Upstream - Walter Rodney, Marxism, and Underdevelopment with D. Musa Springer & Charisse Burden-Stelly

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Pan-African Marxist, underdevelopment theorist, guerrilla intellectual, father, husband, radical—these are all terms that we could use to describe Walter Rodney. You may know him from his classic text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, you may know that he was assassinated at the age of 38 for his activism, or you may not know who he was at all—either way, his ideas and his influence have most likely reached you, if not directly, then indirectly, through the waves and ripples that his life and work created in the many intersecting liberation movements throughout the planet.  Described by some as decolonial Marxism, by others as Pan-African Marxism, or just as a continuation of Marxist theory as applied to the African continent and the African diaspora, Rodney’s work has been monumental in advancing and applying scientific socialism to updated physical and temporal regions which were not covered extensively until Rodney. His theories on underdevelopment as part of global capitalism opened up new spaces for theorizing and understanding imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. His work in academia was imbued with a radical, guerrilla, fervor which resulted in institutions and states taking great measures to silence him, and the impact that he had was so monumental that he was tragically assassinated in his home country of Guyana almost 45 years ago.  We’ve been exploring many ideas on the show recently that are founded on much of Walter Rodney’s work, and so an episode on his life and work are past-due. And we have brought on two guests who we could not be more excited to be having this conversation with.  D. Musa Springer is a cultural worker, community organizer, and journalist based in Georgia. They are the International Youth Representative for Cuba's Red Barrial Afrodescendiente and an organizer with The Black Alliance for Peace. They produced the documentary “Parchman Prison: Pain & Protest (2020),” and are the host of the Groundings podcast. They are currently working on a documentary project titled “Y Mis Negros Que?”, and their book Alive & Paranoid was published in Spring, 2024 by Iskra Books. Charisse Burden-Stelly is Associate Professor of African American studies at Wayne State University, a member of The Black Alliance for Peace and Community Movement Builders, and author of Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, published by the University of Chicago Press. You may remember that Charisse was on the show last year to talk about Black Scare / Red Scare.  In this conversation, we introduce Walter Rodney biographically before we dive into his work applying scientific socialism to Africa, theorizing underdevelopment and capitalism as a world system, applying his work to events happening in the world right now in places like Palestine and Cuba, what Rodney had to say about education and academia, and much, much more. Further resources: Charisse Burden-Stelly Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, by Charisse Burden-Stelly Alive and Paranoid, by D. Musa Springer The Walter Rodney Foundation Related episodes: Upstream: Black Scare / Red Scare with Charisse Burden-Stelly Upstream: [UNLOCKED] How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel Intermission music: "A Song for Walter Rodney" by Bocaflojay Cover artwork: B. Mure Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Ah Ah In terms of being a direct continuation of Lennon's work, if we accept that Marxism or a materialist analysis is a living analysis which is in a dynamic state, constantly developing, then what other reason do we have to not think of Rodney in that sense other than his African-ness, right? And so I always think the more interesting question is, how do we have perhaps thousands of so-called Marxists who do stop at Lenin and don't have a single African Marxist in their reading list, right? I think that's actually a much more revealing question

because it shows that the colonial question remains one of the fundamental questions, sort of undergirding the imperialist world system, if that makes sense. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you

thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Pan-African Marxist, underdevelopment theorist, guerrilla intellectual, father, husband, radical, these are all terms that we could use to describe Walter Rodney. You may know him from his classic text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. You may know that he was assassinated at the age

of 38 for his activism. Or you may not know who he was at all. Either way, his ideas and his influence have most likely reached you, if not directly, then indirectly, through the waves and ripples that his life and work created in the many intersecting liberation movements throughout the planet. Described by some as decolonial Marxism, by others as pan-African Marxism, or just as a continuation of Marx's theory as applied to the African continent and African diaspora, Rodney's work has been monumental in advancing and applying scientific socialism to updated physical and temporal regions which were not covered extensively until Rodney.

His theories on underdevelopment as part of global capitalism opened up new spaces for theorizing and understanding imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. His work in academia was imbued with a radical guerrilla fervor which resulted in institutions and states taking great measures to silence him. And the impact that he had was so monumental that he was tragically assassinated in his home country of Guyana almost 45 years ago. We've been exploring many ideas on the show recently that are founded on much of Walter Rodney's work, and so an episode on his life and work

are past due. And we've brought on two guests who we could not be more excited to be having this conversation with. Musa Springer is a cultural worker, community organizer, and journalist based in Georgia. They are the international youth representative for Cuba's Red Barrio Afro Descendiente and an organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace. They produced a documentary, Parchment Prison, Pain and Protest in 2020, and are the host of the Grounding's podcast. They are currently working on a new documentary project titled Y Mis Negros Que, and their book, Alive and Paranoid, was published in the spring of 2024

by ISCRA Books. Cherise Burden-Stelly is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and Community Movement Builders, and author of Black Scare, Red Scare, Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, published by the University of Chicago Press. You may remember that Charisse was on the show last year to talk about Black Scare, Red Scare. In this conversation, we start by introducing Walter Rodney biographically,

and then we dive into his work, applying scientific socialism to Africa, theorizing underdevelopment and capitalism as a world system, applying his work to events happening in the world right now in places like Palestine and Cuba, exploring what Walter Rodney had to say about education and academia, and much much more. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially.

You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. You can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or one time donation on our website upstream podcast dot org forward slash support. Through this support, you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping us to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund. So thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Robert in conversation with Musa Springer and great to have you both on the show.

Thanks for having us. Yes, thank you so much for the invite. So Sharice, you've been on the show before and I think a lot of our listeners probably remember you from our episode on your excellent book, Black Scare, Red Scare. But I'm just wondering if you can both begin by introducing yourselves for our listeners and maybe just talking a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Yeah, so I can go first. I'm an associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. I am a member of Black Alliance

for Peace and community movement builders. And in terms of the work that I do, I'll just talk about my academic work. I guess that's my primary work. So I did my graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. I finished in 2016. And there I studied the Black radical tradition broadly conceived, primarily focusing on thinkers in and around the Communist Party and W.B. Du Bois, and to a lesser extent, Claudia Jones,

and thinking about the intersections of anti-Black racial oppression and anti-Communism. And I really came to that question through a question about Black studies actually, namely like why there were very few critical political economists or Marxist political economists in Black Studies. And that took me in a bunch of directions, but one of which was looking at the intersections of

hostility towards radicalism and then oppression of people of African descent. And so that's sort of been a through line of my work since then. Actually, my dissertation advisor is a Guyanese Marxist. And so I was actually introduced to Walter Rodney in undergrad through a member of the WPA named David Hines, who was a professor at my undergraduate institution,

