 Hello and welcome to a special Novara FM coming to you from the world transformed in Liverpool. If you have been following our content over the last couple of days you'll know that we've been pushing out interviews and panel recordings left, right and centre, although mainly left. So please do head over to the Novara Media website and rifle through it and tune in this evening to our live broadcast of Tisgy Sauer. Yesterday I was joined by the excellent Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute, Marxist scholar and brilliant historian of the Third World. I began by asking him about the current structure of global trade and the relation of international capital to the periphery. You know when very young Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, they were very young, they were in their 30s I think, they indicated that capitalism had a global appetite, that capital was not going to be held back by national boundaries. In fact there's that celebrated line about the Chinese walls will be broken. But of course it's not easy for capital to transcend its national boundaries. And there were two main blocks until the 1970s. One was as you said technological, the other was political. The anti-colonial struggles, the Soviet block, prevented capital from having a global footprint. So for at least 70 years capital was unable to enter the Soviet Union, China and very much a part of the Third World block, at least not on its own terms. When it came in, it came in on what we might call mediated terms. But also the technology was inadequate. So you had no satellites, you had no computer databases, you had no container ships. By the 1980s, the political obstacle to capital collapses. Soviet Union goes, Third World project collapses and China basically surrenders a very small part of its territory, the Shenzhen region. But this comes fortuitously for capital at the same time as you have these new technologies developed. So what this combination allowed is firstly it brought together under capital's dominion for the first time the world's working class. I mean it's extraordinary. We don't appreciate this enough that the world's working class was brought together under the dominion of capital in my generation. I remember this happening in front of my eyes. Secondly, the new technological developments allowed capital to break up factories and distribute them around the world. This is called the global commodity chain. Now what these two things did was they basically suggested the defeat of labor and the defeat of socialism because by disarticulating factories, breaking up factories, trade unions were weakened globally. Nationalization as a policy disappears from the table. So the resources of socialism, the reservoirs of socialist strength are depleted. And in that sense, the contemporary condition we're in where capital is able to go and extract raw materials at will virtually and is able to provide super exploitative level wages to produce goods. This is a very interesting place we're in and it was constructed institutionally, not by some angel of history, but by the actual events that took place about 40 years ago. It's interesting to me. So I was reading recently Beverly Silver's book on struggling the automobile industry. She says you have it starting in these plants in Detroit, in the US and you have increasing technological advances allow increased exploitation, but they also weaken worker struggle. And then of course, capital moves once worker struggle becomes too intense. And she says that there's an increasing speed in this cycle, so it moves and moves and moves and moves. And with the rising technological composition of that production process, she says it becomes notable that worker strength is weakened. What are the resources for worker strength in an era where capital has the whip hand over technology? You know, this is something that workers' movements have thought about for the last couple of decades. It's no point surrendering because there is no surrender before us. I think the main direction that workers' movements have gone in has been quite productive, which is to say it's very difficult to organize workers at the factory. You see, one of the interesting features of the socialist movement, trade union movement and so on is that when people like Marx and Engels were writing in the 19th century, the factory was this gargantuan institution which concentrated labor and where capital had invested a vast amount of its resources into the factory. If you could strike the factory, if you could close it down, capital had to pause. Today we are in a circumstance where capital actually is not investing down the commodity chain. Subcontractors are investing. You know, a firm like Nike doesn't make shoes. Apple actually makes no computers. They basically collect rent against intellectual property. So in this situation, there is no point being obstinate. Trade unions are tasked to organize workers, not to organize in factories. And what they've come to understand across the world, and I think quite sharply in South America and in South Asia, is that unions need to organize workers where they live. In other words, you need to tackle questions of survival, like water for instance, access to water, access to energy, access to education. I mean, in Cochabamba, in Bolivia, when Bechtel of San Francisco got the contract to privatize water delivery, it was the trade union federation that actually led the protest. You know, it's so interesting in the world of social movement theory, it's ignored that it was the trade