Raju: Okay, so, hello everyone. I am Raju from the Intercivilizational Dialogue Project and today we are going to interview Dr. Tony Monteiro who is based in Philadelphia. Dr Monteiro is a Du Boisian scholar and founder of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation, based in Philadelphia. I wanted to mention at the outset that, this year, the Saturday Free School is doing The Year of James Baldwin to commemorate the centenary of the great writer and philosopher, James Baldwin. The purpose of this interview is to try and understand the American situation which the whole world is watching but not fully understanding and we want to get into the understanding of the situation with some depth. The other day I was thinking that there's so much commentary now on the internet, particularly with all these people commenting on geopolitics and everybody has an opinion on what's going on, but I think very little of it references the American people. Particularly, I think what we want to do today is also understand the nature of what's happening in America from the standpoint of the American people. So I want to begin by asking you, Dr. Monteiro, about the American elections. As we know, last month, Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States and in many ways it was an unprecedented election. And partly, the narrative coming out of the American Media has been so at odds with the actual facts about the election, that it's a little hard for people to understand how this happened. So we will get into the specifics but to begin with I just wanted to ask you how, broadly, you saw the result of this election, and what it says about American society in this time.
Dr. Monteiro: Yes, well, thank you very much, Raju and your colleagues, for having me. Even though the election was over a month ago, it is still very current because, from the standpoint of the elites and from the standpoint of the American people, we are all trying to understand what it all meant, what this portends for the future, and we're even still trying to get a deeper understanding of precisely what happened at the level of various classes and social groups in the United States. By that I mean: Was there a vast and profound political realignment? One where the working class, which had been since the 1930s, and the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency had been securely in the camp of the Democratic Party; and now the majority of working people and lower middle class people are in the Donald Trump camp. I hesitate to say the Republican party, because this election while, at the level of appearances, seems to be the old “two-party system”, “lesser of two evils” scenario, in fact, in a deeper sense, what Donald Trump represented, and he acknowledged this, was a movement against the elites, including the elites who he fought to take control of the Republican party. This is unprecedented and so we would have to call it a political realignment. But I very much agree with you in your emphasis upon how the people and the working people and the lower middle classes– young people– of course black people– saw this and what was their political behavior and how are they seeing things since the election. These are the pregnant questions for us to answer and too often, or most times, the mainstream media which emphasizes elite discourse and elite opinion does not get to this very granular, very grassroots level and certainly wishes not to look at class and class division in this election. Now, they, the elites, speak cryptically most times. In other words, whether it is intentional or not, whether it's a consequence of their world view, which predisposes them to be turned off by any kind of vast changes. Frankly they're turned off to the working class itself and so they look at things from that angle. Somehow they're shocked on the one side but they're also, the elites that is, very very angry at the working people and the working class of this country for having rejected them– the elites. People who are not familiar with the United States, or the mainstream media, will say– well look, Dr Monteiro, you're exaggerating, it's not that bad, the elites of the Democratic Party are for democracy, they're liberals, they're progressives, and what you're talking about is a populist movement that is leaning towards the right and towards fascism and authoritarianism and they happened to win this time because the liberal elites did not communicate well to the working class. Well, if you believe that, I have a bridge I will sell you in Brooklyn or I will buy the Taj Mahal. That's not hardly the case. This was a rebellion against a ruling class that had abandoned the nation. But in abandoning the nation it abandoned the working class. For most Americans and I know for an Indian audience a South Asian or Asian audience this is hard to understand. For most Americans, especially for most working Americans, this society is a dark and tragic landscape. So much so that what most people would assume about American society– a racially divided society– most white people being deeply anchored in white supremacy and most black people being marginalized and so on. Well that may have been what defined American society 50 or 60 years ago, but when we look at behavior, collective behavior, political behavior of groups and you look at their racial identities, what you see is at the level of the working class, the political behavior and