Upstream - [TEASER] Third Worldism and the Bandung Spirit w/ Pranay Somayajula

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know that Robbie and I will be taking the first two weeks of August off, so our next Patreon release will be published on August 18th. We've got some really great episodes planned and we're really looking forward to sharing them with you once we're back. Part of why these governments and these countries posed a threat to American empire such that they had to be overthrown was because they were also part of an international project of third world solidarity that, you know, the leaders who were there in their capital city, they're signing the papers to nationalize the oil industry or the mining industry in their country.

Starting point is 00:00:57 And the next day they get on a plane, they fly to Algiers, they fly to Havana, they fly to Bandung, right, to give a speech where they're talking about the need to stand together with other countries who are going through the same thing. I mean, if you're a bureaucrat in the State Department in Washington, if you are an American business executive from a company that might have interest in those countries, you're watching that happen. You're reading about it in the papers and you are probably quaking in your seat because if they're allowed to do that and realize the project that these leaders in these countries are talking about, that is going to fundamentally challenge your standing in the world.

Starting point is 00:01:28 You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

Starting point is 00:01:46 Third Worldism, a term which might feel outdated but which is anything but, is on the rise. When we talk about the Third World, or the Global South, we are talking about the nations of the world which have been subjugated and exploited by the global imperialist order over the past several centuries. Colonialism, far from ever being abolished, is alive and well in these countries in a new and even more insidious way. And in order to help us understand exactly what this means, and what Third Worldism is, we're going to take you back to 1955, the year that the Bandung Conference was held in Indonesia, to look at a view of imperialism and colonialism and the resistance to it from within the Third World.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Prane Sommadjula is a writer, organizer, political educator, researcher, and the host of the podcast Return to Bandung. He's also the author of several pieces that we'll be discussing today, including most recently a piece from his sub stack titled, This is the Human Race Speaking, Reviving the Bandung Spirit in a Multipolar World. In this conversation, we talk about the Bandung Conference, a groundbreaking and pivotal meeting of many newly decolonized, and we'll unpack this term much more as we go along, many newly

Starting point is 00:03:11 decolonized states in Asia and Africa. We'll explore what was so significant about the Bandung Conference, the global context in which it occurred, the fight from the imperialist powers to keep the third world subjugated all throughout the 20th century, how the spirit pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. So we usually start with asking our guests to introduce themselves. We're going to introduce you at the top as well, but just in your own words and in the way that you want to describe it today,

Starting point is 00:04:11 can you introduce yourself for our listeners and talk a little bit about the work that you do? Yeah, of course. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Pranay Somayajula. I am a writer, an organizer, a researcher, a political educator, and a lot of my work really focuses on the sort of themes that I know we'll be covering in this conversation, decolonization, imperialism, both past and present, migration, diaspora, all those sorts

Starting point is 00:04:37 of things, topics relating to sort of global politics and the structural workings of the global order and how that affects the lives of everyday people. I've written for outlets like The Drift, Jacobin, The Nation, Monthly Review, and I also host a podcast called Return to Bandung, which I've been hosting for almost a year now. I guess I started it last fall, so that's crazy that it's been that long,

Starting point is 00:05:00 which explores a lot of those similar themes by interviewing guests and so on as well. I'm Indian American myself. My parents both immigrated to the US from India in the 90s, and I am originally from Minnesota, but currently based at least for the next week and a half in Washington, DC. I'm moving back to Minneapolis at the end of July to pursue a PhD in political science at the University of Minnesota, but for the time being, I'm in Washington, D.C. And I've been involved in activism and organizing on a host of issues from the time I was in college. I went to George Washington University here in D.C. and was involved in college in workers

Starting point is 00:05:36 rights organizing on campus, fossil fuel divestment, climate justice type of work. And also, I've been very involved in organizing within the South Asian American community against Hindu nationalism, which is an issue that's very close to my heart and something I work on in my, I've worked on my day job. But really over the last couple of years, my politics have, you know, developed and evolved quite a bit. I often half jokingly describe myself as a recovering anarchist. And I've really, I think a big theme in the last year or so in my life has been discovering