union that actually initiated and fought the water war against Bechtel Corporation. This lesson has been learned, and I think it's an important lesson, which is that the point is to build workers' strength, and to build workers' strength where you can have a paralytic impact on capital. So you find the kind of choke points, but if it's the case then that the factory is no longer an effective site in many of these kind of large globalized chains. On the one hand we have that problem of renterism, which you're pointing to, but then it seems to me that much of the stuff I read draws a very kind of sharp distinction between peasant movements and trade union movements. You're saying that that distinction is if it has any validity at all, it's decreasing. Let's go in two directions for this. One is let's return to the question of the choke point. An analysis of the global commodity chain suggests that the greatest vulnerability for capital today is in transportation. In other words, at docks, global logistics, including not only transportation if we call it logistics, you also mean database operators, you mean Amazon sorting centers. These are the choke points. If a trade union wants to actually resume its political control over the system, it has to put resources to organize or to renew the strength of dock workers, various forms of logistical operators. But also there has to be a political challenge against intellectual property rights. You see in the 1980s, up to the 1980s, the general understanding of intellectual property rights was you could only patent the process by which you got to a certain product. If you're making a phone, only the process could be patented, not the phone. In the last round of the general agreements on trade and tariff in the 1980s, the so-called Uruguay round, the West pushed for a shift in patent policy. So what they did was now the product is patented, not the process. We need to reverse that. This is a political fight. Now, of course, the sad thing is everything I'm saying is totally boring. And left-wing people of a certain era get bored by these things. It sounds like legalism. Actually this is the fundamental wealth of corporations today is the intellectual property. And we need to go directly after it. Are there movements doing that? Not enough movements doing that. You see what's happened is that in the international solidarity world around third world solidarity, the question of debt forgiveness, the forgiveness of debt has eclipsed everything. And this is largely to do with the fact that the third world debt crisis of the 1980s has not ended. And it's kind of metastasized into a very ugly situation for most countries in the world. A lot of energy is focused on what we might call a kind of defensive posture. I think we need to come to a much more aggressive place where we go directly after in the WTO, perhaps the World Trade Organization, in the UN's body, which deals with intellectual property rights, you know, the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization. I mean, in these places, people's movements, sympathetic governments need to keep putting on the table the fact that we want to reverse the Uruguay round decision on intellectual property rights. Are there state actors within, say, the hegemonic part of the global system that you can see is sympathetic to that? Well, let's not use the word sympathetic, because that's too much to ask. Of course, the Chinese are playing an interesting game here, because, you see, unlike the other countries that surrendered to global capital, China did something quite unique, which is the Chinese would say to companies, you want to bring your, you know, factories into our free trade areas, you want to use our cheap labor. If you want to do that, you have to turn over technological knowledge. You know, you have to teach us not only technology, but science. We want to know, for instance, how solar batteries work. And you see, the Chinese did this perfectly legally, because they had a right to ask a French solar company, tell us how you make batteries. Five years later, the Chinese are the biggest solar battery makers on the planet. Now, it's interesting, the French company goes to the WTO says a violation of intellectual property. The Chinese turn around and say, no, this is a business agreement. So what I think we need to learn from that experience. This one step in the other direction, which is, I don't understand why countries so easily give up negotiations. You know, you want to come and mine in Zambia, okay, you want to our copper. Now you must teach us how to do the following eight things. Otherwise, you know, it's not merely a commercial deal. We want some long term benefit out of it. This is a short term solution. But we need to build, I think, the intellectual and political will to reverse the last Uruguay round. And that's not on the table at all. Some of the stuff you're saying here, it seems to suggest to me that do you have a sense that the left has a sort of outmoded sense of how production works, of how, you know, how information is commoditized and how that feeds into the political system. Is it just that the left is still looking for that 19th century factory? It's a very good thing you've said, and I don't want to say too much about this. But you know, in the 11th thesis of Feuerbach, Marx wrote, the point is the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it. I'm with you. I doubt very much that our contemporary philosophers are even interpreting the world, let alone wondering how to change it. In fact, it