Transcript: VIJAY PRASHAD on Capitalism's Erosion of Morality /220
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Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Vijay Prashad.
Vijay Prashad This is the canary in the coal mine, not of social systems that are not working and so on. It's a canary in the coal mine about feeling, about the compassion, sense of compassion in a country.
Ayana Young Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Chief Editor at LeftWord Books and Chief Correspondent for Globetrotter. His most recent book is Washington Bullets, just out from Monthly Review Press with a preface by Evo Morales Ayma.
Well Vijay, thank you so much for coming on to For The Wild.
Vijay Prashad Great, it's great to be with you. And I just love the name of this podcast, For The Wild. It's very resonant of you know, so much about the way we live in the world where, you know, well the wild. Where is it now?
Ayana Young Absolutely, yeah, I think about that a lot as I'm in the world and what I stand for, and thank you for picking up on that.
So, Vijay, as a journalist and commentator, I’d like to start our conversation in recognition of how the corporate media is manipulating us today...Certainly, the US media has always ideologically censored that which critiques the State...but what I’m really noticing now, is the ways in which right-wing media and left-wing media, are both pushing the narrative that the country is in peril because of the other side; and it seems to me that we are being fed a great contradiction, where if neither end of the spectrum is happy, and both are blaming one another, we are left to wonder; what is actually happening? Specifically, I’m thinking about how so many of us have become captivated by the sensationalized nature of hate and violence, and whether or not you think we are becoming deeply addicted to this type of media? If so, how does this prevent us from having nuanced conversations and reaching out to one another, and how does this continue to serve the ruling class?
Vijay Prashad It's a great way to begin. For this, I think you have to plumb more than just the media, you have to go deeper into the kind of cultural-stasis that exists, not only in the United States, but in a number of advanced capitalist countries. You know, in Western Europe, maybe even in countries like Brazil and India, you have to go deeper into a kind of cultural malaise, which has set in. The way I see it is about maybe 40-50 years ago, as a consequence of, you know, changes in the way goods are produced. Rather than have big factories inside one country inside a territory. The new technological developments allowed, you know, firms to be broken up and you create what's known as the global commodity chain, you create disarticulated production, a car factory isn't one big factory, you make, you know, 50, 60, 100 components of the car in 100 factories, you know, which are based in 20 countries and the goods are moved back and forth and then assembled in one place.
What this did was, it enabled the people who would have invested money in a factory in Detroit, it enabled them to actually not invest much in the world. See, when you have a big factory you have to invest a lot of money into that factory, you know, let's say millions of dollars. If you break it up into 20 different factories, the investment in each factory is lessened. Because these factories or these manufacturing plants in Mexico or in, you know, Malaysia, or in Indonesia, or wherever they are they, are often subcontracted. So somebody in Malaysia has to raise the funds much less than, you know, starting a big car factory, they have to raise the funds, they invest the money and so the auto manufacturer doesn't actually have to invest a lot of money overseas, you see this actually quite dramatically with Apple.
Apple doesn't make iPhones, iPhones are made by Foxconn, you know, which is a Taiwanese company based in Shenzhen, China. Apple doesn't make anything, they just design brands, they develop some technology and so on, and they patented, but they don't invest in China. That's a Taiwanese company that does that investment. So these firms were able to first not invest a lot of money around the world to do manufacturing. At the same time, they collected huge amounts of the rent on the goods that they sold, this money wasn't going towards taxation, because the big companies were basically buying out the political system. And they bought out the media. And they sold the story that low taxation is good for the whole country for everybody. Well, they didn't pay tax, they corrupted the political system in general, also the media, I mean, look, who owns the media now, oh, well, Washington Post, who's the owner of The Washington Post? It's no longer a family that owns it that's committed to the media, it's big business that owns these things. If you look at American broadcast networks, they are owned by arms dealers, you know, whether it's NBC or whoever, they are all owned by companies that manufacture weapons.
So you have this situation where they stopped paying taxes, essentially, what we at our institute called a long term tax strike, but they go on strike, they just don't pay taxes. They use the enormous wealth, they have to go into tax havens, or they, you know, buy media outlets, and so on and start to produce a version of reality, they influence the culture. And at the same time, municipalities and so on are starved for funds, and they start privatizing and really, you know, eroding the basis of social life. I mean, it's a perfect storm of, to some extent worsened job prospects for people because a lot of manufacturing goes global, precarious conditions in the service economy for a lot of people, a media that's basically pretending, that tells you a universal or truthful story, when in fact, it often just represents the viewpoints of the very rich, you have a government that basically succumbs to the very rich, in the presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump $14 billion was spent on that election. It's an incredible amount of money, you know, in an election, I mean, it's in a democratic process. It's insane. The culture gets corroded over these 40 years, you know, we have more and more people feeling precarious about the prospects, they are listening to quite toxic things in the media.
