<![CDATA[culture shock]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyzhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!B66W!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F040a2cef-6e0e-4fcb-97a9-23b5914fcf89_1080x1080.pngculture shockhttps://www.culture-shock.xyzSubstackFri, 01 May 2026 11:51:09 GMT<![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 35 - Reviving the European Left]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-35-revivinghttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-35-revivingWed, 01 Apr 2026 15:42:53 GMT

Episode 35 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by Peter Mertens, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB), to discuss the current situation and future outlook of the European left. We discuss the PTB’s meteoric rise as one of the most prominent and fastest-growing left-wing parties in Europe today, the fight against a rising tide of militarism and far-right nationalism, and the role of parliamentary politics in revolutionary struggle, and discuss what role Europe—and in particular, the European left—has to play in a shifting international order.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Peter Mertens:

Workers’ Party of Belgium:

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]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 34 - Resisting Empire From Within]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-34-resistinghttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-34-resistingWed, 04 Mar 2026 15:20:08 GMT

Episode 34 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by Marxist theorist and anti-imperialist revolutionary Torkil Lauesen, author of numerous books including The Principal Contradiction (Kersplebedeb, 2020) and Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (Iskra Books, 2025), to discuss the challenges and contradictions of anti-imperialist resistance in the imperial core. We explore key concepts such as the labor aristocracy and unequal exchange and their relationship to the prospects of resistance within imperialist countries, and discuss how revolutionaries located in the heart of empire can overcome these challenges to weaken empire from within.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

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]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 33 - Imperialism and Resistance in Mexico]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-33-imperialismhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-33-imperialismWed, 18 Feb 2026 18:13:06 GMT

Episode 33 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by Alexander Aviña, historian of Mexico and associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University, to discuss imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance in Mexico. We discuss the long history of revolutionary struggles in Mexico, the imperial origins and present-day violence of the U.S.-Mexico border, and how Mexico’s relationship with the United States has shaped the last century of American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere—as well as how all of this has been affected by recent developments in the last decade of Mexican politics.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Alex Aviña:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 32 - The Problem with Western Marxism]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-32-the-problemhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-32-the-problemWed, 04 Feb 2026 16:20:31 GMT

Episode 32 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by guest host Ashwin Shantha of the Journal of International Solidarity podcast to interview Gabriel Rockhill, professor of philosophy at Villanova University and author of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025) about how the ‘imperial theory industry’ has served to undermine actually-existing socialist projects and national liberation struggles while maintaining a superficial guise of ‘radical’ politics. We discuss the political economy of knowledge production, the longstanding entanglements between Western academia, the national security state, and the capitalist ruling class, and what it means to understand the cultural and intellectual spheres as sites of political struggle.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Journal of International Solidarity:

Gabriel Rockhill:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[the sun never sets: making sense of modern empire]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/the-sun-never-sets-making-sense-ofhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/the-sun-never-sets-making-sense-ofMon, 02 Feb 2026 20:00:24 GMTDear readers,

I’m writing to share a big announcement that I’ve been sitting on for a while now and am finally able to share with you all: I’M WRITING A BOOK!!!

The title is The Sun Never Sets: Making Sense of Modern Empire, and it’s intended to be a sort of ‘crash course,’ geared toward a general left audience, in what it means to understand imperialism in systemic terms and why the contemporary left—particularly those of us located in the imperial core—need to center anti-imperialism and international solidarity as a core pillar of our politics. The idea is to draw on a rich tradition of anti-imperialist Marxist thought to push back against two of the most common misconceptions about imperialism that one often encounters in political discourse today—first, that empire is primarily a bygone historical injustice whose ‘legacies’ we need to ‘reckon with’ in the present; and second, that imperialism is a practice that individual states engage in rather than a world system of political economy and capitalist exploitation on a global scale.

The book, which I’ve been commissioned to write by the wonderful folks at Haymarket Books, follows along many of the themes that I’ve been exploring in both my writing, my podcast, and my organizing work for a while now. In particular, it builds upon the arguments that I started to lay out in the talk that I gave on “Reviving the Bandung Spirit” at the Socialism 2025 conference last July in Chicago. I previously published the text of that talk as an essay here; be sure to check it out if you’d like to get a preview of the sort of questions I’ll be wrestling with in this book!

Anyone who knows me knows that writing a book—and specifically, writing a book about imperialism—has been a dream of mine for as long as I’ve been pursuing writing in anything remotely resembling a serious or semi-professional way. I truly don’t have the words to express how grateful I am for this opportunity, and how excited I am to take on what I know will be an enormous but extremely rewarding project. It goes without saying that I am so grateful to all of you, my readers, for all of the support and encouragement that you’ve shown me over the years—I truly would not be here without you all.

Some light housekeeping—I hope you’ll continue to stick with me and bear with me as I navigate this project over the coming year, and in particular as I juggle writing a book on top of graduate school, my podcast, political organizing, and the million other things that are going on at any given moment (especially as my hometown continues to resist a fascist federal occupation that is now stretching into its third consecutive month). You may have noticed that my frequency of publishing on Substack has gone down since I started my PhD program, and I have a feeling that trend will only continue now that I have this major project to demand my energy and attention as a writer. In other words, if you were hoping for more regular essays from me on here, I’m afraid you may be in for a bit of disappointment—but I promise it will all be worth it in the end when this book is done!

I’ll keep this message relatively brief and leave things off here—after all, I’ve got a book to write!

Much love and solidarity,

Pranay

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 31 - Trump's Revival of the Monroe Doctrine]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-31-trumps-revivalhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-31-trumps-revivalWed, 21 Jan 2026 16:51:23 GMT

Episode 31 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by Guillaume Long, former Foreign Minister of Ecuador and current Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, to discuss the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ and its role in shaping the trajectory of U.S. imperialism in Latin America. We discuss the history of this foreign policy doctrine, its evolution over the last two centuries, and why it is so important for understanding the particular shape that American imperial aggression in the Western Hemisphere has taken under the Trump Administration—especially in light of the United States’ illegal invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in the first few days of 2026.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Guillaume Long:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 30 - Debating the National and Colonial Questions]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-30-debatinghttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-30-debatingWed, 10 Dec 2025 17:37:30 GMT

Episode 30 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

Become a paid subscriber

About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined once again by Ashwin Shantha, host of the Journal of International Solidarity podcast, to revisit a crucial but often-overlooked episode in international left history—the 1920 debate between Vladimir Lenin and the Indian Communist leader M.N. Roy over the national and colonial question. In this conversation, posted as a collaborative episode with the Journal of International Solidarity, we summarize the contours of this debate, situating it within the historical context of the Second World Congress of the Communist International, before tackling a wide-ranging discussion of what lessons this debate holds for contemporary internationalists as we navigate the challenges and contradictions of anti-imperialism in the 21st century.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Journal of International Solidarity:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 29 - The Political Economy of Global Shipping]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-29-the-politicalhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-29-the-politicalWed, 26 Nov 2025 16:18:15 GMT

Episode 29 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

Become a paid subscriber

About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by Laleh Khalili, Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020), to discuss the incredibly important but often-overlooked role of international shipping and logistics in the capitalist-imperialist world system. We discuss how the global shipping industry relates to everything from transnational labor exploitation to environmental devastation to the genocide in Palestine, as well as the power of organized labor in this crucial industry to bring the capitalist system to a grinding halt.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Laleh Khalili:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 28 - Internal Colonialism in the United States]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-28-internalhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-28-internalWed, 12 Nov 2025 22:11:36 GMT

Episode 28 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

Become a paid subscriber

About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by intellectual historian Sam Klug, author of The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025), to discuss the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ as it applies to the situation of African Americans and other racialized peoples in the United States. We explore how this concept developed within the Black radical tradition, how it evolved over time, and how it was taken up by an astoundingly diverse array of thinkers and activists across the ideological spectrum, and discuss what this radical way of thinking about the politics of race can offer us on the anti-racist and colonial left today.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 27 - Worldmaking After Empire]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-27-worldmakinghttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-27-worldmakingWed, 29 Oct 2025 15:38:30 GMT

Episode 26 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

Become a paid subscriber

About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by political theorist Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019), to discuss the politics of ‘anticolonial worldmaking’ that swept across the Third World throughout the latter half of the 20th century, when Global South leaders envisioned new ways of radically reshaping the international order into one founded on principles of international justice and sovereign equality. We explore what became of this worldmaking political project, its contemporary legacies and reverberations, and what lessons we can draw from it as we work to build a more equitable world order in the 21st century.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 26 - Anti-Imperialist Political Education (1-Year Anniversary Episode!!!)]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-26-anti-imperialisthttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-26-anti-imperialistWed, 15 Oct 2025 15:29:46 GMT

Episode 26 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

Become a paid subscriber

About this episode:

For this special one-year anniversary episode of Return to Bandung, I’m joined by my comrade Ashwin Shantha to discuss our shared project of anti-imperialist political education. In this conversation, posted as a collaborative episode with Ashwin’s excellent International Solidarity Podcast (itself a part of Ashwin’s larger Journal of International Solidarity project), we explore the importance of political education in our current moment of crisis, the challenges of raising anti-imperialist consciousness in the imperial core, the contradictions and opportunities that from working within Western academia, and much more.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Journal of International Solidarity:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[gaza has remade the world]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/gaza-has-remade-the-worldhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/gaza-has-remade-the-worldTue, 14 Oct 2025 02:18:51 GMT
Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

The first demonstration I attended to protest against the genocide in Gaza—a vigil and ceasefire rally organized by progressive Jewish groups in Washington, D.C.—took place in October 2023, just a few days after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the beginning of Israel’s bombardment. Around a thousand people assembled in Farragut Square and marched a few blocks south to the White House, where the crowd surrounded the building and smaller groups of us blocked off each of the entrances. The intention of blocking the building’s entrances, rather than maintaining the public spectacle of a single large crowd gathered outside the gates, was to send a message to White House staffers as they tried to enter and exit, demanding that they end their employer’s complicity in the genocide.