is indeed the problem that we are working with understandings of capitalism that don't fully grasp this, I think, generalized rontierism that has taken place, you know, that the major companies, pharmaceutical companies, for instance, they don't produce things. The factory is not the site of their profit. They have become entirely rent collectors. And you know, this insight will lead you to understand where you focus, because otherwise what happens is you then turn your attention to a Dominican Republic or Haiti, where, you know, some villainous character is created out of a small factory owner. I mean, that small factory owner might be villainous, but that small factory owner is not the locus, the source, the, you know, center of the problem. So I agree that there needs to be much more attention placed on the contemporary, the real economy that we have. And you know, one of the things about Marxism, because after all, I'm a Marxist. I come to this from that tradition. One of the things about Marxism is it's meant to be a creative analysis of the current concrete conditions. You know, it's not meant to be a religion. So my friends, let's go out there and do some research towards transformation. You mentioned, just as we were talking earlier, the end of sort of third world resistance movement. I don't think we hear much in, certainly in the European left, about the history of the third world. I know you've written on it. What should the European left hear and learn from those movements, including the defeated ones? Well, you know, in my judgment, you go to the past, not as a destination, but as a resource. You go there to learn what has happened and so on. Why it was so important to track the anti-colonial movements and then this third world project that was developed, let's say, at Bandung in 1955 in Indonesia, Belgrade, 1961. Why it's important to look at that is because these states, the majority of the world's people in 1973 at the United Nations put forward a resolution called the New International Economic Order, N-I-E-O. It passed the General Assembly, but of course had no impact on the international bodies. Now why I'm coming to that is I would like people to go back and read the New International Economic Order, because in it are proposals that are fairly sensible even for today. In the 1970s, there was a Dutch Sufi, conservative by the way, who was the head of the IMF. And in his very short career, he made a quite important suggestion. He said this is right after the oil crisis. He said all the oil profits, the so-called petrodollars that are being sequestered by these oil-producing countries should not be turned over to Western banks, because what they will do is they'll inflate the banking industry, make the banking industry more powerful. Banking industry will not be able to find places to invest and will create fictional instruments. That sounds like a familiar story. Everything he said in the 1970s came true. What he said instead was why don't we create some international body, it could be a subsidiary of the IMF, but some international body that holds this money in trust and gives out loans to improve social development. For instance, some things, this is very much against the grain of new labor thinking, what I'm going to say. And since we are in Britain now, I'm nervous to criticize new labor too frontally. I think you'll find a welcome. You never know. You know, they rehabilitate themselves. In the United States, George W. Bush rehabilitated. Oh, yes. Hero of the resistance now. Exactly. Soon Tony Blair, all people may be rehabilitated. Anyway. Well, I'm breathing. Anyway, never mind. But there was an idea in new labor, but of course shared in the West generally, that everything that you privatize is more efficient. That efficiencies come out of privatization. The fact is some things are not efficient. You know, education is not efficient. Education does not have a rate of return. Education is our gift to children for the next generation. It's not meant to be something that we make money on. Health is our gift to each other to make sure we are all not as sick as we could become. You know, things like transportation. These are not meant to be profit making. You have a train system not to make money off it, but to move people to increase their imagination. So in this sense, what he was saying in the 1970s in the IMF, ironically in the IMF, was let's create a fund to invest in genuine social life without concern for rate of return. Because after all, the petrodollars are an enormous fund. Why do we need to make more money off it? Let's use this money to improve the lives of people. I think this is why we go back to the past, to learn in defeat, in the ruins, to learn what shines like a magpie. That's what a historian should be, a magpie in the ruins. We are in Britain, and obviously we have the unusual feat of a socialist now leading the Labour Party. He's a socialist with a history of international solidarity, of organisation with solidarity campaigns internationally. And yet, it has always seemed to me, it does seem to me that where this new socialist direction of the Labour Party is at its weakness, it's weakest, rather, is in the international dimension, is in its attitude to foreign policy, and maybe it's an accusation that's just leveled at European social democracy, is that it has a tendency towards chauvinism. But it seems odd that there's an oversight there. What do you make of it? Firstly, I would like to just say to you with my heart that Jeremy Corbyn is a person of great integrity, and