Compilation of Roy’s best nonfiction over 20 years… I’m all caught up!
--Well, what can I say. With the best books, I always feel humbled experiencing Compilation of Roy’s best nonfiction over 20 years… I’m all caught up!
--Well, what can I say. With the best books, I always feel humbled experiencing the mental tapestry crafted over many years by the author, a synthesis of lineages of thoughts culminating in a work of many lifetimes. It is a wondrous moment where we transcend the dimensions of time and our own brief dance with it. --Roy has expressed her joy of writing fiction (which I have not yet read; yes, I do neglect fiction), while she treats nonfiction as urgent arguments. These topics are indeed urgent and grim, and yet Roy’s words and wit cut through all obstacles to find the humanity in the struggles.
--The title essay “My Seditious Heart” (2016) reviews the rise of Hindu fascism and concludes with the conflicts and resistance in the higher education system, where student activists are building new anti-caste, anti-capitalist alliances inspired by B.R. Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, Birsa Munda, Jyotirao Govindrao Phule, etc.
An absolute favorite dive into censored history to reemerge with the present conditions, so I have to give a worthy review...
Preamble on Vijay: --As inAn absolute favorite dive into censored history to reemerge with the present conditions, so I have to give a worthy review...
Preamble on Vijay: --As in his lectures (highly recommended, see below), Vijay Prashad has such mastery of articulating overarching social issues, drilling down to give detailed examples before resurfacing to tie the ideas together. So well-read, articulate, and with so much humanity... an inspiration. --Prashad brings to life the side of history that is censored, the decolonization movements that shook 20th century power structures against all odds, their triumphs and their setbacks. --Main concept = class analysis of anti-colonial independence movements, revealing their short-term compromises that escalated into long-term crises.
Fair Warning: --This is an in-depth, radical analysis into the roots of global inequities. 1) For Western audiences trapped in their domestic liberal vs. conservative “debates” with little world history: I’m impressed you stumbled across this book, but a “gentler” introduction may be advisable to review the history/economics of imperialism (from the bloody military interventions to the opaque power politics of debt and “free trade”): The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
3) Once you’re ready to dive in, I recommend taking hierarchical notes, keeping in mind to highlight the general ideas and use the historical details as case studies; so much information to organize. Below is my attempt to distill the lessons...
Censored Successes 1) Universal Human Rights: --Wait, from the Global South? Surprised? Didn’t read this in your history books? --Power requires a level of consent, so it appropriates social innovations originating from the bottom. The framing then becomes Enlightened superiors handing down progress to their backward underlings. The logic is rather perverse; which side has the incentives/grievances to push for social change in the first place? --Consider “Liberalism”, which is now associated with its political rhetoric of tolerance (multiculturalism, feminism, human rights). In reality, the world has experienced Liberalism (from the Atlantic Slave Trade to the Enclosures to the Age of Imperialism to today’s global division of labour) by the following definition (going back to Locke): those who developed the land deserve to own the land. Even if we set aside genocidal displacement and accept “development”, the ownership was highly inequitable with most labourers owning little. --In the case of the Third World, sensitive Liberals may put a spotlight on Eleanor Roosevelt’s “human rights” agenda at the UN, ignoring the various Latin American representatives efforts to expand human rights (education, work, healthcare, social security). --Meanwhile, Western Liberals saw the Global South as a treasure-trove of valuable resources and cheap/free labour during colonialism. After resistance mounted on these liberal business practices, the view on the Global South switched to “overpopulation” fear-mongering. Ah, Liberalism… first you commit genocide (ex. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World), and then you entertain quasi-genocide (Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis).
