The Essentials of Socialist Writing

Vijay Prashad

When Marx finished the first volume of Capital, Engels was worried. Would the book require a great deal of learning to comprehend it? In a letter to Marx after he read it, Engels wrote that the people and “even the scholars” are just “no longer at all accustomed to this way of thinking.” He wanted Marx to make the text “as easy for them as one possibly can.” Marx was not bothered. He had uncovered the guts of the capitalist system. He had written it as clearly as possible. Later, Engels would complain about the English translation. He would say that the translators did not understand that Marx was a clear and vigorous stylist.

What Engels said is very interesting to me. He said that Marx’s argument appeared difficult because people were “no longer at all accustomed to this way of thinking” — namely dialectics. In other words, it was not merely the language that was nettlesome but the form of thought, the very manner of thinking. The debate over jargon and clarity that has continued for decades misses the point.

The point is that if you are writing along the grain of common sense, then it is easy to understand what you are saying. Every cultural institution validates your argument — the television, the school books, the Internet. If you are askance common sense, if you are making claims that draw from thinking that is not commonplace, then you are in trouble. It is hard to be understood. You have to work on your writing to be as clear and vigorous as possible.

I’ve worked as a journalist for over twenty years, just about as long as I’ve had a PhD and had an academic career. There are obviously many forms of writing. These various forms have their own audiences and their own cultural codes. There is socialist writing that is highly technical — namely Capital — and socialist writing that is emotive — namely pamphlets and slogans to inform and inspire. Each has its register. Neither is more important. They all play a role.

I am interested in a form of writing that bridges the theoretical text and the pamphlet.

I want to draw insights from the theories that I find compelling and to draw the emotional register from political slogans and then to tell a story that is — I hope — both informative and inspirational.

But what do I get from the slogans? That’s where the detonator sentence comes from. Early in a text, there should be a sentence that captures the essence of your argument — not every part of your argument, but its kernel.

W. E. B Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk asked a question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” This was his detonator sentence. It carried the entire book with it. People of African descent in the United States had been made — through slavery and Jim Crow codes — to experience a subdued dignity. That was Du Bois’s point.

I came at it from a different place. In my second book, Karma of Brown Folk, I developed an argument about race in the United States, and why certain races stood for success while others stood for failure. This hierarchy of races allows white supremacy to make the claim that it is not after all racist.

South Asians in particular, but other Asian Americans as well, entered the United States after 1965 with advanced degrees. Their success story was written by immigration law, so that their “genius” was not through natural selection but by state selection. Nonetheless, South Asians were being positioned, against African Americans, as a success story. Drawing from Du Bois’s detonator sentence, I asked, “How does it feel to be a solution?” That question grounded the book.

One of my other books — The Darker Nations — is about the Third World Project, the political movement of the formerly colonized states on the world stage. The term “Third World” had become resonant with disparagement — state failure, corruption, violence. But this was a phenomenon of the 1980s, when the Third World Project had been, as I wrote, assassinated. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the term referred to that immense struggle to produce an alternative inter-state system. So the detonator sentence for that book — in fact the first sentence — ran, “The Third World is not a place, but a project.” In other words, the disparagement — which is about places in the world that had been reduced to penury and hopelessness — could not account for the political struggle — the project.

Finally, my most recent book — The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution — tells the story of Western intervention in West Asia and North Africa to shore up the West’s allies, such as Saudi Arabia, and to target its adversaries, such as secular nationalism (the Third World Project) and communism.

This use of massive violence by the West and its allies since Iraq in 1991 has destroyed states and seriously compromised Arab nationalism. A range of countries have been devastated — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The detonator sentence in that book is this — “It takes a hundred years to build a state; it can be destroyed in an afternoon.” I wanted the sentence to capture the massive violence as well as the cavalier destruction wrought to decades of social wealth.