Arizona State. But then of course, you know, Walter Rodney and development economics and like the plantation school and a lot of Caribbean thinkers continue to inform my thought primarily because of my advisor, Percy Henson. And yeah, so that's a little bit about my background. Thank you. And Musa? Well, you know, my name is Musa Springer. I am a journalist, community organizer,

and cultural worker. I organize with the Black Alliance for Peace, volunteer with the Walter Rodney Foundation, and I am the International Youth Representative for Cuba's Red Barrio Afro Descendiente. I was first introduced to the work of Walter Rodney, also an undergrad around the year 2013 by a former professor of mine, Dr. Jesse Benjamin, who worked directly with the Rodney family and actually had a hybrid class

where it was a class all about Walter Rodney that took place between not just Kennesaw State University where I was at, but also the AUC, Georgia State University and universities all around Atlanta were able to actually take this class. And so he saw me turning up, protesting, making analyses on campus. And he said, have you ever heard of Walter Rodney? We have this class that's pretty much all about

the kind of activism you're trying to do. And from that point forward, you know, I dived into Rodney's work and was astounded at how relevant and accurate and critical it felt. Aside from that, I'm also, I produce, have produced a few documentaries, one of them called A Parchman Prison. I've worked as a journalist and news producer for quite a while. And then my poetry book with Iskra Books, Alive and Paranoid, recently came out earlier this year. So that's a little bit about me. Awesome, very cool. Yeah, thank you both.

And I've been wanting to do an episode exploring decolonial Marxism and Walter Rodney for for quite some time now and so I'm really excited that to have both of you on particularly and that we're doing this together and I think maybe the best place to begin would be to just give an overview of who Walter Rodney was and I know it's kind of very hard to separate Rodney from his work and his biography so you, those are are definitely like intertwined in his life. And so I'm wondering if you can just give us a bit of a biographical sense of who Walter Rodney was. Sure, I can start off and Sharice can fill in any gaps I may create.

But so Walter Rodney was born in 1942 in Guyana, in Georgetown, Guyana. For folks who don't know, Guyana is next to Venezuela in South America, but is considered a Caribbean nation because it is on the Caribbean coast. He comes from a working class background and family and from a very young age was sort of like a scholar academic type. Most notably, Patricia Rodney loves to tell the story of how he was a master at his debate team in high school. In fact, taking on the local college debate teams and winning. And that is actually how he afforded his way into the University of the West Indies in Jamaica was through actually

winning debates and winning a scholarship. And so from an early age, Walter Rodney was deeply interested in questions that affected colonized Africans, that affected Guyana. It's also important to keep in mind that he essentially grew up in a time where there were British troops patrolling large swaths of Guyana. There was a colonial occupation taking place, even despite perhaps having like a black face in the highest office at times. So he grew up very aware of these dynamics. He would later, of course, like I said, go to school in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies, also in London. And he was deeply invested in African history, specifically. He saw African history and history in general as one of the many tools to liberate our people. At the same time, he was deeply invested in organizing and meeting the working class where they were in terms of activism and organizing, whether that was in

London, Jamaica, or in his home country of Guyana. He also taught for a brief stint in Tanzania at the University of Dar es Salaam during Tanzania's socialist project. And so looking at Walter Rodney's biographical life, it's hard to separate him and his work because he of being in community with and three children as well. And I think it's important not to separate that he was a family man. He did come from a working class family and he raised a family because those things were deeply intertwined with his politics and his way of viewing the world. And so I'll stop there, but that's just some quick notes on him. Yeah, I would just add that, you know, when he left Tanzania and returned to Guyana, he was instrumental in the founding of the WPA, the Working People's Alliance. He was supposed to take on a post at the University of Guyana, but was subsequently denied the position, as was

Dr. Patricia Rodney, who was also supposed to work at the University of Guyana, but they were being repressed by the government of Forbes Burnham. He was ultimately assassinated, I wanna say June 13th, 1980, at the age of 38 years old. And so what's really, I think, important about Walter Rodney is that many people are sort of trying to hoist him up as sort of a messianic type figure, a political savior type figure,

which he completely eschewed all of his belief was in the people and specifically the working people of African and Indian descent within Guyana. He did not come back to be a demagogue or to be any sort of politician at all. His primary purpose was to educate and learn from the people to organize the people for self-emancipation. So self-emancipation has a huge theme of his work and a huge focus of his politics.

Yeah. Thank you so much, both of you, for filling us in on the basics of who Walter Rodney was and his life. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit too, before we dive in more deeply into decolonial Marxism, just about how Rodney blurred the lines between academia and activism. And you know, he received a lot of pushback in his life from both hostile states and uncomfortable educational institutions because of the work that he was doing both inside and outside of the classroom and bringing those two together. So yeah, I'm wondering if you can talk a little

bit about that and also like what movements and actions that he inspired with his work and his activism. Well I would say so his whole concept of grounding I think is about number one doing work that matters if you are in academia. He says in his work Groundings is My Brother that you know academics are enemies of the people until proven otherwise. And I think he took that as a form of praxis. And so all of the work that he did about Guyana, about Africa, about the Caribbean, about the Black world was meant to have a scientific understanding of the Black condition, but to also be able to translate that into concrete action.

And so, for example, something that he really chided his colleagues about was the lack of support of professional organizations for not supporting the struggles in Southern Africa that were happening at the time in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. So he not only chided heads of state and really lauded heads of state who were doing that supportive work, that is to say, offering material support, not this bland abstract solidarity we offer these days, but he thought that the historical task of scholars and academics was to make things plain and clear for the people. dollars in academics was to make things plain and clear for the people. And of course, and universities, which are petty bourgeois institutions meant as instruments of class reproduction.

This was something that was deeply challenged by his colleagues and institutions. As you mentioned, for example, when he was doing work at the University of the West Indies, when he flew away to Montreal, Canada for the Congress of Black Writers, I think it was. He was banned from re-entering, which sparked what became known as the Rodney riots, but as he clarifies in groundings, they weren't just about him. This was about the widespread repression that was happening not only in Jamaica, but throughout the Caribbean that was aimed at RASAs, that was aimed at students, and that was happening not only in Jamaica but throughout the Caribbean that was

aimed at RASAs, that was aimed at students, and that was aimed at quelling any radical forces, not least because of the influence that Cuba was having, right, throughout the Caribbean in terms of a radicalizing force as well as the Black Power movement that was happening in the United States. And so he understood that, you know, whatever academic or work of the mind that you do is irrelevant if it has no real practical use and if it is not informed by movement and what's happening in the real world. And I would just add, he frames this concept called the guerrilla intellectual. The place where he kind of expands on this the most is Walter Rodney Speaks, one of his most slip-on books, but definitely one I think everyone should read.

