Trillbilly Worker's Party - Year Zero 3: The Blues Epistemology (w/ guest Jordan T. Camp)

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

On this installation of Year Zero we sit down with author and scholar Jordan T. Camp to talk about the work of geographer Clyde Woods and his book "Development Arrested." We cover the political economy of white supremacy, how to study a region, how the planter bloc never really went away after the Civil War, and how the blues came to be born. If you like content like this and would like to support us, go to www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Thank you. So So, welcome everybody. This is another installation of Year Zero, Trillbilly's miniseries. This week we are joined by Jordan T. Camp, visiting scholar at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, a visiting scholar at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, author of Incarcerating the Crisis, Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State, and co-editor with Christina Heatherton of Policing the Planet. Jordan, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me. Good. I'm glad to hear it. So, you know, a few, maybe about a year ago, I'd written this thing for the Baffler about eastern Kentucky.

So Tom and I, we live in eastern Kentucky, you know, which is the coal fields of Appalachia. And I'd written this thing about the Appalachian Regional Commission, the ARC, and these attempts in the 60s during the war on poverty, to develop the region. And after I wrote that, our mutual friend Jack Norton, he gave me this book by Clyde Woods, and he said, man, you got to check this book out. If you're into reading about the ARC, and you're into reading about, you know, long-standing hegemonic structures in a region that is mostly rural, you've got to read this book. And I'd never heard of Clyde Woods. And so, you know, I started reading this book, Tom and I both started reading it, and we were both, you know, blown away because, you know, where we come from, there's a lot to cover. And this book is incredible because it almost like takes everything about a region

and then kind of just rolls it into a ball and just, you know, fastball throws it at you. I mean, it's just incredible. He takes culture and music. He takes, you know, hegemonic organizations and structures. And in this case, it's the planter class, the plantation block in the deep south in the Mississippi Delta. But as we were reading this, we were both just pointing out all these parallels to where we live. There's these attempts to develop the region after it's been completely extracted of all of its resources. And at the same time, there's a long-standing tradition of, I guess Clyde called it the blues epistemology. But here we kind of have something similar with our music it's old time music, it's the banjo

and everything but it's something similar it tells a story about the place we live in and about the things that people face from coal mining disasters to union struggles When he says that

the country's becoming the mississippi delta writ large that that's something that's been said about appalachia too forever you know so i thought i i knew i knew i found my guy whenever i saw that yeah and so i you know i was talking to jack i was like well you know i want to cover this on the show who should we talk to and he said well you got to talk to jordan You got to talk to Jordan Camp because he co-edited one of Clyde's books posthumously. And you sent me the book that you co-edited and I've got about maybe a hundred pages into it and I'm just blown away by it because, I mean, his method is so incredible. He starts, you know, he starts with Katrina's like, I'm going to write about Hurricane

Katrina in New Orleans. But to do that, I have to go all the way back to the 1600s. So it's really, it's a comprehensive look at a region and how things develop over time. So before we dig into Development Arrested, that's the name, I probably forgot to mention that. That's the name of the book itself. Before we dig into that book about the Mississippi Delta, I kind of just wanted to talk about Clyde Woods. So he passed in 2011, but you knew him quite well. So what can you tell us about him, his methodology, and the way that he saw the world? Yeah, well, you know, I still remember the first time I met Clyde. I was a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And he had just moved to Santa Barbara to take up a position in the black studies department there from the University of Maryland, where he had been in American studies. American Studies. And, you know, I approached him at an event after he arrived, you know,

having read Development Arrested. And like both of you, my copy completely, you know, marked up, my understanding totally transformed. And what I said was, you know, I explained I'd grown up in Mississippi, but I didn't feel like I understood the place until I read Development Arrested, you know, which I'll talk about with you all the day. And I think this kind of surprised him, you know, but he was really generous man. And he invited me to stop by his office hours and to talk. And, you know, we ultimately went on to work together for the rest of his life. And so my editorial role in, you know, development, drown and reborn is really a culmination of my work with Clyde Woods,

with whom I facilitated research, lectures, poetry readings and public programming. A lot of work to draw attention to the centrality of the U.S. South in the national and global political economy, as well as the unfinished business of labor and freedom struggles in the national and global political economy, as well as the unfinished business of labor and freedom struggles in the region. And so, you know, as you said, at the time of his passing in 2011, Clyde was a black studies professor at UCSB. Like I said, he was a mentor, a member of my dissertation committee. He was, most importantly, a very accomplished and well-respected scholar

born in Baltimore, where he saw the major uprisings there in, you know, 1968 after Dr. King's assassination. And I think it was really, you know, bearing witness to the conditions of Black and working people that led him to dedicate his life to the study of the blues and to political economy. He earned a Ph.D. in urban planning from UCLA. He taught at major universities. I mentioned Maryland and UCSB. He also taught at Penn State.

We're talking about Development Arrested. He also co-edited a very influential volume with Catherine McKittrick called Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, which was originally published by South End, which is subsequently, unfortunately, no longer with us. He was an editor for a major journal, American Quarterly, on the events in New Orleans after Katrina. And he wrote a lot in places like The Professional Geographer, Kalfu. At the end of his life, he was writing about Los Angeles and struggles around homelessness and policing there. And so just quickly, I'll say, you know, towards the end of his life, and I should note this,

he asked Laura Polito, who's now the chair of ethnic studies and a geographer at the University of Oregon, to become one of his literary executors alongside another geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And Laura had been friends with Clyde since they went to UCLA together at the same time, and they remained, you know, colleagues and close collaborators for the rest of his life. And so I was really honored when she invited me to work with her in completing the volume and editing the volume that would ultimately become Development, Drown and Reborn, which I'm proud to say won the Association of American Geographers Globe Book Award. So, you know, on a personal note, I would be remiss if I didn't say, you know,

I was a part of a cohort of graduate students that everyone I knew really looked up to Clyde and learned a lot from him. He modeled the kind of way of doing engaged scholarship and dialogue with social movements. How do you link race and class, political economy, and expressive culture? But he had also won the admiration and respect of a lot of activists for his work, but particularly, I'm sure we'll talk about this, the work on the blues epistemology and the blues geography and how it served as a key site of critique of the plantation culture and political economy and its continued hegemony in U.S. political culture and economy and imperialism around the world. So, you know, there's a lot more to say about this kind of dialectic of the blues and political economy,

but maybe I'll just stop there so I don't continue on a monologue here. Well, let me poke in and ask this, Jordan, because much like Jack Norton gave Terrence his copy, my friend Kerry Freshour, who's a geographer at the University of Washington, gave me my copy. And it's like, what is it about geography as a discipline? Just like, you know, what's being taken out of the ground, put in the ground, place, topography, all that stuff that makes it so right for radicals? Yeah, I think that's a really great question. I mean, you know, yeah, geographers pay attention to things like place, things like scale, things like, you know, how do we think about the landscape, how it's produced.

