PRAISE FOR STRUGGLE MAKES US HUMAN

“Vijay Prashad’s remarkable work has for years been an incomparable source of information and understanding about the Global South, while also providing incisive analysis of major developments of world affairs.” —Noam Chomsky

“An essential, brilliant, revolutionary, post-pandemic conversation and primer about everything that matters and how we can move from the devastation of capitalism to a living, breathing, working socialism. Informative and profoundly inspirational.” —V (formerly Eve Ensler)

“Struggle Makes Us Human is an impassioned and studied case for socialism. In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unrealized promise of the New International Economic Order, and the rupture between intellectual and grounded struggle, socialism remains as necessary and possible as ever. Vijay Prashad takes readers on an intimate journey across the world and through history to introduce us to thinkers, workers, revolutionaries, and martyrs whose example offers glimpses of a horizon that remains within our reach.” —Noura Erakat

PRAISE FOR VIJAY PRASHAD

“Vijay Prashad is our own Frantz Fanon. His writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope.” —Amitava Kumar

“Vijay Prashad recalls a past without which it is impossible to understand the present.” —Tariq Ali

“Like his hero Eduardo Galeano, Vijay Prashad makes the telling of the truth lovable; not an easy trick to pull off. He does it effortlessly.” —Roger Waters

© 2022 Vijay Prashad and Frank Barat

Published in 2022 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618 773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
info@haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-64259-717-2

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This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

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Cover design by Rachel Cohen.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

CONTENTS

PART ONE: The System as It Is

Zigs and Zags But Mostly Zags

The Capitalist Use of Crisis

Resistance and Rebellion

Their Values and Ours

The Real Meaning of Unemployment

PART TWO: Struggle Makes Us Human

History Is a Series of Experiments

The Mechanics of Imperialism

Transition to the Future

The Third World Was a Project, Not a Place

The Long Effect of the Fall of the Soviet Union

Their Violence and Ours

Zambia Is Not So Far Away

Confidence Comes from Building Movements

PART THREE: Toward Beauty

The Future Is Here

The Future Will Contain What You Put into It Now

Art Breathes Life into The World

For the Justice of It

Utopia Is Not a Place but a Project

Afterword

For Jodie and Roy

On March 31, 2020, Frank Barat wrote to ask if I would spend fifteen minutes with him, via Skype, to talk about the pandemic. We met a few days later and talked about the developing crisis: the health impact on the populations of the world, the socioeconomic impact of the unfolding unemployment boom, and the cultural impact of the bewilderment occasioned by the antiscience rhetoric and the lockdowns and restrictions. Our conversation was wide ranging and fluid. It felt clear, even by April 2020, that the pandemic had opened wounds that had festered during the “normal” period that preceded it. We were not merely talking about what COV1D-19 was doing to the societies of the world, we were talking about what capitalism had done and what COV1D-19 had revealed. So, we decided to spend three days going deeper into the crisis. These three conversations allowed us to go beneath the surface of the conjuncture, to understand the festering wounds in terms of their history, and to grasp at the possibilities of moving political agendas out of the capitalist catastrophe and towards a possible socialism. Those conversations provide the basis for this book.

PART ONE

The System as It Is

ZIGS AND ZAGS BUT MOSTLY ZAGS

FRANK BARAT: TINA, or There Is No Alternative, was a slogan used in the ‘80s around the Thatcher years in the UK. The problem is that 1 feel most people today still feel this way. Stillfeel like capitalism has won and that we cannot do much about it, that the years of revolutions are a thing of the past. What would you say to these people?

VIJAY PRASHAD: If we look back at the past forty years, there have been some important advances. We have seen, for instance, the attempts by people to come out onto the streets and overthrow governments that they found disagreeable. Fine, in Egypt, the uprising of 2011 ended up in a disaster, but it still happened. The people took to the streets in Cairo and some other cities and towns. Hosni Mubarak and his sons had to leave office. General Sisi continued the Mubarak legacy to a great extent. It was a zig and a zag. On the one side, the zig, there was something fundamental—people no longer wanted to live under an atrocious government and so they overthrew it. On the other side, the zag, the military returns, even if it takes off its uniform. But this does not mean that we won’t see a zig coming up in the future. It is the fear of the zig that makes Sisi throw any opponent into prison.

In Tunisia, on the other hand, the uprising overthrew a very neo-liberal and ghastly kleptocracy led by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. When Ben Ali fled in January 2011, a set of important social forces—including the trade unions, the left parties, the human rights groups—held together the new Tunisian democracy. This is why these groups won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2015, although this was two years after—and here’s another zag—the poet and left political leader Chokri Belaïd was assassinated. The struggles in Tunisia since then have been difficult, including a slide into undemocratic rule, but there have been some advances in terms of popular confidence.

In 2009 two years before the uprisings in North Africa, we saw a popular upsurge elect the Democratic Party’s Yukio Hatoyama prime minister of Japan. He came with a mandate to remove the US military base in Okinawa. Hatoyama moved toward removing the base, which is very unpopular in Okinawa itself but also in other parts of Japan. That’s the zig. But then came the zag. US president Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton put a lot of pressure on the Japanese political class, breaking Hatoyama’s government and stopping the anti-base project in its tracks. Hatoyama had to resign in June 2010. The US base remains in Okinawa; in fact, it is being expanded at great cost, including environmental devastation of Henoko Bay (and the disappearance of the dugongs, the manatees). So that’s the defeat, although there was the election on a mandate for peace.

Before the “coup” in Japan, in 2009, the US oversaw a coup in Honduras against the government of Manuel Zelaya. This coup came after a long period of US pressure on Latin American countries that had joined the Bolivarian project directed by the government in Venezuela. That Hugo Chavez was able to win an election in 1998 and then win a series of elections to establish a new constitution and to create a new regional dynamic, and fend off a coup in 2002, is remarkable. Venezuela’s left turn in 1998 provided Cuba with an ally in Latin America, and then came a series of election victories in Brazil (with Lula in 2003) and Bolivia (with Evo Morales in 2006). Despite all the pressure on Venezuela and Cuba, they remain intact, and despite the coup in Bolivia, in November 2019 the people voted the socialists back into power and voted out the coup regime in Honduras in November 2021. With the coronavirus running rampant across Brazil, it is Cuba and Venezuela, two countries under immense sanctions and hybrid war, that have been able to contain the virus. We cannot only focus on defeats. We need to look at the zigs and the zags, and the jumps. Even if the zig is modest.

I don’t blame people for the arrival of this defeatist attitude, namely that “there is no alternative.” There’s an enormous industry that produced this, a huge ideological push that provoked it. In 1944, Friedrich Hayek, who is seen as the guru of the neoliberal doctrine, published a book called The Road to Serfdom. Hayek basically argues that any time you want to make the world a better place, you are going to create a gulag. Don’t try to do anything, let the invisible forces make justice come into the world, let the invisible hand create justice. The moment you try to put your hand into history, you will end up executing people. That’s the ultra-libertarian argument. This argument has become widespread in different ways. There are those who totally attack anyone who tries to “socially engineer” the good, disparaging the state as an institution for social change. Anti-state politics of the right and the left meet on this terrain. There is affinity here for a kind of liberal politics that is popular among a range of people that retains great faith in the structures of “formal” democracy, and that believes there is no need to be acting outside these formations since the democratic system will take care of things. This kind of liberalism, which has tremendous faith in the system, demobilizes public action. If there is to be a public action, let it be along the grain of lawfulness, with no challenge to the system. In fact, the ultra-libertarians, the left anti-state people, the liberal democrats—all of them promote, in different ways, the demobilization of public action. Over a generation or two generations, basic faith in formal democracy has been reinforced across the political spectrum in the advanced democratic countries.

Loss of faith in democratic institutions, the turn of these institutions toward a technocracy, creates the opposite of democracy. A key example of this is the European Union, whose bureaucrats seem so totally cut off from the rough world of the people of Europe. The faith of these Brussels politicians and bureaucrats in techniques of management, often techniques of the banking world rather than the world of social development, has created a great deal of anger inside Europe that gave an advantage to the extreme right. The focus on immigration comes alongside the anger at the detachment of the European Union, as well as the racism of Brussels toward the Southern European countries. Racism shapes the heart of the European extreme right. In these circles, the hesitation demanded by Hayek is not followed. The extreme right is quite happy to try to change the world, to socially engineer the world in its own image, which includes a society without immigrants. This is a seam of neofascism that demands a kind of social welfare for certain kinds of people and not for others, based often on ideas of race and belonging, of blood and passports. Democratic institutions are set aside, liberal norms are not honored. The horse of the extreme right gallops right into anger and then stampedes through society.

When you leave the zone of the advanced democratic societies, where money power has eclipsed actual democracy, and go to the rest of the world, faith in democratic institutions is even lower. Take the case of Brazil, where there is little faith in the government, eroded over the past ten years. Rather than directly confront the popularity of the left government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, the oligarchy—with US backing—ejected Dilma in a parliamentary coup in 2016 and then denied Lula the right to run for the presidency through a fake charge of corruption. This is basically what is called lawfare, although in the case of Dilma we could coin a new term, something like demofare, since democratic institutions were used to subvert democracy. The law and the legislature were instrumentalized to undermine the mandate of the people. And then you have Jair Bolsonaro, elected in a desiccated political field, who governs over a COVID-ravaged society. Brazilian medical workers have filed a case in the International Criminal Court charging him with crimes against humanity for his callous approach to the pandemic. A mass movement has grown called Fora Bolsonaro, which came alongside a court [decision] saying that Lula can run again for the presidency in 2022. Again, zig and zag.

Then take a look at India, where the democratic system is now captured by money power and by corporate media power. The code word to describe this is “corruption.” Everything is corrupt. If everything is corrupt, then it is very hard to have faith in the democratic system. In those zones where there’s so little faith in the democratic system, there is a kind of understanding that nothing can improve. Because you seem to have no other alternative. The democratic system is eroded, people’s movements are weak, so there seems to be no way to create change, all pathways for change are limited, confidence in transformation declines and rage grows. This politics of rage favors the extreme right. Although even here the zig and zag, the jumps, take place, since on November 26, 2020, hundreds of thousands of farmers took to the streets to demand the withdrawal of three anti-farmer laws. This protest movement, this farmers’ revolt, triumphed a year later when the right-wing government had to withdraw these laws designed to “Uber-ize” the countryside. Each day of that powerful mass movement built the confidence not only of the farmers and the agricultural workers but of all of society.

What is your take on the right to vote?

In the modern age, human beings rightly feel that we are sovereign. That means that all across the planet, people seek ways to intervene in our societies, since we are not beholden to anyone else; our society, our state, is ours. This feeling is even there in monarchies, where technically sovereignty is only in the hands of the monarch. I have experienced this not only in the European monarchies—and there are many!—but also in the Gulf Arab states. This feeling was there, of course, even when people were subjects of a king, and that is why this feeling is there in contemporary monarchies. People sought ways to intervene to change the world through various kinds of rebellions, peasant uprisings, strikes, and so on. The feeling of indignity and injustice provoked action. In modern societies, just as in premodern societies, people feel the need to intervene.

The question that arises is what are the channels of intervention? In a monarchial system, sovereignty was vested in a monarch or in the nobility, and therefore one channel to follow was to supplicate yourself to the monarch and say, please, I beg you to change this or that. That kind of thing was permitted. In India, during the Mughal period, the emperor had a regular meeting in the Diwan-i-Am, the hall in Delhi’s Red Fort, the house of the people. Supplicants would go there and beg the emperor to pay attention to this or that problem. That kind of thing happens even now, when we write a petition to the rulers and ask them to please address something. That’s a modern way of supplication. Now, you might not throw yourself on the ground, but you take that same sort of attitude in your petition.

In the modern period, we have canalized our sovereignty along certain tracks. For instance, you can go to the offices of the state bureaucracy and write a complaint. I complain about something, this action or that behavior of a particular administrator. Or else we have consumer boards of various kinds that complain about the actions of private companies. Even more so, I can write to a local newspaper or—in our time—get outraged on Twitter. These forms of dissent are pretty established and are often individual forms of protest. There are often large forms of canalized dissent, such as through the democratic process. If you don’t like the government, one is told, then vote them out and get a new government. This is an invitation to political activity through the forms of the representative structure. The most canonical liberal democrat will say that the way to handle dissent or disgruntlement is to wait for the next election or, perhaps, to write a letter to your representatives. That means wait five to seven years for a change, since most liberal democracies do not have an easy right to recall. The amount of money that saturates democratic politics makes this kind of canalization a rebuke against democracy. Such a liberal democratic vision is a surrender of sovereignty to the state. Citizens are sovereign, we have the bal lot, but we give our sovereignty to the elected representatives and to the permanent state project. That’s the ultimate liberal idea.

To the left of liberalism there is a sensibility that people need to have the right to protest. Out of tremendous struggle we won the right to assembly, the right to free speech, the right to demonstrate. These rights are part of a bundle of rights that guarantee our ability to protest the government’s exercise of power, even if it has a democratic mandate. These are the canonical ways in which we try to exercise our sovereignty vis-à-vis the elected representatives.

What happens if the system is not able to realize the mandate of the people or if the elected representatives betray their promises that got them elected? What if the system is so corrupted by money and by money power in the corporate media that the basic democratic norms are not observed? What happens then? What happens when money power in the corporate media maligns the integrity of the dissenters, calling them “antinational” and so on? We are stuck.

What is the system? The system is not some god-given thing. If you boil it down to the essentials, all the people inside a territory have sovereignty over the territory. But it is impractical for everybody in the territory to govern the territory. We decide to create various methods of representation of our sovereignty. These could be locally done, and these could be done on a bigger scale. Rather than see these as experiments toward better democracy, there is an ideological belief that whatever system a country has is the best possible system and there is no other way to surrender sovereignty to a representative.

I do not agree with this religious approach to the democratic experiment. It is worth thinking of the democratic process as an experimental one, with more and more discussion of how to draw more and more people into the process. What about neighborhood platforms that bring together people to discuss issues with each other—more deliberative democracy and less representative democracy? We need to have a richer discussion about what would be a better form of democracy. Take Cuba, for instance, where there is a range of different forms of deliberation, including the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which are neighborhood committees that draw people in to deliberate about how to run things and how to fix things, to address issues and to manage issues. In Kerala, for instance, there are local self-government forms that operate alongside the formations for public action. These are experiments to decentralize sovereignty and power. More needs to be studied of these forms to learn from them and to draw from them.

The current democratic systems in many of the capitalist countries have been compromised by money power, by media power, by the advantages of the elites and their parties. It is not reasonable to say that these forces win elections because the people do not vote. This is a cart-before-the-horse problem. First, the forces of the elite win elections because the system does not allow anyone else to prevail. Second, people sometimes do not vote because of the futility of the process. Frustration with the institutions indicates that people believe that it can be better, that they want their sovereignty to be better managed, that the system, as it is, is inadequate. Third, there are a range of barriers to participation, including holding elections on working days, preventing people from registering to vote, and insisting on forms of identification that are not easy to obtain.

THE CAPITALIST USE OF CRISIS

FRANK BARAT: You were just talking about a system favoring the elite and the rulers and the bourgeois class. I guess there’s something, I don’t want to generalize, but on the left, we are very good at talking about the past. We are not that bad either at trying to imagine a better future, at least on paper. But something we forget, and I guess maybe a lot of people forget to focus on, is the present. Because the right, the elite, the bourgeois class are very good at making things happen in the present, and because we don’t really look at them, once we realize what they have done it’s too late. Look at what’s happening following a terrorist attack in Europe. They pass emergency laws, and then, a few years later . . . they are still there, part of the legal system, and are often used to attack solidarity movements, antiracism, anti-globalization movements. In a way, it is another component of the “shock doctrine” as Naomi Klein would say.

VIJAY PRASHAD: There are several things to say on this theme. First, there is the general issue of keeping your eyes open in the present. The consequences of not focusing on what is happening around us are serious. Elites have become very sophisticated at turning things into a crisis and then in using the “crisis” to further their own interests. They’ve become very clever about that. Second, and following from this, is the issue of surrendering one’s power to the state and to corporations. These two series of thoughts provoke some reflections.

The terror attacks in London and in Brussels, if you look at them in the larger scheme of history, they are not that significant in terms of the attacks themselves. Of course, it is terrible that people die, that noncombatants are killed in such a brutal way. But such events of great tragedy take place daily: Palestinian children killed ruthlessly by the Israeli forces or cancers that spread in places like Lagos, the spreading out of the toxic garbage routinely shipped from the North Atlantic states and lying unprocessed in the Kibera region. There have been many days when more people in the US died of COVID-19 than died during 9/11. No doubt that the attack in 2001 was a dramatic attack, with aircraft flying into buildings and killing more than three thousand people. Of course, even these smaller attacks—ten or twenty killed—are terrifying and inexcusable. But they are not out of the ordinary and do not necessarily require the kind of security state that grows out of these incidents. Elites take advantage of these crises to expand their power, out of scale of the incidents themselves.

I first flew in a plane in the 1970s when there was barely any security. I probably flew from Calcutta to Delhi. You just walked onto the plane, no security, no metal detectors, no search of your bags. This was, by the way, during the era of airline hijackings. From 1970 onward, there were hijackings by the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; a Japan Air Lines flight was hijacked and landed in nearby Dhaka, while the Palestinian factions hijacked a set of planes and blew them up in the Libyan desert. Even in India, there was already a hijacking by Kashmiri separatists in 1971. I remember a flight in 1978 was hijacked from Calcutta and forced to land in Benares. This was a protest against the imprisonment of Indira Gandhi. But despite all this, the airport had very little security. I remember flying to the Gulf from Bombay. There was no checking. We landed in the Manama airport in Bahrain and walked out to a small building and strolled around. My father smoked a cigarette on the tarmac, which was not a good idea with the jet fuel all around. I played around with the luggage truck. It was a totally different world. But the point is that slowly there was an acceleration of security as hijackings were seen to be more common—even though they have always been a very rare phenomenon. Then 9/11 takes place. A guy tries to make his shoe into a bomb— he fails—and now every passenger must remove their shoes. I do not want to make light of the seriousness of the situation. There are great dangers here. But we must manage the dangers and the risks.

Fear becomes the instinctual response to the acts of terror. Rather than have a conversation about why this violence takes place, there is an escalation of the security state. But there is inefficiency here. The security state takes yesterday’s event and tries to prevent its happening in the future: the shoe issue is apposite, since after the state makes everyone take their shoes off, the terrorist will not likely use shoes as the weapon. There is little attempt to get to the root of the problem—what is the social root of terrorism? These are not merely crazy people but people who emerge from a particular set of experiences and assessments of the world. That should be part of the discussion, not merely an expansion of the security state.

Elites first take an event and make it into a crisis. All tragedies do not equally become a crisis. Certain events are taken up as emblematic of a new set of worries. These crises are then used by the elites to their own advantage. See what happens with COVID-19. First, the elites in the capitalist side of the world and their mostly profit-first governments diminished the seriousness of the virus. This is different from poor countries like Vietnam and Cuba, where the pro-people governments took the pandemic seriously. In Vietnam and in Cuba, the governments and public agencies undertook contact tracing, testing, and then isolation and treatment of those who had contracted the virus. This was a sophisticated approach. In the capitalist part of the world, there was at first no response; then, when the virus got out of control, there were a series of general and seemingly unending lockdowns and restrictions.

The way in which the capitalist firms took advantage of the situation is yet to be properly digested. Governments opened up the spigot, flooding capital markets with social wealth to stave off a general economic collapse. Out of thin air, it seems, the central banks in the developed countries conjured up $16 trillion during the pandemic to protect the value of money and the integrity of the capitalist system. The sense was that this money would go toward essential lines of economic production and toward providing relief for the unemployed. We have already seen evidence of large firms pilfering from these COVID relief funds. In addition, these firms sacked enormous numbers of workers whom they had already seen as superfluous. Amazon is a good example, since it used the pandemic to harvest hundreds of millions of new customers to platform capitalism, made its systems of distribution more efficient, laid off large numbers of workers, and then made the work for those who remained more intensive and harsher. Substituting machines for these workers for higher labor productivity was always the goal. Human service labor has seen a great attrition in the consumer sec tor as platform capital has emerged at a greater scale. If you had a retail shop, you had to rent the premises and hire people to wait for consumers to come in. These expenses are considerable and are now reduced to virtually zero. Machines can take the orders online, and then highly exploited human labor does the packing and the shipping. The labor productivity implications of this and the implications for human life are significant. If you are hired to be in a shop, there is slack time and you can either daydream or read or chat with coworkers. We already know from studies of online sales that the workers at their computers are not permitted even to have paid toilet breaks and that every second of their time is accounted for by the machines. The worker sits at their desk at home, so there is no need for a retail place to be rented, and they have their headphones on, taking orders nonstop. They are not waiting by the phone waiting for it to ring, because the calls are on a roster that they take one by one until their shift ends. It is mind-numbing and exhausting, poorly paid as well, with no benefits. Platform capitalism increases the productivity of labor by magnitudes, such that we have not got a good number for it yet. Retail outlets in malls are closing down; the mall itself as a social institution in many countries will start to vanish. Human interaction in these basic ways will slowly start to vanish, as people interact with their computers to buy from computers that are then managed at many removes from a human being. Even if you call up to complain or to cancel an order or to make an order, the interaction is stilted by the fact that the worker has a row of calls and might get rebuked by a supervisor for taking too long with a call. This is a process that will only increase. Amazon is key here, but this is not an issue with Amazon alone but a general social process across capitalist firms.

We have not sufficiently been able to build power to fight back against this. Amazon workers, for instance, have been trying to organize themselves, but the pressure against unionization is enormous. Workers who are atomized as home-based call workers have no way to even begin the process of unionization. Because of these developments in capitalist labor management, unionization has not been able to advance in general. For this and other reasons, our movements have become largely defensive over the past decades. We have rarely been able to go on the offensive. Every day there are a range of issues to which we must respond, some of them about daily survival and some of them against the attacks by capitalists. As they attack privacy rights, we have to be there to defend these rights. As they move to more platform capitalism, we have to defend local jobs and local shops. This is defensive, and since there are fewer social democratic forces, the left has to defend the gains of modest reforms and even fight for greater reforms. I understand that we must always fight for reforms, since these fights are a way to gather larger and larger constituencies into the much deeper revolutionary fights. But the point I am making is that the fight for reform has few allies in the center, since many of the former social democratic forces have committed themselves to neoliberal policies, including the efficiencies of platform capitalism. We have not yet reached a powerful enough place—in most parts of the world—to set the agenda. You can’t build a movement in the present unless you are setting the agenda.

