Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, and political commentator. He is the author of 40 books, including “Washington Bullets,” “The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South,” and The “Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power,” the latter written with Noam Chomsky. Prashad is the executive director of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of New Delhi-based publisher LeftWord Books. In his own words, “I’m a marxist. I’m a communist. I believe in women’s emancipation. I believe in gay rights. I believe in everything good, decent, and sensitive in the world.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: How did the young Vijay find Marxism and find that it was something he identified with?
Vijay Prashad: It’s not a difficult or complicated story. It’s about whether you trust that the systems that are in place can solve problems that you see around you. I grew up in Calcutta, India, and like in many places in the Third World, poverty is not masked; poverty is pretty much in front of you. Now, of course, you can see poverty all over the world – you’re in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you will see homeless people and other markers of poverty. But for a young person growing up in India, the sheer depth, the volume of the poor, as it were, is very dramatic. My mother was a very sensitive person who got me involved in various things as a young person. You see all that as a child and you see that the system is simply unable — or unwilling — to address the problems that you see in front of you. Problems that seem normal and ethical to deal with — like poverty. If a system can’t deal with poverty, it makes you think, “Well, why can’t it deal with poverty?” And then it makes you ask another question, “What could deal with poverty?”
My journey to Marxism comes through an engagement with that. The ethical question is always how can you allow a person to be hungry. And a system that allows people to be hungry is a failed system. Marxism provides a critique: It shows you that in fact, there are hungry people, and then there’s food in the world, and hungry people can’t access food because they don’t have money. And they don’t have money because either they’re working and not getting paid enough or they are unable to find work. And the system is such that it just doesn’t feed you without money. Small sections might get some welfare payment, but by and large hunger is basically allowed to fester.
That means the system is a problem. Marxism helps you understand that: You don’t have money, you don’t have property, you can’t eat. And then you have to think, well, what’s going to transcend it? Maybe the class divide needs to end. And so my journey to Marxism essentially, if I’m honest with you, comes from a pretty simple place. I read theory much later. I understood the theory even later than that, but initially, it came from a common sense thing, like “why is this there?”
HPR: An objection to poverty or an objection to hunger can be characterized as a mainstream objection that any sensitive person can make. Can you talk a bit about why Marxism uniquely is a response to those objections, because it seems that most people have those objections but don’t necessarily go as far as to adopt Marxism?
VP: You see, most liberal ideologies or most religious ideologies would perhaps say that it’s a bad thing to have great divides and hunger and so on, right? Most traditions would say this is insane.
But the differences in how they analyze the lack of food for people. A lot of traditions will say, well, there is no food because there are too many people; we still think people need to be fed, but the cause of it is overpopulation – Malthusianism. Some people may say, well, people are lazy — that doesn’t mean they should starve, we can feed them, but they are lazy people. They’ll say you can’t change the reason why they’re starving — you can feed them, but you’re gonna have to keep feeding them forever, and therefore, let’s create institutions of charity, which basically don’t solve the problem but maintain people with food. So a lot of other ideologies recognise hunger and they even may want to prevent hunger from being too bad, but they don’t acknowledge why hunger is produced.
Marxism uniquely doesn’t have a religious attitude towards hunger (“t’s about fate”). It doesn’t think ambition is enough because, you know what? Ambition is unevenly distributed. There are lots of rich people with no ambition, but they continue to remain rich because they inherit money. If certain families keep getting rich, then it’s weird because ambition seems to be only in certain families, and families that remain poor over generations seem not to have ambition. So then ambition can’t be a uniquely individual trait. It must be inherited. But it’s not inherited biologically, it’s inherited socially.
If you want a rational explanation of hunger or inequality, all of this leads you to Marxism. Marxism is unique among all these different approaches, in that it is quite rationally and dispassionately able to ground “lack of ambition” or ground “lack of resources” in a class analysis. It is true that if you are in grinding poverty, generation after generation, a culture of ambition might be wiped out from your children’s life, because from a very early age, their ambition is to get food for that day. They can’t even imagine anything other than survival. So the culture of ambition is stolen from them, and a Marxist analysis allows you to see that ambition isn’t just some inner light that an individual has. It’s a cultural issue. If it’s cultural, the question is why? And then again, you come back to the malignancies of class.