And nobody I mean, you know, I mean, this nobody, none of the major political forces seems to have a project for the people that resonates in a way that is genuine and sincere. Instead, what you get is political projects that just appear insincere at best and hateful at worst. In other words, insincere, where, you know, politicians come and tell you just retrain for the next generation’s jobs. You're a 50 year old person who's just lost a job, it's not easy to retrain, that's an insincere thing to say to somebody. And on the other side, you get this horrible, toxic stuff about, “Well, you've lost your job, blame it on an immigrant” and most likely on a body that's colored slightly different than yours. The range of political projects we have in most of the advanced countries now are therefore between insincerity and hate, and my God, that should make everybody a little sick.
Ayana Young In one of Tricontinental’s newsletters from this year, you write: “The idea of social bonds or even of society is so compelling in our time. It is getting harder and harder to experience society in a civil manner: political discourse seems to have emerged from the sewers, and a general compassion for suffering seems to have evaporated as the neo-fascists propagate the hard steel of toxic machismo. This is not merely a problem of the political class–it is a problem that should be associated with the erosion of State and social institutions that would otherwise make individual lives richer.” and this idea dovetails with what we have been talking about, but also offers a reality check for many, that, the disappearance of dignified discourse, cannot solely be blamed on individual failures, but is a by-product of the gradual and calculated divestments from our social and state institutions. Before we go on to discuss the shortcomings of the left in the West, I wonder if you can begin by talking about how this moment in the United States, culturally, is deeply connected to the privatization of life, the starving of economies of care, and the bolstering of war industries?
Vijay Prashad There's so much to say here, again, and this is something I feel desperately moved by, because, you know, as a consequence of the lockdown, and this pandemic, we estimate that hunger rates have gone up dramatically. And I don't know, maybe half the world's population struggles with hunger and there's something just obscene about our world that we can do so many incredible things. You and I are talking to each other through a computer. It's incredible. Ayana, you're in Portland, Oregon, we're just chatting as if you're sitting in the same room as me, your voice is very clear. We can do all these amazing things, you know, we could put our cameras on if we'd like and see each other. It's incredible. And yet, just five minutes from where I am, somebody will be hungry. A young person can't study properly, their brains are not developing because their nutritional rates are down.
Stay with the United States, roughly 567,000 people struggle with homelessness. You know, half a million people struggle with homelessness in this extraordinarily rich country. This is a canary in the coal mine, not of social systems that are not working in and so on. It's a canary in the coal mine about feeling, about the compassion, sense of compassion in a country. I mean, how does it, how does a country claim to be a civilization, you know, if you just have no way no project, to address the fact that half a million people struggle with homelessness? And that increasing numbers of people struggle with hunger? I mean, how do you go on with your own life? You know, there's something wrong with that. When a country doesn't have that as its first priority, you know, the principal priority in an election campaign should be, we're going to just not have people be homeless. It should be we're just not going to have people be hungry. We need nutritious food for people.
And it's not a question of creating giant, ugly, you know, nature destroying factory farms. Let's be creative and think of ways to, you know, grow nutritious food near where people live. Decentralize, you know, food, regimes and so on. Let's have that conversation. And let's be serious about it. Let's not say this is some marginal thing for hippies and you know, people on the side. It’s a ridiculous attitude, this should be at the center, why isn't a mainstream political party putting at its heart the question of homelessness and hunger? And they don't, and for me, what that says is, that's the canary. That's an indictment of a culture. It's nothing to do with this party or that party.
You know, The Squad, Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have put together these seven bills, and others with them, put together seven bills to directly address the question of, you know, homelessness or houselessness, as you see fit to say, they're very pragmatic and good steps that they are asking for. There is nothing utopian about it, you know, but it's a direct challenge to the banks, to people with money, to property owners and so on. And it's the same way hunger, I mean, we know that there's enough food produced in the world and, you know, I have my critiques of how food is produced. But let's leave that for a moment. There's enough food produced in the world. And I often think about this, that, you know, there's a place where there's a warehouse of food, and then there's hungry people, what prevents the hungry people from getting the food from the warehouse? Well, what prevents the hungry people from eating that food is they don't have money. And if you don't have money, then you are condemned to starvation. There's something just vulgar about the fact that we have people without homes, people without food, people without health, people without access to education, and what prevents them from getting these things which we have is the lack of money.
This is what the capitalist system has done. It has eroded the sense of morality in a culture, where people in a society just come to terms with this. They see homeless people on the street, they just turn their face and walk by, they see hungry people, they just don't know what to do they feel they feel assaulted by the presence of the hungry person on the street, it's as if the hungry person is hurting them by just being there, you know, instead of taking that hurt that you feel when you see somebody hungry and saying “I need to construct a political project. I need to be involved in something to end this, to not allow this.”