I mean, listeners in Appalachia will understand, yeah, you build these prisons on top of coal mines. That's not natural or inevitable. There's a social and a spatial process. And, you know, one of the things that geographers and I think that's one of the things that attracts Clyde and makes it useful resources is to say, look, you look at these landscapes, you look at these spaces, you know, that kind of hierarchies, the inequalities are the outcome of past struggles over, you know, how the place is going to be used. Is it going to be for use value for foreign working people or exchange value for political and economic elites? Is it going to be, you know, in the interest of, you know, abolition democracy, or is it going to be in the interest of, you know, capital in the state? And so I think it, you know, right at the heart of geographical thinking are battles over place. What is the space going to look like? And so in that way,

I think it's really important to give us the kind of theory that can equip us in the movements that we're engaged in. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, so speaking of that, speaking of what goes in the ground, what comes out of it, and, you know, what makes a region, we're talking about Development Arrested. And so this book is mostly about the lower Mississippi Delta. And so as we get into this, let's just maybe establish some basic facts about the Delta region. Delta region. You know, as Tom mentioned earlier, you know, one of the things that Wood says at the beginning of the book is that the United States is becoming the Delta region writ large. I mean, he was writing this in the 1990s, and I think he was looking around at the current political and economic landscape. And I kind of tend to agree with him. That's like I said, me and Tom have

said that about Appalachia for a while. But, you know, just as an overview, I mean, what are we dealing with here? Like what areas are included in the Delta region? What are some of the sort of ecological and environmental features that make it amenable to agriculture? And more importantly, I guess, who lives there? Yeah, well, thanks for this question. I mean, the Mississippi Delta stretches from Memphis to Tennessee to the north of Jackson to the south. It's made up of 18 counties in northwest Mississippi. It's on the western part of the state, borders Arkansas and Louisiana. At the time that Clyde was writing, this book was published in the late 1990s.

It was recently re-released from Verso with a preface by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It was home to about 500,000 people, 60% of whom were African-Americans. It's the poorest region in the state, which remains the poorest state in the country. And, you know, one of the factors among many is that this alluvial soil, you know, soil alongside a riverbed makes it one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world and particularly with cotton. And in fact, you know, as Clyde notes, the rates of cotton production would more than double the other regions across the South. And so, you know, the reasons for this enormous productivity, like I say, have to do with a lot. But, you know, most importantly, during the 19th century, you know, these regions were transformed into what he describes as kind of factories in the fields, you know, where enslaved African-American workers were super exploited by the planter class.

And Mississippi came to epicenter of a vast kind of cotton plantation empire in the world. And, you know, there's a way in which we sometimes imagine, you know, Mississippi and those Delta counties as a backwater, as a kind of feudal backwater, you know, holds back capitalist development. What Clyde said, and I should say some 20 years before, you know, the history of capitalism became a big thing in the universities, is that, you know, this boom had to do with the ways in which the cotton produced in Mississippi became the raw material for the Industrial Revolution in Britain, which was driven by textile.

It also linked to New England and those mills in places like Lowell, Massachusetts. And so the levels of exploitation of enslaved African-American workers was extreme. You know, workers were literally forced to work from, you know, can't see in the morning till can't see at night. And I think it's important what Clyde quotes Karl Marx about the specificity of capitalist slavery. And he pushes back on the idea that, you know, some backward kind of hold over from feudalism. But it combines what he describes as the barbarism of overwork to the horrors of slavery. So I think this is really important. And I could say more about this, but I think it's really central that we understand that Clyde takes us through these factors in the 19th century, that Clyde takes us through these factors in the 19th century, through Jim Crow and capitalism in the 20th century, and then as we'll come back to the 1960s and the Green Revolution with use of

pesticides, herbicides, the introduction of new, you know, strains of cotton to increase production. But again, I know we'll come back to this. No, that's a great overview. And, you know, we've established some of the characters here. I think one of the things that I found so fascinating with the book is how he chooses to open it. So he opens with an overview of something called the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission. And it was started by then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. I'm sure you've all heard of him, along with the Mississippi and Louisiana governors. It was supposed to be like a delta equivalent to the Appalachian Regional Commission.

And, you know, if you're interested in more about that, you can see episode 112 of our show. You know, I thought this was interesting that he chose to start here. And it starts to make sense. As he starts to pull back the layers of this development commission, he starts to unearth these several different development agendas in the region. And so, you know, we have some of the characters we've established that the African Americans lived there formerly enslaved. But there was also the plantation block and the plantation owners. And he shows that their development agendas had never really gone away.

And so, you know, what are some of these development agendas that were uncovered in this process? And what were some of the various community blocks, maybe forces that were pushing for them? Yeah, that's a great question. Let me start by, and I guess it's a kind of follow up on the first answer, by establishing some of the conditions. I mean, Development Arrested, you know, it's a kind of story about underdevelopment, you know, the development of underdevelopment in the Mississippi Delta. And I'll just start, you know, this is over 20 years later. Mississippi continues to have the highest rates of poverty, inequality, people lacking health insurance in the country. Over 20 percent live in poverty, which is higher than Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana. Louisiana is pretty close. Louisiana, Mississippi are the poorest states in the country.

You got child malnutrition and hunger is a fact of daily life. The Delta continues to have the highest rates of unemployment in the state with the highest rates of unemployment. And that was before the deleterious impacts of COVID-19, you know, in 2020. So I should also say it's a development agenda that's part and parcel of a kind of extreme authoritarianism. No less, you know, perhaps most importantly, symbolized by Parchman Farm, the slave plantation that was turned into a prison. You got a situation where black Mississippians are 70% of the prison population of 29,000, despite the fact that they're only about 37% of the state population. And, you know, since Clyde wrote this, the incarceration rate has actually increased. I mean, Mississippi locks up 1,039 out of every 100 hundred thousand citizens. That's way higher than most countries around the world.

And it's a higher rate than the U.S. It's incredible, which has the highest carceral rate on the planet. I mean, you know, compare the U.K. It's one hundred thirty nine out of one hundred thousand instead of, you know, a thousand out of one hundred thousand. Right. Portugal and so on. And then, of course, the racial and ethnic disparity is stark. Portugal and so on. And then, of course, the racial and ethnic disparity is stark. I mean, you look African-Americans, Latinos, huge rates of incarcerations, native communities and poor whites.

I mean, but poor whites are underrepresented overall. And so, you know, but it's also a place where there's been competing visions of development, right? And I think, you know, one of the things that Clyde really wants us to think about is how this is an outcome of struggles between regional blocks. And so he focuses on these kind of regional blocks, which he defines for us as a kind of dynamic regional power structures. He says they may have different segments, but what they're unified by is efforts to gain control over resources and over the ideological and distributive institutions governing their allocation. So on one hand, you've got a plantation block, and on the other, what he calls a blues block. You've got a plantation block and the other what he calls a blues block.

