https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/when-we-are-all-enemies-of-the-state/
PHOTO (L-R): Walter Rodney and Stuart Hall. Jim Alexander, the Stuart Hall Estate
Politics
Race
When We Are All Enemies of the State
A recently discovered 1974 speech by Stuart Hall on Walter Rodney—and why fascists fear ideas.
Stuart Hall
Jordan T. Camp
Caribbean History Protest
Inroduction by Jordan T. Camp
June 12, 2025
Boston Review
In September 1974, at a protest in London, Stuart Hall delivered a speech in support of fellow Caribbean-born radical intellectual Walter Rodney. After being offered a professorship at the University of Guyana, Rodney had resigned from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to accept the job. As he returned home to join his wife Patricia and their children in Guyana, Rodney was informed that the offer had been rescinded under pressure from the government of Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. A revised version of Hall’s remarks was recently discovered in the Stuart Hall Archive at the University of Birmingham; they are published here for the first time.
The “Reinstate Walter Rodney Now!” protest in London was just one episode in a global solidarity movement that erupted in support of Rodney, who by that point had established an international reputation following the publication of The Groundings with My Brothers (1969) and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). His scholarship focused on exploitation by the “colonial capitalist system.” Yet Rodney also argued that formal independence, including Guyana’s, was not the fulfillment of anticolonial struggle: on the contrary, it had resulted in the ascension of a governing class—exemplified by Burnham’s rule—that spoke the language of national liberation and socialist movements while advancing interests contrary to those of workers and peasants. Independence, Rodney warned, had not fundamentally altered the “map of the world” or shifted the material conditions of the masses.
The year 1974 was a pivotal historical moment—or as Hall and Rodney might say, a conjuncture. That year, Rodney became a member of the newly formed Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, a multiracial class alliance formed to resist the U.S.-backed Burnham dictatorship. The organization challenged the Burnham regime’s nationalist narratives, which portrayed racial conflicts between African and Indian working people as inexorable features of Guyanese society. For this work, Rodney and his comrades were subject to multiple arrests and harassment.
By 1974, Hall had been a leading figure of the British New Left for almost two decades, immersed in the political culture of “Caribbean Marxism” in dialogue with other radical intellectuals like C. L. R. James. In these remarks, Hall writes that Rodney had been criminalized by the “caretakers of neo-imperialism” and targeted by the Burnham regime for his ideas, which made their way “outside the strictly academic context, because he insisted on talking to and with ordinary people.” Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s recently translated prison writings, Hall argues that Rodney was a “shining and striking example” of a revolutionary, organic intellectual.
Hall also understood the profound threat that Rodney’s work posed to the legitimacy of the Burnham regime, and he correctly anticipated the force of the state’s reaction. On June 13, 1980, Rodney was assassinated by a car bomb in Georgetown, Guyana. He was just thirty-eight years old. It would take over four decades to officially corroborate what Rodney’s family, colleagues, and comrades knew at the time: that the assassination was carried out by an agent of the Burnham dictatorship.
Today the legacies of both Hall and Rodney demonstrate the imperative of organic intellectuals to confront authoritarian nationalism and forge global solidarity. Over a half century after Hall’s speech, and forty-five years after Rodney’s assassination, their work speaks to our own moment of resurgent fascism with remarkable clarity.
The following text is published with the permission of the estate of Stuart Hall and with the generous support of Professor Nick Beech of the Stuart Hall Archive Project.
—Jordan T. Camp
1974 Speech by Stuart Hall
I am sorry that circumstances prevent me being with you today, to join again in the voices of protest raised against the actions of the Burnham Government with respect to Walter Rodney. But I am pleased to have the opportunity to say again, in summary form, the remarks I was privileged to address to the excellent London protest meeting organized a fortnight ago.
I was asked then to say something about Rodney’s work and position as a radical and committed black intellectual. Now it may seem odd to speak of Rodney’s intellectual work at a moment like this: for it is clear that the embargo which the Burnham government have laid against him is not intellectual in origin but political. However, it is not easy, or indeed, correct, to make this false distinction between intellectual work and politics. The Burnham government has itself given us an important political lesson in this respect. It is, first of all, because of his ideas that the Government fear[s] Rodney’s return to the Caribbean: because they know the power of critical ideas, powerfully and cogently expressed, to take root among people and to move them into action and organization. It is also because he has a special view of the role and responsibility of the intellectual that they fear him: because he has always taken responsibility for the propagation of his ideas outside the strictly academic context, because he has insisted on talking to and with ordinary people.
The government fears Rodney because it knows the power of critical ideas to move people into action.
It may be worth saying a word about this question of the relation between the intellectual and politics: it is a relation which is frequently misunderstood, not only abroad but amongst our own people, and perhaps especially by intellectuals themselves. Intellectuals are formed by their education, their training, the situations in which they work, the dominant definitions of intellectual work which they pick up like bad habits. Black intellectuals from the West Indies, in my experience, are especially prone to believe that intellectual work is, by definition, an elite activity—for other intellectuals only: and that it is only worth doing if it is done—as they say, “objectively,” in a framework of “value neutrality,” without the intrusion of commitments, biases, personal feelings or opinions: neutral men, standing outside history, judging and commenting on it in a way which leaves him free of the judgements he makes and of the things he finds out. This is a disastrous and crippling view. It utterly mistakes the role of the intellectual and the nature of intellectual work in its relation to politics.
