00:00:00.360Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Vijay Prasad, originally aired in February of 2021. We hope you enjoy this special encore episode.
00:00:14.960this is a canary in the coal mine not of social systems that are not working and so on it's a
00:00:24.680canary in the coal mine about feeling about the compassion sense of compassion in a country
00:00:30.340Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research chief editor at
00:00:38.260Left Word Books and chief correspondent for Globetrotter his most recent book is Washington
00:00:44.040Bullets, just out from Monthly Review Press, with a preface by Ivo Morales Aime.
00:00:52.360Well, Vijay, thank you so much for coming on to For the Wild.
00:00:56.800Great. It's great to be with you. And I just love the name of this podcast,
00:01:01.280For the Wild. It's very resonant of, you know, so much about the way we live in the world where,
00:01:07.980you know well the wild where is it now? Absolutely yeah I think about that a lot as I'm
00:01:16.260in the world and what I stand for and thank you for picking up on that. So Vijay as a journalist
00:01:26.180and commentator I'd like to start our conversation in recognition of how the corporate media is
00:01:32.460manipulating us today. Certainly the US media has always ideologically censored that which critiques
00:01:39.320the state. But what I'm really noticing now is the ways in which right-winged media and left-wing
00:01:46.180media are both pushing the narrative that the country is in peril because of the other side.
00:01:51.880And it seems to me that we're being fed a great contradiction where if neither end of the spectrum
00:01:58.140is happy and both are blaming one another, we're left to wonder what is actually happening.
00:02:04.780Specifically, I'm thinking about how many of us have become captivated by the sensationalized
00:02:10.740nature of hate and violence and whether or not you think we're becoming deeply addicted to this
00:02:16.440type of media. If so, how does this prevent us from having nuanced conversations and reaching
00:02:23.780out to one another? And how does this continue to serve the ruling class?
00:02:30.260It's a great way to begin. For this, I think you have to plumb more than just the media. You have
00:02:37.080to go deeper into the kind of cultural stasis that exists, not only in the United States,
00:02:44.880but in a number of advanced capitalist countries, you know, in Western Europe, maybe even in
00:02:50.660countries like Brazil and India. You have to go deeper into a kind of cultural malaise which has
00:02:57.000set in. The way I see it is about maybe 40, 50 years ago as a consequence of changes in the way
00:03:06.040goods are produced rather than have big factories inside one country, inside a territory. The new
00:03:13.020technological developments allowed firms to be broken up and you create what's known as the
00:03:19.260global commodity chain, you create disarticulated production, a car factory isn't one big factory,
00:03:25.900you make, you know, 50, 60, 100 components of the car in 100 factories, you know, which are based in
00:03:32.66020 countries, and the goods are moved back and forth, and then they're assembled in one place.
00:03:37.840What this did was, it enabled the people who would have invested money in a factory in, say,
00:03:45.140Detroit, it enabled them to actually not invest much in the world. See, when you have a big
00:03:50.880factory, you have to invest a lot of money into that factory, you know, let's say millions of
00:03:55.220dollars. If you've broken it up into 20 different factories, the investment in each factory is
00:04:00.780lessened. Because these factories or these manufacturing plants are in Mexico or in,
00:04:06.660you know, Malaysia or in Indonesia, wherever they are, they're often subcontracted. So somebody in
00:04:12.740Malaysia has to raise the funds, much less than starting a big car factory. They have to raise0.83
00:04:19.260the funds, they invest the money. And so the auto manufacturer doesn't actually have to invest a lot
00:04:24.500of money overseas. You see this actually quite dramatically with Apple. Apple doesn't make
00:04:30.140iPhones. iPhones are made by Foxconn, which is a Taiwanese company based in Shenzhen, China.
00:04:36.380Apple doesn't make anything. They just design brands, they develop some technology and so on,
00:04:42.220and they patent it. But they don't invest in China. That's a Taiwanese company that does
00:04:47.860that investment. So these firms were able to first not invest a lot of money around the world
00:04:53.860to do manufacturing. At the same time, they collected huge amounts of rent on the goods
00:05:00.100that they sold. This money wasn't going towards taxation, because the big companies were basically
00:05:07.300buying out the political system, and they bought out the media, and they sold this story that low
00:05:15.120taxation is good for the whole country, for everybody. Well, they didn't pay tax. They
00:05:20.640corrupted the political system in general, also the media. I mean, look who owns the media now.