And so these these blocks are, you know, antagonistically clashing over what the Mississippi Delta is going to look like. So on one hand, the plantation blocks advocating for a kind of monopoly control over agriculture, manufacturing, land, water. water. They're hostile to federal interventions and any program to reduce inequality, which is kind of central feature of this plantation development agenda. It maintains its hegemony through national and international alliances with capitalists and, you know, it ensures the kind of mass impoverishment that I was just describing and it kind of increased, you know, what Clyde calls the deadliness of everyday life. And so it's, you know, it's labor control and exploitation, it's prisons and sharecroppings, it's racial domination as manifest through slavery and Jim Crow. And, you know, again, though, but the success of these practices at the kind of local and regional

scale have led this bloc to export these practices around the U.S. and the world now known as neoliberalism, which I'll come back to. So, you know, by contrast, I'll stop here. I just say the blues block is, on the other hand, the kind of ethnic and class alliances between the black working class and multi-ethnic communities, working class communities. So it's a working class philosophy that emerged in the overthrow of Reconstruction, which took place in the 1860s and the 1870s. You know what W.E.B. Du Bois describes as the first real multiracial working class movement in the United States, the first real multiracial working class movement in the United States where black people and poor whites were able to implement, you know, a kind of socialist democracy in the South. What Du Bois calls it, you know, and Clyde follows his lead, a kind of dictatorship of the proletariat.

And what did they try to do? And I'm quoting Clyde here, but they break up racial and economic monopolies, the economic redistribution of monopolized resources to oppress the working class communities, full recognition of human rights and the affirmation of black culture and intellectual tradition. So the blues block or tradition refers to the countless ways that working class black people, Latinos, indigenous peoples, and poor whites have struggled for a kind of social and economic democracy in the South. And that's become a beacon for the whole country in the world. Yeah, no, you kind of anticipated my next question. I was going to talk about how, you know, one of the things Clyde talks about is that one of the ways that the elite stays hegemonic is it has to stay in perpetual mobilization. It has to continually be launching and, you know, different mobilizations to keep people repressed and to extract more surplus from institutions, from labor, etc.

You know, and he and he lists himself about 12 different planter mobilizations in the region. He starts with the Trail of Tears and the expulsion of indigenous people from the Southeast lands. He goes through, you know, running up, you know, the expansion of capitalist slavery, running up to the Civil War, the Civil War itself, and then Reconstruction. And then he talks about what is, you know, referred to, and you mentioned it, the Shotgun Plan of 1875, the overthrow of Reconstruction. And he kind of identifies this as the moment when the sort of blues epistemology itself is born. So you talked about the blues block as this sort of alternative, the counter-mobilization to the planter block.

Can we talk about the blues epistemology? What was the context that the blues was born in? You know, we all think of the blues as, you know, B.B. King and, you know, Muddy Waters. We have this idea of it that is kind of a mainstream idea. But what is the context that the blues is born in, and what is the blues epistemology that's born out of it? Yeah, well, you know, the context, again, and, you know, I think no understanding of the blues can proceed without having read, I think, alongside it, you know, W. B. Du Bois is black reconstruction in America. And so it's, you know, the most dramatic experiment in democracy that the world have ever known.

You know, Du Bois also really emphasizes that it's a moment of class struggle and, you know, an understanding and a transformation of what the possibilities of democratic institutions could be. But Clyde also, you know, draws for his concept of the blues epistemology from the Mississippi born writer Richard Wright. And in his now famous essay called The Blueprint for Black Writing, is what I'm going to say, though, you know, a different term in the 1930s. This is published in a magazine called New Challenge, which is a Popular Front era publication. And, you know, during this period that intellectuals like Wright on the black left really started thinking about expressive culture, the blues traditions, jazz traditions and folk traditions, which, you know, as articulating a kind of social vision of black working people.

And I think it inspired a lot of artists and intellectuals. I mean, you know, Margaret Walker, walker langston hughes and they were being influenced by the communist party's work in the south you know uh and particularly you know the the notion of a self-determination and the black belt you know uh uh so you should read i think people should read uh clyde's work on the blues alongside robin kelly's great book hammer and hoe you know which is looking at the Communist Party organizing in Alabama in the 1930s. And so, you know, it was in this context that, you know, Wright in particular argued that Black writers should tap these, you know,

expressive forms of culture and use them to articulate an overall struggle against racism and capitalism. And so Clyde follows rightfully this early, right, and saying this is the kind of the foundation. It's a blues literary tradition as well as a musical tradition. That's the foundation of a blues epistemology. And, you know, he says there's really two periods in terms of context where it gains a big advance. One's the first reconstruction and the second would be the period between the 1930s and the 1970s. You know, sometimes we call this, you know, a long civil rights era. Clyde's calling this, I think, the second reconstruction, you know, where there's a black working class led leadership and labor and freedom struggles.

And but he's you know, he gives us a really good definition. He says the blues is an encyclopedia of the multiple forms of traps experienced by African-Americans and how they challenge these practices. And so, you know, he traces a continuity in the blues tradition between these kind of labor and freedom movement organizations and musicians who he sees as kind of organic intellectuals, people like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Charlie Patton, Sun House, you know, Muddy Waters, people like B.B. King. But he's also thinking about organizations like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,

you know, multiracial civil rights organization in the beginning of the 60s, goes in a different direction in the late 1960s. And then he's thinking about how the blues tradition continues well into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. say early 21st centuries. And so, you know, what I think Clyde offers us is a conceptualization for understanding how the blues as philosophy, right, the blues as epistemology, way of knowing can be connected to blues theory, which is where Clyde comes in, right? Because he says, look, the blues has been understood as an aesthetic tradition. It's been taken up in literature, but the social sciences have been slow to respond to this working class philosophy The blues has been understood as an aesthetic tradition. It's been taken up in literature. But the social sciences have been slow to respond to this working class philosophy of development.

You know, he really takes on how, you know, the social sciences, which I have a Ph.D. And I should say, you know, they they reproduce this planter block ideology. They blame poor people as the source of their own problems. They say that people in Mississippi or Appalachia, their poverty is an outcome of their family structure and bad behavior. And what Clayton's saying is that, you know, this is a cover. This is ideology, the hegemony for which, you know, he's following Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist, as a combination of, you know, coercion and consent. Right. So, you know, the planet Bach maintains of you know coercion and consent right so you know the planet bach maintains its dominance to coercion things like uh parchment you know imprison anyone who you see as a threat to white supremacy and to capitalism through the police i mean famously the police and

the clan worked together there was a you know a direct connection between the police and the mob through the attacks on labor unions uh you know breaking up any kind of effort to unite working class people across racial lines, but also through the social sciences, right? The ideological part, the ideas, the beliefs where consent is one to a planner agenda, which is really a ruling class agenda. which is really, you know, a ruling class agenda. I'm glad you mentioned black reconstruction. I mean, I feel like it's come up multiple times in the past couple of months because, I don't know, you have people on the left and they see these things about calls for defunding the police and they say, well, you know, we can't get bogged down in these kind of things.

