This interview was conducted for the journal 马克思主义与现实 (Marxism and Reality), where it was published earlier this year.
Marxism
Wang Jing: Why did you grow up to be a Marxist? Could you briefly introduce your personal experience and academic career?
Vijay Prashad: I grew up in Calcutta, India, and then in northern India. During my youth, I was deeply impacted by the prevalence of urban and rural poverty. The grotesque inequalities of life and the ubiquity of feudal type social relations (especially the hierarchy of the caste system) was deeply objectionable to me. My parents raised me with the values of decency and good behavior, which seemed impossible to sustain in an indecent society. I was angry at the world, and then when I began to get involved in small struggles and read Marx, I realized that my anger was necessary but insufficient. I needed to be in an organization, I needed a theory of social transformation, I needed discipline. This is what drew me into both a more serious academic study of the roots of social inequality in India (the subject of my doctoral dissertation, which was on the social history of an oppressed caste community) and to struggle against the conditions that prevented social transformation (which drew me into the left movement).
WJ: What is the significance of Marxism in the 21st century? Is Marxism, as some people believe, outdated and unsuitable for today’s era?
VP: Marxism, which is an ever-evolving field of analysis, is the most accurate critique of capitalism. As long as capitalism remains with us, Marxism must remain until another form of critique—better than Marxism—appears. Thus far, no clearer critique of capitalism has been developed. It is true now as it was in 1867, when Marx published Capital, that the exploitation of the working class produces surplus value and it is this surplus value that creates the accumulation of capital in the hands of the capitalists and immiserates the worker, and it is this accumulation of capital in the hands of different capitalists who compete with each other that creates the conditions for a general crisis in society. If there were a better explanation of these crises that afflict us, then I do not know it.
India
WJ: In recent decades, the Indian economy has developed rapidly, but under the capitalism system, various contradictions in Indian society are also very acute. What are the main social conflicts currently facing India? What social oppression is the Indian people facing?
VP: India’s economy grows rapidly because there is a large pent-up demand that began to settle over the country after the early phase of reforms in the post-independence era. A deficit in infrastructure had to be fulfilled, which has not fully occurred, but it does account for some of the growth. The growth, however, is uneven. One of the great problems of the Indian economy is the failure of the state to conduct agrarian reform and thereby create conditions of relative social equality in the countryside. Wretched social inequality, exacerbated by the caste hierarchy, means that the old forms of subordination remain intact and are even exacerbated by the increase of wealth amongst the more powerful sections in society. So, you get growth, but very uneven and unequal growth. This creates great social turmoil, which is held down by the state’s instruments of force (both the legal apparatus that is used to designate dissenters as anti-national, and the apparatus of violence that cracks down hard on social protest, including the protest of farmers).
WJ: What is the current development status of the communism movement in India? What are the main Marxist political parties and organizations?
VP: The communist movement in India is weak due to the depletion of the reservoirs of strength for such a movement, that is the weakness of the trade union movement in the manufacturing and service sectors, and the weakness of the agricultural workers’ movement in the countryside. The organization of the working class—both urban and rural—is weak due to the forms of disarticulation of society and the workplace that is a mark of the neoliberal era. If the working class is weakened, the left is weakened. There are three main parties of the communist movement: the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPIM, the Communist Party of India or the CPI, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation or simply Liberation. These are the legal parties that have a role in the national and provincial parliaments. There is also the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which is banned and operates in the countryside. The total strength of these parties’ numbers in the hundreds of millions, but that is still not sufficient to move a decisive agenda at this time.
Global South
WJ: When was the concept of Global South proposed? How do you understand this concept? What does it mean in the present?
VP: The Global South is an idea that first came to world attention with the Brandt Commission (1980), where the South referred to the countries that marinated in poverty as opposed to the North, which referred to the former colonial powers. The concept was elaborated by the South Commission (1989), which was chaired by the former President of Tanzania Julius Nyerere and had a Commissioner from China—Qian Jiadong—who was an aide to Zhou Enlai and is the father-in-law of Wang Yi, China’s current foreign minister. The concept for the South Commission was developed to refer to the developing countries that had to build an agenda for their development, not just the countries that were stuck in poverty. That was an advance. The South Commission, which had studied the already pretty remarkable developments in China’s Shenzhen region, advanced the agenda that dependency was not permanent and that a break could come with the transfer of technology and the proper harnessing of domestic resources. This was far more than what had been on the table from the old modernization development agenda.
WJ: In your book The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013) you propose that, Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism. Why do you think so?
