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Episode 196 - Who Speaks for the Trees? (w/ Vijay Prasad) (Patreon)

Published:
2022-07-28 11:56:07
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2026-06
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Subscribe to Bad Faith on Patreon to instantly unlock our full premium episode library: http://patreon.com/badfaithpodcast

Marxist historian, commentator, author, and executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Vijay Prasad joins Bad Faith this week to talk about what global revolutions in Sri Lanka, India, Colombia, and other locales around the world can teach Americans trying to cultivate a left revolution here at home. How should the left put pressure on captured union leadership, and how can it hold left politician's accountable? Does the left "eat itself," or is it in a necessary processes of developing a more adversarial theory of change? How does Vijay believe he will see revolution in his lifetime even as he observes the enormous structural barriers to change?

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Comments

Anonymous

1) Great episode. 2) Regarding the suggestion to have mental health professionals ride along with cops, I'd suggest looking into Portland Street Response.

Louis Waweru
>>88479871

Interesting, I hope they get funding to ho 24/7. But in the absence of a government solution, people should be voluntarily filling this role, but I don’t believe that is possible in a country like ours. Not just in the sense of a lack of social cohesion, but when activities like this are attempted they often face crackdowns dealing with prohibitory regulation of pretty much anything that can wind up as a lawsuit.

Bernard Scott

Really enjoyed this! I do wonder about the Indian farmer example he provided and how it fits into what Bri said about not enough of us struggling yet. That sounds like something that maybe happened BECAUSE(as opposed to in spite of) of their social conditions where they have nothing to lose. In the U.S., I feel that we give enough middle class and working class folks just enough such that they feel they do have a lot to lose by getting on board with potentially revolutionary moments and having political expression that reflects it. For example, the George Floyd moment was easy to squash when you have a bunch of white and non-black POC liberals out in the streets or empathizing what is happening by watching media. However we saw that when push came to shove with some of the demands showing up as ballot initiatives in liberal cities, they either fail or get rolled back as even liberal voters worry about their own property and "safety". Even within a "movement", it is easy for monied interests to elevate and corrupt someone like Patrice while also having the whole branded global BLM org mission drift into areas of concern that aren't what they advertise to the public (and especially black folks) as their primary mission. Give folks just enough to lose, and you'll have a hard time sustaining any movement or translating a big moment into significant and tangible political concessions.

Mint

I think one the reason the political culture looks so different in places like India and Chile is because the whole ideological framework of socialism/Marxism isn’t completely unfamiliar there. In the US, I feel like if you tried to tell the average person that all labor in a profit-making enterprise that’s not worker-owned constitutes “exploitation,” they’d be a little skeptical. There’s also just a deeply rooted naturalization of the ideas of property and private ownership in the US. I think a lot of people almost don’t think of property as a legal instrument created by the state. There’s a sense that property relations arising from gov’t redistribution are ‘political’ and ‘artificial’, whereas the distribution of property acquired through wages, investments, and pay packages is ‘natural’ and not the outcome of state activity. That’s why people think there’s some credibility to the idea that taxation is theft, as if the state didn’t create (and forcibly maintain the existence of) the very property it’s taxing.

Anonymous

This was excellent! I hope you found it interesting to you, Brie. Thank you for the content this week and I hope you are feeling better!

Dez Martin

I felt intense disappointment last week when Norm Finkelstein, an otherwise morally decent person, decided to be a fucking dickhead about women's bodily autonomy. This week, I see to my relief that the episode is about PRECISELY the thing that I come to this pod for. You really make up for it after you have a stinker!

