Hillman: Well, I think, you know, to be ahead of the crowd -- I mean if I'm
going to be light about it -- then the best thing you could be today is to be a
Marxist. No one -- there isn't a Marxist left in Eastern Europe, there isn't a
Marxist anywhere -- no one will stand...I wanted to write a piece the other day
and say, "Yes, I'm Red!!" (laughs)
All the values that Marxism held have been jettisoned. And there were real
values in there. There were the values, for example, of class consciousness --
awareness of class -- which in America we don't want to be aware of. And class
is terribly important. "Baraka," Leroi Jones, said the other day, I was told,
"Listen, Brothers, this is not about black and white, O. J. Simpson. This is
about poor and rich." In other words, the people who stood up and cheered that
O.J. got free. And then he said, "Listen Brothers, and Sisters, O.J.'s not going
to show up, didn't show up in your neighborhood for twenty-five years---and he's
not going to show up now in your neighborhood.
Meaning this is a question of rich and poor. This is a class question. And I
think, to use "Red," or "Marxist" thinking, and I'm not up on it, but my idea of
it is that nothing could work better for the ruling class than to divide the
lower class by turning them against each other. This is a classic mode,
political mode! So, that's what we have. We have the whites turned against the
blacks, the blacks turned against the whites. They have exactly the same
interests, which is to control the corporate world in some way or another. To
get back into the action. But instead, they turn against each other. Who does
that suit? That suits the upper class, the ruling class, the rich. So I see much
more -- I mean this sounds ridiculous for a Jungian psychologist to be talking
this way -- but I see the way of looking at a lot that goes on today -- it would
be good to put back on a pair of Marxist glasses.
Another reason for this is the Marxist idea that capitalism can only survive by
its last phases, which is through war material. Producing. Having wars and
producing useless goods, which are not good for the people. That's what we're
doing. The biggest part of the budget is still the defense budget. We've got no
enemies anywhere. And it's still space shots. The spin-off of the trickle-down
from them is so remote, but it keeps all the constituencies voting, because
they've got a little piece of the defense industry, everywhere in the country.
Look at that through Marxist glasses. This was all said fifty years ago, a
hundred years ago, the way we are -- the way the country is functioning was
predictable according to Marx's view of capitalism.
Capen: So, where is the Left at this point? Is there a Left? How does one, how
does this mass of people become revived? You know, the term, the handle, "Left,"
is about the best you can find, I guess; but it doesn't really say what people
who would band together in this matter are all about...nevertheless --
Hillman: The Left? Right now, I read just recently that the unions are waking up
again. But if you would -- Did you see that? There's an election out: a man has
come in to run the AFL and the CIO.
It's a guy named [John] Sweeney, I think. But they said it may be necessary to
do insurrection in order to---in order to get justice, we may have to use
injustice. Things like that. Those are revolutionary sentences that you haven't
heard around here for how long? And he's the man who shut down the bridges
around D.C. There was a labor strife going on a year ago, and he shut the
bridges down, preventing people from moving in and out of the city. So he's an
activist. The Unions have lost all influence and, again, there's a tradition of
American spirit in the Unions. Their songs. There's great poetry about the
Unions. Go back into the '30s, the '20s, the beginning of the century. All of
that got wiped out. So there's some Left there. There's a little bit of the Left
left there.
Where else is the Left? See, the Left also turned away from Marxism, doesn't
even want to use the term, because that's outdated, that's means you're a
Stalinist, or a communist, or a, you know -- this dysfunctional system over in
Eastern Europe. Agreed! That's the way the Right Wing gets you: it says,
"Christ, you're a Marxist! Look how fucked up they were in Eastern Europe."
Of course they were. That isn't the point. The point is that Marxism is
essentially a Western -- Marx was a German, a Jew, and lived in England. It's a
Western set of ideas that belong in our world. We shouldn't have exiled it into
Communist China or somewhere. It belongs in ours! (laughs) Not Ho Chin Min's
world. It's our world! And it's a critique of our world. It's an insight into
the destructiveness of American -- of Western capitalism. That's the thing we
need to wake up to. In that sense, I'm a Marxist.