When all was said and done, it was little more than yet another purely symbolic expression of civil disobedience, the sort of tactic that has been increasingly (and rightly) critiqued as the genocide has worn on for being overly performative and largely ineffective. At the time, however, we were spurred on by the possibility—however remote—that the people working inside the building we were blockading, the people with the power to put an end to the carnage that was just beginning to unfold might look out the window and pay attention to us. Back then, of course, Joe Biden was still in office, and as disillusioned as I and most of my fellow travelers on the left already were after three years of feckless Democratic Party leadership, we still held on to a glimmer of hope that perhaps, if only we were able to mobilize enough public outrage and opposition, we might be able to exert sufficient pressure to shift the administration’s policy of unwavering support for Israel.

Two years later, the situation has changed so drastically that it feels trite to even point it out. We all know by now how things played out—the refusal by Biden (and later by his anointed successor, Kamala Harris) to heed the public outcry and exert any meaningful leverage to stop the genocide, the relentless demonization and smear campaigns against anyone who offered even the most milquetoast criticisms of the Zionist entity, the brutal repression of student protesters during last spring’s wave of encampments. We know also what happened next, how Biden’s toothless liberalism and promises that “nothing would fundamentally change” ended up meekly giving way for the triumphant resurgence of Donald Trump—the bloody, putrid expectoration of a decrepit empire in its final death throes—and the subsequent ascendance of fascism at a pace that has caught even the most cynical among us off guard.

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All of this, of course, has taken place against a backdrop of escalating carnage in Gaza and across the Middle East. As I am writing these words, two years and a day since the genocide began, media outlets are reporting that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the “first phase” of what appears to be the most comprehensive ceasefire plan yet. Whether that ceasefire holds, and what comes next as negotiations continue over the longer-term horizons of Trump’s proposed ‘peace plan’—a plan that, if implemented, would entail the complete demilitarization of the resistance, the denial of Palestinian self-determination, and the installation of a neocolonial ‘transitional authority’ dominated by Western elites and war criminals—remains to be seen. But even if this latest development does prove to bring about a lasting cessation to what is only the most recent episode in a 77-year history of Zionist settler-colonial brutality against the Palestinians, there can be no undoing the devastation that has already been wrought.

That devastation is so complete and so incomprehensibly horrific that it is impossible to offer more than a cursory sketch of it here. Since October 2023, conservative estimates indicate that Israel has murdered some 67,000 people in Gaza, more than 80 percent of them civilians. 92 percent of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, along with 89 percent of water and sanitation infrastructure and 92 percent of schools. The most recent months of the genocide have seen Israel sadistically and systematically weaponize starvation against Gaza’s besieged population, leaving more than half a million people facing “catastrophic” famine while desperate Palestinians are gunned down indiscriminately at aid distribution sites that have been turned into killing fields. And as if the desolation of Gaza weren’t enough, the repeated expansion of Israel’s onslaught to target the wider Middle East has put the fundamentally imperial nature of this war and genocide on full display. Earlier this year, Israel launched a U.S.-backed war of aggression against the people of Iran, and in the span of just three days in September, it bombed six countries across the region—Lebanon, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen—all but two of which had already been attacked by the Zionist entity multiple times since the start of the genocide.

As we pass the second anniversary of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, when Palestinian resistance fighters heroically tore down the walls of the Gaza ghetto, as well as the second anniversary of the genocide’s beginning, now is a moment to reflect on everything that has happened since then—especially as it seems that a lasting ceasefire has finally begun to take hold. Upon such reflection, it is clearer now than ever before that the events of the last two years have fundamentally reshaped not only the world around us, but the way we as human beings look at and move through and respond to it. Gaza, in other words, has remade the world. The rest of this essay is dedicated to making sense of exactly how that remaking has unfolded, and where we go from here.

• • •

We have all, in one way or another, been forever altered by the genocide in Gaza. Whether we care to admit it to ourselves or not, we are all a little more hardened, a little more cynical, a little less trusting in the platitudes about humanity’s inherent goodness that we were taught as children to believe. The routinization of mass slaughter as just another facet of our daily lives, the overwhelming constancy with which we have been inundated with graphic images of suffering and atrocity—not to mention the disturbing ease with which the vast majority of us, in the face of this inundation, have been able to continue living happily during the war—has contributed significantly to this profound sense of alienation from our collective humanity.

But even as the genocide has indelibly touched our individual and collective psyches at the most fundamental level, it is equally true that, in ways that it is perhaps still too early to fully discern, the larger world we inhabit has been forever altered as well. After two years of genocide, the so-called ‘liberal international order’—already severely tarnished by decade after decade of Western (particularly American) leaders unilaterally forcing their imperial hegemony onto the rest of the world with smiles on their faces and guns in their hands—has been shattered beyond all hope of repair. In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Gaza genocide has proven to be for the 21st century what the Nazi Holocaust was for the 20th.

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Before I develop this argument any further, a note on Holocaust analogies: there are some who will read what I have just written and find it obvious to the point of banality; there are no doubt many more who will be scandalized and even outraged. Even amid the sea change in public opinion regarding Israel that has taken place since October of 2023, there still remains a taboo in mainstream discourse against pointing out the obvious—that Netanyahu’s Israel has spent two years deploying against Palestinians the same exterminatory logics that Hitler’s Germany once deployed against the Jews of Europe, with deportation trains and gas chambers replaced by AI-powered drone systems and precision-guided munitions as the preferred instruments of mechanized mass slaughter. To do so is to risk charges of rank antisemitism, of downplaying and even outright denying the Holocaust—but after two relentless years of livestreamed genocidal barbarism, we can no longer afford to entertain such bad-faith accusations. If ‘Never Again’ is to be more than an empty slogan, we must have the moral courage to call a spade a spade.

My intention, then, in drawing this admittedly controversial comparison is not to provoke shock for its own sake, nor is it to reify the exceptionalist logic that treats the Holocaust as the universal reference point for evil in its purest form—what the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, in his powerful London Review of Books essay “The Shoah After Gaza,” calls “the measure of all crimes.” Rather, it is to highlight the unique function that the carnage in Gaza, like the Holocaust before it, has come to serve as an epoch-defining atrocity, shattering widely-held illusions and shining a light on realities that many would rather not face. The horrors of the Second World War, and in particular the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, brought about a profound rupture in Europe’s self-conception as the cradle of Enlightenment civilization (a self-conception that had, for centuries, underpinned the European project of spreading that civilization throughout the colonial world at gunpoint). A generation of European thinkers were spawned who sought desperately to make sense of the decimation of the image of the enlightened, civilized West, to understand how such a West could have produced such barbarity. In the process, a deeply distorted view began to emerge, reinforced by popular culture and political discourse, which placed the Holocaust on a dubious pedestal of exceptionalism—exceptional not only in the sense of being a unique and incommensurable evil, but more importantly in the sense of representing a particularly bloody deviation from a pre-existing standard of civilization that Europe had supposedly enjoyed.

In the introduction to his seminal 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (himself a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis as a teenager) sums up this exceptionalist narrative—a narrative which he forcefully rejects—as follows:

The etiological myth deeply entrenched in the self-consciousness of our Western society is the morally elevating story of humanity emerging from pre-social barbarity . . . In view of this myth, long ago ossified into the common sense of our era, the Holocaust can only be understood as the failure of civilization (i.e. of human purposive, reason-guided activity) to contain the morbid natural predilections of whatever has been left of nature in man.

Nearly a century after the end of World War II, this exceptionalist narrative of ‘Holocaust-as-rupture’ continues to loom large in our collective imagination. Even at the time, however, this view was powerfully challenged by anticolonial thinkers who watched it all unfold from the vantage point of Europe’s colonies, recognizing in Europe’s civilizational debasement the same barbarity that the West had long inflicted on the colonized world. Perhaps the most famous—though by no means the only—such critic was the Martinican poet and anticolonial leader Aimé Césaire, who wrote of Nazism in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism:

[Europeans] hide the truth from themselves . . . that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Many others among Césaire’s anticolonial contemporaries, from the Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru to the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore, offered similar indictments. What this contestation over the Holocaust’s origins and its implications for Western modernity reveals, then, is that rather than representing a rupture in or deviation from that modernity, the Holocaust served to expose the fundamental hypocrisy and brutality that had always festered at the heart of it. As Bauman puts it in Modernity and the Holocaust, “every ‘ingredient’ of the Holocaust—all those many things that rendered it possible—was . . . fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world.”1

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If the Holocaust in Europe shattered the illusions that underpinned Western civilizational identity in the early decades of the 20th century, then the holocaust in Gaza, three-quarters of a century later, has had a similar effect on the illusions that underpin our understanding of the international order in these early decades of the 21st. For decades since the end of World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the trans-Atlantic alliance of Western Europe and the United States has sought to position itself as the protector of liberalism on the world stage, championing the international promotion of democracy, human rights, and political freedoms while pursuing ever-greater degrees of global integration. The events of the last two years, however, have revealed the complete and utter moral bankruptcy of a ‘rules-based international order’ whose rules are set and enforced by the same Western powers that have continued without fail to provide moral, political, financial, and material support for Israel’s genocide. The fact that European leaders (the United States, in classic American fashion, still insists on sticking to its guns) are only now beginning to grow publicly uncomfortable with the sheer barbarity of the Zionist entity’s genocide, issuing tepid statements of quasi-condemnation and halfhearted gestures toward recognition of a Palestinian state, is—to put it lightly—far too little, far too late.