The other point you raise is the belief that the state is inherently good. Watchdog liberals in the societies with a capitalist state generally give enormous leeway to the state, because they have this feeling that the state and its officials are reliable and decent people. If there is evidence that the state is exerting itself and—for instance—spying on the public, then this must be for good reason. The state cannot be inherently bad. There is a racial element to this. The French state or the US state is seen as inherently good, whereas the Chinese state is seen as inherently bad. I recently had a conversation with some people who started talking about hacking. They focused entirely on the Chinese state and the Russian state. I asked them, on the question of hackers and the Chinese and Russians, where do the largest hackers sit? They pointed their fingers toward Chinese hackers, Russian hackers, and then some Eastern European hackers, with the state projects implicated in all this. I said, you people live on Mars. The biggest, most sophisticated hacking operation in the world is run by the National Security Agency, the NSA, of the US government. They have the largest troll farm in the world, more extensive than anything in Asia. But the information war is such that when one thinks of a hacker or of government espionage, you think of Moldova or Russia or China, but not of the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. There are, of course, the individual hackers who prey on the naïve or the elderly or whatnot, and these are criminals. But they do not define the exploitation of privacy, which is something that is by scale dominated by the NSA and various agencies like it. The establishment liberal will say that it is okay to turn INTERPOL after that individual hacker, which is correct, since the person has broken an established law that is generally a good law; but INTERPOL cannot be a problem, even when it hacks into my phone because of some idea that I am a problem to the system. This idea that the Western state is democratic and cannot be a problem is a serious issue. When Chomsky says, rightly, that the United States government is the most dangerous terrorist force on earth, that seems ridiculous to many people. They cannot fathom that the US-imposed violence on the world’s peoples could be construed as terrorism. Terrorism is what they do. The expansion of the Western state project cannot be seen as terrorism.

The world’s twenty-five richest billionaires have gained nearly $255 billion in the last two months. We are in a time of crisis, people have lost their jobs, people have lost their means to survive. The stock markets are thriving. Amazon made more money during the crisis than ever before. I’m not sure what to make of these numbers. It’s so obviously abnormal.

Well, I’m glad you didn’t make that into a question, because there’s no question. It should be a scandal. Scandals themselves don’t provoke questions; they provoke horror. We are horrified by this. Likely these billionaires will not even pay taxes.

The pandemic has provided a period of training for the world’s consumers to become consumers through platforms such as Amazon. This pandemic is a University for Platform Capitalism. It is true that in countries where the Internet is weak and where connectivity is an issue, and where you don’t have widespread use of credit cards or good online payment portals, it is difficult to train and convert people into platform capitalism. But this is not true in large developing countries such as Brazil and India, where the middle classes are large and integrated into the digital marketplace. More and more people from the middle class, out of fear of infection, are buying goods via their phones and their computers from platforms on the web that can supply not only durable goods such as television sets and chairs, but also perishable goods such as food. Amazon, for instance, can send you goods on a recurrent basis, milk every week and so on. Even local shops can do your shopping for you and deliver it to your home. Shops will become more like warehouses and less like arcades. Even when things open up again, habits of buying online have now become established, particularly when there is no financial incentive to go to the shops. In fact, they can make it cheaper to get goods delivered since it saves the shop the need to have an entire retail apparatus in place. Online buying is becoming more and more common. China, by the way, is the largest e-commerce marketplace.

More and more people have shifted to paperless billing, no longer getting the bill and writing the check, putting the stamp on the envelope and mailing it. In that older way, the money stayed in your bank account longer, and you might earn some modest interest on it. Now the vendor gets the money faster, to their advantage.

The pandemic has trained people to do their retail shopping through the platform. That is why the platforms are making so much money. They are few and they are powerful. As the crisis winds on, small-scale retail will not survive. Nor will small-scale tourism. Nor will small-scale entertainment. Oligopolies such as Amazon and Netflix will come out of this crisis strengthened. Already people had moved from the local movie theatre to Netflix and other platforms; this tendency has only increased. As these platforms deliver basic sustenance and entertainment, the incentive to leave the home and go out decreases. The home becomes everything, with social interaction decreased. What this means is that strangers will talk less to each other and there will be less social interaction in general. This means less trust in society and less ability to build the kind of social fabric needed to build democratic movements. Democracy is going to be seriously eroded because of this diminishment of society. If society fragments further, a tendency already present before the pandemic, how can you produce a democracy?

During the height of the pandemic, left and people’s organizations sought ways to return to the streets, following WHO advice. In India, on June 16, 2020, there was a mass demonstration against the cutbacks on labor laws, so the left brought out thousands of people to stand six feet apart in these protests. There were long lines of people protesting, visually different from what we usually see with large masses. I have seen caravans of people in other countries, people getting into cars and driving up and down the street—a waste of gasoline, surely, but still the aim is to make a political point. I can imagine bicycle protests, where you ride your bike up and down the street with masks on. People are seeking innovative ways to make their voices heard, to continue democratic traditions.

Humans are social animals, however great this tendency to break up society by the long-term atomization exacerbated by platform capitalism. You cannot break human bonds entirely. You still want to go out and meet friends, still want to interact with strangers, still want to build unions and community organizations. So, while they continue to try and push platform capitalism as a permanent condition, they will not succeed. They are fighting against the inherent human tendency toward justice and fellowship. The contradictions are too great. The atomization of platform capitalism cannot take away from us our desire for mutual comfort and mutual aid. Their failure is inevitable, but that does not mean our success is also inevitable. We have to fight for our world!

RESISTANCE AND REBELLION

FRANK BARAT: Do you think that at one point we need to fall down very, very low, to finally rise? Maybe at one point it needs to go so bad that that’s where the fire will start.

VIJAY PRASHAD: I don’t accept that position for the simple reason that when repression is very bad, or when exploitation rates increase, when society is broken up fundamentally, then the ability and confidence of people to come out onto the streets and organize themselves diminishes. You cannot wait for things to get terrible. If you look at the history of the military dictatorships in South America— in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, for instance—right from the start of the dictatorships, people start to resist. It is the same in Germany during the Third Reich, when the communists and others resist from the first. Do you know the story of Georg Elser, which is recounted by J. P. Stern in his book Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People? Well, Elser was a cabinetmaker who was a union member and an indifferent member of the Communist Party. He was disturbed by Hitler’s war plans and so decided—on his own—to kill Hitler. He went to work at a quarry to get explosives, and then decided to deposit them in a pillar of a beer house where Hitler would come to celebrate his failed beer house putsch of 1923. The assassination attempt failed because Hitler was delayed, and the bomb went off. Elser was arrested while fleeing Germany and put into a concentration camp, where he was killed in 1945. I think of people like Elser or the Edelweiss Pirates, a group of youth in Germany who resisted Nazi indoctrination. Their resistance comes to mind when we think about the people in Argentina and Chile who protested the military by putting their lights on and off during certain times to register their protest. This kind of action gives people confidence to act, telling people that there are others like you who do not accept this dispensation. So, they will not let things get to the point where they surrender their values and their homes. The people who went onto their balconies around the world and banged pots and pans, or those in Italy who played music at set times, all of them are demonstrating something: we are alive, we exist, we will not surrender. That violinist who starts a tune in an Italian street, picked up by a horn player, then a singer, a guitarist, the key, the time sequence, the well-known song, either the partisan anthem “Bella Ciao” or the pandemic-themed song “Abbracciame”—hug me! They are saying we don’t want the human spirit to erode or be crushed. The human spirit rises up when it feels the crushing weight of structures and events.

You are talking about the masses of people rising up, not just resistance but rebellion. Resistance is the act of not surrendering oneself to systems with which one does not agree. Rebellion is the act of trying to overcome that system and produce another one. There can be no rebellion without resistance, with resistance being the first test for people toward developing an agenda of rebellion. To move from being a person in society to resistance and then to rebellion requires elements of transformation. It takes coming into contact with organizations, which are formed by people who are active, people who have been activated to resist and to change things. Activists are human beings who have confidence, who feel confident enough to resist adverse social forces and to try to overcome them, to transform the world. Those who develop confidence put their fingers to the light switch and turn it on and off, on and off. Then others join and the activist’s resistance becomes a movement, which, after it is organized, develops a theory of change, which is a strategy and then develops a set of options for the future.

At every point of repression, even at the start, there are always people who say, No Pasaran! I am not going to allow this to pass. When that one person goes out there and says it somebody comes and stands next to them. And you know those scenes in the movie where one person steps forward, and then another steps forward, and then another steps forward, and soon everybody has stepped forward, and the police must take a step back, and you, watching the film, you’re going Yeahhh! And that’s what we want, you see. What we don’t want is for one person to run toward the police. Because if you run too fast away from the people, the rest will not follow you. The most powerful is if you take one step, and then the people take one step, and then you take one step further. Part of being political is not to run away from the people but to draw the people into confrontation with the present toward the future. So, I personally don’t ever believe things will have to get too bad for people to rise. People always rise, and the question is, can more people be encouraged to rise up? And that is up to the person or the organization who takes the first step.

THEIR VALUES AND OURS

FRANK BARAT: What are your views on the nonviolence versus violence debate?

VIJAY PRASHAD: The first thing I’d ask is: who is the author of the violence? This is a question that is provoked by the work of Frantz Fanon, especially in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, called “Concerning Violence.” A civilization that tolerates high levels of hunger among its people is a violent civilization. A civilization that tolerates unemployment among a section of people is a violent civilization. A civilization that needs to have a police force to stop hungry people from getting food is a violent civilization. The violence comes prior to the looting. The primary looting has happened already. Colonialism was looting. Capitalism is looting. I think the way in which our societies are so violent already should stop people from any knee-jerk entry into the violence/nonviolence debate. That should be where you think, oh my God, how is it possible that in rich countries there is such a high level of hunger, when there is food all around. If you don’t have money, you can’t have food. That is an act of violence, in my opinion. It’s violence against humanity.

We just did a calculation at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research about waste in the world. Waste is so extraordinary, such a burden to the human experience. The greatest part of the waste is produced by the North Atlantic states. One of my colleagues said, “We should calculate whether the nutritional quality of the waste per capita in a European country is higher than the nutrition eaten by people in a third world country.” That’s an interesting idea, although it is hard to get at the data. We know that the average US resident wastes about 1500 kilocalories of food per day, while the average Indian consumes about 2100 kilocalories of food per day. If we had more granular detail, we would find that more than half of the Indian population eats less than the average person in the United States discards per day.

H&M the clothing company, they burn unsold clothes. Tons of it every year.

And that’s bad for the environment, for the climate, and it’s absurd, because there are people who could wear it. If you don’t have money, then you can’t buy the clothes. The greatest violence in this system is against those who don’t have enough money because they are left with no food and no clothes, hungry and naked. That is violence.

When someone like George Floyd is murdered in a brutal way by the police, it provokes protests and sometimes even violent protests. But the violence that might follow the killing of George Floyd is not authored in a vacuum. The killing of George Floyd is violent, brutal, barbaric, and it raises the temperature in society. The violence of the state and its structure is already inside society; it has not been brought from outside by this or that violent actor. Yes, people come and burn cars or shops because they are angry and they might even loot things from shops, but their violence is part and parcel of social violence, the violence of the structure. No political party or organization has said, go burn down the shops or cars, or loot. You don’t need to direct the dispossessed to act in a certain way. As Fanon pointed out, the dispossessed, the wretched of the earth, will act like this because they are mirroring the structure of violence in which they survive. Their violence is a symptom of a violent society. Yes, the United States is a violent society, not only in the guns that flood the homes of people but in the state’s reaction to social problems. The US, with just over 4 percent of the world’s population, has 22 percent of the world’s total prisoners. That’s a large number, near 1.8 million people in jail. If your first reaction to a social problem is prison, that’s the sign of a class-biased violent society.

You can preach nonviolence as much as you want, but your preaching is not going to halt the hand of the person who will break a window and take a television. An organization that is pledged to nonviolence will do important work, but it cannot by itself change the world overnight. There is something spontaneous about the acts of violent rage in these moments of great tragedy and tension, such as the killing of George Floyd. People get angry at the way violence is imposed on them, and they are angry because they are hungry, and they have had enough of the structural violence that prevents them from making decent lives. If we had a nonviolent society, then the spontaneous response would be nonviolent. In a violent society, the spontaneous reaction of people is violent. That’s a sociological rule. A violent society produces a violent response when something violent happens. I’ve used the word violent three times in the previous sentence. At no point has the phrase people’s movement entered that sentence or this thought. There is no people’s movement involved here. There is a violent society, something violent happens, such as the killing of an innocent person by a police officer, and then there is a violent reaction by some sections of society. That was a social reaction and not the political reaction by an organization. Some people on the left will interpret that uprising as a political rebellion. It’s not a political rebellion but a symptom of the violence of capitalism, a social rebellion—a part of capitalist society, not its antithesis.

Capitalist society provokes that reaction. That reaction is part of the history of capitalism. The people’s movements are part of the history of socialism, a different historical tempo, a different set of values and aspirations, a different kind of project. We want to change the conditions that made the death of George Floyd possible, and the death of the millions who die of starvation and hunger-related diseases. We are against the violence of capitalism, against the violence in the structure. We do not need to take any positive or negative position regarding that spontaneous violence because that spontaneous reaction is a reaction to the violence of capitalism and is not occasioned by any organized political force. There is a great difference between the armed struggle that emerges out of the strategy of a political force and the spontaneous uprisings.

We want to change the underlying conditions. When people ask, “Are you in favor of nonviolence?” I answer, “Absolutely”— but should the sanctimonious call for nonviolence be pressed into service only when the wretched of the earth rise up? How do you expect people to be nonviolent in a violent system? Nonviolence is the demand to the system, not to those who are oppressed, crushed by it. The capitalist state is not a dignified state. It is a state of police officers not social workers, a state of tax collectors not teachers and health workers. The capitalist system burns clothes and wastes food. It is not dignified. It is an abomination, an obscenity. It is decadent. The system is violent. So we are not abstractly in favor of nonviolence. We want to create a nonviolent system, a socialist system.

I often think about a quote by Eduardo Galeano, who said that advertising enjoins everyone to consume, while the economy prohibits the vast majority of humanity from doing so. So, when I see a kid stealing a pair of Nike shoes or a TV, it’s also a “fuck you” to the system. Also, the role the media plays in framing the “looters” is key. I was reading about the great revolt in India in 1857, against the East India Company rule, which actually started with the mutiny of Indian soldiers. The soldiers were immediately framed by the British as looters and rapists. And that’s a strategy that is still being used today.

The word loot comes from Hindustani. It’s an Indian word, and it means pillage, essentially. It becomes part of the English language after the uprising of 1857, the mutiny and rebellion. But the word enters the English language not through the looting of the soldiers, but a different kind of looting. When the East India Company was losing most of its hold on Northern India, it sought out allies. One of the allies was the monarch of Nepal, and that’s when the Gurkhas enter the British army. So, the East India Company promised the king of Nepal, the monarch, and the soldiers, If you come and help us take back the cities of the Gangetic Plain in Northern India, then you can take whatever you want and go back home. Essentially, You can loot the city. One of the most famous cases is when they come into the city of Lucknow, and they loot Lucknow, and they take the loot back with them. In Kathmandu’s casinos, if you win a lot of money people say, “You had a Lucknow loot!” The word comes into the English language as part of a counterrevolutionary maneuver, where the soldiers come into a city, break the back of the rebellion, and then take stuff as payment, and go off. It’s actually the financial elites and others who have looted the world. The real looters are the capitalist class. They are the ones who have looted society.

When you walk through the streets of Detroit, Michigan, or Minneapolis, Minnesota, you will see, in many parts of the city, empty storefronts looted. What do I mean? I remember one of my relatives used to work for a big investment company, and when I was in graduate school in the early 1990s in Chicago, I met him at O’Hare Airport and took him for dinner at a restaurant on Devon Street. He was going to Wisconsin to finish a deal regarding a paper factory. The owners did not have the capital to upgrade the factory, so they asked his investment firm to do an assessment. Well, he told me, I investigated it and now I am going back to New York to file my report.

What will it say? I asked him.

We could invest in the factory, he said, since it is a viable factory. We can get new equipment that would keep this factory profitable for twenty or thirty more years. It was the biggest factory in that part of northern Wisconsin and anchored the community. But my relative, whose interests lay with his investment firm and capital rather than the little communities along Lake Michigan, decided against this viable option. I’m going to recommend that the machinery be sold and shipped off to China, he said. The land can be redeveloped as lakeside real estate. That is what they did. The owners made money, the bank made money, and my relative earned a large commission. This is known as asset stripping. I consider this the looting of that town. The town lost its main employer, the lakeside property was sold at high prices, but, as the region slipped into depression, the housing market collapsed and was even more devastated by the credit crisis of 2007 and 2008. That region remains in permanent depression. Who is the primary looter here? The New York investment company had engineered the asset stripping of a small town in Wisconsin. The investment firm bears no responsibility. By the way, in the last two US presidential cycles, the area voted largely for Trump, the man who said in his inaugural address that there was “carnage in America.” That ghoulish phrase by Trump is accurate. There is carnage. The killer is the capitalist system.

I’m going to talk again about the US uprising happening as we speak. A lot of people are in the streets protesting against racism, which is amazing. But many of the major corporations are in the meantime trying to rebrand the Black Lives Matter protest. So, how can we understand the possibilities and pitfalls of a moment like this? In a way, what makes you optimistic, and what gives you caution?

At one level, I’m perennially optimistic. That is because people on the left always believe in the capacity of human beings. To be pessimistic as a person on the left is silly. If you are pessimistic, why would you be a political person of the left? It would be a waste of time. It’s a better idea to just enjoy life, watch a lot of films, make the most you can of things that are ultimately not worth it. You cannot be pessimistic if you are on the left because you already need to have some confidence in the capabilities of humanity, and you need to feel the need to prevent the annihilation of human beings and the extermination of nature. We on the left feel these things. We, on the left, are generally optimistic people because we believe that change is not only possible but that a socialist future is necessary and that human beings must create it.

In that case, you must look around and do an inventory of what sustains your optimism. There are so many people’s movements that struggle to maintain the balance between seeing the world as it is and trying to produce the world that we need. There is the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, which is fighting tooth and nail against evictions from the land and fighting for a humane set of policies to tackle the pandemic. There are the students in New Delhi who have built a tenants’ union in the midst of the pandemic to prevent students from being evicted. There are the farmers who are in a long-term protest. There are the medical workers from Kenya to South Africa to Argentina, in the thick of struggle. Each of these movements is extraordinary.

People struggle to sustain optimism within these small struggles, which are very big for the people who are in the midst of them, and to build the broader struggles out of them. The left is challenged to move from being defensive to building enough power behind our ideas to move these ideas forward. We have a good set of ideas, but we don’t have enough power to push our ideas forward, for our ideas to be taken seriously. For instance, why is it that the left has not been able to gain greater traction for our demand for the complete cancellation of the external debt of developing countries, which is now at $11 trillion. We know that there are at least $37 trillion sitting in illicit tax havens. Why not do a calculation? Take that tax haven money and swap it out for the debt and then use the rest for development projects to erase hunger, illiteracy, reliance on carbon energy, and so on. Gone. No more. We are not going to postpone it. We are going to cancel it. At the same time, why not put on the table the importance of enhancing public health systems? Instead of a police station in every neighborhood, what about a public health office? Convert police departments into a public health office, where you can go to get treated if you fear you are ill; and have a social worker’s office, to see that everybody is doing well in social terms; and then have some kind of community officer, to make sure that the roots of violence are tackled. There is nothing utopian about this, since we know that so much of what becomes seen by the state as criminal is a consequence of social or medical problems, either mental health issues or issues of poverty. The public health workers and the social workers can keep track of these and offer public solutions. Where they are failing and where there are problems that are beyond these, the community officer could come in and see if anything needs to be done that involves more serious measures (such as a community police intervention). Even police officers these days say that they are simply not trained as social workers or mental health workers, yet they have to deal with these problems. It is as if the state has a hostile attitude toward the population, which indeed is how the capitalist state does deal with its population. It treats its own population through the framework of criminality. Social and medical problems are seen as criminal problems. Poverty is treated as criminality.

The idea of neighborhood public health has been used to great impact in places such as Cuba, where the community health personnel are highly respected, and they know the fabric of the community. They know that there are not just individual ailments but also social illnesses that have to be addressed at a social level. The public health worker and the social worker are capable of detecting some problems that otherwise do not make it to light, such as child abuse and other forms of hidden violence. Having a community worker involved in people’s private lives is not a violation of privacy, because privacy can be a shield for horrible terrors inflicted on children and within families. Robust community services bring these to light and create a healthy environment.

These are elementary, immediate demands from people’s movements. But we just don’t have the power to make these demands realized.

The US taxpayer spends twice as much on police than on affordable housing every year. A budget tells you a lot of what you need to know about a government or a country, right?

I think more than that. I think that a constitution of a country tells you a little bit about its aspirations. Constitutions contain the aspirations of a people. The budget contains their values. If you look at a budget, you’ll see the actual living values of that society. A constitution doesn’t have your values; it’s an aspirational text. It’s a budget that has your values. A society that spends more money on preventing people from getting housing is a sick society. Look, here’s a vacant house and there’s a homeless person; there should be a framework to get the person into the house. Instead, the capitalist budget says: here’s a vacant house and here’s a homeless person, and between them is the police force to keep the person from the house. That’s the actual values of the society.

There are two sets of values. Value number one is the value of compassion. In this, you say that housing is a right. Homelessness is an abomination. We will use our combined resources to prevent homelessness. Value number two is the value of barbarism and decadence. In this, you say that we will use our resources to prevent people from getting housing, to prevent people from getting food, to prevent people from getting mental health treatment. So now you have to tell that society, These are your values, do you like them? This is the reason why, in the United States, the Defund the Police movement arose. Defunding the police doesn’t mean abolishing the police. What it basically means is, we should not be paying so much money to the police force; we should be paying to solve the problems that the police are there to prevent solving. Such as homelessness. Why should the police be preventing people from being alive? That should not be their job, but that is what they do. So, with defund the police, what is being said is, Let’s solve the problem of hunger, the problem of homelessness, and not increase policing at the expense of solving these problems. Therein lie the values of a civilization.

THE REAL MEANING OF UNEMPLOYMENT

FRANK BARAT: Let me go back to what we have been talking about for an hour now—the need for fundamental changes in our societies. A lot of people will say that this kind of transformation is impossible now, with so many people unemployed and in dire poverty. What makes you think that change is still possible?

VIJAY PRASHAD: In a way I don’t understand the question. And I’m not being dense or facetious, or whatever. It’s not understandable to me. The system doesn’t know how to deal with unemployment. The system simply cannot employ more people; in fact, we are seeing capitalist firms having cuts on their employment rolls, at this time. They are cutting people off the roll.

Do you see unemployment as a tool of capitalism?

I don’t think that unemployment is a tool of capitalism, but unemployment is fundamental to the capitalist dynamic. Capitalism is a relatively competitive system. Firms compete with each other to make a profit, not to make better goods or to solve social problems. These firms improve goods to wipe out their competitors; that’s a major reason why they innovate. If there is a monopoly situation, you rarely see real innovations. Monopolies stifle innovation. As part of the competitive process, firms increase the productivity of their production processes. They find better ways to handle the making of commodities. Each time they advance their mechanization or improve their labor processes, these firms hire less and less people. That’s the way it goes. They want to make greater profits, so they enhance productivity, cut the rolls, and with that their payroll. This leaves more and more workers unemployed or underemployed by forms of flexible hiring and subcontracting, all done to suppress wages and increase profits.