Value neutrality, false objectivity of this sort may be possible in the natural sciences (though of course what one does with the things one finds out about nature cannot be “neutral”). But this sort of neutrality, I am convinced, does not belong within the human and historical sciences—whether your particular branch is history, economic, political science, literature or sociology. I say this particularly because so many of our gifted young men and women go into economics and the law, especially, and inhabit those professions as if they guaranteed them protection against the winds of politics and political controversy.
Of course, given the way educational chances are distributed in our society, only a very few men and women—and more men than women—ever get the chance to become full-time intellectuals. Often, these men and women work in schools, colleges, universities—in the academic world—and they tend to confuse the jobs they hold, the careers they are carving out for themselves, the whole restricted universe of Academia—for serious, critical intellectual work. They equate the restricted route they have been privileged to take to knowledge, with the functions of knowledge itself, with its production. Let me insist that “the academic” and “the intellectual” are not interchangeable terms: they are not the same thing: they may even be at the opposite ends of the scale. The academic life can actually prevent intellectuals [from] doing serious intellectual work. The academic world certainly encourages us to cut ourselves off from the transmission of ideas into action, the propagation of knowledge among the people. The fact is that, as Gramsci, the great Italian revolutionary and theorist once said, “all men are intellectuals,” though only a few are paid to do such work. All men, in so far as they think about what they do, apply thought to action, becomes self-conscious of their actions and their consequences, are intellectuals. If, then, we “full-time” intellectuals restrict our knowledge to those who have been fortunate enough to get full-time education and to work in universities, we are simply reproducing, by our own efforts, the unequal distribution of knowledge and education in our societies. We are simply contributing to the perpetuation of the “knowledge” of the few, and the ignorance of the many. Academics may be satisfied with that role: revolutionary intellectuals cannot be.
It is not possible, in my view, to study human societies, to study historical movements and developments, in a “value-neutral” framework. Knowledge is always from a certain point of view. It is always for this group or that. It always, either tells the story from the top downwards—making firmer the orthodox and prevailing interpretations of history—or it tells history from the bottom up, and thereby disrupts, displaces, challenges and subverts the dominant definition of things. There are lots of things we don’t know about slavery and the plantation: but there is no invisible point of “true objectivity” between a history of slavery told from the perspective of the slave-owner and the history of slavery told from the perspective of the slave. Of course, this does not mean that the intellectual is free to say whatever he likes, according to his personal beliefs. He has a commitment to the truth. He has a commitment to the complexity of events. He has a commitment to discover things we did not know, to expand the range and reach of our common knowledge. His commitment to the truth, to the complexity of historical reality, however, is not due to the fact that he must obey certain canons of academic scholarship. He has a commitment to the truth because we need to know, because we need to be right about the past and the present, so that we can actively take hold of history and shape the future for ourselves. Sometimes, then, the intellectual must tell us unpalatable truths—things we would much sooner not have heard. He must not bow before these difficulties. On the other hand, he must never confuse commitment to the truth with value-neutrality, with standing outside of history.
In this respect, Walter Rodney has set us a shining and striking example—his whole life, so far, has been a living testimony to the points I have been trying to make. Long ago, he set out to find out and to tell as fully and truthfully as he knew, the facts about the relationship between Caribbean society and its African heritage. I need hardly tell you how deeply this whole story has been buried, how falsely the history about it has been reconstructed for us over 400 years by our intellectual masters and mentors—what a labour of discovery, a labour in the “archeology of hidden knowledge” this story of Africa and the Caribbean has been. I need hardly tell you the courage it requires, even now, to assent and assert “the African connection.” Walter Rodney’s works in this field of Caribbean and African history have been models of historical scholarship: but that is not the point. That is only to say that, as an intellectual, he did his work well. What is more important, Rodney recognized from the very outset the political and cultural consequences of telling the African story anew to Caribbean audiences. He knew how deeply we had all, collectively, repressed that “African connection.” He knew the depths of collective forgetfulness which have marked our culture, which have led us black men and women to scorn and repress and look away from the truth about our past which history, properly told, has to tell us. He knew the depths of collective self-disgust and self-mistrust over which we had constructed a heavy historical veil. To open up the dark corners of history, not only to rewrite “white” history in “black terms” but to enable black men to see for themselves who they were and where they came from, is, in our present circumstances, to trigger the deepest emotions, to touch off a historical time-bomb with [a] short fuse. The connection, then, between Rodney’s intellectual work and politics in the Caribbean were not externally imposed—imposed from the outside. The connections were internal to the story itself—the intellectual and the political work were one and the same. To do one, given our past, was inevitably to do the other. To assert that our societies in the Caribbean are connected to world history through the history of black civilizations, as well as of Asians, is to pose the question, at the same time, of how this connection ever got lost: who told the story the wrong way round? and why? and what consequences follow when we destroy the old historical myths and falsifications and begin to reconstruct history along different lines? That is a critical and subversive intellectual task—political because it is intellectual. It constitutes his first “crime” in the eyes of the governments which protect and defend the status quo in our home societies. The fact that some of those governments are themselves composed of black men is only one of the many paradoxes which his unfolding story discovers—and explains.