HPR: Bhaskar Sankara published an essay in Jacobin last year that he called “The Left in Purgatory.” In it he suggested a parting of ways between leftist intellectualism and those the left was built for. That’s a leftist critique — there’s a centrist or right perspective which either views Marxism as if not dormant than something of a historical relic. I’m interested in what you make of the state of the left or, more precisely, the state of Marxism today and in the era post the fall of the Soviet Union.
VP: I mean, it’s interesting — the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but the largest political party in the world today is a Marxist party, and that’s the Communist Party of China. It’s got 96 million members. There are more Chinese Communists — that is to say, party members — than the population of Canada. So when people say Marxism died in the rubble of the Soviet Union, I say, well, maybe you’re just talking about Europe and maybe North America. Because the Communist parties in India have over a million and a half cadre members. That’s a lot of people, you know, that’s probably bigger than the Republican Party in the United States in terms of memberships.
So the Soviet Union collapsed, but Marxism or communism as a project remained intact for lots of people. It was heavily attacked, no doubt about that. People said, well, you know, it’s finished, it’s in the gulag, burned to bits, blah, blah, blah, Stalin, you know, the whole thing. But the fact is that it didn’t die, it continues to be a vital force in many countries, including in South Africa. Whatever one thinks of the various left political formations, they continue to do their work, contesting the privatization of leading state assets, raising issues of the electricity situation.
They still exist. The Communist Party of Sudan led a revolution recently, the Communist Party has been and is one of the most powerful forces in that country. The Workers Party in Brazil just won the election; a large section of the party are Marxists. So it’s a very North Atlantic perspective that looks at the fall of the Soviet Union as a cataclysm for the left, but in fact, the left didn’t disappear in the third world. It remained pretty solid.
So when Bhaskar in his essay says “The Left in Purgatory,” it sounds interesting, but my question is which left in which purgatory? I mean, China under Xi Jinping is very much driving a left agenda. Now, some people may disagree. They may say, well, you know what atrocities are happening in Xinjiang or whatever. But that’s an interesting information game taking place. In the middle of all this, China eradicated absolute poverty, including in Xinjiang. Why not also talk about that? But they don’t want to, they want to focus and say, well, it’s not really communist.
HPR: Besides what Western liberalism has made of communism today, there is also a view of capitalism — at least liberal capitalism — as entrenched, inevitable, simply here to stay. Is that a view you push back against?
VP: You know, 175 years ago, when Marx and Engels published “The Communist Manifesto” on February 21, 1848, they said either human history is going to proceed to a socialist civilization or we will see the common ruin of contending classes. Well, it looks like we’re already seeing the common ruin of the contending classes. It doesn’t appear so, because the oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t seem to be in a common ruin at all. But you can see if you look at Elon Musk’s Twitter account, the man is in distress, he doesn’t seem to be a happy man. There is a common ruin of one kind or the other. I mean, I want to say that there is nothing inevitable about socialism. The reason we’re fighting for it is we believe that capitalism is unable to complete the project of human emancipation. It’s just not able to do it.
So if you believe in the project of human emancipation, and you are trying to complete that project, you will inevitably go into some sort of socialist project. It is the only way. Socialism is a broad word for a lot of broad currents — it’s not singular. So, if people don’t adopt socialism but are still sensitive people, they may not believe that capitalism cannot complete the project of emancipation, they might believe that it can. That’s the contest.
Those are at least people who believe in human emancipation. There are lots of people on the right who don’t believe in it. And I would say there are two problems for humanity: one, the growth of a population that doesn’t believe in the possibility of human emancipation, a lot of North Atlantic university academics are against the possibility of human emancipation, they have become cynical, they have become overly practical, they become fragmentary in their postmodern professionalization. And then there’s a second problem, which is those who believe human emancipation is possible in capitalism (at least they believe in human emancipation).