But do you think that having a lot of people unemployed is also a way, for example, for a boss to say, “Hey, if you don’t want your job, look, I know people would love to replace you!”

I’ll return to that. That’s there. But before that there is a process, which is that you get this large population of people who are structurally unemployed. This has been written about in neoclassical economics as the “natural law of unemployment.” In every capitalist society there is a certain number of people who are unemployed. Capitalist firms are driven by competition and in this competition they only think about the world through their own rational perspective—namely, to increase their profits. But as they increase their profits and fire people, they leave an enormous pool of unemployed people. Two problems arise from this pool of unemployed people. First, they can pose all kinds of social problems, such as criminality and so on. They do not have resources to survive, so they might turn to forms of illegality to survive. If they do not turn to these forms, then they might die in the streets, or they might protest against the conditions of their lives. They might start to burn you down. Individual firms have no responsibility for this social crisis. Second, individual firms want to make a profit, but they can only make a profit after they have sold their goods and services. If there are more and more unemployed people, then the market for these goods and services diminishes. The firm is not interested in lending money to people to buy their goods. That’s not a sensible solution. There is a problem of insufficient demand for the goods produced by the various competing firms. So, from the firm-centered perspective there is no easy solution to these two problems of a social crisis and a demand-squeeze.

Institutes of the state are created to tackle this problem. The state tries to regulate unemployment. It creates unemployment benefit schemes and welfare schemes, small income transfers to maintain people at a basic level sufficient to prevent death and to prevent mass protest and to prevent riots. There is an understanding here that it is the violence of the system that creates hunger and therefore leads to protest. At the same time, these modest income transfers create some demand for the competing private firms. Even the unemployed can buy some things. This is the role that the state plays here. And these benefits are financed from some redistribution of wealth but also by borrowing against the future.

When the neoliberal agenda appeared on the horizon a generation ago, states entered into a permanent austerity mode. Welfare, unemployment benefits, and so on began to be cut. Now you have a problem. Capitalist employers are making life harder, demanding greater productivity, cutting the rolls. This is exacerbated in the pandemic. If you don’t like it, get out, because there is what Marx called the “reserve army of the proletariat,” the 20 percent who are unemployed and willing to take any job. But the 20 percent of the population might still get angry and burn you down. Plus, there’s ineffective demand, so this large population cannot buy things. These older problems that could not be solved by the capitalist state and that provided the social condition for neoliberalism—problems inherent to capitalism—are now there in an even sharper form. The population is disgruntled; it does not have money, and the competitive firms are unwilling to do anything social that goes against their productivity and their profits.

It is into this breach that the neofascist arrives to canalize the anger. In an earlier era, fascism arrived to break the workers’ movements, to destroy the communists and their allies. That was the point of Mussolini and Hitler. Bolsonaro and Modi do not arrive to smash the workers’ movements, because the workers’ movements are already weakened. They have been weakened by globalization, which depletes trade union power and the instrument of nationalization. The historical mission of the neofascists is to channel the anger of the vast numbers of frustrated people who are either unemployed, underemployed, or not happy about this or that social reform that improved the standing of people other than themselves. The neofascist channels this frustration against minorities and the vulnerable. This is their historical task. Even inside Europe, these neofascists—politely and erroneously called populists—canalize the anger of people from the unemployed, underemployed, and frustrated middle classes and sections of the working class against the vulnerable. Men in their fifties and sixties who find that their life has not turned out the way it should have—they get attracted to the Le Pen movement and to Alliance for Deutschland and to extreme right sects that canalize their anger toward the vulnerable and away from the capitalists. They go and beat up a migrant but let the banker off the hook. The system has found a safer alternative than having the Yellow Vests expand into a massive wave that overwhelms Élysée Palace. They are diverted from their march toward the main offices of the state to the neighborhoods of the migrants, to terrify them with their violent presence.

So, to return to your question, unemployment is a contradiction. It is not necessarily just good for the employers, who are able to lift productivity and increase profits without employing more and more people, since structural unemployment is bad for society. To manage the social problem, states do different things. A social-democratic state would pay out unemployment benefits; a neoliberal state will champion the far right to go and just channel the anger.

PART TWO

Struggle Makes Us Human

HISTORY IS A SERIES OF EXPERIMENTS

FRANK BARAT: How is history a series of experiments?

VIJAY PRASHAD: I was quite young when I read a quote from Friedrich Engels. Marx had published A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, so his friend Engels wrote a number of reviews of it. This is what Engels did for all of Marx’s books. He was a true friend! In his review of the Critique, Engels wrote that “History often proceeds by jumps and zig-zags.” I’ve used those words zig and zag a lot already. History does not happen in a linear, empty time. Some moments seem faster than others, as events drag us along and push us to alter structures, while other moments seem totally slow. People sometimes argue that Marxists believe that history moves in a kind of unidirectional straight line, a progressive history, in other words. That’s not the case. In neither Marx nor Engels do we see this kind of caricatured version of history. Take the case of the Haitian Revolution of 1804. It was the first proletarian revolution in world history. It was much more of a proletarian revolution than the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution had different class elements in it. But the masses that made the Haitian Revolution came from the agrarian proletariat who worked in plantations. Now the fact that they were not paid a wage doesn’t mean they were not proletarian. We don’t understand their class position entirely based on whether they were paid a wage or not (this has a great deal to do with the analysis of exploitation and surplus value, but not with our analysis of their class position). I think that’s a rather trivial way of understanding their lives and their experiences.

They conducted a very brave and zigzag revolution. Their revolution was not a straight line. There were betrayals inside it, but eventually they got rid of the planters. But then see what happens: immediately the French demand, essentially, reparations for their lost property. In other words, the people who had been enslaved now had to pay the French exchequer at least $21 billion till 1947. This was for their so-called property—namely, human life. So, the revolutionaries advanced history, but then there was an immediate retreat. And that happens throughout Haitian history: every time the Haitians raise up their heads, they are crushed—by the invasion and occupation of US Marines (1915–1934); by the US-backed Duvalier dictatorship (1957–1990); and then into chaos with two US-backed coups (1991 and 2004); and onwards. Advance, retreat. History is a series of experiments. It depends on how you remember the dynamic of history, its ups and its downs, the hunger for more ups than downs!

If I am taught history in such a way that the people always look like they have been defeated, then my confidence to struggle will go to zero. If I keep studying history and it says, Well there was the French Revolution, but hey, guess what guys, then Napoleon comes and the revolutionary aims are gone, so it was a big waste of time. A lot of people died, and then nothing seemed to advance. But they rose again in 1848 and then again in the Paris Commune in 1871, undaunted, willing to experiment to build a socialist future. Well, then comes the revolution against the tsar’s empire, the October Revolution. Well, that ends up in the gulag, so that’s a big failure. If you reduce the entire October Revolution to the gulag, then it does not inspire confidence. Why bother?

Almost a hundred years ago, socialist historians went in search of rebellions from the past to try to excavate a tradition of unrest, a tradition that challenged the prevailing order of things. There are two Marxist books from 1938 that I want to point toward, one remembered very well, namely C. L. R. James’s unsurpassed study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, and A. L. Morton’s largely forgotten A People’s History of England. A decade before this, there was José Carlos Mariategui’s Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality, another landmark Marxist book that tried to revive entire traditions of struggle of the Indigenous peoples of the Andes. There were also lots of books written by Communist historians published in small pamphlet form that were written in a simple language that recounted rebellions upon rebellions, each to increase your sense of confidence. There’s a famous slogan, I thank the trade union movement for the weekend. That’s a nice idea, because it is not saying remember the Haymarket martyrs only to remember the past, but to know why there are things we enjoy today; these are not the gift of the elites but the product of great struggles by the masses.

If history is not only defeats but also advances, if history is taught in this way, where the struggles of the past are foregrounded, then history will enrich consciousness. If there are indeed zigs and zags, and jumps, this will change our perceptions of what a struggle would be like in the future as well. The story of those struggles produces, I believe, the experience that you can have change, that change is possible. This gives us confidence to act in the world in our present moment.

Nobody is going to save you from a catastrophe. You are going to have to save yourself. And you cannot save yourself on your own, which is a lesson of history, but you have to save yourself in community with others, in struggle, together. And the construction of community is not automatic, but it develops through great struggle, through the creation of organizations and networks, how ordinary people built their confidence through their organizations, through building power, through the class struggle. These lessons emerge out of traditional socialist history writing, since these histories emphasize the contradictions of struggle, how there were gains and defeats. These lessons show us how hunched shoulders straighten up.

What moments in history are you turning to, to think about the struggles at this present moment? How far do we need to go back in history to put what’s happening today in perspective?

History is not just the things that happened. History is how you remember the things that happened. And how you remember the things that happened actually relies on who the you is. When you say, “How do you remember the things that happened?” Well, who are you? Now, obviously, we have this old adage that who wins writes history. And that is of course true, because those who win have the means to print their stories, to disseminate the stories. But it’s not true that the winners are the only ones who tell stories. People who have lost also tell their stories through oral histories, through sorrow songs. There are lots of ways in which people transmit the historical feeling of loss.

I want to say this because we know that the statues of owners of human beings—the slave masters, as they are called—and the statues of colonial leaders that are being toppled down in sections of the West in this moment in the middle of a pandemic, these statues are statues of people who both won and lost in the past. And that’s what’s interesting. Many of these men made their wealth through the enslavement of human beings. Edward Colston (1636–1721) in Bristol, his statue was thrown into the River Avon. That was a person who made a lot of wealth, but at the same time—we are told—he felt some remorse for what he had done. His remorse does not matter. I don’t care to dwell on it because he made his wealth through trading in human beings. In a way, he was a winner in history, even though in Britain they abolished the enslavement of human beings in 1833. Colston died in 1721. The statue of Colston was erected in 1895, a full generation after the abolition of slavery. Why did the Bristol philanthropists of the Arrow Society erect Colston’s statue a full generation after the end of enslavement? Because they continued to respect the trader in human beings a full century and a half after his death, and a full half century after the abolishment of enslavement.

In the United States, the Confederacy lost the war. This class, which made its wealth from the enslavement of human beings, lost the war but remained in power. Decades after the end of the US Civil War (1861–1865), statues of Confederate generals and political leaders began to pepper the landscape of the US South. Bear in mind that right after the war, Confederate leader Robert E. Lee said that he did not want statues erected, since these would keep “open the sores of war.” It was afterward, in the era of Jim Crow, as the assertion of white supremacy rose, that these statues were raised. In other words, the Confederacy was not defeated; there was no historical defeat. Just imagine. After the British came to India and destroyed the Mughals, they didn’t allow statues of the Mughals to be put up. That was not going to be permitted. You just don’t see that. You see the destruction of the past and all its symbols, and sometimes quite viciously. The first thing to remember is that what appears to be a loss in the past is not a loss for everyone. The US Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was not a war about racism, with the forces of antiracism (the Union) defeating the forces of racism (the Confederacy). It was two forces of racism battling each other—one prevails and allows the other one to continue its traditions. I think it is very significant to recognize that. In other words, on both sides of the Atlantic, celebration of the enslavement of human beings continues long after the formal abolishment of the capitalist trade in humans.

And by the way, I never use the word slave. I never think that anybody should be called a slave. This is very much the slavers’ language. We should only think about human beings who have been enslaved, human beings who have been put into a situation of bondage. There is no such person as a slave. I think that is the viewpoint of the slaver and of the colonial. On both sides of the Atlantic, whether it’s Robert E. Lee, the general who led the Confederacy in the United States, or Edward Colston, they belong to the same set of traditions. These are people who promoted the enslavement of human beings and they continued to be celebrated, including Winston Churchill, whose great affinity to colonialism should mark him. So, I think that orientation to the past is important.

You see, I grew up in Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s. The US consulate was on Harrington Street, in the heart of the city, and five hundred meters down was the consulate of the United Kingdom. Harrington Street was named after John Herbert Harrington (1765–1828), an old English orientalist and East India Company official; it should be said that he was not the worst of the colonialists, since he spent his time translating texts from Arabic and Farsi (including the writings of the great Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz). During the height of the war against Vietnam, the government that came to power in West Bengal, where my city Calcutta is, was a left-leaning government. There were communists in the government, there were left socialists, and so on. They changed the name of Harrington Street. They called the street Ho Chi Minh Sarani. And at the end of the street, they put a statue of Ho Chi Minh, which is still there. The issue of statues, memory, politics, and so on is very intimate in our struggles. I remember walking down Ho Chi Minh Sarani and thinking, This is amazing. It was before 1975, when the US withdrew in defeat, and there was a statue of Ho Chi Minh, and the US consulate officials had to write the address, US Consulate, 5/1 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta, India, right during the war they were fighting.

It appears now, for whatever reason, that the forces that are for the emancipation of human beings have finally said, We’ve had enough. We don’t want to walk past a statue every day of this fellow who made his living enslaving human beings. We don’t want to walk down the street and have Robert E. Lee stare at us. And we certainly don’t want Winston Churchill in Westminster. And it’s very interesting that there are sections of the British public—and elected officials—that have come out to defend these people such as Winston Churchill. It shows you that the fight, the abolition of enslavement of human beings in 1833, didn’t fulfill the hopes and dreams of the abolitionists, because the abolition didn’t fully happen. The feeling of the right to enslave human beings continues until this day, and that’s why there’s a fight about the statues.

Most students in schools and universities are studying a history written by the powerful for the powerful. How crucial is it to change this, the narrative of the powerful? Language and semantics play a key part. The war of words is very important.

The first thing I would say is that every historian has a stance, a place from which they observe the past. The question is not whether you have a stance or not; the question is what is your stance. Of course, there are historians who are not political people, but that does not mean that they do not have a class bias or a bias of another kind. You must have a commitment to something, whether you acknowledge it or not. And I think that’s important. I have a commitment that I am public about. I’m quite happy to put my commitment on the table, and therefore you know where I’m coming from. Others, they hide behind objectivity. I have as much faith and trust in objectivity as them, actually. I believe that one must look at records carefully, you shouldn’t make things up, you should have as full an understanding of the past as possible. I agree with the protocols of the profession. I don’t think you should fight for somebody when you write their history, you should look at their limitations, but I have my sentiment somewhere. And I would like everybody to at least admit to their sentiment if not take a direct position. If you’re in favor of Winston Churchill, come on, say it. I want to hear you say what you believe. At least Boris Johnson came out and said, “We should not change our history.” I agree with that, or at least I agree that since Churchill defines a key part of history, Churchill should not be erased from the history books, nor should colonialism; but Churchill’s racism and colonialism’s brutality should not be sugarcoated. It needs to be acknowledged and then judgments should be rendered about it. I’m not proposing a relativist solution, that there are many pasts, that everyone is entitled to their view of the past and that somehow these views are equivalent; that strikes me as the way of some post-modern theories. There is only one past, but we have different perspectives of the past. This is like the present, which is singular, although there are different perspectives of it based on one’s social position.

Look at tea in Britain. What does tea mean to British history? Inside tea is opium. The British pushed opium on the Chinese to get the tea. Trading opium prevented the British from draining their silver to China. In the nineteenth century, Britain was one of the world’s most important drug dealers. But the drug dealing was not restricted to the British, since US traders were also involved in this trade—traders such as the Forbeses and the Astors. In New York, the Astor family is made of what they call old money, the vieux riche. These were, however, drug dealers. The Forbeses and the Astors made their money as brokers in the drug trade. Jardine Matheson, the old Hong Kong trading house now domiciled in the tax haven of Bermuda, was a broker in the drug trade; it was because of Jardine’s eagerness to dump opium in China that the English fought the First Opium War (1839–1842), and the defeat of the Chinese is what allowed the English to seize Hong Kong through the Treaty of Nanking. The British held Hong Kong as a colony from 1842 to 1997, with no democracy for the people of the region (so it is quite strange now to hear the British talk about Hong Kong and democracy in the same faux-outraged breath). Most of the so-called British-Asian banks were brokers in the drug trade, including Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), and so on. HSBC was founded in 1865 after the Second Opium War (1856–1860), which the English prosecuted against the Chinese to force them to buy opium. Let’s talk about that. I’m happy to be frank, I want them also to be open. This is not a hidden history, but it is a history that is written in the tiniest font. The information is out there, but knowledge about it or wisdom about it is not available.

Language is important. How we talk about things shapes how we understand things. For instance, I don’t think there was a Vietnam War. The Vietnamese did not have a war. The war was imposed on them by the French in 1945. Ho Chi Minh declared independence for Vietnam. World War II had ended, so, when the Japanese were defeated, Ho Chi Minh comes through Hanoi and he declares during a mass rally that we are now free, and we are independent. And the French return, and they said, No you’re not. You’re a French colony. The French were defeated in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, and then the US forces come in. There’s no Vietnam War. There is only the French War imposed on Vietnam, there’s the US War imposed on Vietnam. In the same way, there’s no Iraq War. Iraq invaded Kuwait in a dispute with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and others in 1990, saying, Listen, I’ve fought against Iran for you for eight years, you were supposed to pay me. You only paid for the first year of an eight-year war. Pay me. Also, Kuwait, you are drilling into Iraqi oil fields. So, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. Then the United States of America comes in. It’s a US war on Iraq. It’s not an Iraq War.

Is it really an Israel/Palestine conflict? It’s not. The Israelis have occupied Palestinian land since 1948 certainly, and then since 1967 in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. It’s an Israeli occupation of Palestine. The Palestinians are struggling against an occupation. There is no Israel/Palestine conflict. Language is very important, because language crafts reality; it makes things natural. If you think about it as the Vietnam War, there’s no US in there. It’s a war that is somehow in Vietnam. It’s not a US war, it’s a Vietnam war. It’s a very clever way of saying, We were drawn into their war to save them from disaster. We were drawn into Iraq. Look, excuse me, you were not drawn into anything. You imposed a conflict there. The Palestinians are not in a conflict with the Israelis. The Palestinians were living in Palestine. Then you impose Israel on Palestine and you occupy the people. So, these words have within them words of ideology. History, the writing of history, is a battle of ideas itself. It’s a contest about how to understand the past.

THE MECHANICS OF IMPERIALISM

FRANK BARAT: You’ve often said that much attention is given to colonialism and the need to decolonize our institutions and our thinking, but less attention is given to imperialism. So, what’s the difference and why does it matter?

VIJAY PRASHAD: This is an old debate between the concept of colonialism and the concept of imperialism. Let’s do a quick, thumbnail definition, just to make sure we’re clear about what we mean. Colonialism and imperialism are related concepts. Imperialism is the underlying structure of plunder and domination, which can take place without direct control of another people’s political sovereignty. Colonialism essentially means the entry of a foreign power that conquers territory and begins to govern the territory to its benefit. But it basically means that you’ve come into a territory; you remove the political sovereignty of the people; therefore, you’ve also perhaps removed the economic sovereignty of the people, and you determine what happens in that territory to your benefit.

When the English come to India, for instance, they colonize India. They take the territory, then they use the land revenue from the Indian peasants to buy indigo and to buy opium, which they then ship to China. They sell the opium in China, they buy tea from the Chinese, and they sell the tea in England. Now, see, the English have invested nothing. They have taxed the Indian peasants to get the opium. There’s no British investment. They move the opium to China. They buy tea from China with the money earned from selling the opium taken from the Indian peasants as land revenue, and then they sell the tea in England. They are making money out of nothing. That’s straightforward plunder. This was in the 1770s. When Britain left India in 1947, or when it was thrown out of India in 1947, the literacy rate in India was 13 percent. So, in this long period, they were taking land revenue and providing no social benefits. I think this should be clarified—that for this long period there were no social benefits. When you take taxes, you’re supposed to give something to the people, but not in the colonial context. No, there was what the nationalist historians in India called the drain of wealth. Wealth was drained, and then it was used elsewhere.

Now we come from colonialism to imperialism. What is imperialism? Imperialism is where, essentially, a section of the world takes advantage of the gains of history. For instance, this colonial plunder, it uses that wealth not for the development of the colony but for the development of the “home country.” Historians have calculated that perhaps 30 percent of the down payment for British industry comes from the Indian plunder. In most countries of the world, when you want to buy a house or anything, they ask you to put 10 percent as a down payment. Ten percent is a very generous down payment. The rest you can borrow from banks. If 30 percent is your down payment for English and Scottish industry, you’ve done a pretty good deal. You’ve got a huge investment. That’s coming directly from India, only India. The economist Utsa Patnaik calculates that between 1765 and 1938—part of the period of British rule in India, not the whole period—the British drained $45 trillion from the Indian people to enrich the United Kingdom; this money went toward the industrialization of the UK and toward the fattening of its banks. This was money just from India. Not from the Caribbean trade, where you had enslavement of humans, you had sugar cane, you had the rum sales, and a huge amount of profits accrued from there. Forget all that. Just India provided 30 percent of the down payment for the Industrial Revolution. If you add everything else, the colonial super-profits from the Caribbean and from the trade with Africa, from Malaya and Ceylon, from the trade with South America, the percentage of the down payment will be much higher. The railway network in the United Kingdom, for instance, was funded by the compensation given to the owners of human beings after 1833; that capital, blood money really, was then transferred to investments in various infrastructural products, especially railways. It was through colonial plunder that you built up your industry, you advanced your economy, and then you decimated other peoples’ manufacturing. So, the colonies become places that provide raw materials and places where you sell finished goods. You want to maintain this global structure in place for as long as you can. This is the imperialist structure where certain parts of the world start to dominate the world economy. Initially, it’s in commerce, then in manufacturing, and now in finance. You want to use the advantages of history regardless of the principles of free-market economics, and you want to maintain that dominance in perpetuity. And you’ll use anything. You’ll use armed force; you’ll use diplomatic maneuvers. You’ll use anything to essentially maintain your hegemony. What this means is that when the British are thrown out of India in 1947, colonialism may have ended, but imperialism continued.