You know, we have to keep our eye on the sort of universal programs and all this. And it's like, well, you don't understand. And this was one of the biggest, as you said, experiments in radical democracy. You can see, you can sense reading Du Bois' writing that the promise of this era and what it actually could have held for the future of this country. And I think that's the tradition that we tap into when we, you know, go into the streets and we protest, you know, for black lives. And I mean, it's just it's very discouraging to see other people on the left kind of just, you know, shoo that away or I don't know. No, I agree. I just say quickly, I mean, you know, this is one of the things that Du Bois is dealing with in the 1930s. Right. I mean, amidst we're, you know, in the worst economic

crisis since the 1930s. And Du Bois kind of says, look, we're blind and led by the blind. And he's referring to leaders, you know, in the labor movement who could see no leadership coming out of that reconstruction era applying to the labor movement, right? And, you know, fortunately, Du Bois intervened in this moment of the age of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, to say black workers could play a decisive role. And indeed they did. Five hundred thousand black workers in the CIO. It led to a huge advance for working people. We have no victories for, you know, the general working class in this country outside of the black working class and, you know, an ally in the multiracial labor movement. black working class and, you know, an ally in the multiracial labor movement. I mean, you know, I'm fond of, you know, kind of my summary of Du Bois is when the black working class is moved, it quickens the step of the working class as a whole.

And certainly, you know, we can see that in the contemporary period. And, you know, this separation, you know, it's identity politics, it's, you know, class politics. I mean, you know, I can I don't want to dismiss that out of hand. But I also want to say that, you know, I hope our friends on the left will listen very carefully to how that must feel. If you've been putting your life on the line in the poorest places with the most repressive states saying that, you know, we have to end racism and white supremacy. And they said, no, you need universal programs and social welfare.

I mean, you know, I think that the way that the left can actually, you know, confront racism and capitalism is by, you know, putting our shoulder to the wheel in an overall struggle. That's a great way to put it, Jordan. And, you know, speaking of the 1930s, that's actually a great segue into the next question I had. I kind of wanted to dig a little deeper. And earlier I mentioned he lists out 12 planter mobilizations. But I kind of wanted to dig a little deeper

into the 9th and 10th ones because, you know, I think, maybe you disagree, but it seems to me like what he's saying is that they're largely responsible for the spread of the blues and the blues epistemology across the United States. And so, you know, the ninth mobilization occurred during the New Deal, you know, during the New Deal years of the 30s and 40s. And he describes it as an enclosure movement. You know, and this is kind of a history that I was not really aware of. You hear about stuff like the Agricultural Adjustment Act

and the Resettlement Administration. You know, these are generally regarded as pretty radical institutions. But the history he tells is that they kind of facilitated and worked with the planter block to sort of complete this process of enclosure. So, you know, what happened to black communities in the South during the New Deal years? And how did the planter class

collaborate with what he calls the New South Movement? That's one we haven't talked about yet, actually, the New South Movement and the New Deal movements to facilitate the removal of black sharecroppers from the South. That's right. Yeah. Well, thanks for this question. I mean, you know, Clyde uses the term enclosures, I think, in the way that Karl Marx did in the first volume of Capital to describe the kind of central role of violence and force in capitalist development, you know. And I think this attention to violence is really, or coercion, is really central to understanding how planners maintain their forms of extreme exploitation and literally use what was called the Agricultural Adjustment Act passed in 1932 under FDR. a federal expenditure that was supposed to go to sharecroppers and to tenant farmers, and

that money was appropriated by landlords and landowners, and instead they used it to purchase mechanized farm equipment like cotton pickers, and what they did, therefore, was use that mechanization of agriculture to do things like mass evict poor African-Americans, sharecroppers and workers. And this led to a kind of a mass migration out of the South. And so this enclosure movement, what he's doing is he's saying, look, this is parallel to the rise of capitalism in England. And he's saying, look, this is parallel to the rise of capitalism in England.

I mean, you started by saying, you know, one of the things he says with Katrina is that you have to look back to the rise of capitalism. He's saying, if you want to understand what's happening with, you know, 20th century social and economic policies like the New Deal, you have to situate it in the history of capitalism as a whole. of capitalism as a whole. And, you know, because of the New Deal in that way was not simply, you know, benevolent liberals trying to, you know, help poor people in the midst of, you know, terrible inequality, but rather an effort to save capitalism. And I think that's, you know, important because what Clyde's saying is like, look, the plantation block used New Deal federal subsidies to starve African-Americans amidst this terrible economic situation. I mean, you know, the unemployment rates for the working class as a whole were some 35% in the U.S. and they were, you know, overwhelmingly African-Americans, but who were, you know, the last hired because of Jim Crow hiring policies and the first fired, which made them, you know, disproportionately fill the ranks of the surplus population.

And, you know, this is important because what Clyde is arguing, and it's a big intervention in the literature, by the way, is that basically, you know, FDR, Franklin Roosevelt's response to the crisis, Franklin Roosevelt's response to the crisis, and particularly the Delta crisis, gave rise to the Star of the Beast, you know, program that we associate with subsequent right wing, you know, in Development Drown, the book that I co-edited of his, he says, look, the mass expulsion of African-Americans from the South had already been set in motion and thousands of communities were being starved into non-existence in the New Deal. Unlike the situation with the first Reconstruction, the Roosevelt administration did not comprehensively address African-American voting, civil and human rights in the South. And so this led this inattention to the fundamental political and economic and social rights of African-Americans led them to be displaced. And I think that's what he means about how it led to the nationalization of the blues, because, you know, a lot of blues musicians who came off of those plantations. I mean, you know, they moved to places like Chicago. I mean, look at the staple singers, man. Where was pop from, you know? Yeah. And, you know, pop worked on one of those plantations, right? And that's where he learned to play the blues.

