Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator and a Marxist intellectual. He is the Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books.
Turkey is using the Islamic State in the same way as Pakistan used the Taliban in Afghanistan. You know, that's perhaps Turkey's strategy.
In the early period of Left struggles, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were many different trajectories for the struggle, whether you call it 'syndicalism' or 'anarchism' or, at the time, 'social democracy', eventually 'Communism', these were different theories of struggle. But all of them shared a basic understanding that the people. . . experience exploitation, they experience oppression, but they're not prepared to rise up.
It is convenient for Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair to say the rise of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the Iraq War because that takes the culpability off their shoulders. The Islamic State is a product of the Iraq War. It took about a 100 years to build the Iraqi state, and the Americans and the British destroyed it in an afternoon.
Interestingly, what the bourgeois women's groups in India wanted to do in the nationalist period is to have the peasant women essentially follow them. . . They would be the leaders and the peasant women would be the masses.
You see, one strand. . . of anarchism believed that you needed to use essentially homeopathic doses of terror by assassinating people, et cetera, the so-called 'propaganda of the deed', and that this propaganda of the deed would rouse people up, give them confidence to rise up. Another section believed 'No, it was not by seeing something happen that people get confidence, but it's by acting', in other words, the movements must go among the people and produce small struggles, bigger struggles, to give people greater and greater confidence.
It's important to reflect about what's happening inside Israel.
Where there is a living memory of struggle, they have a living memory of the rebellion. Where there's no struggle afterward the rebellion is forgotten.
The Chinese did after all decide that the Soviet Union was a greater threat than the United States and decided to come to terms with the United States when Nixon visits China.
There are several studies done of peasant uprisings where the first chapter might be 'conditions in that area' and so the conditions are bad, and then the second chapter is a kind of conjectural event, somebody's shot and then there's an uprising. But there's no consideration, no chapter on preparation.
It's Israelis who are ready to abandon the hard work of peace.
We come from the future, essentially, because we have all these ideas about gender equality, sexual freedom, and these are not shared by the working class, the peasantry among whom we work.
Mr. Obama needs to make a phone call to Ankara and have a serious conversation about why the current government in Turkey isn't going to seal its border, why it doesn't take a stronger position against the Islamic State.
To be a Communist or to be somebody who believes in the future is a curious thing. So you have to live with people around you, you have to be with the people.
The best intentions (of respect and tolerance) can often be annoying to those whose cultures are not in dominance: we feel that we are often zoological specimens.
Where there is no history of struggle after an uprising, the living memory dies.
Organizing is always a relationship between the person who arrives and says 'Let's meet together' and the person who comes to the meeting.
I consider this a kind of neoliberalism of the Left, this rise and promotion of spontaneity above preparation.
In times when the tempo for struggle is not very high, you prepare populations by conducting acts of courage-building, confidence-building, respect for each other. That's what the preparation is about and it requires leadership.
You see often it's not ideas, it's inertia, it's bureaucratism, it's all the other things that sometimes come in the way of a good idea.
You cannot have politics without building mass-movements.