Kwame Nkrumah wrote a book in 1965 called Neo-Colonialism: The Latest Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, who led the liberation struggle in what was the Gold Coast, became the first head of government in Ghana and then was ejected in a coup in 1966— the year after he published his book. Neocolonialism was another way of talking about imperialism. The imperialists say you can have your political sovereignty or what we used to call flag independence, but your economic sovereignty, your social sovereignty, even your cultural sovereignty is taken away. You no longer trust your own culture. You are watching movies from outside; you are reading books from outside. One used to joke that in faraway places, let’s say in India, I would have known the latest book published in Paris, but I may not have known what’s being read in Iran. Today, for instance, everybody knows who the TikTok influencers are from Hollywood, music stars, et cetera. But they may not know who their own cultural producers are. So, even your cultural life is being suffocated. There was a very good book written by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart called How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971). This was produced right before the coup led by General Pinochet—backed by the US government—against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, in 1973. And what Dorfman, who is Chilean, and Mattelart demonstrated in How to Read Donald Duck is how our brains are also subordinated to the cultural dominance of somebody else. Disney shows Indigenous people incapable of managing their resources and a handful of characters accumulating piles of wealth—and explains it as chance; plunder is a normal feature of Disney stories, but plunder is providential, not planned. Chilean children watch Disney shows and see themselves through the eyes of Disney, see themselves as alien to themselves; they see themselves through Washington’s eyes, not their own eyes. They might see themselves as chosen by providence to expropriate the lands of the Mapuche and other Indigenous people. This cultural subordination means that their faith in themselves is eroded. That’s imperialism. It is a point made very powerfully by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and in his essay “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

About ten years ago I was writing a story about trade between India and Iran. I said to some Iranian officials, “You are sending oil to India, and India is paying you in rupees.” This was because of the US sanctions. The rupees are sitting in a bank account in Calcutta, as it turned out. And I asked them, “Why don’t you buy food from India?” I learned for the first time that the Iranians, in the 2000s, were buying their wheat from the United States. I asked, “Why are you buying wheat from the United States?” They said, “It’s better quality wheat.” Now, that’s interesting. That means even in Iran there is this idea that US wheat is better than Indian wheat. That’s the cultural dominance that then allows you to put yourself into the circuits of imperialism, and you subordinate yourself. Iran could have rejected that and said, “We don’t want to buy US wheat. We’re under US sanctions; we’ll buy wheat from India because we have money sitting in Indian banks.” No. Culturally, they felt, no, US wheat is superior. So, imperialism is much more tentacular, the tentacles of the octopus are entering you in different ways. Even if you’re politically independent, if you fought off colonialism, you still are under the yoke of imperialism. And I think, in most countries in the world, colonialism has been fought off. We are definitely in a system where it’s much harder to tell people that, look, you are under the yoke of a foreign power; your sovereignty is compromised. They say, No, it’s not. I just prefer to eat McDonald’s. Okay, you prefer to eat McDonald’s. But why? And what does this mean? You live in Paris, you live in France, it has an authentic cuisine, and yet you’re going to Burger King every day. Why? I’m not against burgers. If you like hamburgers, that’s fine. But think about this. Why is this such an attractive thing, this sort of US-exported fast food? It’s not even authentically US culture. This is a form of hypercapitalist fast food, instant food, which takes elements of food in the US and creates a new kind of cuisine. Why is this a good thing? In the United States, fast food like this only has a hundred-year history. It’s not like this is something authentically from the culture of the United States. This is a new form of delivering food where the social engagement of food gets destroyed, such as eating together, slow eating, enjoying your family and friends. This gets eroded because of the pressures of work and life and so on. This desire for something that is alien to you—this is cultural imperialism.

Deeper than that is the fact that one’s entire economic development agenda is constrained. A country that had been colonized saw its wealth drained. When it is politically independent, it must borrow money to develop its social life, and this money is borrowed often from banks and bond holders who are former colonizers. This debt becomes an instrument of subordination. Total external debt held by developing countries is now $11 trillion, an obscene amount. When a country must borrow more or to refinance the debt, the wealthy bondholders—through the International Monetary Fund—will say change this or that aspect of your domestic policy, disregard the voters of your country, and listen to us first because the wealthy bondholders have a more significant vote than your own citizens. This is the mechanics of imperialism.

I guess that’s probably why there’s less attention to it, right? Because it’s a lot more, in a way, subtle, right? It plays with our minds without us even noticing.... It’s like a virus.

I use the phrase, “It’s like the tentacles of an octopus,” because one tentacle is the social domination, one is the cultural, one is the economic, and so on. But they all have basically come around our necks, and we can’t breathe. If you take the social aspect, it’s quite significant. And it’s not got to do with Americanization. I think there’s some problems here that people say, “Well, it’s American.” To say that something is American is false. It’s not. It’s about capitalism.

What I’m getting at is how social life becomes atomized, the atomization of people. And the technology facilitates it. When I grew up in Calcutta, we had a radio, but there was no television. There were only two radio stations, both government stations. My father used to put on the news, then we would like to listen to the music channel, and we’d go back and forth. Then the TV came into our lives in the late 1970s. Initially, there was only one government channel. You put the TV on for three hours in the evening, watch some news, some variety shows, and then it was over. When India liberalized, cable TV made its appearance, with about fifty channels. In a house, if you can afford it, you buy two TV sets. Different people can watch different things on the separate televisions. If there is one channel, then you only need one set; if there are more than one channel, then you can use more than one set. Now, even worse, your computer is a TV, and so is your phone. You can have a household of eight people, and each person watches different things on a different instrument. They are totally atomized from each other. Then they’re not even having that experience together. So, this social process of a combination of technology and the social relations of capitalism deeply atomizes us from each other. This form of interaction or non-interaction enters our way of thinking.

Of course, technological forms have contradictory social impacts. Phones both take individuals away from immediate social contexts—the family in the example I just gave—while putting them into social linkages with others with whom they can communicate. I suppose the way in which we build our social networks is of concern, and two major concerns have been raised in various cultural and political discussions. The first is the narrowing of the public sphere, with our retreat into subcultures of politics and social life, building groups that have shared interests of various kinds. The second—building from the first—is that in these groups, particularly in political groups, an echo chamber of information and assessment can develop, where there is the possibility of unchallenged false information gathering steam. These are elements of concern, and sometimes the debates around them take place by blaming individuals rather than coming to terms with how these two outcomes are reflective of the overall diminished sphere of public action in our societies. The attack on public action contributes to the production of this inwardness.

So, when we think about capitalism and life, we often think about it in terms of political suffocation, cultural humiliation, and economic subordination. But there is also a major social impact. The social structure is altered by the entry of technological forms, altered as well by the way in which we interact with each other as a consequence of commodities of leisure. It is not just what we look at but how we look at things, not just the cultural content that dominates our lives but also the social form that leisure and communication take. So, there is an intertwined subordination to the social form and the cultural content. How you live your social life is as fraught as what kind of culture you are shaping. The culture is often one that alienates you from yourself. We grow up speaking a certain language, but many of the cultural products we enjoy are in a different language. We could get alienated from our own imagination and our dreams because we are living in someone else’s language. Certain cultural forms through specific channels of dissemination shape the way we think about the world. This is how imperialism functions on the social and cultural plane. For instance, we begin to accept the premises of Hollywood. If you watch the show Homeland, developed initially by Israeli producers, about the CIA, you start to see the world from the eyes of the CIA agents; you begin to sympathize with them. The Arab—who is often the terrorist—is a threat, whereas the CIA agent is always the savior. You can’t cheer for the Arab. It’s the same with children of an earlier era who watched John Wayne or later Clint Eastwood films. They always cheered for the cowboy against the “Indians.” A Native American friend once told me that even on the reservations in the US Southwest, kids wanted to be the cowboys. This is a closed system of significations. Even now, when you watch the new kinds of Western movies, the cowboy is the attractive character. And that’s very disturbing to me.

TRANSITION TO THE FUTURE

FRANK BARAT: The people in power, governments, corporations, want, in a way, the masses to have a very short-term memory when it comes to history. The present is what counts. The status quo is what you have and what you will get forever. How do you challenge this?

VIJAY PRASHAD: This is an issue of ethics and possibility. Marx and Engels, in their fiercely productive period from their meeting in 1844 till the death of Marx in 1883, are struggling with these themes of ethics and possibility, with the capacity of certain classes to carry forward the agenda of humanity. What they develop into historical materialism is partly an encouragement for people to understand that history is not random, but one can discern a logical process, a motor. Now, that does not mean that it is mechanical. It means that things are transformed, both structures and social practices. History is not just the movement from one king to the next. Marx is a contemporary of Leopold von Ranke, who is considered one of the fathers of modern, scientific history. But Ranke was essentially a court historian, who of course pioneered narrative history but at the same time wrote books such as the history of the popes. Even though there are explanations in Ranke’s work, the general undertow of history is that things just happen. There is empty time and then events take place inside that time. You have to chronicle the events. A lot of bourgeois historiography is like the old medieval chronicles: there was this king, and then there was that king, and then there was another king. The Marxist intervention goes beyond all this and inaugurates a more scientific assessment of the past. There are periods in history that are related to the way people produce, and the way they produce impacts what they think about the world around them in terms of the constraints and possibilities; imagination is not totally free but restricted by the way humans relate to nature and to each other. The concept—mode of production—enabled Marx to understand these constraints and possibilities and the periods in history. There are periods in antiquity where—at least in Europe—enslavement was dominant, and it was this enslavement of the city-states of Greece that enabled the freemen of the cities to create a certain civilization. Through a protracted process, this mode of production will be transformed into one in which feudal systems are in dominance. This feudalism is not identical in all countries of the world. In fact, there are great differences between the kind of feudalism we see in Europe and in Asia, between the character of the social formation in Africa and in the Americas. The point I am making here is not that there is one feudalism but that there are modes of production that are identifiable and that shift over time. Eventually, through another long process that involves agricultural transformation, colonial conquest, and plunder, as well as the development of new technologies, capitalism emerges. Capitalism is very different from feudalism. A revolution against feudalism produces capitalism, although this “revolution” is partly structural and only partly political (such as with the 1789 French Revolution, which Ranke, by the way, disliked). Marx’s studies on France—Class Struggles in France, the 18th Brumaire, and Civil War in France—lay out a new kind of historical analysis, a more sophisticated analysis. Perhaps we can tinker with some of their texts based on newer empirical findings, but the broad point made by the interventions of Marx in history writing is clear, and this clarity and this sophistication are now taken completely for granted: namely, that there are structural forces and political forces that drive history forward (and not always forward, sometimes backward!), so that there are actually transitions in history.

This idea of transitions in the past is important. It’s an ethical question. If there are transitions in the past that were so radical, then there can be transitions in the future. That’s the basis of the argument. Feudalism is so dramatically different from capitalism—in feudal times you had the political domination of the lord over the whole of society, and under a capitalist system you have this abstract economic domination, where we are not dominated by a lord. When you do a protest, Frank, and you walk out on the street, you can go and burn down a bank branch. But you’re not actually impacting capitalism. You just burned down a building. Capitalism is abstract domination—abstract social domination, in fact, where you are actually participating in a slight way in your own domination, you know? Because you must sell your labor power to the system. You can’t survive outside it. You can’t just check out from capitalism. In feudal times, you could run away, and you could create some utopian colony somewhere. People who had been enslaved in Brazil would run away from the plantation and they would create a maroon, you know? They would create a quilombo, free territories that you can see across the Caribbean as well. Even in the United States, people who had been enslaved would escape and create a free zone. This phenomenon was known as maroonage. Under the social law of capitalism, you just can’t run off and create your own territory outside the law of value. It is much harder, since capitalism is much more pervasive.

Let’s take an example of the attempt by small groups to break away from capitalism, an example different from when a country tries to delink from the capitalist system. You must know the writer Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote the brilliant Slaughterhouse-Five. His son, Mark Vonnegut, wrote a book called The Eden Express, which recounted his life on a commune that tried to escape from the laws of capitalism. He has a hard time in the commune since he finds that his group cannot survive without asking their families for money. They need to ask their parents to help them, the capital to flow in to provide the kind of machines they need and the upkeep necessary for those machines. In the modern world, if you do not have capital, you will not be able to live within the mode of production of our times. It’s like what a Chinese minister once said: You can distribute wealth, but you can’t distribute poverty.

To break away from the social domination of capitalism is difficult but not impossible. To create a new system, a socialist order, requires seriousness of purpose. Samir Amin’s concept of delinking was part of the effort to think about how countries can break off from the capitalist law of value and journey toward a socialist future. Amin was an Egyptian Marxist who worked most of his life in Cairo, Dakar, and Paris. His early writings were on the mechanisms of imperialism, how capital accumulation took place on a global scale. Toward the end of his life, Amin developed the concept of delinking, which means that a country will submit its external economic relations to the requirements of its internal economy and not the other way around, which is how capitalism operates nowadays on an imperial scale. Having turned to give priority to the internal relations of a territory, it is not impossible to drive a socialist agenda outside the parameters of the capitalist law of value.

We can agree that feudalism is different from capitalism, that humans—through structural changes and political changes— created a new system. If you accept that this is possible, then it is impossible to make the case that a transformation out of capitalism is not possible. Capitalism, like feudalism, is not eternal. It is merely a stage in the journey of human evolution. The point here is not that history moves in an evolutionary fashion, because of course there is the imperative for human agency to drive various agendas forward. Nonetheless, the point is that there are breaks and shifts and transformations. This structure can move to that structure, and that possibility gives us hope.

There is real power in making the argument that a better future is possible. What has happened under the logic of the cultural domination of capitalism is that the argument has been made very successfully that there is no future. What you have is the present. And this present will continue forever. You will tinker. You will change certain things, you know. The inequality rate is too high; we’ll decrease it a little. But you can’t fundamentally change anything.

An intellectual who comes up here is Francis Fukuyama, who is associated with the phrase the end of history, which is read to mean that history has ended and all we have is the present. Fukuyama was with the US state department and the Rand Corporation. When the USSR was dismantled, Fukuyama wrote an essay called The End of History and the Last Man. He took pieces of Hegel— the idea of the end of history—and pieces of Nietzsche—the idea of the last man. Fukuyama was not exactly saying that history has ended, but essentially what he was saying was that the possibility of going beyond liberal capitalism was no longer available. The Soviet Union had collapsed; liberal capitalism is eternal. Within liberal capitalism, reform is possible but nothing beyond it. Recently, with the rise of the neofascists around the world, Fukuyama has withdrawn his thesis. He said, No, I was wrong, liberal capitalism is not eternal; in fact, liberal capitalism is being challenged not by communism but by neofascism. So, I was wrong. A future is possible. The future is barbaric. This returns us to Rosa Luxemburg, who said that capitalist crises open up a choice for humanity between barbarism and socialism. Okay. We all understand now that capitalism, the present, is in total crisis. The neofascists have told us that a future is possible, and that this future will be barbaric. So, what we are saying is, Okay, you accept that a future is possible. In which case, let us construct socialism. Seems an adequate response to them.

THE THIRD WORLD WAS A PROJECT, NOT A PLACE

FRANK BARAT: I guess your point is that what’s dangerous when people actually know history is that they know it could change. We hear all the time that capitalism is what you’re going to get for the rest of your life. Same when it comes to the Palestine question. People say, you know, there’s nothing you can do. Israel, the US, they’re too powerful. But if only they could look at even short-term history, like the time of Apartheid South Africa. You know, Black South Africans were like Palestinians. They had imperial powers against them. They had the banks against them. And they managed to get out of it. History is a very powerful tool, and that’s probably why it’s so badly taught in schools. We, for example, often talk about the Global South, but a lot of people refer to this as a geographical space. When you wrote about it, you didn’t write about it as a place but as a project. How differently is history viewed in this part of the world than in the West, in your opinion?

VIJAY PRASHAD: When I got to graduate school in the United States in the 1980s, I was perplexed by the way the entire “Third World” was treated. It was denigrated as a place of failed states, of dictatorships, and of basket cases. Details of this or that country were irrelevant, as an overall blanket of clichés suffocated our entire histories. In his Covering Islam, Edward Said wrote about the importance of a detailed assessment of the politics of the different countries of the Third World as an antidote to the orientalist portrayal of these countries. He had in mind the Iranian Revolution of 1979. I was interested not only in the individual political dynamics but also of the overall political project of the Third World.

This process of building the project of the Third World goes from at least the 1920s to the 1980s. It begins with the League Against Imperialism meeting held in Brussels in 1927 to 1928, where people came from all around the colonized world, including from Asia and South America, from Africa and from the United States (including African Americans and Puerto Ricans). They gathered in Brussels and they put out a very powerful statement for a new world. This conference was organized and financed by both the communists and the Chinese Kuomintang. This was in late 1927, after the Shanghai Massacre in April 1927, when the Kuomintang cracked down on the communists. That’s itself remarkable. The meeting takes place in the winter of 1927 to 1928 and then the participants go home. Many of them are arrested and killed, ruthless behavior by the colonial forces, who knew that internationalism was dangerous. When some of the survivors meet again in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955—after some of them have won their independence—at the Asian-African Conference, Sukarno, the president of Indonesia, referred to the importance of the Brussels meeting. The process began there and then restarted in Bandung, which is emblematic of the process, the place where the project takes shape. The leaders of the new states created an agenda. They said, This is how we want the world to look. This is our idea. We want to shape the world in this way. We are not just going to be passive recipients of Western knowledge. We want to produce knowledge of how the economy should function, how trade and development should be organized, all these big questions. We want to have our opinion on the table. In 1961, they create the Non-Aligned-Movement (NAM). Very soon thereafter, in 1964, they create a bloc in the United Nations initially called the G77, or the Group of 77 Countries. Now, there are 134 countries in the G77. These new states created institutions—institutions with a project.

In 1973 and 1974, they fought to pass a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly, called the New International Economic Order (NIEO). They had a political project, which we call the Third World Project. In my book The Darker Nations, I make the claim that the Third World is not a place, but a project. This project is summarized in the NIEO—major claims on the way the politics and economics of the world should be organized. The text of the NIEO resolution is incredible. If only they had won! But they were defeated. Their project was defeated.

One of the weapons that struck them hard was the debt crisis of the 1980s. The Third World states financed their development through loans denominated in dollars, as well as through in-kind development from the USSR and the communist states. The dollar loans were the Trojan horse for the destruction of the project. These dollars were borrowed based on the London Interbank Offer Rate (LIBOR), which is—as we now know—a rigged system controlled by international banks domiciled in London. In 1979 the US treasury secretary Paul Volcker lifted the US interest rate, which drew in dollars to the United States; this is called the Volcker Shock, and it was designed to bring investment into the US and to kick the US out of stagflation, or a combination of inflation and stagnation. This tsunami of dollars that entered the US triggered LIBOR, raising the rates of borrowing for the Third World, which suddenly saw their debt servicing payments skyrocket. Nothing fundamental changed about these loans taken by the Third World states, but the interest payments rose as a consequence of what Volcker did. These countries went into a long-term crisis, with some parts of the world still struggling with the consequences of the debt crisis of that period. This is important to remember.

The debt crisis crushed the Third World Project. Mexico went into bankruptcy in 1981. One after another the countries had to line up to beg for debt restructuring and debt forgiveness. They went to the IMF, where they received orders to “reform” their economies, and the structural adjustment that the IMF forced on them was the price of debt restructuring. The IMF used the debt crisis as an instrument to subordinate these countries, to put them on firm neocolonial foundations. They had to commit institutional suicide, putting their social formations into permanent austerity. The IMF took charge of their sovereignty, using the dollar-denominated credit system to control them.

None of this is a mystery. Even bourgeois economists agree with the broad facts of what happened. All of it is on the table. These countries had projects that were destroyed by something that had nothing to do with them. The whole project of neoliberalism is born on the ashes of the Volcker Shock. After the collapse of the Third World Project and the birth of permanent austerity—with suppressed wages at the core of it all—you see new forms of unrest develop in the Global South. These are often referred to as IMF riots, since they are a direct answer to the IMF-driven structural adjustment austerity programs.

The most spectacular IMF riot in this period takes place in 1989 in Caracas, Venezuela. It is known as the Caracazo. It is a general rebellion, with lots of burning and looting, a great deal of pure anger against the system. As a consequence, there is a brutal crackdown on the people. It is important to recognize that the people rise violently, but they are merely mirroring the terrible violence of the system that holds them down. Hugo Chávez was then the head of the Presidential Guard in Caracas, although he was not on duty that day since he was unwell. When he came out of hospital and the rebellion had been suppressed, his colleagues told him, We are very angry that we were forced to shoot people of our own class. This event deeply radicalizes Chávez. Three years later, in 1992, he attempts a coup d’état, which fails. Coups are no good, he decides while in prison. I remember being in Caracas when Chávez was in prison. There were all these stories about Chávez and what he was going to do, how a political movement would develop. This is what happened. His movement won the election in 1998 and inaugurated the Bolivarian Revolution after he took office as the president in 1999. Venezuela had a heroic role in this era.

Most other countries went into long-term crisis, with mass uprisings burning down cities and then being crushed. These uprisings came punctually because they reacted to the systematic cutting-back of spending on education and health care, of investment in jobs and infrastructure. The IMF essentially cannibalized these countries. No money on health, no money on education, no government salaries; the entire social formation went into permanent crisis.

Before Venezuela, there was one other shining star in this period, but this star was knocked down. In 1983, a young military officer, Captain Thomas Sankara, comes to power in Upper Volta. That’s in the Sahel region of Africa, just beneath the great Sahara Desert. Sankara changes the colonial name of his country from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, which means “land of upright people.” What a lovely name for a country! Sankara deepens the commitment of his government into projects for Burkina Faso to become food sovereign, water sovereign, to become a model for Africa. Sankara’s commitment to women’s rights went in a practical direction, since he said that, on a regular basis, women must do no care work, no housework, no social reproductive labor. It was a government mandate. Men must do it, must get the experience of doing it, and perhaps should derive pleasure from sharing the work of social reproduction. It is a very interesting political project that Sankara put forward. He had less than four years in power in Burkina Faso to move this very deep agenda. What happens to this far-seeing, brave, and brilliant man? He was assassinated by the old colonial powers in 1987. They would not permit an example of a socialist society to develop in Africa.

What is the situation in Burkina Faso and in nearby Mali today? Total chaos. Both countries are food insecure. The Sahel is desiccating as the Sahara grows, a consequence of capitalist-induced climate change. The region now teems with all kinds of gangsters, including al Qaeda–type groups. Many of these al Qaeda groups in the Maghreb, as I have seen myself, are not ideologically driven by Islamism as much as they are cigarette and cocaine smugglers, as well as gun runners and human traffickers. They have formed an al Qaeda franchise in order to smuggle. You had a choice in the 1980s: you had Sankara on one side and gangsters (including al Qaeda) on the other. The old colonial powers made a choice for the people. They said, We give you the gangsters. The West chose al Qaeda. The underlying issues in places like Burkina Faso and Mali are products of the IMF pressure to create ceaseless austerity; above these issues exist groups with toxic politics that reveal the contorted forms taken by the dispossessed when a socialist alternative is not easily available.

THE LONG EFFECT OF THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

FRANK BARAT: The collapse of the Soviet Union in ’91 was also felt very differently in the global South or the East-South than the West.

VIJAY PRASHAD: Yes, absolutely, it was felt differently. The USSR’s own history is complex, but I want to focus on one aspect, namely the reform attempts. From the 1950s onward, but accelerated in the 1970s, Soviet economists understood the need for various kinds of reforms. Alexei Kosygin led these reforms in 1956, in 1973, and then again in 1979. There were problems of low levels of investment and low development of technology as well as perennial problems of low labor productivity. So there was a weakness in the economy that manifested itself in a very negative way by the 1980s. The Soviets struggled with it, made it public, which is why it was well known outside the USSR and which is what provoked open debates inside the communist movement around the world. These debates took place in order to better understand the limitations of the Soviet experiments and to see how better to rectify it. The USSR was not going to go the way of the Third World or the West, where austerity regimes became a permanent feature in order to maintain growth rates. The USSR instead accepted low growth rates in order to protect the social wages that it offered to the population (including public education, public health, public housing, and so on). Two of the arenas of the Kosygin reforms from as early as 1956 were “computerized economics” or the introduction of cybernetics to planning, which meant better use of statistics to allocate scarce resources for social needs and experimentation with forms of incentives that would include social incentives and decentralization of enterprises. Both of these reforms made some gains, but far too slowly to deal with the rising costs of the social wages.

