Vijay Prashad, Nitheesh Narayanan
Vijay Prashad has been active, in different roles, in Marxist intelligentsia over the last three decades. He has contributed immensely, as a writer, journalist, academic, and activist, to the cause of people’s emancipation. Prashad began engagement with Marxian philosophy and politics as a student of history, travelled across the world as a journalist, continued teaching in different universities in the world, took charge as Chief Editor of LeftWord Books, and recently played a leading role in setting up the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and is currently steering it as its executive director. Through his continues writings and reports, publishes in various journals, newspapers, online portals and magazines he introduces the developments from across the nations and also about the people’s movement. In this interview with Nitheesh Narayanan (NN), editor of Student Struggle, Vijay Prashad (VP) talks about a range of issues that concern people’s movements across the world. Read on to know.
NN: You started off as a student of history, from where you went on to become a journalist at a very young age. You have been a teacher of International Relations and have then moved to publishing. Now you have set up a research institute. Your engagements have been quite diverse.
VP: Life rarely follows a predictable pattern. I was very marked by the killing in Delhi of over 3,000 Sikhs in a few days – this was in 1984. That disturbed me, a young person then of 17. One question came to me then and remained with me for a long time: why do oppressed people kill other oppressed people on behalf of the ruling class? I wanted to study that question in one way or another. I worked as journalist, trying to track various developments in late Nehruvian India, when the opportunity came to do a PhD. My PhD was on the Balmiki community, which was accused of being the perpetrators of the violence in 1984 – working for the Congress Party. My studies went backwards to the early 19th century, where I found the way in which this Dalit community was reduced to being sweepers by the British and then a hundred years later, this Dalit community lost its own religion to the forces of Hindutva. What became clear is that history must be show us how what appears clear in the present is not so clear in the past, that whatever problems exist now these are made by the development of human history and are not therefore intractable. They can be overcome. If history can slide to the bad side, then it can move – by human effort – to the good side. The new research institute – Tricontinental – hopes to help move the good side along.
NN: Why did the Oxford University Press decide against publishing your work?
VP: I turned that PhD into a book and submitted to it to many presses, each one rejected it. Cambridge University Press said that I was an ‘unreconstructed Marxist’. You have to understand that this was the early 1990s, with the USSR just collapsed and Marxism apparently was pushed by the ruling class as an out of date philosophy. This was one of the first histories of a Dalit community. It could not find a publisher. My dear, dear friend at Oxford – Bela Malik – insisted that it be published and put her job on the line. That is how it saw the light of day, and then promptly went out of print and was kept out of print by Oxford. I now have the rights, and we hope to bring out a free e-version.
NN: Not many Marxists in India have specifically studied caste. You, on the other hand, have written on it multiple times during the early 90s. Your doctoral research was also on a caste group. It seems like you have stopped writing it at a time when the class-caste debate is raging. Is it so?
VP: Actually, I was very interested in the debate around caste and class that took place in the 1970s between EMS, BTR, Gail Omvedt and others (including the liberal writers such as Andre Beteille and M. N. Srinivas). This debate was about the conceptual landscape of caste and class but also about the role of caste in Indian history. Most of the debate was very abstract and very combative. I was interested in the nuances of history and the way in which caste was enfolded by class, how the question of property ran through and solidified the caste hierarchies. BTR’s essay from 1979 in EPW was called ‘Caste, Class and Property Relation’ – leading one to see how it is property relations, the basis of capitalism, that reformed caste into the 19th century and onwards. So, that earlier debate really interested me. I also found that there were few monographic histories of Dalit communities – sporadic references to history, surely, but nothing complete. I was already interested in the Balmiki community for reasons I have pointed out, so this gave me an opportunity to study the community’s long history. I spent years travelling across Punjab, Haryana, western UP and Delhi – creating an archive, building a narrative through reading documents kept by families and by the government as well as by interviewing thousands of people. I have boxes and boxes of material that I was not able to use in the dissertation and the book. Why I stopped writing about the subject is mainly biographical. My book was roundly attacked when it came out by the leading anthropologists of the previous generation – all saying that my method was flawed or that the Marxism had twisted my views. I found myself a bit paralysed by the attack (and by the difficulty in getting the book published). The personal toll was exacting. I tried to edit a book on Dalit history with scholars from JNU and Hyderabad and elsewhere, but that went nowhere. Most of the scholars I interacted with had moved in the direction of identity politics and some had even come to terms with liberalisation. It was not our historical imagination that separated us or our commitment to Dalit emancipation, but our understanding of the role of capitalism in the reproduction of caste. This was a central disagreement. I wrote a series of articles about this in various publications, mainly as book reviews and so on. But it ran out of steam.