00:05:25.700Oh, well, Washington Post. Who's the owner of the Washington Post, I wonder? And so on.
00:05:30.380It's no longer a family that owns it, that's committed to the media. It's big business that
00:05:35.520owns these things. If you look at American broadcast networks, they're owned by arms
00:05:39.940dealers, whether it's NBC or whoever, they're all owned by companies that manufacture weapons.
00:05:47.820So you have this situation where they stop paying taxes, essentially, what we at our
00:05:53.420institute call a long-term tax strike. They go on strike, they just don't pay taxes.
00:05:58.760they use the enormous wealth they have to go into tax havens or they you know buy media outlets and
00:06:07.540so on and start to produce a version of reality they influence the culture and at the same time
00:06:13.140municipalities and so on are staff for funds and they start privatizing and really you know eroding
00:06:19.980the basis of social life I mean it's a perfect storm of to some extent worsened job prospects
00:06:27.520for people, because a lot of manufacturing goes global, precarious conditions in the service
00:06:33.040economy for a lot of people, a media that's basically pretending that it tells you a universal
00:06:39.740or truthful story, when in fact, it often just represents the viewpoints of the very rich.
00:06:45.780You have a government that basically succumbs to the very rich. In the presidential election between
00:06:51.840Joe Biden and Donald Trump, $14 billion was spent on that election. It's an incredible amount of
00:06:58.260money, you know, in an election. I mean, it's in a democratic process. It's insane. The culture
00:07:05.680gets corroded over these 40 years. You know, we have more and more people feeling precarious about
00:07:11.320their prospects. They're listening to quite toxic things in the media. And nobody, I mean, you know,
00:07:18.800Ayana, 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.
00:07:31.360Instead, what you get is political projects that just appear insincere at best and hateful at worst.
00:07:40.500In other words, insincere, where politicians come and tell you just retrain for the next generation jobs.
00:07:46.840You'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.
00:08:04.980The 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.
00:08:17.340yeah absolutely um in one of tri-continental's newsletters from this year you write quote
00:08:26.980the idea of social bonds or even of society is so compelling in our time it is getting harder
00:08:34.280and harder to experience society in a civil manner political discourse seems to have emerged
00:08:39.820from the sewers and a general compassion for suffering seems to have evaporated as the
00:08:44.720neo-fascist propagate the hard steel of toxic machismo. This is not merely a problem of the
00:08:51.620political class. It is a problem that should be associated with the erosion of state and social
00:08:57.400institutions that would otherwise make individual lives richer, end quote. And yeah, this idea
00:09:05.700dovetails with what we've been talking about, but also offers a reality check for many that
00:09:11.460the disappearance of dignified discourse cannot solely be blamed on individual failures,
00:09:17.440but is a byproduct of the gradual and calculated divestments from our social and state institutions.
00:09:24.580So before we go on to discuss the shortcomings of the left and the West,
00:09:28.900I wonder if you can begin by talking about how this moment in the United States culturally
00:09:34.600is deeply connected to the privatization of life, the starving of economies of care,
00:10:52.240not of social systems that are not working and so on.
00:10:56.780It's a canary in the coal mine about feeling,
00:10:59.820about the compassion, sense of compassion in a country.
00:11:02.880I mean, how does a country claim to be a civilization?
00:11:07.620You 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.
00:11:22.280I mean, how do you go on with your own life?
00:11:24.740You know, there's something wrong with that when a country doesn't have that as its first priority.
00:11:30.540You 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.
00:11:50.940Let's be creative in thinking of ways to, you know, grow nutritious food near where people live, decentralize, you know, food regimes and so on.
00:12:01.640Let's have that conversation and let's be serious about it.
00:12:04.880Let's not say this is some marginal thing for hippies and, you know, people on the side.0.98
00:12:12.500Why isn't a mainstream political party putting at its heart the question of homelessness and hunger and so on?
00:12:20.260And 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.
00:12:30.240You know, the squad, you know, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib have put together these seven bills, and others with them have put together seven bills to directly address the question of, you know, homelessness or houselessness, as you see fit to say.
