- cross-posted to:
- bloomer
- lectures@lemmygrad.ml
Clipped this last night to share here, I've probably watched it 20 times since I found it on Thursday
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Vijay Prashad is legitimately a light in the darkness. I hope we can keep hearing what he has to say for 100 years, they gotta get him the Futurama head tank treatment.
I gained a lot of respect for him this year because I read his The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2006). It's a people's history of the Non-Aligned Movement. A lot of his later texts are poorly-cited pamphlets but this earlier work is very serious, incredibly thoughtful and artful constructed. It's easy to imagine a version of this book being that is a bunch of sprawling facts as it involves like 80 different counties but he organizes the book by concept (like developmental economics or the cultural question) and centers each chapter around a city that acts as a metonym for the idea, then expands the chapter to other areas that had significant movements with respect to the idea.
I realized as much as he's a guy who likes to go off on a microphone he's actually quite a serious dude too.
Watched the entire discussion. A much better use of my time than just browsing stuff all night, thank you for sharing.
Vijay Prishads comments on imperialism throughout the discussion were brilliant, I look up to him as a guiding light in our times. Oh and, he said the t-shirt was accidental. :D
Fr the whole discussion was really good, even the audience questions. I haven't read or listened to a lot of David Harvey and thought he was always interesting too (hot take I know)
Absolutely loved the passion of the first audience commentary on the need to re-center imperialism.
Also found Harveys takes on China to be surprisingly western chauvinist or something. The way he compares things was surprisingly, I don't know how to word this, simplistic? It seems symptomatic of academia as I see similar stuff a lot in my uni reading.
The middle guy was voicing the interesting anxiety Western left academia currently has about the breaking of nation-states and therefore consensus. I just read a whole book that was essentially about the same and also downplayed imperialism (as Lenin frames it). It seems very contradictory as it almost feels like they are pining for the very systems of liberal democracy they at the same time critical of.
I guess it's all about expectations, I expected him to be much worse on China (he famously put Deng's picture on the cover of A Brief History of Neoliberalism) so I was surprised how much more nuanced he was than I expected lol
Oh he is that anti-China? Well that considered not so bad, but still pretty bad.
His comment about chips and computers was especially weird. Like there would not be goods made in socialism? Like it would just end there. Smelled like some latent braimworms about "capitalism and the free market as innovation" and the myth of modernization & capitalism as a whole.
Also disappointed how little he aknowledged the weight of history especially regarding imperialist forces, good on the first commenter to go so hard on that point even though they were clearly nervous in doing so.
The stark difference on the focuses of the panelists did really highlight the different conditions these people are from as well.