And again, this in your sense of break, where people just don't feel like the hungry, the homeless, the people without medical care, in the sense that they are not part of me, they are alien to me, you know, we are alienated from them, that predates the pandemic. I mean, that's been a long time in motion. And, you know, I think that there is really something quite significant about trying to create a political project that, in a way, breaks the alienation of human beings from each other, and breaks the alienation of human beings from nature. You know, it's, it's the same sort of detachment, I am detached from other people, especially those who are struggling, I don't want to deal with them, I don't want to see them, we'll move them away, we will evict them and remove them. And I'm also detached from nature. I don't want to deal with the vagaries of nature, the sense of nature.
I just want to give you an example, in Cuba, every year, as you know, there are hurricanes and the hurricane tears through the island as it tests through other islands. It's a decentralized society. So in every village or town, there is a committee to defend the revolution. And among their committee, there's often electricians, when the storm is coming, they leave their homes, they go and they take down the power lines, they just dismantle it, they remove it, because they know that the lines will otherwise snap. So they preemptively put people without power, then the storm blows right through, then they go and put the power line back up. In other words, they're planning for a certain eventuality, and then they remedy it in these countries, like let's say, the United States example, Puerto Rico, nothing is done. And then the storm comes in, knocks down the power line, and a population is completely disorganized, you know, they're not able to do these things, these skills haven't been produced. So then now you have to wait for the electricians to come from the mainland or somewhere else to put up the power again, and then you go weeks and weeks without power. I mean, this is, it's an example of two different models, you got the Cuban model, where they put people before profits, you know, where they where people are organized, the train, they work in community, to deal with adversity to deal with challenges, you have the other side where people basically are alienated from each other. They don't know they don't have the skills, you have to pay money to get the skills and so on. And then you get these disasters.
And really COVID has shown us that, you know, 29,000 Cuban medical students went door to door and tested all 11 million Cubans to see if they had COVID-19. In the United States, most people and I would hazard almost like to say everybody, nobody has seen anybody from the government come to the door, knock on the door and say, “Can I test you?” It just is not happening. And yet it happened in a poor country like Cuba, it's a different attitude to human beings. That model says people come before profit. In this very rich society of the United States, there is no doubt that profit always comes before people. And profit always comes before nature.
Ayana Young You have long vocalized that so-called leftists in the United States have continuously failed to capture the power of community organizing, instead, settling for liberal identities...and there is so much to ask, but I think listeners would like to know as a precursor, why you think it is that we have remained so limited in our ability to pursue social and economic transformation? What do we need to rectify, in order to ensure that future generations, and the current one, do not remain stymied in their efforts to build a movement to address labor exploitation, global austerity measures, and climate chaos?
Vijay Prashad You know, I mean Ayana let's take two recent incidents, one is the killing of George Floyd and before, Eric Garner. Why was Eric Garner killed? Eric Garner was killed because the police officers saw a Black man in the streets of New York, selling loose cigarettes. That's what was alleged, that he was selling loose cigarettes. Now, I'll come back to that in a minute. Why was George Floyd killed? Allegedly because this Black man passed a counterfeit $20 bill, they alleged that he passed a counterfeit $20 bill. In both cases, these were men, if indeed it is true that Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes and George Floyd was trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, if this is indeed true, we have examples of two Black men who are attempting in a very, very challenging economy, challenging economic situations, to get by, I mean to take care of their families. You know, it's, these are economic crimes in a way if indeed they're true, one selling loose cigarettes and then passing a counterfeit bill these are crimes, but they're not crimes.
Many years ago, Marx wrote something really important. He said that, you know, peasants used to go into the forests in Germany, and they would collect fallen wood for firewood. You know, when a branch fell on the ground, they would go into a forest, collect the branch and bring it and it was firewood. And when the government in these parts of Germany, was not yet Germany, but in these parts of what would become Germany, the government passed a law saying this is private property, you can't come and collect firewood. And so the police would ride into this forest, and they would beat peasants who were coming to collect firewood, as was their customary practice, and in some cases, even killed people. And Marx wrote with great feeling, he said, the peasants understand the punishment, the punishment they're facing is they're getting arrested. They're getting beaten, and in some extreme cases, they are killed. They understand the punishment. What they don't understand is the crime. What's the crime in coming in collecting firewood, you know, they are collecting firewood in a customary way for warmth. What's the crime, they don't understand the crime? They don't understand that there is a crime here? Well, it's a crime against private property in the same way, in a society where there are large numbers of people who are without a home, who are struggling, because of lack of proper income to feed their families with there's no government support for this are minimal, anemic government support people are trying to get by. And this is not seen as a crime because you're trying to feed your family, you know, you're just trying to get behind. I mean, imagine that, and then you get killed. The punishment is easy to understand, but the crime is not clear. Why is that a crime? I'm trying to get by. Meanwhile, big corporate bankers, or somebody steals hundreds of millions of dollars and they don't get killed. In fact, they sometimes don't even get punished. But we are getting killed for this, we can see the the punishment, we don't see the crime.