even political consciousness of black and white working people and poor is almost identical even when they don't know each other personally. You get people who live in a de-industrialized small city somewhere in Western Pennsylvania, that is majority white, and where industry has left that city or that town years ago, and then you get black urban dwellers who were poor and unemployed because of the same processes of de-industrialization and on and on and on. They don't know each other personally but they do know each other because their conditions are so similar and I would argue that they behave politically the same. This is highly important from the standpoint of what we would call radical theory or communist theory of class struggle. Well, what is the high point of class consciousness in Marx's Theory? It is when workers recognize that they are in the same class, hence, in the same situation, and have the same struggle, to conduct and to wage, and therefore move in all kinds of ways, that we don't often see, towards class unity. We saw that demonstrated in this election. It was extraordinary, and it was more than, and went beyond Donald Trump. And it was not as, you know, most mainstream commentators would have it– well, people voted on the economy and inflation and the border. That was just the smallest, most obvious part of it. Working people voted in essence to reject the ruling elite and once you take the results of this election, which I'm still trying to study– all the data is not in, especially in Philadelphia, we're trying to understand it better– but once you account for everything, the vote, but then the polling data leading up to the vote, where 70% of people who were polled in what we call credible, or A+ polls– polls that are generally reliable and so on– 70% of the people polled said the American government must be fundamentally reformed; 15% of them, which in the American population is about 45 million people, said that the existing government must be torn down and a new social and economic system built up. We have never seen that in American polling data. Never. So when you use that kind of as a backdrop, and then you look at the vote, that backdrop of the government must be changed, fundamentally reformed or torn down and then you correlate that to the vote- it makes all the sense in the world. So there’s more I could say but I'll let you… Raju: Yeah, there are many things to follow up on there and kind of bring out. Well, to begin with, maybe I'll just start by asking you about what you were saying about the emerging class consciousness among the people. I think that maybe you could clarify a couple of things a bit more: one is the nature of the American ruling elite, because a lot of people see it as the Democratic party and the Republican Party and I think when you're speaking about the revolt or this emerging class consciousness as a revolt against the elite, maybe you could sort of bring that out more– what the revolt is against? The other thing in particular was the question of the African-American people, because so much of the media narrative paints Donald Trump as a racist, a fascist, and all of these kinds of things. That's the way he's described. So I think a lot of people are unable to understand why then would you have significant proportions of African-Americans either voting for him or not showing up to vote. Dr. Monteiro: This is one of the most profound outcomes of this election. The US ruling elite are defined not by whether they got money but they are defined by their relationship to State power. The Democratic Party had increasingly become the party of the State and all of those forces within American society, within the US ruling elite, who have an investment in upholding the State and the State power of the ruling elite were in the Democratic Party and were anti-Trump. What is extraordinary is that given their particular concern and I don't know how this would play out in India, but here control of the propaganda, information, and ideological universes is an essential part of State power. In other words the American State is not merely, and I would even argue, solely, a blunt instrument of class control. I think if you study the American State and American political processes, the ruling class of the United States which is probably the most sophisticated in the world recognizes that to govern and rule a nation like the United States in a complicated world situation, they have to win and control the commanding heights of information, ideology philosophy, art, entertainment and so on. And they do. But what is so deep about this election is that with all they said about Trump, working people rejected their line, their narrative. In other words, this huge investment in the ideological control of society– and it is huge, it is almost airtight, I mean it's sometimes frustrating that alternative ideas and art and culture and so on are rarely heard through this tight control. However, and this is what research will have to explain, working people did not accept the ruling elites’ branding and labeling of Trump and that is part of the Great frustration and anxiety of the ruling class. They asked– What? The working people have rejected our view of the world? Our view of Trump? Better yet, our best experts in political science and sociology and economics have said that Trump would be a disaster for the country and the working people rejected that? I mean, the