So I would say that there are two problems — one is the gap of whether you believe or don’t believe in human emancipation that divides humanity. And secondly, the camp of those who believe in human emancipation are divided by those who believe that the project can or cannot be completed in capitalism. So these are the big debates, inside them are little debates. I for one am dismayed by people who don’t believe in the project of human emancipation. What’s the point of being alive then?
HPR: You spoke of a common ruin. It resembles the language being used to describe the present state of the climate. Is it an abstraction of that same idea of common ruin to make the increasingly popular claim that there is no solution to climate change without some kind of class war? Does the fight against climate change necessarily go through class war?
VP: The United States is the largest institutional polluter in the world and the largest producer of greenhouse gasses and blah, blah, blah. The United States also happens to have the largest military in the world, which is the largest institutional polluter by itself in the world, the Pentagon. But the United States, using its immense power, particularly power of information, and therefore, its role in the class struggle, argues that it’s everybody else that’s to blame for the climate catastrophe. It’s coal burning in the South and so on, not the US, even though it’s the largest per capita polluter. It’s always somebody else.
So, in fact, in my opinion, the United States is the one that’s imposing class struggle on the climate debate by saying that it itself is absolved — some recycling maybe is in order, but the problem is somebody else. They are imposing it. And in fact, other countries have been coming for 27 years to the Conference of the Parties meetings and saying, “Let’s negotiate.” The US doesn’t negotiate, it just says you guys have to cut. The US has imposed a class struggle on this.
HPR: Not so long ago, the Harvard Kennedy School denied a fellowship to Ken Roth, formerly of Human Rights Watch, on account of his criticism of Israel. We stopped earlier to consider the state of the Left, but a critique that arises frequently is that the American and Western Left operate with a limit to their politics — one can be “progressive except for Palestine.” Do you have a sense of what’s behind this? And what are your wishes for the future of Palestine?
VP: Look, frankly, we are talking after a massacre in Jenin — nine people killed. The Israelis prevented an ambulance from going there. One person killed just north of Jerusalem That’s the context in which we’re speaking. I’m furious by the violence against the Palestinians, Operation Break the Wave, it’s horrendous.
What is the solution? I mean, it’s really bathed in futility, because the Israelis are refusing to allow the possibility of a multinational state — full citizenship for Palestinians inside Israel. They refuse because they want to hold on to the idea of the Jewish state, like the Afrikaaner position, “it’s a white state, it’s an apartheid state.” This is an apartheid situation and that’s what Human Rights Watch eventually called it, after a lot of pressure.
Now, the other option is a two-state solution, but that is invalidated. Israel keeps stealing the land (according to what was given in Oslo) by settlement building and so on. So there is no one-state solution, there is no two-state solution. We’re stuck. That’s where it is, the Israelis just want to get rid of the Palestinians — “Palestinicide.” It’s like the Bantustans in South Africa: Let the black Africans live in the Bantustans and walk to work and then go back home at night, except maybe domestic servants who can stay in the house. That was the structure of South Africa, and to some extent it still exists today. But in Israel, they would like to move all the Palestinians to Jordan and to Egypt, get them out. That’s inexcusable, you can’t make an excuse for that.
In the United States, there’s a considerable section of people, especially right wing Christians who believe in a fantasy that the Jews have to build a temple in Jerusalem and then God will kill all the Jews and you will have the Messiah come back to Earth and there will be emancipation. It’s actually an anti-semitic dream of the right wing Christians, but they are a big ally of the Israeli government. And then there are sections of the Jewish community in the United States that have an emotional relationship to Israel. And it’s more complicated because there are military relations and there are arms deals — it’s not just the Jewish Diaspora, and it’s not just the right wing Christians. It’s a very complicated soup.
The bottom line is the United States is the great enabler of Israel. Ken Roth — his organization Human Rights Watch released a document which said Israel is an apartheid state — played a lot of games: delegitimizing people who are critics of Israel, including Richard Falk, who was the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. When this scandal started with the Carr Centre — which is hardly a great repository of open minds — Richard Falk wrote an article asking, “can you remember you smeared me around my position on Palestine?” So I just want to put that on the table, Ken Roth isn’t some shining knight in shining armor, it just happens to be the fact that he’s hoisted on his own petard. Now, I’m not celebrating that. I just think it reveals how far to the right things have gone, and how individual donor based the Carr Center is, that certain donors can say, “This is not acceptable.”