Starting point is 00:06:05 and really orienting myself more towards Marxism, Londonism. And that has really come hand in hand with the growing and increasingly central role that anti-imperialism has played in my political identity. And that's something that I've always cared a lot about. I mentioned my family is of Indian origin and I have family members who were involved in various ways in the independent struggle. So I grew up like learning about sort of this history of imperialism and I spent a year living in London. I was getting my masters out there and during that time was really learning a lot. That's actually when I first sort of

Starting point is 00:06:40 in an intellectual or academic setting was introduced to third-worldism and these sort of internationalist political movements. And so as anti-imperialism has become increasingly central to my politics over the last couple of years, it's also become increasingly central to my organizing and to the work, the writing that I do. And a lot of my work these days really focuses, my organizing work these days rather, really focuses on political education. And, you know, I really think of my writing as it's a literary and creative pursuit, but also it is a fundamentally a pursuit of political education. Same goes for my podcast. I recently organized in six week anti-imperialist summer school with the

Starting point is 00:07:17 Metro DC DSA, our internationalism working group, which I've been very involved with here. So I'm always sort of trying to find ways to, I think, raise internationalist consciousness among the American left, which is something that maybe we can get into this a bit in the conversation that I think in some ways the left in the US is moving in the right direction, especially in the last couple of years. But I think that compared to the left in the global South, there is really a dearth of internationalist awareness or

Starting point is 00:07:45 analysis at times that really impedes the ability to fully articulate a cohesive or coherent analysis of how the world works and what it takes to actually overcome capitalism and these structures that we talk about wanting to overcome as socialists as Marxists. So that was a very long-winded introduction to myself. So I suppose I'll stop there, but hopefully that gives folks a picture of what I'm all about. Yeah, no, that's really, really helpful, really interesting and seeing a lot of overlap, both with like return to Bandung, your podcast, which I think we've shared actually several guests, including the great Vijay Prashad, which is exciting.

Starting point is 00:08:29 And also your writing is really great. We're going to be talking about a couple of your pieces today. And yeah, also I love this idea of a recovering anarchist because, you know, a lot of the time people will hit us up and say, we just found out about your podcast and like, should we start at the beginning? And I'm like, well, yes, if you wanna go along the journey with us,

Starting point is 00:08:54 because we definitely started off looking more deeply into like the solidarity economy and other sort of anarchist inspired spaces on the left. And since then, just like you, we have like, I don't wanna say the world evolved because that might be like, might be seen as like judgmental, but we have like grown in,

Starting point is 00:09:17 and that's also the word grown, but anyways, you get what I'm saying. Definitely. Into like a Marxist-Leninist orientation. And particularly, I think since October 7th, yeah, like really jumping into anti-imperialism and really like grounding ourselves in this in this approach that like really view, you can't see capitalism outside of it being a global system and that capitalism is imperialism and Exactly and all of that. So it's really cool to hear that you had a similar trajectory

Starting point is 00:09:51 And I just I actually hear about sort of similar things quite a bit So I feel like you know You mentioned the left in the United States is starting to orient itself towards anti-imperialism more and I think that's definitely true and definitely quite exciting and the last overlap that I'd like to mention is That we are apparently both in the midst of moves out of state Just yeah a lot of overlap there Okay, so let's go ahead and start with we're gonna focus our conversation in a sense on the band doing conference Which you just brought up and it's the name of your podcast as well

Starting point is 00:10:31 But we're gonna branch out and talk about some other issues that are related, of course but let's use band doing as a launching point because it's a really sort of Important and I think pivotal moment in history sort of important and I think pivotal moment in history. So I want to start with a quote from your latest piece in culture shock. The piece is titled, This is the human race speaking, reviving the bandung spirit in a multipolar world. And so you write, the bandung conference is widely recognized by scholars and activists alike as the birthplace of Third Worldism, a political movement that swept the colonized and decolonizing world

Starting point is 00:11:13 through the latter half of the 20th century. Characterized by a spirit of solidarity and cooperation between global South countries who, by virtue of their shared experience of colonial exploitation, remained forcibly relegated to the periphery of a world system dominated by rivalry between the great powers of the Cold War." So yeah, that's the quote that I wanted to start with. And maybe just ask you to sort of reflect on that and comment on that and tell us about the Bandung Conference and why we should be talking about it. Yes, so that piece that I just put out very recently on Culture Shock, which is the name of