And just as the Nazi Holocaust was no aberration, but was in fact “fully in keeping” with the fundamental logics of European civilization, so too is the Gaza genocide fully in keeping with the fundamental logics of our current global order. Zionism seeks to exterminate the Palestinians not because of some primordial ‘ancient hatreds’ that cleave along ethnic or religious lines, but rather because Palestinian resistance to settler-colonial occupation and erasure poses an existential threat to the imperialist world system of which the state of Israel has always functioned as a key outpost. This is why Western countries, and in particular the U.S., have remained so resolute for so long in supporting Israel—they recognize, as we all should, that the current genocide is really a proxy war, waged by the United States’ most important vassal state, to defend and uphold the crumbling edifice of a world system in which the West’s imperialist boot can remain firmly pressed against the necks of the darker nations.

To say that Gaza has remade the world, however, means more than merely pointing out that it has shattered widely-held illusions about the world we live in. In giving the lie to the mythology of the liberal international order, the events of the last two years have also proven transformative for the collective empowerment of the Global South, and contributed significantly to what the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research calls the “churning of the global order.” The ‘new mood’ of assertiveness and self-determination that Tricontinental executive director Vijay Prashad has identified among Southern nations has taken root in large part as a response to the growing moral isolation of the West as a result of the genocide, and the complete delegitimization of Western powers’ claims to be legitimate arbiters of human rights and global justice.

Of course, the antecedents of these shifts—the structural contradictions of neoliberal globalization, the rise of China as an alternative leader on the world stage, the growing push for multilateralism and South-South cooperation—long predate October 7th. There can be little doubt, however that the genocide has dramatically accelerated these transformations. From South Africa accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice to China explicitly affirming Palestinians’ right to armed resistance to Southern states taking the enforcement of international law into their own hands through the formation of the Hague Group, Global South countries have used the genocide in Gaza to confront Western hypocrisy and hegemony in ways that would have been all but unthinkable just a few years ago. And lest we fall into the trap of treating these developments as if they are taking place merely at the highest levels of state policy and foreign relations, it’s worth remembering that every ‘official’ expression of Global South solidarity with Palestine has been accompanied by grassroots mobilization on the part of the masses, who have rallied in the thousands and millions across the Global South to pressure their governments from below.

Underpinning this outpouring of solidarity is the recognition that the devastation unleashed by Israel on Gaza does not exist in a vacuum—that what is being done to the Palestinians today could well be done to the rest of the Global South tomorrow. Few world leaders have been more outspoken on this point than Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has repeatedly used his platform in international fora to draw attention to this chilling reality. In his speech at the December 2023 COP28 climate summit in Dubai, for example, Petro called the genocide in Gaza a “rehearsal for the future,” warning that “the unleashing of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian people is what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate crisis.” Nearly two years later, in a July 2025 speech at the Hague Group’s emergency conference in Bogotá, Petro repeated his warning, declaring that “Gaza is simply an experiment by the mega-rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how you respond to a rebellion of humanity.” And just a few weeks ago, in his September address to the United Nations General Assembly, Petro connected the genocide in Gaza to the escalation of imperialist aggression in Latin America, emphasizing once again that “they will not just bomb Gaza, not just the Caribbean as they are doing already, but all of humanity that demands freedom.”

• • •

When reflecting on the events of the last two years, there is of course an inherent danger in speaking about the Gaza genocide and its implications for the overall state of the world in such sweeping and conceptual terms—namely, that doing so risks further dehumanizing Palestinians by treating their very material suffering as a sort of symbolic blank canvas onto which all manner of abstract conclusions can be projected. For those of us engaged in the intellectual work of trying to make sense of war and genocide, it is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that we are talking about real human beings who have suffered—and continue to suffer—real and unimaginable loss and devastation. In an August 2025 essay for the LA Review of Books, Mary Turfah argues powerfully against precisely this sort of sanitized abstraction, writing:

I will admit that I don’t care, not right now, about reordering the world, in salvaging it at all. The beginning and end of my concern is stopping the genocide in Gaza, whose people—like all people—exist not as a moral lesson or a symbol, but as people.

I am, of course, profoundly sympathetic to this position. At the same time, however, I remain firm in my belief that we cannot afford to miss the forest for the trees. The reality is that the genocide in Gaza, as I have highlighted extensively above, is the symptom and not the disease. It is the logical outgrowth, and indeed the inevitable conclusion, of an imperialist world-system that is structurally designed to facilitate the merciless exploitation of the global periphery and the international working class by a small handful of elites in the imperial core—and to punish with extreme brutality any people that dares to challenge that system.

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In other words, we have no choice but to care about reordering the world, no choice but to pay attention to the very real shifts in the global order that have been engendered and intensified by both the genocide itself and by the Global South’s reactions to it. To argue, as I have maintained here, that “Gaza has remade the world” is to argue that Gaza has further sharpened the internal contradictions of the capitalist-imperialist world system, hastening their development and bringing us closer to the final crisis that will lead to that system’s inevitable collapse. What will follow in the wake of that collapse—socialism or barbarism, a liberated world or an annihilated one—is by no means a foregone conclusion. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that Gaza has started to remake the world, but that it is ultimately up to the revolutionary masses, in the Global South and the imperial core alike, to determine what form that remaking will ultimately take.

All of this is to say that even as we celebrate the news of a ceasefire in Gaza, it is incumbent upon us to remember that this is not the end of anything, but rather just one link in a long chain of historical developments that are accelerating and intensifying with each passing day. With this in mind, must remain steadfast in our commitment to a revolutionary politics whose horizon is nothing less than the liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed peoples—a liberation that can only come with the complete overthrow of the entire capitalist-imperialist world system. Anything short of that will inevitably lead us back to where we find ourselves now, picking up the pieces in the wake of yet another genocidal calamity—perhaps in Palestine, perhaps somewhere else.

• • •

In August 1971, the Black revolutionary martyr George Jackson completed his manifesto Blood in My Eye while incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. Just days later, he was murdered by prison guards while attempting to liberate himself from captivity. (Notably, after his own martyrdom, authorities found a handwritten copy of the poem “Enemy of the Sun” by the revolutionary Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim in Jackson’s cell. The poem was later mistakenly published in the Black Panther Party’s newspaper under Jackson’s name, in what the Black Studies scholar Greg Thomas calls “a magical ‘mistake’ that would cement a certain Black/Palestinian connection for decades to come.”)

In Blood in My Eye, Jackson wrote of the life-and-death urgency of revolution and liberation for oppressed people everywhere, exhorting the reader:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.

More than half a century later, these words still ring true. In the decades since Jackson wrote Blood in My Eye, generations of people around the world have continued to die needlessly, continued to live “poor butchered half-lives” as a result of the same systems that Jackson dedicated his tragically short life to resisting. The tens of thousands dead in Gaza are among their number, their names the latest additions to an unending list of those who have been martyred over the centuries by the West’s imperialist barbarity. We owe it to their memory, and to the memory of those countless millions who came before them, to carry forward the torch of revolution until victory and liberation.

In the words of the chant that has echoed at Palestinian protests around the world, from Ramallah to London to New York and beyond:

يا شَهِيد اِرْتَاح اِرْتَاح واِحْنَا نْوَاصِل الكِفَاح

O martyr, rest, rest, and we will continue the struggle!

culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox:

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1

Bauman himself recognized the parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews, telling the Polish magazine Polityka in 2011 that “it is forbidden to stay silent in the face of Israeli crimes and their persecution of Palestinians exactly because the fate of Jews in Europe had similar beginnings – discrimination, pogroms, ghettoes, concluding with the Shoah.” Bauman died in 2017, at the age of 91, but we can imagine what he would have of thought about the Gaza genocide, had he been alive to witness it.

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 25 - Defending Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-25-defendinghttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-25-defendingWed, 01 Oct 2025 18:50:11 GMT

Episode 25 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by scholars Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, coauthors of Venezuela, The Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2020), to discuss the history and current situation of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Situating our discussion in the context of escalating imperialist attacks against Venezuela’s socialist project, this wide-ranging conversation explores the relationship between state power and grassroots organization, the role of communes in Venezuelan socialism, and how the Chavista grassroots has mobilized to defend the Bolivarian Revolution against U.S. sanctions and imperialist aggression.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

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Venezuelanalysis:

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]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 24 - Imperialism and Global Inequality]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-24-imperialismhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-24-imperialismWed, 17 Sep 2025 15:06:11 GMT

Episode 24 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, author of The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (W.W. Norton, 2018), to discuss the complex and interconnected relationship between imperialism—both past and present—and global economic inequality. We examine why mainstream liberal frameworks for understanding the divide between rich and poor countries inevitably fall short, instead presenting an alternative account of global inequality that centers the crucial role of colonial plunder (as well as unequal exchange in the supposedly ‘postcolonial’ era) in keeping vast swaths of the world trapped in conditions of poverty, underdevelopment, and economic dependency.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Jason Hickel:

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]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 23 - Reviving the Bandung Spirit]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-23-revivinghttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-23-revivingWed, 03 Sep 2025 19:26:07 GMT

Episode 23 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

This is the recording of a lecture that I gave in July at the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago, titled “‘This is the Human Race Speaking…’: Reviving the Bandung Spirit in a Multipolar World.” In the lecture, which I also published as an essay on Substack, I reflect on the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference and the legacies of the Third Worldist movement, arguing that the global left—particularly in the United States and other Western countries—urgently needs to revive the ‘Bandung Spirit’ of anticolonial internationalism in order to remain relevant in the face of today’s increasingly multipolar global order.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[goodbye to all that]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/goodbye-to-all-thathttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/goodbye-to-all-thatMon, 11 Aug 2025 20:19:54 GMT
the main street in mount pleasant, the northwest d.c. neighborhood where i spent most of my time, taken the night before i left for minneapolis

In the last few weeks and months before I moved to Minneapolis at the end of July, whenever people I encountered on dating apps and at parties asked me how long I’d lived in Washington, D.C., I always gave them the same answer: “on and off for about six years.” Vague though that response was, it was simpler than explaining that even though I had called this city home since the fall of 2018, when I first arrived there as a college freshman, my current stint of just under two years was the longest I’d ever spent consecutively living there. In my first year of college, of course, I returned home to the Twin Cities with some regularity for school breaks, and halfway through the spring semester of my sophomore year the onset of the pandemic sent me back to my parents’ house once again—this time, for the better part of a year. I returned to D.C. in January of 2021, moving into an off-campus apartment in the Adams Morgan area, and stayed there for around a year and a half before moving to London in September of 2022 to study at the London School of Economics. Master’s degree in hand, I returned once again to D.C. a year later, moving in with my partner at the time, and had been living there ever since.

