Vijay Prashad: Reviving collective life and scaling small gestures of care (ep394)
“Where is the space for a collective life? If you then yell at the planet and say, ‘Why aren’t you acting collectively?’ You don’t understand this social system. This economic system has stolen collectivity from people.”
In this episode, we welcome Vijay Prashad, an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. Vijay begins by sharing about the turning points in his life that led him to focus his work on unraveling the various atrocities visited upon people in the world. With a recognition of the power of media narratives, he goes on to address how both mainstream and independent media perpetuates the limiting view that democracies are driven primarily by participation in electoral politics. Offering alternative inspirations, Vijay shines a light on examples of grassroots movements in Brazil, India, and China, where ordinary people have taken matters into their own hands to occupy unused lands to grow food and to practice small gestures of kindness and community care.
Rather than asserting blame for the numerous challenges everyday people face when trying to become more engaged members of society, Vijay points out the various systemic factors making organized action more difficult. Ultimately, Vijay calls for reviving our collective lives through rebuilding confidence and capacity—leaving us with an empowering invitation to start creating the future, now.
About the guest:
Vijay is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, as well as an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is also a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. Vijay has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by RVBY MY DEAR
Episode-inspired artwork by Luci Pina
Episode references:
Struggle Makes us Human, a book by Vijay Prashad
Capital, a book by Karl Marx
Wretched of the Earth, a book by Franz Fanon
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Vijay Prashad: People say, "Well, when I was young, this happened to me," and so on. But when you look back, it's difficult to actually draw a straight line. I do remember, however, that I was always interested in writing, and I was always interested in telling stories. And when I was fairly young, in my school, I, along with a group of friends, created a magazine called The Circle. I used to write about things that were happening in the world, mostly utterly derivative, based on things that were in the public domain. I would read a newspaper article and I would refashion it. I was a teenager and didn't have access to the Internet- this is the 1980s. But I do remember that I saw one story- this would have been in 1982. I was pretty young- I was then about 14, 15 years old. And I read a story about a massacre that had taken place in Beirut, in Lebanon. This was what I learned had been in the neighborhood of Sabra and Shatila. Looking at the photographs, there was one in particular that I can't get out of my head of a woman walking down a very narrow street with dead bodies on both sides of her. I remember writing a heartfelt piece about- well, first going and trying to read as much as I could about the situation of the Palestinians. Admittedly, there was not much that I could find, but from whatever I could find I pieced together a story.
I wrote a very heartfelt piece, that I quite remember, in the school newspaper. One of the reasons I remember it is that it created a little bit of a conversation in our school and among the teachers about what I was saying there, which is I was basically saying that, how can we as young people sit by in the world when this kind of thing happens? Two years later, there was a ghastly pogrom against the Sikh community of New Delhi. About 3000 Sikhs were killed over a weekend. That really rattled me, sort of made the link between Sabra and Shatila and the Sikh community. And in fact, the story was so impactful to me at the time, I suppose I was about 17 years old, that I many years later ended up writing a Ph.D. dissertation, which was related to that massacre in 1984. It was very much on my mind and remains on my mind. So yes, I was interested in writing, that's true. Writing is important to me, telling stories.
I'm mostly rattled by the atrocities visited upon people in the world. I've been from then interested in, is there an exit from these atrocities? Surely there is. There has to be because otherwise, this whole thing is futile.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. Thank you so much for this introduction.
Something that I've been thinking about is the ways in which independent media, or media untethered to corporate or establishment interests, still contribute to skewing public perception of politics by the types of stories that they disproportionately focus on. And what I mean by this is that—not going off of any statistics but just my general sense—the vast majority of independent media covering politics disproportionately focus their coverage on electoral politics or actions taken or not taken by nation-state institutions and their representatives.
I think this feeds into a lot of people's perception and thinking that the most significant political action we can take comes down to the voting booth. Or maybe that politics equals nation state governance, or in terms of climate action, the most significant events to pay attention to are things like the global United Nations climate conferences.
I wonder what you've observed or what frustrations you might have in terms of the ways that the media, including both mainstream and independent media of sorts, limit or skew our collective imaginations in terms of what we can do in light of the very entangled socio-ecological-cultural crises that we face today.
Vijay Prashad: It's interesting what you say. Look, let's face it. Most media coverage has to be driven by some kind of hook. It's very difficult to get, particularly in an incredibly saturated media landscape- images everywhere on TikTok and Instagram, things come rushing at you, web pages, one after the other. So much media, so many stories. You are inundated. And there's got to be a way, therefore, to reach audiences.
There's a lot of research on this that has been conducted, some by journalists, others by psychologists and social psychologists, sociologists. There's a lot of research that goes, I suppose, under the broad umbrella media studies. So this idea that you need a hook is really an established idea. People don't disagree with that. Here's a problem: if you're searching for a hook- what is that hook, what would that hook be? Well, hooks generally speak to either our prejudices or they speak to what somebody with a lot of power and authority, or perhaps a lot of money, is driving.
