar de lado, hesitando entre uma hipótese neutra em termos de valores e outra — especialmente os intelectuais. É o seu dever para com a verdade que o leva a se comprometer. Ele é um intelectual, não apesar de estar comprometido, mas porque está comprometido, porque escolheu se manter na linha. Protesto que o Governo Burnham se encontre neste momento histórico, traçando a linha. É motivo de profunda consternação descobrir que todo o aparato repressivo de poder herdado dos homens brancos pelos negros e aplicado exatamente da mesma maneira. Mas é uma questão que precisa ser enfrentada e resolvida. A luta para defender Walter Rodney contra esse exercício deliberado e arbitrário de poder coercitivo é um episódio dessa luta mais longa. É para essa luta mais longa — a luta para "fazer a revolução no Caribe" — que sua vida e obra testemunham, e para a qual Rodney continua a nos convocar.
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) foi um sociólogo e teórico cultural nascido na Jamaica. Foi editor inaugural da New Left Review e diretor do Centro de Estudos Culturais Contemporâneos de Birmingham.
Jordan T. Camp é professor associado de Estudos Americanos e codiretor fundador do Trinity Social Justice Institute no Trinity College, além de autor de "Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State" (Encarcerando a Crise: Lutas pela Liberdade e a Ascensão do Estado Neoliberal).
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