The debate in the international communist movement on some of these themes was both a rich debate and a narrow debate. It was rich when it allowed for an honest discussion about the actual limitations of socialist construction, which needed to be addressed and rectified, and it was narrow when it descended into camp-type debates between the Soviets, the Chinese, the Albanians, the Yugoslavians, and those who lined up behind each of these options.

In India, based on a range of issues, there was a split in the communist movement in 1964. On the one side, you had the Communist Party of India (CPI), which was much more pro-Soviet, with close ties to Moscow and with a much greater collaborationist position vis-à-vis the Indian bourgeoisie. The larger section that left the CPI became the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). We don’t take instructions from Moscow, this party said, we have a fraternal relationship to the USSR but not a subordinate relationship. The CPI(M) developed an independent understanding of Soviet history and an independent understanding of the role of the USSR in the world. For parties such as the CPI(M), there was a very frank and clear assessment of the situation in the USSR. This is not unusual in the communist networks, where frank discussion about the problems in the USSR during the 1980s appeared in print. In fact, in 1987, B.T. Ranadive [a member of the Politburo of the CPI(M)] wrote a piece in The Marxist that offered such a view of the USSR on its seventieth anniversary; this essay prefigured the collapse of the USSR a few years later. Ranadive wrote of the “erosion of inner-party democracy” that prevented proper assessments of the challenges faced by the Soviet government in light of economic slowdowns (partly occasioned by high social wages, by aid to socialist and national liberation states and movements, and by high military spending to match the increased military expenditure of the West). It was this inability to meet the challenges of the day, Ranadive suggested, that endangered the USSR. Such theory as from Ranadive prepared the CPI(M) for what would happen in 1991, when the USSR was dismantled.

In the West, the attack on the Soviet Union generally came from the right. The left critique of the Soviet Union was highly sectarian, taking place in small Trotskyist and Maoist groups, and resembled the critique that came from the right. There was little mass left understanding of the USSR in a balanced way. When the USSR collapsed, the pro-Soviet groups also suffered, and those that had attacked the Soviets also suffered (the Eurocommunists mostly fell apart). The CPI(M) and groups like it outlasted the collapse. The CPI(M), although weakened, remains a force in Indian politics, with a million cadre members and hundreds of millions of people involved in its mass organizations. The farmers’ revolt of 2020 to 2021 would not have been possible in this way without the presence of the All India Kisan Sabha and the All India Agricultural Workers Union, both mass fronts of the CPI(M).

The CPI(M) offered a critique of the limitations of the USSR, but from within the terms of the communist experiment, not from outside it. That is why the CPI(M) considered the USSR to be an important reference, since it was the Soviets who played a key role in defending the expansion of freedom in the world. The Soviets defended national liberation struggles and socialist construction, as in Cuba, despite the difficulties. The USSR was a shield for the Palestinian struggle, with the countries of the communist state system—such as the GDR—offering important material support to the Palestinians. Communists such as these, who had a balanced view of the USSR, were not confused when it collapsed. The CPI(M) did not collapse when the USSR fell apart. It had its own theory, and it was not reliant as a client on Moscow. The Vietnamese Communist Party did not collapse, since it had its own theory and its own history, having come into government in 1945 in the north and then in 1975 across Vietnam, after the terrible war imposed on it. By the time the USSR collapsed, the Vietnamese had defeated the US for sixteen years and had developed their own socialist construction project. It had developed and matured and created its own understanding of its place in history. Generally, the collapse for the left took place in the Western European parties and in some parts of the world where the link to Moscow was too close.

I remember a very key meeting held in Calcutta in 1993. The CPI(M), two years previously, had held a discussion at the party’s Fourteenth Congress on the setbacks in the socialist world. It turned out that 1993 was the 175th birth anniversary of Karl Marx. So, the party invited a range of parties to Calcutta to discuss the world situation after the fall of the USSR. Leaders came from the Communist parties in Cuba and Vietnam, from Nepal and Portugal, from South Africa and Brazil; there was the Workers’ Party of Belgium and the Workers’ Party of Turkey, socialist parties of Mexico and Australia. They held a very sophisticated discussion on the US-dominated unipolar world that had begun to take shape. The papers were later collected in a volume which I remember studying very carefully. What did they foresee? More military adventures from an increasingly imperialist United States, and more IMF-type austerity regimes put in place. It was going to be very important to build independent political strength to oppose the IMF kind of economic restructuring and the US-led military adventures. The war against Iraq had already begun, and then you would see the NATO war against Yugoslavia that destroyed that country in 1999. Then there was a war against the planet launched after 9/11. Those who came to Calcutta saw all this clearly. There were spirited, sophisticated disputes but general agreement that Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action.

Similar dynamics occurred in South America. In Brazil, for instance, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) was formed in 1984. Through its struggles to organize peasants and excluded workers, the MST developed an independent understanding of the world, derived from Marxism and left variants of liberation theology. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the MST had already rooted itself in its independent assessment of world affairs. In the next period, the MST would offer decisive ideological leadership across Latin America, largely because it had created its own sense of the world and of the direction forward, including the key problems of land hunger and land degradation as well as the need to develop direct action and cooperative social experiments to build the capacity for mass struggle among key classes whose sense of possibility needed to be awakened.

Many years ago, the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti championed “polycentric communism,” which referred to a communism without a center: the USSR, for instance. This was the kind of thinking that developed during the cold war. This view came out of the differences in the communist camp, certainly, but it also came from an understanding that different communist parties must develop their own thinking rooted in their context, and this thinking will then allow each communist movement to interact with others and build a rich, diverse kind of internationalism. The theory that emerges out of this rooted understanding of the world and the engagement between these different organizations is a richer one, a fuller one. Many communist parties in the Third World—whether in India or in South Africa—and left organizations, such as the MST and Democratic Way in Morocco, developed their own theories, which meant that they were not without a skin when the USSR collapsed.

When the USSR collapsed, it created a vacuum. The USSR held back the US and its allies from exerting their power over the world, which is exactly what happened after 1991. What came afterward, a world created to benefit multinational corporations domiciled in the West, has been catastrophic. Was it a good thing? Not for the people of Iraq, for instance. The people of Iraq have suffered from the long war that the US prosecuted against that country from 1991 through the sanctions regime to the massive bombardment and occupation from 2003, a nonstop war for decades. The same kind of fate befell Afghanistan. When the US began to bomb Iraq in early 1991, Saddam Hussein was sitting in one of his palaces with his close advisers, including Hamad Hammadi. They drafted a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the last president of the USSR. Saddam and Hammadi hoped that the USSR would help save Iraq from the US barrage. Hammadi told Hussein that the war was not intended “only to destroy Iraq, but to eliminate the role of the Soviet Union so the United States can control the fate of humanity.” This is how Hammadi saw the world from inside the destructive US bombardment. There was no USSR to the rescue, since Gorbachev had already started to collaborate with the US. People like Gorbachev surrendered the USSR to the US. They are deeply compromised in its collapse.

The collapse of the USSR had many intellectual implications. What were they? I’m going to come to this in a roundabout way. First, I want to address this image that develops of the communist as an apologist for authoritarian violence. The term used in social media is tankie. It refers to the 1956 entry of Soviet forces into Hungary. People who use this term have no idea that Hungary had one of the most wretched feudal systems, with fascism rooted in that country prior to the arrival of Hitler to power in Germany and long before Germany moved into Hungary. This feudalism and its fascist cognate had deep roots in Hungary, and it did not go in the new people’s republic that emerged again after the student protests in 1956. This is a complex issue that should not be reduced to merely the Soviet tanks entering. The issue is not to litigate the Soviet entry into Hungary in 1956, which parties such as the Indian communist party criticized, by the way. The point is that there is an image of the communist as an undiscerning follower, which is ahistorical, since communists in 1956 had a range of opinions about that event and communists ever since have debated issues with a great robustness. It is incorrect to believe that those who have a party discipline do not have a range of discussions inside and across their movements. It is part of the information war against the left to dismiss the left activists as robots.

Let’s return to the idea of the independently developed theories of left movements around the world, because it has a bearing on this question of the post-USSR period. In a place like India, the communists developed a very significant and strong tradition of Marxism, outside the trajectory of Europeans and North Americans and even the Soviets. This was a trajectory of Marxism that goes back to people in the party, important party leaders, such as E. M. S. Namboodiripad, who was the general secretary of the CPI(M) and a very significant intellectual. Toward the end of his life, E. M. S. discovered Gramsci. He read Gramsci at his hospital bed and then began to dictate articles—along with his comrade P. Govinda Pillai—which became a little guidebook to Gramsci. E. M. S. said at that time, “I wish I had engaged with Gramsci before. I just didn’t come across him.” But, in fact, when you read E. M. S. on Gramsci, and when you read E. M. S.’s early writing, you will see that they were both interested in the same kinds of things, given the similarities between southern Italy and India—both peasant societies— and you will see similar formulations. They were both interested in the question of culture and how communists must engage the wretchedness of the culture we inherit and how we find in that culture the resources to move history forward. Marxism developed in India through thinkers inside the party, such as E. M. S. and, after him, Prakash Karat—but also those who were outside the party, such as the great mathematician and historian D. D. Kosambi, who wrote many important historical accounts and wrote regularly, by the way, in Monthly Review. One of the key themes that each of them had to develop is how to understand the wretchedness of hierarchies in India, including caste and gender hierarchies, and how to articulate these with a strategic orientation that was rooted around the class struggle. An important finding of the praxis and theory was that these social hierarchies had to be confronted on their own, taking seriously, for example, the way caste operates and fighting caste on its own terrain rather than as a proxy of the class struggle.

In India today, we have a list of Marxist intellectuals who developed their theories out of the Marxist canon as well as out of the praxis of the Indian left movement. I have in mind historians such as Irfan Habib, political and literary theorists such as Aijaz Ahmad, economists such as Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik. Journals such as Economic and Political Weekly and Social Science are filled with their notations about Indian history, contemporary India, and economics. Utsa Pat-naik’s work on imperialism and on Indian agriculture is fundamental to any assessment of India today. It cannot be ignored. Whole traditions of Marxism develop from these circles. There was this Indian Marxism that was very well developed outside the channels of the West and of the USSR, and inside the praxis of the left parties.

This is not a situation only in India. In Cuba, for instance, intellectuals such as Fernando Martínez Heredia, who, in 1967, joined with others to create the journal Pensamiento Crítico, which was the home to the development of Marxism that emerged out of the Cuban context. Heredia and other intellectuals such as Aurelio Alonso, Jesús Díaz, José Bell Lara, and Thalía Fung engaged with a range of thinkers, including Althusser, and with Latin American dependency theory. Later in his life, Heredia published a book, El Tiempo de los Hornos, that called for a detour back to the ideas and spirit of Che Guevara. This was in 1997, after the USSR had collapsed and during Cuba’s Special Period. What’s the situation here? was the kind of orienting question, but also How do we move a socialist agenda; how do we build a socialist society? These were the fundamental questions of their Marxism.

In 1976, Perry Anderson published a very sharp book called Considerations on Western Marxism. He makes the point that this Western Marxism must be understood as an intellectual tradition of Marxist thought that has made a break with praxis; Anderson looks at a range of thinkers such as Lukács, Gramsci, Adorno, Althusser, and so on. He argues that the realm of theory is broken away from mass movements and from mass struggles. There is a lot of truth to this assessment, but it needs to be modulated a little. Two of the people he looks at in this book—Gramsci and Lukács—were members of communist parties and both had an intimate relationship to praxis. Even Althusser, whose work is looked at very seriously, was a member of the Communist Party of France. But Anderson’s general point is correct, particularly in the period after 1956 (Hungary) and 1968 (Czechoslovakia), when many Marxist intellectuals broke with the communist movement and retreated into the academy, leaving the orbit of organized politics of a party kind. What you see in this tradition of Western Marxism is more philosophy and less political economy, more high-level thinking about issues and less interest in the material base, in the working class, in the conditions of the working class, in the potential for revolutionary transformation. Even communism becomes an idea. You will recall that in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels had written that communism is not “an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself,” but it is the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” This kind of attitude does not exist in many of these texts. I read many of the books from French Marxists, from Balibar to Badiou, and found them to be largely abstract accounts, unmoored even in the French social formation. They are interesting texts, but they are also written at a remove. I’d like to read about what a French Marxist thinks is the potential of the French working class to move an agenda. What is the role of the migrant workers in the French working class? How do we understand the race question in the French working class? Why has part of the French working class gone to the Le Pen movement? These are fundamental Marxist questions, but I don’t get that. I get broad questions about the communist horizon and philosophical considerations, which are interesting. I’m not against it. It’s just that it has eclipsed everything else. That was a tradition that developed in North America and in Europe. It is a detached form of theorizing that focuses on ontology rather than on praxis.

When the USSR began its collapse, it was a blow to intellectual thought. You had leftists who would now take advantage of its disappearance to announce that they were post-Marxists. As Aijaz Ahmad said, the post-Marxists are actually pre-Marxists because rather than advance Marxist thoughts they return to forms of disorienting idealism. Several important left intellectuals announced the death of Marxism—and sometimes Leninism (even when they had not previously been Leninists)—which meant that they asserted that socialism was not possible (since it was another “grand narrative”), and that any struggle in our time would have to be rooted in specific social experiences (what would later be assembled as “identity politics”). The key figure here was Jean-François Lyotard, whose 1979 The Postmodern Condition set the terms for this retreat from revolutionary and emancipatory theories to theories of fragmentation and perpetual struggle.

From the established world of Marxism came a surprising text in 1985 by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe called Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Sadly, Laclau and Mouffe took the heritage of Antonio Gramsci and created a fake Gramsci, a Gramsci without teeth. Gramsci was a founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy. He paid the ultimate price for his commitments because he was imprisoned by Mussolini. The prosecutor at his trials said, “We don’t want his brain to function for twenty years.” But it did. He sat in prison and wrote an incredible amount, which was published later as his prison notebooks. There were also beautiful letters he wrote to his partner. In prison, Gramsci asked questions of defeat. Why did the left face defeat from the fascists? This was the core of his theoretical work from a Marxist perspective. Why were we defeated? Why did the fascists come to power? What is the role of culture in this defeat? How must the left engage the deep roots of repressive culture and how must the left engage the battle of ideas? Really incredible material, which has been consequently developed by many Marxists. I had earlier talked about E. M. S. and his reading of Gramsci. Laclau and Mouffe ignored the actual ground of Gramsci’s theories. They created a fake Gramsci, who seemed interested in politics but not economics, who was interested in power but not in revolution. Laclau and Mouffe’s Gramsci is not a historical materialist but an idealist. It is more Kant, less Marx, and, in fact, less Gramsci. They use Gramsci to make a leap beyond Marxism. We renounce Marxism, they say, reducing Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to something that is called cultural hegemony. Capitalism vanishes, and the mode of production that structures Gramsci’s thinking dissolves into abstractions such as society and power. Capitalism is not understood as a coherent system with structures of power that operate against the working class and structures of production that draw surplus value from labor power. We hear about different forms of power and of social fragmentation and so on. That’s all true, but underneath the different forms of power there are some very rigid structures and constraints that are also there. I don’t disagree that there are different ways in which people are political. People are political on the social terrain in different ways, different struggles to be involved with against racism. This was already developed by Indian Marxists, such as E. M. S., who engaged the hierarchies of caste and gender. The fights against the wretchedness of caste and patriarchy are fundamental struggles that are also related to the rigid structures. But, come on, there are rigid structures underneath, and these cannot be ignored. Since such a text on socialist strategy has no assessment on the coherent systems of power, there is no coherent strategy for resistance and struggle. There’s leakage from Foucault’s view of power as everywhere and society as in flux. There is no structured system, only points of density of power, and only fragmented politics at these points but no overall strategy to overthrow the system; this is a little bit like the politics of Eduard Bernstein—evolutionary politics, reformist politics, nothing revolutionary in this tradition. Laclau and Mouffe draw on a very desiccated Gramsci to chart out their own post-Marxist journey, which ends in a narrow kind of identity politics.

As the USSR collapses, this post-Marxist stuff—drawing from postmodern influences—becomes culturally hegemonic and corrupts an entire generation. By the way, this is my generation, because I was in college when the USSR collapsed, and I watched the best minds of my generation get corrupted by these ideas—from Laclau and Mouffe to Foucault to Derrida. I’m in my early fifties. You will not find many intellectuals of my generation in the West who continued to be not only Marxists but also communists and who worked out of the traditions of national liberation and Marxism. The tsunami of postmodernism washed through the commitments of many people toward fundamental change, for a rupture from the capitalist present to socialism.

In places like India, postmodernism and post-Marxism make their entry, but they have to compete with rooted traditions of authentic Indian Marxism that remain linked to political movements and to the left. The left intellectual traditions in India remain intact, partly because they are needed to confront the challenges of the ruling class surrender to neoliberalism (what in India is called liberalization) and to confront the challenges of the extreme right agenda of religious supremacy (what in India is called communalism). I joined the communist movement in India just as the USSR collapsed, not because of the USSR but because of the extremes of inequality in India, the wretchedness of the caste system, the rise of communalism, and the perils of neoliberal policy. I found the communist movement adequate to these threats and in the lead in fighting them.

There was a kind of intellectual disorientation after the fall of the USSR, but this was not a general collapse. It took place in the North Atlantic academies, which then leaked into intellectual production around the world.

THEIR VIOLENCE AND OURS

FRANK BARAT: You wrote a piece titled, “Violence: Theirs and Ours.” It was published in Jadaliyya not so long ago, where you highlight something crucial, in my opinion: precious life versus disposable life. We hear this all the time: the East, the Indians, the Palestinians, they do not care about life as much as we do in the West. How can we live in an equal world while a lot of people are going to still think along these lines?

VIJAY PRASHAD: When I wrote that piece, I was motivated by the way in which the media—particularly the corporate media of the West—portrayed certain leaders of countries as tyrants. The tyrant is always someone from over there—the leader of North Korea, the president of Syria, the leader of Libya, always Kim Jong-un or Bashar al-Assad or Muammar Gaddafi. They are always the tyrants. It is okay for the United States to bomb Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps near a million people when it was all said and done. In 1996, during the long US war on Iraq, US secretary of state Madeleine Albright went on 60 Minutes, where the journalist asked her what she thought about a UN report that said that half a million children had died due to the US sanctions imposed on Iraq. She could have given one of three answers. She could easily have said, Well, the report of the death of these children is false or that the numbers are exaggerated. She didn’t say that. She could have said, I haven’t yet studied the report. She could also have said Yes, the children died, but it is the fault of Saddam Hussein, Saddam is blocking the entry of medicines, or He is only distributing the supplies to his supporters. But she did not say any of these things—she did not deny the deaths, she did not say that she had not studied the report, and she did not blame Saddam. Instead, the US secretary of state said that “It was a price worth paying.” To her credit she said later that she regretted what she had said on national television. But what did she regret? Did she regret that she said this or the fact that half a million children had died due to a US sanctions policy? I think she regretted how she said it because she came out sounding callous. Her boss, Bill Clinton, gets away with not being cast as a tyrant or as genocidal. In 1998, two years later, to cover up scandals in Washington having to do with his sex life, Clinton authorized the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory, the al-Shifa factory, in Khartoum, Sudan; as a consequence of this action, Sudan lost its main source of medicines. This is not considered a tyrannical action or a genocidal action. Clinton is not the tyrant. Tony Blair is not a tyrant, nor is Sarkozy, who—with Obama—is responsible for destroying Libya. The tyrant is Gaddafi. That is something to consider. It is with this observation that I began the essay, “Our Violence, Your Violence.”

It was the United States that bombed Japan with two nuclear bombs, but the stain of this does not stay on Truman’s legacy. He is seen as the standard bearer of freedom and democracy. This is an ideological claim, which clears out the facts and allows an illusion to stand in for reality. This sort of claim says a lot about the differential view from the West of human life. Let’s take the example of ISIS and beheading. If a US national is beheaded in Syria, it is an outrage. Now, I happened to know the first journalist from the West who was beheaded, James Foley. I met him many times, the last time at an anti-NATO protest in Chicago a few months before his death. He was a very nice, very sensitive person. He had been kidnapped in Syria before and had returned to make a film about his kidnapping. Sadly, he was kidnapped again, and this time was beheaded on film. It made world news. It was seen as the outrage that it was. But he was not the first person to be beheaded by ISIS. ISIS had captured a battalion of Syrian troops, lined them up, dug a trench in front of them, and then beheaded them all, all seventy-five of them. Jim Foley. We know his name. You can find a trace of his death on the Internet. He will be named as the first to be beheaded by ISIS. But he was not. The Syrian soldiers who were beheaded do not merit any mention. We do not know their names. Their lives are seen as less significant in the conversation curated on the Internet than the lives of a handful of US journalists. There was no cultivated outrage about the death of the Syrian soldiers, largely because the corporate media of the West was against the project of these soldiers, and, bizarrely, therefore ignored their brutal deaths. These soldiers were being beheaded because they were Alawites, they were being targeted for their religion, and yet there was no outrage. These soldiers stood in for Assad, who was portrayed as a tyrant, so somehow these soldiers deserved to be butchered by . . . whom? By ISIS, a more radical breakaway faction from al Qaeda (or in this case, from al-Nusra). There is our dead, and then there is your dead.

We can continue with examples. There is a cyclone in India with a thousand people dead. This barely gets a mention. In the tsunami of 2004, the lives of thousands of people around the Bay of Bengal were devastated—deaths, destruction, devastation. Now, there are a few beach resorts along the coastline. Europeans who died in the resorts became the story on the front page. I get it. You want to sell newspapers in Paris, so the French papers put the French family on the front page. I get that. But why should the picture of the French family be on the front page of newspapers in Malaysia and in Thailand? What about pictures of Malaysian and Thai families? Well, there is an assumption that they are expected to die, and this expectation is not only about nationality (French versus Malaysian) but also about class (working-class Malaysians would be seen as disposable). We are expected to die, but the European or the upper class is not expected to die; the first is normal, the second is a tragedy. After the great crime of the explosion of the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, in 1984, an executive from American Cyanamid said that Indians do not share “the North American philosophy of the importance of human life.” Educating people about the hideousness of this assumption is not sufficient. What is needed is political pressure to build political movements that make such attitudes impossible to hold.

Let’s go into the arms trade, another place where this attitude prevails. Arms are sold in the Third World with great impunity because there is a view that these people will kill each other anyway. The great purveyor of destruction in the Arabic-speaking lands is not terrorism, but the weapons trade. Al Qaeda is not as great a threat in many parts of the world as the arms industry. It is a terrorist industry. The UK firm BAE Systems sells immense amounts of weaponry to the Saudis and the Emiratis to bomb Yemen. This is not just a Saudi or an Emirati war against Yemen; it is also a British and a US war against Yemen. People in Britain and in the United States have blood on their hands for this war.

There must be a robust campaign around the world against militarism and for peace. In the campaign for peace, we can make the argument that all human life is sacred, that there is sanctity to every life. There is no point in simply saying that all people are equal. Such abstractions make no sense when BAE Systems sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. The ideas in one’s heart are not useful if they do not mean anything in the world. If you are not fighting to end arms sales to such countries, or arms sales during terrible conflicts, then your abstract ideals mean nothing. Stop selling arms. Sort out what needs to be done to help countries like Yemen and Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan recover from these terrible wars.