Let me give you some examples of what I mean by that. Let's take the question of prejudices. There's a war in Ukraine, and there's like a global focus on that war. Lots of people dying, terrible suffering. I agree, horrible war. Meanwhile, millions of people have died over the course of the last 20 some years in the Great Lakes war in Africa. I'm in the middle of reporting another series from the Sahel region of Africa, where just recently 19 people were killed in Burkina Faso on the border with Mali. This is a jihadist insurgency which has toppled four governments, at least, and so on- and there's absolutely no coverage. Why? Because there is an underlying prejudice about who should not be killed. And well, if others are killed, it doesn't matter so much.
You remember at the start of the war in Ukraine, people were saying things like, "Well, it's terrible because the victims here have blue eyes and blond hair." Well, if they're Afghans, it doesn't really matter, or Iraqis, it doesn't really matter. And certainly, if they're from Burkina Faso or Mali, they're just off the radar. There's no hook there. How are you going to write a story about 19 killed in Burkina Faso? Who's going to read that story?
There's one way in which the idea of the hook, a well-established idea in media studies, in fact, reproduces prejudices. You see a certain kind of reporting takes place that mimics the prejudices of the people who have the money to consume media. That's one way in which the hook goes.
The other is if powerful interests are driving a certain storyline. The major newspaper outlets, or television outlets, or social media companies drive a certain algorithm or drive a certain story. So it's interesting. Here, if you look at the question of elections, which is where you began, this is a case in point.
Now, what is a democracy? A democracy isn't an election. A democracy is a social institution where people are empowered and they feel like they can participate—to make decisions, to implement decisions, and so on.
Democracy isn't just going to the voting booth and electing somebody. It's about having a very rich collective life with people, making decisions and implementing decisions.
In fact, in a country like the United States, which is really a place where money powers exercise through the ballot box, people go for—actually, an extraordinary number of people don't go, there's a high abstention rate. People go to the voting booth, they vote, and that's the end of political activity for a lot of people.
There are others who might be activists of one kind and the other. Isn't it interesting that we have the term ‘activist’ as if to say the rest of the people are simply not active?There's just a small number of people who are activists and others come in, exercise their vote, and then go. In a sense, they provide the political class with the right to have a monopoly over decision-making and implementation. It's not an active democracy. It's a passive democracy. But this suits the interests of powerful people. They would like to define or describe democracy as a place where once every four or five years, people go into a voting booth and they surrender their right to be political to a representative and say, "You do it for me, I'm going home," having described democracy in this way.
But then you can have lobbyists lobby, on a consistent, punctual basis, the representatives, and get the the kinds of climate policy that the energy companies would like to see rather than the climate policy that an active citizenry might be interested in. So, yeah, I think that it's true.
You need a hook when you have stories, but one has to be careful that hooks are not just reproducing the prejudices of those who have the money to consume media, and on the other side, that the hook is not something that is snowballed from people who have money and power, and then create pathways for what becomes a legitimate news story.
Kamea Chayne: Right. So it seems like it could be a vicious cycle, in that media obviously influences people's perceptions and thinking, but at the same time, people's existing biases and prejudices can also reinforce certain practices or focuses of the media landscape. So, that's really important to point out.
And as an invitation to expand our imaginations, your recent book, Struggle Makes Us Human shares that "The path toward hope and liberation lies in looking closely at the myriad of under-covered struggles being waged all across the world by workers in countries such as India, Kenya, Peru, Tunisia and Argentina."
I would love for people to dive into all of this through the book itself, and also, I would appreciate if you could touch on some of these stories that really inspired you most, in terms of highlighting people taking grassroots action without waiting for legislation. Occupying spaces without seeking permission and just practicing simple gestures of care to rebuild community, perhaps brought about through the specific political settings and values people are situated within.
Vijay Prashad: Let me give you two stories. The first is from Brazil. It was an enormous struggle of trade unions, workers and peasants and others, that overthrew a dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985. It was a 21-year dictatorship, backed fully to the hilt by the US government. In fact, the United States egged on the military, in 1964, to go and conduct a coup d'etat against the legitimate president of Brazil, João Goulart—who was not even a man of the left! He was a pretty reasonable, man of the center. It was nothing to do with any kind of communist politics or anything, but he had to be overthrown, the United States found him to be an unpleasant character because he wanted to establish the sovereignty of Brazil.
So for 21 years, there was a dictatorship. During that period, it was ordinary people, as I said, trade unionists, farmworkers, and others who fought, built the phalanxes against the dictatorship. One of those people was a factory worker and trade union leader, and that was Lula, who is now serving his third term as president of Brazil. Having conducted this struggle, some of the people involved in the anti-dictatorship struggle created the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil, the MST, in 1984, the year before the dictatorship fell. They put a lot of pressure on the first democratic government, and on the new constitution that was written, which basically had a clause in it that said, if land is lying fallow, it should be allowed to be used by people who need it—a very humane clause.
