WEST: I think that is an interesting question because on the one hand, in '67 we had a slightly higher poverty rate. We had much more intact communities. We had a smaller black middle class. We had a much more strong industrial working class even though deindustrialization was just beginning to unravel be the automobile workers in Detroit or rebel workers in Akron, Ohio. You had fewer examples of persons at top echelons in our society. No Colin Powell. Very few -- no Kenny Chenaults (ed. note: Kenny Chenault is CEO of American Express) not at all. Senior management, corporate America, literally white.

GATES: Right--maybe vice president for community affairs or personnel.....

WEST: Community affairs or human relations and even that would have been and few between.

GATES: Euphemism: B-l-a-c-k, right?

WEST: You are absolutely right. But what is frightening about 1997 is the erosion of the systems of caring and nurturing in America at large, but in particular,black America so you actually have more isolated, insulated, lonely, alienated, estranged black folk especially among the working class and working poor, but it's true across the board and that's what is frightening.

We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good. Materially speaking, we were much worse. But culturally speaking in terms of social connection, they were much better.

GATES: Well, how did we get this peculiar outcome -- which is that we have a large black middle class in history quadrupling since 1967 doubling under Ronald Reagan alone, and 45 percent of all black children living at or beneath the poverty line. How did this come about?

WEST: I think we had a decision to make in about 1964, '65 just prior to the wave of uprisings. we had 329 rebellions in 257 cities. We had over 200 rebellions one night when brother Martin was murdered. That changed things.

Before in '64 and '65 America had a chance. They could decide to go social program base, liberalism. Or, they could go full employment base liberalism. They took the easy way out. Typically American. Social program base liberalism. What that would do would be to highly divide the New Deal from the Great Society that would target the poor and not make it universal and would downplay the role of jobs with a living wage. Because to go for employment based liberalism was a significant challenge to corporate America that is why it was easier to go the other way. These social programs would be contingent. They would be variable. They could shift. We could pull the rug from under them. Whereas if we said there is a right to a job with a living wage and that is the very basis upon which we are going to fight poverty connected to the fight against racism, then we actually have some grounds of legitimacy against any form of management that would attempt to bring power and pressure to bear at the workplace to push folk out and to get the government to claim that that person has a right to a job with a living wage. We did not go that route. It was the liberals who pushed. There were a few-- Schultz and others did push at that time. But it didn't work.

The Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill that Ron Dellums and others were talking about at that time. It would have been a very different America. The trade union movement would be much stronger. Working people's power would be much stronger. Instead we went the other way and admit when we hit sluggish growth, when the profits began to decline, when the competition from Japan or at that time West Germany and other places intensified, then you could get a restructuring of the capitalist economy, the low road, the low wages moving to other parts of the world looking for low wages and allowing those workers in the United States -- the plunge to engage in social slippage no longer be able to keep the jobs that they had at wages that were commensurate at that time, their own time and talent as well as power. So we got a very different situation.

GATES: Well, how much of this though, is structural and how much is behavioral? How do we as black leaders talk about individual responsibility without being appropriated by the right? But also, structural change, without being appropriated by the left?

WEST: Well, they go hand in hand. I mean there is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

At the same time, there should always be social accountability. We shouldn't talk about one without the other. When we do talk about both, I think we recognize that it is always possible for persons to work hard, to sacrifice and to make a difference in their life. That's true for nearly any set of social conditions as a certain constant in human life that even limited years that one has just cracking a smile makes a difference in peoples's lives. People have agency; people have responsibility; people have a choice to do that. Or you could be mean. See that's true in the concentration camp. That's true on Park Avenue.

But as we know, we are a little more complicated than that because you have power, wealth, influence circulating in a variety of different ways. Therefore, it is going to take much more than cracking smiles in order to make the world a better place. You are going to have to organize, mobilize, bring power and pressure to bear on various status quos in place. That's where the structural institution comes in. There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference. Yet, there is no organizations and institutions that are worthwhile in terms of fighting for and dying for unless there is some individual integrity and character and virtue that is at work within various individuals in those institutions especially their leaders.

GATES: What's happened to our people in the last 30 years? I mean we have forms of cruelty that we visit upon each other scarcely imaginable in the '60s.

WEST: Well, I think when LeRoi Jones wrote his book, Blues People in 1964, he was saying something quite profound. He was saying that these people are neither sentimental or cynical; they're blues people. Blues is neither with these narcissistic fantasies of innocence and these Peter Pan-like descriptions of the world. We couldn't accept that. But we weren't cynical either for the most part. Put it this way--the cynical tendencies were not the dominant tendencies which meant that we were still willing to fight and struggle and sacrifice and give service to others even when it did not look as if it would produce major consequences and effects.

GATES: We danced with irony, but we didn't fall over to the other side.

WEST: Absolutely right. That's a wonderful way of putting it. But theirs is with irony, with compassion in our hearts. Because it is quite possible to be an ironist and a cynic too. But the compassion trumped the cynicism.

I think what has happened as a result of the penetration of these markets sensibilities in which persons attempt to get over by any means--hustling mentality, gangster orientation, people feeling as if well, this talk about doing something because it is right, and just and morals doesn't allow you to get over. Very market driven, very capitalist at its worst. Also, very American. And so black people have no monopoly on this, but it has certainly penetrated our communities in ways that it sapped some of our spirit.

GATES: What can we do about it?

WEST: We have to talk about it honestly. We have to be true to ourselves. We didn't give it an account for why it is so -- to help us get out of it. We are not locked into it forever. This is a word of role of leadership.