It is not just war that generates these bifurcated attitudes to human life. Zambia is one of the world’s largest producers of copper, which is essential for wires in our computers and phones and so on. In the Copperbelt region of Zambia, copper is under the ground. Yet, 60 percent of the children in the Copperbelt are illiterate. I think that this is a sign of the differential attitude to human life. Zambian life is seen as disposable life, not as precious life. If it were precious life, then the world would stand up and say, We will only allow copper to be taken out of Zambia if the copper companies immediately build good-quality schools in the Copperbelt. As a beginning, as a small social democratic gesture, unless children are being educated, no copper should be removed from Zambia because these children are not getting any benefit from the export of copper.

There are disposable lives and precious lives. I don’t want anyone to tell me that, well, life is precious. I don’t believe you. I believe that you are saying that all life should be precious, but not that all life is precious. Unless we transform the social conditions that reproduce certain lives as disposable, all these slogans are simply verbiage. It just makes people feel better if they can say that life is precious when we know that it is not; we need to do things to make sure that all lives are precious and that no life is treated in a way that it is disposable.

ZAMBIA IS NOT SO FAR AWAY

FRANK BARAT: It’s also about relating to the other, right? Many of your books touch upon this essential question. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, The Karma of Brown Folk, and Uncle Swami deal with questions of identity. What would you say to people who feel they can’t organize [around] or relate to an issue?

VIJAY PRASHAD: Let’s return to the young child in Zambia in the Copperbelt. The copper underneath the ground enters the cell phones of people around the world. Your identity is partly wrapped up with your cell phone. The first thing you do in the morning is check your cell phone. And then you play a game. You talk to a family member. You check your email. You go on your computer. This is a cross-class phenomenon and indeed increasingly a practice in many countries. There are close to six billion mobile phones around the world, and since there are about 7.9 billion people in the world, these phones are widespread. The copper is inside your hand. It is in your identity. You are shaped by copper wires that are everywhere. That means you are directly connected to that child in Zambia. The child is not outside you. The child is intimately linked to you by the imperialist exploitation of the copper resources in Zambia. But you don’t see that because you buy the phone from a shop. It comes wrapped in plastic and in a nice box. It doesn’t say that, by the way, you’re getting this phone at this cheap price relatively because a child in Zambia is illiterate. I would like to go to an Apple shop or some shop and put stickers on all the boxes saying this phone is cheap because a child in Zambia is illiterate. You need to make the connection because it’s not that the child in Zambia is external to you. The challenge in Zambia is internal to your social condition. Globalization, therefore, is an objective fact. This is what makes internationalism necessary. You might not be doing anything to change the conditions for that child, which means that you are globalized but you are not an internationalist. That for me is objectionable. You can’t have globalization, the copper from Zambia in your phone, and not be an internationalist, standing in solidarity with the struggles of the people of Zambia.

Part of this idea of the other is not that there is an “other” outside, but that we are both related to each other by the social relations of production but estranged from each other by ideologies of various kinds (including individualism and nationalism). In Capital, Marx’s greatest work, in the opening section, he writes of the fetishism of commodities. Marx makes a lot of the idea of the fetish, which is a thing that—in certain forms of religious activity—is seen as having consciousness, whereas the people who interact with each other do so only through the fetish and not directly with each other. People in this form do not have an independent or interlaced consciousness; they are related through the thing, which has consciousness and which subordinates humans to it. The thing will move, and you take instructions from it. That’s the fetish character of the thing, which could be a doll or an idea (such as god). So, Marx says, Listen, what happens is that you and I, our social relations, are mediated through commodities or through money, which is merely a commodity, the embodiment of commodities. Our links to each other in a capitalist system are formed through commodities. That’s the fetish character of the commodities, which interrupt human interaction, since our relations are mediated through commodities. There is a wall between us and that wall is the commodity form, and the generalized form of the commodity is money. In that way, what divides me from the child in Zambia is this movement of copper: mined for low wages, driven to Durban’s port, shipped away to China, then put into an iPhone. It then comes out of the factory in Shenzhen packaged in Apple’s wonderful design. Between the child in Zambia and the consumer are a series of transformations, a range of commodities added to each other—with such amazing names as Indium and Wolframite—and the accumulation of these commodities vanishes into the phone itself. The content of copper in the phone far outstrips that of other metal. The raw copper becomes processed copper becomes copper wiring becomes highly sophisticated copper instruments. That is then sorted into an iPhone, which is then boxed up. By the time the consumer sees the phone, the child has disappeared. Zambia has disappeared, Chile has disappeared, Peru has disappeared. There is a fetish character that makes the people in Zambia, the child and the miner both, othered, separated from the consumer in the rest of the world. But they are of course linked intimately by the socialization of labor, by the social relations that are underneath the surface.

The phone pings. There is a meme about hunger in Zambia. The consumer feels bad. Let me donate some money for them because I don’t know anything about Zambia. The Zambians are othered from the consumer in other parts of the world. Their social existence is seen as separate. This is a result of the fetish character of commodities in capitalism. Listen friends, one wants to say, there is nothing like that going on. The Zambian miner is intimately related to you because the miner’s labor is inside your phone. When the consumer says, I don’t know anything about them, this is true. Nonetheless, Zambia is intimately inside the consumer’s life through the mined copper in the phone and in other devices. Zambia is not that far away from everywhere, nor are Zambians.

The wretched conditions of illiteracy are related to the fact that Apple both sells the phone at a reduced price and is still able to make a fabulous profit. The iPhone retails at a ridiculously underpriced level. If you calculate what an iPhone should cost if the wages paid along the commodity chain were at the levels in the North Atlantic, each phone would cost near $30,000. We did a notebook at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research called The Rate of Exploitation (The Case of the iPhone). If the phone were entirely manufactured in the US, it would retail at $30,000. Who is paying for the phone to be discounted to around $699 or so? The balance is being paid by the community in the Copperbelt, which is being paid very low wages and where there are barely any social wages to maintain schools and medical centers. Their standard of living is artificially suppressed so that they can be adequately super-exploited and those wages stolen from them, and the money stolen from the Zambian people through taxes and so on becomes the discount for Apple’s super-profits and the lower price for the phone. All of this vanishes because of the fetish character of our relations with each other, where the commodities come in between us. Because we are othered from other people, set in an artificial remove from them, we see their sufferings and then say, Oh, I should donate something. It is not that donations and charity are bad, but they merely reinforce the fetish character of our relations and they demean people, since we don’t see—through charity—that the people in Zambia are subsidizing the lives of the consumers and that they deserve a fair price for their labor, not this condition of super-exploitation. Donations do not change the conditions of the world. We need to strive to change the conditions of the world, not just try to make consumers feel better. Charity remains necessary because the conditions of precious life are so bad these days, but charity is not the solution to the problem. Nor are empty words of critique for othering or of solidarity. Material support is needed. We need to support efforts of the miners to build their unions and support the Socialist Party of Zambia as it builds the power of the people against the system.

CONFIDENCE COMES FROM BUILDING MOVEMENTS

FRANK BARAT: You often talk about the importance of the history before the revolt. The journey to the revolt being in a way as crucial as the revolt itself. Howard Zinn once wrote, “The reward of participating in a movement for social justice is not the prospect of future victory. It is the acceleration of standing together with other people, taking risks together, enjoying small triumphs, and enduring disheartening setbacks—together.” I’d like you to comment on this.

VIJAY PRASHAD: Howard Zinn was a great man, a very optimistic person. I am glad that my book Darker Nations appeared in his series on people’s histories, even though the book itself is not a conventional people’s history. He wrote a very nice preface to the book. But this quote you read out to me, well, I don’t entirely agree with it. I think winning is as important as the struggle. There’s too high a price paid by people for the continuation of this imperialist system. We must never think that struggling is more important than winning. Just to annotate that part of the point: I actually think we must dare to win. And that desire to win has to be part of the joy of the struggle.

One of the key concepts here is confidence. When the Cuban revolutionaries—Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Celia Sánchez, Haydée Santamaría—were in the Sierra Maestra, they brought with them their own histories. Che Guevara, whose story is the most well known, provides the best example of this. Before he meets Raul and Fidel in 1955 in Mexico, he made a second tour of Latin America. He had made a first tour in 1951 on his motorcycle, where he went to Chile and then up to Peru, to Venezuela, with his friend Alberto Granado. It is a great story made immortal in The Motorcycle Diaries (1993). Less well known is his second journey which he made in 1953. He arrived in Bolivia after the Revolution of 1952. He studied how the Indigenous population, the native population of Bolivia (including the Aymara and the Quechua) was finding its feet in this struggle against dictatorships and capitalism. You have to understand that the Indigenous of the Americas faced the brunt of the conquistador rule across the Andes, Bolivia having large silver mines, whose miners were treated as animals rather than as humans. That Revolution of 1952 delivered citizenship for the Indigenous for the first time. Che Guevara noted down how the Indigenous communities had developed a new political confidence through these struggles. Then he goes to Guatemala, where he learns his Marxism from the Peruvian communist Hilda Gadea, whom he marries. In Guatemala, Che watches as the CIA and the Guatemalan oligarchy overthrow the government of Jacobo Àrbenz. This coup marks Che, who understands the fundamental ruthlessness of imperialism frontally. Arbenz, a left democrat, does not arm the people, he does not prepare them for this eventuality. Arbenz had pushed an agrarian reform agenda, which ran up against the US company, United Fruit, which egged on the US government and the CIA to overthrow Arbenz. Che felt, the people are not rising up to defend the government, which is incredible. He goes to Mexico, he meets Fidel, and they eventually come to the Sierra Maestra. These mountains have a great history of rebellion, and so Che and others meet the peasants here who carry with them older histories of rebellions. Again, Che in his wonderful Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1963) writes of how the people in the mountains had these independent traditions of rebellions, but their confidence to struggle had been lowered. They were oppressed in the social formation, and their confidence needed to be lifted by the revolutionary process.

So, why am I telling you this story? On the left, we don’t talk enough about the process of building confidence of the people. We talk about consciousness, as if people don’t know anything and that the correct line needs to be injected into people, and if they got the correct line then they would rise up. We talk about consciousness and knowledge, but even people who know things do not have confidence. University students and left-wing people know a lot about the system, but they do not necessarily have confidence to change things, to go out on the streets and build movements. Confidence does not come through knowledge but through the experience of building movements and through the work of building organizations, through testing yourself, through learning how to struggle.

Frank, do you remember the first time you went to a demonstration? It is a very nerve-wracking thing. I remember going to a demonstration at a very young age in Calcutta. I was scared and went with a few friends. There was a lot of fear about violence and about being arrested, fear about what the police would do. It was a protest about bus fares or something, not itself a call to march and overthrow the government! I remember being very nervous even though I was already in an organization, and I took great comfort in that fact. In the process of being in the organization and in these sorts of activities, I gained confidence from the fact that we can actually make history. And I do not come from an oppressed community or from a family that struggles to make a living. The gaining of confidence in these activities, this practical work, allowed me to gain confidence in the process of revolutionary change, and I recall seeing this process in many of my young comrades who came from working-class families and from oppressed communities. The process of learning and of doing, of developing one’s consciousness and confidence is essential. That’s what you see in Che’s writings, the importance of both consciousness and confidence. Anyone who has been involved in the building of mass revolutionary organizations will know what I mean. When Che and others arrived in the mountains, they brought people into political education classes and started with various practical activities to reorganize social production. This was not for their own comrades but for the society around them. They brought the people in, encouraged them, and developed their confidence in the classroom and in the society, through learning and through praxis. Tasks are given to people: Go deliver these medicines or Go bring that letter. And you go. Then you say, My god, I went through the army lines and I came back with a box of medicines or Now I want to do it again! Your adrenaline is pumping. You are participating in building the new world. It’s these small gestures or activity that build confidence of real living people. The world is not going to rise up by itself. The world never does anything. The world is an abstraction. It’s real concrete people that must develop the confidence in praxis, build up their own ideas, their independent thinking of how the world is and how to change the world. Working with other people, that’s how you change the world. You have got to have confidence. So Howard Zinn is totally right. The process of struggle must be enjoyable, but it’s not only about enjoyment and the struggle. The process of struggle is a great journey to realize yourself. There’s a line from the eighteenth-century poet Akbar Allahabadi, aadmi tha, bari mushkil se insaan hua. We were people; with great difficulty we became human. The process of struggle is a humanizing process. It’s in the process of struggle that you and I learn to be better people. We rid ourselves through struggle of patriarchal ideas, of sexism, of disdain for this or that community, of homophobic ideas. You don’t learn these things from reading a book. You learn them in struggle. And struggle is what makes us human.

PART THREE

Toward Beauty

THE FUTURE IS HERE

FRANK BARAT: Do you think the critique of the present is a journey to thefuture?

VIJAY PRASHAD: That’s a very good question, Frank. I’m very interested in this problem. Does the present seem eternal and block a future? I think it is an objective task of left movements to build the road to the future, which is why left intellectuals need to trace the lines from the present to the future. That is our task. I don’t agree with people who say that you can’t anticipate the future. You don’t know what socialism will look like, they say, and we will just have to wait for it. There’s a couple of things I’d like to say about this.

The way in which anticommunism has worked, not only from the right but from liberals and some sections of the left, is that it has blocked our ability to look at the actual socialist experiments and see what was good in them. Most of these experiments took place in very poor countries, from the revolution against the tsarist empire and the October Revolution in 1917 to the revolution against US imperialism in Cuba in 1959. If you look carefully at these revolutions, you will find many things of interest. In the Soviet experiment, they decided very early that they would use whatever resources they had to build housing and to eliminate illiteracy—all this as a right. Everybody should have a high-quality education. Everybody should have access to health care. They pioneered public health care. They said that we do not tolerate homelessness, so everyone will have a place to stay. They had universal rights long before the capitalist states came to adopt some of these positions.

We need to see how in Cuba and in Kerala the idea of the cooperatives came to reality. There are cooperatives in Kerala with millions of members, and these are producer cooperatives, not retail cooperatives. There are cooperatives of construction workers and IT cooperatives. Marx called these producer cooperatives “possible communism.” People are wrong to say that Marx did not try to envisage socialism. He looked carefully at cooperatives and said that these are a fantastic way forward, to create production on a democratic basis. We need to talk about these texts and study the experiments in cooperative, democratic production. We need to travel to Brazil and see the Landless Workers’ Movements (MST) land occupations and settlements, to see how they have already begun to build socialism through collective educational projects and through cooperative farming to grow agro-ecological, organic food without the use of transgenics. They build cultures of solidarity and love in these collectives.

These experiments exist now on planet Earth. They do not exist only in dreams. When you visit an MST settlement, you see something impressive. These are poor people who have built a dignified life—the total opposite of the slum. When we talk about the future, we have to recognize that the future is here, and the future has been here for a long time—in these small gestures in the USSR with universal housing, that’s the future. Even though it is chronologically in the past, it is a practice of the future. In the future, we will all be with shelter, and housing will not be commodified. Why should we buy and sell shelter? Why should we pay rent for it? What is the need for that? We have such powerful computers now that would assist us in better, reasonable planning that allows people to make democratic decisions about where they would like to live. We already have rental apps that find you places to live. That’s not the problem. The problem is that money has come in the way of shelter. There are many productive discussions to have about the possibilities of decommodifying housing. These things are possible. When the USSR had their universal housing planning, their computer system had as much power as my phone. Now, computers are much more sophisticated. We must look at what people did, but we don’t return to that, we advance it forward.

FRANK BARAT: For you, what kind of portal could the pandemic be? What would be your dream portal?

VIJAY PRASHAD: One of the things that I’m very keen on is not allowing myself to dream like that. Because change doesn’t happen from dream to reality, change happens from reality into struggle to the future. Dreams are useful but they’re also dangerous. I’ll give you an example. What is a dream? I dream that tomorrow, the developing countries of the world are able to gather together at a conference on debt and they will say together, “We refuse to service the $11 trillion of debt. We refuse to pay $4 trillion this year in debt servicing, and we demand the cancellation of debt.” The cancellation of debt, Frank, is the most important issue right now for the world’s people. Developing countries cannot breathe because they have $11 trillion of debt sitting like a huge brick on their heads.

That’s the dream. My dream isn’t rainbows and unicorns. My dream is debt cancellation, because it will open the possibility for countries like Burkina Faso, like Argentina, and so on, to plan with their resources, to improve the conditions of their people. If you have debt on your neck, then a lot of your surplus is going toward servicing the debt and you cannot build up your public health system. What do we want? We want a world where every neighborhood will have a public health office where there’s a social worker and a public health nurse to help people. This is a substitute for police stations. That’s my dream. But this dream relies on a proper form of social production and social life, a proper use of human potential, not potential used through aggressive production processes that lead to vast inequality and vast deprivation, which are then managed by security forces.

Police officers are not trained to deal with schizophrenia or with de-escalating a so-called domestic situation. If two people are fighting in an apartment, the police coming in with their testosterone on high, they’re not the best way to go in a civilized society. You want a social worker to come in, perhaps even a medical person, to come in and talk people down from a ledge. When a couple is fighting, there are some instances where the couple’s fighting is toxic and dangerous and can become violent. But in most cases, it’s a controllable situation. You de-escalate. Somebody with schizophrenia has a relapse—you have to learn how to de-escalate them from their agitation and fear. You can do this kind of thing. You can build a neighborhood center. But if you don’t have resources, if you are busy paying off your debt, you can’t be creative in your society, you can’t build these types of infrastructure.

Look at what’s happening now, with all this talk about online teaching and online education. In a European country where there are three laptops, a Wi-Fi connection, and three children in an apartment, that’s pretty easy. Each kid is on a laptop in a different part of the apartment, there’s Wi-Fi, it’s fine. But 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa homes do not have a laptop or a computer at home. They don’t have a Wi-Fi connection. So, what happens is, in those families, they have to use the phone and data. The moment you’re using phone and data, it becomes very expensive to be in a classroom. Then, if you have three kids, you have to choose which kid goes to their class at which time. You can’t have everybody go.

You want me to tell you what the pandemic is a portal toward? Free Wi-Fi. Just public Wi-Fi. That means 5G connection for everybody. No commodification of Wi-Fi. Wireless access to the Internet should not be commodified. It should be like breathing the air, because it’s important nowadays. It’s a fundamental right to information. You cannot access information today if you don’t have access to the Internet, frankly. If I go to municipal offices in many countries and say, “Can I see this document?” they’ll say, “It’s online,” but if you do not have Internet, you cannot access it. So, it is a fundamental democratic right for universal, free, non-commodified Wi-Fi. For the whole planet. I want the poorest rural area to have Wi-Fi. That’s the test. The test isn’t Barcelona having free Wi-Fi. I want a part of rural Madhya Pradesh to have free Wi-Fi. Then I would like governments to provide every child with some sort of computing device. That’s what interests me. The Left Democratic Front government in Kerala has said that access to the Internet is a basic human right. That’s a huge advance.

But you can’t do that if you’ve got a debt overhang where you’re paying billions of dollars per country, and you’re going into default. You’re unable to create a robust domestic computer industry. Indian firms, for instance, produce laptops and other devices, but these are not scaled up. And why should this production be in the private sector? Why can’t there be a public computer manufacturer creating laptops for classrooms for kids? You can’t do that without electricity. In six African countries, less than one in five people have access to electricity (11 percent in Burundi, 11.8 percent in Chad, 14.4 percent in Burkina Faso, 17.6 percent in Niger, 18 percent in Malawi, 19 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). In that list, two of the countries—Niger and the Congo—are major producers of uranium. Uranium from Niger powers one in three light bulbs in France, where 100 percent of the population is linked to the electric grid. This reality has to be confronted and changed. We can’t talk about climate change without the acknowledgment of the overcon-sumption in places like France and the underconsumption in places such as Niger and Burundi.

What is the pandemic a portal to? Currently, the biggest lock on the portal is the debt crisis, which is increasing. Because as the unemployment situation increases around the world, as the hunger crisis increases, governments are going to face greater budgetary problems. They are going to go to capital markets and borrow money, and they are going to go deeper into debt. I love Arundhati Roy’s expression, “the pandemic is a portal,” but I want to caution you that the portal is locked, and the biggest lock on it is the debt overhang.

It’s not just government debt, external debt of states. It’s also personal debt. Around the world, as half the population is sitting on unemployment, they are not able to survive on the cash transfers coming from governments—they are going into credit card debt or other forms of personal debt. Credit card and personal debt is debilitating. You look at your credit card, the interest payment on credit card loans is three, four, five times greater than taking a bank loan, but it’s difficult to get a bank loan. It’s much easier to overspend on your credit card. So now you’re paying five times more; your personal debt will go into trillions. There’s country debt, which we know is about $11.9 trillion or so right now. It will increase to about $13 trillion, $14 trillion as the pandemic begins to dissipate. Argentina has already defaulted; so has Zambia. Others will follow. In my opinion, unless you break that lock, there is no portal that you can open. The first task of the world is to break the lock of the immense debt overhang that sits on not only the developing world but on ordinary people all across the world.

FRANK BARAT: Can you explain briefly what the debt is about?

VIJAY PRASHAD: There’s a couple of things I think that are important for our conversation. First, just to clarify, I’m using the term “developing countries” a lot, and I think there is a bit of misunderstanding with this term. It does not mean that these countries are “developing” in a formulaic way. It is a term of art from the UN network, which refers to the fact that these countries have low GDPs and high rates of social distress. It is silly to think of them as being able to develop—how can they develop, given the structural barriers to advancement for many of the countries because of the imperialist design of international trade and finance?

For the period from around the Bandung conference in 1955 to the 1980s, the developing countries borrowed mainly from public and multilateral agencies. They would borrow from multilateral development banks—such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank—and from governments from both the North Atlantic states and the Soviet bloc. Bridge funds were available from the International Monetary Fund, and aid monies came from various development funds. Since the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, many things changed in relation to the entire arena of funding for development. The IMF pushed the structural adjustment policies, insisted that developing countries change their priorities from helping their people to protecting foreign direct investment (FDI). Barriers to private finance were lowered as a consequence and FDI—often as hot money—rushed into countries whose financial regulatory systems were not able to manage the inflow and outflow of the funds. We saw a tsunami of money coming into the developing countries, especially because interest rates in the developed world remained low.

Questions were not asked about why this money came in. Why would an institutional lender in Frankfurt lend money to Tanzania? The reason they lend money to Tanzania is because there is a crisis of profitability inside Europe, some of it manifest in low interest rates. If I lend money to a European company, let’s say Wirecard, the rate of return is good—but then see, you might be mired in an intractable scandal. Wirecard is a German digital payment service that “lost” billions of euros through accounting malpractice, a common enough way that large corporations move money about to fatten the wealth of their executives and owners at the expense of customers. The firm seemed very attractive to retail banks and others who invested there, but then it flattened when the scandal—like the Enron scandal or the housing market crisis—unfolded.

