Struggle Makes Us Human Read online

  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

  [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-64259-717-2

  Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

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

  Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email [email protected] for more information.

  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, sin
ce 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.