Struggle Makes Us Human

Vijay Prashad, Frank Barat

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781642597172
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An incisive and inspiring call to look beyond capitalism to chart a road map for a planet ravaged by pandemics, climate crisis, and wars.Prompted by trenchant questions by international solidarity organizer Frank Barat, renowned author and activist Vijay Prashad shows that the path toward hope and liberation lies in looking closely at myriad, under covered struggles being waged all across the world by workers in countries such as India, Kenya, Peru, Tunisia, and Argentina. A marvelously global but grassroots perspective.Prashad also examinespressing topics such as debt cancellation, a wealth tax, austerity, the pandemic, the arms industry, the climate crisis, socialism, working-class social movements and much more.

PART ONE

The System as It Is

ZIGS AND ZAGS BUT MOSTLY ZAGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your take on the right to vote?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CAPITALIST USE OF CRISIS

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

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

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

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

Fear becomes the instinctual response to the acts of terror. Rather than have a conversation about why this violence takes place, there is an escalation of the security state. But there is inefficiency here. The security state takes yesterday’s event and tries to prevent its happening in the future: the shoe issue is apposite, since after the state makes everyone take their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• PART ONE: The System as It Is
• PART TWO: Struggle Makes Us Human
• PART THREE: Toward Beauty
• Afterword
• Back Cover