consequences of this are enormous. That is not to say, and I want to be clear, I don't want anybody to get it mistaken, I'm not saying that we're looking at a revolutionary situation. I would argue maybe a pre-revolutionary situation. What will happen as we go forward depends upon a lot of things. And we'll have to see. But in this election the ruling class, its political framing of the election, and so on, as a struggle against fascism and “Trump is the closest thing to Hitler that we've ever seen”, that he is a white supremacist etc– well, look at the results of the election. Now, the African-American people. And I still believe– and this is not based upon what happened last year or 10 years ago or even 50 years ago– we're looking at a long history of the formation of the American proletariat and the central role of the black worker in this. So, any analysis that does not include a specific understanding of their consciousness and where black people stand will be limited and superficial. I can speak about Philadelphia because I'm more familiar with the data here. But I'm certain too in big cities where black people constitute either a majority or a major part of the population– such as Detroit, such as Cleveland, such as Kansas City, Missouri, St Louis, Missouri– these formerly industrial cities. If you look at Philadelphia and here we have to, you know, break the data down to specific groups– black men, the poorest demographic in American society, except for black children– black children are the poorest demographic, the second poorest demographic are black males, especially young black men, that is under 45, so to speak. In Philadelphia, 20 to 25% of them who voted, voted for Trump. Now, Philadelphia is a city that is controlled by a very strong political machine, the Democratic machine. They can get out the vote, can determine the vote etc. and it's done this over a long period of time, many decades. So in this city, everything was done to keep the Trump vote down. They knew, the Democrats knew, some months ago that they were losing the black male vote. This in itself was historic and if we study it properly can tell us a lot about consciousness. But then another 20% of registered black male voters did not vote, which in effect was a vote for Trump. One could extrapolate from this that 45% of black male voters– because you got a big part of the population that does not even register to vote, put those aside– of the registered voters 45% of black males either did not vote or voted for Trump and the “did not votes” were a vote for Trump, in effect. Well, if the Democratic Party loses the black vote, or more specifically, the black male vote, that party has become a spent force. It is a party that does not have a mandate from the people to govern. The Democratic party had built itself up as the party that has inherited and is the banner-holder of the Civil Rights Movement, and they created all these myths, all this propaganda– that, for example, Barack Obama was the new Martin Luther King Jr., well that's a joke– so this idea that the Democratic party is the Civil Rights Movement in a political form. Well, we're seeing that large numbers of black people, especially black males, didn't accept that, and they were prepared to vote against the Democratic Party. And they, in effect, decided that the state of Pennsylvania– which turned out to be a key state, a central, deciding state– was lost to the Democratic Party because of the black vote, and the black male vote in Philadelphia. This trend will not be reversed. Raju: I think one of the things that you have said in the past is the nature of the crisis in American society. I think maybe it would also help if you could speak to what you're describing– this pre-revolutionary situation, this rejection of the working class, of the ruling elite– just what the nature of this crisis in American society is, what has gotten people to this point, where they can no longer stand this, that we have to have to reject this ruling elite– so if you could just speak a little bit about that. Dr. Monteiro: Well, Raju, I think, you know, your emphasis upon crisis is the proper emphasis. You cannot come to the United States, you cannot talk about American society without talking about the crisis writ large. This is a society convulsed by crisis on every level, and these are crises that have to be put at the doorstep of a ruling elite who so structured the economy of the United States as to make it objectively an anti-working class. In other words, the 40 or 50 years of deindustrialization, the 40 or 50 years of neoliberal financial policy– in other words, policies especially after the 2008 economic financial crisis– that favor the largest banks, hedge funds, money markets– anything that is connected to the financial oligarchs– is prioritized in this economy. In 2008, you bailed out the banks, you bailed out the large mortgage companies, but the people who lost their homes because of what the big banks and mortgage companies and others did; the people who lost their homes never got them back. If there was a downward cycle of impoverishment and distress for the working class before 2008, it accelerated afterwards. In a certain sense, it is the downward pressure, the downward spiraling of the conditions of life of the working class, in general, that explains the anger and outrage, the new levels of consciousness of the working people– and in fact, as I said