And he essentially says like the academic of consciousness within academia, your role is to subvert that space to the best of your capabilities. You're supposed to subvert whatever resources, whatever access to the tools of knowledge production that you have as an academic, you should subvert those and then not only subvert those, but you should actually be redistributing the tools of knowledge production. So whether that is sometimes something as rudimentary as literally access to a classroom or something to the extent of working knowledge of an archive, research skills, whatever it may be, the tools of knowledge production themselves, you are

tasked with subverting and redistributing those. And I don't even like to say that he blurred the line between academia and activism. I think that he more so showed an example that the two do not have to be in conflict with one another. You know, he speaks about people like Lenin and Cabral very, very highly because they also sort of showed that the line between intellectual and revolutionary isn't a made-up imaginary distinction. And so this is another one of those moments, like we said earlier,

it's hard to remove his biographical life from his academic life because he also traveled to the USSR when he was kicked out of Jamaica. Effect effectively, he stayed for an extended stint in Cuba under the refuge of the Cuban government and Castro, Fido Castro. He traveled to Tanzania, Ghana, I believe China as well. You know, this is someone who saw his role not as an academic doing activism, an academic doing activism, but someone whose academic work had to necessarily be activistic, had to be revolutionary in that sense. And then also like in the Russian Revolution, a book of his recently published, you know, a few years ago, he also spends a great deal of time talking about the ways that academics and academic institutions are infiltrated by like the CIA and things like that. He speaks specifically about Harvard and how Harvard is a hotbed of anti-communist

action with shady funding connected to the CIA. And this was in the 1970s, this was years ago, right? And so he's not just interested in individual academics, he's also interested in the ways that academic institutions themselves function to reproduce capitalism and colonial modes of production. And I think that to boil down his criticisms and his line to just simply academia and activism is like, no, he had actually a very sophisticated understanding

of academia as reproducing the colonial relationship. And I think that is his strongest intervention right there. Hmm. Yeah, I think I mentioned before we started recording, but I just finished how Europe underdeveloped Africa, actually literally last night. And in the last section of the book, Rodney talks about the colonial education system, or systems I guess, that existed on the African continent during the time of colonialism. And of course he spends a great deal of time critically examining them and exploring how they were a tool of colonialism and a way of upholding colonialism

and underdevelopment in the continent. But he also talks about how Africans subverted this colonial education system in many profound ways, which actually helped to spur the process of formal decolonization in the 60s. So there are actually a few quotes. I actually have them open here in my notes. So I might as well just share them because I think they're super relevant to this part of the conversation. The first quote is, quote, Ultimately, from a purely quantitative

viewpoint, Africans pushed the colonialists and the British in particular to grant more education than was allowed for within the colonial system. And that was an important explosive contradiction that helped Africans regain political independence. So like he says from a quantitative viewpoint, Africans actually demanded more education than the British and the other colonialists were willing to ultimately give in the first place. And then another quote, colonial powers aimed at giving a certain amount of education to keep colonialism functioning. Africans by various means required more education at the lower level than their allowance, and this was one of the factors which brought about deep crisis and forced the British to consider

the idea of withdrawing their colonial apparatus from Gold Coast. The timetable for independence was also speeded up against the will of the British. As is well known, the regaining of independence in Ghana was not just a local affair, but one that was highly significant for Africa as a whole. It therefore highlights the importance of at least one of the educational contradictions in bringing about the political independence of Africa. And the final quote here is, the educational process had equipped a few Africans with a

grasp of the international community and of bourgeois democracy, and there was a most unsatisfactory credibility gap between the ideals of bourgeois democracy and the existence of colonialism as a system which negated freedom. Inevitably, the educated started gravitating in the direction of claims for national independence, just as educated Indians had done much earlier on the Indian subcontinent. So yeah, I just want to really appreciate the idea of education as a mechanism for reproducing class power. And in this case, colonial power being subverted by the very individuals it's supposed to be oppressing. So thank you very much for sharing a little bit about Rodney's life and biography.

And there's so much more that we could talk about. But I'd love to move the conversation into Rodney's work and his theories. And so I'm wondering, and feel free to attack this from any angle you'd like, because it's a huge question. What is decolonial Marxism? I don't know actually what that is. And that's not actually terminology that comes out of Walter Rodney's work. In fact, in his piece, I think it's called Marxism and African Liberation, he takes a lot of time explaining how Marxism, that is to say scientific socialism,

is applicable to the African continent and understanding the historical and material conditions of the African continent when understanding the historical and material conditions of the African continent when it's used as methodology or applied as methodology and as an ideology of revolution and of class position. That is to say an ideology of the working class. And so for him, I think decolonial Marxism would be redundant. But I think that one can infer that the editors perhaps used that title to signify how innovations in Marxism and expansions of Marxism came through the era of decolonization and primarily in the global South,

that the sort of potentiality of Marxist methodology and of revolutionary class struggle has shifted to places like Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, China, and away from its traditional center or its classical center in Europe, so to speak. But I, you know, I push back on, I suppose, on the term decolonial Marxism because it assumes the very object of critique that Walter Rodney is making when he, you know, he's answering the question, does Marxism apply to African people

or to the African continent? And he says somewhere in that piece that I'm mentioning, you know, if it applies to Vietnam, if it applies to China and other places where there are racialized and colonized folks, what is there something in black people's genes or DNA that makes it not apply? That that's the assumption when in fact, even Marx himself would say that you it not apply, that that's the assumption when in fact even Marx himself would say that you

have to apply the methodology to your own historical and material conditions, not unlike Lenin did to Eastern Europe because Marx and Engels are analyzing Western Europe. This is why we have something called Marxism-Leninism because Lenin is not only analyzing the historical situation and the material conditions in Russia, but also a different epoch of capitalism that is to say the stage of imperialism. And so one has to take time and space into account, but that is with any application of a scientific principle. We do that with the physical world. And when we have a science of the physical world, he says we have different types of innovation. This is why, for example, in physics, we have like string theory. Not

unlike that. This is where you get things like Maoism or other types of applications or what Fanon says, stretching Marxism to the colonial situation because it's a living thing. What he does not agree with and what he's also critical up is something called African socialism. That is to say some blending of socialism and aspects of capitalism or socialism and Christianity. It's like either you have a bourgeois philosophy or you have a materialist philosophy.