Anonymous

I love this interview! One of the best I’ve heard in awhile, in any show or podcast. Now I’m going to figure out how to assign pieces of it as homework in our various classes. 😆 I think what I find so captivating and energizing in hearing Vijay speak is the integration of community and relationship into social movements and organizing. One of the courses we teach regularly focuses on ancestry, and I think there is something unique in the American experience that relates to capitalism as expressed within a settler colonial state that then went on to dominate others through imperialism. We sit at the heart of the global experiment that is capitalism/colonialism, and the separation of people’s from their traditional cultures reaches deep into the European enclosure of the commons and beyond. We’ve been intentionally fractured, people socialized as white particularly so, as a necessary precondition for our alignment with capitalism and ruling class power. Finding our way back to the sense of community and intimate web of mutually dependent relationships that define humans as a species is as integral a project as anything else in the left. I often grow disheartened in progressive or even radical organizing spaces when it just seems that the only reason people gather is to delegate tasks and focus on work…it’s really beautiful to receive encouragement to build the community and relationships I long for as part of the social project I’m committed to. I also feel thankful to the little set of neighbors I am in relationship with here in Riverdale Park! We are perhaps closer than some… Anyway, thank you Vijay and Brie!!✊🏼🌷♥️

Anonymous

The system works. Let's stop supporting it. Panther Party.

Anonymous

I love listening to Vijay. He has very concrete suggestions and If we (the Left) only worked at implementing a few of them, we would be much better off. Really agreed with Bri's comment that if people like Patrisse Cullors would have spoken directly to the Left, it could have built some understanding and, perhaps, some better bridges. I would double that sentiment as it applied to Bernie. He just walked away and refused to have any dialogue with the movement he created. That energy could have been leveraged but it was left to founder and, I believe it was a huge factor in splintering everything he seemed to want to build.

Anonymous

So wish you could or would have asked him about Uttar Pradesh. They eradicated Covid with home kits. Now with Jeffrey Sachs on Ukraine blacklist, I truly hope Bri you are seeing the larger narrative. So exhausted. 68yo 3xVax injured relative in hospital past month where twice she’s been isolated for testing positive thus not getting needed rehab & insurance bout to run out. See The Foegen Effect. Masks truly make things worse

Anonymous
>>88668106

Really getting hard to watch some times & fear The Hill has co-opted you. Patreon member. Haven’t listened to Callin yet sooo

Anonymous

As a social worker, I wasn't thrilled with the suggestion that social workers voluntarily start doing ride-alongs with the police. First off, Brie is correct that we are already badly burned out and subject to increasingly dangerous workplace conditions. Second, it's not that I'm against the concept of it (I think it's fundamentally a sound idea, if we lived in a completely different political and social reality), it's that the implementation would be inevitably neutered both by bureaucracy and by the toxic and broken systems (jails, healthcare, housing, jobs) that remain. (Not to mention, this could never be done "voluntarily" because I feel quite confident that absent a legislative decree or organizational change on an administrative level, civilians would NEVER be allowed to ride in police cars!) I live in a state where there has been a (extremely) half-hearted attempt to shift some funding into mental health crisis response in response to some well-publicized violent events. While I applaud on principle any effort that could even marginally reduce the risk of harm to persons in mental health crises, the fact remains that after the crisis is averted there are no good options available. They can spend 1-3 days in a psychiatric hospital, where they will be discharged the moment their health insurance decides to stop paying for them, and not a moment after. They will return to the same unstable housing, overpriced and borderline inhumane in its conditions, they were in before, struggle to pay for their medication, face a job market that excludes them entirely, and continue to fight to survive on $750/month disability benefits (if they're lucky). Under such challenging, dehumanizing and stressful conditions they will inevitably end up in crisis again, and the system repeats itself. This doesn't even begin to address the number of these folks that are also intertwined with the criminal "justice" system. I live in a daily reality where jails and psychiatric hospitals fight to "dump" their inmates/patients/HUMAN BEINGS off on one another, in a constant war to maximize profits by displacing people in need, NEVER addressing the roots of the problem. I appreciate inspiring ideas, and hate to sound so jaded. And yet I don't want to obscure the truly catastrophic nature of our national predicament either. Brie has a point when she says that things haven't gotten bad enough yet. I fear they might have to in order for true change to be ignited.

Margaret Okuzumi

As someone who knows a former Shahid Butter staffer personally, I will attest that he was abusive towards staff, is an egotistical self-promoter and vicious person, and is someone we want to keep far away from office. It was not a Pelosi smear campaign that brought him down. The Me-Too allegations weren't made up. Very sad about that bc I'd love to see a viable challenger to Pelosi.