over the course of his entire career has stood with people who have suffered in different ways. And I don't think Mr Corbyn has shirked any protest against injustice. So that must be said, I think the vilification of Jeremy Corbyn surprises me when I read about it in the media. The very fact that people can call him an anti-Semite seems to me strikingly ignorant. A man of such high integrity should have some, I think, dignity proffered to him even by his critics. But that doesn't, of course, mean that his party is alongside him. I think here is the gulf. I think there's a tendency in social democracy, particularly in the West, to move towards a kind of economic protectionism. How do we take care of our own? And I think this is a very limiting posture. It leads in disturbing places. Sarah Wagenek, for instance, of the delinquer, has gone in an extreme direction from delinquer, the party of the left, she has come to the position essentially of anti-immigration, saying let's take care of our people first. So I would suggest to people in Britain who are of the view that let's take care of our people first, that this is genuinely a slope that is well lubricated, that leads you to where Sarah Wagenek has gone. And I would say that that's something people need to be very cautious about, that you don't actually win your humanity by closing your island down. You win your humanity by reaching out to people. This is something Corbyn, I think, knows very well, intimately well. So here I think the question that the British progressive movement, the left social democracy needs to ask itself. You know, if you really want to live up to your values, look into the mirror of BAE systems because at the same time as you're saying let's fund our schools, let's fund public transport, let's fund the NIH, whatever it is, the various institutions, very important institutions. Do you want to fund these institutions by the profits of BAE systems, selling arms to kill Yemeni children, bringing famine in Yemen? I don't think so. I think sensitive people in Britain, the majority of the British public, sensitive people, don't want that. And I think we sharply need to put that forward as the choice. That really, if you don't want that, then you need to be internationalist. And this is where I say that I think that Labour Party really needs to become the party of Jeremy Corbyn and not merely have Jeremy Corbyn as its leader. Yeah, I agree entirely. Maybe building on that, so I'm thinking about that kind of core Marxist category of imperialism. Britain's in the imperialist core. It has things like BAE systems, huge funds of technological wealth. If we were to attempt to move politically in another direction, what is the best use for those kind of resources? So I get from what you've been saying that in one sense it would be ideal to roll back intellectual property to euthanize the rentier in a far more intense sense than Cain's probably meant it. But we still have this. Is there the possibility of a globally redistributive project? Not merely redistribution. After all, there is a lot of wealth in Zambia. Zambia doesn't need the city of London to provide it wealth. It needs for big Canadian Swiss mining companies not to misprice and steal plunder from Zambia today. You know, in Zambia, there is a region known as the Copper Belt. This is one of the richest seams of copper in the world. There are five companies that mainly mine in the Copper Belt. One is Chinese. The rest are not Chinese, but you'll only hear about the Chinese firm. They are Swiss. They are Canadian. You see, the Swiss and the Canadian are always able to show themselves as extraordinarily sophisticated. And therefore, nobody points the finger at them. But let's point the finger at them. The children that live above who walk on the ground of the Copper Belt, 60% of them are illiterate. There are more children illiterate now than there were when Kenneth Kwanza was the leader of Zambia. And Ken Kwanza was run out of power in the early 1990s. So there's been a slight backwards. You see, what I would say on the one hand is that we need to allow countries like Zambia to develop. We shouldn't be stealing from them. That's what's happening. So it's not a question of redistributing wealth. It's a question of allowing the country to actually live on its own two feet. But secondly, I think this was quite fashionable as a talking point when the Cold War ended. And this was the reconversion question. I mean, you have arms industry, but I see a lot of infrastructure in Britain that really does require help. And there's people whose entire careers, smart engineers who are wasting their lives designing weapon systems when they should be designing a clean energy way of moving people across even this small island. You know, you need better transportation. You need better transportation that links Manchester to Liverpool. I mean, of all things, it's so hard to get from that airport to Liverpool. I mean, there's got to be a fast train that comes here designed by one of the scientists or a group of them that are right now designing the best siting system for missiles. I mean, it's a waste of our resources. It's not even a question of redistribution. It's the better management of precious resources that are being deeply wasted in an inhumane direction. This is a strongly moral appeal, isn't it? And there's often a hesitancy, I think, within certainly the Western left to appeal in that way that there are better, like objectively better ways to use your wisdom or to use your skills. Is that hesitation wrong? I