Capen: Maybe the intentions of Communism and the intentions of unions in America
fell for the same reasons, i.e., corruption. The system never really worked the
way it was intended to.
Hillman: Yeah. And usually the ruling class co-opts its enemies. The British did
it by giving them titles and knighting them. The old kings in the Middle Ages
gave them land and gave them, you know, made them whatever they wanted to be.
And the knights and baronies and so on were ways of keeping potential rivals
pacified. Then the British even gave their rebels in Africa, people who fighting
against them, gave them titles and brought them to England -- you know, that was
a way... The unions got bought by Capitalism, too. That was one of the reasons
they became ineffective and corrupt, yes.
Capen: So, with the population in this country -- Give someone a job and keep
them happy at six or seven dollars an hour, far less than anybody needs to live
these days. A forty-hour week, workers at five and six and seven dollars an
hour, are still below the poverty level here.
Hillman: Yes, that's right. That's right. But, were you making a point with that
that I missed?
Capen: That I think that you're lucky to have a job in this country and that's
why there's not so much of an uproar, mass or otherwise, because people need
this work, and they'll work fifty, sixty hours a week at those wages just to get
by. God help them if they have family!
Hillman: How did they get conned into thinking that they're lucky to have that
job, at six or seven dollars an hour, and that their women have to go off and
work? I'm talking about men to start with, and that the women have to go off and
work, and that the children have to go God knows where -- and so on and so
forth. Where did the idea come from that you're "lucky" to have a job? A job
without benefits, a job without pension, a job without health care, a job
without any permanence whatsoever. Which is now what we have, which is a return
to a very old kind of -- this is pre-labor union kind of work.
Capen: Everybody's a temp: Jeremy Rifkin's book, "The End of Work," spells it
out. So it's bad. And it's getting worse.
Hillman: It's still...the awakening hasn't come yet. The awakening hasn't come
yet. Sometimes I think therapy is partly responsible for the lack of awakening.
I've written about that one, you know. With "A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy
and the World's Getting Worse." Ventura, Michael Ventura, is co-author, and he
says many good things about that. But we both sort of imply that there's a lot
to do -- that the therapized world has internalized all the problems. So that
it's somewhere my problem, and my wife's problem, that we're not doing better.
(Laughs.) Think about that! And so we got to work on our relationship and on the
kids, and find the inner motivations, and what happened wrong with us in our
childhoods, and work it out somehow. Instead of thinking, "Shit! I'm being
abused right now and here by a system that doesn't care about me at all!"
Capen: I can't fathom this, though, because Newt Gingrich is an extraordinarily
popular individual in this country --
Hillman: Is he? I wonder about that. I don't know -- If I said to you, "Oh yeah?
Show me why! Who says he's popular?"
Capen: All I can point to is the support he gets in an election. And that's with
the caveat that only a third of the electorate votes.
Hillman: A third of the electorate votes, and I wish I knew the figures 'cause
I've read them. It's something like 14% of the actual American people are for
the present Puritan-Republican party. A very small percent of the actual---and
state by state, the margins were so tiny, in so many of those districts. So,
when you say he's popular, I -- that's media talk. I don't believe it.
Capen: Well, if people are not going to vote because they're disenchanted, and
therefore disenfranchise themselves, they don't want to take part in this
system---as a William Kunstler might advise them, you know. How do we change the
system? We're getting to a question here about whether this "awakening" is going
to be a violent awakening or not.
Hillman: Well, I hope it is not going to be a violent -- I don't use the word
"hope" Ever. But, I guess I let it slip out. I would not like to see a violent
awakening. That's number one. The awakening may simply be a repetition of the
awakening in other parts of our history. We must have had an awakening under
Theodore Roosevelt, when he began to fight the corporate interests, and the
railroads, and the steel barons. You know, big business, he fought big business,
and he got support.