It's really interesting because you listen to that, you think it's gospel, but Pop's playing the blues on that. They're singing gospel, right? So it's contradictory in that sense, right? The ruling class has its interest in basically expropriating, you know, you know, federal funds to line elite pockets. It displaces African-Americans who look are basically like, you know, landless having to migrate to cities for, you know, urban proletarian jobs. the dynamic you've got you know is the relationship between you know expropriation of land forced migration and exploitation and urbanization in the post-world war ii period so that's the situation that you know that gives rise to the you know national dynamics and the globalization

of the blues as working class philosophy because of course of course, you know, Mississippi Blues people could get more money playing in Chicago, you know, or London, for that matter, than, you know, in Mississippi. Right. And so, you know, it's that kind of contradictory dynamic that I think Clyde's talking about. And I think this the last thing I'll say is this kind of flies in the face of even a lot of popular interpretations. I mean, Clyde notes that, you know, a lot of unions saw Roosevelt as a defender of workplace rights, you know, supporter of the CEO. Many African-Americans saw and see the new deals and advancement for civil rights and economic security. There's no doubt about it. But he's saying at the same time, federal government was subsidizing you know basically the the planner class and i tell you you know you want to test this thesis look at the tva you know and how it came into being i mean you had southern racists

uh embrace that policy um give themselves infrastructure um you know so i, there's a lot more to say about that. But, you know, thanks for the question. Yeah, no, just as a side tangent, you know, you were talking about the globalization of the blues. One of my favorite parts of the book is he's talking about how the blues went to England. And then when the England blues singers like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and every, you know, Jimmy Page came to America, they were like talking to these music critics,

and these critics were asking them who their favorite musicians were. They were like, oh, Muddy Waters. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, yes. Yes, Sonny Boy Williams. And these critics were like, who are you talking about? They had no idea. I just thought that was pretty incredible. Man, I recently watched a recording with Aretha Franklin,

and I saw Mick Jagger in the audience of this church, and he was grooving in the background. It's just another example of that kind of connection. I kind of gained a new admiration. I mean, the Rolling Stones are rock stars, so I'm sure they did all kinds of bad things, but they were, I think he talks about at one point, supposed to go on Ed Sullivan,

and they refused to go on unless Muddy Waters came on stage with them or Howlin' Wolf, one of the two. And I was like, that's pretty admirable. Yeah, that makes me appreciate it a little bit more. Yeah. But no, so, you know, going back to this sort of era, you know, something that sort of facilitated in this, you mentioned mechanization. And so this would probably be a good entry point for us to talk about the Green Revolution. And, you know, this was the era when we have the creation of the neoplantation. And, you know, this was done with the Green Revolution practices like, you know, herbicides, mechanization, crop diversification. You know, when we talk about

the political economy of white supremacy, this is one of those cases where there are sort of direct lines running from these Green Revolution practices to Jim Crow. One of the things he talks about that I found was fascinating was you have this office in Stoneville, Mississippi, the Delta Experiment Station, where they tried a lot of these new green revolution techniques like crop diversification, new strains of cotton. And it actually shared office space with the Delta Council, which was this, you know, planter advocacy lobbying group that was behind a lot of the Jim Crow enforcement policies, etc. So I guess my question is, what can you tell us about what a green revolution is you know where

and why it's been an effective tool of you know imperial control around the globe because he mentions that it's been used in mexico and other places as well and and how is it beneficial to the planner block's agenda in the region yeah no you know clyde argues that the violent enclosure process that we just talked about with the Great Depression led to the consolidation of the planter block hegemony through the Green Revolution, which, as he knows, was a central feature of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, particularly in the post-World War II period. particularly in the post-World War II period? Like you said, it was launched in Mexico at the same time, India, and China along very similar lines.

What was the policy? The policy sought to basically promote increased rates of agricultural productivity, right, in the third world, so we can link Mississippi to what's happening in China in that sense, basically with fertilizers and with irrigation. And what Clyde does is he joins a body of scholarship in showing that these, while ostensibly simply about promoting increased productivity, were basically counter-revolutionary or counter-insurgent policies designed to contain the advances of revolutionary movements in the third world.

You know, anti-colonial struggles that were rocking the whole planet in that period. And so, you know, in that way, the term refers to both increased agricultural production and the political, economic and ideological shifts that were coincident with the expansion of U.S. hegemony over the global political economy in the post World War Two world. And so, you know, elites all around the world associated food production with the fight against communism, right? In China, you see that, you know, I mean, after all the Chinese had just won the revolution in 1949. In Korea, you see that

where the U.S. wages the Korean War, which, by the way, is ongoing. So, look, there's a parallel process happening in the Mississippi Delta. Planners used new technologies to increase agricultural productivity, but they also use these technologies to attack union organizers, to, you know, turn the South into a bastion of anti-communism and anti-unionism and low levels of environmental production in order to attract capital and maintain capitalist hegemony through the planter monopolization of political and economic power.

I mean, look, this is monopoly capitalism as it's taking place in a particular region. And so we're still living with the legacies of this today. I mean, you know, look, I think that elites from Mississippi and from the region since the 70s have basically shaped domestic and foreign policy to deleterious effect. policy to deleterious effect. And the strategies that Clyde Woods documents in Development Arrested, anti-unionism, enclosures, forced displacement, and so on, have been promoted by Southerners ever since. I mean, that's the story of Bill Clinton that he starts and ends the book with, right? Don't forget Jimmy Carter. So, you know, and Clyde's not the only one to argue this. I mean, historian Nancy McLean has done some very important work about how the rise of the region since World War Two has had to do with the nationalization and globalization of basically this, you know, neo-Confederate agenda around the country and the world. And, you know, Clyde's saying, look, this model of development has its roots in capitalist slavery, in the plantocracy, gets cultivated in Jim Crow, globalized with the Green Revolution. And, you know, we're still seeing the hellspawn

vomited on the planet resulting from this. Yeah, one of the, I Yeah, and it's so embedded in even just the most mundane cultural artifacts that one of the things I didn't know about this is there was the Delta Council, but there was also the National Cotton Council, which was directly responsible for, like I said, enforcing a lot of these segregation, Jim Crow policies. And I didn't know this until I read the book, but they're responsible for that jingle that everybody knows by heart, uh, Cotton the Fabric of Our Lives.

That was created by the National Cotton Council and then, you know, expropriated to the rest of the country. But no, I mean, this kind of moves us up into the 60s and the freedom movement and, you know, as Clyde calls it the second reconstruction and so yeah how how were some of these entities participating in the the sort of fight against

the freedom movement throughout the 1960s like I said you had the Delta Council the National Cotton Council but there was also Citizens Councils, the Sovereignty Commissions, which was basically a private intelligence agency for the state of Mississippi that was, if I'm not mistaken, I think responsible for assassinating Medgar Evers and other civil rights leaders. What was the sort of ties between these organizations and what were they doing throughout this period? Very important question. They were linked by the formation in response to the challenges of the, you know, long black freedom movement and its alliance with radical labor struggles right through the 30s and into the 1940s and certainly, you know, throughout the post-World War II period. So, you know, these things didn't emerge all of a sudden, you know, after Brown v. Board of Education. You know, they formally institutionalized in that period.