mean, I'm not opposed to a good moral argument. After all, I come from the tradition which is deeply moralistic. I mean, imagine the entire left-wing tradition without people standing there and banging. Well, Khrushchev went one step further and banged his shoe at the UN podium. But moral arguments are important because we are human beings. Now, I wouldn't say let's remain at the moral level. I'd say let's go to the next level, which is I'd like to ask people in Britain, do you like being inconvenienced? I mean, do you enjoy poor public transportation? You see, you are being given a false choice. You're being told public transport is bad. Let's privatize it. Well, I'm saying let's create another choice. Public transport is bad today. Public transport need not be bad tomorrow. The problem isn't public transport is misallocation of resources, the real issue. And I'm talking here now about intellectual thought, about where the brightest people seem to be going. And when you have a situation like in the United States, where very bright people who study mathematics and physics go to work for Goldman Sachs to design sophisticated and idiotic instruments like derivatives and so on, this is a waste of human resources. I mean, the greatest killer of women in Nepal is asphyxiation because they use smoke fires inside their little houses. I go to universities and I ask people, do you have designs for smokeless chulas, basically a little thing? Many of these are already available because it's become a cliche of development projects for engineering students to design these. But then these same students, having designed this in their nice liberal environment of their development lab, go and work for BAE systems or Goldman Sachs or whatever it is. And they are suffering from a kind of moral calamity themselves. So it's not just a moral issue, it's also a practical issue. Is this the island you want to live on? And the issue of self-interest. It's definitely self-interest, not only for those who suffer from bad transportation, but for the human beings who have to go and design these awful things. I'm interested, I think in the question of how capital would resist these moves. And we know that it does. We know all too well the history written in letters of blood and fire, as Marx would say, of how capital resist this. Where do you see the strengths of capital? Because we can see some weaknesses at the moment. It's unusual. It's not how it was when I was 15 or so, that it looked like we were in the eternal 1990s. We can see some weaknesses, but we should think about its strengths as well. Where are capital strengths? Where will it fight back from? Well, there's two different things you're saying. One is what are its strengths itself and what are its weapons that it will use to protect what it has. I think the first one, and I'm not naive here, I think that one of the immense advantages of capitalism is it's been able to take advantage of human ingenuity. We've had incredible things produced in the modern period. But is this really thanks to capitalism? Because after all, so much of the ingenuity was publicly financed. The internet was a publicly financed venture. So many pharmaceutical drugs, major breakthroughs were publicly financed. So we sometimes gave capitalism too much credit for things that it takes credit for. But how will it fight back? Certainly on intellectual property, it's going to fight viciously. And it will make the argument that, well, we invested money in research, therefore, you can't take a property back. I'm going back to the manifesto because it's such a brilliant book. But in the manifesto, Marx says, and Engels say quite cleverly, look, we are not interested in your shirt. I'm not interested in your clothes or your, firstly, you don't own anything. He says 90% of peasants don't own their land. They own debt. They don't own their land. So what's happened is the word property has become inflated. When we say we are against private property, I'm not going to nationalize your toothbrush. I want to nationalize one part of the economy, which is to say, I would like to nationalize socially produced wealth, or at least a part of it. That part of it, which we should use towards, in an interesting, perhaps decentralized way, use towards the production of a new society. One of the great errors in the Soviet Union was that they centralized their nationalization policy. You don't need to centralize. We have learned over the course of the century the power of cooperatives, the power of small-scale sector nationalization. We've understood the value of small dams rather than giant dams. We've learned a lot in these 100 years. We don't have to go back and repeat the same, you know. One of the important things I would say about the tradition of socialism, you know, when you say how will they fight back? One of the important things about the tradition of socialism is socialists should give each other the right to fail. You know, we don't. We look at failed experiments and we condemn people. You should have the right to fail because we'll only learn dialectically through our failures. And I think that's a lesson we've really forgotten. I want to ask you about the left in India and Indian communism. Indian communism is something that is understudied, I think, in the West. You don't hear much about it. It has its own sort of unique history. Tell me a little bit about the history of the left in India and then we can come on perhaps to talk about the current situation. Well, I mean, the left in India is related intimately to the