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Capen: You made a rather startling remark, when I spoke to you recently, which began our conversation: the root concepts of your criticism revolve around "-isms" in many respects. You've always been somebody who's tried to take and move things through, instead of getting stuck in something as blatant as an "-ism." But you made the statement to me that you're.... so upset, perhaps, about what's happening in this country to a mass of, as Noam Chomsky calls them, superfluous people, that you're becoming a Marxist.

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?