And so I think this is where Rodney is really central. And he says something that I think is really important that points to Rodney's ethics, which are really important to why I love Walter Rodney. But he says, you know, these questions are worth looking into because there are Black people asking these questions. Whereas, you know, oftentimes academics will kind of roll their eyes and write things off like, of course it applies to Africa, right? He's like, we actually have to go meticulously through these questions because our people are asking these questions, and so they're important questions. You can't just assume these things to be true because we

said so and so. I appreciated the way that he goes through and then he uses Cabral as an example of the application of Marxism or of scientific socialism to an African society that did not have class struggle until comparatively recently. What he said was that what that Cabral analyzes the relationship of people to the mode of production and the social and cultural relations that emanate there from. And that is also part of a Marxist methodology. And so even if there's not class struggle in the way that appears in Europe,

there are still modes of production, right? There are still relationships of people to each other and the environment, et cetera. And so to make a short story long, as I just did, I think what is called decolonial Marxism for Rodney is just Marxism applied to the African reality. You know, I think I strongly agree with Cherise. I'm not a fan of after someone has passed away, applying a term to them in their work, which they never applied to themselves. It's kind of like calling Claudia Jones a feminist

or black feminist when her work predates feminism by years or decades, right? And so on a personal note, I can't really quite tell you what decolonial Marxism means. I would, I think, reterm it or rename it if I had to maybe Pan-Africanism, Pan-African Marxism, things like that, because Walter

Rodding was deeply committed to pan-Africanism as a mode of thinking, organizing, and decolonizing. And I think that what the editors of the book perhaps were getting at is this question of decolonizing and decolonization, which can at times confront or brush up against the assumptions and presuppositions of Western Marxists who kind of see the colonial period as a thing of the past and don't see decolonization of a place like Africa as an ongoing struggle. And so I definitely in that respect understand it. There's a part in the book Decolonial Marxism in chapter 16 Decolonization in which Walter Rodney says, Decolonization is going to be inseparable from a total

strategy for liberation that encompasses a total control of the material resources, which encompasses a restructuring of the society so that those who produce have the principles say and how their wealth is going to be distributed. And so, you know, I think that he provides an extremely clear definition of decolonization right there that does include this question of production of class and economic relationships while still maintaining the fact that this is a strategy of total liberation, which includes armed struggle, organization, social relationships. So yeah,

I have some pushback against the term decolonial Marxism, but I think that we can kind of look at it through this pan-Africanist lens, revolutionary pan-Africanism, and understand that he's speaking towards using this material analysis to understand and guide towards a total liberation strategy. I really appreciate those responses. And to be honest, I hadn't really thought about the title of the book and the framing of it like that, you know, as something that Rodney never actually used himself. But after hearing sort of both of you explain the limitations and the gaps there, it really does make a lot of sense. And I think if I'm hearing you both right, the the main contention here is that Marxism is a methodology, right?

It's a historical process. It's an analytical materialist framework for understanding the world. And it's been stretched and adapted to many regions of the world, you know, as it's spread there. And for the context that we're talking about and that Rodney talks about, it's about how Marxism has been and continues to be applied, particularly to the African context. And like, you know, like you said, Marx talked about Europe mostly because that's where he was from. But that doesn't mean that we should conflate Marxism with Europe somehow. Just that the place that Marx happened to be discovering these processes was a specific

subcontinent with its own unique material conditions and its own unique history. So I do really appreciate you both pushing back on that idea that like, if we do apply Marxism to Africa, that it has to have its own unique term or something like that. I think, yeah, it is all just Marxism. And so we're gonna talk about that a little bit more, but before we do, you had mentioned the book,

The Russian Revolution, A View from the Third World, which is a collection of writings from Rodney about the Bolshevik Revolution and sort of, yeah, its relevancy to the third world. And in their introduction to that book, which is a bunch of lecture notes really that were later adapted into book form, Robin D.G. Kelly and Jesse Benjamin suggest that Rodney's work is a direct continuation of Lenin's work on imperialism. And so at some point we're going to do an episode on Lenin's, you know, famous book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. But just for now, I'm wondering if you can talk about how Rodney's work builds on and contributes to Marx

and Lenin's work particularly, and revolutionary Marxism more broadly. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure Musa has a lot to say about this too. For one thing, for Rodney, colonialism is the political administration of imperialism. And imperialism is the particular set of economic relationships that structure things like dependency and underdevelopment

and the creation of metropoles and peripheries. So imperialism is a particular stage of capitalism, but he would also follow, I think, in Krumah in saying that neocolonialism is the highest stage of imperialism. And so he's really concerned with imperialism and its neocolonial form and the ways that the continuation and perpetuation

of economic relationships between African States and North America and Western Europe continue particular types of relationships that reproduce like extraversion that actually intensify class struggle that was perhaps more nascent or embryonic in the formal colonial period. And that any bourgeoisie on the African continent

is wholly dependent on international capital. So it's a dependent bourgeoisie. And that those who would claim that there aren't classes in Africa or those who would not pay attention to class struggle are either ill-informed or they're attempting to throw dirt in the eyes of the people. And he has a particular critique of Nkrumah on this score that Nkrumah didn't really acknowledge classes in Ghana until he was overthrown. And he talks about how Nkrumah went through these stages from conscientism to Nkrumahism

to Marxist, right, a more sort of traditional scientific socialism. He ceased to try to meld these different ideologies, right, a more sort of traditional scientific socialism. He ceased to try to meld these different ideologies, right? He just understood that, you know, he wrote a book called Class Struggle in Africa. That was probably his most definitive statement of Marxism, Leninism. But this has to do with imperialism because if we don't acknowledge imperial relationships, then we just, we were down back to these like cultural or racial arguments. And so I think that for Rodney, imperialism is front

and center because it is a economic relationship that has deeply political implications, or that is bound up in sort of political realities. And I think that he expands on Lennon's analysis because number one, he's applying it to a particular historical moment, that is the moment of so-called decolonization. And he's also shifting the locus of enunciation. So not to the global South generally, but to the African continent particularly, where we see these relationship, the other side, so to speak, of the imperial

relationship. So whereas there's a particular set of social relations and political realities that emanate from the core, his is an emphasis and analysis of the periphery and how imperialism creates a distorted form of capitalism. So these places are not non-capitalist. They're capitalist because they're inscribed in the capitalist system and in the capitalist world economy. But what it does is ossify particular pre-capitalist forms in a distorted way and creates these

relations of, again, underdevelopment and dependency that arrest relations of production, that arrest relations of development, that impose exogenous forms of culture, etc. etc. And so he's offering an analysis of imperialism through the objective realities, I think, of the sufferers of that reality. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Musa Springer and Charisse Burden-Stelly. We'll be right back. The I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man.