before, over 50% of working people live either in or near poverty. I think this might exceed India's rate of poverty, or come close to it. I mean, you know, often people see the United States through the lens of Hollywood movies, of celebrities, of pop culture, of advertisement, of the most recent Apple iPhone, and all of this type of thing, but they don't see it through the lens of the people. Cities have been hollowed out and gentrified, where the poor and working class cannot live in neighborhoods they once occupied, and they've been redesigned for the elite, for the educated, for universities, and so on. That has angered people. People can't afford to buy a house, a home, they cannot afford to send their children to University, or college. This is a society beset by crisis on every side– a general crisis of a system as it were. This cannot be overemphasized. That's why, you know, we could talk about the growing class unity, or class behavior, by working people– which is the positive– but then on the other side, this society has every potential to break off into a civil war, provoked by the ruling elite. And they would love nothing more than to have a race war break out in the United States. Although in this time and this is very important. If you went back 50 or so years ago, right after the assassination of Martin Luther King, there was talk of race war all over the place. Many young people, including myself, said we have to prepare for urban Guerilla warfare, we have to train ourselves to fight a race war in the cities. Today you don't even hear a mention of anything such as a race war, but we do hear talk of a civil war, and a civil war that looks a lot like a class war. This is where the question of the US State has to be brought into the discussion. Who has a right to command state power? Whose definition of democracy should be actualized? Should we have a new democracy, a people's democracy, a state of the people rather than a state of the elites? These questions are not remote from the situation and are on the table and in the minds of millions of Americans, as we speak. You know, I try to follow European politics and, you know, the political crisis in France– it's almost like a tiptoe through the tulips compared to the depth of this crisis in the United States. The political crisis in Germany– you know, oh my God, the Schulz government will have to step down– we had always thought of Europe as a center of class consciousness. No one ever thought the United States would be at the forefront of this. But the political crisis of the United States makes France and Germany and other European countries– Great Britain– look very shallow compared to what we are experiencing. Because in the United States, and I'll end this part here, in the United States, in ways that have not yet been fully articulated, the question of state power and what form of democracy will rule in the United States is definitely on the minds of people. Raju: I think that's a good point to you know because I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you see things going forward, and I wanted to ask you on two sides– on one, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about Trump's cabinet appointments and how you see what he's trying to do given his experience with his past presidency and the kind of people he is appointing, like Tulsi Gabbard or this Department of Governmental Efficiency he started with Vivek Ramaswami and Elon Musk and so on and so forth– that's on one side, and on the other side this question that you've raised about the possibility of civil war in society– do you also see the possibility of a peaceful transition to a new kind of democracy and if you could in that context speak about the role of the American left, whatever it is today. Dr. Monteiro: It's a lot of questions! Too much! First of all, Donald Trump's cabinet appointments. The most discouraging part of them are all of these Zionist neocons who, in many ways, will not have much power. Donald Trump will make his own foreign policy, I think. So Marco Rubio will not have much to do. Maybe as an advisor, maybe as an administrator of the Department of State but I don't expect him to be there long by the way. You take his appointment for the Department of Defense– obviously a person without experience– and almost Donald Trump's way of saying, you know, the hell with this vast bureaucracy of War. Hegseth, the guy that he's appointed for that, he's appointed to deconstruct the Department of Defense and fire a lot of four-star generals, the top generals. But beyond that, he will not have a lot to do with military policy. Again, Donald Trump will be the final word on that. In fact, if you want to understand the way Donald Trump sees himself governing, it's more Napoleonic– where Napoleon was the state and the state was him, or the government was him. Donald Trump sees himself as this huge historically transformative figure. Especially in foreign policy, he will be the decider. So I would not get immediately upset although I'm concerned. What does this mean for Donald Trump's foreign policy especially in the wake of the collapse of the Syrian State and Israel's genocide and attempt to annex all of these Arab lands? So that's a concern, a deep concern. But I could come back to that– I have some thoughts on that. But then, Tulsi Gabbard– at best, an anti-war, anti-interventionist Democrat as a congress person, who becomes a