00:12:49.980they're very pragmatic and good steps that they're asking for there's nothing utopian about it you
00:12:55.960know but it's a direct challenge to the banks to people with money to property owners and so on
00:13:01.440and it's the same with hunger I mean we know that there's enough food produced in the world and you
00:13:06.860know I have my critiques of how food is produced but let's leave that for a moment there's enough
00:13:11.920food produced in the world and I often you know think I often think about this that you know
00:13:17.400there's a place, there's a warehouse of food, and then there's hungry people. What prevents the
00:13:23.200hungry people from getting the food from the warehouse? Well, what prevents the hungry people
00:13:28.020from eating that food is they don't have money. And if you don't have money, then you are condemned
00:13:32.760to starvation. There's something just vulgar about the fact that we have people without homes,
00:13:38.360people without food, people without health, people without access to education. And what prevents
00:13:43.940them from getting these things which we have is the lack of money now this is what the capitalist
00:13:50.280system has done it has eroded the sense of morality in in a culture where people in a in a society
00:13:58.560just get inured they come to terms with this they see homeless people on the street they just turn
00:14:03.900their face and walk by they see hungry people they just don't know what to do they feel they feel
00:14:09.060assaulted by the presence of the hungry person there on the street. It's as if the hungry person
00:14:14.160is hurting them by just being there, you know, instead of taking that hurt that you feel when
00:14:20.360you see somebody hungry and saying, I need to construct a political project. I need to be
00:14:25.200involved in something to just end this, you know, to not allow this. And again, this in your sense
00:14:33.000of break where people just don't feel like the hungry, the homeless, the people without medical
00:14:39.500care, the sense that they are not part of me, they are alien to me, you know, we are alienated
00:14:45.740from them. That predates the pandemic. I mean, that's been a long time in motion. And, you know,
00:14:52.400I think that there is really something quite significant about trying to create a political
00:14:58.180project that in a way breaks the alienation of human beings from each other and breaks the
00:15:05.120alienation of human beings from nature. You know, it's the same sort of detachment. I am detached
00:15:12.520from other people, especially those who are struggling. I don't want to deal with them. I
00:15:17.720don't want to see them. We'll move them away. We'll evict them and remove them. And I'm also
00:15:22.820detach from nature. I don't want to deal with the vagaries of nature, the sense of nature. I just
00:15:28.560want to give you an example. In Cuba, every year, as you know, there are hurricanes, and the hurricane
00:15:34.620tears through the island as it tears through other islands. It's a decentralized society.
00:15:40.560So in every village or town, there is a committee to defend the revolution, and in their committee,
00:15:47.420there's often electricians. When the storm is coming, they leave their homes, they go and they
00:15:52.180take down the power lines. They just dismantle it. They remove it because they know that the
00:15:56.660lines will otherwise snap. So they preemptively put people without power. Then the storm blows
00:16:02.840right through. Then they go and put the power line back up. In other words, they're planning
00:16:06.640for a certain eventuality and then they remedy it. In these countries, like let's say the United
00:16:13.620States, example, Puerto Rico, nothing is done. And then the storm comes in, knocks down the power
00:16:19.600line and a population is completely disorganized you know they're not uh able to do these things
00:16:25.520these skills haven't been produced so then now you have to wait for the electricians to come
00:16:30.840from the mainland or somewhere else to put up the power again and then you go weeks and weeks
00:16:35.520without power i mean this is it's an example of two different models you've got the cuban model
00:16:40.940where they put people before profits you know where they where people are organized they're
00:16:45.800trained. They work in community to deal with adversity, to deal with challenges. You have the
00:16:51.300other side where people basically are alienated from each other. They don't know, they don't have
00:16:55.700these skills. You have to pay money to get these skills and so on. And then you get these disasters
00:17:00.920and really COVID has shown us that, you know, 29,000 Cuban medical students went door to door
00:17:07.600and tested all 11 million Cubans to see if they had COVID-19. In the United States, most people,
00:17:13.940and I would hazard almost like to say everybody.
00:17:16.700Nobody has seen anybody from the government come to their door,
00:17:20.720knock on the door and say, can I test you?
00:20:40.180These are crimes, but they're not crimes.
00:20:44.700Many years ago, Marx wrote something really important.
00:20:47.680He said that peasants used to go into the forests in Germany,
00:20:53.540and they would collect fallen wood for firewood.
00:20:56.820When a branch fell on the ground, they would go into a forest,
00:21:00.440collect the branch, bring it, it was firewood.