British left. You know, let's face it, we are left traditions, many. Of course, there is the Fabian tradition. It plays an important role in the early phase of the Indian socialist movement. Of course, there's a communist tradition which runs through the experience of the Russian Revolution but also the Communist Party of Great Britain, you know, played an important role. Cannot underestimate the role of Rajnipam Dutt, for instance, who I read as a schoolboy, his great book, India Today. I mean, RP Dutt didn't really travel much to India, but his essays, weekly essay in Labour Monthly was read, you know, Labour Weekly was read as if it was gospel because he was an extraordinarily well-informed person. But the Indian left, as it developed, as I said, is a wide stream. It's not a narrow current. It's a very wide river. And the width runs from basically what in the West you call social democracy or even sections of Gandhian socialism all the way out to Maoism. It's a very wide river. And I think we should emphasize its width and emphasize that the current moment left unity is very important in India. So groups are beginning to work together like they've never worked together before. Now, this tradition that developed in India, especially the communist tradition, began to have a serious debate around the time when India won its independence from Britain. And the debate was around how to understand the Indian leadership, the bourgeoisie. It was also the role of the Soviet Union, how to understand that. So the splits in the Indian movement, unlike in the West where the splits were around issues of Stalin, Trotsky, this, that and the other, much more sectarian in the West. In India, the splits were around how do you characterize the Indian bourgeoisie and what should be our relationship to the Soviet Union or China or what not. These were really important substantive debates because after all these were mass movements and these were movements where millions of people were card-carrying members of these organizations. You know, these are not small group of skills where doctrine and ideology became the main issue. It was really what strategy should you create. So over the course of the 20th century, the bulk of Indian communism had a fraternal but not subordinate relationship to the USSR. So when the USSR collapsed in the 1990s, Indian communism didn't collapse. You know, it's important to see countries where the break had come before 1991, those parties remained because their reason of existence wasn't the Soviet Union. It was their own revolution that they were trying to build and they had already built their own theory. You know, one of the things I've been trying to do over the last few years is to introduce people around the world to the theories of communist movements, left movements outside the West so that the debates are not always, you know, with reference points that are familiar, you know, Luxembourg, Lenin, Bernstein, etc. But let's see what EMS Nambudri Pad was saying. Let's even not talk only about Trotsky. Let's see what Neville Alexander was saying in South Africa. You know, a South African greatly inspired by Trotsky but created his own understanding, his own... So we need to actually see not only the width of this river, but its depth, because the fact is that they developed their own theories. You know, one of the sad ways in which the left is thought about is theory is made in Europe. And then the rest of the world, you have people writing guerrilla manuals. Che Guevara's guerrilla manual, you know, the guerrilla manuals coming out of Vietnam, etc. Those are just tactical, mini-manual of an urban guerrilla from Marighella of Brazil. But these are not just tactical manuals of how to fight a guerrilla war. Look elsewhere for their theories. And I think that's something I'm very interested in, you know, helping the Western left broaden its terms of reference so that this Western Marxist tradition is not so claustrophobic. Yes, and there are Indian Communist parties that have quite significant experience in power, certainly regional power in say Kerala, right? Do you think there's something bad that can be, you know, specifically brought to bear on the situation of a European left approaching state power for the first time in decades? Well, I'm happy that you asked me that question. One of the places I work is at Leftwood Books in Delhi, where we have been publishing a series of books on the Kerala experience. We have done two already and a third is going to come out. And I'll tell you quickly what they're about. One of them is about a participatory planning process that the government of Kerala did in the 1990s, where the government said that our budgeting, the budget that we're going to have is not going to be written in Trivandrum, in the capital. It's going to be written in every village. And the process started months before the budget was to have been proposed, where in small local areas, people came in to train, you know, interested parties to come and start the process of budgeting. In order to do the budgeting, they had to first understand what is our natural resources? What resources have we commodified? What are other resources we don't want to commodify? You know, do we in our area need to spend money on a road or do we need little metal bridges to cross the stream so that people who don't have cars can walk? And those decisions then went upward to the state government and a very good budget was produced. I think this is a very productive area to look at, the idea of participatory budgeting, but