Interest rates in the West have been flat. In the United States, it’s been below zero, effectively. So to put money into US banks, in cash, is a waste of money. You’re looking for a higher rate of return. This is what is called predatory lending. You’re lending to Tanzania because they are desperate, and they are offering a higher interest rate. So, you’re going there for commercial purposes. You’re not going there for developing the country. You want to get more out of it, and they are desperate for investment, so they lifted the interest rate, lifted their bond rate; they really want money to come in. This is a mistake. Because they will not be able to pay it back. Of the $11 trillion and some external debt obligation of the developing countries today, in 2020, the debt service payment is almost $4 trillion. That’s just the interest to be paid that year. It cannot be paid. These countries will default. There will be a cascading set of defaults over the next few years. This is like the debt crisis after 1979. Mexico defaulted in 1981, and many countries had to default after that to shelter in the IMF’s structural adjustment program, which was a surrender to globalization. These are commercial creditors who are going in to make money. Now, if I invest in you, Frank, if I invest in your company, investment, technically, is the twin word of the word risk. I invest in your company; my investment comes with a certain iota of risk. If the risk is higher, then your interest to me is higher— you know, because it’s a risky investment, so I’m trying to recoup the investment. If the risk is low, the interest rate is low. If the risk doesn’t pan out, like if I invest in your company and your company fails, why should I be able to recoup my investment? I risked the money, that’s the price of business. Business has failed, I lose my money. Right?

But in the case of lending to developing countries, the creditor groups, both the Paris and London groups, private and public lenders, insisted on recouping the investment. If they follow free market capitalism and private lender investing to Argentina, and Argentina says, We can’t pay you back, sorry, we’re bankrupt, well, you made a bad investment. The logic of capitalism dictates that the developing country cannot pay its creditors, so the debt should be canceled. Why are you asking me to pay you? You came freely, now I’m telling you I’m bankrupt, and yet you want me to pay you back. There is a kind of mafia attitude toward capital flows to the developing world.

A very important point people need to understand is that asking for debt cancellation has nothing to do with charity. It has everything to do with the logic of investment and risk. You see, capital, when it invests nowadays, doesn’t want to take a risk. It wants a guaranteed rate of return. But then there is no capitalism. No, they want a kind of welfare state capitalism.

And when they restructure the loan, they don’t give a significant haircut to the loan, as they want you to believe; they don’t cut the amount of payment due. What they do is restructure the timetable for the loan. Here’s a haircut: Okay, you have a $500 billion loan and I want to cut it down to $300 billion to make it possible for you to pay back. Rather than that, they offer the delay: What we’ll do is, instead of paying me back in ten years, the whole $500 billion, I’ll allow you to pay me in thirteen years. So, they’ll restructure the timing of the debt payment rather than the volume of the debt.

This is crazy. For these countries, to have this enormous debt overhang means there’s no creativity in the policy space. The IMF puts pressure on them to lower public sector spending. That means you can’t pay doctors and nurses in the public sector in your country effectively, and so they migrate to work in the West. That’s what’s happening. Jamaican nurses are going to England and the United States because Jamaica has been told, You cannot increase public sector wages above 9 percent of GDP. That’s the IMF forcing Jamaica, and the reason IMF forces Jamaica and Jamaica must accept is that they say, If you don’t do this, then we won’t guarantee that you are a good place for people to invest in.

The IMF guarantees the investment climate. This is a scandal, frankly. That is why there are so many Jamaican nurses in the national health service in the UK and in US hospitals. It’s not because Jamaican nurses are saying, I can’t wait to endure racist attacks against me in New York City. No, they are going because their wages are held down artificially in Jamaica. Not by the Jamaican government but by the IMF, which answers to the US treasury department, which today is telling private creditors, You don’t need to give a haircut. You don’t even need to postpone debt payments. It’s up to you, it’s a free market. It’s not a free market, it’s a market designed and controlled by the banks, the US treasury department, and the IMF.

THE FUTURE WILL CONTAIN WHAT YOU PUT INTO IT NOW

FRANK BARAT: As activists—and let’s call ourselves the left, for the sake of it—it looks to me like we have all the proof we need to make a very solid case to win, a case that will be impossible to ignore for the rest of the world, but we do not seem able to actually do this. When there is a vacuum... it is often filled, and very quickly, by the right.

VIJAY PRASHAD: You see, Frank, you have had experience at building the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which operated in the 2000s in the tradition of the great Russell Tribunal set up in 1966 to investigate the US war on Vietnam. It would be interesting to have a tribunal about the crimes of capitalism. I spoke to Arundhati Roy, and she said we need to have a COVID-19 tribunal to try countries like India, Great Britain, the United States for complete negligence. I wrote about the dangerous incompetence of Bolsonaro and Modi. Somebody wrote to me and said that it had nothing to do with incompetence, that this was their policy. Well, I think that policy is a policy of deliberate incompetence toward the working class and socially marginal people. These are buffoons; they have played with the lives of human beings. So, let’s put them on trial—let’s try this social system. Bring the evidence, as you say. Bring books of it. Lay it out. Take the example of Brazil. In 2016, the government of Michel Temer, the right-wing guy who overthrew Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party, pushed through a constitutional amendment, EC 95, in Brazil, which basically sliced the health budget. Health workers in Brazil have filed a case at the International Criminal Court charging Bolsonaro with crimes against humanity. Yes, good. But then charge the system, too, which is an open wound against humanity.

In India, when Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, his first action was to cut India’s public health spending by 20 percent. They destroyed the health system in front of our eyes. The United States, between 2009 and 2019, has not filled a quarter of a million public health jobs. A quarter of a million public health jobs vacant. These are criminal actions, because, as the WHO said, I think in 2016 or ’17, when Gro Harlem Brundtland was the head of a commission of inquiry on behalf of the WHO, the commission report basically said, You are not prepared for a pandemic. The world is not prepared. What they pointed to was the enormous deficit of public health workers. That was a key part of it. We’re just not prepared. You don’t have hospital beds. You don’t have enough oxygen produced. I mean, frankly, between you and me, the very phrase flatten the curve, used in the early days of the pandemic, is an indication of surrender, because what you’re saying is, We don’t have the ability to deal with the pandemic, so please don’t fall ill at the same time, because we don’t have hospital beds for you, we don’t have ventilators, we don’t have anything. Please try to sequence your illness. I understand that this is a slogan, and slogans are not always precise. Perhaps by flatten they meant bring to zero, but so be it. That’s what they were saying. In Kerala, in India, the slogan was break the chain. It wasn’t flatten the curve, it was Let’s try to stop the infection. It’s a much more robust attitude.

But you know what the interesting thing is about austerity? Look at what they want to be austere about. I generally don’t like the term austerity by itself, because it assumes that governments have shrunk. It’s not the case. It’s austerity against the social side of budgets. On education, you privatize the creation of curriculum. I mean, seriously, if you hired enough teachers, you could allow the teachers to produce the curriculum. Why do you need to hire a consultancy firm to come in and do a curriculum? You don’t need a consultancy of people who never taught. Let the teachers self organize, let them create unions, let the unions produce the text. Let teachers who know what they’re talking about develop materials. With austerity, if you don’t have enough of them, then you say, Let’s outsource to a consultancy; allow them to charge a huge amount and produce a text that has no real resonance for the teaching profession.

Look at health care. Let’s privatize health care. Let private hospitals do things. What you are creating are huge disparities in access to health. In the many countries that follow the capitalist logic, most of the poor access health care at death’s door, and they often go to poorly funded public hospitals, where they die. If you don’t fund the public hospital, it will have terrible statistics, and then people will much rather go into debt and pay out-of-pocket expenses to go to the private hospital. There’s no reason for a public hospital to be bad, but if you underfund it, it will be terrible. In places like India, one of the surest causes of bankruptcy for the lower middle class and the middle class is out-of-pocket expenses for health care. You’re not using the public hospital; conditions are not good because you underfunded it. You’ve produced the conditions to create bankruptcy. Why are the middle class in so much debt? Because they must go to private hospitals. You cut health care, you cut education, you cut production of infrastructure, you’ve not produced good Wi-Fi systems. In the middle of a pandemic, kids can’t study, and so on. Meanwhile, you’ve increased the forces of repression.

I want to leave this question you asked with an image. I want you to visualize something. Here you have a market, a grocery store, a grocer who has private ownership of food. They’ve got a building in which there’s a lot of food, and all of that food is private property because the grocer has bought it from the supply chain and has put it up on their shelves. Here you have hungry people, lots of hungry people. You can do two things. The state can buy food from the store and feed the hungry, or you can instead hire a police officer. The police officer stands between the food and the hungry people.

Now, a civilization has made a decision. This is about the values of this civilization, of a capitalist society. Because by hiring a police officer to stand between food or a vacant building and a hungry person or a homeless person, by making the police officer stand between them, what you’re saying is that private property is more important than people, than humanity. That’s a value and a choice. If you could change that and say, No, we will not spend money on the police. Our priority is to feed people, so we are going to use government resources to find food to just give to people. Why should hungry people be denied food? It’s the values of a capitalist society.

The challenge for us, when you ask what’s the portal and how to open it, is also a mental thing. If you can say that the protection of private property is not as important as the protection of humans and nature, you’d change your attitude toward medication. Like the COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine should be produced and distributed for free. There shouldn’t be intellectual property protections on it because it’s produced with public wealth, with public knowledge, to save humanity. But capitalism dictates that the intellectual property of the virus, its protection, is more important than the well being of people. That’s insane, Frank, because if you don’t create 16 billion doses and vaccinate everybody twice, you’re going to continue to get the virus. It’s going to continue to spread. It can continue to kill people. The vaccine should not be commodified. Medicines should not be commodified. Food should not be commodified. Education should not be commodified. These should be part of the noncommodified sphere, a noncommodified life. I’m just emphasizing three things: medicines, food, and education. You should have universal access to education; kids can go to their neighborhood school, no need to pay. This is the case in many societies. You shouldn’t have private schools. It sucks resources out of society. You should be able to go into any medical center (not necessarily a hospital, but every neighborhood has a medical center), and you get treated. No need to extend your money. You walk in, you say, It’s hurting over here, the medical person looks at it, says, I can take care of that with a quick intervention before the problem forces a more dramatic solution. Small things can be taken care of, so it doesn’t fester and then—because there is no care—you have to go to the emergency room.

Finally, food. There’s no need to commodify food. I mean, there really is no need. It sounds like a crazy idea. There’s no need for food to be something that I need to buy with money. You can have food chains established that are socially paid for. People receive government support right down the whole commodity chain so that I go into a shop and I take what I need. It’s noncommodified. Or, even if I’m buying what I need, I receive supplements to be able to buy it. Enough not to buy just the bare minimum. Why should we deny the eating of healthy things to the poor? Why can’t the poor eat fresh vegetables and fresh fruits and so on? In most countries, when you give food support, the food support is grains, some rice; it’s offering some protein, most likely some lentil, beans, dal, or something like that; there is maybe sugar and maybe some tea or coffee. That’s about it for the food support. You don’t get food support for vegetables or for fruit. Those prices are high. Let’s create a society where in every neighborhood there are community gardens where people grow fruits and vegetables and then can harvest them and eat them and enjoy them and share them with each other. I agree that you don’t have to have supply chains producing fruits and vegetables. Every city should have community gardens. You see this already in many countries. In the poorer parts of the world, it’s much harder to do this. Part of that is because the debt crisis has made creativity come to zero. Also, populations have moved from rural areas to urban areas. There’s no place to develop community gardens. Why are people moving from rural areas to urban areas? It’s because in rural areas, life has become unsustainable. Corporate agriculture has basically displaced millions of people to come to cities and beg for work. This needs to be reversed.

FRANK BARAT: In the last couple of years the left has nearly become mainstream in two countries where people thought this never could happen: the UK and the US with Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. They both got very close to gaining power, but you saw in both cases the whole establishment turning rapidly against them to make this impossible. How do we break this cycle? How do we win?

VIJAY PRASHAD: This is a perennial question for these advanced capitalist countries. I think we need to acknowledge, first, that in these countries, you have a shell of democracy, but the democratic spirit is really lacking. So, what has happened is that because of the way the systems are set up, democracy has come to be self-identical with elections. You think that by exercising your franchise, that is sufficient as a democratic act. Look at your shirt. Your shirt says, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Right? That’s a great shirt, and it’s apropos of this question. If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. Well, the reason they don’t make it illegal is because, yes, voting happens within a narrow set of parameters.

The political system in capitalist countries has been reduced by money power, media power, and by the attack on the range of people’s organizations that enrich democracy. India, in the election that reelected Narendra Modi to the prime ministership, was the most expensive election in world history alongside the election that elected Donald Trump. More than 80 percent of the money spent on the Indian election went to the right-wing BJP. Money power corrupts the process. We know that. Media and money power corrupt the process. They can easily destroy anybody. The political system narrows the exercise of political rights to elections. There is no further encouragement of democratic activity. Trade unions, people’s organizations, peasant groups, neighborhood groups: most of them are treated as if they are anti-national, seditious organizations.

Think of the narrowing of public space. Decades ago, the Communist Party in countries like France and Italy had cultural organizations and cultural centers for these organizations. Young people would come here and gather, and here they would imbibe democratic and left ideas. They would hold dances and learn musical instruments, play sports and hold study groups. Over the years, noncommodified spaces such as these have disappeared. These places to gather have either been shut down or overrun by commodification. Parties, as they have become weaker, no longer have the ability to rent these boxing halls or these movie theaters. Now you have to go to a place where you have to pay a fee to get in, where you must buy this and buy that, everything commodified. Social life deteriorates as young people are segregated even more deeply by class. Sections of the public stay home, without disposable income, watching TV, eating at home, atomized now, more and more, and the more you are atomized and watch crap TV, the less you talk to your friends, the more you get into subcultures with narrowed opinions, your social life withering.

A democracy does not only come alive on election day. A democracy must have a vibrant public sphere, where people are able to talk to each other, debate each other, argue with each other, laugh with each other, build their ideas, build their confidence, build organizations. The attack on trade unions has really weakened society. That attack was fundamentally antidemocratic, not only anti-socialist. Trade unions constructed working-class culture. It was the union hall where people came to hear music. There was a time in many parts of the world where the union hall was a place where people went to hold their children’s birthday parties. Now, it must be done either in a restaurant, which is expensive, or in your home, privatized, and so on. So that robust community, the culture that is produced, withers. People understood themselves to be workers—that was where forms of proletarian culture developed. But when the union loses their halls, when their strength diminishes, when they don’t hold dances and they don’t hold birthday parties and things like that, you privatize things, and the social fabric of a society slowly disappears.

When democratic culture withers, then you start to think that democracy means voting. Once you’ve restricted the concept of democracy to voting and you smash people with money power, media power, and so on, it’s not a democracy anymore. It’s just a hollow shell. It looks democratic but in fact, it’s socially authoritarian. You’re giving me two candidates—in most countries, it’s a two-horse race. They want you to believe that you have multiple candidates, but effectively it boils down to a two-horse race. One of them is better funded—they have better ads, WhatsApp groups, troll armies that send me messages. I’m bewildered, and I have to now choose between two people, but I don’t have a democratic culture. I don’t have the space to talk to my friends. I’m on social media, where trolls are coming in and blowing my mind in different ways.

This is not a democracy. In fact, I would say that advanced industrial countries are merely election-based. Their political system is election-based but not democratic. Because a democracy isn’t elections, it’s a spirit.

FRANK BARAT: Don’t you think the left needs to be more aggressive and needs to be seen in a way as the only authentic way to go forward in society?

VIJAY PRASHAD: Frank, this is a very complicated problem, and it raises many issues.

First, there continue to be debates in the socialist projects of the world about the experiments underway. In places like Vietnam and Cuba, but also states like Kerala, governments come to office and are tasked with both lifting the social wealth of the country and creating a socialist society. You can’t socialize poverty. You have to build some social wealth. That the socialist experiments are mostly taking place in poor countries should give one a sense of the enormity of the problem in the actually existing socialist projects. The arrogance that says, Oh, Vietnam is not socialist but a mixed economy, deeply bothers me. It does not see the actual problems faced by the country, which struggles with the colonial past and the war imposed on it for so long. Despite the difficulties, during the COVID-19 pandemic we saw the governments act rationally and the people operate with great care through the instruments of public action. In Kerala, millions of people were fed by community kitchens, something we just did not see in capitalist states, where you saw some very modest mutual aid, if that. In Cuba, 28,000 medical students left their dormitories and tested 11 million Cubans. That’s incredible. I mean, that has not happened anywhere else in the world except in China. Cuba has done this despite the terrible, cruel embargo, the attempt to suffocate the Cuban Revolution since 1961, when the US began its pressure campaign. Nonetheless, the Cuban people and the Cuban project are both resilient and popular. Out of 11 million Cubans, 8 million belong to neighborhood committees called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Their organizational capacity was turned over to pandemic relief, whether the making of hand sanitizer or masks. Kerala’s cooperatives went into action to provide this sort of relief. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we documented this as part of our CoronaShock series in a text called CoronaShock and Socialism. We showed how in these countries it was not just the socialist government that operated, but also the socialist character of public action. So, there are these actual socialist experiments, which are taking place in the poorer parts of the world.

There are obviously problems in each of these socialist state projects. The problems come from a range of sources. First, there is simply the problem that all of these state projects take place in countries either very poor or whose poverty was sharpened even more by various forms of war (the bombing of Vietnam or the hybrid war against Cuba). This meant that the governments had to innovate to raise capital for social development, pushing them to adopt various forms of classic postcolonial means of raising revenue, such as tourism, or to exploit natural resources, or indeed to go into deeper and deeper debt. Second, there is the problem that many of these state projects drew the best of their political cadre into the state bureaucracy, which had the result of hurting the non-state party organizations and prevented them from retaining their strong ties with the masses, ties that should ordinarily encourage mass struggles to shape government policy. These are only two of a range of problems faced by and created by the socialist state projects. These projects are experimental, which means that some of their policy approaches might fail, and they are run by humans, who are not always correct. But the nature of the harsh information attack often leads to a defensive attitude.

Many people are absorbed by the idea that the socialist experiments are authoritarian failures. This is a result of the information war against these countries. They’re not willing to look beyond the information war and say, What have the Cubans done during COVID-19? How have they dealt with it? How is it that Cuban doctors continue to travel around the world to heal the poor, especially working in COVID-19 hot wards? If you look at the actual way in which Cuba operated, it is very impressive. People are fed, the elderly get their medicines delivered to them. This is a product of public action, that is to say, community mobilization and state action. There is a view that Venezuela’s government is authoritarian and a kleptocracy, which is once more a fiction of the information war. On the ground one sees neighborhood committees and various other programs. Of these programs, the most impressive is the CLAP or Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción (Local Committees for Supply and Production), which provides food boxes to those who need it. Those who work in these programs work overtime to get people relief and to prevent the infection from spreading.

You just don’t see this level of community mobilization and state action in the capitalist states. In these socialist projects, we see neighborhoods organized into rational action, and we see governments offering their support to this kind of operation. These socialist experiments, in very poor places that are often under the gun from the United States and its allies, nonetheless have been able to engender public action. That’s so important to highlight.

Second, across the world, it has been left organizations that have, in this spirit, been out there providing relief in our societies. In India, for instance, the left parties and the left mass organizations have been vigorous with relief operations: building community kitchens, building sinks for hand washing, distributing food and medicines, going door to door to see that neighbors are okay during the emergency period. They are also protesting the crackdown of labor laws, trying to give people confidence, and being at the center of the farmers’ revolt. The left has been active during this period at great risk.

Little of this is being reported in the suffocating capitalist media. Why should such a periodical or television channel report that a trade union in India is providing relief to the people and not asking for bailouts or handouts? The capitalists who control information do not highlight this; instead, they highlight when some capitalist philanthropist donates money, which they see as acceptable “public action.” There is so little written about Vietnam and about Cuba, about Kerala and about Laos—all poor parts of the world which have been able to hold the infection in check against huge odds.

The left in the capitalist countries has also tried to provide relief throughout the pandemic. But there is a problem here of resources and of expectations. The left has become largely defensive and unable to articulate a firm, united agenda that is not reactive. The attack on human society has been so severe in the last few decades, which has led to an isolation and defensiveness. The rise of the neo-fascists, with the liberals often unwilling to stand up for their principles, has put the left in the position to lead in the defense of basic democratic and humane frameworks. I mean, when the right is so virulently offensive against basic humanity, the left has to occupy the post to defend rights. In Poland, Andrzej Duda, president for half a dozen years now, thrives on an anti-LGBTQ platform, something that resembles the terrible anti-LGBTQ framework of Bolsonaro. It is the left that struggles in Brazil, for instance, against the virulence of Bolsonaro, whose hatred of the vulnerable is legendary; it is the left that has to lead against him, even if this does not result in electoral gains. The same is true in Poland and in most of eastern Europe; the liberals have gone to sleep, surrendered, while the left—in small numbers—is forced to do our own work and the work of the liberals, namely, to uphold basic decency. Our slogan returns to No Pasaran, you will not pass; we are not able to be loud enough when we say, This is what we want.

You started by saying the pandemic is a portal. That means we are looking for a future society. The left in general has been in such a defensive posture that to articulate a future society has not seemed possible. It requires an enormous sense of confidence to articulate what type of future society you want; you need to have a program to get there. It’s not just writing a science fiction book about the future. Yeah, you can write a science fiction account of the future, and some of the things I’ve been talking about have a science fiction quality to them, right? That every neighborhood will have an office where there’s a doctor and a therapist and anybody can stroll in and see them. There’s a science fiction quality to that. You can imagine it, right? If you’re going to take a kid to the doctor, why do you need to go by train or whatever, with a one-hour wait to see the doctor? Just go down the stairs into the street and there’s the storefront public health office, and you walk in, and on two days of the week the pediatrician comes there, on a cycle, and sees the children. Then that pediatrician goes to ten different clinics like this and sees all the children. You don’t need an appointment. You come in, you pull a number, and, by turn, you see the pediatrician.

You see, you’ll criticize public health by saying it rations resources, but so does market health care. I mean, if you’re taking a kid to see the doctor in a capitalist system, I bet you didn’t just stroll in. I bet you had to make an appointment, to fill in forms and then bring them in; if you have no health insurance or no private funds, you might not be able to seek medical care. It’s not like capitalist health care is unlimited. It’s also resource-thin, it’s constrained. There’s nothing wrong with waiting in a queue; there’s nothing wrong with having an appointment. These are the same thing. But somehow, public health has taken a beating. So, it has a science fiction quality to it, and I think that’s one of the reasons the left hasn’t robustly articulated a vision.

If you look at European left-wing writers, they write about the communist horizon. That’s a phrase they use, communist horizon, often to great lyrical effect and with great charge. I’ve read a lot of those books, but the books don’t get into the actual, practical aspects of engineering social life to solve people’s problems. We need a rigorous engagement with the conjuncture we are in, where we are weak. Therefore, out of the conjuncture, with a great deal of pain, we, on the left, need to articulate the path to the horizon. It is not sufficient to assert that there is a horizon, which I’m sympathetic to, but I would like more than the idea of the horizon—I would like us to show that our praxis can actually open a door to an imaginable future, because the socialist future is utterly imaginable. Our defensive posture sometimes prevents us from articulating the imagination of the future, that future which will emerge from our practical activity. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write that communism is not “a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself,” but is “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” These lines are like a talisman for me.