But, you know, one of the things that Clyde is showing us is that their platform promoted things with deep historical roots in the political economy of the plantation. So what did they do concretely that unified them in their opposition to the freedom struggle? Economic retaliation against protesters who sought to use the victory of Brown v. Board of Education to integrate public schools. And what did they do in response to this massive effort to integrate public schools. And what did they do in response to this massive effort to integrate public schools with federal backing is they basically created a separate system, highly unequal, of private schools for white students. And so, you know, to maintain,

students and so you know to maintain you know jim crow uh segregation through uh privatization and then we have uh they're joined through a dixiecrat revolt that happens in you know 1948 and basically in opposition to truman's modest i would say cold War civil rights measures, you know, anti lynching legislation. And what they do is they describe opposition to the Jim Crow racial order and economic order. You know, it's what I term a kind of Jim ideological framework to legitimate racism and white supremacy without having to use the old codes. And this has taken place in this Cold War global context when it's starting to become a liability, a kind of Achilles heel for the American ruling class, that you've got all these socialist countries and third world countries pointing out, like, look, why would the rest of the world kind of consent to U.S. hegemonic leadership when it treats African-Americans and people of color in the way that it does? Right. And so you go around the world and you read left leadership. I mean, they're just hammering, you know, U.S. leadership. And I think in response to this, you know, the Dixiecrats are also, you know, very integral in, you know, fomenting anti-communism.

You know, so if you were in opposition, you know, black or white to Jim Crow, you're perceived to be a communist, you know, which is which is pretty interesting, you know, whether you were or not. I mean, you know, you can see that, like, you know, Dr. King went to Highlander for the 25th anniversary, you know, that great, you know, School for Freedom co-founded by Miles Horton. And, you know, he was one of the keynote speakers and he gets there's a spy that was sent in by the state. They snapped a picture of him there. And there was a communist journalist there from the CP. And, you know, anyway, they try to connect him to Pete Seeger, who, as you know, was also connected on the left and everything. And they go around the South and they start, you know, the citizens councils and the racist organizations in this whole network of white

supremacists they put up these billboards and they say you know dr king's a communist so they start you know smearing opposition and using a kind of beer and anti-communism to advance a white supremacist agenda without having to say you know color don't leave right it's a law and order and it's a security agenda right so but there's also so this dixie crat revolt It's a law and order and it's a security agenda. Right. So but there's also this Dixie Crat revolt. It's a Cold War moment, but it's also a mass exodus of whites. Conservatives out of the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. So sometimes we think about the kind of right-wing turn in american politics you know goes back to goldwater's campaign in the 1960s i think one of clyde's points here is to say no look at the dixie crap revolt and like you say the alliance

between the delta council the national council the citizens councils know, so it's not like a backlash against the movement of the coercion, but also dressing themselves up. I mean, they're not coming out in Klan robes anymore. They're going to be white citizens councils. They're going to wear ties and be in the business meeting. And this, I think, is more devastating in terms of maintaining ideological hegemony, because then they're able to control the banks and finance and you know uh you know the ports i mean certainly mississippi elites are linked to you know elites in new orleans a global port city you know what used to be the the wall street of the confederacy as well

and so you know and what this what this does i think you know c Clyde's intervention is to say that, look, this violent opposition, but also this ideological attack on the freedom movement right from the 1930s and the New Deal onward has been kind of etched you know, all of a sudden, what, you know, the March on Washington happens in 1963. And, you know, civil rights legislation is passed in 64. Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. And we've had what, like, you know, harmony ever since. And he's saying, far from this, this is a sanitized version of U.S. history that thrives on the production of historical ignorance. It's a situation that belies the fact that what this alliance did between the National Council, the Citizens Council, the Sovereignty Commission, is it linked, you know, intelligence gathering, Is it linked, you know, intelligence gathering, the use of the state to infiltrate organizations, the control over the means of production and over finance, hostility to federal programs of intervention from the New Deal to the Great Society programs,

or the appropriation of those funds to reproduce planer hegemony, and also the belief, which is fundamental. reproduce planar hegemony and also the belief which is fundamental i think we do well to remember this you know as we go to the polls now uh and authoritarian forms of governance you know not the least of which you know parchment prison and i think that you know this political economy still with us yeah well and even to go even further they you know they even as you were saying they even made interventions in social sciences, but in science itself. Like reading this, like the idea that soil, I mean, like they changed the very concept of soil itself from something that was like this sort of like holistic organic thing into a machine. You know, you put the seeds in, you just spray it with herbicides. I don't know.

It's fascinating to read. But, you know, I think this brings us up into the sort of 1980s. I think this is really the sort of meat of this. This is the part that Tom and I really kind of wanted to talk about just because it so closely mirrors, you know, what we see on a daily basis and what we've seen in the last few years. what we see on a daily basis and what we've seen in the last few years. But, you know, we started our episode off talking about the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission, Bill Clinton, you know, and these attempts to sort of, you know, create a sort of new development agenda for the region.

By the 1980s, the planter block had largely defeated the civil rights freedom movement, as Clyde calls it the second reconstruction but they themselves encountered a new series of crises most of them were concentrated in the production of cotton itself there were rising commodity prices soil exhaustion overproduction and declining federal subsidies for the planter block you know among other things this meant that this, and this was one of the most fascinating parts of this. I've never heard it sort of worded this way, but when I heard it, it was like a light bulb just going on. It was just such an incredible moment. But, you know, Clyde talks about this process of creating the development commission as a way for the planter

block to identify a new set of institutional rents that could be extracted from the region's institutions. And, you know, again, as soon as I encountered that sentence, as soon as I encountered that idea, it was just like, you know, a flame going off in my head. Like, all these other things that I've seen over the past few years in this region make so much more sense. When you look at these development commissions as a way for the ruling class, the elite in the deep south, delta south, it's the planter block. Here, it's the, maybe you would call it the coal block or

the coal industry or whatever you want to call it. But, you know, they have to use these commissions to, like I said, identify institutions that can be extracted institutional rents from. So I kind of want to talk about this concept of an institutional rent. You know, what is it? What is Clyde getting at there? Yeah. Well, I think that it might be worth actually me just quoting Clyde on this, right? I think that if we go to, if listeners want to, if they have a copy, they can look at, you know, page 278 at the bottom and 279. And I think

that one of the things that he's describing is that acts of violence by law enforcement and by employers can be, and I'm quoting him, classified as institutional rents. The deeply embedded traditions of industrial redlining, occupational segregation, and union busting all fall within this category. State research and infrastructure funds are used to fund planter block projects while local school systems, hospitals, and governments collapse. State regulated utilities, water, and health systems can either directly support the plantation's development agenda or implicitly support it through their failure to regulate. Additionally, local water and sewer services, health care and education are either underfunded, selectively funded, or unfunded. Finally, the exemption of plantation lands from tactation severely limits local fiscal capacity and necessitates an increased dependence upon declining federal and state funds.