Republican or a MAGA supporter, a Donald Trump supporter– to appoint her as the head of the Department of National Intelligence? Now, for those who don't know– people probably have heard of the CIA, the FBI and a whole slew of other intelligence agencies that arose after the 9/11 attack upon the United States– all of them are housed in one department. In other words, one could think of this department as one of the commanding heights of state power because it includes all of the intelligence– military intelligence, global intelligence, the FBI and so on– to put her in charge of that rather than someone who is connected to the Deep State is literally to say that the Trump Administration intends to wage a struggle against the Deep State. I know a lot of people say– well, there is no Deep State. Yes, there is one in this country. It is the permanent government, it is the permanent military intelligence state that is so huge– at least as symbolic of the intentions and the political attitude of Trump towards the Deep State and those who command the highest positions within the state– that is breathtaking. The appointment of Matt Gates, who had to step down, replaced by this woman, Pam Bondi, who I don't know a lot about, but a trump loyalist, to head the Department of Justice– which means that Trump will attempt to carry out his election platform, to go after and prosecute and seek revenge against those forces in the state who went after him during and after his first presidency. To use the power of the state, and especially of what they call the justice department, which includes the FBI, a lot of the investigative agencies of the state, to use the leadership of that department against the state is an act of enormous courage– I find it almost breathtaking– and you put that alongside Tulsi Gabbard, who the mainstream media said is a member of an Indian yoga cult. There's a deep Indian connection in a lot of this, by the way, which should make the Indians proud! Then to get a guy named Kash Patel– connected to the Patels of India– and make him the head of the FBI. He wrote a book called Gangster Government where in the appendix of it, he lists all of the people that he will go after. Now it's a drama which you would almost only expect to see in a Hollywood comedy sometime. But this is what is happening. So if you set aside, for example, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, who won't have much power to decide foreign policy, and you look at what can only be described as an assault upon the Deep State– the permanent government, the state that has gone after democracy and after individuals who have fought for it including going back to the McCarthy period and people like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois and the Communist Party and so on. So when Trump says that his government will seek retribution and revenge for what the ruling elite has done to the working class– these are my words, he didn't put it this way– is to call it a paradigm shift I think is to miss the depth of what is going on. It's never happened in the United States. So much so that Joe Biden, who had said he would not pardon his son if he were found guilty, pardoned his son, because of the fear that Trump and his people are coming after him. And then preemptively pardon, or wants to pardon a whole list of other people– some of whom don't want a pardon, they said I didn't do anything wrong. Biden said just in case you did, I want to give you some protection. Raju: You know the other day I was listening to, you know, one of these commentaries and first of all, a lot of people are panicking with his cabinet appointments and I heard one person describe them as revolutionary. It was interesting because she was having a back and forth with her host who was saying– well, I don't think you can call this revolutionary but she went– I forget the name of the woman, I'll have to look it up– but she said that we've never seen anything like this and these are revolutionary cabinet appointments. Dr. Monteiro: Yeah I would agree with that. You know, in a lot of ways, when you think of it, let us say a Left or revolutionary government took power in the United States– would they do much different with the justice department or the department of National Intelligence? I doubt it. So in a sense, and it's according to how you define revolution and how far this will go, but even in the most classic definition of revolution– let us say Lenin's definition– you break down, you undo the old State and build a new one. I'm not saying we're on the cusp of that but we're moving very close to that. Now when you ask the question of the Left, the American left– and you know the definition of what is Left is so amorphous that it's not even a definition. You know, everybody from Hillary Clinton to the Revolutionary Communist Party, or the Communists, but whatever, you know, we're all the Left. And the way they defined it, the way the Left defined it, was we're in a united front against fascism and this is something like George Demitrov back in the 1930s– it was really a fake narrative that influenced nothing and no one, especially the working class. But what it showed is that a lot of what is called the Left, from Social Democrats, to Communists, to Liberals and Progressives had sided with the Democratic party, in spite of Biden's funding of this genocide in Gaza, in spite of the fact– and I would propose this to your listeners– in