By the way, that clause comes right out of the playbook of John Locke from the 17th century. The difference is that in the 17th century, John Locke used that argument to say that Native Americans in Virginia were not using the land productively so they can be effectively evicted from the land, so that people like him—he was a huge landowner in Virginia—could corral the land and put it to use with people who were brought from Africa and enslaved on the land. John Locke used that argument in that vicious direction. But the same argument could be used against absentee landlords saying, well, look, you're an absentee landlord, why are you holding on to all this land? You're not doing anything to it. So we're going to have a constitutional provision that says if you're not going to develop your land, people who need it should be able to go and work on it.
So the MST, having won that in the Constitution, then began to do land occupations, where landless farmworkers would rush onto land, they would seal it off, build little homes for themselves and start farming the land. Very early on, the MST settlements and encampments began to use agroecological techniques to farm the land. I don't know if people know this, but Brazil has one of the most polluted soils in the world, as a consequence of high-intensive farming, green revolution type farming, using all kinds of seeds, fertilizer, pesticide and so on—highly-polluted soil. So the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil decided, no, we're not going to do this. The food produced there is killing us. The soil is being polluted.
So as early as 1985, '86, the MST on these occupations in these settlements and encampments began to grow food in an agroecological way. The MST now is one of the largest producers of rice in Brazil, all produced agroecologically or, I suppose, what in North America is called organic farming.
Here is a great example of a mass movement that has taken land misused by the holdings of absentee landowners and is growing [food] in a sustainable, agroecological way. Why isn't there more coverage about that?
You talked earlier about how when we talk about climate change, the mainstream media encourages us to see what's happening at the COP meeting, and so on. But the real changes are already happening at the settlements and the encampments of places like the MST. They're already trying to deal with not producing food through massive diffusion of carbon into the atmosphere. They're already thinking about things like that. How do we produce nutritional food? How do we teach people to eat in a nutritional way, that's not destroying the planet, and so on?
That's a highly inspirational story to me, because here's an example of a rural, landless farmworkers who seized the land and tried to make food sovereignty important, tried to make decent labor practices a part of their world, and also use nature without abusing it.
Here's another one. In Kerala, in the southwest of India, where the Communists happened to be in power in this state of the Indian Republic, during the pandemic, people didn't wait for the central government in New Delhi to act, because in fact, it didn't act. The mass movements, trade unions, peasant organizations, women's movements, youth movements of the left, just took to the streets and began to build various things. What did they build? Trade unions went to bus stations and built outdoor sinks, so that people coming off buses could wash their hands. They were masked up, and so on. The largest all-women's cooperative, millions of members, I think, four and a half million members in Kudumbashree, which is one cooperative in Kerala... Kudumbashree started to produce masks and hand sanitizers at scale. All the women members of Kudumbashree began to sew masks, and then just give them away to the public.
The youth organization in Trivandrum, which is the capital of Kerala, did something quite interesting. They organized themselves, so they went door to door, conducting a survey in several congested areas in Trivandrum, asking people, "Do you need anything? Do you need medicines, do you need food? How many people live here? Is there any way we can assist you?" And so, once they did that survey, they worked with other mass organizations to provide things like, medicine delivery to elderly people who couldn't leave, and so on. They didn't wait for the state to act. They acted. As a consequence of this remarkable work done by the youth organization, 21-year-old Arya Rajendran, one of these youth leaders, she became the next mayor of Trivandrum. She, in fact, is the current mayor of the capital city. She's still in her early twenties.
These are the kinds of stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to make the world a better place today.
They're not waiting around to see what's going to happen at COP, or what's going to happen at the W.H.O. They understand that you've got to get out there and do things now.
You've got to try to build a future now. And that's exactly what they're doing.
Kamea Chayne: Hmm. Really powerful. And definitely more people need to hear about these stories. So we appreciate you highlighting them here.
Something that you've really emphasized is our need to rebuild confidence and capacity, for example, through your message that people need to build society before you can have socialism. This reminds me of our past conversations with other guests like John Clark, Liam CamplinG and Alex Colás, acknowledging that it hasn't been so much about the tragedy of the Commons, but rather the tragedy of the loss of community—suggesting that we need to rebuild community before we can restore the Commons. Because we can imagine how a community of people who care deeply for one another would take care of our shared space much differently compared to people who maybe fear one another or people who have been incentivized and taught to act out of individual interests and gain either in fear of scarcity or in pursuit of greed.
So how would you elaborate on this need to rebuild confidence in the people in terms of how that actually could and may be necessary to shift people's worldviews and orientations of politics and imaginations of what is possible?