And so I think that, you know, I couldn't possibly reproduce, you know, Clyde Wood's prose on his own, so it feels important to, you know, think through his own words. And I think, you know, one of the things that he's showing is the planner block is able to use things like institutional rents in the way that he just defined it and to advance the agenda through a variety of strategies i mean they do things like public hearings uh conferences studies but also and i think importantly public policy recommendations i mean uh and planning you know after all clyde was a planner. He was really, you know, got his

PhD in planning. He studied under Ed Soja there. And he was interested in how planners' visions were being taken up by the plantocracy to counter the historic vision of development being promoted by African-American workers. And I think that, you know, one of the consequences of their agenda and Klein looks at, you know, particularly documents being produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It's kind of late in the game for most people to be thinking about plantation.

They think this is kind of dead and gone. It's to show how they financed these series of studies, right? And, you know, I won't go through everything because I'm really just hoping people will buy a copy of the book from Verso. But one of the things that he shows, and I think this continues to plague a lot of research, is that it assiduously avoids any discussion of race and poverty and instead sought to legitimate the hegemony of the neopl neo plantation block and naturalize increased poverty amongst black people and poor whites. And that's really important. Right. For what Clyde's thinking about with a political economy of white supremacy. Right. What do they do? And this has deep roots. Right. I mean, you know, he thinks about it in some form.

You know, one of the people on his dissertation committee was Gerald Horn, his major historian, you know, as well. And I think, you know, Clyde was in dialogue with Gerald. But there's a kind of a cross class unity being built through race, you know, where for the longest time you could get poor whites to identify with a ruling class and against poor black people in Black Studies tradition, African-American Studies want to point out is what this has done is obscure the declining material conditions for working class people as a whole. So you have people in near, not identical, but near similar conditions in terms of access to education, health care, housing, housing, you know, nutrition daily, just like caloric intake, you know, talk to hate each other.

Right. And not to see that they have the same shared interest. And so I think that's one of the things that Clyde is really trying to get us to grapple with, but for working class people to be able to have what he's describing as a third reconstruction or, you know, a development agenda that, you know, builds on the 1860s and 1870s, the advances of the 1960s and the 1970s and carries it into the to the 21st century. And, you know, there have been encouraging signs that Clyde's, you know, invitation to the social sciences has been received warmly. And there's a whole new generation of scholars and activists and podcast hosts, you know, reading Clyde's work to think

about the stakes in this battle between these, you know, competing development agendas. And, you know, so that's a really beautiful thing. I agree. I mean, when I finished the book, you know, I finished it feeling very inspired. And, you know, like that there was some hope for the future, which is very hard to find these days. These are very bleak times, and that's part of the reasons why I enjoyed it so much. I think we're sort of winding down here. We've kind of run the whole sort of gamut of his argument and what he's presenting.

But I kind of just want to put a sort of finer point on this. His methodology is that he's essentially taking a region and he's saying, look, no matter where you live in the world, you can learn a lot about the world through this one region, through what is happening here. It's not going to be the same everywhere you go, obviously. But it can tell us important things about political economy, how power operates and works. And so I was just wondering, like, you know, and I don't want to put too much pressure on you, but, like, what do you think Clyde would have said about the Delta region today? And how do you think he would have connected it to what's going on in the world right now?

Like, you know, we have Trump, the alt-right, the police state. Are these things that Clyde would have connected to the regions around New Orleans and the Delta region? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that he was really thinking a lot about, you know, right up until the end of his life. And remember, you know, right up until the end of his life. And remember, he's writing, you know, right up until 2011. He's working furiously. He's seeing, you know, the beginnings, I think, of a crisis of hegemony or a crisis of legitimacy of capitalism. So, you know, while he didn't see, you know, the rise of Black Lives Matter, you know, the mobilizations after Trayvon Martin, after Mike Brown gets, you know, murdered in Ferguson Matter, you know, the mobilizations after Trayvon Martin, after Mike Brown gets, you know, murdered in Ferguson or, you know, the uprising in his hometown of Baltimore

following the murder of Freddie Gray, you know, he wouldn't have been surprised by that at all. I mean, because he understood that there was, again, a dialectic of resistance and power. I mean, he started out by reminding us that, you know, hegemonic forms of rule are always subject to contestation, to resistance from, you know, below. And, you know, there's been a kind of flowering of struggles, you know, in this post-2008 period, right, leading to, you know, one hand a kind of deepening radicalization, you know, questioning of the fundamentals of the political economy. I think, you know, we saw elements of that certainly with, you know, Occupy popularizing, you know, the 99% versus the 1%. I think you see this, you know, in formations like the, you know, the movements for Black Lives who, you know, are articulating really a public policy program to think about, you know, taking the money that's being, you know, invested in policing and

prisons and being reinvesting that into, you know, social programs to, you know, do things like address the unemployment crisis that plagues black communities and other working class communities. And I think Clyde would have been, you know, very enthused by this. But, you know, he wouldn't have been surprised by trump at all i mean right like i mean one donald trump you know parrots uh a rhetoric that i think segregationist gave him you know i mean this this whole thing of you know uh scapegoating uh migrants you know appeals to vicious nationalisms, you know, outright support of white supremacy like he did in Charlottesville, you know, both sides, you know, you know, coming out in support of murderers, you know, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, you know, right. Like going and, you know, publicly, you know, kind of, you know, just barely veiled support for far right. What they call alt-right, you know, far right neo-fascist formations like the Proud Boys.

Right. You know, QAnon. I mean, you know, all of this, I think Clyde would see as a resurgence, this neo-fascism, as we call it, which is, you know, in my judgment. And, you know, there's some good writers about this. I mean, John Bellamy Foster, I think, in the current period gets a lot of this right, you know, as well. But, you know, there's a neo-fascism represents an alliance, you know, between, you know, the billionaire class like Trump. Right. I mean, he's a symbol for monopoly capitalism, which Clyde Woods is talking about finance capitalism. Remember, he makes his money through real estate in New York City. Right. Right. You know, his father, a famous racist, gives him millions of dollars from exploiting residents through rents. Right. And, you know, thinking about the dominance of finance and real estate and financialization in this political economy.