So what's happened, because of this lack of an understanding of class in the United States, is the punishment is what is seen there. In other words, when we say Black Lives Matter, we say Black Lives Matter, meaning Black Lives Matter. That means that police killing must stop, that police killing must stop. In other words, the punishment must stop. But what about the so-called crime? What when you say Black lives matter? You surely don't just mean that the killing must stop? Surely you mean that the precious lives of human beings must have access to food, must have access to housing, must have access to education, health care, broad range of services, and so on. Surely it means that the whole preciousness of life, not just that, oh, you should be allowed to live, what's the point of living if I can't live with dignity, you know, is the issue.
So in that sense, you know, there is no project that's articulated particularly in the Democratic Party, which addresses the broader question of life. You know, again, it's not enough to say we have to go and check the police and so on. Because it's not just about the police. It's support the whole system is wretched. People don't have the ability to feed themselves. They don't have the ability to take care of the children. They don't have the ability, you know, to have their health monitored on a regular basis. Public services have faced total attrition. That kind of broad bold project needs to be articulated. You know, you need something like that. And it's out of a bold project like that, that you have to risk creating a majority, you know, a majority, as we say is not found, it has to be made. You can't find a majority of people to back you, you have to make a majority, you have to make a majority around a program that unifies people and people will be unified by programs such as everybody agrees that feeding people is paramount. And so that's what I think, you know, I think that what's happened with identity, politics and so on, is that we've ended up focusing on the punishment, we've forgotten that we need to attack the idea that certain things are crimes, there is no crime in trying to survive, you know, survival is heroic. And we need to find a way for us mutually, to survive without having to hurt other people. In other words, theft, and so on. There are ways. We have to look at that as not a crime, but survival and make survival not something that requires a person to surrender their dignity, you know, to steal from others and so on. But survival must be something you can do with dignity. I think it's from there that you build a majority.
Ayana Young I’d like to transition our conversation to explore how countries have responded to COVID-19 because our media in the States has certainly been fairly limited and biased in terms of what information is disseminated around COVID responses. Tricontinental Institute published a study titled “CoronaShock and Socialism”, which pointed out that there is a “marked difference in the management of the pandemic by countries with bourgeois governments and countries with socialist governments. The latter has a science-based, public sector, public action, and internationalist attitude–which has meant that the areas of the world governed by socialists have experienced less of a catastrophe than the countries of the bourgeois order.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I wonder if you can speak to some of the most glaring differences between socialist and bourgeois governments, and what this implies for future crises, and perhaps, what climate catastrophe responses will look like under socialist governments?
Vijay Prashad Well, the last question is very difficult, and I hope we can get there. But there's something quite, I don't like to use the word ironic, by the way, because that song ruined the word ironic, I understand that it's often a misunderstood word, but there is something quite odd about how people assume that, let's say China is authoritarian, and the United States is democratic. That's the basic Western framework, when the pandemic was finally, you know, understood in China by about the 20th of January of this year 2020. In other words, by the time it was clear to medical experts that there was human to human transmission, and when the government in Hebei Province shut down Wuhan city, and they put really emergency measures in, built a big hospital and so on. That's what the government did. That was what the state did. But suddenly, underneath that, you saw a whole different set of activities begin. So just to give you an example, Chinese society, not the state is highly organized, people are organized in all kinds of associations, whether it's neighborhood associations, you know, professional associations, and so on. And what you saw in Wuhan city, is that neighborhood associations kicked in, and so did the Communist Party. So what did they do? Well, in every neighborhood, the neighborhood association started to do temperature checks of people who lived in the neighborhood, you didn't need high expertise, they would quickly trained you to go with masks and with gloves and go and take temperatures of people, if there are spikes in temperature, immediately, you know, medical experts must come test them and so on. They can be isolated. They did contact tracing, not through the government, but through these decentralized neighborhood committees.
Secondly, these neighborhood committees did surveys of neighborhoods, who are the elderly? Where do they live? Do they need medicines? Do they need food delivered and so on. So this is the kind of way in which society started to take care of itself. You know, remember I said we have this vision of China as an authoritarian state, and therefore no society, everybody is dominated by the state, the state does everything. It's not true. They're the neighborhood associations to care a lot of the basic functions during the lockdown and Wuhan and Hubei Province were able to beat the pandemic. It's quite amazing. Now in places like the United States, it's a really good comparison. Because you see, you can say, “Look, I'm free,” but you're also thoroughly disorganized. What did you not see in the United States? You saw people just waiting for the government to do things. Even trade unions didn't come out there and feed people. You didn't see, you know, the NGOs. I mean, what's happened in a way is you've commodified public action in the West, in the capitalist countries, but public action has become the province of non governmental organizations that get grants and they have professionals running them and so on. You don't have masses of people organized into neighborhood committees and so on, you just don't have that kind of broad public action.