NN: You write frequently on the Frontline, for the Independent Media Institute and BirGün, on The Hindu, and elsewhere. How do you manage to write regularly?
VP: There is so much to say, so many stories to recount. Eduardo Galeano – my guru – used to say that the world is not made of atoms, but of stories. I agree with him. In this adverse environment, the voices of the working-class and peasantry, the science of the exploited classes (Marxism) and so on barely get a fair hearing. Equally, our understanding of the balance of forces in the world, our sense of how to understand globalisation – all this is off the table. It seems to me that we have to be engaged in the battle of ideas, in the fight over how to interpret reality. This is what motivates me. It is my small contribution to our large and strong movement. I keep a notebook with me at all times and fill it with observations, lines from things I’m reading and arguments with reality. This habit has been with me since I was very young. I highly recommend it for building a memory and for improving one’s writing.
NN: You were a keen observer of the Arab Spring and the events that contributed to it. How did such a political and social condition occur?
VP: I’ve been covering West Asia and North Africa for almost twenty years. First did a story on Turkey’s attack on Kurdish guerrilla positions in 1996. Over this period, I have come to understand a few of the dynamics that drive history in the region. The most important factor in the region is the role of imperialism linked to both the geographical centrality of this region and to oil. If West Asia were far from Europe and if it had no oil, it would not face as much scrutiny as it did. No surprise that the US overthrew two popular-nationalist governments in West Asia (Iran, 1953) and Central America (Guatemala, 1954) – both countries trying to build an independent path right on the doorstop of Europe and the United States. The overarching imperialist logic denied the region any popular breakthrough of real depth. Arab nationalism was suffocated quickly so that it became merely a one-party state that used the rhetoric of nationalism. There was no dynamic for the emancipation of the people. Monarchies were protected by the United States and its allies. The one major challenge in the region came from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Since then, two main dynamics have played out – first, the struggle between the potential of a republican Islam (as seen in Iran – an Islamic Republic, not an Islamic Monarchy) and the monarchies of the Gulf region, a conflict that has mutated into a Shia-Sunni dispute even though it is more a political contest; second, the struggle between the people and their governments, whether the one-party republics or the monarchies. Both these dynamics unfolded in 2011 in the Arab Spring. People rose up – as they did in Tunisia and Egypt – to overthrow unpopular one-party states – and the imperialist and inter-state conflict heated up, killing off the popular uprisings in war and repression. The idea of the Arab Spring remains. But the people are exhausted. It was not able to become a world-historical event.
NN: You have written extensively on military conflicts and wars. You have also been on the battlefield multiple times, including in Syria. Could you tell us about your experiences? What is the political economy of war?
VP: I am experienced enough to know two things about war. First, that you can learn more from outside the battlefield than inside the conflict. Conflict zones are themselves very confusing and you generally start to imagine that what your side is telling you is true. After all, your own well-being in wrapped up in their fortunes. It is hard to have a ‘balanced’ attitude in a war zone. Linked to this, a war zone is useful to gauge the morale of the troops but little else. Second, that you should not take unnecessary risks. There is no valor in dying in battle, as far as I am concerned. Wars are horrible. They are to be avoided. But, as you note, there is a political economy of war. Arms dealers make enormous profits selling weapons, and then the hoard of weapons encourages the military solution. So, one has to point one’s figure firmly at the merchants of death. What is happening Yemen today, for instance, is a grand war crime – with the arms dealers fully implicated in it.