ART BREATHES LIFE INTO THE WORLD

FRANK BARAT: I want to read you a quote by political activist Angela Davis. I’d like to know what you think about it. Davis said, “Artists are the ones who guide us towards the future, allow us to experience what we are not yet able to conceptually articulate. Artists allow us to imagine the possibilities of a better world.” What’s your opinion on that? What is the role of artists in our societies?

VIJAY PRASHAD: I’ve thought a lot about art because I think that beauty cannot be a concept restricted to the bourgeoisie, the elites. Beauty is a universal concept. Everybody must have a taste of beauty in their lives.

Ideas must be sharp as diamonds. When diamonds come out of the ground, they are not as they look. It takes great artistry to carve the diamond, to shape the diamond, and to make it shine. If ideas must be sharp as diamonds, well, it takes a lot of effort, of artistry and style, to craft a diamond. Music, poetry, visual arts, sculpture, these are different forms of communicating ideas. When the October Revolution took place in 1917, left artists suddenly breathed in the air of a new world and produced new art forms, exciting new ways to tell the million new stories. The Bolsheviks did not say that the only form of communication is the communiqué. They said, Tell us the many stories that exist around us, and that is what the artists did. In those days, left artists spoke to each other about style, about new forms of communication, as much as the content. We need to take our inspiration from those kinds of conversations.

Take a detour with me through Gramsci, who was entirely lifted by the October Revolution and by these new conversations. When Gramsci was in prison, he tried to understand why the left had been unable to carry the people against the fascists. To understand this, he tried to understand Italian culture. He came up with the theory of the contradictory consciousness. The working class sees the world through their own eyes, seeing themselves as exploited, but at the same time seeing themselves through the eyes of the bourgeoisie, because the working class draws ideas from the teachers, from the priests, from the culture industry. Gramsci says that it is the role of the permanent persuader, the new intellectual, the communist intellectual, to go amongst the people, draw out the contradictory consciousness, and elaborate it into philosophy. In other words, clarify things. Then, when you return to the people with this very hard work of elaboration, and with their philosophy, they will recognize themselves in it. That’s what the revolutionary intellectual must do.

Now, it does not mean that an intellectual should hold a mirror to the working class and say, Look, this is what you look like. If you’re doing that, you’re not doing any real work. The role of the new intellectual or the communist intellectual is to take the ideas of people, elaborate it into philosophy, and then come and say, Does this sound right? For instance, when a trade union leader speaks to people, if you’re not speaking about the fury of people, you are alienated from them. That’s what Gramsci means—you come back, and you deliver it, and people say, Wow, this is a good speaker. Now why are you a good speaker? It is because you are speaking to me, and you are touching me. So, when we think of touching people, you don’t just touch them with ideas. You touch them with beauty as well. The speech has to be beautiful. It must elevate them and lift the ideas. You don’t want to depress people. You want to say, There’s a portal, let’s walk in. Let’s go. Are you ready to come with me? And that is about beauty, that is about art.

Why is poetry distinct from prose? Poetry is the distillation of ideas into fewer words. You take an idea and make it into an image. That’s what a poem is for us. It uses words to create pictures. In other words, I actually don’t see these forms as doing different things. Poetry, painting, music, films, and so on, are there to elevate you. In our Tricontinental material, in our newsletter particularly, we have lots of art. The paintings, the pictures, and the poems that are chosen aren’t necessarily of red flags and people marching because I want to also depict tenderness. I want to depict the full range of human feeling, because as you read something, as you come across something, it must evoke in you the full palette of human feelings. The point of left-wing communication, the way to reach people from the standpoint of the left, is not to narrow them into anger or protest. We don’t want a left that is angry and always protesting; we want a left that has the full range of human feeling. Tenderness, empathy, joy, humor, love, sexuality—they all need to be there. Nobody will come and join the left because the left is always red-faced and angry about the world. Why would you want to join a bunch of angry people that look like the far-right neofascists, always angry and screaming? No, we must be people of tenderness, we must be people of patience and love. I believe that fundamentally.

There is nothing wrong with tenderness; we must say tenderness is a good value. Patience is a good value. Anger is a good value if it’s channeled in a certain way. Love is a very important value. When Che Guevara became the head of planning and finance, he was asked, Don’t you give people material incentives to work harder? He answered, No, you can give them moral incentives. What is a moral incentive? A moral incentive is love. A moral incentive is example. Working by emulation, work by example. We have examples of this in our lives. When my children were small and came running to me and said, We’re hungry, I didn’t immediately commodify the exchange and say, What am I going to get from you if I get up from my chair and make you lunch? What are you going to do for me? No. It is love that motivates us to rush off and make them lunch. Why can’t we draw from these elemental human relations to draw lessons for our social life? Love can be one of the motivations in our society. We volunteer out of love, and out of that motivation we learn to enjoy the act of fellowship and solidarity. You say to me, Okay, let’s make a book. I’m not going to ask you, Frank, what will I get out of it economically? How much am I going to make from this? No, I’m thinking, I like him, he’s an interesting person. I would like to talk with him. I’m thinking, This is going to be fun. You know, two hours a week. I’m motivated by a range of things. Maybe I’m motivated by thinking, I’d like to have another book, it’s easy to do it this way. Maybe ambition is a motivation or the desire to get some ideas into the wider conversation. Or maybe just fun. It doesn’t have to be merely commercial.

Art allows us to enjoy and to convey the widest range of human feeling and to complicate it. Art allows you to understand that the double-entry bookkeeping psychology that capitalism produces is limited and perhaps even inhuman. Every time anybody asks you to do something, you might ask, What do I get paid for it? but then this is just not enough. There are also great feelings of joy and love, fellow feeling, and solidarity. Art does that. The passion of people at a concert or the feeling of joy when you share a poem with someone, the great joy of it all. I wouldn’t have made it past my teenage years without The Dark Side of the Moon, which is what I’m glad I got a chance to tell Roger Waters. It was the soundtrack of my generation’s depressives. We were held together by it. Art lifts you above yourself into something meaningful. There is no price that can be paid for that, so why try to make everything have a price?

FOR THE JUSTICE OF IT

FRANK BARAT: I want you to talk about transformative justice. We’ve spoken about this in the last few weeks, about the need for us as a society to change the dynamics that have created people who behave in harmful ways. But should this also apply to Derek Chauvin? Kae Tempest, a brilliant British artist, said to me one day that we should have radical empathy.

VIJAY PRASHAD: This is a big debate in the world of criminal justice reform. In many countries, when you have killed somebody, you get a sentence that’s twenty years. In some societies, you are in prison until you die. You’re sixteen years old, you killed somebody, you will spend the next seventy years in prison. In the United States for example, they sentence you to prison for your natural life. That’s incredible. In most countries, a maximum sentence is seven years, then you go out. Because, after seven years, you should have rehabilitated yourself; you’ll have thought about it, had therapy, changed your ways, and so on.

The very fact that advanced human society puts people in prison for their natural life is incredible, that somebody can spend sixty, seventy years in prison. I can’t even imagine it. There’s something barbaric about it. I think there are debates to be held about people who maliciously killed somebody. Derek Chauvin maliciously killed George Floyd. So, am I going to say let’s have empathy for him? I think he needs to really think about what he did, and I think the police departments need to think about how they allowed this to happen. I saw somewhere that US police kill three civilians a day. So, on the one side, officer Derek Chauvin needs to really think about What did I as a human being do to another human being? You can’t just say you can come in for counseling and that’s fine. Something has to be taken away from you. I’m not opposed to that. You have surrendered the right to be a free person by doing something so malicious and disgusting as that. But then at the same time, institutions need to also be put on the dock. The institution needs to look at how they are training people, because it’s not just Derek Chauvin we are talking about. It’s all these officers over the years and since the killing of George Floyd. That’s a very important issue.

I do believe that justice is very important, and justice doesn’t come by punishment. I’ll give you an example. When Osama bin Laden was killed, I had the very bad fortune of going on a US radio program the next morning. He was killed on a Sunday night, and the next morning, on Monday, I went on the program and made the point that his killing was a mistake for several reasons. One, there was a violation of international law by the United States crossing into Pakistan, grabbing somebody, killing him, and taking the body out. I mean, I said it’s dangerous because India could do that to Pakistan. India can fly in across the border, grab somebody, come back. It’s a terrible precedent. Secondly, it would have been better to have caught him alive and tried him with an indictment and seen what he had to say about his life and the organization he created. You know, these are the things we are trying to avoid—vigilante justice. So, I said these things, and I happened to use the phrase restorative justice. I talked about how a court case is important because it also restores the brokenness of society. That you want him to stand there and tell you about what’s going on because it’s not just bin Laden; it’s not just a singular monster. It’s a system that produces somebody like that. Let him talk about the Saudi royal family, let him talk about the CIA. We need to hear about all of it. Well, following this, I was nominated the “Pinhead of the Week” by Bill O’Reilly, and he made my life a living hell for one week. He mocked me on his show, a reporter came to my house and ambushed me with an interview, and they played it. It was a nightmare. They did this because these terms are, for the right wing, a flashpoint. Because by saying restorative justice or transformative justice they think you mean no punishment. In fact, we don’t mean punishment. Punishment is the least of justice. Punishment does not eclipse justice. Justice is much more than just punishment. What is justice? You see, when somebody’s killed, like when George Floyd is killed, there were protests all around the world. Those protests came because they were saying that society is broken and that we need to reconstruct society. People were in effect begging the institutions to take its brokenness seriously. They wanted a process of redistributive or restorative or transformative justice. They wanted this process to happen.

Let’s have a conversation about the fact that a man who was alleged to pass a counterfeit note was just killed on the street. Or a man who, like Eric Garner, was alleged to be selling loose cigarettes, was just killed on the street. So, finding Derek Chauvin guilty is only a piece of the problem. The larger problem is that faith in institutions, faith in the system of justice, is totally broken. When you say transformative justice, when you say restorative justice, you’re not talking about this officer alone. It’s not about him. It’s about the system that’s broken. So what people are saying is, Look, you can execute this officer tomorrow, but thereafter, somebody’s going to be in the next day. The issue isn’t punishing him, because punishing him doesn’t deter crime. Crime is not deterred; it’s never deterred by executing somebody. Crime is deterred when you take away the source of crime. If you take away starvation, people will not steal food. If you enable people to live with dignity, they will not rise and smash windows.

There is also a debate that I know a lot of people participate in about rioting and looting. Well, the conditions of society produced looting, as we have already seen. Looting happens because it’s an unequal society and people are frustrated. You don’t end looting by shooting the looters. You end looting by liberating society from the conditions that produced it in the first place. I think that’s what these terms, transformative and restorative, mean. They’re not about the individual. If you take a term like transformative justice and make it about the individual, then you’re mirroring bourgeois ideas of justice. Because the bourgeois idea of justice is that the officer is the guilty one and we can only try the officer. By the laws, bourgeois law says you can’t try a structure. You were an important part of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, and who did you put in the dock? Can Israel be in the dock? Can the Israeli Defense Forces be in the dock? No. Typically, bourgeois justice tells you that you should try an individual. These terms are not about individual justice; they’re about structural justice. And the systems of law that we currently have are not capable of handling that.

UTOPIA IS NOT A PLACE BUT A PROJECT

FRANK BARAT: There are alternatives to neoliberal projects, like the World Social Forum, Via Campesina, the rise of the BRICS countries, the socialism experiments in South America like the Zapatistas in Mexico, the International People’s Assembly. If you had to make a case to someone to show that radical and socialist experiments work, which case study or example would you give?

VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, it’s impossible to give you one example. There are many examples. What I would do is take you on a journey to the state of Kerala, in India, my country. The state of Kerala is one of 35 million people and has been governed on and off, since the 1950s, by a left-wing, communist government. I would say, Let’s go to Kerala so I can show you what a socialist society is like. A state of 35 million, with around 17 million women, and four and a half million of them in a cooperative of women called Kudumbashree. Then you have another cooperative of construction workers, one of coir [coconut fiber] workers, and so on. These are production cooperatives. Workers in them have democratic decision-making processes; it changes everything in regards to your relation to work. They do a lot of public actions. There are youth organizations, trade unions, all kinds of things, and it creates a highly educated society, pushed by the left. It’s almost a hundred percent educated society.

Yes, there are economic vulnerabilities, like the fact they rely on migrant labor and remittances and so on. That has to do with the fact that it’s a small state, resources are limited; it’s another discussion, but it’s a much healthier place to live than most places in the world. By healthier, I mean socially healthier. There are lots of problems; of course all is not rosy. For example, the state of Kerala hasn’t really figured out how to crack the back of patriarchy or caste discrimination. That the chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, took up issues of menstruation by providing free sanitary supplies in school and that he advanced the cause of the transgender community by hiring workers from that community to work as ticket collectors in the metro is a part of a long struggle. These are big struggles. I’m not going to say this is utopia, but I will say they have advanced certain things, especially public action, collective production, things like that, enormously important and impressive developments.

We could also go to a place like Cuba, a very poor country with minimal resources under heavy embargo, yet with a highly educated population (the literacy rate in Cuba is 99 percent, whereas in the United States the adult literacy rate is merely 79 percent). Cuba is also a country where they really worked hard to deal with the question of racism. Again, it’s not a paradise, there are severe problems, but I would say that despite the poverty, they’ve worked hard together, producing a very collective and proud people.

There are these examples. Then, outside these areas that are trying to build socialism, there are movements. I’m a part of the process called the International People’s Assembly. There are about two hundred peoples’ organizations located in a hundred countries. We have been, over the past several years, building a process for working-class organizations to create an international network. It is very complicated, of course. There are language problems because we do not have one common one. And that’s the same for political traditions. You must build collective trust and unity and so on. But at the end of the day, it’s a long journey and a beautiful journey. I would prefer any day to spend my time fighting to build popular unity among people than just being critical of the world.

You see, here’s the problem with abstract intellectualism. It is too easy to stand outside the practical activity of building the future and offer one’s criticisms. You might end up with the best criticisms of everything because you have taken a step outside the stream of reality, and take the position of objectivity. You’ve taken a god-like perch. You’re judging things against utopia, and you say, This falls short, this falls short, this falls short. You’re probably right in your judgments because, against utopia, everything is going to look bad. You’ll say, Well, why do they have a police force, why do they do this, why did they fail in that? All the things you are saying are probably true, but I learned something very early on from Marx. In the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx writes, “The philosophers have interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” What he’s talking about is the intellectual that leaves the stream of reality, stands outside it and says, Ah, I interpret that world over there. He’s not saying you can change the world without interpreting it, but he’s saying you have to interpret it from the standpoint of praxis. You understand things best if you are in the midst of changing them. You have to root yourself in the stream of history; you’re in a little canoe, you have a little paddle, and your little paddle is helping you analyze the currents, analyze the wind in which you’re moving as well as the speed of the water. The intellectual must be in the middle of the river interpreting motion. That’s why I would say that intellectuals must, with great pain, analyze the conjuncture and then try to find the path out of the conjuncture. That activity is beautiful activity. It’s difficult because it means you have to make commitments to people; you are to understand the limitations, but you have to find a way to exit our problems rather than judge the world one way or the other.

In the process of building the International Peoples Assembly, all the participants are rooted in the middle of the stream of history. We are trying to find a way to steer the boat, with many people doing a lot of steering, and that means trying to construct some unity in a complicated way. That journey is fraught because you’ll hit a rock, you’ll run aground, but you have to keep struggling to maintain control of the boat. I find that to be the exciting way to create ideas. You want to create ideas? Root them in praxis and in practical activity. Not from a standpoint outside. When you say, Where does hope lie? I will say that hope is not a place but the practical activity where you make errors, you have heartbreak, you fight. Hope is in the struggle amongst people. That’s what hope is. Utopia is not a place. Technically, it means no place. Utopia is the project you construct.

AFTERWORD

During the conversations with Frank Barat recounted here, and the course of editing this book with my old friend and editor Andy Hsiao, I often recalled what Vincent Cochetel of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said in early August 2017 in Niger. Reflecting on the 2011 war by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that destroyed Libya, Cohetel called it “a machine that destroys humans.” After NATO’s war, the Libyan gateway opened, and refugees poured across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. Alarmed by the number of refugees who were getting into unsatisfactory boats along the Libyan coastline, Europe began to build its moat deeper and deeper inside the African continent. The European border used to be at the northern Mediterranean coastline; it has moved to the south of the Sahara Desert, in the Sahel region of Africa. Cochetel, who is French, has been a dedicated worker of the UNHCR; he said these words not too far away from Arlit, Niger, where the French mining firm Areva and French troops have garrisoned enormous reserves of uranium. They say that they must protect the Sahel from the growth of al Qaeda in the Maghreb, one of the franchises of the global al Qaeda network. The French entry into the region was highlighted in 2013, when through Operation Serval it came into Mali to beat back an advance from Ansar Dine and other jihadi groups. There was no mention of the uranium of Niger or how the French monopolize it. The road out of Arlit is known as Uranium Highway. The uranium of Arlit powers one in three light bulbs in France. Uranium makes its steady journey to Europe, but the refugees’ journey to Europe must be prevented. It is not only NATO’s war that is the machine that destroys humans, it is also the terrible malady of the system that dominates in our world: an imperialist system, with income and wealth inequality, war and misery, at its heart.

Stories from the Sahara and the Mediterranean raise our anger and reduce us to hopelessness. Cochetel’s evocative phrase is incomplete. Even in the Sahel, there is unrest and protest: there are the young followers of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, and there are the experienced Tuareg in Libya and Algeria, who struggle against their social conditions and whose struggle—with victory in mind—produces for us the category hope. This conversation, I trust, was not only about misery but also about the hope. The visions of hope come to me from the process in which I have been involved since 2015—to build an international network of political and social movements, which is called the International People’s Assembly. Part of my work with the assembly has been to build its partner research institute called Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. It is thanks to the research of our team at Tricon-tinental—spread out from Buenos Aires to Trivandrum—that I have been able to sharpen my sense of the present, both the misery and the struggles, the zigs and the zags. One of the important theoretical advancements of our collective work is the acknowledgment that you can best understand the world if you are struggling to reshape it, since if you are trying to move the dialectic, you are able to unmask the buried contradictions. Whatever interesting observations emerge in the conversation, these are part of our collective work.

Crises abound: the crisis of unemployment and inequality, the crisis of environmental destruction and climate change, the crisis of the pandemic and social desolation. Answers to these crises will not come from the owners of property and their political parties. They created some of these crises and accelerated others. The good side of history is alien to them. The capitalist system is very good at generating vast amounts of commodities and very high qualities of certain kinds of commodities. It is good at the production of high-value medical care, for instance, but not so good at the production of quality public health care. This has to do with the profit motive. What makes money in a capitalist system is what is encouraged. Since there is great social inequality, most of the public does not have cash in their pockets for quality health care, so health care for the vast majority simply is not affordable or possible. It is this attitude toward health and education that shows us the inhumane side of capitalism. During the pandemic, sixty-four countries spent more to service their external debt than on health care.

The planet will only be saved by creativity and the hard work of the masses of people, the workers and peasants, the teachers and doctors, everyday people who do extraordinary things to allow us to survive through the crises and to allow us to dream of other possibilities. This work is part of our movements and part of the socialist experiments that are ongoing across the world, from Cuba to China. While hunger rates rose to catastrophic levels during the pandemic, the Chinese people abolished absolute poverty; this is a world-historical feat. These socialist projects experiment with ways of shaping society outside the meanness of the profit motive.

One of the great lies of our age is that there are simply not enough resources to do all the things that socialists believe are necessary. It was easy enough for the governments since 9/11 to spend over $6.4 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the former ending, essentially, where it began, with the Taliban back in the saddle. There is at least $37 trillion in illicit tax havens, much of that money squirreled away by US billionaires and corporations.

Twenty-two of the richest men in the world—most of them from the United States—hold more wealth than all of the nearly 700 million women who live in Africa. One of those men, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, is worth $109 billion and has an ambition to be the world’s first trillionaire. There are no roadblocks to his desire, few regulations on his business practices. Poorly compensated Amazon workers, meanwhile, rely upon public assistance to make ends meet (“It feels like I’ve been hit by a garbage truck,” writes Emily Guen-delsberger of her time as an Amazon employee in On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane). Imagine what all these resources could do to build a decent society: well-funded schools from pre-K to university, well-funded public transportation that can supplant fossil-fuel vehicles, well-funded public housing, well-funded hospitals accessed by universal health care, well-funded arts and community centers, and above all, a four-hour day at a full day’s wage so that there is time to help rebuild society. These are the dreams that are part of A Plan to Save the Planet, which was produced by twenty-five research institutes under the leadership of ALBA-TCP, the treaty that binds nine states of the Caribbean and Latin America. This plan lays out the principles for a new order along twelve key themes, from democracy to the digital world. Under “Health,” the plan lays out thirteen principles:

•Advance the cause of a people’s vaccine for COVID-19 and for future diseases.

•Remove patent controls on essential medicines and facilitate the transfer of both medical science and technology to developing countries.

•De-commodify, develop, and increase investment in robust public health systems.

•Develop the public sector’s pharmaceutical production, particularly in developing countries.

•Form a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Health Threats.

•Support and strengthen the role that health workers’ unions play at the workplace and in the economy.

•Ensure that people from underprivileged backgrounds and rural areas are trained as doctors.

•Broaden medical solidarity, including through the World Health Organisation and health platforms associated with regional bodies.

•Mobilise campaigns and actions that protect and expand reproductive and sexual rights.

•Levy a health tax on large corporations that produce beverages and foods that are widely recognised by international health organisations to be harmful to children and to public health in general (such as those that lead to obesity or other chronic diseases).

•Curb the promotional activities and advertising expenditures of pharmaceutical corporations.

•Build a network of accessible, publicly funded diagnostic centres and strictly regulate the prescription and prices of diagnostic tests.

•Provide psychological therapy as part of public health systems.

These are commonsense ideas that are rooted in socialist values. We would like to see these principles used to shape our societies.

When the writer Kurt Vonnegut was asked whether Dresden, Germany, should have been bombed by the Allies during the dying days of World War II, he answered that it was, after all, bombed; the point was how one behaved after the bombing. The withdrawal of resources by the billionaires effectively bombs society, which is why the question on the table is how you behave in the midst of the carnage. Perhaps it’s better to imagine a better world than be stuck in this one. The name of that better world is socialism.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, chief correspondent at Globetrotter, and editor at Left-Word Books. He won the Muzaffar Ahmad Memorial Prize in 2009 for his book Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.

Frank Barat is a film producer, author, and journalist. He is currently producing or co-producing four films, including The Key, London Recruits, and a feature documentary on Palestine directed by Ali Al-Arian. He is also developing a television series with UK producer Geoff Arbourne. Barat has edited books with Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Marc Lamont Hill, and Ken Loach. Born in France but currently based in Brussels, after spending more than a decade in London, he is also the cofounder of the Festival Ciné-Palestine in Paris and the Palestina with Love festival in Brussels.

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