So because you don't have the habit for it, what you did see is in some small localities, you saw decent people, sometimes organized in some left groups, conduct mutual aid, you know, tried to raise funds to go and buy groceries delivered to people who couldn't afford it and so on. So there were small instances of mutual aid conducted by really sensitive decent people, but it wasn't scaled up. You know, we didn't see trade unions participate, in Kerala, for instance, which is a state in India, governed by the Left Front, a communist government, their trade unions came, they built sinks, next to bus stations. So when people got on buses, they would wash their hands, the trade unions didn't wait for the government to come and build the sinks, they just built the sinks.
Youth organizations opened public kitchens, they would cook, you know, basic food in public, under tents, and anybody could come and take food and go home. This was to ensure that people were being fed during the pandemic, schools, public schools said whatever lunch, you get children at school, we will, we would like to have it delivered to your home. So student organizations from colleges said we volunteered to pick up the food from the school and deliver it to people's homes.
I mean, this is public action, you know, this is the habit that develops in these societies. They haven't attacked trade unions, they haven't attacked the organization of students and so on. You just don't see this in the West where people live much more atomized lives. You know, there's a greater sense that the culture promotes individualism, you need to get by, don't work collaboratively and cooperatively. And the cooperative spirit has eroded deeply in these societies.
It's not like the United States didn't have this at one time, you know, let's go back to the readings of 19th century fiction, you know, where you see, or I guess even the history books where community would come together to raise somebody's barn, you know, the barn needed to be raised, the whole community would provide the labor, nobody asked to be paid, they just did it together as a community, because they knew they relied on each other. That's mutual aid. You don't need, you know, anarchism to teach you about mutual aid. Mutual Aid is a basic, common human decent thing to do. But that decency has eroded because of individualism. Because rather than call your neighbors and say, listen, can you please come and help me move my stove, you call up somebody, a handyman, or whatever to come and do things like that. And that culture of commodifying, all social relations, it doesn't prepare you for a pandemic, and how to respond to the pandemic, in the end, in the places like the United States, you wait for the state to act, and otherwise you're paralyzed in your home, in these kinds of countries, in a country where you've essentially commodified so many social relations, you know, where, when you need help from for something, you try to either hire somebody to do it for you, you know, by paying them directly, or you use your credit card, or whatever it is, but this idea of mutual community support is deeply eroded in the system, and it has its impact at the time of a pandemic.
Ayana Young Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you just brought up so many important points about our mutual aid being eroded. And I feel that, and you have been working to outline what a post-COVID 19 agenda needs to look like for parts of the world who have long been held captive by global austerity measures and I’d like to explore how the pandemic is projected to affect the world in the long term and what strategies and policies need to be centered. But, before I ask about the 16-point agenda, I wonder if you can remind listeners about the extent of global debt servitude, and just the amount of external debt countries have been forced to bear while trillions of dollars sit in tax havens and billionaires offer paltry philanthropic donations?
Vijay Prashad I mean, this is extraordinary. Like, it should be a slogan. I mean, I would like to make a T-shirt that says “No philanthropy, only taxation.” Look, the problem with philanthropy is they give money and then they expect you to genuflect in front of them, name buildings after them, praise them to the skies. I mean, this is medieval, you know, this is how kings and noble people said, “Look, I am giving you something” and then you had to make, you know, to fall on the ground before them, what's the difference? You know, the donor comes, “Oh, my God, the donor is coming tomorrow, everybody smarten up.” And this is medieval. The attitude towards philanthropy is positively medieval. I don't want philanthropy, pay your taxes fair and square. And then let's have a democratic discussion of how to utilize that money to not allow one rich person to define the agenda of our society. And when you have somebody like Bezos, you know, $700 billion plus, that they're sitting on, you know, they have more money than the wealth of countries, you know, they can move enormous agendas by the whim. That's what I mean, by being medieval. I mean, what gives one person the right to move a major social agenda, you know, whether good or bad, you know, I'm not judging it. It's just that the structure is wrong, you know, we should have democratic control over our social wealth, not allow will to define it?