NN: How do you see the emergence of political Islam on a global level? Does it pose a challenge to imperialism? In India, political Islamists speak of social justice, projecting them as natural allies of Dalit-Bahujans. Samir Amin, as we know, was a strong critic of political Islam. Could you share your views?
VP: To my mind, we have to clear about the term ‘political Islam’. We have to be clear that we are not talking about the religion of Islam, which is a diverse belief system. We are also not talking about Muslims in politics or about Muslim political parties per se (we might not like to see religion in politics, but its presence is a reality for now). What we are talking about is a specific tendency that goes back to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, which then – like the RSS in India – created a cadre to organise the lower middle class and professional middle class across the Middle East and elsewhere. This Brotherhood had a conciliatory attitude towards imperialism, even collaborating with the imperialist against the Arab nationalists. Again, there are similarities with the RSS. This tendency of ‘political Islam’ is rooted in the long experience of the Muslim Brotherhood and its associated parties. They are eager to push a view of the world where they accommodate themselves to imperialism, they champion capitalism, and they drive a politics of piety for the home (this is a deeply anti-woman agenda). It is never clear what they mean by ‘social justice’, which could be taken as the understanding that their domestic affairs must be off the radar of the state. But then, all kinds of horrible social traditions could be protected. One has to be clear about this. If social emancipation is not on the agenda, then how can you be for social justice? Samir Amin was right to be totally opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood’s socially retrograde agenda, the mirror of the agenda of the RSS.
NN: Latin America, with whatever limitations, is always projected as a centre of hope for all who wish to see an alternate model to the rigid neo-liberal regimes across the world. Many of its countries have elected Left-wingers to power in recent years. But we also hear of coups.
What was the Latin American model, if at all there is something? What is happening to it now?
VP: In 2006, Teo Ballve and I edited a book called Dispatches from Latin America for LeftWord. The subtitle of the book was Experiments Against Neoliberalism. The idea of ‘experiments’ is important here. I had been travelling and reporting from Latin America from the 1990’s. I had seen the aftermath of the military dictatorships and the way in which the new democracies turned to full-scale neo-liberalism. It is important to remember that the dictatorships executed the entire Left on the continent. Thirty thousand leftist activists were killed in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Latin America had to re-invent its Left, now broken from earlier traditions and histories. This is an essential point. The new left that came forward was, in some places, cautious and in others bold depending on the power of the oligarchy, the grip of imperialism and the ability to mobilise the people. Venezuela and Bolivia led the way in this new development. They recognised that it would not be enough to build socialism in one country. They went immediately to a regional project, Bolivarianism, and to confront imperialism. This is the core of their Latin American model – to come to power through the ballot box, to use the referendum to rewrite the constitution, to seize control of commodity exports and siphon more of that wealth into the governments, to push a strong welfare policy for the majority of the population, to drive a regional policy to break out of the global commodity chain and so on. But, imperialism is not easy to defeat. The death of Chavez was a blow. By dint of personality, he was able to push part of his agenda on less bold left movements (such as in Brazil and Argentina). After this death, the imperialists began to suffocate Venezuela as oil prices fell and the Bolivarian bloc fell apart. Right-wing governments returned to power and as coups overthrew parts of the left (in Honduras and – by a judicial coup – in Brazil). Currently, Latin America is under siege. The defence of Venezuela is a key element for all of us, just as the defence of Cuba remains an important part of our international politics.
NN: How do you see the Latin America Left?
VP: As I said, the military dictatorships executed an entire generation of the Left, breaking its link to the past. The Left had to be reinvented. Only in some places such as Brazil was the Left able to survive the dictatorship, which is why the Workers’ Party and the Movement for the Landless (MST) play such a key role in the continent. They remained alive because they went amongst the people during the dictatorship and built links through the provision of everyday services. They incubated their left-wing agenda in mass projects of various kinds. This left has now been in reformation over the past decades. It is remarkable how young the leaders are and how open they are to collaboration and to ideas. It is important to meet them with the same kind of enthusiasm. They are under attack now and require our solidarity.