spite of the fact that it was Biden who unleashed the dogs of war which have brought us closer to nuclear war than we've ever been. He unleashed the dogs of war and a second term or a term of Kamala Harris would have only increased that. The war danger is greater now than ever and if you were talking of lesser two evils, one would have to say that Trump was the least danger of global war. In fact, he spoke out against it– not clearly enough, not unambiguously enough– but enough to suggest that he wanted to pull back from war, pull back from an economy reliant upon the military industrial complex and because of the profits of war would get us in war wherever we could find one to get into. But the Left, which should have known better– the Communists, the Social Dems, the Progressives– to side with Kamala Harris or the Biden Administration was an act of betrayal that went beyond what the German Social Democrats did in 1914 in supporting war bonds for Germany to conduct World War I. This betrayal of the American people, of Peace, of Democracy, of the legacy of Martin Luther King, of Paul Robinson, this betrayal can never be forgotten and I think they will never recover from it. So without a Left– and this raises a whole lot of other questions of political parties, of movements, of consciousness– without a political Left, the working class found its way to do the right thing. The working class of the United States in their majority are anti-war. We've never known this before, Raju. This is why it's all so breathtaking. The American working class voted against war and in significant ways voted against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Nobody asked them– well, what did you think of this or that– but if you know them, if you talk to them, it is very obvious that a part of the pro-Trump vote was an anti-war vote. That's why the majority of the youth voted for Trump. I think it was a majority or close to majority, because the youth are generally the most anti-war. I don't think we have a “Left” in the traditional sense any longer. I think something new will have to be created out of this new moment. How that will take place I don't know. We, in the Saturday Free School, we work in Philadelphia, and to some degree in Chicago, but definitely in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is the sixth largest city in the country, the fifth largest black working class black population in the country. So we will do our part through mobilization, political education, ideological education of the people. But the people are not like sheep. The people have memories. They have consciousness more than at any time in human history. Working people know things, they find ways to get information. The working class can behave and move forward without a “revolutionary party” as previously defined. So the working class went far beyond the Left. The Left is behind the working class even though the left claims to be a vanguard. In fact, most working people overwhelmingly rejected the trade union leaders, which is another unbelievable thing, because what are the trade union leaders– the trade union leaders are connected to the ruling class. They follow that theory– that early 20th century theory of Edward Bernstein– the more capitalism develops, the more democratic it becomes, and the less necessary is the class conflict. That's what most trade union leaders hold to. They were rejected. The automobile workers, in their majority, rejected the United Automobile Workers Union. The Teamsters went with Trump and on and on. The black working class rejected the black political class and the black political class is panicking– what do we do? They too are a spent political force. Trade union leaders, spent political force. Black misleadership class, spent political force. The Democratic party, a spent political force. The so-called Left, a spent political force. The Democratic party is in such a crisis that they've kind of formed what we call a circular firing squad– where each side destroys the other. The Democratic party cannot find a basis of unity which means that those forces that command the state cannot find a political solution to the problem of a population that rejects their legitimacy. Raju: The last question that, you know, I wanted to ask you, Dr Monteiro– and then we should wrap this interview up for today, though, you know, you've raised a lot of issues which are going to need more time to, you know, fully discuss and get through– is just how you see the consequences of all of this on the world situation. In particular if you could, you know, talk about the rise of BRICS and we're hearing every day about the situation in West Asia but, you know, whichever way you want to do it, if you could just connect the International and World situation to what's happening in the US. Dr. Monteiro: It's so interesting because, you know, the United States is the major purveyor of war in the world and the European nations and the US cannot imagine a world where they are not hegemonic. They just can't imagine it. To see how this is actualized in the United States is something to behold and I know a South Asian or Asian, even best informed people, would find it difficult to see how this all works out. Can the United States again be the single hegemonic power in a multi-polar world? In a world where new alliances like BRICS– and the last meeting I think in Kazan, the summit of BRICS which went beyond