In addition to being far more complicated than a simple “on and off for six years,” the above chronology also fails to adequately capture the full depth and intensity of the connection that I felt, and still feel, to D.C.—the fact that, despite the sporadic nature of the time I’ve spent in the city over the last several years, it still feels decidedly like home. To a certain extent, this is due to the fact that, having been my home for so many of my formative early adult years, the city has served as a backdrop to the development and sharpening of my own sense of self. In that sense, I suppose, I would likely feel this way about any city where I were to spend my college years and early 20s. And yet, there is no mistaking the fact that there is something about D.C. itself, something fundamental and ineffable, that shapes my connection to it.

Anyone who’s spent enough time in the District of Columbia will tell you that it’s really two cities—‘Washington’ and ‘D.C’—superimposed on top of one another. They may occupy the same 68-odd square miles north of the Potomac River, nestled comfortably in between Maryland and Virginia, but in reality they are worlds apart. ‘Washington’ is what usually comes to mind when people from elsewhere in the country think about the District of Columbia—the federal government, lobbyists, think tanks, all the backstabbing and corruption and dirty dealing that goes on ‘inside the Beltway.’ It’s not so much a city as a punching bag, a convenient shorthand for everything that people find dysfunctional and distasteful about the American political system. ‘D.C.’, on the other hand, is a real city, populated by 700,000 real people. D.C. is Chocolate City—the home of jazz and go-go, the half-smoke and mumbo sauce, its cultural landscape shaped as indelibly by the Salvadoran and Ethiopian communities who have made the District their home as by the Black inhabitants who, until the early 2010s, made up the majority of its population.

Like every American city, the District is undergoing rapid changes wrought by gentrification, with skyrocketing costs of living and accelerating rates of displacement. The bifurcation of the city’s identity into ‘Washington’ and ‘D.C.,’ however, means that gentrification in the District takes the unique form of a fierce and protracted struggle between these two identities, as Washington continues its relentless efforts to erase, displace, and replace D.C.

For all the grandiose claims about how “the city is your campus,” the picture of the District that the George Washington University’s admissions office paints for prospective students is very much one of Washington, not of D.C.—and when I first moved there in the fall of 2018 as an incoming GW freshman, I had no idea that such a distinction even existed. Like so many GW poli-sci majors, I harbored delusions of wanting to one day run for office—delusions that induce more than a little nausea when I think back on them now—and like most of my peers, I too saw the city as little more than a launchpad for an eventual political career. I lived on campus, safely ensconced in the infamous ‘Foggy Bottom Bubble’ that envelops the university, and apart from the occasional concert at the 9:30 Club or visit to my doctor’s office in Adams Morgan, my ‘exploration’ of the city rarely brought me much farther afield than Georgetown.

In other words, the District that I experienced as a GW student was little more than a hollow simulacrum of the real thing. As a result, I drifted through those first few years of college largely ignorant of the living, breathing city, with its own vibrant culture and deeply complicated history, hiding just beneath the monotone surface of monuments and government buildings and overpriced brunch restaurants—the same city to whose erasure GW, as the District’s largest private landowner and an entity which my peers and I often referred to as a real estate corporation masquerading as a university, was actively contributing. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of these dynamics in the abstract—I knew, of course, that the District was more than just the government and its various appendages, and that like any other major American city, it had undergone its own processes of gentrification and so-called ‘urban renewal’ over the last several decades that had fundamentally altered its culture, demographics, and built environment. What I didn’t quite grasp was that these processes were far from a fait accompli, that Washington had not yet entirely succeeded in its quest to destroy and replace D.C.—that just because all I could see when I looked around me was the former didn’t mean that the latter didn’t still exist.

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It wasn’t until my return to D.C. in January of 2021, after a 9-month period of COVID-imposed exile, that I began to understand just how much I had been missing. Instead of living on campus, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the Lanier Heights section of Adams Morgan—my first ‘real’ apartment, and my first time living alone. The place was incredibly charming, perched on the top floor of a four-story brick building just above Rock Creek Park, with gorgeous hexagonal doorways and original wooden floorboards that creaked under my feet when I walked across them. The walls of the apartment were lined with large south-facing windows, and on summer afternoons the place would be flooded with warm light that filtered in through the leaves of the willow oak outside.

the living room of my first d.c. apartment, taken shortly after moving in

In many ways, though I first came to the District in 2018, I think back on my 2021 return as marking the moment that I really arrived there for the first time—certainly, it was my first time living in D.C. rather than in Washington. Living off campus, in a real neighborhood populated by real people—a far cry from the corporate soullessness of the downtown area surrounding GW—I found myself becoming suddenly aware of the city as more than a mere static backdrop for my insular collegiate experience. In other words, this was the time in my life when I first came to truly understand the difference between Washington and D.C.—and more importantly, this was the moment when I came to realize that everything I hated about the District was a product of the former, while everything I loved about it was a product of the latter.

Slowly but surely, the image that formed in my mind when I closed my eyes and thought about the city began to shift, its population of yuppie consultants and self-described ‘policy wonks’ that I found so distasteful replaced by a more diverse and compelling cast of characters—the young parents pushing strollers along the sidewalks of Lanier Heights and Mount Pleasant, the Salvadoran abuelas dragging grocery carts through the aisles of the Columbia Road Safeway, the gaggle of elderly Black men who held court every day at the 42/43 bus stop. (Of these last, one in particular—a retired Jamaican truck driver named Sam—sticks out to me more clearly than the others. I first made Sam’s acquaintance when, waiting for the bus one morning, I heard his voice behind me asking me if I played cricket. Exchanging pleasantries with him quickly became a fixture of my daily commute, and to my great surprise he still remembered me even after I returned from my year in London.)

All of this said, as significant of a turning point as moving to Adams Morgan was in my relationship to D.C., the truth is that I would never have come to appreciate the city in the way that I did were it not for the influence of my best friend, Izy. We had known each other since freshman year, and had grown close during our student-activist days organizing for fossil fuel divestment on campus, but it was really in the spring of 2021—particularly in those few months before COVID vaccines became widely available, when my social circle was limited by necessity to a tiny handful of people—that our relationship first began to blossom into what it is now, her role in my life resembling something more akin to that of a platonic soulmate than a mere friend.

By this point, we were in our third year of college, each of us beginning to carve out our own niches within our respective majors, and Izy’s specialization was D.C. history. (Her honors thesis on the 1970 D.C. sanitation workers’ strike remains, to this day, one of the most brilliant pieces of undergraduate scholarship I have ever read.) During social gatherings, whenever anyone began complaining about how boring the city was and how bland the people around us were—a not-infrequent topic of conversation among my peer group of fellow pretentious college students, who fancied ourselves decidedly more interesting than most of the people we encountered every day—Izy emerged as one of the District’s fiercest defenders, always quick to remind us that our complaints and condemnations only pertained to one small part of a much larger and more complex whole.

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It was Izy who opened my eyes to the rich history of community activism and organizing that had shaped so many of the local programs and institutions that I had long taken for granted. For all the talk about this being a political town, she pointed out, hardly anyone ever paid any attention to the forms of grassroots political contestation whose battles played out in community meetings and neighborhood streets rather than in congressional hearing rooms and lobbyists’ offices. It was she who impressed on me as well just how significant it really was that D.C.—the first major American city to have a majority Black population—was denied the basic representation afforded to any other similarly self-governing U.S. polity. Thanks to her influence, I quickly came to recognize the issue of D.C. statehood, which had long existed in my mind as a relatively toothless liberal talking point, for what it really was—a fundamental question of self-determination and its denial to what effectively amounted to an internal colony of the United States.

There was a time, I learned through our conversations, when the statehood movement’s center of gravity lay not with well-funded NGOs and wealthy Dupont Circle liberals who just wanted two more Democratic seats in the Senate, but with grassroots activists and community groups fighting for Chocolate City’s right to govern itself. The current state of affairs—a piecemeal sort of quasi-autonomy known as ‘home rule’, in which the District is empowered to govern itself through an elected Mayor and Council but is subject to onerous oversight requirements and limitations on its powers by the federal government—came about in 1973 with the passage of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, a compromise that represented a significant step in the right direction but fell far short of genuine self-determination. I learned that in the decades since the Home Rule Act was passed, the limited autonomy granted to D.C. under the Act has come under attack countless times, with Congress blocking, overturning, or otherwise amending local laws ranging from criminal justice reforms and the legalization of cannabis to the definition and proscription of marital rape. For all its flaws, Izy explained to me, home rule had to be defended against these assaults at all costs.