Harvard is one of the richest places on the planet earth — why doesn’t it just say, “We don’t need your money. We’ll fund the Carr Center ourselves. We’re sitting on billions of dollars.” But the fact that Harvard doesn’t do that is interesting, because when the person said, “I’m going to pull my money out,” Harvard didn’t say, “We don’t need it.” Harvard didn’t do that because they also don’t want to have the stain. You see, Harvard has an anti-semitic history, a real anti-semitic history. Harvard denied Jews admission. It has a real history of anti-semitism, which it hasn’t really owned up to, in the same way as it has its history of racism. So it’s much easier to stand on a box now and say, “We are against anti-semitism.” What anti-semitism? How is criticism of Israel anti-semitic?
HPR: I want to return once more to our discussion of Marxism. At least in the economics that I’ve taken here, discussions of Marxism typically end at the question of “practicality” — it’s a system that might appear desirable but history shows it to be unworkable in a world of scarce resources. How do you navigate questions in that domain, and how do you push back against some of those critiques of Marxism that say, “It’s a nice looking theory, but how is it to be carried out?”
VP: I mean, you want the real answer? You just do. The fact is, you have to stand for what you believe in. Okay. And if you continue to make compromises with your own beliefs, you will disappear. When I was in graduate school, I faced a lot of pressure, because it was the era of postmodernism, and I believed fundamentally in the transformation and emancipation of humanity. People would laugh at me, and I felt, if I’m going to give up my beliefs, I’m going to vanish. My aunt used to ask me, “Son, what’s your price?” What price would you accept to give up the things you believe in? If you believe in something, you should believe in it! What price are you willing to pay for that?
If somebody comes to you and says, “Hey, listen I’m going to give you a job. $200,000 a year, but you have to stop all this.” Would you accept it? Would you say no, that’s too low. A million dollars a year? Would you accept it? What’s your price? You believe in something right? Something is real to you. You’ve analyzed it. You have a grip of it, you know that practically that thought is leading you somewhere, right? You’ve understood that, caught the grip of it. Then somebody tells you “No, no, listen. I’m not going to argue with you about your ideas, I’m gonna pay you so much, but you just have to mute all that.” Is the money worth it?
And so that’s what I feel, you know. I don’t have a general theory. All I have is my own experience. I have my own views. They’re shaped out of my own history and my own analysis, my own understanding in the accompaniment of movements. I learn from movements a lot. But at the end of the day, the only time I would withdraw my views is either when I’m given an argument that shows they’re wrong, or if I surrender my views for some material or other interest. I’m not religious about my views — if you come to me and say “I can make some other argument,” I’ll accept that you made an argument and if your argument is correct I’ll alter my views. I’m not religious about them. But the fact is that I haven’t heard a good argument yet. So the only thing that would make me surrender my views is if I’m willing to make some material compromise. But that’s not happening.
HPR: What are your prospects or aspirations, then, for where the movement’s advocates might go from here?
VP: I don’t believe, either, that one should be nuts about the whole situation. Breakthroughs take place. The rightwing president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, was defeated by Lula. That was a considerable, enormous victory. We will see other such things happen — on the African continent, we carefully track developments taking place in the Sahel, where I’ve been several times. In Burkina Faso, Mali — they’ve kicked out the French military. Now, they are military governments themselves, but they have their own process of development. There are interesting things happening in Benin.
It’s not futile. I’m not saying that the world is at a point where the United States is going to say, “Okay guys, let’s experiment with socialism.” It’s not going to happen. It’s a protracted, long fight. But it’s not futile. And it’s not idiotic. But even if it were looking futile, I would still rest my hand firmly on the principle of hope. Much better to rest your hand on the principle of hope than to burn your hand and say, “To hell with it.”