Starting point is 00:11:56 my substack, I guess I should have mentioned that in my intro, but that piece is a text of a lecture that I gave earlier this month over July 4th weekend at the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago. And yeah, the title was, This is the Human Race Speaking, Reviving the Bandung Spirit in a Multipolar World. And that quote at the beginning of the title, This is the Human Race Speaking, comes from a book called The Color Curtain, which the African American legendary writer and journalist Richard Wright. He traveled to Bandung as an observer of the conference as a journalist and wrote this book about sort of what he observed there. And that was, I was reading that looking for sort of quotes to use

Starting point is 00:12:36 in this lecture and that really struck out to me. And I think listeners probably have heard of the Bandung conference. It was, of course, took place in 1955. So this year is the 70th anniversary. And the official name was actually the Afro-Asian Conference, but it took place in April of 1955 in the Indonesian city of Bandung. It's I think the third largest city or at least metropolitan area in the country. It's about 90 miles southeast of Jakarta. And this conference, the Afro-Asian Conference, the Bandung Conference was convened by leaders of African and Asian countries that had been within the last several years either were in the process of achieving independence from colonial rule or had already – mostly had already won independence. And the real drivers of the conference, the main

Starting point is 00:13:20 organizers were Indonesia's President Sukarnarno, and then India's prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. But there were many other nations came together as well. I forget exactly how many, but it was many countries across specifically Africa and Asia. And it was a really, I think it's important to highlight this was a really diverse grouping of nations. I think Bandung is usually invoked by the left, obviously third worldism, these ideas of international solidarity, they resonate with us on the left.

Starting point is 00:13:51 But if you actually look at the ideological alignments of the governments that were gathered at Bandung, you had communist states, you had China, you had Vietnam, you had some of these like like communist and socialist movements. You also had, of course, in countries like India, Indonesia, this more not overtly communist but definitely sort of like status, so quasi socialist developmentalism, secular nationalism, you might call it right. But then you also had hereditary monarchies, you had Thailand, you had Ethiopia, and so

Starting point is 00:14:22 on. You know, these are not necessarily progressive left-wing governments in the way we might think of them today. But despite this diversity, and this is something that if you go back and read or listen to Sukarno's opening address, welcoming delegates to the conference, he acknowledges this and actually says this is like a strength of the conference. The fact that despite this diversity, all of these countries are coming together and the reason they're coming together is because they have a common interest around building a more just and equitable world order because all of their countries, regardless of their various political positions, are all by virtue of having been colonies that

Starting point is 00:14:58 are now trying to establish themselves in the world stage are all on the periphery of this global system. This world order that is still dominated by Europe, by the US, by the imperial core, right? These advanced capitalist countries that have historically been colonial powers. And so the Bandung Conference is really about bringing together the nations of the third world. What is now more sort of politically correct term is the global South. I still think the third world is a very powerful term to use and I still use it because it connotes this political project, but bring together these Third World nations to present a united front against the, you hear the terms, colonialism and racialism are used a lot in the proceedings and documents from the conference. Those were sort of identified as the

Starting point is 00:15:39 twin evils that this movement, this conference was trying to combat. And so the idea was really to promote solidarity and cooperation between newly independent and decolonizing nations to provide support for ongoing struggles against colonialism and to really oppose neocolonialism. There was a very strong recognition that it wasn't enough for these countries to just win political independence, to get new flags, new governments, you know, new people in their parliament buildings. That these newly independent countries were, as I said, they were being birthed into a world that was structurally set up to put them in a disadvantage, structurally designed to facilitate their continued

Starting point is 00:16:22 exploitation, their subjugation by their, oftentimes their former colonizers. You know, of course, Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah was a participant and Kwame Nkrumah developed this idea of neo-colonialism to describe this phenomenon of continued economic exploitation of countries on paper are independent from colonialism. And so the organizers of the Bandung conference recognize that not only is this a reality they have to contend with, but also the only way to combat these dynamics is to do so together. That individual countries are never going to be able to stand up against a neocolonial world system because it is precisely that, is a world system. So that is why I really