It's not a matter that Capitalism is bad. It is unrestrained Capitalism that is
bad. And we have now this kind of corporate, unrestrained corporational world --
Get the government off my back -- may make sense to a little man who's burdened
-- he has a bake shop and he's got all these regulations about cleanliness and
worker damage and -- you know, he's got tons of papers to fill out, yes, I
understand that. But we need the government on the back of the Big Boys. Really.
There is nothing -- You know if we return everything to the States, which is
part of this new agenda, return the power back to the States -- Do you remember?
I remember -- what the States were like in the thirties and why the federal
government stepped in and took over. The police were corrupt in the States. The
South was running its own little fiefs. We had to have a federal government that
-- we had to have an FBI, because the police were corrupt. We had to have a
Federal Bureau of Investigation of impartiality -- people who did belong to the
local politicians. There was nothing more corrupt in America than local
politics! So we wanted a federal government, which was impartial, and dutiful,
and responsible. That was the idea in the thirties. We trusted the federal
government. Now, we've returned the power to the States, the States have less
power than the multinational corporations that live in those States, that are
incorporated in those States. Meaning there will be even less control over the
multinational corporations.
Capen: And then how is it possible to change that if every important figure in
the government, right up to the top, is in the pockets of the masters?
Hillman: Only by what you called, or I called, the awakening. The Awakening.
That's going to be harder and harder to do, because the pharmaceutical companies
are also engaged in keeping us numbed. Or anesthetized. Anaesthesia. Robert J.
Lifton, his new books on Hiroshima, and a very careful study of Truman's
decisions and the denials that are going on all through the culture about it.
And at the time of the decision. Lifton says we suffer from psychic numbing. But
I think we suffer from just plain physiological numbing (laughs) through the
vast amounts of drugs that have now been made over-the-counter drugs. Stuff I
used to take for this or that is now available over the counter. And you can now
be tested, the governmen or the pharmaceutical companies will give you tests to
prove that you're depressed, and now we know how to deal with that one, Prozac,
and so and so forth.
So, the awakening becomes more and more difficult. We have a culture where the
slaves vote for their masters. So, when you say how we going to change, have you
got some ideas?
Capen: Well, I just keep expecting it -- it's not going to be my job to run for
office, A. -- but I'm still waiting for the guy to come down the lane who's
going to offer people that change, this huge body of people who's disenchanted
with what's going on here. And I refuse to believe, for one, that people don't
know any better.
Hillman: Well, I think they do know better. In other words, they are -- maybe
they're awake, but inactive, or passive-aggressive as we say. Their aggression
is in frustration and rage, and not in .... action. But do you know Farrakhan's
march showed something. Didn't it? It showed that there's a -- a desire, a
really powerful desire to -- to move.
So, the changes that will come will not -- will have to come from, from below
our visibility. That was below our visibility. And they tried to keep it
invisible. The standard reaction to what black people do is keep it invisible.
Unless it's basketball. I mean, you know, there's this appalling turning --
turning black people into Al Jolson's minstrels, still. But they play on the
basketball courts now -- an appalling, appalling attitude!
But they tried to keep that million man march also invisible: "Only two hundred
thousand came." Maybe it was four hundred thousand! Well, let's take a recount,
maybe it was a little more. But no one wants to admit the peacefulness, the
inspirational quality, the coalition of people like Stevie Wonder, Jesse
Jackson, I mean -- the speeches that were made. Everyone wants to either
suppress it, make it invisible, distort it -- but that's the kind of movement
that can happen. That's a big thing, that many people walking, coming into
Washington!
And you'll notice that the Senate and the House weren't there. None of them said
a word.
Capen: A fairly respectable member of the Jewish community took out some ads in
some major papers across the country, and objected to the march, and compared
it, in asking the question, "Would you support a march by white supremacists?"
Now, what do we have here? Do have a paranoia that's as old as time?
Hillman: Probably we have a half a dozen different things. There's no doubt that
Farrakhan was racist, Anti-Semitic, Islamic, Anti-Christian. I mean, he was the
whole bag. All the people who were in that march probably know all that. That
doesn't mean they are that way, too. I think that's not the main issue. One of
the problems with -- when you say paranoia, you're talking about a Jewish
reaction?