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I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. Wow! Wow! That's it! Wow! Wow! I said, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, I'm That was A Song for Walter Rodney by Boca Floja. Now back to our conversation with Cherise Burden-Stelly and Musa Springer. And just a quick thread that I wanted to pull on from your response, which is something that I've been thinking a lot about recently and has really sort of been informing my politics in a major way is how capitalism is a world system. Like there aren't just a bunch of different capitalisms happening here and there around the world, right? Like, and that there are just like these little distinctions between them. Capitalism is a world system and all of the different regions of the world are

integrated into that system. And like we've been talking about the core and the periphery, the, the metropoles and the extraction sites, like those are all capitalism and they are indirect relationship with each other and they're part of this whole. And so there is a quote on this that I would love to read again from the Russian Revolution, which speaks to this. And in this quote, Rodney sort of speaking to and this is of course before their time, but he's speaking to people like Steven Pinker or Milton Friedman, for example, who argue that capitalism actually like overall improved living standards for the vast majority of

people. And you know, they like they're cherry picking what countries they want to focus on. So here's Rodney again, paraphrasing Soviet economist Eugene Varga, talking about quote, the condition of workers under capitalism must be judged not only by what went on in the metropoles, but by the conditions in places like Bombay, where Indian workers were being exploited in the interest of world capitalism. And this could be applied to so many different regions of the planet now, right? The different extraction sites and the places of exploitation, super exploitation, that serve the core and allow us in the West to maintain our standards of livings and our lifestyles. It's all built on the backs of these super exploited workers and the extraction of raw materials and like we'll get into the

underdevelopment of these regions in the periphery. And so thinking about capitalism as a world system is really something that Rodney helped to teach me with a lot of clarity. And I'm wondering if you had anything that you'd want to like say to that, Musa, if you'd like to just follow up on the original question. No, I mean, I think Sharice hit the nail on the head, especially when she said colonialism is the political administration of imperialism. I think that is one of the best ways to think about it. And I should also note that for myself at least, when I talk about Africa in the Rodneyist sense, I'm necessarily including the Caribbean and the African diaspora because in much of Rodney's analysis, the Caribbean and the African diaspora, because in much of Rodney's analysis, the Caribbean and the diaspora are also included in thinking through imperialism. But in terms of being a direct

continuation of Lenin's work, I think that's absolutely an accurate way of describing it, particularly because if we accept that Marxism or a materialist analysis is a living analysis, which is in a dynamic state, constantly developing, then what other reason do we have to not think of Rodney in that sense, other than his Africanness, right? And so the same could be said about Kwame Nkrumah with his book, Neo-Colonialism, The Highest Stage of Imperialism. I mean, he very outright, even in the title, is building on Lenin, you know, but the fact that a lot of the European and Western Marxists, I think, stop at Lenin and don't continue to then read Rodney and Nkrumah as a glaring omission.

But essentially, if the analysis of imperialism is that it's built on colonialism, then one cannot overlook the massive continent and its diaspora, which was the source of both raw materials, resources, and forced labor through which that imperialism was even able to develop in the first place. And so in some ways it is building upon Lenin's legacy, in other ways it's maybe correcting and updating and sort of stretching Lenin's work. But I always think the more interesting question is how do we have perhaps thousands, I was gonna say millions, but that's an overshoot, but perhaps thousands of so-called Marxists who do stop at Linden and don't have a single African Marxist in their reading list, right? I think that's

actually a much more revealing question because it shows that the colonial question remains one of the fundamental questions sort of undergirding the imperialist world system, if that makes sense. And then in terms of, you know, more direct examples of how Rodney builds on Lenin and other Marxist thinkers, I would say that Rodney is like a master class in creating a materialist analysis that is built on an ideological foundation and framework. So something that Lenin did that Rodney does, for example, is stating clear objectives, stating clear biases, refuting this idea of objectivity when discussing imperialism. If one is the victim of imperialism, one does not have to be objective

in obsessing it necessarily. And so I think Sharice really hit the nail on the head and those are just a few little notes to add. So I'm wondering how you would respond to the claim and we've touched on this a little bit, but that Marxism is not relevant to the third world or that it is a white European ideology? Well, I think Kwame Ture said it best. He said Marxism is no more European than gravity is

European. You know, just to put it as simple as possible, Marxism is simply an observation, an objective observation of the world and an application of that observation. And I think that it is a, and we're of course here in conversation with the black scare, red scare scholar herself, you know, I think it is no coincidence that Marxism, which is often just a euphemism for communist ideologies, is so heavily Europeanized in the West. I think that's actually intentional. When you look at the vast majority of people's movements in states who have organized revolutionary movement and decolonial quote unquote movements underneath the banner of Marxism, they have been largely non-white people, right?

Whether that is Vietnam, Cuba, we spoke earlier about Burkina Faso and different places. And so whenever I hear people say Marxism is not relevant, Marxism is white, I'm like, well, do you use gravity or the theory of relativity or, you know, all these other things to simply name a phenomenon is not to sort of have like an ethno claim to that phenomenon. Right. And so there was recently a video I saw on YouTube and it was this African sister critiquing how Europe

underdeveloped Africa. And I sent it to Sharice and her opening line, her like literally how her her main critique is we can't trust him because he's Marxist. And that should tell you all we need to know about Walter Rodney. And so I think that there's a very very deep issue where on one hand we do have a minority of European Marxists who do very strongly ignore the Third World and who do ignore the global South scholars. But then on the other hand, we have forces and institutions at play who wanna make sure

that that is put forth as the vision of Marxism itself to intentionally discourage colonized and oppressed people from venturing into what Marxism even actually is. You know, in some ways it's a bit of an overcorrection, right? Because of histories of colonialism and cultural imperialism, especially, you know, scholars and political leaders, particularly in this decolonization moment, but through to the present are very hypervigilant about the imposition of exogenous ideas, cultural practices, et cetera, to the detriment of what's considered to be sort of endogenous or indigenous ways of thinking, epistemologies, ways of knowing, et cetera.

But as Rodney explicitly states, methodology is independent of time and place. And insofar as scientific socialism is a methodology, it's not European just because that was the location of discovery, not unlike, you know, in his writing he says, you know, you wouldn't reject my use of this microphone because it was, you know, the technology for it was discovered in Europe, right? So why would you reject a methodology simply because of a particular origin point,

temporally or spatially? The other thing Rodney talks about, I think that is really important, is the willful ignorance that fuels rejections of Marxism. So it's not only that people reject it, they won't even read it. And he said that Anglos, like the English speaking world is particularly bad for this. He said in continental Europe, people actually read and study Marxism and reject it or not

based on an informed position, whereas in the English speaking world, especially in the United States, people don't even read it. They reject it outright and that's supposed to be some badge of honor, some display of Whereas in the English speaking world, especially in the United States, people don't even read it. They reject it outright and that's supposed to be some badge of honor, some display of Americanism or patriotism or of objectivity or integrity that you haven't even read it. So you're just rejecting, you're rejecting vibes basically. You don't even know what's going on, but you're saying that it's incorrect, you know? And so that is particularly ubiquitous today.

