Vijay Prashad Interview

Interviewer: Michael McGrath (Networking Team)

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, and editor. He has written over 20 books including ‘The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World’, ‘Red Star Over the Third World’, and ‘Washington Bullets’, which was translated by the ISC. He is director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research that recently published another work that was translated by the ISC, ‘Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective’.

Vijay came to Korea for three days in early December to give a series of talks about the new cold war and other issues affecting the world. We met Vijay on his third afternoon in Seoul for a conversation about organizing and the importance of growing the left domestically and internationally.

You’ve said, ‘I didn't choose being on the left. It chose me. How can I speak to people that didn't get that calling?’ That really spoke to me as a similar issue I have with trying to talk to other people who don't agree with me politically. So, what advice do you have for talking to people that just don't feel the same way?

 You know, the left is a stance. It's a tradition. There are certain things that are held in common in its history and tradition. But to be frank, most of our existence on the planet Earth is struggling to be human beings.

 Young people are taught ideas of equality and fellowship and being nice to other people and being kind. But, barriers are placed before you that prevent you from being a nice person. Sometimes these barriers are barriers of class, or barriers of gender and so on. Because at the same time as you're told ‘be a nice person, don't be mean’, you might be told, ‘men are superior to women’. So, it interrupts the ability of a person to be a nice person.

 What the left is trying to do, in a way, is trying to allow those values to be realized in the world. We just want the basic values of human dignity to be realized. They should not remain as ideals. They should become a reality. They should be facts.

 I believe that the left is merely a kind of argument for decency and not just decency of attitude, but decency of conditions. So that it's not like, ‘oh, be nice to everybody, but there are homeless people out there, so that's okay’. We want decency of attitude, ‘be nice to everybody’, but also decency of condition. So, I actually think that the left is not that far from the rest of society. Sometimes we go to people and talk to them like we are aliens; [using] vocabularies that are quite removed from everyday life. But in fact, if you go and poll people in a country like Korea, ‘Do you believe that everybody should have healthcare?’ ‘Do you believe everybody should have a decent ability to house themselves?’ ‘Do you believe people should be educated?’ If you polled people on these separate issues, I bet you'd get a super majority saying ‘Yes, everybody should have education. Yes, everybody should have health care’. In other words, the ideas of the left are actually quite dominant in society.

 The problem is that in a way, we haven't been able to create electoral majorities, and that's because the right is very effective in saying, ‘Hey, listen, I'm not disagreeing with you about the need for universalizing these things, but the problem is you can't because we believe in initiative, and we believe in these other human nature things.’

I see the online left disagreeing and arguing about the need for studying theory. Where do you stand on the importance of needing to read the theory and history, or is it enough to just have the ideals?

Well, it depends. Different people have different journeys in life. Some people need greater clarity about a range of things. They want to study things. They want to understand, ‘How do we build a better, less exploitative, and less destructive transportation system?’ We look out of the window; all these private cars going up and down and you think, ‘Is there a way to do it differently?’

 Then, you have to study the theory. You have to try to learn about why is it that private cars are so ubiquitous? Well, it has a lot to do with the car companies. Well, that has a lot to do with the nature of capitalism and how it operates. If you just had public transportation, then giant corporations don't have the ability to sell commodities related to transport. So, this is the commodification of transport. Can you de-commodify that? You have to read and study. You have to learn things. So, it’s not that studying is bad, but studying must also come with a purpose because you want to learn how to do something.

 Now, people say you have to read theory. What does that mean? You read, say Marx, to sharpen your understanding of how capitalism works. Why is there the competitive drive to commodify everything? Theory is not something you can get as an injection: a vaccine against reality. Theory is to help you advance your own understanding about how you will struggle.

I often feel powerless about what I can personally do. People might think, ‘What can I do? We just sit around complaining about everything. I'm not part of a big organization or I'm shy or I'm not good at these things.’ Do you have any advice for anyone feeling that kind of impotence?

 There's a range of ways in which people contribute. Some people translate, some people organize their research. Some people are there helping at events - everybody there is organized into trying to create a new debate and discussion in society.

 A country like this, Korea, where there's been immense repression for decades of people who espouse ideas that you can transcend barriers: you can end poverty, you can end hunger, or you can end a war across the peninsula. Those  who believe that have been severely repressed. That repression, it leaves a residue in society where people are like, ‘I don't want to get involved. I've heard of people getting shot or I've seen people getting arrested. I don't want to get involved.’ I understand the residue. On the other hand, the residue of that fear, in a sense, carries on the dictatorship. Dictatorship might end formally, but you keep it in your mind, and sometimes that takes generations to clean out of your mind.

 I always feel that we in the left misunderstand what contribution means. If you taught a class for working class women in the evening, and in that class, they read about important women in world history. You don't know what those women can accomplish. You have made a huge contribution to the movement. All across time we've had teachers like that who teach interesting things to working class people - going to the neighborhood, teaching children. You don’t have to teach them Marxism. You just need to teach them ten heroes of world history.

 The gap between somebody who organizes a major strike and somebody who goes and does adult education in a working-class community, I don't think there's any gap between them.

What advice do you have for small groups like the ISC?

 Obviously, you have to grow. That’s without question. You have to have what is known as a mass line; how do you bring large numbers of people into the conversation? So, if you want my opinion, you have to build up references of the ISC who are on TV, who are writing, who become well-known.

 Every movement has to decide who they want to make as a reference, out there. And that's got to be a deliberate process. You pick somebody as a reference, push them on the media, you push them to write and so on. You can do it collectively, but individuals have to promote it. It's very important for politics in a media kind of age. People don't want to just come and see posters. They want a character. Let's say you create a character with this person who does Instagram Live all the time related to ISC things. If that person is charismatic and has interesting things to say, people will come there to see. If you're not out there, people don't know you exist, so you can’t grow. You have to get out there to be noticed because the most important thing for this kind of group is not your existence, it's to be discovered.

The other thing is to sharpen your own assessment of contemporary Korea, because you have to also explain Korea to Koreans and non-Koreans. Most people get their ideas and opinions shaped by the mass media. Most people, their understanding of the trucker's strike would be how it was represented in the media. Now imagine if when we went into the truckers’ strike, you did an Instagram Live from there and talked to a couple of truckers.

 The formation of our own media using Internet platforms is so important in providing a different view, a different theory of what's happening in Korea today. That'll open the eyes of so many young people who just can't fathom what's happening. Don't stress about the sectarian left groups trying to have the most precise analysis of the situation. Precision is overrated; have a general viewpoint: ‘This is what we generally understand of the Korean world’. Yesterday Kim Jong-min said that neo-liberalism is the category that helps us explain the economy. And now we have get out this New Cold War to explain international geopolitics. That's a general orientation. Well, you don't need more than that because 99% of society doesn't even have this general orientation. You've got to be out there, and then for the rest of the world, somebody has to interpret from the standpoint of the left.

I heard that Washington’s New Cold War was going to be part of a series of books and you're hoping to do other similar books. Do you have any other books lined up?

 We had one we did also, which was about the nonalignment, which is it's all available on the Tricontinental website. This series, it's called Studies in Contemporary Dilemmas. And we're going to do a series of these dilemmas type books.

I like the term ‘dilemmas’ because it doesn't suggest that you have answers. It's an invitation to a dialog, and I think this book is an invitation to dialog: it gives a lot of information, a lot of facts and so on. It gives this concept of a new cold war, and that can provoke a debate and discussion. We are not interested in creating propaganda. We are interested in creating debate and discussion.