I think we have a profound crisis of black leadership now in our communities. Most of the best leadership is probably at the grass-root level, which is relatively invisible but in terms of the larger regional and national leadership, we just don't have enough fearless truth tellers. I mean part of the popularity with Louis Farrakhan has less to do with the content of his message and more to do with the form that he portrays himself--as being a free, black person who speaks what is on his mind with boldness and fearlessness. Who is willing to pay the consequences.

GATES: And black people love that.

WEST: Well, human beings do. There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one's mind that warrants freedom. Shakespearean claims about "to thine own self be true as the night follows day, that would be false to no man." He is absolutely right.

The problem is we need much more moral content. We need sharper analysis of how wealth and power and influence, how you keep track of the role of corporate power and big banks and so forth, globally as well as domestically but also be able to link the boldness and fearlessness with a sense of humility so that you always open to listening to other voices so you don't assume you have a monopoly on truth. If we had a whole wave of new leaders, I think in some ways we might in the next five or seven years, then black American would be a different place. Black America would be on the move. When black America is on the move, America is on the move.

Historically, when in fact we hit the issue of race head on as the abolitionists did, as the CIO did and organizing unskilled and semi-skilled black and white workers as we know in the '60s that spawned the feminists and the gay movements and lesbian movements and others because they were also freed up to speak the truth to themselves and to speak the truth to their own suffering caused by patriarchy, heterosexism, homophobia, or what have you. Usually it has been the black spokespersons and leaders who have served as catalysts in this regard.

GATES: The Poor People's Campaign was about economics; it was about class--no one would have been caught dead using the word class at that time. What happened?

WEST: Well, one, brother Martin was murdered, and you needed a leader who had credibility, legitimacy to hold that multiracial alliance together, especially at a moment when various groups were accenting their own racial identities. You had white backlash which is identity politics, and you had the black power movement, which is identity politics. Both were clashing. King was trying to talk about a multiracial alliance that talked about class and economic inequality. So it was both the moment and context on the one hand, as well as the loss of a great leader on the other. If brother Martin had lived, it still would have been very difficult. But he had a much better chance that brother Ralph Abernathy, as talented as Ralph was.

GATES: And then also what happened of course was that affirmative action kicked in under Richard Nixon. Who benefited from affirmative action?

WEST: Some people would claim that it was probably the black middle class, but there was more than black middle class. You had black working people, blue collar, from policemen to firemen to even some construction workers and others who benefitted when those plans were implemented. The problem is that affirmative action could never really get at the issue of corporate power in the workplace, and so you ended up with the downsizing; you ended up with de-industrializing. You ended up with the marginalizing of working people and working poor people even while affirmative action was taking place, and a new black middle class was expanding.

So we end up with this paradox that you mentioned before just larger black middle class, devastated black industrial working class and increasing black working poor and very poor. Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary. It's a very weak strategy actually. When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That's not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important. It was a concession that the business establishment and education establishment made with those various forces in the '60s that were bringing critique and resistance to bear; it was a concession. For a while as the stability remained rather fragile, the even the right wing elites went along with it. The early Pete Wilson, the early Bob Dole, early George Bush. They were all pro affirmative action.

GATES: Early Richard Nixon....Do you think that a socialist revolution is necessary to take care of the problems of the poor that you described? Or can capitalism be amended? Can a more humane face be put upon the system as we know it, which is maximize profit and a great lifestyle for more people than probably any other society that we have experienced.

WEST: I think anytime we talk about transforming in capitalist society, we are talking about a process not a particular event so you can't talk about a socialist revolution. You can't talk about revolution per say in that way I think we are talking about various means by which we are able to convince the demos, which is to say convince the significant number of fellow citizens that they have a right to a life of decency and dignity that they are not able to live now, and it's changeable because certain priorities are promoted, certain choices are made. The result would be a fundamental transformation if in fact, one could convince persons that the most powerful and the most wealthy ought to have some public accountability be it wealth tax, be it more progressive income tax, be it workers having some voice in investment decisions within those entities and enterprises and so on. That's what I actually mean by fundamental social change.

So in that regard it would still be a very both experimental and a mix. I don't think we would ever eliminate markets. I think markets are mechanisms that determine prices that are necessary for mass heterogenous populations, and markets do generate levels of technological innovation and productivity that is crucial. But when unregulated, they often generate levels of vast inequality and ugly isolation that makes it difficult for people to relate and connect with one another. So the question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices. It's very different. These days it determines values even more so with the market culture and so on. But we have to have some markets in place were there were conditions on which they are regulated. How do we eliminate poverty. How do we ensure that working people have a sense of power, vitality, vibrancy, and at the same time, how do we treat our rotating elite with humanity, which is to say render them accountable, not delinize them but also convince them that they have a stake in the public interest that this matter -- their personal greed.

GATES: Would it be possible not to regulate markets but to increase the social safety net -- I mean the welfare state -- so that markets floated the way that they float now, but you wouldn't be caught in a freefall if the market floated in the wrong way for your life.

WEST: That would be nice. I mean we've got some examples like Sweden and others that have been able to cut back on the poverty rates by providing strong social nets within a capitalist framework. The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states. Hence, you would have to have some significant regulation if not governmental intervention to convince corporations to pay the taxes that they ought. Then to convince the lobbyists that most of the taxes ought not to go to the military side of the budget but rather the social side of the budget. You see.

So it's a battle that cuts through and across the board whether we recognize it or not. But you are right. It is certainly possible for there to be a kind of regulated capitalism that could do away with the worse of the poverty that we know in the states. That is a possibility. It's highly improbable given the powers in vested interest in place at the moment but it is certainly possible and it is certainly worth frightening for. In that sense we certainly do humanize capitalism. There is no doubt about it.