Well, you know, we know that right now. The situation with debt is just obscene. You know, it's literally obscene. You know, the best estimates show us that there is about $11 trillion in external debt in the developing world, and the wealthy bondholders, they just don't want to give these countries a break. I mean, right now, if you're smart, and we live in a smart world, we'd say, “Oh, wait a minute, let's just forgive all the debt”, you know, this $11 trillion. I mean, after all, after all, this $32 trillion, sitting in tax havens, and that's, that's just the number that we were able to find, you know, $32 trillion. And I, you know, we went in and looked at this $32 trillion, which is more than the total value of gold that has ever been brought up from under the Earth, all the known gold reserves are less than $32 trillion. So we've got $32 trillion, sitting in tax havens, let's use some of that money, which is sitting idle, to essentially forgive the debt. These countries. For instance, if you take an example, Ethiopia, Ethiopia doesn't need aid, it just needs complete debt cancellation, if you cancel the debt to Ethiopia, they have enough resources in their society to drive an agenda. The reason these countries have to keep coming with the begging bowl, is because their resources are essentially sapped by this vacuum cleaner of debt servicing, which is endless and perpetual. It's a perpetual debt machine. You know, countries have to keep servicing the debt. You know, I said $11 trillion is owed this year. Sorry, is currently owed as external debt. The servicing on that debt this year, about two months ago was about 3.9 trillion. Yeah. So just about 40% or 37% of the total principal is owed as interest. I mean, that's how miserable the situation is.
Ayana Young You have long called for the need to push the debate about the environmental crisis to not only include more nuance and complexity but to also acknowledge labor and land struggles, to address the question of deprivation, I’ve heard you share sentiments that point out, what is the point of a climate strike that speaks of an uninhabitable Earth when people on this Earth presently cannot eat? And so this question is open-ended, but I wonder if you could speak to what agricultural workers can teach us about reorganizing the system and how does an extended movement actually translate into a stronger movement?
Vijay Prashad You see, right now we have in places like India, we have increasing and long term, and what looks to be permanent agrarian distress. Agriculture has been commercialized, you know, big firms dominate the landscape, determine the outcome, they are growing things, essentially, for markets all over the world. And they're growing at a massive scale, and in order to grow at massive scale, they use poisonous things that are ruining the soil. You know, that is both insecticide fertilizer, they use seeds that are, you know, God knows what seeds, they basically plow enormous landscapes, you know, and with no interest in the integrity of the soil or anything, I mean, it's basically treating as we say, treating the field like a factory, and hoping that the attrition of soil, the soils depletion and so on, can be reversed by using intensive chemicals and so on, and clever seeds. And even sometimes, in some cases, you know, computerization in the field itself.
So this is the great hope. And what this has meant is it's completely taken the power away from the cultivators. And also it has thrown a lot of people off work because you've mechanized, and you know, in a place like India, 70% or so people in the countryside it has created enormous agrarian distress and small farmers have found it very hard to survive. So for a long period, suicide rates among farmers were very high. In recent periods, agricultural workers and farmers in India have been leading these very large marches, particularly in the states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. These marches are very important, because it shows that the leadership in trying to transform rural areas is coming from the agricultural workers, the small farmers and so on. You can’t do this from policy to farm, it has to be from worker to policy, there is no other way, you know, because you have to build mass support for some of these ideas.
And this is a long term rebuilding project. Because around the world, farm worker organizing, farm worker strength has been greatly depleted, you know, in the face of giant corporations coming in with the full support of governments, and basically eroding the capacity of agricultural workers and small farm owners, you know, to, to live with dignity. I mean, that's what they’ve eroded. So you know, we can talk as much as we want about agroecology, organic farming, good stewardship of the land, and all that all of that stuff is abstractions, because it's not a question of having the right ideas, you know, you can have the right ideas, you can say, “Oh, look, you know, you shouldn't use so much fertilizer, don't use so much this”, some scientists will come in and say no, the optimum is to use only so much chemicals in the land or don't grow three cycles, leave one fallow, you know, okay, that's all fine. But these abstractions, they have to be picked up and made alive by people, by people's movements and so on.
You know, you can't save the world by building a small organic experimental farm somewhere that proves that small experimental farms are correct. You need hundreds of millions of people who work the land to be gripped by the idea that we need to have a different way of doing agriculture. And that's why I want to emphasize the importance of these agricultural workers movements, farm workers movements, these big marches being held in India, because in the marches, they are also articulating and debating their agenda. And that is certainly an agenda about letting the cultivator set the course for what agriculture should look like, listen to the cultivators and so on. And I think this is not just happening in India. In Brazil, for instance, the Landless Workers Movement. They have experimented, built cooperatives, worked on the construction of, you know, of what they call agro ecological production and so on. And that's entirely driven by formerly landless farmers and workers who now live in these collective settlements, where they are experimenting with new forms of not agriculture, for boutique consumption, you know, rich for the rich, and so on. But agro ecological food for the, for themselves, for the communities around them, and so on. So I say that the beginning of the transformation doesn't come from, you know, a book somebody has written somewhere about, you know, let's do agriculture like this, it comes from these experiments and struggles of peasants, farm workers, who are literally, with their fingers in the dirt, trying to understand how to draw food from the Earth without destroying it. And I think we need to actually take the lead from them.