NN: In India, the government is openly against migrants and minorities, with a witch hunt at work against journalists and activists, a sobatage of the Parliament and so on. There are similarities between what is happening in India and the United States and elsewhere. What kind of ‘democracy’ is being produced?
VP: Some years ago, Aijaz Ahmad wrote, ‘every country gets the fascism its deserves’. In fact, that is very correct. Each country has its own problems, its own authoritarianism. But, the global situation also has a role in producing certain conditions for harmony across countries. I edited a book for LeftWord called Strongmen, which has essays on Modi, Trump, Duterte and Erdogan – leaders of India, the United States, the Philippines and Turkey. Each of these countries has a different history and a different structure. Yet, they have all turned to strongmen for rule. Each of the ruling cliques have driven policies of divisiveness – whether against minorities or drug dealers or migrants. Each of them is centred around a strongman who believes that he can squeeze the throat of his country and make it cough out jobs. There are no jobs, only asphyxiation.
Democracy, in our time, has taken on a very superficial meaning – elections, parliaments and a press. But, money has corrupted elections, the media has been eaten up by fear-mongering at the service of corporate houses and parliaments are gobbled up by millionaires and billionaires. House of the people? Not so. Plus, universities and other culture making institutions are under attack, so that they can also be shaped into places that reproduce ruling-class ideology rather than question it – not even necessarily attack ruling-class ideology. We have to see the attack on educational and cultural institutions in this light. It is not just to make them into profit-making entities. It is to silence dissent and to silence a better alternative to capitalism and imperialism. This is their democracy. Our idea of democracy is richer, infinitely better, with emancipation at its core. They dislike our ideas and want to penalize us by pointing to the worst aspects of the history of the USSR. We know that history. We don’t need to be taught that by the ruling class. We have drawn our lessons from the failure of emancipatory democracy in the USSR. We have enriched our Marxist assessment based on that experience, based on that experiment.
NN: You have been a long time critic of India’s foreign policy. Has it worsened under Modi?
VP: Yes, it has become worse under Modi. But Modi has merely made awful what was already bad. There is no qualitative change of foreign policy, only a quantitative worsening of the boot-licking attitude of the Indian ruling class. Prakash Karat had used the phrase ‘subordinate ally’ to describe the Indian ruling class attitude towards imperialism. This is a totally accurate phrase. The ruling class, since 1991 – namely, since liberalisation, has sought to become the subordinate ally of the imperialist forces. This is clear with the military and security arrangements with the US and with the trade relationships with the West; and it is clear with the normalisation of relations with Israel. India has slowly walked away from the Non-Aligned Movement and has bartered its independent foreign policy for a few crumbs. What this has meant is that India cannot have a healthy relationship with China and so, not with Pakistan either. The position of subordinate ally means India’s tension with its neighbours will not lessen. Modi’s party – the party of the RSS – has since independence sought better relations with imperialism (and Israel). The RSS’s political bloc – whether the Jan Sangh or the BJP – is a pro-imperialist fraction of the Indian ruling class. This has been its view since the 1940s. No wonder that Modi, pickled in the RSS, is so eager to befriend Trump and Netanyahu – partly due to their joint anti-Muslim agenda but also due to their place in the imperialist alliance. The scandal over India’s arms purchases needs to be in this discussion. India is the world’s largest importer of arms. For a country where half the population goes to bed hungry at night, this is a real failure. The bourgeoisie has failed. The liberals have failed. Other views need to prevail.
NN: Then what is an alternative idea of democracy?
VP: Democracy is not a static concept, one that is formed and then lives in that way forever. We humans learn from our history, from our experiences. Our attempts to enlarge our ideas of democracy teaches us what is the correct way and what is the wrong way. We have to approach democracy in this way. Electoral democracy is only one way forward. It was an advance over monarchies. But it is not sufficient. Money has corrupted this democracy. To extricate money from democracy is our next challenge. This challenge is a direct assault on the ideas of private property and on the freedom of the rich to assert themselves in society through their wealth. Any challenge to money in politics should open the conversation towards socialism.
NN: You have introduced many Marxist scholars to Indian readers. What are some of the notable developments made by Marxism in recent times, according to you?