Starting point is 00:17:02 think that, you know, despite the many shortcomings, pitfalls, contradictions, of which there were many, I mean, this, like I said, this was a deeply ideologically incoherent and contradictory project. But despite all of that, I really do believe that Bandung was one of, if not the greatest expressions of international solidarity in the 20th century. And I say in the essay, you know, that Bandung, as in the quote that you mentioned, this conference inaugurated third-worldism, which isn't so much a cohesive ideology as a political current, you might say,

Starting point is 00:17:34 an ethos that really played a major role in shaping the international relations of the global south throughout the latter half of the 20th century. It sort of provided a foundation on which the basis could be built of how countries in the third world interacted with and related to one another. The conference issued this final communique that really sums up this ethos in 10 principles that talk about, if you read these 10 principles, which I quote directly in that piece in the lecture that I gave, it's very strong emphasis on sovereignty,

Starting point is 00:18:06 both political but also economic sovereignty, on equality among nations. You know, we think about the United Nations today, and this is absolutely true. It was a, the United Nations is an institution that was created by the West and was, and is dominated to this day by powerful Western countries who have veto power at the Security Council and so on.

Starting point is 00:18:26 But at the time, if you look at, you know, throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the number of countries in the UN General Assembly grew dramatically because more and more countries were being formed by virtue of decolonizing and becoming independent. So all of a sudden, you know, by the 70s, 80s, there's a situation in which the majority of votes in the UN General Assembly are in the global south or in the third world. And so that idea of like a system in which you have one country with one vote is a very powerful expression of this sort of idea of sovereign equality. That's very central to the third world is project. And more generally, there's just a really strong emphasis, I think, on multilateralism,

Starting point is 00:19:05 on cooperation, diplomatic solution to disputes, nuclear nonproliferation was central to the conference. There was a very strong sense that the Benden Conference was convened just a decade after the US drops two nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II, to date the only country in history that has ever done that. There was a very strong recognition that this is an existential threat, not just to the Third World, but to all of humanity. I think for all of those reasons, it's really important that today, as we observe the 70th anniversary of Bandung, which passed in April of this year, that we really look back on or see what we can learn from this history. I think

Starting point is 00:19:45 especially, you know, especially as we are living through this moment of really profound shifts in the global order, the way the world is arranged, the way power is distributed, this sort of era of unipolar US hegemony that was inaugurated with the fall of the Soviet Union is starting to fracture. I mean, America is in the stage of imperial decline. Not to say that it is not still the most powerful country on earth. It is by far, but it's got this power without hegemony in quite the same way, right? China's President Xi Jinping often refers to what he calls great changes unseen in a century.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And I think that that feels very true to me. And I think as we're looking at the state of affairs, as we're looking at these great changes unseen in a century. And I think that that feels very true to me. And I think as we're looking at the state of affairs, as we're looking at these great changes unseen in the century, it's really important that we look back to how countries in the global South have responded to similar moments of great global upheaval. I mean, the era of decolonization, what could be more of an upheaval than that, right? These empires, the European empires are collapsing and dozens of new countries are suddenly on the map that weren't there before. And so I think there's a lot to learn from this history, but to learn from this history without merely replicating it. You know, I'm not saying that

Starting point is 00:20:56 the solution to all the problems facing us today is to simply copy one for one, the approaches that were taken at the Bandung conference. And my podcast is titled Return to Bandung. When I say return, I don't mean, you know, return there with the purpose of staying there, but rather return with the purpose of revisiting and sort of reevaluating it, right, to see what we can learn from that moment. So yeah, I would say that this is really a,

Starting point is 00:21:19 it's a part of history that is still under appreciated. I think there's been more attention paid to it in recent years. Vijay Prashad, who you mentioned, his of course, his seminal book, The Darker Nations, has been really influential for a lot of people. It's a People's History of the Third World that I highly encourage folks to check out if you haven't already read it. And I think there is a growing interest in looking at this history of Third Worldism. But I think that there's still a lot that

Starting point is 00:21:45 needs to be done in terms of raising awareness of it and inserting it into left-wing discourse and discussion. So that's part of what I've tried to do with my writing and my work. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Prane Somaajula. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an Upstream Podcast Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you will have access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and

Starting point is 00:22:24 bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream podcast.

Upstream - [TEASER] Third Worldism and the Bandung Spirit w/ Pranay Somayajula

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.