Ayana Young I loved how you spoke to that, and especially the part where, you know, it's not just about good ideas, it's about the people on the ground. And I've been so disenchanted with just the folks who have the mic and had the power and how they try to, yeah, push their armchair philosophical ideas on to those who are actually the ones working with the land. And I think that's just such a powerful point. So yeah, thank you for that.
You’ve been very vocal about the recent coup in Bolivia and its relationship to lithium mining, as over 50 percent of the world’s lithium resides amidst Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. Can you talk a bit about the United State’s role in interfering with this election in order to gain fuller access to lithium? And if you think more and more coups will ensue in the coming decade as corporate miners seek to propel “clean energy” forward?
Vijay Prashad Yeah. So you know, I mean, I think the idea of the Green New Deal sounds great. And who's going to disagree with that, you know, we do want to transition away from fossil fuel energy, of course, we want to transition from fossil fuel energy. But what are we transitioning to, you know, we're transitioning to energy that is derived from the sun, solar, we're looking to wind, we're looking to maybe tidal energy, you know, different forms of energy from the Earth, from the sun, as I said, but of course, these forms of energy, erratic solar energy is not available at night, you need energy at night. Therefore, you need to somehow capture the energy. In order to capture energy, whether it's any of these non fossil what we call renewable energy, to capture these you need batteries. And thus far the most efficient batteries we have use cobalt, use lithium, and other such, you know, minerals and so on. But cobalt and lithium are two important ones.
Well, where do you get cobalt from? Cobalt comes from the tailing mines of copper. And the largest amount of cobalt comes out of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where some companies with hideous records like Glencore, domiciled in Switzerland, these companies are the ones that essentially, by outsourcing the gathering of cobalt, from the tailing mines, make a ton of money, you know, a ton of money. So the people who are mining this, you know, families, including children are paid almost nothing. And these companies make a ton of money. So in Congo, you don't need to do a coup because basically, these corporations have enormous control of parts of the country already.
Then with lithium, there's big lithium production in Australia, but it's not enough. When the real scaled up, green transition takes place, you're going to need a lot more lithium than is currently being mined out of Australia. You know, there's lithium available in Cornwall in England, let me tell you, I don't think they're going to be mining in Cornwall, this kind of dirty mining, it's always in somebody else's backyard. So the big, big, big dump of lithium is in that ABC triangle, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
You know, and in these countries, there is considerable lithium. Evo Morale’s government, when he was in power for 14 years, improved the conditions of his people immensely. He insisted that the government mining company would be in charge of the sale of the lithium or going into joint ventures, that you cannot privatize the mines. You know, and they also started making a deal, which would allow them to process the lithium and make batteries in the Bolivian government run factory. In fact, they also mass produced a small car, which Evo Morales was the first to drive off the lot in Bolivia, they were interested not just in selling raw materials, but in going from lithium all the way out to electric cars with their own lithium batteries in it and so on. And then the coup happens, because you know, this is unacceptable, because who actually should control the lithium, not the Bolivian people and the government. No, certainly not. It has to be controlled by big multinational corporations. And that's the scandal.
And you saw after the coup in October, November 2019, newspaper after newspaper, The New York Times and so on, justified the coup, you know, they blame Morales for fraud. All of it was later proved to be nonsense. You just saw, he returns to Bolivia and comes to a hero's welcome. He's walked to the border by, you know, a president Fernandez of Argentina, he crosses the border, there are tens of thousands of people hanging around waiting to see him. They carry him essentially into Bolivia. He goes from one town to the next thing, he goes up to the highlands to the lithium area. I mean, he's a hero in the country, you know, he was welcomed with open arms, not by the elites, not by the people at Santa Clara, but open arms by the ordinary, mainly Indigenous population of Bolivia, because he was trying to defend this resource in
You're asking, will there be more coups in the future? Well, of course, they will be because this seems not to end. And these coups are getting more and more sophisticated as time goes by, because the apparatus to make you believe it's not a coup is quite sophisticated. I mean, even sensitive people, people who lean toward the left, after this coup in Bolivia, they spent weeks saying it's not a coup Morales should not have run again. I mean, who are you to say who should have who shouldn't run again, you know, I mean, this is something that can be settled in the ballot box in Bolivia, you know, somebody sitting in Vermont, shouldn't have the license to dictate to other parts of the world, what should or shouldn't happen, you're entitled to your opinion, but in this case, your opinion is not merely an opinion, you're being weaponized by the CIA, by the US State Department. If you come out there and join the chatter saying, “Well, you know, he's, he's been there too long.” You're just legitimizing what they are doing by force on the ground. And I find that to be quite shameful. I mean, people need to really introspect. Next time, there is a coup. And as I said, there will be a coup somewhere, hopefully, not in Bolivia, but somewhere, people need to really think about what they are saying and in whose interests they are saying what, you know, look, you may not like the way somebody is governing, that doesn't give you the right to allow your government to overthrow them.