• • •

My most recent, and perhaps final, departure from D.C. comes at a moment when national political developments have begun to throw these contradictions into even starker and more harrowing relief than before. Of the many egregious positions that Donald Trump has taken, first as a candidate and now as President, one that has not received nearly enough attention or outrage from people living outside of D.C. itself—owing, I suppose, to the American public’s general lack of awareness that there even exists a D.C. beyond Washington—is his longstanding and rabid hostility to the very idea of a self-governing District. Particularly since the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, Trump has repeatedly invoked D.C. as the paradigmatic example of the failures of Democratic municipal governance, portraying it as a crime-ridden urban wasteland in desperate need of a strong federal hand to guide it. Upon Trump’s return to power in January of this year, many in D.C.—myself included—feared that, in addition to the countless other horrors that candidate Trump had promised to enact once in office, the new administration would seize the opportunity to go after home rule as well.

Those fears have proven not to be altogether unfounded. In March, Trump signed an executive order to “Make Our Nation’s Capital Safe and Beautiful,” establishing an interdepartmental federal task force and ordering it to crack down on “drug use, unpermitted demonstrations, vandalism, and public intoxication” by “[surging] law enforcement officers in public areas;” “maximize immigration enforcement to apprehend and deport dangerous illegal aliens;” and “keep dangerous criminals off the streets by strengthening pre-trial detention policies.” The effects of this order were swift and palpable—particularly in terms of a dramatically increased police presence across the city, an alarming increase in immigration enforcement activity, and a severe crackdown on even the most minor instances of public consumption of alcohol and cannabis—and only contributed to a general sense among most of the people around me that the D.C. we knew and loved was under attack.

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In the last week or so, the attacks on D.C.’s self-determination have only intensified. A few days after my return to Minneapolis, a friend informed me that Trump was now threatening more openly than ever before to “federalize” the District’s government after one of his former DOGE staffers was attacked and beaten during an attempted carjacking. “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly,” Trump wrote in an August 5th post on Truth Social after the assault, “we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run.” A day later, Trump confirmed in a press conference that his lawyers “are already studying” the possibility of overturning D.C. home rule. (Such a move would require an act of Congress, but legislation to repeal home rule was already introduced in February by Senator Mike Lee and Representative Andy Ogles—both far-right MAGA Republicans.) On the evening of Thursday, August 7th, Trump announced that federal law enforcement officers from multiple agencies, including ICE, would be deployed in increased numbers on the streets of D.C. And in a press conference on Monday, August 11th, Trump announced that he would be placing the D.C. police under federal control and deploying hundreds of National Guard troops in the city in a bid to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.”

a banner displayed prominently in mount pleasant’s central plaza, july 2025

Watching all of this from afar, it’s been hard not to feel as though my leaving D.C. constitutes a sort of betrayal of the city that has given so much to me over the years, and has played such a pivotal role in shaping me into the person who I am. In more ways than one, I’ve come to think of D.C. as my second home, and there can be little question that I owe it an immense debt of gratitude. And yet, just as the going started to get tough, I skipped town and moved on to greener pastures. The timing of all this, of course, was purely coincidental—my decision to leave D.C. to pursue a PhD elsewhere had nothing to do with the national political climate; in fact, this had been the plan ever since my return from London nearly two years ago. But even so, it’s been hard to shake the sense of guilt that I feel at abandoning D.C. in this particularly dark moment—the undeniable, if imperfect, parallels between my experience and that of the countless other transplants who move to this city as students, stay for as long as is personally convenient to them, and then move on to the next thing.

Thinking about the timing of my departure from D.C., and of the dire circumstances that happen to have coincided with it, I am reminded of Molly Crabapple’s haunting reflection on the impact that the COVID pandemic had on New York City, first delivered as a lecture in December 2020 at the Brooklyn Public Library and later published as an essay in Literary Hub. At the beginning of the pandemic, Crabapple writes,

most of those who left [New York] were rich. They left blithely, as if from a nightclub that was no longer cool . . . [They] had had their good years. They dined, consumed, and profited. Over three decades, they had dulled the city to their generic, Connecticut tastes, driving out so many of us in the process. When a bad year came, they felt no responsibility. Why would they? They only had ties to each other.

Of course, the parallels between my situation and that of the yuppie New York transplants whom Crabapple derides—exemplified in the essay by the archetypal character of ‘Hedge Fund Brett’—only go so far. Unlike them, my departure had nothing to do with it being a ‘bad year’—and more importantly, unlike them, I did feel (and still do feel) a profound sense of connection and responsibility to the city that I left behind. Watching the Trump Administration’s current assault on D.C.’s sovereignty unfold, even from halfway across the country, I find myself consumed by an overwhelming sense of horror—not unlike how it felt, during the Minneapolis uprisings in 2020, to watch the city where I was born come under active military occupation. In other words, it’s precisely because I feel so connected to D.C. that I feel such guilt at having left.

But that’s not the case for everyone. For every transplant like myself and the friends I surrounded myself with in D.C., who feel that intense love for and connection to the city even after saying goodbye to it, there are many more for whom that is not at all the case. They exist in the District in much the same way that Crabapple writes about Hedge Fund Brett and his friends existing in New York—taking up residence in a few insular pockets of NoMa and Navy Yard; maintaining ties only to one another and to others in their same white-collar, GW- and Georgetown-educated milieu; dulling the city to their generic, New Jersey tastes. I know this to be true, because I went to college with many of them. I still see the Instagram stories they post of brunches at Le Dip and Saturday nights out on 14th Street. I still see, on the vanishingly rare occasions when I open LinkedIn, their posts announcing new positions at consulting firms and Congressional offices. I know without even needing to ask that these people are denizens of Washington through and through, who have never so much as set foot in D.C.—that even though we have shared the city for the same amount of time, their understanding and appreciation of the place where they live has not expanded far beyond where it was when we were college freshmen.

What will these people do as things in D.C. continue to get worse? What reason will they have to stay in this place to which they feel no allegiance, no responsibility? Already, so many of them—government and non-government employees alike—have had their employment jeopardized by federal funding cuts, fraying the most concrete tie binding them to the District. Those who have remained untouched by these changes likely have the sort of remote jobs that they can do from anywhere with an internet connection; there is no reason, in other words, why they (overwhelmingly liberal Democrats) should remain in a city that is currently in the midst of a full-fledged MAGA takeover. If things continue in the direction that they are, how much longer will these people stick around? When they do finally leave, what—and who—will they be leaving behind? And after they have moved on and settled into their new lives in other cities, frequenting the same types of places with the same types of people in the same types of neighborhoods, how much thought will they give to what became of the city inhabited by those who had no choice but to stay?

And what about them, the ones who stay behind? Crabapple ends her essay with the line: “The city belongs to those who love it enough to stay.” No matter how many people leave the District in the months and years ahead, there will always be countless more who cannot—and will not—follow them. These are the people who will watch the city’s dramatic transformation unfold, in whatever form it ends up taking, before their eyes; they are the ones who will feel the brunt of and bear witness to the horrors and injustices of the coming crackdown. And when the time comes, it is from their ranks that resistance to the federal government’s depredations will ultimately be drawn.

• • •

Just a few months ago, the streets of Los Angeles erupted into unrest as protests against ICE raids were met with brutal repression by the state. Seeing the images of National Guardsmen and Marines occupying the city, the footage of tear gas being deployed and journalists being assaulted on camera, it was hard not to find myself transported back to exactly five years ago, when nearly identical scenes were playing out on the streets of Minneapolis and countless other cities across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. This was, to my knowledge, the first large-scale instance of street protest spiraling into civil unrest since the 2020 uprisings, and I remember wondering at the time whether the situation in LA might, as 2020 threatened for a moment to do, spread and escalate into something much larger and more difficult to control—the sort of situation that poses more of an existential threat to the stability and legitimacy of the present regime. That is not, of course, how things ended up playing out; the unrest had largely died down within a week or so of the protests starting. Nevertheless, the LA protests demonstrated clearly the fact that the seeds of of popular discontent against the Trump administration’s fascistic excesses have already been sown, that they can burst through the surface of the earth and out into the sunlight at any moment.

It’s far too early, of course, to know how things will unfold in D.C. in the coming weeks and months. But it’s not impossible to envision a situation in which home rule is repealed, the militarization of the District’s streets is intensified, and the contradictions between Washington and D.C. that have been simmering beneath the surface for years finally reach a breaking point. There are many factors that have long combined to make the District something of a powder keg—the city’s intense social, economic, and geographic stratification; the function it serves as the nation’s capital, making it the backdrop for all the fractiousness and volatility of America’s national-level politics; the fact that its status as the seat of power also means it faces a unique degree of scrutiny and potential for state repression. D.C., after all, was a key epicenter of the uprisings that broke out in urban centers across the country in the aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968; during the summer of 2020, some of the most egregious images of police repression and brutality outside of Minneapolis came out of the District.

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It’s easy to imagine something similar happening again—perhaps on the scale of what we saw in LA earlier this summer, perhaps larger. The nature of these things, however, is that they are impossible to predict until they actually happen. Everything is normal, until one day it’s not. If and when that does finally happen, I know that the comrades alongside whom I have been organizing for the last two years—both those whom I count among my closest friends and those whom I know only by their aliases—will be on the front lines of whatever comes to pass. I know also that whatever feelings of guilt, whatever sense that I have abandoned D.C. in an hour of need, that I feel now will pale in comparison to what I will feel watching it all unfold from afar.