And you know, that it's for Marx or Hegel or any other sort of European thinker, you know, people think that it's political or they're being politically, you know, woke or politically radical to be ignorant. And, but anybody that's on their t-shirts, anybody that they say quote unquote taught them But absolutely not take that position because the enemy is studying us all the time

Why wouldn't we be studying if you think Marxism is your enemy? Why wouldn't you be studying it right to know your enemy better? So anyway, so I think that's another important point that it can be a sort of knee-jerk reaction to this idea of cultural imperialism And then it's also just sort of ignorance knee-jerk reaction to this idea of cultural imperialism, and then it's also just sort of ignorance. And if I could just say too, because Sharice's perfect answer made me think of this, there is an essay by Kwame Nkrumah about African socialism revisited,

and he actually straight up says, if there were a European ideology which would lead to Africa's liberation, I would follow it despite its European-ness, essentially. I'm paraphrasing. And so when we're thinking in terms of materialism, we're thinking dialectically, hypothetically, if there were a European ideology which itself had been proven by history to be revolutionary, then we would be ignorant to not even assess the revolutionary merits and tenets of it.

You know, so even if that assumption were true, Kwame Nkrumah and even Rodney in different ways, they pretty much state like, we would use that as well, right? And so I just wanted to add, sprinkle that little point in there too. Yeah, no, that's really helpful. And I'll just follow up with a quote from the book Decolonial Marxism by Rodney. He writes, so there is a body of Marxist literature, which is inadequate to the needs of the third world, because it just does not deal for the most part with the problems

of the third world. So that when one says that Marxism is relevant to the Third World, it means that the Marxist scholar, whether he be Third World or of Third World origin or not, who attempts to deal with Marxism in the Third World, must be operating at the most advanced and creative level. He is not merely transferring known truths from another part of the world to the African or Asian situations. He has to engage in the very difficult task of building from the bottom an actual body of Marxist inquiry and Marxist analysis of the societies in question. And this is where one has to emphasize, and to emphasize again and again, that Marxism can only be of value if whatever it takes to be the universal is applied to the particular and it is in the very particularity of that exercise that

one will demonstrate that the universal is actually universal and that it is applicable. So I think that's also just a really like great summary of how the application of Marxism, like I love how he says it, it universalizes it in the fact that you can apply it in so many a really great summary of how the application of Marxism, like I love how he says it universalizes it in the fact that you can apply it in so many different contexts. I wanted to ask you both about Palestine and how you think Rodney's work could help us analyze

and understand not just what's happening there, but also how we should be thinking about Palestinian liberation and the sort of resistance movement. Yeah, well, you know, I think that Rodney, much like the struggle in southern Africa where he chided heads of state for not stepping up and supporting materially the struggle in southern Africa, so too would he be particularly critical of, especially, I would think, the African and Middle Eastern states who are also not stepping up to support the Palestinian

struggle materially. I think from a Rodneyist perspective, we have to take seriously the realities of armed struggle. And any solidarity that is proclaimed with Palestine that condemns armed struggle is not solidarity. There's no actual understanding of real decolonization without the realities of armed struggle. And any idea that what Israel is doing is self-defense is simply nonsensical. Any idea that what Israel is doing is self-defense is simply nonsensical. Any idea that what Israel is doing

is justified or warranted over hostages or the events of October 7th is simply nonsensical. Rodney would push us to understand that actual history, right, dating back to 1907 or 1905 or 1917 or, you know, 1948 or, you know, 19, like all of these different moments of Palestinian resistance and not start our analysis on October 7th. And so, you know, simply put, I think that he would insist on the seriousness and importance of armed struggle, the importance of having a historical materialist and dialectical materialist understanding of what's happening, the necessity of material support from states and also from the masses, from organized people for the Palestinian struggle. And I think, you know, he would not be surprised

at the repression of like the encampments that was happening several months ago, but would push faculty in particular to go further, right? To wage struggle where you are, as he says, not only through encampments, but through other ways of resisting, of educating, of consciousness raising about what's happening in Palestine and to put oneself at risk up to it,

including perhaps your job and livelihood because that's our historical task. So I think that a Rodney is perspective on what's happening in Palestine. One has to take all of that into account. And also I think with the belief that ultimately the Palestinian people will be free, right? I think that Walter Rodney was profoundly an optimist in the sense that he believed in the people, he believed in self-emancipation and as a real strategy

and a real tool of liberation. And in his tribute to Amilcar Cabral in the opening chapter of the book, The Colonial Marxism, he refers to armed struggle as the unavoidable path to liberation for Guinea. And at a different part later in the book, when he's discussing Angola, he says, again, armed struggle was put about by the Portuguese, right? They left us no choice but to develop towards the stage of armed struggle, which is very similar to what Fido Castro said. It is not us who chose armed struggle as our means of liberation.

It was the imperialists who put us in that position of having that be the only choice. So I think Walter Rodney is very clear that true decolonization does involve armed struggle, not even necessarily by the choice of the colonized, but often to use an analogy, it's you're back in the corner and this is the only path you have been left with. So by my reading of that, if Rodney knew armed struggle was the unavoidable path to liberation in Guinea or in Angola or in South Africa, then it would seem that Palestine would be no different. People can also look up on Rope, Review of African Political Economy. There's a wonderful archival sort of research piece that shares some of Rodney's writings from the Walter Rodney Archive in Atlanta, Georgia about Palestinian liberation.