Vijay Prashad:
If you take a long perspective, you'll notice that over time, collective life has really deteriorated in the world. And this is not the fault of this person or that person or whatever. The way in which capitalism operates puts a lot of pressure on the ability of people to build rich social lives.
What do I mean by that? If you go back and read Karl Marx's book, Capital, particularly the chapter on the working day, it's very instructive. What Marx argues is that capital ordinarily would like to hire the worker for a 24 hour period. There is no limit as far as capital is concerned to how they want to hire people. After all, it was under the rule of capital that they did do that. They hired people and enslaved them and made them work unbelievably long hours.
Well, the problem is, if you hire somebody and make them work for 24 hours, they'll die in two days or three days. They won't survive. So there's a human limit to how many hours you can work. But still capital fights with us to basically take as much labor as possible by lengthening the working day or by refusing to allow people to get paid breaks at work. Your lunch break is not always on the clock. Sometimes in many workplaces you have to go to the toilet, you have to click, check out and then go to the toilet. You can't go to the toilet on the clock and so on. There was a fight in factories over where you should come in, clock in at the place where you work or at the gate, clock in at the gate and then enter the premises.
You might know that people who work for airlines in the United States, they only get paid when the handbrake of the plane is released and the plane starts to leave the gate. In other words, the pilots, the stewards on the plane, all of them are working for free when they are welcoming you and helping you with your bags and things. That pay doesn't start for domestic airlines until the plane starts to withdraw from the gate. Well, all this is to say that puts a lot of pressure on people's time because they're working long hours.
And on top of that, because of the nature of the way in which capitalist urbanization works, people cannot live next to the place of work. They have to commute long distances. This has to do with the expense of of certain neighborhoods. If you go and work staying in a you know, you know, in a bank somewhere, you're not necessarily going to be able to live near it. You have to travel a long distance in places like India, in the rural areas, you have people traveling very long journeys, you know, hours sometimes to get to the fields where they go and try to get work as day laborers and so on. So your days are even lengthened by the commute, not only the working day, but the commuting day. This leaves very little time for people at home, and this impacts even harder on women because of the pressures of patriarchy and also their own feelings of love towards their family. Women are working to take care of children, elderly people, and produce life in the home. And however much men, you know, help out, the statistics show that it's a disproportionately a woman's job.
So all of this, this lengthened day, the stresses of work, the precariousness of work, the long commutes, the pressures of doing things at home, there's not much social support for elderly people. Where are the visiting nurses that they might have been at one time and that there should be in the future? Where is the creches for young children to go to before they start their secondary school education? All those supports are gone. So this puts a lot of pressure on the family.
When you put so much pressure on the family and you steal leisure time from family members, it's virtually impossible for people to have time for a collective life. Add to that the increase of technologies that allow us to basically disappear for a few hours into a form of individual pleasure.
You talk to people, they'll tell you, I take my phone in when I get home. There's so many people around kids this that, and they're going to have a moment to breathe. So I go into the bathroom, take my phone, and I watch a show or something just to get my mind off everything, you know. And so this technology is created for individualized pleasure. You don't have to sit with the whole family and watch TV together, which is also a form of collective life. So a combination of the stresses and strains of the precarious work environment, then the ability to have a form of pleasure through the way in which technology has given us entertainment on phones and so on. You know, in India, I see men on subway trains [eating] their cereal while they're on the subway and watching songs or watching TikTok videos, just escaping.
Where is the space for a collective life? If you then yell at the planet and say, ‘Why aren't you acting collectively?’ You don't understand this social system. This economic system has stolen collectivity from people.
It's not that people are making bad choices necessarily. When people are eating more fast food, for instance, which is really not great for your health, that's because their time for cooking has been taken away. On the way home, they pick up something, they take it, they give it to people. Everybody rushes off to their own part of the house, watching something on their phone while they eat their fast food. I mean, this is not the fault of that person or this person or whatever. This structure has really diminished our capacity to act in a collective way. And that's why those who are sensitive people interested in collective collectivity, enhancing collectivity, building more collective actions- that's why we need to be creative in thinking about how to fight against the system. People who are interested in in communitarian life need to also be fighting against a precarious work environment that has stolen leisure from people. We've got to join with trade unions and others to build the fight for people to be able to have leisure.
Socialism isn't about having a better job necessarily. Socialism is about having more leisure. Socialism is about being able to spend time doing collective things, either with your family, with your neighbors, with your community in general, perhaps within your national container, whatever it might be. That's what socialism is about—increasing leisure time. That's why I welcome mechanization of many things in the world, the drudgery of doing things that we are liberated from—that would be great. But right now, mechanization is used to further oppress workers, not to liberate workers from drudgery.