But that, I suppose, is just the way it goes. You move to a city, make your life there, even come to identify with it in your own way—but when you inevitably move on, time does not stop for you. The city, and all of the people and places and things that comprise it, continue to grow and to change, sometimes to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and all you can really do is hold on to the hope that those who stayed behind when you left will be able to weather those changes as best they can. In that sense, leaving a city that you’ve come to call home is not unlike the end of a long and rather serious relationship—you spend so much time intertwining your life with someone else, and when your paths diverge and you go your separate ways, you suddenly lose the window into the other person’s life that you had long since come to take for granted.

I suppose it’s fitting, then, that the timing of my departure from D.C. coincided more or less with the dissolution, some months ago, of my relationship with the woman with whom I had moved in upon my return from London—a relationship whose development was, in its own way, profoundly tied up with the development of my relationship with the city itself. Things between us ended amicably, and I have no regrets whatsoever about the three and a half years that she and I spent together—on the contrary, our relationship was crucial to my developing into the person who I am today—but at the same time, I know that things ended when they did for a reason, that it would not have done either of us any good to try and continue on past a certain point. In a similar vein, by the end of my time in D.C., the profound love and loyalty that I felt to the city was accompanied by the inescapable feeling that if I stuck around for too much longer, I would be in some way overstaying my welcome.

To paraphrase my favorite Joan Didion essay, “Goodbye to All That”:

There were years when I still thought of D.C. as ‘Washington,’ but they seem a long time ago.

culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox:

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]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 22 - The Politics of International Solidarity]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-22-the-politicshttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-22-the-politicsThu, 31 Jul 2025 03:09:53 GMT

Episode 22 of the Return to Bandung podcast is out now! Listen below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

The Return to Bandung podcast, along with the writing that I publish on culture shock, is a political education project and a labor of love. To support this important work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today! Paid subscribers get access to the entire culture shock archive, as well as a typewritten physical newsletter in the mail each month :)

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About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by Pawel Wargan, Coordinator of the Secretariat of the Progressive International, to discuss the past, present, and future of left internationalism and international solidarity. In this wide-ranging conversation, we unpack what ‘internationalism’ really means, how debates over internationalism have evolved on the left over time, and what a politics of solidarity across borders can and should like amid the present moment of global upheaval.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Washington, D.C. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

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]]><![CDATA[the dispatch - july 2025 edition]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/the-dispatch-july-2025-editionhttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/the-dispatch-july-2025-editionSun, 20 Jul 2025 17:43:52 GMTDear readers,

I hope that this summer has been treating you well so far (and that, wherever you’re located, it’s been less miserably swampy than it’s been here in D.C.)! It’s been a while since I sent one of these updates, but I’m writing today to share some exciting personal news:

At the end of this month, I’ll be moving back to my hometown of Minneapolis to start a PhD program in political science at the University of Minnesota!

I’m planning to specialize in political theory and international relations, with a specific research focus on how the administration of counterinsurgency practices in the British Empire shaped the construction of discourses around ‘terrorism’ and ‘counterterrorism’ that we still operate with today. This is a topic that builds on the research I did for my master’s dissertation in colonial and postcolonial India, and I’m sure that it will end up influencing at least some of the essays that I publish here over the next few years!

If you know me at all, you know that I thrive best in an academic environment, and I’ve been feeling restless to be back in school ever since I completed my master’s degree at LSE nearly two years ago. Of course, D.C. is a city that will always be extremely close to my heart, and saying goodbye to it is definitely bittersweet (stay tuned for a possible essay about this sometime in the coming weeks!), but I truly cannot wait to return to Minnesota to start this next chapter!

Took this on a walk in Rock Creek Park back in May :)

Of course, as anyone who knows anything about academia also knows, being a PhD student is not exactly the most lucrative thing a person can do in their 20s—especially in our current moment, with the academy as a whole facing sustained attacks and the humanities and social sciences being hit especially hard. Even in a more affordable city like Minneapolis, and even with the relatively generous contract that the UMN Graduate Labor Union won for PhD workers earlier this year, I’m still looking at about a 50% reduction in my income now that I’m leaving my nonprofit job to become a graduate student.

That’s why I’m appealing to you, my loyal and beloved readers, to please consider becoming a paid subscriber of culture shock today!

Your support will enable me not only to continue writing the essays that I share on this blog, but also to continue producing my biweekly podcast, Return to Bandung—another labor of love that, as much as I enjoy making, does require a truly immense amount of time, energy, and effort. By becoming a paid subscriber, you’ll help ensure that I can continue producing the high-quality, insightful commentary, analysis, and political education that you know and love, even as I juggle the many responsibilities and stresses that come with being back in grad school.

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But what’s in it for you? As I wrote about when I first launched paid subscriptions back in September, I really don’t like the idea of paywalling the words that I pour so much of myself into. I have decided to paywall a handful of my much older essays, mostly from the no more mangoes days, but for the most part, my work is and will remain open to everyone. Of course, the decision to keep the vast majority of my work publicly accessible means that there is less of an incentive for readers to become paid subscribers, which I totally understand—especially given that, in today’s Substack economy, there are quite literally thousands of publications jockeying for your $5 a month.

I’ve been thinking hard about what perks I can offer for paid subscribers while still maintaining the accessibility of my writing, and I was honestly at a loss until I attended a recent concert here in D.C., where the opening act had a sign-up sheet at the merch table for people to write down their mailing addresses to receive a physical newsletter from him in the mail. I found this to be thoroughly charming, and after receiving the first newsletter in my mailbox this week, the idea occurred to me that this would be the perfect perk to offer my paid subscribers—after all, who doesn’t love getting mail!

That’s why I’m very excited to announce that starting in August, all paid subscribers of culture shock will receive an ACTUAL PHYSICAL NEWSLETTER in the mail each month, lovingly written by yours truly on my beloved typewriter!

Her name is Joan (named, of course, for Christina Hendricks’ character on Mad Men)!

When you sign up as a paid subscriber, the confirmation email you receive will include a link to a Google Form where you can provide your mailing information. (If you’re already a paying subscriber, stay tuned for an email with the Google Form later this week.) The newsletter will come out each month, and first installment will go out in August once I am settled into my new place!

Thank you all SO MUCH for your support of this project and my work—you truly have no idea how much it means to me! I can’t wait to start this exciting new chapter in the Bold North, and bring you all along for the ride with me.

More soon!

Much love and solidarity,

Pranay

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today!

]]><![CDATA[Return to Bandung Ep. 22 - Development and Imperialism]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-22-developmenthttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/return-to-bandung-ep-22-developmentWed, 16 Jul 2025 13:52:48 GMT

Episode 21 of Return to Bandung is out now! Listen to the podcast below, and read on for more information about my guest and today’s topic:

About this episode:

In this episode, I’m joined by critical development economist Jayati Ghosh to discuss the complex relationship between imperialism and international development. In this wide-ranging conversation, we explore the problematic assumptions underlying mainstream ideas of ‘development,’ why GDP is a profoundly inadequate measure of a country’s economic well-being, and how the globalization of the international economy has shaped the structural dynamics of imperialism as a world system—as well as some of the ways that the global economy needs to be restructured in order to deliver genuine justice and sovereignty for the Global South.

culture shock is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Washington, D.C. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Sources and helpful links:

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

Pranay Somayajula:

Jayati Ghosh:

]]><![CDATA["this is the human race speaking..."]]>https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/this-is-the-human-race-speakinghttps://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/this-is-the-human-race-speakingTue, 08 Jul 2025 19:03:16 GMT
Posters designed by the Organisation of Solidarity for the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). Source: V&A Museum

This is the text of a lecture that I delivered at the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago on July 4th, 2025.

In the spring of 1955, the legendary African American writer Richard Wright was traveling in Spain on literary business, collecting material for a book that would be published two years later under the title Pagan Spain. By the middle of April, his work in the country was complete. But rather than returning to Paris, where he had been living in voluntary exile for the last nine years, Wright instead took a train to Madrid, where he boarded a flight that would take him halfway around the world to Indonesia—specifically, to the city of Bandung.

Located around 87 miles southeast of Jakarta, Bandung is Indonesia’s third-largest metropolis and the capital of the country’s largest province, West Java. The city’s relatively cool climate, nestled into a mountain basin in the West Java highlands, at an elevation of some 2,500 feet above sea level, has long made it a popular resort town for Jakartans looking to escape the heat and crowds of the Indonesian capital. But what brought Wright to Bandung in April of 1955 was no weekend getaway. In fact, he had come as an observer to attend the Afro-Asian Conference, more commonly known as the Bandung Conference—an international gathering of leaders from across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, organized primarily by Indonesian President Sukarno and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and held from April 18th to 24th, 1955 in central Bandung’s Merdeka building.

Wright was one of several American journalists who had come to Bandung to attend the conference, his travel arrangements paid for by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom—an entity that, as would be revealed nearly a decade later, had been covertly funded by the CIA since its inception. Wright’s experiences and observations at Bandung were compiled into his book The Color Curtain, which was published in 1956 and remains, to this day, one of the most significant firsthand accounts of this historic gathering. In the book’s first chapter, Wright describes what went through his mind when, thumbing through a newspaper in Paris several months earlier, he first encountered the announcement that representatives of nearly thirty newly-independent nations across Asia and Africa would be gathering in Bandung to discuss, as the article put it, “racialism and colonialism.”

He writes:

The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here was class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon that Western world! (10)

In this section of the book, Wright goes on to recount an exchange with his wife, in which she presses him on why it is so important that he travel to Indonesia immediately after spending several weeks in Spain. To this, Wright replies:

I know that people are tired of hearing of these hot, muddy faraway places filled with people yelling for freedom. But this is the human race speaking… (12)

• • •

This year, 2025, marks the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. It is, I think, difficult for us now, seven decades on from Bandung, to fully appreciate the scale and ambition of what the conference represented. At a time when the world was nowhere near as interconnected as it is today, when ‘an ocean away’ still really did mean an ocean away, the Bandung Conference brought together representatives from 29 nations across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Among these were Communist states like China and North Vietnam, secular nationalist republics like India and Egypt, and hereditary monarchies like Thailand, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia. Together, they combined to represent some 1.5 billion people—more than half of the world’s population at the time.

