• Monthly Review
  • Monthly Review Press
  • Climate & Capitalism
  • Money on the Left
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Mastadon
MR Online
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact/Submission
  • Browse
    • Recent Articles Archive
    • by Subject
      • Ecology
      • Education
      • Imperialism
      • Inequality
      • Labor
      • Literature
      • Marxism
      • Movements
      • Philosophy
      • Political Economy
    • by Region
      • Africa
      • Americas
      • Asia
      • Australasia
      • Europe
      • Global
      • Middle East
    • by Category
      • Art
      • Commentary
      • Interview
      • Letter
      • News
      • Newswire
  • Monthly Review Essays
 | Chittaprosad Indian Workers Read nd | MR Online

A Programme for a future society that we will build in the present: The Second Newsletter (2022)

By Vijay Prashad (Posted Jan 14, 2022)

Originally published: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research on January 13, 2022 (more by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)  |
Movements, Political EconomyGlobalNewswirethe United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Tricontinental Newsletter

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender. ‘Multidimensional poverty’ is a much more precise measurement of poverty than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. It looks at ten indicators divided along three axes: health (nutrition, child mortality), education (years of schooling, school attendance), and standard of living (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets). The team studied multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, looking at the living conditions of 5.9 billion people. They found that 1.3 billion–one in five people–live in multidimensional poverty. The details of their lives are stark:

  1. Roughly 644 million or half of these people are children under the age of 18.
  2. Almost 85 per cent of them reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
  3. One billion of them are exposed to solid cooking fuels (which creates respiratory ailments), inadequate sanitation, and substandard housing.
  4. 568 million people lack access to proper drinking water within a 30-minute round trip walk.
  5. 788 million multidimensionally poor people have at least one undernourished person in their home.
  6. Nearly 66 per cent of them live in households where no one has completed at least six years of schooling.
  7. 678 million people have no access to electricity.
  8. 550 million people lack seven of eight assets identified in the study (a radio, television, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorcycle, or refrigerator). They also do not own a car.

Dossier no 48 The absolute numbers in the UNDP report are consistently lower than figures calculated by other researchers. Take their number of those with no access to electricity (678 million), for example. World Bank data shows that in 2019, 90 per cent of the world’s population had access to electricity, which means that 1.2 billion people had none. An important study from 2020 demonstrates that 3.5 billion people lack ‘reasonably reliable access’ to electricity. This is far more than the absolute numbers in the UNDP report, but, regardless of the specific figures, the trend lines are nonetheless horrific. We live on a planet with greatly increasing disparities.

For the first time, the UNDP has focused attention on the more granular aspects of these disparities, shining a light on ethnic, race, and caste hierarchies. Nothing is as wretched as social hierarchies, inheritances of the past that continue to sharply assault human dignity. Looking at the data from 41 countries, the UNDP found that multidimensional poverty disproportionately impacts those who face social discrimination. In India, for instance, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (‘scheduled’ because the government regards them as officially designated groups) face the brunt of terrible poverty and discrimination, which in turn exacerbates their impoverishment. Five out of six people who struggle with multidimensional poverty are from Scheduled Castes and Tribes. A study from 2010 showed that each year, at least 63 million people in India fall below the poverty line because of out-of-pocket health care costs (that’s two people per second). During the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers increased, though exact figures have not been easy to collect. Regardless, the five out of six people who are in multidimensional poverty–many of them from Scheduled Castes and Tribes–do not have any access to health care and are therefore not even included in that data. They exist largely outside formal health care systems, which has been catastrophic for these communities during the pandemic.

Tina Modotti El Machete 1926

Tina Modotti, El Machete, 1926.

Last year, the secretary general of ALBA-TCP (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America–Peoples’ Trade Treaty), Sacha Llorenti, asked Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Instituto Simón Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela to start an international discussion responding to the broad crises of our times. We brought together twenty-six research institutes from around the world whose work has now culminated in a report called A Plan to Save the Planet. This plan is reproduced with a longer introduction in dossier no. 48 (January 2022).

We looked carefully at two kinds of texts: first, a range of plans produced by conservative and liberal think tanks around the world, from the World Economic Forum to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism; second, a set of demands from trade unions, left-wing political parties, and social movements. We drew from the latter to better understand the limitations of the former. For instance, we found that the liberal and conservative texts ignored the fact that during the pandemic, central banks–mostly in the Global North–raised $16 trillion to sustain a faltering capitalist system. Though money is available that could have gone towards the social good, it largely went to shore up the financial sector and industry instead. If money can be made available for those purposes, it can certainly be used to fully fund a robust public health system in every country and a fair transition from non-renewable fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, for example.