Just take the case of the computer. For white collar workers, the computer has basically made your work day run around the clock, you can take your projects home with you. Gone are the days when you shut your desk at work, close the manuscript you were working on and go home. Now you bring the manuscript home with you, you work on it at night—all that time stolen from you, from your leisure. So I would say there's a structural problem we have to deal with. I think we need to be creative in dealing with that and not moralistic.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And I think all of this really calls for more empathy. Like, even if a lot of people aren't so politically correct or whatever, I think it's important to understand that everything is contextual. So we have to take a step back to look at the environments and the systems and the structures that people have been embedded within.
You've highlighted various simple acts of care at that grassroots level needed to help rebuild confidence and community. And then you remark, "What is socialism but the upscaling of small gestures of humanity? That's how I understand socialism. You take the smallest kindness and you scale it up to all of humanity."
First of all, I think a lot of people conflate socialist or communitarian politics with authoritarianism, leading to fear, rather than associating them with things like more care in the community, or under another light, really an expansion of how we define family and who we care for, and also in reciprocity, help care for us.
But when you frame it in this grounded way as the scaling up of kindness, I don't know, it really resonates and maybe it'll be harder for people to oppose. So all of this leads me to question two things. The first one is, oftentimes certain values can get compromised when they're scaled. So I wonder if you think this could be the case with kindness, or if you're more so referring to deepened intimacy and care at small scales, but syndicated across society.
And then my bigger question would be, I think very few people would not be inspired by acts of kindness, of people checking in on their neighbors, asking how they can help, of people showing up and just helping to take care of one another. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on why there becomes a discrepancy and divisiveness when people are envisioning kindness at scale. So in other words, why might it be that fear drives some people to turn to each other for security, to see the potentials in reviving our collective lives, while at the same time, that same fear could drive others to discriminate and isolate and put up wars in the name of security and double down on individualism.
Vijay Prashad: Wow. I wish I knew the answers to that question. I really, really wish I knew the answer to that. I mean, isn't that the most important question, is why is this not attractive to people?
Well, firstly, we have been battered for a very long time with the idea, as you said, that socialism is authoritarian. This is a curious judgment. Let's take the United States as an example, especially coming from the United States. What do I mean by that? I mean, look at the United States. There are many levels of things to consider about freedom in the United States.
I was looking the other day at the website Washington Post has on police killings, it's something like three people killed a day by the police in the United States. High level of poverty for such a rich country, high level of homelessness. I was in Santa Monica a few years ago. I was stunned to see such a rich community with so many homeless people living under bridges and and on the beach and so on. A wretched state of affairs, police violence, people sleeping on beaches, not able to find a home or a dignified life. So many people trying their best to survive with multiple jobs and so on.
And yet they might turn around and say this is a free country, authoritarianism is somewhere else. A country where people fought so hard to develop a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act, and then the Supreme Court basically invalidates large sections of the Voting Rights Act so that it's not clear that you have free and fair elections in the United States. So much money poured in. A Citizens United allowed essentially unlimited money to enter into the electoral process and so on. Why is the conversation not in that context about failures? This is authoritarian if every day, three people are killed by the police—the highest rate of police violence in the world, the highest rate of incarceration in the world. And somehow the term authoritarian is always used for somebody else. So that's something people should reflect on. I'm not saying that the United States is authoritarian. I'm saying check yourself, and have a look at how actually life takes place in the United States. And then you might want to look at how actual life takes place in other countries.
I spend a lot of time in Cuba, which is frequently called an authoritarian country. I don't see it as an authoritarian country at all. I see it as a place under attack by the United States. 11 million people, a population smaller than than that of New York City, trying their best to secure and hold their independence from the pressure of the United States. And at the same time, despite the blockade trying to experiment, Cuba was able to produce five vaccine candidates during the COVID pandemic. You know, they take science seriously, they take humanity seriously under a lot of pressure and strains and stresses. And yet people casually in the US can say, Oh, it's an authoritarian country. There's nowhere near the incarceration rate in Cuba, as in the United States, nowhere near the rate of police killings in Cuba, as in the United States. People need to check themselves, reflect on the facts, build theory from the facts. Don't let theory essentially suffocate your ability to understand how the world really works, you know? So that's the first gesture toward what you're asking me. You asked a difficult question. I'm not going to presume to dance around it or to pretend to have an answer for it, but I just make another observation about that.
It's difficult to imagine something different than the world you've lived in. I think that is just an axiomatic thing. It's difficult to imagine a different world.
I've looked at the history of revolutions over the course of the past 150 years. After the Mexican Revolution in 1911, for instance, when Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata enter into Mexico City, and when in some parts of the country, they say, "Well, bonded labor is abolished." The bonded labor couldn't believe it, you know. They just couldn't believe what was happening. And very quickly, they began to straighten their shoulders and walk upright and say, I'm not going to bend my neck to anybody right now. But it was a it was a process where people began to have confidence that another world is possible. There's a lot of anxiety, "What do you mean, socialism? I don't want to vote for socialism.”