anything that it had previously done by the way, in Russia, which suggested Russia the so-called rogue regime and Putin as the authoritarian leader; this was the most sign significant BRICS meeting and maybe the most significant meeting since Bandung, the afroasiatic world, and it announced, this BRICS Summit announced that they would in multiple ways challenge American hegemony and European dominance. And you don't have to go far, you look at the data– BRICS, in terms of the size of the economy, is the largest part of the global economy, going beyond Europe and the EU. Of course, if you throw the United States in it, maybe the two sides become even. But when you put China, and India, and Russia, and Iran, and maybe Saudi Arabia, and Brazil, and South Africa, and maybe Nigeria, and Egypt, and Ethiopia– this is the future. It is irreversible. The future belongs to the darker races of previously colonized people and you don't need to know much more than that to know where the world is going. However there's a man named Richard Haas, who might not be well known in India/South Asia but he's very influential. He was previously the head of the most important foreign policy think tank in the United States– the Council on Foreign Relations. He retired last year and he gave a retirement interview, where he said that the greatest threat to America's national security does not come from China or Russia or anywhere else, it comes from the American people. Now what was he saying? He says the American people do not accept the direction of foreign policy of the US state. Another way of saying it is what I previously said– the American people are anti-war, war exhausted. I think so much that will happen in the next, let us say, five years, probably less than that of course, will be decided by the American people. Never before– it's hard for me to say never before but the gravity of this cannot be underestimated– the American people who had been rejected in revolutionary theory and revolutionary politics, along with BRICS, along with China, along with all of this, could probably become a deciding factor in War and Peace, in global Democracy, and what the future future will look like. But that means people like myself, and my colleagues, and others will have to do a lot of hard work, because there's going to be an ideological assault upon the masses. Everything will be done to convince them that they need to stay out of global politics, that they don't need to get involved in these things– let the experts handle it. But I think the genie is out of the bottle. This election proved to the working class that they do have power, that they can decide the future. Now, everybody is not thinking the same way, of course. You know 150 million people voted– that's a drop in the bucket compared to the electorate of India– but 150 million people in the most powerful, most war-like nation in the world is qualitatively on a different level and that's what we're looking at. I would just say this– all of us have to be modest, we do not know how this will go forward, we do not know. W.E.B. Du Bois talked about “Law and Chance” and sometimes Chance is a more important factor than Law. I know with you and and your colleagues in Bangalore and in India, we try to think about these things on multiple levels of ideology, epistemology, knowledge formation and so on and so forth and we have to continue this. But rather than knowing the future in the sense of knowing how it will come into being, we have to be prepared to fight for the future– and I'd like to make a distinction– to know the future often leads to passivity but to commit to fight for the future means that you don't know exactly how it's going to come into being, but you have an idea, in a set of broad imaginaries of how we must fight, who and what social forces are necessary to create a future.This is why anyone who's a revolutionary has to be very modest and humble because the people will decide. The people will decide, and the people are capable of deciding and the American people have a capability that very few people ever thought they were capable of, and they are capable. So that's the way I would put it. I can't say what it will be actually, how it will come about, but I know we are on new ground. There are new possibilities– we have to think and imagine differently. There is no substitute for ideological clarity, for knowledge and for taking whatever we know to the people, to live with the people to talk to the people, to share what we know and to learn from the people, most importantly, and I would say that is the landscape that exists in the United States right now, and the challenge for revolutionaries. Raju: Okay, thank you very much, Dr Monteiro. Just to add to what you said at the end, I think that, you know, no matter where you are in the world, it's pretty much impossible to conduct the fight for the future without understanding and knowing some of what you said today and what we got into. Unless we understand what's going on in the US, it's difficult– in a sense, what you were saying, the role of the American people may almost be overdetermining in the fight for the future. So, you know, thank you for coming and giving this interview and, you know, hopefully we'll have another chance to talk again. Thank you. Dr. Monteiro: Thank you.
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January 2025
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