Ayana Young In Tricontinental’s “In the Ruins of the Present”, it’s written: “The culture of commodities and the idea of people as consumers has desecrated the idea of the human. Bolivian socialists have looked deeply into their own traditions and elaborated a vocabulary to talk about human character, of a human society that is not subsumed by capitalist social norms. David Choquehuanca, the executive secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA), speaks of Qhapag ñan, the path of the good life, with the need to create not consumers and owners, but iyambae, a person without an owner. Being a person without an owner is, as Choquehuanca says, ‘the future, the path of people who look for the good life’. Such efforts to revive the idea of the human – and to revive ideas of the need to tend to the creation of a human community – requires a great deal of effort…” And, as we come to a close, I wonder if I can ask you to speak about what the world, and mass movements, and lives being lived outside of the West, remind you about the authentic agency that still exists and a sense of satisfaction that isn’t sought through consumerism?
Vijay Prashad Well, before I answer that, I would just like to say that you've quoted from our first document and you quoted within that from David Choquehuanca, David has just been elected the Vice President of Bolivia, he was the vice presidential candidate with Louis Arce and I'm very pleased that he is the Vice President, because what the sentiment that you read out from our first document, it's something that I deeply believe in, you know, when he articulates a view, that a person without an owner, you know, that's the future, that that's what a good life will be, we want everybody to feel like they don't have an owner. And whether it's a tangible real owner, another person, or it's us being owned by money, by, you know, by mortgages, by these sorts of attachments to things rather than other people. I mean, that's a beautiful way to try to construct a world.
And I'm very, very pleased that David is the Vice President of Bolivia. And I know that he will be alongside Louis Arce. And all the people there, including Patricia Arce, who is such a brave person, was beaten during the coup, and looked directly in the cameras, they cut her hair, put red paint on her face, threw gasoline over, she looked directly at a camera and said, “We are not afraid”. And she has just been sworn in as a senator in the Senate in Bolivia, what a brave person Patricia is. So these are the people in a sense, Ayana, who are going to construct with us the future. These are the kinds of people this is the caliber of person in the movements around the world. You know, these are sensitive people, these are people who believe we have great faith in the capacity of other people, they're not afraid of people, you know, you got to listen more and build projects in unity with other people, whether it be in Bolivia, as we see here. Or it's in, you know, places where like in South Africa and Durban, where, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Shack Dwellers Movement, you know, has incredible resilience, you know, mostly these women who built networks, political networks are clearly inside the neighborhoods of the poor in Durban, but other parts of South Africa as well, which stood attacks and murder by, you know, property developers and so on to give themselves dignity.
You know, if you go to Colombia, in the northern part of South America, where social movement leaders are being killed almost one a day, you know, at that rate, nonetheless, people still stand up, unafraid to stand up to the kind of mafia state. These are brave people. I mean, you know, it breaks my heart every time I hear the name of somebody who's been killed, because they are trying to create a sensitive world. It breaks my heart. I mean, it's a very sad thing that these people, what is the crime? You know, back to that old thing, right? Remember? We know the punishment, we're getting killed, but what is the crime? My crime is, I'm sensitive and want to create an end to hunger, you know, that's my crime. And for that you killed me.
Why did they kill Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso in 1987? Well, Thomas wanted to create diversified food regimes. He said every Wednesday, he said, “We forbid women to work in the kitchen. We forbid women to do any housework, any childcare, anything on every Wednesday, because men must get a taste of reproductive labor, you know, you must see what it is.” And if you see what it is, you'll start to enjoy it. And then you can truly share with the women in the household, the practice of reproductive labor, what a fast sided intelligent way to go. You know, instead of just talking, talking, talking about the need for men to involve themselves, he said, we're gonna pass a law, like it or not, guys, you got to just go and try it. Try the kitchen, try the laundry, try taking care of your children, you will find something beautiful in it. Initially, you're terrified of it. You think it's women's work, you think, Oh, I can't do it. You'll find beauty in it. You'll be like that child who eventually jumps in the pool and doesn't want to get out. You will say “Wow, I really do enjoy cooking. I feel less alienated. You know, when I do this when I see the happy faces of my family, when they eat what I have cooked.” But he had to be killed. They killed him, you know, a sensitive person. What was his crime? his crime was he said, I want to make a better world. I want to make a better world. In our world, apparently that's illegal.
Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today by Jonathan Yonts, Nathan Keck, Lizabett Russo, and Sidi Toure. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.