Even milquetoast, quite simple socialism, as promoted by Bernie Sanders, was disallowed in the United States. What was Bernie asking for? Bernie was merely asking for, for instance, healthcare for all. What's the problem with healthcare for all? I get it, there's an in-built section that doesn't want healthcare for all, and that's the health insurance industry and maybe sections of the medical industry. But largely it's the health insurance industry. They'd be out of business with a healthcare for all a set of policies.
What was wrong with what Bernie Sanders was promoting? Nothing. Nothing was wrong with this totally self-evident idea that everybody must be taken care of. If I have a cough, I should be able to go to a local clinic and have my cough seen to, not have to call the insurance provider validated doctor who can only see me in two weeks, by which time my cough may have killed me. And if they can't see me and I feel like it's serious, they say go to the emergency room, which is ten times as expensive. Why not just build clinics in every neighborhood where people can just drop in and see the local nurse practitioner? Maybe the doctor comes once in a while and so on. That's a socialist form of medicine. Why not have that? Well, that's too scary. We are too scared to take a leap into the dark.
That's why I say that don't let socialism be a leap into the dark. Start building it now. Start building it now. The future will contain what you have in it now. So let's start building it now.
Kamea Chayne: There are certainly a lot of powerful interests who would have a lot to lose if we nurtured, and grew, and even started to decommodify our systems of care and relationships of care. I also agree that it's difficult to imagine otherwise when this is all that a lot of people grew up as a part of, and it's the only narratives they really know, which is again, why spreading and seeding these stories of other ways of living and being and enacting change can be so powerful.
What I've really been thinking through this past year has been the impacts of the digitization of relationships on our cultures and capacities for empathy and care. Because just by design, I personally feel that social media is dehumanizing media and how it really simplifies the complex human experience. It makes it easier for people to ignore and block others that we disagree with while never actually getting an opportunity to opportunity to know them as people and what led them to think the ways that they do, perhaps the same ways that in-person and repeated encounters would allow for. And on the other side, perhaps the digital world also makes it easier for people to romanticize revolution or romanticize community. Now, I recognize that online communities have been really helpful and even therapeutic for a lot of people who, due to health or other constraints, haven't been able to get out and about as much.
So this is definitely not an either or. But I do wonder about the large-scale impacts of people disproportionately investing our "social or connecting time" up in the clouds rather than in person on the ground in our neighborhoods, our communities. What have you thought through on this subject, especially through the lens of building confidence and capacity?
Vijay Prashad: I'm glad you said that it's not an either or, because after all, what is social media, all forms of media like social media are ways to communicate, humans seek ways to communicate. When we started to move away from each other, migrate somewhere, in a very early period, you lost contact with people when people migrated hundreds of kilometers from each other. There was no way to communicate, and they lost contact, they no longer had connection with people. And then eventually they started writing letters when the Postal Service developed, one kind or the other. Well, a letter is interesting.
A letter is where, you and I are in different places, but we are able to communicate with each other, except that not in the same time. It takes time for my letter to get to you. Eventually, the telegraph was created, the telex machine that allows me to send a message in real time. Then we have the telephone, then we have the internet and so on. Time and space begin to collapse in our ability to communicate. All of that to me is for the good, including social media, where you can communicate with people in a billboard fashion, with large numbers of people if that's where you're at.
By itself, there's nothing wrong with that. I think what you're reflecting on are some of its internal problems. One is where people begin to feel like yelling and screaming on social media is by itself a political act. Well, to some extent it is because it can shape public opinion and so on. You can take slander and make of it a public opinion. You can actually destroy people's lives on social media. So it's impactful. It's not that it's not impactful. It can have a terrible impact, sometimes a good impact. You can have some message that teaches people things they may not have been able to see. So that's a form of media, it's a form of communication. Let's set all that aside.
One reason why there's some substituting of collective action by social media is precisely what I talked about earlier. If you just don't have the time to drive to a meeting or to go and meet other people or to spend time building a political or even just a community organization, you don't have the time to do that, so you start putting that energy online. When you lie in bed at night, tired, you put out a bunch of opinions out there, let people fight it out and you find it entertaining. And that sort of takes care of the political part of you. So I see that that form of letting loose on social media is part of the deterioration in general of the structures of collective life and social life.
It's difficult to rebuild those, as I said earlier, but not impossible. And people are building them and doing it in different ways. I think what's happened is that a lot of frustration with the global nature of social media has made people turn to much smaller scales of interaction, neighborhood interaction or family interaction. They cut themselves off and say, I can't deal with that. I want to do something small-scale.
Our problem is how do we take the desire to rescue the collective life to bigger than the small scale? Because if you want to confront the problems and challenges in the world today, you can't do it family by family. You're going to have to scale things up.