VP: Lenin’s line about the necessity to be creative within Marxism is to be thought about seriously. Marxism is not a religion. We do not have a set of beliefs that we have to memorise and then put into place. Marxism is an approach to the world, a worldview, a method, a set of principles to help guide us to understand a dialectically shifting set of social relations and the relations between humans and nature. We have to have an open mind to the developments within Marxism and in other scientific approaches to reality. Marx read enormous amounts of writing – not only people he agreed with, but those with him he vehemently disagreed. His Theories of Surplus Value is a terrific introduction to the way in which Marx read and engaged with those whom he did not agree – such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. So, we need to read everything, understand everything.
I think it is important for us to digest the fact that for the past century Marxists in the formerly colonised world have produced very important work about the post-colonial period. Samir Amin’s work is one, and I am thinking of him only because of his recent death and because we – at LeftWord – have brought out a volume of his writings with an introduction by Aijaz Ahmad. Marx lived before the full flow of high colonialism and before the emergence of ‘globalisation’. Therefore, Marx’s concepts are not able to fully grasp each aspect of the current situation. It is for this reason that we have to study the world – as Samir Amin did – through Marxist concepts and to enhance that conceptual universe. How do we understand automation today, for instance, or intellectual property rights? The writings of Marxists in different places, including in China, might help us develop new areas of thinking. That is the essence of Marxism – to be dialectical and creative.
Of course, there is a very turgid academic Marxism which is not always Marxist. The less said about that the better.
NN: What is happening with the anti-imperialist struggle today?
VP: Anti-imperialism is in a position of some disarray. First, the idea of imperialism is not wholly adopted by sections of the left, which have given up on this view and tended to the camp of a plague on all your houses. Belief that Russia and China are imperialists has produced some of this confusion. Russia and China are what I would call defensive powers. They do not have the kind of global military footprint of the US nor is their accumulation strategy designed around the use of extra-economic force. Second, the attack on countries like Iran and Venezuela produces the problem of isolation and ideological confusion. Because the US is attacking Turkey now, does that bring Turkey into the camp of the people? Not at all. Merely being an adversary of the US is not sufficient. A left anti-imperialism must attend to the domestic arrangements of a society, its own internal class configuration, its own agenda, its own project, its own struggles. Iran is an Islamic Republic. We defend Iran against imperialism, but we do not defend the arrangements of the Islamic Republic – with its social agenda that is against emancipation and with its economic policies that are basically neo-liberal. So, we have to have distinctions here – not imagine that there is an imperialist camp and an anti-imperialist one. There is a broad feeling against imperialism and there are even powers that are against the United States for its imperialist policies, but that does not make them part of the camp of anti-imperialism. We oppose the attack on Syria, but that does not make us into defenders of the internal arrangements in Syria. We have to be very clear about this – as Marxists.
Some Leftists do not see this. They believe that because Iran’s ruling elite is a theocracy, that they should not defend Iran. Or they see Venezuela and point out the errors of its government as a way to not support the Venezuelans. This is a politics of purity, one that does not grasp the balance of forces in the world and the need for policies that expand the power of the people.
NN: You maintain close relations with the organised Left in different countries. Is today’s Left well-organised?
VP: The left around the world is in a position of weakness, but of regrouping. We suffered from the fall of the USSR – a major impediment to capitalism’s aggression even if the USSR had its own problems. In the 1990’s, Cuba’s Fidel Castro used to say that we are being defeated ideologically because the bourgeois forces have taken over our ways of thinking, maligned our ideas and put their own ideas forward as the only ideas worth dealing with. Universities took this view. My own experience with my early work shows that this was the case – publishing houses and universities simply rejected Marxism without a discussion. Globalisation – namely the global commodity chain, the intellectual property regime – weakened unions and made nationalisation of manufacturing very difficult. Peasants and agricultural workers found themselves prey to agri-business firms. The reservoirs of the Left – unions – were drained. This was a major blow globally.