00:21:02.360And when the government in these parts of Germany, it was not yet Germany, but in these parts of what would become Germany, Silesia, etc., governments passed a law saying this is private property, you can't come and collect firewood.
00:21:16.680And so the police would ride into these forests and they would beat peasants who were coming to collect firewood, as was their customary practice, and in some cases even killed people.
00:21:54.120They don't understand that there is a crime here.
00:21:55.960Well, 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, where there's no government support for this or minimal, anemic government support, people are trying to get by.
00:22:15.020and this is not seen as a crime because you're trying to feed your family you know you're doing
00:22:20.180just trying to get by I mean imagine that and then you get killed the punishment is easy to
00:22:27.280understand the crime is not clear why is that a crime I'm trying to get by meanwhile big corporate
00:22:34.000banker or somebody steals hundreds of millions of dollars and they don't get killed in fact they
00:22:39.720sometimes don't even get punished but we're getting killed for this we can see the crime
00:22:44.280the punishment we don't see the crime so what's happened because of this lack of an understanding
00:22:49.900of class in the united states is the punishment is what is seen there in other words when we say
00:22:56.400black lives matter we say black lives matter meaning black lives matter that means that
00:23:02.320police killing must stop that police killing must stop in other words the punishment must stop
00:23:08.400Well, what about the so-called crime? 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, healthcare, broad range of services, and so on.
00:23:31.840Surely it means that 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.
00:23:57.060You know, again, it's not enough to say
00:23:58.860we have to go and check the police and so on,
00:24:01.520because it's not just about the police.
00:24:03.280It's about the whole system is wretched.
00:24:05.840People don't have the ability to feed themselves.
00:24:08.600They don't have the ability to take care of their children.
00:24:11.900They don't have the ability, you know,
00:24:13.660to have their health monitored on a regular basis.
00:24:16.340Public services have faced total attrition.
00:24:19.100That kind of broad, bold project needs to be articulated.
00:24:23.080You know, you need something like that.
00:24:25.020And 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.
00:24:52.440People must have a full dignity of their precious lives.
00:34:37.500Like, you know, it should be a slogan. I mean, I would like to make a T-shirt, Ayana, which 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.
00:34:55.620This is medieval. This is how kings and noble people said, look, I am giving you something, and then you had to fall on the ground before them. What's the difference? The donor comes. Oh, my God, the donor is coming tomorrow. Everybody is smart enough, and you're like, hello.
00:35:13.680This 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.
00:35:30.260not allow one rich person to define the agenda, you know, with society, when you have somebody
00:35:36.220like Bezos, you know, $700 billion plus, you know, that they're sitting on, you know, they have more
00:35:45.080money than the wealth of countries, you know, they can move enormous agendas by their whim.
00:35:51.680That's what I mean by it being medieval. I mean, what gives one person the right to move a major
00:35:57.440social agenda, you know, whether good or bad, you know, I'm not judging it. It's just the structure
00:36:03.040is wrong. You know, we should have democratic control over our social wealth, not allow whim
00:36:08.200to define it. Well, you know, we know that right now the situation with debt is just obscene. You
00:36:17.380know, it's literally obscene. You know, the best estimates show us that there is about $11 trillion
00:36:23.660dollars in external debt um in the developing world and the wealthy bondholders they just
00:36:31.200don't want to give these countries a break i mean right now if you're smart and we live in a smart
00:36:37.160world we'd say oh wait a minute let's just forgive all the debt you know this 11 trillion dollars i
00:36:42.360mean after all after all there's 32 trillion dollars sitting in tax havens and that's that's
00:36:48.580just the number that we were able to find, you know, $32 trillion. And I, you know, we went in
00:36:54.820and looked at this $32 trillion is more than the total value of gold that has ever been brought up
00:37:03.280from under the earth. All the known gold reserves are less than $32 trillion. So we've got $32
00:37:12.420trillion sitting in tax havens. Let's use some of that money, which is sitting idle,
00:39:07.880you've long called for the need to push the debate about the environmental crisis to not
00:39:27.220only include more nuance and complexity but to also acknowledge labor and land struggles
00:39:33.180And to address the question of deprivation, and 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, which is something you were just referring to.
00:39:48.220And so this question is open-ended, but I wonder if you could speak to what agricultural workers could teach us about reorganizing the system and how does an extended movement actually translate into a stronger movement?
