Teach-in: Socialism and Anti-Imperialism - Vijay Prashad Australia Tour

Vijay Prashad will host an all day public teach-in. This will be an opportunity to engage in in-person political discussion with Prashad.

See all of Prashad's events in Australia here: https://red-ant.org/events/cat...

The program for the teach-in is as follows:

10:00 am - 11:40 am

The Crisis of Capitalist Legitimacy and the New Right

Vijay Prashad and Rjurik Davidson

Recent events have seen the rise of new Right movements and figures from outside the traditional political establishment - Trump, Le Pen, Farage and the Brexiteers, the Brothers of Italy, Alternative for Germany, and Bolsonaro. What lies behind their successes, and what are the implications for socialists?

12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Getting Organised to Wage the “Battle of Ideas”

Vijay Prashad and Max Lane

Much was written by Marx and Lenin on the need for a party of professional revolutionaries guided by Marxist theory to lead a revolution in capitalist countries. While the study of the writings and praxis of these great revolutionaries will surely enrich our work, it is also possible to think about this question using basic common sense if based upon a Marxist analysis of our current situation in Australia. We are at a low ebb in class and social struggles and the almost total absence of a revolutionary party based on a Marxist analysis of Australia in the imperialist order. At the same time there is a small but important upturn in consciousness among sections of the population related to some of the worst abuses and oppressions of the capitalist order. What does common sense tell us about what are our urgent tasks?

—Lunch Break—

2:15 pm - 3:40 pm

Global Social Apartheid, Imperialist Exploitation, and the Imperialist Nations’ Support for Israel’s Genocide

Nandini Shah and Brendan Duncan-Shah

The dominant discourse in countries like Australia is that poverty is natural, that scarcity of resources, mass hunger, grueling labour and housing precarity are the normal states of humankind, and that capitalism should be lauded for raising humanity, for the first time in its history, out of its debased condition. According to this line of thought, if poor countries remain poor, this because they have not committed themselves to capitalist development enough. The solution it proposes is therefore simple: more capitalism, not less.

Flying in the face of this framework is the reality: that poor countries are not developing, but are in fact getting poorer, despite their increasing and unrestricted integration into the capitalist world economy. If current trends continue, the answer to the question, "when will the poor countries of the global south catch up to the rich countries of the global north," is: NEVER.

This talk proposes an alternative explanation for this state of affairs. It argues that the inequality between countries is actually a structural feature of the world economy, that poor countries are integrated into global capitalism unequally and are subject to mechanisms of economic coercion, expropriation and value transfer that keep them poor. Moreover, it argues that this economic reality explains the political and military balance of forces on a world scale—why, for instance, all the rich countries of the global north, including Australia, line up so quickly behind Israel.

If, as Lenin wrote, it is the 'division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the essence of imperialism,' then, we argue, our age is just as imperialist as his.

4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Australia in Today’s Imperialist World: Alliance with the U.S. in the Asia Pacific

Vijay Prashad Keynote address