participatory planning as well, not just budgeting, because you have to plan your economy. They did budgeting in Porto Alegre, the workers' party attempted participatory budgeting. But this is participatory planning. The second book we produced was on a construction workers cooperative that is now almost 100 years old. And it's become like a multinational corporation, except it's still a cooperative. And the workers still control it. Now, I am very, very much a booster of the idea of cooperatives. I mean, I know that there are people on the left who sniff and sneer and don't like to pay attention to these things, you know, who say silly things like, well, you know, let's wait for the revolution and then the forms will show. It doesn't work like that. You have to build tomorrow today. And cooperatives are an excellent way to reconstruct production relations. And in Kerala, they are experimenting with cooperatives. And finally, finance. How do you raise finance to do interesting things? You don't actually have to go to international finance markets. There are lots of resources available to you. It just depends what you want to do. Do you want to build a big petrochemical hub that spews toxins? Then you need to go to international finance markets. Do you want to improve the quality of life of the people who live there? Well, now you can reach out to people for different kinds of resources, such as voluntary labor. You know, the labor of people is a great investment. So if you're able to canalize people's voluntary labor, this is something Che Guevara understood and wrote about. He theorized the concept of voluntary labor. We take this very seriously. When there were terrible floods in Kerala, it was voluntary labor that came in and cleaned things up. You know, there was a horrible hurricane in Puerto Rico last year and the island is still devastated. The island is still devastated. Richest country in the world, the center of world imperialism, and they've still let this area be devastated. Kerala, the floods were just a few weeks ago. Voluntary labor, just as in Cuba during Hurricane Maria, voluntary labor came in and sorted things out. It sounds naive to say these things, but I'm sorry to say, socialism has to draw from your actual love and belief in the people. It sounds naive, surely, because certainly we sit in a system in which alienation is so fundamental, but it's very hard to imagine something outside of that. And you're saying that it's, even if it's not completely achieved, it's sort of partly achieved and that's what spurs that kind of thing. You know, I'll tell you some things that might be portable into the British context. You see, our goal as human beings is to create communities and societies. And we have allowed corporations to even take up this part of life. So for instance, you'll have a London marathon. It will be sponsored by corporations. So why doesn't a trade union say we want to do a 10 kilometer run to end cancer or to raise money for cancer? You see, cancer is a problem in our society. Why can't a trade union do, why can't Nuwara media say we want to do a cleanup day? You know, we have an office in this building in London and we want that neighborhood. We are calling upon all businesses in our neighborhood to come on Sunday. We are going to do a cleanup. We've got a DJ playing music. We're going to have food. You know, we've allowed corporations to do these things but this is what brings people together. It gives people an experience of doing something where you don't have to wear a sign. This is brought to you by the Bank of Scotland or whatever. You know, so I think these are practical ways in which people feel that the society is in their building society. You know, we don't do these festivals, you know, that we come to the world transformed and so on. What's nice about them is it brings people together but it doesn't bring us together to do voluntary labor. It only brings the volunteers together but what a great experience the volunteers have. You know, but the other people come as spectators. We have to reconstruct festivals like this so that nobody is a spectator. Everybody is participating in some voluntary labor, you know, in militant work as they call it in Brazil. I want to end just by asking about political situation in India because it is extreme and it is severe. There was muted reaction to the election of Narendra Modi globally. Someone with whom we can do business I think was the general sense. For me it was, you know, genuinely, you know, this guy is an arch reactionary. You know, his RSS background, he's the butcher of Gujarat and there were, you know, Britain rolled out the red carpet for him over here. What is the political situation like now in India? I mean, I'm glad you said all that in the introduction to the question because it makes the point about Modi himself. Modi is the antithesis of Corbin, shall we say. It's important to remember that the BJP only won 30% of the vote in 2014. That means 70% of those who voted did not vote for Narendra Modi. The problem with our electoral democracy, what we call democracy, is that a minority government can behave as if they are imperial. In fact, Mr. Narendra Modi sometimes behaves as if he's the Maharaja of India. So this is important because there is a very strong section, thoroughly opposed to Mr. Modi. What the election of people like Modi, Erdogan, Trump, Duterte, you name them, what they do is they enable the sliver of the far right to try to take over society. You know, society hardens. Society becomes scared. Society becomes