The plan covers twelve areas, from ‘democracy and the world order’ to ‘the digital world’. To give you a sense of the kinds of claims made in the plan, here are the recommendations in the section on education:

  1. De-commodify education, which includes strengthening public education and preventing the privatisation of education.
  2. Promote the role of teachers in the management of educational institutions.
  3. Ensure that underprivileged sectors of society are trained to become teachers.
  4. Bridge the electricity and digital divides.
  5. Build publicly financed and publicly controlled high-speed broadband internet systems.
  6. Ensure that all school children have access to all the elements of the educational process, including extra-curricular activities.
  7. Develop channels through which students participate in decision-making processes in all forms of higher education.
  8. Make education a lifelong experience, allowing people at every stage of life to enjoy the practice of learning in various kinds of institutions. This will foster the value that education is not only about building a career, but about building a society that supports the continuing growth and development of the mind and of the community.
  9. Subsidise higher education and vocational courses for workers of all ages in areas related to their occupation.
  10. Make education, including higher education, available to all in their spoken languages; ensure that governments take responsibility for providing educational materials in the spoken languages in their country through translations and other means.
  11. Establish management educational institutes that cater to the needs of cooperatives in industrial, agricultural, and service sectors.

Tina Modotti A Plan to Save the Planet is rooted in the principles of the United Nations Charter (1945), the document with the highest level of consensus in the world (193 member states of the UN have signed this binding treaty). We hope that you will read the plan and the dossier carefully. They have been produced for discussion and debate and are to be argued with and elaborated on. If you have any suggestions or ideas or would like to let us know how you were able to use the plan, please write to us at [email protected].

Study has been a key instrument for the growth of working-class struggle, as shown by the impact of working-class newspapers, journals, and literature on the expansion of popular imaginations. In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed Mexican revolutionary farmers reading El Machete, the newspaper of their communist party. Modotti, one of the most luminous revolutionary photographers, reflected the sincere commitment of Mexican revolutionaries, of the Weimar Left, and of fighters in the Spanish Civil War. The farmers reading El Machete and the peasant organiser in India reading the Turkish communist poet Nâzim Hikmet in a hut during the great Bengal famine of 1943 depicted in the woodcut by Chittaprosad suggest places where we hope the plan will be discussed. We hope this plan will be used not merely as a critique of the present, but as a programme for a future society that we will build in the present.

Warmly,

Vijay

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.

About Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Tricontinental Newsletter
How Education International is pushing teachers’ unions into the 4th Industrial Revolution
Michael Löwy: ‘Revolutions’
  • Also by Vijay Prashad

    • The people want peace and progress, not war and waste: The Twenty-Fourth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad June 13, 2025
    • Hundreds of millions are dying of hunger: The Twenty-Second Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad May 30, 2025
    • How the International Monetary Fund underdevelopes Africa: The Twenty-First Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad May 23, 2025
    • A language of blood has gripped our world: The Twentieth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad May 16, 2025
  • Also By Vijay Prashad in Monthly Review Magazine

    • The Actuality of Red Africa June 01, 2024
    • Africa Is on the Move May 01, 2022
    • Preface January 01, 2022
    • Introduction January 01, 2022
    • Quid Pro Quo? October 01, 2011
    • Reclaim the Neighborhood, Change the World December 01, 2007
    • Kathy Kelly’s Chispa December 01, 2005

    Books By Vijay Prashad

    • Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective November 15, 2022
    • Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations September 16, 2020

    Monthly Review Essays

    • US Imperialism in Crisis: Opportunities and Challenges to a Global Community with a Shared Future
      Sam-Kee Cheng  | A late 1940s Soviet poster showing a US military service member lounging on top of a German factory smoking a cigar The text beneath reads DER DOLLARIMPERIALISMUS dollar imperialism | MR Online

      1. Introduction The predominance of US economic, political and military power in the world was established at the end of the Second World War.1 With just 6.3 percent of global population, the United States held about 50 percent of the world wealth in 1948. As the only power which had used nuclear weapons on civilian […]

    Lost & Found

    • Strike at the Helm: The First Ministerial Meeting of the New Cycle of the Bolivarian Revolution
      Hugo Chávez  | Mural of Chávez in Caracas Univision | MR Online

      On October 7th, 2012, after hearing of his victory as the nation‘s candidate with 56 percent of the vote, President Hugo Chávez Frias announced from a balcony in his hometown that a new cycle was beginning the very next day, October 8th.