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 throughout 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. As the Marxist historian Vijay Prashad puts it in the introduction to his seminal book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, “the Third World was not a place. It was a project” (xv).

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Bandung, of course, was not the first international gathering dedicated to galvanizing a global anti-imperialist struggle—that distinction would go to the congresses of the Comintern-backed League Against Imperialism, which first met in Brussels in 1927—but what set it apart from its predecessors was the fact that by the time the Bandung Conference was convened in 1955, vast swaths of the Third World had either already won, or were in the process of winning, independence from European colonialism. The gathering at Bandung thus represented the confirmation of what millions of people across the world, from the streets of Delhi and Beijing to the boardrooms of New York and London, already knew to be true—that the tide was turning, the global order shifting, and the age of Western imperial powers acting as the sole agents of history rapidly coming to a close.

In his opening speech welcoming delegates to the conference, Indonesia’s President Sukarno declared: “This is the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples—so-called colored peoples—in the history of mankind!” I want to pause for a moment and draw attention to that parenthetical—“so-called colored peoples.” The turn of phrase that Sukarno employs here says, I think, a great deal about the significance of what Bandung represented—not just to the delegates who attended the conference itself, but to millions of people around the world whose hopes, dreams, and struggles were wrapped up in the Third Worldist project. By coming together at Bandung, the nations of the formerly colonized world—what Vijay Prashad calls “the darker nations”—were sending the message to Europe and the West that they were no longer content to be relegated to the second-class status of “colored people,” whether as colonized subjects or as a dependent, neocolonial periphery. Here, we can thus recall Wright’s assertion in The Color Curtain that “this meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon [the] Western world!”

As I previously mentioned, the grouping of nations that gathered at Bandung could not have been further from anything remotely resembling a unified or homogenous bloc. Political differences between delegates, particularly between those representing liberal-nationalist governments and those representing more socialist-oriented states, were at times stark, and the countries gathered at Bandung differed widely in their degree of friendliness or hostility towards the West—at least insofar as their bilateral relations were concerned. And yet, this staggeringly diverse array of countries was nevertheless tied together by a common thread: the shared experience of having been subjugated by centuries of colonialism and of having been forced, even after achieving nominal ‘independence,’ into a dependent and subordinate position within the capitalist-imperialist world system.

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Thus, even in the absence of any shared ideological commitments amid the Cold War confrontation between capitalism and Communism, the Third World was still able to coalesce around a common political project—one aimed at radically reshaping the world order from the ground up, transforming it from a system structurally designed to facilitate the imperial core’s ruthless exploitation of the periphery into one characterized by peaceful coexistence, international cooperation, and genuine sovereign equality among states. As Sukarno put it in his opening address:

All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world.

The ethos of anticolonial internationalism that found expression at the Bandung Conference, and in the Third World project more broadly, has come to be known as the ‘Bandung Spirit.’ The essential contours of this Bandung Spirit were laid out most succinctly in the conference’s final communiqué, issued on April 24th, which calls for nations to “live together in peace with one another as good neighbours and develop friendly co-operation,” based on the following ten principles:

1. Respect for fundamental human rights and . . . the Charter of the United Nations.

2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.

3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.

4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.

5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively . . .

6. (a) Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defence to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers.

(b) Abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries.

7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.

8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means . . .

9. Promotion of mutual interests and co-operation.

10. Respect for justice and international obligations.

What we see reflected in these ten points is a radical politics of Third World solidarity—at once defiantly nationalist in its assertion of sovereignty and self-determination, and yet unmistakably internationalist in its globe-spanning reach. It was then, and remains to this day, a powerful example of what the political scientist Adom Getachew, who is speaking at this conference tomorrow evening, calls “anticolonial worldmaking.” In the first chapter of her brilliant book Worldmaking After Empire, Getachew defines this project as one of “overcoming international hierarchy and constituting a postimperial world,” and writes:

Anticolonial worldmaking was viewed not as an alternative to or rejection of nationalism but instead as a necessary vehicle for securing national independence. Central to this combination of nation-building and worldmaking was the view that the global project of European empire had radically transformed the economic and political conditions of the modern world in ways that required a similarly global anticolonial project. (23-24)

This worldmaking project, in other words, was about more than just forging closer connections between newly independent former colonies, or constructing a Third World ‘bloc’ to compete in the playing field of global geopolitics. Rather, it was about recognizing that just as the Global South’s former colonizers had constructed the international order for their own benefit and on their own terms, the nations of the Third World had both the right and the collective power to reconstruct that order into something more just, more equitable, and more conducive to human flourishing. We can see this worldmaking nature of the Bandung Spirit reflected clearly in the ten principles laid out by the conference’s final communiqué, which offers a vision for the world order that applies not just to the nations of the Third World, but to every country on Earth.

• • •

The ‘Bandung Spirit’ extended far beyond the walls of the Merdeka Building, and its echoes continued to reverberate long after the last delegate filed out of the conference hall. In the decades that followed Bandung, Third Worldism—and the politics of Cold War non-alignment that accompanied it—quickly took on a life of its own, and came to represent something even more revolutionary than the relatively muted spirit of cooperation and coexistence espoused by the Bandung Conference itself. It’s no coincidence, I think, that when we think back on Third Worldism today, the first leaders who come to mind are not respectable, pragmatic moderates like Nehru or Sukarno, but more explicitly revolutionary figures—Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, Ho Chi Minh. It’s telling that the figure we are now inclined to associate most strongly with 20th-century Third Worldism is not that of a bespectacled diplomat in a conference hall, but rather that of the Palestinian fida’i, the Vietnamese rice farmer, the Algerian mujahid. Rather than the politician’s business suit, it is the guerrilla fighter’s combat fatigues that, in our contemporary imagination, constitute the Third Worldist uniform.

Of course, it’s also telling that when we think back on Third Worldism today, we do so primarily in the past tense. From the outset, the very task of survival for the Third World proved to be a Herculean one. Not only had centuries of colonial plunder placed Third World nations in a structurally disadvantaged position, trapping them in patterns of neocolonial underdevelopment and dependency that continued long after the achievement of nominal independence, but these same nations, in their pursuit of sovereignty and self-determination, also found themselves tragically caught in the crossfire of Cold War geopolitics. Of course, one of Third Worldism’s central tenets was non-alignment in the great-power rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. This, however, mattered little to the U.S.-led capitalist-imperialist bloc, for whom the Bandung Spirit’s assertion of Southern agency and calls for a more just and equitable world order were, simply put, too communist for comfort.

As a result, throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Third World governments whose rhetoric and policies challenged the foundational assumptions of the imperialist world system found themselves the targets of Western-orchestrated coups, invasions, and assassinations. Leaders like Indonesia’s Sukarno, Chile’s Allende, Congo’s Lumumba, and Burkina Faso’s Sankara were overthrown and replaced by neocolonial puppet regimes and U.S.-backed military dictatorships. These new regimes were all too happy to dismantle the developmentalist state-building projects of their predecessors in favor of throwing the doors open for their countries to be penetrated—and exploited—by foreign capital. Meanwhile, those who survived were subjected to a devastating neoliberal onslaught at the hands of multinational corporations and Western-dominated institutions like the IMF, which sought to bring the Third World to its knees by weaponizing a growing debt crisis and imposing brutal regimes of austerity, privatization, and deregulation in the name of ‘structural adjustment.’ By the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell and the United States cemented its position as the undisputed hegemonic force in a newly unipolar world order, the worldmaking potential of the Bandung Spirit seemed like little more than a distant memory.

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Today, we are living through the devastating consequences of that worldmaking project’s untimely demise, as the structural injustices of the world system that Third Worldism sought to challenge continue to grow starker with each passing day. Global inequality has grown steadily for the last six decades and is now reaching unprecedented heights, with the per capita income gap between the core and periphery increasing from $14,000 in 1960 to nearly $52,000 in 2023. The underdeveloped countries of the global periphery collectively owe more than $11.4 trillion in external public debt, and some 3.3 billion people around the world live in countries that spend more on debt payments than on health or education. Despite making up just 15 percent of the world’s population, the so-called ‘advanced economies’ of the imperial core control more than 59 percent of voting shares in the International Monetary Fund and more than 56 percent in the World Bank—all while these same institutions continue to impose punishing neoliberal reforms that open debtor countries up even further to foreign capital at the expense of their most vulnerable populations.

As these structural injustices have been exacerbated alongside the demise of the Third World, so too have the more existential threats that the Bandung Conference recognized and sought to avert. The entire latter half of the 20th century, of course, was haunted by the terrifying specter of nuclear war, and Bandung was no exception—the conference’s final communiqué declared that nuclear disarmament was “imperative to save mankind and civilisation from the fear and prospect of wholesale destruction.” Famously, after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, the liberal establishment across the imperialist West brashly proclaimed that the rise of a unipolar world would usher in a new era of perpetual peace and global stability—but recent escalations of nuclear tensions around the world betray the dangerous shortsightedness of this triumphalism. The recent cross-border clashes which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of all-out war, the United States’ entry into the Zionist entity’s war of aggression against the people of Iran, the U.S. and NATO’s persistent military hostility and provocation towards China and Russia—these are all sober reminders that insofar as the prospect of nuclear annihilation is concerned, the current arrangement of the imperialist world system has not, in fact, made the world a safer place.