Right. I think is intimately linked and the forms of legitimation, racism and nationalism. Right. The resurgence. I think I would say, well, you need to go and understand where those scripts were first forged. Right. And so, you know, when we think about how to confront this alliance, the billionaire class, the symbols of finance, capital, monopoly, capital and real estate and a lower middle strata. Right. And this lower middle strata is in the midst of, you know, the worst economic economy and being redirected towards crime in the streets, black people, Muslims, migrants and so on. we're seeing is that you know Clyde would suggest I think for us to go back and think about Antonio Gramsci and you know the ways that we might conceptualize hegemony and crisis right and there's a moment like this where the political economy of neoliberalism it's kind of it's running out of steam, right? It can't solve the problems

that it creates. And so, you know, elites like Trump are, you know, blaming the poor and the people of color and migrants, you know, as the source of problems to distract from the more fundamental causes of this crisis. And, you know, every crisis, I think, creates an opportunity, right? And if we go back to Clyde, the opportunity that we have here is to go back and study, you know, a region like the Mississippi Delta and to look and say, you know, amidst this crisis of neoliberalism, amidst this crisis of hegemony, here's an opportunity to shift the structure of understanding. How do we do that? How do we introduce a new common sense? I mean, one of the things is to say that all those statistics that I described at the beginning, you know, the highest rates of unemployment, the highest rates of poverty, we're seeing Mississippi, you know, get ravaged by COVID-19. We're seeing, you know, disproportionate death rates among black people,

you know, huge infection rates. All of that are not natural. OK, these are this is not an inevitable product of nature. This is not divine. This is not God given. Right. This is a product of a political economy with deep historical roots. That's human made. Right. And if we want to, I think, learn from Clyde Woods and development arrested, then we will go into those communities and learn to listen to the solutions that are being developed, you know, at the grassroots, working class communities, labor unions, you know, social movements that are addressing the ecological crisis, right? And, you know, what he described as kind of blues geographies,

the cries of the new society struggling to be born. I mean, this is the thing about a moment like this. The old world is dying and the new one can't be born. And I think Clyde would encourage us to say that it's our responsibility to try to bring that new one into being by confronting these fundamental facts of political economy. But to do that, we have to get better at studying U.S. history. We have to be better about learning from the expressive culture,, you know, visual cultures that are born out of the struggles of working class Mississippians,

black Mississippians in particular, and try to understand the new alliances that are being forged, you know, out of that region, the kind of global justice agenda. Because, you know, he was always saying to me, and I think other students that he mentored, you know, there's a way in which we neglect the extent to which the freedom agenda, you know, that, you know, was forged in the Reconstruction generation, revived in the second Reconstruction with SNCC, you know, confronting the plantocracy, the kind of heroes that came out of that generation. Fannie Lou Hamer, we have to go back. Fannie Lou Hamer should be, you know, a part of all of our vocabulary. Study those working class leaders, working class visions, working class theories, build a new society. That task remains the top agenda for all people.

So I just really appreciate the question and the engagement. I hope I've done Clyde Woods justice. He taught me so much, and he taught a lot of us so much. And so I come at this with a lot of humility and respect. And anybody that knows him knows that he was a gigantic figure. He should be remembered as one of the most important intellectuals of his generation. And I just want to thank you guys for, you know, this opportunity. It's really important. I'm honored to have the chance to speak about this important work.

We thank you, Jordan. Like I said at the beginning of this, this is a book that has helped me understand where I live in my own place in it, much deeper in a much more productive way. And I think that most people, if they would read the book, they would feel the exact same way, and I definitely feel like you've done them justice. This has been a really great interview and discussion, and Tom, did you have anything that you wanted to talk about before we let Jordan go? No, I was just going to say,

when Terrence and I were talking about doing this show, I was talking to a friend of mine from Tullahoma, Tennessee last night. We were talking about, I was talking a little bit about this book and kind of encouraging him to read it and whatever. We were talking about how the blues epistemology really is still alive, even if you look at how groups of people form around a beat. If you're talking about Newleans bounce music that gave us little wayne and master p and all those people if you're talking about like the the the triple

rhyming couplets of three six mafia in memphis you could draw a through line you know from the blues tradition to like those people leave it today and it's uh it's just been interesting to hear you talk about it sort of uh cement it more in my mind for me you know i think when i got into to left politics i started with a guy like cordell west you know who in his own inimitable style would he said something one time he was like you know i'm a jazz man and in the life of the mind and a blues man in the world of ideas and i'm like that's a really beautiful sentence i don't know what the hell that means that's a really beautiful sentence. I don't know what the hell that means, but it's a really beautiful sentence. But Radin Woods has kind of tipped me off to what he was getting at there.

So, yeah, I just appreciate you coming out, Jordan. And it's sort of connecting all these dots from somebody that knew him. So, thank you. Thank you, Tom. I appreciate it. I grew up listening to the 666 Mafia in Memphis. And, you know, Memphis needs to be understood as part of the Delta. Right. I mean, you know, and in that sense, you know, like I really appreciate that you've drawn this connection between the blues and hip hop and rap.

Right. It's an oral tradition of working class communities. You go back and you listen to those lyrics of 666 Mafia and everything, you know, like, you know, they're talking about making low wages at Mickey D's. Yeah. Right. I mean, and, you know, when they're doing that, they're offering a critique of this political economy of globalization and of capitalist restructuring. And so, you know, and carrying that.

I mean, I know that was early 90s and everything like this, but I think to carry it forward into the 21st century. Who knows how it will be reinvented, how these traditions change traditionally. Tom, I just really appreciate the chance to be in dialogue with you all and to learn about your work. Hat tip to Jack Norton for the introduction to you guys. I really appreciate it. Definitely. Well, Jordan, before we let you go, do you have anything you want to plug or, you know, get out there that you'd like people to check out?

Well, you know, I would just say again, you know, Development of Aspen, The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta has been re-released by Verso with the collaboration of Ruth Wilson Gilmore who is a geographer at the City University of New York at the Graduate Center written a very important foreword and I would also say if you haven't already, in addition to Development Arrested, which we've spent would also say if you haven't already um you know in addition to development uh arrested um which we've spent the time talking about today take a look at development drowned and reborn is available by the university of georgia press you can find out you know details on their website and i think

these two books together you know should be studied to understand, you know, the unfinished struggles for freedom, for economic justice and for global justice being waged in Mississippi and in Louisiana. And I think they can be used in addressing the crises that we face, you know, the intersecting COVID crisis, the economic crisis, the political crisis, and this resurgent white supremacy and nationalism that we see all around us. And that way, you know, Clyde Woods lives on. So Clyde Woods, present day. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, you mentioned COVID. It's a man-made thing. I mean, the crisis created from it.

And Development Drowned and Reborn is about how Katrina was also man-made. It was an environmental fact, but the crisis that came afterwards was man-made. And I think that we're seeing something very similar with COVID. So definitely check that out. Jordan, thank you so much for coming on. We'd love to have you on again. This has been really great. Anytime.

Thanks so much for the invitation. I'd love to come back sometime. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks so much. And we will talk to you soon. Boy, you've been living in the big city Broken, had to get a loan

But you can hurry back to Mississippi Cause Bilbo is dead and gone Yes, he's gone Well, he had to put it down I feel like a lonesome stranger in my own

hometown © transcript Emily Beynon