Episode 94, 'The New Age of Empire' with Kehinde Andrews (Part II - Further Analysis and Discussion)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2021
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introduction
Western civilisation is the most successful in history. Built on the shoulders of science, industry and democracy, enlightenment philosophy gave birth to the scientific revolution that has increased the quality of life for millions. The Western political drive for democracy has given rise to the largest political representation of people in history, and supranational bodies like the United Nations ensure that inequality and injustice are a thing of the past. Shortly, a Green New Deal and universal basic income will solve the remaining of society's problems.
For Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, nothing could be further from the truth. In his eyes, Western civilisation is built not on Enlightenment ideals, but on the shoulders of genocide, slavery and colonialism. Since 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the West has systematically murdered, exploited, and hoarded the wealth of black and brown nations.
Unfortunately, this is not a thing of the past. Today we live not only with the legacy of Empire, but firmly within it! The age of Empire is alive and well, and its colonial, racist, white supremacist logic shapes every part of our lives today. Although the prospects look bleak, a revolution is possible. As Andrews says, Malcolm X was right: 'the ballot or the bullet, liberty or death, freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody'.
Contents
Part I. The Logic of Empire
Part II. Further Analysis and Discussion
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan |
| 0:07.2 | Scicast |
| 0:08.0 | Part 2. Further analysis and discussion. |
| 0:26.8 | So, Cahendi, you criticised the work of another one of our previous guests, which is the |
| 0:30.4 | Dutch historian Rooka Bregman in your book. |
| 0:32.8 | Bregman is a proponent of a universal basic income, higher taxes for the rich, a green |
| 0:37.2 | new deal, and the |
| 0:38.1 | eradication of borders between nation states. You argue that, quote, racism, white supremacy, |
| 0:43.7 | sexism and labor exploitation are the preserve of white Western politics. Not as Bregman argues |
| 0:50.0 | that historically politics was the preserve of the left and that he is too deeply steeped in Enlightenment thinking. Now, many people would say things like, well, a UBI, higher taxes for the rich, removal of borders. These are quite radical ideas. Are they misguided, Cahendi, or are they not radical enough to solve the problem of racism? Well, all of those things still depend on capitalism, right? Like, radical means to overturn, |
| 1:11.7 | it means to get rid of to me, to do something new. And just how having higher taxes isn't really going to deal with it. I mean, what we have, so there's a whole chapter in the book where I talk about its concept of imperial democracy, which really is about how do we share the spoils of empire equally in the West. So if you look at a lot of these left projects, That's really what they're about, right? |
| 1:08.0 | Like, tax and rich more, |
| 1:09.3 | help the NHS stuff, |
| 1:10.4 | but I always remind people that my family came to the United Kingdom under social democracy. There's also really racist as well. Like, you can have social democracy, it'd be really racist. That doesn't end racism. And if you think about someone like UBI, UBI is a perfect example, and actually go back to that canteen idea about the universal rights and to how it freezes people in white supremacy. I think in the book I give some quite concrete examples about how UBI has been practiced. There's a lot of experiments in the underdeveloped world because UBI is pegged to subsistence. And because of subsistence level is so low in places like Kenya, the Western |
| 2:01.2 | company, the charity can go in and like give 10,000 people money for a year, et cetera, to see how it runs. So all UBI would do is say, well, yeah, we're going to give people in Kenya, whatever, the equivalent of the, say, a thousand pounds a year, and then we're going to give people in the UK an equivalent of 20,000 pounds a year, and then we're going to freeze that. So yeah, that means that people in Kenya won't be in abject poverty, they'll be able to survive, but it literally locks in white supremacy. That's not a radical idea, and it's certainly not an anti-racist idea. So often when we talk about ideas that are radical ideas or ideas on the left, there's this idea that pops up called the cult of narcissism, where people often critique it and say that instead of trying to unify and elect political organizations that can actually enact practical change, that radicals and liberals will just argue the minutiae amongst themselves, whilst far-right organizations just lead the way, unchallenged, and will just increase equality worldwide further. How sympathetic are you to this view, Guindee? 100%. I mean, I think this is why I'm really trying not to make the debates totally academic. Well, the New Age of Empire really is a prequel to back to black, returning black radicalism, which tries to be more, we're trying to do this. We've started the Harembe organization of Black Unity. This is what Black Revolutional Politics looks like, whereas this book is more of a, we have to understand the problem first. This isn't really debate, I guess it's somebody just like, look, this is a way to understand the problem. And if you kind of see it through this way, it says we have to do different things. And that's kind of the point of this book, I think. We can debate it until the chaos come home. The question is, What do we do, really? Cahindy, in the book you say about the Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinking, |
| 3:08.4 | absent from this propaganda is there, the chaos come home. The question is, what do we do, really? Cahindy, in the book you say about the Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinking, |
| 3:26.2 | absent from this propaganda is the reality that Western concepts of reason can never be the |
| 3:32.0 | solution to the problem of racism they helped to create. |
| 3:35.4 | Freeing ourselves from the very nature of this intellectual framework is essential. |
| 3:40.5 | And I kind of thought this is really |
| 3:41.8 | powerful, but it just left me troubled because I thought, how can I do this? How can we do this? |
| 3:47.5 | If all of my concepts and the way I think about the world are kind of based on the products of |
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