To this dire state of affairs, of course, we must also add the existential menace of the rapidly-worsening climate crisis, whose devastating beginnings are already upon us and whose worst impacts still remain to be felt. The delegates who gathered at Bandung, three quarters of a century ago, could not have known the scope or scale of the threat that anthropogenic climate change would come to pose for the survival of humanity—a threat on par with that posed by the nuclear question which featured so prominently on the conference’s agenda. And yet, the emergence of climate change as one of the defining issues of our time—an issue that cannot be meaningfully separated from the historical and current realities of the imperialist world system—only underscores the crucial need, now more than ever, for precisely the sort of worldmaking anticolonial internationalism that the Third World project represented.

We know, for example, that the United States, the European Union, and the other countries of the Global North are collectively responsible for 86 percent of all carbon emissions beyond the planetary limit, and that the Global South countries who bear the least responsibility for these emissions are nevertheless the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We know also that, under existing political-economic arrangements, the so-called ‘green transition’ that is increasingly being invoked by political and business elites in the imperial core risks simply opening up a lucrative new avenue for the exploitation of the Global South through resource extraction and unequal exchange. The conclusion to be drawn from these sobering facts could not be more clear—the only politics capable of meeting this existential challenge is a resolutely anticolonial one, rooted in international solidarity and foregrounding the sovereignty of the Global South countries who are being made to pay the price for climate change.

• • •

So where does all of this leave us? There can be little doubt that the moment we find ourselves in now is one of profound and deepening crisis. It is, however, also a moment of heightening contradictions—which means it is therefore a moment of opportunity. The structural antagonisms that have long simmered beneath the surface of the U.S.-led ‘liberal international order’ are finally reaching a boiling point, and as a result, cracks are beginning to emerge in the very foundations of that order. Decades of failed neoliberal governance have fueled a right-wing national-populist backlash across the West, with Donald Trump and the MAGA far-right leading the charge here in the United States. The result, even in just a few short months of the second Trump Administration, has been an unprecedented withdrawal of the U.S. from the leadership role that it has traditionally occupied on the world stage. This withdrawal has manifested in numerous ways, from the embrace of protectionist trade wars to the abandonment of liberal internationalism in favor of a retreat to the crude hemispheric expansionism of the Monroe Doctrine. Among the most significant such manifestations of America’s international withdrawal under Trump has been the fracturing of the transatlanticist consensus of U.S.-Europe cooperation—a consensus that emerged in the aftermath of World War II, and that was cemented in the early 1990s with America’s ascendance as the sole hegemon in a unipolar world.

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Alongside the United States’ protracted imperial decline, which has been accelerated by Trump’s withdrawal but whose roots in fact run far deeper than that, we have also seen the meteoric rise of socialist China as a new superpower on the world stage, which has sparked panic among the U.S. ruling class and fueled the intensification of a New Cold War. China’s growing international presence has opened up crucial new avenues for the development and empowerment of countries across the Global South—particularly in Africa and Latin America. To these countries, China offers not only an alternative source of foreign investment and assistance that is far preferable to the predations of Western-dominated financial institutions, but also a deeply compelling alternative model of development and international engagement—one that elevates sovereignty over dependency, cooperation over antagonism, and mutual benefit over narrow self-interest.

Meanwhile, the Zionist entity’s barbaric genocide against the Palestinian people—a genocide that was inaugurated not under Trump, but under the liberal Democrat Joe Biden, and that has been materially supported for nearly two years now by governments across the imperialist West—has, in spectacular and horrific fashion, given the lie to the so-called ‘rules-based international order,’ laying bare its blood-soaked hypocrisy for the entire world to see. The world-historical significance of this particular veil being pulled back cannot be overstated. Beyond shattering the veneer of liberal internationalism that has long underpinned the U.S.-dominated imperial order, the genocide in Gaza has also empowered Global South countries to stand up to the West and challenge this order in new and unprecedented ways—as evidenced by South Africa’s historic genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, or the recent formation of the ‘Hague Group,’ whose nine member states are convening later this month in Bogotá, where they will announce “concrete actions to enforce international law through coordinated state action.”

These are just a few especially prominent examples of the tectonic shifts that have been underway in the global order over the last few years, as the contradictions of the status quo reach a breaking point and the world becomes increasingly multipolar with each passing day. This list, of course, doesn’t even take into account the rapid expansion of the BRICS geopolitical grouping, whose 19 members and partner states collectively comprise more than 55 percent of the world’s population and more than 42 percent of the global economy. Nor does it take into account the growing interest among Global South countries in pursuing alternatives to the currency hegemony of the U.S. dollar—an interest fueled not only by declining trust in the United States’ own economic stability, but also by a desire to escape the stranglehold of U.S. sanctions that dollar imperialism enables.

Taken together, these myriad upheavals herald a crisis of imperial legitimacy, on a scale unlike anything the world has seen since European empires began to collapse in the mid-20th century amid the first wave of decolonization movements and national liberation struggles. As a result of these shifts, we have seen the emergence of what Vijay Prashad and the Tricontinental Institute have called a “new mood” in the Global South, as Southern countries take an increasingly assertive stance against the pressures and predations of the West. In a recent dossier on the legacies and lessons of the Bandung Spirit, Tricontinental researchers define the ‘new mood’ as follows:

The principal objectives of the ‘new mood in the Global South,’ are rooted in two concepts, regionalism and multilateralism, both motivated by a desire to democratise the world order in economic and political terms.

The aforementioned response of Southern nations to the Gaza genocide is a clear example of this ‘new mood,’ as is the wave of anticolonial and pan-Africanist sentiment sweeping across the African continent, manifesting most notably in the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States by the governments of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.

As these unprecedented global shifts play out before our eyes, it’s hard not to be reminded of the heyday of the Third World, and of the worldmaking potential that this radical project of anticolonial internationalism contained within it. The parallels between the ‘new mood’ and the Bandung Spirit are certainly there, and they’re certainly striking—but we must be careful not to overstate the case. As Prashad puts it in a recent newsletter for Tricontinental, “this mood is not the same as a spirit. It is merely a hint of a new possibility.” The sobering reality is that unlike during the ‘golden age’ of Third Worldism, when the Global South’s pursuit of national sovereignty was accompanied by and intertwined with a profound emphasis on international solidarity, the ‘new mood’ that we are seeing take hold in the Global South today does not quite have that same internationalist dimension—at least, not to the same degree.

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Instead, the fracturing of the current international order and the emergence of an increasingly multipolar world has largely been characterized by individual countries pursuing more favorable terms for their own national integration into the capitalist-imperialist world system. There is, undoubtedly, a greater emphasis on multilateralism and South-South cooperation than in the past—but this still functions more as a means to an end than as an end in itself, in the sense that many Southern governments have still shown a general willingness to align themselves in various ways with the imperial core as and when it suits their national interest to do so. In other words, unlike with the Bandung Spirit of the 20th century, what we are witnessing today is the emergence of a new politics of non-alignment without Third Worldism. This new ethos complicates the logic of the imperialist world system without directly challenging it—a world-altering project, certainly, but not quite a worldmaking one.

What, then, would it take to revive the Bandung Spirit for our present moment? There is no easy answer to this question, but I think a crucial first step is to rekindle anti-imperialism as a central concern of left politics. For too long, the left in the imperial core—particularly here in the United States—has failed to place the appropriate amount of emphasis on anti-imperialism, at best relegating it to secondary status and at worst ignoring or even abandoning it altogether. This abject failure of political vision stems largely from pervasive misconceptions about what imperialism is and how it functions in the world today—treating it either as being merely synonymous with ‘war’ and ‘militarism’, or else as a bygone historical injustice in need of retrospective redress rather than as a central pillar of our contemporary world order.

This myopic approach can and should be contrasted with the anti-imperialist politics of the Bandung Spirit. What ultimately made this politics so revolutionary, and underpinned its worldmaking potential, was the crucial understanding that imperialism is first and foremost a system of globally stratified political economy, characterized by an international division of labor and unequal exchange between the nations of the core and periphery, which continues to exploit the latter even after they have achieved nominal independence from formal colonial rule. This system is not separate from the capitalist system that we as socialists oppose—it is capitalism, manifesting on a global scale and, as Lenin famously observed, at its highest stage of development. This means, therefore, that rather than being ancillary to our anti-capitalist struggle, anti-imperialism and international solidarity must in fact lie at the very heart of it. This is true for socialists and communists across the world, but it is especially true for those of us who are located in the imperial core and working to resist empire from within, even as we benefit from it.

• • •

As I prepare to close out these remarks, I will leave you today with the words of the revolutionary Palestinian writer, freedom fighter, and martyr Ghassan Kanafani. Before his assassination by Zionist intelligence forces in 1972, Kanafani said:

Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.

Reviving the Bandung Spirit for our time means taking Kanafani’s words to heart, never forgetting that the struggle against imperialism is not just part of the world revolution—it is the world revolution. To engage in that struggle is to take part in the same worldmaking project that millions of people across the Third World took part in when they rose up to break the shackles of colonial oppression and declare with one voice that, as Richard Wright put it, “this is the human race speaking.”

We must never lose sight of the fact that as different as today’s world may seem from the world that those freedom fighters inhabited, our contemporary struggles are nevertheless a part of that same revolutionary lineage. We must recognize that if we want to overcome the structures that continue to exploit and immiserate vast swaths of the world’s population, then our efforts—like those of the Third World revolutionaries who came before us—must be aimed at nothing less than the complete and total remaking of the entire global order as we know it. That is an ambitious project, to be sure, but if we want to ensure humanity’s survival in the face of the myriad existential crises confronting us, it is also a profoundly necessary one, and one for which we simply have no other choice.

The world, dear comrades, is not just ours to win—it’s ours to build.

culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox:

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