00:40:03.180You see, right now, we have, in a place like India, we have increasing and long-term and what looks to be permanent agrarian distress.
00:40:14.840You know, agriculture has been commercialized.
00:40:18.580You know, big firms dominate the landscape, determine the outcome.
00:40:24.380They are growing things essentially for markets all over the world, and they're growing at massive scale.
00:40:30.580In order to grow at massive scale, they use just 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.
00:40:54.600I mean, it's basically treating, as we say, treating the field like a factory and hoping that the attrition of soil, the soil's 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.
00:41:19.420So 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 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.
00:41:41.280So for a long period, suicide rates among farmers were very high.
00:41:46.320In recent period, agricultural workers and farmers in India have been leading these very large marches,
00:41:53.660particularly in the states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan.
00:41:57.880These marches are very important because it shows that the leadership in trying to transform rural areas
00:42:04.760is coming from the agricultural workers, the small farmers, and so on.
00:42:08.820You 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.
00:42:20.320And this is a long-term rebuilding project because around the world, farm worker organizing, farm worker strength has been greatly depleted 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 to live with dignity.
00:42:45.760I mean, that's what they were 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, Ayanna. All of it is abstractions, because it's not a question of having the right ideas.
00:43:01.740You 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.
00:43:19.080So, 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.
00:43:44.880And 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.
00:43:59.640And in 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.
00:44:09.580And 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 agroecological production and so on.
00:44:25.900And 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 agroecological food for themselves, for the communities around them and so on.
00:44:47.460So 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.
00:44:59.700It comes from these experiments and struggles of peasants, farm workers, who are literally, literally with their fingers in the dirt, trying to understand how to draw food from the earth without destroying it.
00:45:15.720And I think we need to actually take the lead from them.
00:45:29.660And I've been so disenchanted with just the folks who have the mic and have the power and how they try to, yeah, push their armchair philosophical ideas onto those who are actually the ones working with the land.
00:45:49.960And I think that's just such a powerful point.
00:45:54.580And Navija, you've been very vocal about the recent coup in Bolivia and its relationship to lithium mining, as over 50% of the world's lithium resides amidst Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.
00:46:07.780So can you talk a bit about the United States' role in interfering with this election in order to gain fuller access to lithium?
00:46:15.320And if you think more and more coups will ensue in the coming decades as corporate miners seek to propel, quote, clean energy forward.
00:46:24.580Yeah, 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.
00:46:38.720But what are we transitioning to? We're transitioning to energy that is derived from the sun, solar. We're looking to wind. We're looking to maybe tidal energy, different forms of energy from the earth, from the sun, as I said.
00:46:57.620But of course, these forms of energy are 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 or what we call renewable energy, to capture these, you need batteries.
00:47:16.880And thus far, the most efficient batteries we have use cobalt, use lithium, and other such minerals and so on.
00:47:26.940But cobalt and lithium are two important ones.
00:48:05.680And these companies make a ton of money.
00:48:08.460So in Congo, you don't need to do a coup
00:48:10.000because basically these corporations have enormous control of parts of the country already.
00:48:16.260Then with lithium, there's big lithium production in Australia, but it's not enough.
00:48:22.280The real scaled-up green transition takes place.
00:48:25.660You're going to need a lot more lithium than is currently being mined out of Australia.
00:48:31.560You know, there's lithium available in Cornwall in England,
00:48:34.480but let me tell you, I don't think they're going to be mining in Cornwall.
00:48:37.620This kind of dirty mining, it's always in somebody else's backyard. So the big, big dump of lithium is in that ABC triangle, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. And in these countries, there is considerable lithium.
00:48:54.360evo morales government when he was in power 14 years improved the conditions of his people
00:49:01.080immensely he insisted that the government mining company would be in charge of the sale of the
00:49:08.660lithium or going into joint ventures that you cannot privatize the mines you know and they
00:49:14.360also started making a deal which would allow them to process the lithium and make batteries in
00:49:21.280Bolivia government run factory. In fact, they also mass produced a small car, which Evo Morales was
00:49:29.120the first to drive off the lot in Bolivia. They were interested not just in selling raw materials,
00:49:34.000but in going from lithium all the way out to electric cars with their own lithium batteries
00:49:40.120in it and so on. And then the coup happens because, you know, this is unacceptable. Because who
00:49:44.780actually should control the lithium? Not the Bolivian people and their government. No,0.99
00:49:49.460Certainly not. It has to be controlled by big multinational corporations. And that's the scandal. You're asking, will there be more coups in the future? Well, of course there 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.