And he's actually speaking specifically about armed struggle and violence on behalf of the Palestinians. He refers to Leila Khalid, who famously hijacked a plane. He says she's an example of a woman liberated their struggle. And you know, he defends the hijacking of planes and refers to them as armed propaganda, which if we can sit and think with that term for a second, I think that's very powerful and somewhat eerie how relevant that might be to when we think of the Al-Aqsa flood right of last year. And then there's one more section in that where he talks about the kidnappings that took place decades ago and he says quote, when we exchange our currency for money from the developed countries the rate of exchange is always unfavorable because they set the terms. But when comrades in Latin America exchange kidnaps diplomats for prisoners,

the rate of exchange is good. And so I think we can really clearly deduce how Rodney would feel about policy and liberation. He writes very clearly about it. Again, I encourage people to go to the archive in Atlanta at the Woodruff Library. If he clearly states that armed liberation is an unavoidable path, then that would necessarily include the Palestinian

struggle. And I tend to agree. We recently had Jason Hickle, an economic anthropologist, on the show to talk about his research on unequal exchange in the world economy and we talked a little bit about one of his papers which actually quantifies some of the really truly massive amounts of value that are transferred to the global north every year and it's really mind-blowing some of these numbers. For example, they found that in the case of materials and labor around half of everything that is consumed in the core is net appropriated from

the global south. And when you look at it in terms of labor and raw materials, the amount of value that the south transfers to the north on an annual basis is an amount of energy and materials that would be enough to supply the entire global south with like an entire system of social services. So we're talking healthcare, education, housing, public transportation, water and electricity, heating, cooling, all of it for the entire population of the global south. And so this would end poverty, but instead it flows to the global north. And this is also from a paper that he was the lead author for that just came out. So in 2021, they found that the North net appropriated 826 billion hours of labor

from the global south. And this is labor across all skill levels. So that's effectively more labor than what's delivered by all workers in Europe and the US combined. So we're really talking about massive, massive, almost like unimaginable amounts of value transfer from the Global South. And of course, this is sort of the bread and butter of what Rodney's work was about in terms of underdevelopment and his famous text, how Europe underdeveloped Africa. And in decolonial Marxism, the book that we're sort of focusing our conversation around, Rodney writes, underdevelopment is a form of development, dependent and asymmetrical, but development nonetheless within the socio-historical context of the capitalist world system.

So I think that quote might be a good jumping off point for, yeah, if you could talk a bit about underdevelopment and maybe give us some historical examples of how the North underdeveloped the South? Definitely. This is like my favorite question, so I'm going to be brief because I know Sharice can add a lot too. But as we were saying before we started recording, you know, the theory of underdevelopment, especially when you look at it in the context of when Walter Rodney was writing it was at the time very new

cutting-edge I would say an advancement not just to Marxism and Marxist theory but also to history historical worldviews It was around the inception of world systems theory and so thinking in these terms not only was it cutting-edge, but it kind of remains cutting edge now in my opinion, because Rodney writes about how capitalism is development by under development. So there is a dialectical process between the development of Europe and the West development of Europe and the West and the under development of Africa slash the global south. This development according to Rodney is not only economic

it is also social, political, and cultural. He also distinguishes and says he is not saying underdeveloped as an adjective as we often hear today in the media for example he's speaking of underdevelopment as a verb and as a process in a relationship a dynamic process and relationship and so one of the examples that he uses both in decolonial Marxism and how Europe underdeveloped Africa are the rise of the port towns and port cities across Europe. Seville, Bordeaux, the London docks, and how at the inception of colonialism and shadow slavery, these were just regular relatively poor coastal towns in Europe. And the more and more, Europe. And the more and more, as Rodney puts it, gold and African skin arrives, the more too do these coastal towns become larger and larger and receive more infrastructure and receive more of the spoils

of the colonial pillaging. And so he's essentially saying you cannot develop And so he's essentially saying you cannot develop capitalist imperialism without a regime of underdevelopment simultaneously sort of as the foundation. Another example is he looks at technological development and underdevelopment. So for example, many parts of Western Africa had iron smelting hundreds of years before Europe, right? It was actually East Asia and Africa were some of the first to develop the process of iron smelting. But by the time the colonial period transitioned into a neocolonial period, that practice had been completely lost across Africa. Similarly with like cloth making and textiles making. The African continent for a

period was actually the world's premier textile creator and exporter until Europe, European colonialism was able to subvert that, use the underdevelopment of Africa to overdevelop their textile technology, and then in turn flood the African markets with cheap knockoff textiles and then eventually that technology and that sort of local practice of textile making is completely lost, right? And so I think that what Rodney is getting us to look at more closely getting us to look at more closely in this relationship is how one necessitates the other. The development of European capitalism necessitated the underdevelopment of the African continent and vice versa. When he looks at the Caribbean, for example, he looks at how places like Jamaica and Guyana were able to be set up as colonial outposts for the

empire, as a way of routing this triangular trade, all for the betterment of not just the European state, but European workers, European peasants who also were economically and ideologically transformed from that underdevelopment. So the relationship between the core and the periphery, he says, is a relationship of underdevelopment. And so I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I mean, I'll just add, like, so one of the earliest, I think, development economists is Raul Prevish.

And like his focus is on Latin America. And then there's like Andre Gundar-Frank who starts in Latin America and then starts to do work in Africa. But so this sort of school of thought about dependency is that because of the ways that Europe imposes itself on the global South or on the third world, everything, all the economic and political formations there

are externally focused. They're not for the local populations. It's very hard to develop local forms of production. It arrests modes of, indigenous modes of production and makes them extroverted toward the global political economy. And the dependency aspect of it is that this is a relationship.

And so I think that's also what Rodney's getting at when he says that, when he talks about the sort of deformed form of development, that this is not because of latent African savagery or backwardness. This is actually the way that development looks when there's one site that is the source of extraction and plunder and super exploitation and expropriation. And there's one site that is the beneficiary of those processes.

And so the other side of dependency is that really, and so Susan George, another economist, talks about this much later, but it's actually really the global north that's depending on the global south because of capital flows and because of these massive amounts of extraction that whatever debt is owed to the global north,

like 10 times that is extracted from the global south through resources, through labor, through land theft, etc. etc. And so there's a sort of cultural pushback with dependency theory and development theory, you know, the theory of underdevelopment in that people try to, you know, make it seem as if these savages just can't rule themselves. But in fact, those who get bloated and fat and decadent off of these economic relationships are the cause of... And then there's a whole lot of figuring ideology that's created around that economic system to legitimate the conditions of colonized and racialized

people. And the final thing I'll say that it's in decolonial Marxism, but also it's more developed in higher up underdeveloped Africa is that he describes the conditions of classical African societies. And he says that we actually have too much emphasis probably on like the kingdoms like Oyo and Domi that we also need to study just regular ass villages and formations, but that he starts there to be able to do this comparative analysis and to see like what the actual material effects

of like enslavement and depopulation that ultimately created the conditions for colonialism were, and to talk about the sort of stages of development that Africa, for example, didn't have like a feudal stage in the same sense as Europe and that these different approaches and organizations of society actually led to the relations of underdevelopment and dependency based on relative technological superiority of Europeans, etc. etc. So

there's much more to be said, but that is effectively Rodney's position. If I could add two quick things too, I would really, really recommend readers go read the book The History of the Upper Guinea Coast. I know Sharice B. Hirami shout that book out all the time. It is one of Rodney's most boring books. I will put that on the table straight up. All right. And I think a lot of people in his family kind of agree with me, but he does a painstakingly detailed job of showing just how the advent of chattel slavery in the Upper Getting Coast uprooted every single indigenous African system of politics, economics, culture, and social. And the reason I say that is because when we think about underdevelopment from a Rodneus sense, he also provides a framework that

we can use to understand contemporary situations and other situations. So there's like a paradox. You are dependent on the West because they have underdeveloped you. And at the same time, the West is dependent on you for the extraction of your resources and labor. And so think about somewhere like Cuba, for example, the US blockade just in the last few years has forced hundreds of thousands of mostly young able bodied Cubans to flee from the island. Walter Rodney talks about how chattel slavery, the majority of people targeted by chattel slavery were young able bodied men to the most part.