To do revolutionary intellectual work, then, on the black, African past of present Caribbean societies was itself, in the eyes of the powers that be, a “crime”: a political crime. We should not at all underestimate the pressure and the constraints, the harassments and surveillance which go on and have gone on over the last two decades, pressuring black intellectuals at work in the Caribbean to conform: Walter Rodney, after all, has himself already been a victim of precisely such pressures, exerted—to my shame—by the then Government of my own country, Jamaica.
The “black revolution” was never about those men who happened to have black skin but about changing the terms of power itself.
To this first “crime,” however, Walter Rodney added a second. He refused the invitation, so to speak, to limit his work to academic circles and audiences only. He was determined to go out beyond the walls of the universities, to speak to ordinary people, to organize classes and meetings and discussions with them, to make his ideas and his knowledge live among them. If it is a “political” act to do certain kinds of intellectual work, to take one’s commitments seriously, and to follow the path of critical knowledge, it is considered even more so to break the boundaries of Academia and to try to reach and work alongside the masses in their struggle. This is the point where the intellectual takes upon himself the full political responsibility of his work, his role—and thus the point at which he most directly encounters the repressive mechanisms of the State. Rodney’s career is also a clear testimony to this harsh fact not once, but now thanks to the Burnham Government—twice.
It has never been easy in the Caribbean setting to follow the intellectual vocation—as I’ve tried to outline it—right through to its logical conclusion. But in earlier days, when the lines of power and influence were simpler, more starkly drawn, it was easier to know one’s enemies, and to foresee where the crunch would come. It is not so easy today. Almost everywhere in the Caribbean [where] political independence has been “won,” “black people” have won a measure of political, economic and educational influence and power in these societies. Not only this: often, in the name of the nationalist revolution, in the name of “independence,” even in the name, God help us, of “black power,” Governments have appropriated and incorporated the national figures of the past, the history of the past, and erected them into symbols and totems which feed and support their own power. The statues to slave leaders, to black nationalists, to Maroons and leaders of rebellions go up everywhere; the names are woven into the nationalist rhetoric; the stamps and coins are printed; the power of their names and actions are b[r]ought over. How come it, then, that black men, in power, ruling in the name of a nationalist revolution, and with the symbolic power of a Garvey or a Gordon behind them, fear to hear the truth about black men and Africa from a black intellectual who is also their own countryman? If “black power” is in command, how can “black history” subvert?
This is a paradox: and the Walter Rodney case demands that we confront it honestly and openly, and discover its truth. The truth is that the “black revolution” was never about those men who happened to have black skins: it was never about black men slipping into white men’s shoes; it was never about black men inheriting the mantle of power which white men had laid aside. It was always about the dispossessed of the earth, about changing the terms of power itself, about creating new societies—not about inheriting the old. The truth is that, though the trappings and emblems and sometimes the “colour” of power in the Caribbean has changed, the structures have not. Those things which kept some men and women in chains while others were free, and then kept some men in power while others were powerless, are still at work keeping some men rich and powerful while others—the great masses of the people, wait at the gate, “the wretched of the earth.” Structures are more powerful than men. Men with good or bad intentions enter into structures they have not revolutionized—and are tamed by them. They take over the structures of exploitation and power: they internalize the beliefs, the justifications, the rationalizations, the motivations of power and privilege: they begin to think of “the dispossessed” as them; and of those who take up the struggle alongside the dispossessed as—the enemy. For some of these men—the caretakers of neo-imperialism, those who manage the “over-development of under-development” in the Caribbean—Walter Rodney has become the enemy. We must not, for a moment, misunderstand what this means, or what its consequences are.
I salute Walter Rodney. If what he has tried to do is the act of “an enemy,” then we are all enemies. When the lines of struggle are drawn in this way, men cannot stand aside, hesitating between one value-neutral hypothesis and another—especially not intellectuals. It is his duty to the truth which drives him to commit himself. He is an intellectual, not in spite of the fact that he is committed, but because he is committed, because he has chosen to stand on the line. I protest that the Burnham Government finds itself in this historical moment, drawing the line. It is a matter of deep dismay to find the whole repressive apparatus of power inherited by black men from white, and applied in exactly the same way. But it is a matter which has to be faced and dealt with. The struggle to defend Walter Rodney against this willful and arbitrary exercise of coercive power is one episode in that longer struggle. It is to that longer struggle—the struggle [to] “make the revolution in the Caribbean”—to which his life and work witnesses, and to which Rodney continues to summon us.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was a Jamaica-born sociologist and cultural theorist. He served as inaugural editor of New Left Review and Director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Jordan T. Camp is Associate Professor of American Studies and Founding Co-Director of the Trinity Social Justice Institute at Trinity College and author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State.