2) Internationalist Nationalism united against Imperialism: --The first 1/3 of this book highlights the solidarity of global anti-imperialism; with a shared history of enduring the teeth of colonialism and the overwhelming imbalance in arms, the Global South/"Third World” became the voice of reason on the global stage, using the United Nations (despite its limitations) as a platform. Disarmament has been a key demand, from the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung to the 60s Non-Aligned Movement focusing on nuclear disarmament (which is after all an existential threat to humanity). --Thus, this nationalist (sovereignty) internationalism (united against imperialism) provided space to experiment with cultural development outside of Europe's conceptions of nationalism. Instead of nativism, there were experiments in multiplicity: a secular state to acknowledge multiple religions, anti-racism to mend colonialism's divide-and-conquer scars, and multilingualism. --A key outcome from experiments in social development is economic justice and Global South contributions to Development Economics. For example, UNCTAD's New International Economic Order (NIEO) provided alternative visions to the imperialist GATT (and convenient Liberal smokescreens like “Modernization Theory” which focuses on blaming poverty on “traditional” culture, covering up imperialism forcing dependency through “free trade” and usurious debt). --Economic justice focuses on redistribution of world’s resources + more dignified rate-of-return for labour (including more high-productivity sectors i.e. manufactured goods, instead of relying on exporting raw materials) + shared acknowledgement of the heritage of science/technology/culture. --The 1966 Tricontinental Conference (Africa + Asia + Latin America) during Vietnam’s resistance to American bombardment epitomizes the hope of solidarity (and global diplomacy), which is why Prashad has started the Tricontinental Institute of Social Research. --“[…] who would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plutocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labour without want, now wanted to labour in their own image!”
Contradictions to Crises 1) Domestic Elites, Class Contradiction, and Cruel Cultural Nationalism: --The central contradiction at the heart of the Third World project was uniting with hostile domestic classes (i.e. landlords, emerging industrial/financial capitalists) in order to prioritize the abolition of colonialism. --While this may have been pragmatic at the start, domestic hierarchies were protected and the contradictions grew. Radical Left groups led anti-colonialism and programs for social development, but domestic elites used them to their benefit and purged them at their discretion. --Using nationalism to fight colonialism thus became perverted, as solidarity increasingly gave way to crude nationalism. --For example, the Sino-Indian border conflicts led to prioritizing militarization; this derailed the Global South’s demands for global disarmament and moved various members into the nets of Cold War spheres. --More generally, independence required systemic transformations and great sacrifices to attend to the scares of colonialism and challenge the neocolonialism of global economics. This was not in the class interest of domestic elites, who pivoted to apolitical (safer) market-oriented liberal-globalization “development” (see below). The failures here (rampant inequity, losing economic sovereignty) combined with capitalism's abstraction (And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future) opened the doors to cruel cultural nationalism, which diverted blame onto visible minorities instead of the abstractions of global division of labour/debt financing etc (reactionary politics 101, as seen in Nazism/Fascism/Global Trumpism):
2) Imperialism’s Dollars: --Country-by-country comparisons of “advanced” vs. “developing” conveniently assume national economies, obscuring the dependencies/violence of global trade/finance/militarism (i.e. “imperialism”). --Liberal economics is built on cheap raw materials and labour, which requires the divide. Forced (often by violent means) into dependency on the loser end of the global division of labour, liberal free trade laws forces open “free markets” in weaker countries (weaker states) while the stronger countries maintain non-market protection (stronger states). Open markets prevent domestic planning to build higher-productivity sectors, which requires nurturing before it is ready for global competition (“Infant Industry argument”); this is how the advanced West developed (along with violently smashing competition), in particular Britain and America. -Crucial in-depth economic theory to supplement Prashad: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present -The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions -Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism --A key example is agriculture. The Global South, without protection to build other sectors and forced to swim in the open seas of the global market (free trade), competes in the global agriculture market with the US. The US creates enormous agricultural surpluses, with its immense technological scale and (perhaps more importantly) strong state protectionism. Thus, global market price shocks disproportionally ravage the Global South. Would like to read more on the Green Revolution in this context… --Liberal finance (IMF, World Bank), like all private capitalist banking, profits from interest payments (usury). Post-colonial countries are of course in desperate need of capital for their social development projects, but Liberal finance targets the ill-planned projects of Global South elites. Falling into debt traps, productivity gains end up going to debt services (interest payments). A discussion on this "Super Imperialism": https://youtu.be/paUgY6SGlgY --"The mecca of IMF-driven globalization is therefore in the ability to open one's economy to stateless, soulless corporations while blaming the failure of well-being on religious, ethnic, sexual, and other minorities." --The 1970s-80s Nixon Shock, Oil Shocks, and Volcker Shock are popular turning point events in Western-centric narratives on the collapse of Keynesianism/Welfare State, but what is unmentioned is the overwhelming costs to the Global South’s social development/industrialization projects and subsequent Third World Debt Crisis: -more accessible: The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy -dive: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance --For structural solutions, see: -Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present -Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World -A People’s Green New Deal
In his words: Quoting the beginning of "The Darker Nations":
Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals.
The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's "Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence.
The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home empty-handed. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as "overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.
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