    Trending

    • Plutonian Mac: December 2017
      Official: U.S.-Israeli deception gave Iran false security ahead of attack
    • New Pan-African Path
      Forging a new Pan-African path: Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, and the Land of the Upright People
    • A black and white photograph of Paulo Freire later in life. Freire is bald, bearded, and wears large eyeglasses.
      Pedagogy and Class Power: Reclaiming Freire in an Age of Reaction
    • Senior Israeli official talks with Israel’s Channel 12 News
      Sky News smears Greta Thunberg as a Nazi to justify IDF attack
    • SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks with a person during a live interview with Ben Shapiro at the European Jewish Association’s symposium on antisemitism in Krakow, Poland, Jan. 22, 2024. Photo | STR | NurPhoto via AP
      Meet the Think Tanks behind MAGA’s new free speech crackdown
    • Colombian president defends social justice and labor reforms amid right-wing threats.Photo: Presidencia Colombia/X.
      Colombian President Gustavo Petro denounces U.S.-backed coup plot and urges popular consultation for social justice
    • BILDUNGSROMANCE: Calam Lynch as Max and Ellis Howard as Byron in What It Feels Like for a Girl [Pic: Enda Bowe]
      Naughties in Nottingham
    • Artificial intelligence, artificial support: Google buys new friends in Parliament
    • Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum
      Mexico: “We will firmly defend the rights of our compatriots”
    • Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg talks to journalists upon arrival at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport, as she left the occupied territories on a flight to Sweden via France, after she was detained along with other activists aboard a Gaza-bound aid boat, June 10, 2025. (Photo by AFP)
      Greta Thunberg: “Israel kidnapped me in international waters”

    Popular (last 30 days)

    • This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows six U.S. B-2 stealth bombers parked at Camp Thunder Cove in Diego Garcia on April 2, 2025. Though officially deployed for operations in Yemen, the presence of these nuclear-capable aircraft in striking range of Iran has raised concerns that the U.S. is quietly preparing to support a potential Israeli attack. Photo | AP
      Staging for a strike? U.S. quietly moves bombers as Israel prepares to hit Iran
    • Wood gavel and open handcuffs symbolizing freeing judge decisions
      High Court opens door to police accountability
    • Plutonian Mac: December 2017
      Official: U.S.-Israeli deception gave Iran false security ahead of attack
    • America is a scam
      America is a scam
    • President Maduro was unscathed from the attack (Hugoshi)
      ‘Neoliberal and authoritarian’? A simplistic analysis of the Maduro government that leaves much unsaid
    • New Pan-African Path
      Forging a new Pan-African path: Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, and the Land of the Upright People
    • A black and white photograph of Paulo Freire later in life. Freire is bald, bearded, and wears large eyeglasses.
      Pedagogy and Class Power: Reclaiming Freire in an Age of Reaction
    • Activist Greta Thunberg stands near the stage during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Mannheim, Germany, on Dec. 6, 2024. Uwe Anspach | AP
      From media darling to persona non grata: Greta Thunberg’s journey
    • Tianjin Qiaoyuan Park in Tianjin, one of the earliest sponge city projects in China. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
      Don’t believe the New Cold War lies, China is leading the world in climate solutions
    • An Israeli officer wears Microsoft’s HoloLens headset during military testing in Ramat Gan, Israel. Stefanie J’rkel | AP
      Microsoft’s role in Gaza goes way beyond the ICC email lockout

    RSS MR Press News

    • EXCERPT: Colonial dreams, racist nightmares, liberated futures (from the introduction to A Land With A People) June 13, 2025
    • The legacy of a Sardinian original Roses for Gramsci reviewed in ‘Counterpunch’ June 13, 2025
    • LISTEN: Gramsci’s lasting contributions (Andy Merrifield on ‘Against the Grain’) June 6, 2025
    • Why did Marxism fall into such deep crisis in the West? (Western Marxism reviewed in ‘Socialism and Democracy’) June 5, 2025
    • A remarkable personal journey WATCH: Andy Merrifield, author of Roses for Gramsci, at The Marxist Education Project June 4, 2025

    RSS Climate & Capitalism

    • 1.5 is dead: How hot will the Earth get? June 5, 2025
    • Carbon capture company emits more than it captures June 3, 2025
    • Some thoughts on Nature and the German Peasants’ War May 23, 2025
    • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, May 2025 May 19, 2025
    • Humans have observed less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor May 8, 2025

     

    RSS Monthly Review

    • June 2025 (Volume 77, Number 2) June 1, 2025 The Editors
    • The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism June 1, 2025 John Bellamy Foster
    • The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order June 1, 2025 Thomas I. Palley
    • Big Pharma and Monopoly Capital: Four Dynamics in the Decline of Innovation June 1, 2025 Jia Liu
    • What’s going on June 1, 2025 Marge Piercy

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

    Creative Commons License

    Monthly Review Foundation
    134 W 29TH ST STE 706
    New York NY 10001-5304

    Tel: 212-691-2555