much more unfriendly, dangerous, violent and so on. But there is a very strong undertow against Mr. Modi. You know, recently the Modi government arrested five activists, journalists. Really, in fact, I am friends with most of them. You know, one of them and I write for the same media house, NewsClick, that's Gautam Navlakha. So they went after these people saying that there's a plot to kill Mr. Modi. There's no such plot to kill Mr. Modi. Everybody knows that. But I must say that there has been a reaction outside India, which has been quite good, including from the United Nations, which suggested that these arrests were really going too far. And the election next year is not going to be easy because after all, Mr. Modi does command a section of the population, just as Mr. Trump commands 30% of the American electorate. But India is a parliamentary system. It is hoped that in one small section of India, that is the belts that speaks Hindi, particularly Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, there is a hope, especially in Uttar Pradesh, that Mr. Modi's party will be defeated if the opposition comes together. And that's the crucial issue. Because when the opposition doesn't come together, his people can get elected with 20% of the vote. In one seat, the person wants 17% of the vote. That means, just to say it, the obvious point, 83% of the people voted against the member of parliament. The situation kind of vitiates. Congress party represented. Tarik Ali wrote a book which was not one of the books that really was read much, but it was called something like the extreme center. I thought that phrase was quite charming, the extreme center. What it means, of course, is that the center has become extremist with its privatization policies, its, let's say, counter-terrorism kind of policies and so on, they've become fanatical in their fear of those whom they deem to be terrorists or those whom they deem to be anti-privatization. And it's this fanaticism that leads them to criminalized dissent. I think this is the way the arrow goes. The arrests of these five people in India, the disdain for dissent in the West, it all comes from this fanaticism. So these extreme fanatics of the center, they want you to look at the fascistic forces and say, look at them, they are horrible. Taking the eye off this, but in fact, both of them go after dissent. One, perhaps charmingly, you know, who can deny the fact that in his youth, Tony Blair was much more charming than Theresa May today. Who can deny that? Now, of course, he's not charming anymore. He looks sort of punch drunk, drugged by the Saudis and others who are pumping, you know, oil money into his veins. But they like to give this view that they are socially progressive and so on. I think this is an issue in India as well. The Congress party is utterly an extreme centrist party. Socialist core has been relatively vacated. The current leader of the party, very young man, Rahul Gandhi, grandson of Indira Gandhi, great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, you know, has been trying to move some sort of social democratic agenda, but he's not a natural politician. You know, in some families, some businesses are good with families, maybe shop keeping and so on. Politics is a very bad family business. You know, it hasn't really worked out well for the children of politicians who try. It's a good thing Mark Thatcher continued to try to race cars in the Sahara Desert and to take bribes from friends here and there. He would have been a terrible. Imagine him as the leader of the conservative party. Appalling. Not that your leader of the conservative party today is any better. Maybe he would have been better than her, but still. So Rahul Gandhi is, you know, attempting to move an agenda, but I don't think he's going to be able to do it quickly enough. It's going to come down to the regional parties, actually. The parties of the dominant castes in Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samajwadi, they need to unify against the BJP. In the South, the BJP is going to be wiped out again, but the temptations in places like Tamil Nadu to ally with the BJP in the center, somebody has to pay a cost for that. And the party in Tamil Nadu in power, the AIADMK, is an ally of the BJP in the center, even though the BJP doesn't need their seats. They need to be, you know, punished for allying with the BJP. In fact, the BJP might lose its ally in Maharashtra, the even more far-right group, the Shivzena. So let's see what happens. But I just want to emphasize that 70% of the population did not vote for Mr. Modi in 2014. I'm not saying this to protect the dignity of India. I'm saying this merely as a practical issue. Yes. Vijay Prasad, thank you very much for joining me today. Pleasure. Thanks a lot. And we'll be keeping an eye on those elections. This show is brought to you by Navara Media. To find articles, videos, and more audio content like this, head to navaramedia.com. If you've particularly enjoyed this podcast and encourage others to listen to it, why not head to iTunes and as well as subscribing and leave us a review? Navara Media can exist only thanks to the generosity of our subscribers and supporters. If you have the means, please consider subscribing at support.navaramedia.com. As well as helping us continue to produce regular content, subscribers will also receive priority access to events as well as promotions throughout the year. For regular updates, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. 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