And so that's a challenge, for us to think about interesting ways to rescue the collective life at a higher level than merely in the family. And at the same time, to rescue the collective life in a way that's not reinforcing alienation as sometimes the yelling and screaming on social media does.
There are events and processes that are there—in the International Union of Left Publishers, for instance, we put forward something called Red Books Day, which takes place on the 21st of February. Last year, almost a million people participated around the world. They went into public places and read, read books of different kinds. It happens to be the date of publication of the Communist Manifesto, 175 years ago. This year we know we'll cross 1 million again. But our ambition is by the end of the decade, by 2030, we'll have 10 million people participate in Red Books Day around the world.
Now 10 million again, very small percentage of the global population, but maybe it'll expand and become something bigger than that. Maybe many more millions of people would like to go into public places on the 21st of February and read out any kind of radical book that they'd like and and make of it what they want—a festival, sing songs. We need more of that, not just concerts and so on where you go to be entertained, but also festivals where you participate, where you're not just a spectator. It's what Augusto Boyle, the great theater impresario who built a theater practice called Theater of the Oppressed, developing Paulo Freire is Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Boyle is to say we need to make a world not of spectators and actors, but of spectaculars, where people are both watching and doing, participating in public activities as much as they are enjoying being around that public activity.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I really love that. Well, particularly in "activism" spaces in the West, whether activism for climate action or Black Lives Matter or Indigenous rights, I would say that there's there tends to be an emphasis on only supporting "peaceful protests" and otherwise condemning any and all violence in how people are reacting to and responding to their conditions.
You shared what I thought to be a really eloquent and beautiful way of thinking through violence and nonviolence in a past Q&A that I would love for you to bring in here as well in terms of how we recognize chronic and systemic violence, understand acute violence in reaction to oppressive conditions, and orient our goals of transcendence. What should we keep in mind on this front as we think through and act on ours or other people's how in order to realize a more caring society?
Vijay Prashad:
People who get into that debate about violence and nonviolence have started at the wrong point.
They start the debate, let's say, when a young person in a black mask goes and smashes a window, or where poor people in the middle of a very chaotic situation take a television set from a window display and walk home. That's where the debate starts.
In my opinion, that's the wrong way to begin the debate. I think first one has to understand the social conditions of advanced capitalist society, and I've already described it earlier. Those conditions are very violent. It's violent how people have to live every day, their place for leisure taken from them, again, police violence at high levels. People always yelling at you, don't go there, don't do this. Then people telling you to be happy, you need to have the best commodities. And then when you try to get them, they say, sorry, you don't have money in your bank account. We're surrounded in a way, by violence. Violence is imposed on us. And then when people burst, when they're frustrated, when the violence against them goes too far, people erupt and they erupt in a way that they've experienced, which is the system inflicts violence on people, so they respond with violence.
And you see, from, let's say, the 18th century onward that many protest movements start with extreme forms of violence, people smashing windows, angry peasants going into a moneylenders house and burning the books, which are oppressive, they keep the records of how much is owed. They are acting violently against the moneylender because the moneylender has acted violently against them. Moneylenders diminished them, made them feel small, yelled at them, humiliated them, and so on. And that becomes the reaction.
Frantz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth in the first section called Concerning Violence, essentially says, in a violent world, people are going to respond violently. Now, most political movements don't tell people to respond violently. Those violent reactions are often spontaneous, they are not organized. The spontaneous reaction of people in a violent society is to act violently. And then you have political movements that try to channel that energy, try to make people understand that there are better ways to organize against the violence inflicted on them so that you transcend the condition of violence, build trade unions, build political parties, create a foundation which allows you a basis, which allows you to say we're going to forbid users money lending. We're not going to allow you to be humiliated because you don't have money. And so a lot of political activity tries to shape the the energy of violence into something that's more constructive, that leads towards transcendence.
But when all roads are blocked when you attempt to do politics, you're going to have to find a way. And sometimes in a really autocratic systems, for instance, Nepal in the 1990s, sections of the left movement began an armed struggle. That also happens. But there's a great difference between the spontaneous rebellions of people who've had violence inflicted upon them and an armed struggle where consciously a political force has decided that all roads in our society are being blocked. We need to open a new road and we'll open that road with a gun.
Often the debate around violence starts in the wrong place. We have to begin with the violence imposed on people and how people often respond to that violence spontaneously with violence, but not generally or typically violence in a very studied, deliberate way.
There are instances of what we call armed struggle, but those are few and far between.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. This is really important—things to distinguish between the different forms of violence and the reactions to them.
And lastly, what particularly inspired me was just learning about how various communities of people are taking matters into their own hands and doing things because they feel right and are necessary to helping to care for more people now, instead of waiting on government leadership, playing by present and socially constructed rulebooks on legality or asking for permission.