00:50:09.380I mean, even people, 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 or who shouldn't run again?
00:50:26.340You 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.
00:50:47.760if you come out there and join the chatter saying well you know he's he's been there too long
00:50:52.800you're just legitimizing what they are doing by force on the ground and i find that to be quite
00:50:58.920shameful i mean people need to really introspect next time there's a coup and as i said there will
00:51:04.380be a coup somewhere hopefully not in bolivia but somewhere people need to really think about what
00:51:10.780they are saying and in whose interest they are saying what you know uh look you may not like
00:51:16.460the way somebody is governing. That doesn't give you the right to allow your government to overthrow
00:51:20.980them. I want to go back to Tri-Continental and in the ruins of the present, it's written, quote,
00:51:28.860the culture of commodities and the idea of people as consumers has desecrated the idea of the human.
00:51:35.700Bolivian socialists have looked deeply into their own traditions and elaborated a vocabulary to talk
00:51:41.060about human character, of a human society that is not subsumed by capitalist social norms.
00:51:47.220David Choke Iwanka, the executive secretary of the Bolivian Alliance of the Peoples of
00:51:52.280Our Americas, speaks of kapaknian, the path of the good life, with the need to create
00:51:59.200not consumers and owners, but iamba, a person without an owner.
00:52:04.380being a person without an owner is as choki wanca says the future the path of people who look for
00:52:12.300the good life such efforts to revive the idea of the human and to revive ideas of the need to tend
00:52:18.820to the creation of human community requires a great deal of effort end quote and as we come
00:52:26.060to a close i wonder if i can ask you to speak about the world the mass movements and lives
00:52:33.180being lived outside of the West remind you about the authentic agency that still exists
00:52:39.000and a sense of satisfaction that isn't sought through consumerism?
00:52:44.180Well, before I answer that, I would just like to say that you quoted from our first document
00:52:50.160and you quoted within that from David Chokyuanca.
00:52:54.900David has just been elected the vice president of Bolivia.
00:52:58.740He was the vice presidential candidate with Luis Arce.
00:53:01.880and I'm very pleased that he is the vice president
00:53:06.480because what the sentiment that you read out
00:53:22.200You know, that's what a good life will be.
00:53:24.520We want everybody to feel like they don't have an owner
00:53:27.620and whether it's a tangible, real owner, another person
00:53:31.440or it's us being owned by money, by, you know, by mortgages, by these sorts of attachments to
00:53:40.000things rather than other people. I mean, that's a beautiful way to try to construct a world.
00:53:46.160And I'm very, very pleased that David is the vice president of Bolivia. And I know that he will be
00:53:52.580alongside Luis Arce and all the people there, including Patricia Arce, who was such a brave
00:53:59.440person who was beaten during the coup and looked directly in the camera as they cut her hair,
00:54:05.420put red paint on her face, threw gasoline over her. She looked directly at a camera and said,
00:54:10.320we are not afraid. And she has just been sworn in as a senator in the Senate in Bolivia. What a
00:54:17.380brave person Patricia is. So these are the people, in a sense, Ayana, who are going to construct with
00:54:23.900us the future. These are the kinds of people, this is the caliber of person in the movements
00:54:29.880around the world. You know, these are sensitive people. These are people who believe we have
00:54:34.820great faith in the capacity of other people. They're not afraid of people. You know, you've
00:54:39.860got to listen more. You've got to build projects in unity with other people, whether it be
00:54:45.380in Bolivia, as we see here, or it's in, you know, places where, like in South Africa and Durban,0.87
00:54:53.240where Abaklali-based Majondolo, the shack dwellers movement, you know, has incredible resilience.0.87
00:55:00.400You know, mostly these women who built networks, political networks of Abaklali inside the0.93
00:55:07.560neighborhoods of the poor in Durban, but other parts of South Africa as well, which stood
00:55:12.500attacks and murder by, you know, property developers and so on to give themselves dignity.
00:55:18.400You 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, stand up to the kind of mafia state that's led by Ivan Duque. 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.