Quote

You cannot have politics without building mass-movements.

Vijay Prashad

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vijay Prashad
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 14
Historian
Writer
Calcutta
Without
Movements
Mass
Building
Movement
Politics
Cannot

More quotes by Vijay Prashad

Image
I consider this a kind of neoliberalism of the Left, this rise and promotion of spontaneity above preparation.
Vijay Prashad
Image
Interestingly, if you write preparation out of history, leadership and preparation, the building of confidence among people who are exploited, you've actually methodologically written out the Communists because, when an uprising takes place, you don't necessarily see red flags everywhere.
Vijay Prashad
Image
To build a mass movement, nonviolence is indispensable.
Vijay Prashad
Image
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.
Vijay Prashad
Image
The United States is facing serious pushback from Turkey, which is not comfortable with the view that the Islamic State is a terrorist organization.
Vijay Prashad
Image
We would like to participate in manifestations, in Occupies and things like that. We would like to be involved in a march. But we don't actually see the very hard work that goes to build confidence towards those events. And we don't have a shared discussion.
Vijay Prashad
Image
However you define territorial ambitions, it need not be a country that's right next to the U.S. for it to exercise its extraterritorial or territorial ambitions.
Vijay Prashad
Image
There are people who are saying that they voted twice for Mr. Obama and they are now feeling a great sense of regret, not only over Guantanamo, etc., but now perhaps the entry into a new war in West Asia.
Vijay Prashad
Image
When anarchists are having a debate, they're having a debate about tactics, 'Should you do this?', 'Should you do that?' The question isn't 'Should you do this?', 'Should you do that?', the primary question is how do you build confidence among the masses of people who experience hierarchies, who experience exploitation, who experience oppression.
Vijay Prashad
Image
You see all kinds of anarchic forms of rebellion, but the moment of preparation is when the Communists and other kinds of political forces play a roll.
Vijay Prashad
Image
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.
Vijay Prashad
Image
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.
Vijay Prashad
Image
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.
Vijay Prashad
Image
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.
Vijay Prashad
Image
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.
Vijay Prashad
Image
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.
Vijay Prashad
Image
All evidence suggests that Turkey has allowed ISIS fighters, when they've been injured, to return into Turkey and to get treated in Turkey's hospitals.
Vijay Prashad
Image
I think a far more important strategic way to deal with the Islamic State would be to bring some of these regional partners and explain to them that Turkey's own contradictory foreign policy has to end. I mean, if United States is serious, it has leverage over Turkey. And apparently it has not been able to move Turkey sufficiently.
Vijay Prashad
Image
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.
Vijay Prashad
Image
Mr. Obama at the UN said that the large nations should not trample small ones in pursuit of what he called territorial ambition. These are curious statements coming from the American president at this time.
Vijay Prashad