With, again, your calls to help rebuild community and confidence and capacity, I wonder what calls to action you'd like to share in terms of getting our hands dirty and getting out there to seed and act on more of these simple gestures of humanity and of course, scaling them up.
Vijay Prashad: I don't want to give like a laundry list of what people should do or not do. Because after all, part of the process of building confidence and building clarity and so on is to risk yourself in coming up with ways to react to the suffocation that you experience. There is no one way. People need to start small, figure out things, see what they're capable of, and I think that's the most important thing, is we develop by testing our capabilities. Am I capable of of attempting this? Is it possible for me to do that?
There's no substitute for going out there amongst the people and trying to organize people to do various things collectively.
There is no substitute. That's obvious. But having recognized the importance of that, how you do it and what you do, that's entirely based on the kind of culture of where you live. Different places have different cultural maps of how you act to bring people together. In some places, you have to do it in a very calm and gentle way where you go and meet people and explain your project. In other places you can be a little more vocal, go out there, bang a drum and say, "Listen, everybody come to the street because we need you." I mean, this all depends on the grammar of politics where you live. But the most important thing is to bring people together in some way to solve practical problems that are there in front of them.
I asked people in Britain, in the United States, and other places during the pandemic, did anybody from the state interact with you? Did anybody knock your door and ask you, are you okay? Do you need anything? And universally people said no. Interestingly, in China, which is considered authoritarian, it was not the state that came and knocked on your door. It was neighborhood groups. They have a very well-developed and very old practice of building neighborhood groups. And neighborhood groups during the pandemic went door to door, just like the young people in Kerala, and they asked people if they need anything and so on. And they did temperature checks in all the houses and that was the neighborhood groups that took that initiative.
Imagine if you live somewhere, and five or six people from your neighborhood decided, "You know what, let's go door to door and just ask people, how are you doing?" Imagine if you had done that during the pandemic. Imagine how that might have changed the sense of isolation. People experience a sense of joy at seeing their neighbors take initiative to come and help them in their isolation and their fear. Those videos that we watched in Italy of people going onto the balcony and playing music, those videos were so affecting, they really made you feel wonderful, and those were indeed beautiful to watch. But equally beautiful is somebody knocking on your door, wearing a mask, taking two steps back when you open it and just saying to you, "How are you doing? I'm from three doors down. We're just going door to door down the street just to see how people are doing."
If that occurred, once the pandemic came to a close, people might be happy to get involved together to do things that are not just social, "Let's close the street and have a cookout." No, but they might be interested in doing other things like, "Can we all work together to deal with the garbage on our street? Can we all find a way to work together to maybe create a neighborhood creche where all the young kids in our neighborhood, we can take some turns taking care of them? Will we hire somebody to cover a dilapidated building down the road, which we can revive somehow, go and talk to the city, say, look, nobody has been living in 20 years. Can it be made into a neighborhood community center?"
These kind of initiatives might emerge out of the activities that people do out of the goodness of their heart. And that's actually how we construct socialism today.
~ musical intermission ~
Vijay Prashad: The most important book I've ever read in my life was Karl Marx's book Capital, because it really opened my eyes to how the capitalist structure operates. That doesn't mean that in 1867 he understood everything about 2023, but man, he really was able to get a grip of the structure of profit or what he called surplus value and how it operates.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice that you engage with to keep yourself grounded?
Vijay Prashad: I use this phrase a lot, and I have used it in my conversation with you a lot. And that is:
How do we rescue the collective life?
I think that phrase for me is important. It's important in two different ways. One is the collective life, I think, is a way to talk about people acting together, which is the basis of socialism. You can't build socialism if you don't have a society. So building the collective life is important. And the other in that phrase is rescue, because it's my view that you don't have to reinvent the collective life. We have to bring it back from people's elemental need to live socially. Humans are social beings. We are not actually individuals. We like to be in concert with people, we produce goods and services socially. So we want to rescue the collective life.
Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Vijay Prashad: Well, I suppose the greatest source of inspiration at the moment is watching people's movements like the Landless Worker's Movement in Brazil or the Farmer's Movement in India. Watching people against all odds, and I mean, all odds, defy reality and try to create something different. That defiance is not only against the powerful interests in their society, it's in defiance against reality. And I am inspired by that defiance.
Kamea Chayne: Vijay, it's been an honor to have you with us here. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. For now, what final words of wisdom do you want to leave us with as Green Dreamers?
Vijay Prashad: Well, all I would say is keep dreaming. There's nothing wrong with it. And thanks a lot for spending so much time talking to me. I'm impressed always with people who are committed to trying to change the world. So if you're a dreamer, I'm with you.
// This conversation was originally recorded at the start of 2023. This episode’s supporting researcher is Tammy Gan; the show notes and transcript were edited by Emma Jeffrey, Anisa Sima Hawley, and Kamea Chayne; the audio editor is Scott Donnell; and the host and producer is Kamea Chayne. //