And he talks about what that does to the economy, what that does to local practices, all of these things. So we can use that same model and look at Cuba. There's a very intentional underdevelopment of Cuba taking place where we have hundreds of thousands of young, able-bodied majority men leaving the labor force, leaving the workforce, and what that does to create sort of a deficit and a forced dependency on external forces.

And so examining that paradox right there is something that Rodney does as well. And there's like a centrality to slavery and Rodney's work that I'm such a huge fan of. But yeah. Hmm. Yeah. There's so much that we could talk about when it comes to underdevelopment. Like we can and should probably devote an entire episode to it. But for now, for anyone who wants to follow up here, there is the text that Musa mentioned, a history of the Upper Guinea Coast. And then of course, there is how Europe underdeveloped Africa, which to me is just like a classic. Like it belongs on every bookshelf and personally I read it in like under a week. It's really, really engaging. It's one of those books that like you just can't put down once you've started it.

And it's going to change the way that you think about the world. So we're coming to the end of our time together, and so I'm wondering to close out maybe if you could both just share a bit about how Rodney's work has inspired and informed your work and maybe just any other final thoughts that you might want to share. final thoughts that you might want to share? Yeah, I think that for me, like as a academic, you know, thinking through and with Rodney inspires me to be more like rigorous in the type of work that I do, more patient with people. Something about Walter Rodney that really comes out in the essays written about him and in Roundings with My Brothers, there's like several essays,

especially the one by Pat Rodney is, I spoke about this earlier, but like his ethics. Like he really actually cared about people. And even when he was doing critique and engaging in polemic, it was always from like a place of like love and deep care. He never like grandstanded or anything like that. Like he, it was always to the end of unity and to create a new synthesis for struggle.

And so I think that that's something that's really important. I think a lot about Vanguard versus self-emancipation because of Rodney. I don't fully agree with his anti-Vanguardism, but I think a lot more about Vanguardism and its role now versus or in relationship to self-emancipation. But he just had a deep and inviting trust

in people's capability to liberate themselves. And I think that that's really important. He was a good person, right? You know, we were talking about, we mentioned a little bit about education, but he really cared about education. So he supported Dr. Patricia Rodney to go on to get her education and took care of the kids,

you know, while she was doing what she needed to do. He cared about the education of his children. And he was as gender egalitarian, it seems, in his praxis as one could be, and even probably more so, you know, at that time. And so I just think being a good person is really underrated and being sort of kind and like listening are things that really I think Rodney embodied and not in his sort of eschewal of

political leadership I think is really important. He just had a humility about him that I think is really really inspiring. Him and Patricia Rodney, so if you ever meet Patricia Rodney, you'll know. And they're both, you know, he had a sense of humor. She's, I think she's hilarious. But like, it's really important to be a good person and to live out your principles. I think that's why a lot of people are drawn to Malcolm X and why a lot of people fail,

fall flat on their face to be anything like Malcolm, because they're not, they don't inhabit those ethics. And I think ethics is really, really important. How you relate to yourself, how you relate to other people and being like, whatever it is that you're doing, whether you're a culture worker, a knowledge worker, being serious about what you do in your historical task. And so those are all things that inspire me about Walter Rodney. And I only imagine if he lived beyond 38 years, we'd have many, many more like classic texts.

So, yeah. I think like Cherise said, he was very clear and concise on his historical task and what the historical task of a historian, academic, cultural worker, what that task has to be. There's a speech that he gave in 1968 in Montreal at the Conference of Black Writers. This was actually the speech Sharice referred to earlier.

I mean, the conference in which he was subsequently banned from Jamaica, but in that he lays out some rules. He says, the first rule is that I as the black historian and talking to other black people. So right off the bat, he's very clear on that. He says, the second rule is that African history must be seen as a very intimately linked to the contemporary struggle of black people.

And I really don't think it gets much clearer than that. Be clear and cognizant of who you're trying to talk to and who you're trying to reach, and be very, very clear and cognizant about the role of our history in our liberation struggles. And so from those two things, I think Rodney has really inspired me to never elide, which is a word I learned from Sharice,

history, never to elide or evade our African history, the way that history shows up in our contemporary struggles. I don't come at this as an academic. I am not a formal academic. I am someone who has been able to use Rodney in political education, in cultural work, in organizing, as has Charisse, and I think that even the fact that he can write such dense academic works that are still able to be digested and studied

and useful to our liberation movements by all, including non-academics, is in and of itself a skill that we could learn from Rodney. A book like Groundings is about 100 pages long and it's mostly his speeches, yet it has more academic integrity than half of the actual academics out here publishing today, right? So just the idea on its face that we should be creating work that is applicable, that is relevant to our situation and to the liberation of our people is as basic as it gets. And I think that's probably the largest lesson I get from him.

And then of course, like Sharice said, he was an outstanding man of ethics. And I think sometimes on the left, we want to sort of divorce ethics and morals from the political. And Rodney is a very glaring example of how you can and shouldn't do that. Because if our politics are not informing our personal ethics then what is actually the point of having them and so all of that and then so much more is what I get from Rodney. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Musa Springer and Sharice Burden-Stelly. Musa Springer is a cultural worker, community organizer, and journalist based in Georgia.

They are the international youth representative for Cuba's Red Barrio Afro Descendiente and an organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace. They produced a documentary, Parchman Prison, Pain and Protest in 2020, and are the host of the Grounding's podcast. They are currently working on a new documentary project titled Y Mis Negros Que, and their book, Alive and Paranoid, was published in the spring of 2024 by ISCRA Books. Live and Paranoid was published in the spring of 2024 by Iskra Books. Cherise Burden-Stelly is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and Community Movement Builders,

and author of Black Scare, Red Scare, Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, published by the University of Chicago Press. You may remember that Charisse was on the show last year to talk about Black Scare, Red Scare. Thank you to Boca Floja for the intermission music and to Berwyn Muir for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month but usually

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