The left had to learn to engage with working-class and the peasantry in the unions that remained and to build new unions, new kinds of organisations in the informal sector. This has been an enormous challenge. Inequality rates and precariousness have made it hard for workers to take the time to build their own organisations. There is little time for meetings. Even harder, aspirations have been created by the psycho-social side of neo-liberalism. Everyone wants to improve their lot, even if the structure is an impediment to that. There is a belief that I can make it. Nothing wrong with this belief. But it would be more accurate if you changed that to we can make it. Namely, to go for a socialist alternative rather than an individualistic one where only a few might (against heavy odds) succeed. These are the challenges of the left. They have to be met head on.
I see the left growing slowly across the world, regrouping in Latin America and in Africa, regrouping in East Asia and in the Middle East. But slowly. We have to patient. We have to build relationships across these continents, to create trust between movements. Morocco’s Democratic Way has been formed by a variety of popular working-class movements – now led by people who spent decades in prison. This is the mirror of the situation in Chile, but with different outcomes. In Chile the left was able to emerge as a significant force, and then hastened to take power before they were truly ready. In Morocco, the monarchy makes that road impossible. Nonetheless, the Moroccan and Chilean left needs to be in contact, to learn from each other, to build the confidence of each other. The Workers and Communist formation plays an important role here, but it is not enough. There are movements outside the formal communist parties that need to be at the table. We have to have a much broader outlook when we think of the regrouping of the left.
NN: What is your take on the organised Left in India, its challenges, weakness, and it’s future?
VP: The situation in India mirrors that of the rest of the world. A few years ago, I wrote a book – No Free Left – which is on the Indian communist movement. It placed the challenges that I mentioned above into the story. The reservoirs of the left in India were also depleted. It took a generation of militants and full-timers to build up the Kisan Sabha and the CITU, the AIDWA and the DYFI, and the other mass orgs of the different parties so that now we can have massive mobilisations. Kerala leads the way, surely. But more is needed. We are weak in the Hindi belt. Is this because of the lack of an anti-caste movement in that region, and so when that movement did come – in a very late way only thirty some years ago – it was folded into narrow caste politics and not emancipatory politics? Is this because of a culture that remains caught up in the hierarchies of caste and of landlordism? How to break into that region, from Rajasthan to northern Bihar? How to recover ground in West Bengal and Tripura? How to move a genuine electoral agenda in the South (outside Kerala) so that the powerful communist bloc can make gains against the narrowness of the regional bourgeois parties? These are some of the million questions I think we need to be asking.
NN: How did you reach the idea to set up the Tricontinental Institute? How do you visualise it?
VP: The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is part of an ongoing attempt to build international links between left-leaning researchers. There are many such initiatives. We are only part of that stream. Our interest is to build our research agenda in conversation with political and popular organisations. We believe that intellectuals should develop their research projects in collaboration with those who struggle to change the world. The formulation here is from Marx’s remark – the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it. We are working to make sure philosophers (intellectuals) actually interpret the world. And then to see if those interpretations are useful in the movement for emancipation. Our institute is new, but growing. We have offices in Delhi, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg and Buenos Aires. As we learn more from our own intellectual and institutional experiments, we’ll be able to speak with more confidence about them!
NN: What are your ongoing projects – books, engagements?
VP: My time is taken up in three ways. First, doing my regular reporting from around the world, such as the recent series from Argentina. Second, building the Tricontinental. Third, making sure you get to read good books from LeftWord. By the way, we are expanding at LeftWord – moving to 50 books a year by 2020 from about 12 or so a year. Next year is LeftWord’s 20th anniversary. We have some important books coming out to commemorate it, including a new list in Hindi. We hope that our books meet the needs of our readers. We are always open to suggestions. What we want to do is to produce smaller book at lower cost so that they can be purchased and read by everyone. To this end, I’m writing a book on socialist writing and socialist reading. It will be out next year. For now, I have just released a volume of Lenin’s work in a single book. It was a lot of work to produce and I hope it will be appreciated by those who read it.
Vijay Prashad was selected for the Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Achievements, this year. He is the author of around 25 books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism etc.
Nitheesh Narayanan is the editor of Student Struggle, a Central Secretariat member of SFI, and a PhD scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy.
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