VP: In the early years of the 2010s, there were a series of protests taking place across the Global South against the debt-austerity regime imposed by the International Monetary Fund. It appeared at that time that no solution to the misery was possible. The protests themselves seemed to define the post-financial crisis (2007) era. But then, there was a very interesting shift taking place that I had noted in the book but had not accumulated into a theory. This was the appearance of a more confident South, what I later called the new mood of the Global South. The formation of BRICS in 2009 is one signal, but so too is the insistence on the need for a new development theory and the building of new institutions for finance and development (including the New Development Bank, established in 2014). These moves have shifted us from a period of protests to a period of construction. Can the new architecture start to supplant the IMF debt-austerity regime? That is the question of our time. We are on the horns of this dilemma. There is no way to accurately predict whether the IMF approach will prevail or whether a new development theory with a new develop architecture will establish itself.
WJ: After the end of World War II, although colonialism withdrew from the historical stage, the exploitation and oppression of the global South by imperialist countries still existed, forming neocolonialism. What are the manifestations of the neocolonialism?
VP: Neocolonialism is a term used by Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah in 1965 to refer to the situation of flag independence (he was the victim of a coup the next year). Countries gained their political sovereignty but were not able to control their own economies. This lack of control took place because they had to borrow money from overseas for almost everything (even to pay their public sector bills) and they had to allow foreign companies to exploit their resources because they had neither the capital nor the technology nor the expertise to do so. This lack of financial and scientific power left these countries prey to their former colonial masters. In our time, the basic outlines of neocolonialism remain intact for many countries, exacerbated by the seemingly endless spiral of debt. The current total external debt of developing countries is $11.4 trillion, and over 98 percent of the export earnings of these countries is used to pay off wealthy bond holders. This makes development impossible. That is the structure of contemporary neocolonialism. It was this structure that produced the theory of dependency, whose formula was articulated by Andre Gunder Frank as “the development of underdevelopment.”
China
WJ: What impact has the rise of the Global South represented by China had on the global order?
VP: The South Commission referred to the “locomotives” of the South and hoped that these locomotives—that had scale (population and land) on their side—would develop fast, and that they would then pull along the other countries on the train of development. In a sense, that is precisely what happened. China broke the dependency knot. The People’s Republic of China benefitted from the Maoist reforms that produced a well-educated and healthy population. Domestic savings and foreign investment combined in a financial system controlled by the government. This capital was used alongside technology and science transfer to industrialize the country and to build up its overall productive forces. A less dramatic version of this socialist development agenda was conducted in other countries—such as Vietnam—where the growth rates ballooned. The rise of China inspired and pulled along a range of countries, including Indonesia and Bangladesh, which otherwise could not have imagined the possibilities outside the dependency trap. It is because of the power of China that Indonesia was able to ban the export of unprocessed nickel and advance its own industrialization, and it was because of China that the actuality of industrialization has returned to the African continent.
WJ: How do you understand the significance of China’s Belt and Road initiative for the Global South?
VP: The Belt and Road policy—first articulated in 2013 as the One Belt, One Road policy—initially had everything to do with the attempt by the Chinese government to pivot away from reliance on the US and European markets after their collapse in the financial crisis of 2007. It became clear in Beijing that the markets of the Global North would not be permanently available to countries such as China. To seek new markets, Beijing looked to continue the western development policy in Western China (including Xinjiang, Tibet, and Qinhai) started by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and then to expand it into Central Asia. But beyond that, the Belt and Road sought to build infrastructure across the Global South to facilitate a more harmonious economic development between China and those regions. From 2013 to 2024, China’s BRI engagement reached a total of $1.175 trillion, including investments, loans, and donations. This is a significant transformation of the development agenda. It has been studied in parts, but not properly in totality to understand the theory of the BRI. I hope that more people will accumulate more of the evidence from the BRI sites and develop a proper theory of development from this new experience.
WJ: You mentioned that to understand Chinese path to modernization, we should not forget these three years: 1949, 1979 and 2014. Why do you think so?
VP: There is time in a country’s history when the totality of its experiences can be ignored to emphasize one aspect or another. In contemporary China, it is no doubt clear that the reform agenda started in 1978 is of great significance. But this emphasis has the sometimes failed to acknowledge the immense achievement of the Chinese Revolution from 1949 and the Maoist reforms that followed. Without the agrarian reforms, the transformation of social relations, the creation of social institutions to manage finance and property, and the formation of early industrialization, it would be impossible for China’s economic reforms after 1978 to have succeeded. The first date, therefore, for China’s transformation is 1949.
The second date is 1978, because it was acknowledged that without the transformation of the productive forces, China’s economy would stagnate, and it would not be able to provide for the needs of its people and play an internationalist role in the world. For this reason, the entry of capital and technology was allowed as long as it was to adhere to the planned agenda of Chinese socialism. That entry of technology and finance enabled China to upgrade its productive forces and to become one of the most powerful economic engines of the world. That is the second date, and it is related to the Deng reforms.
The third date is 2014, when two facts became clear: first, that the North American and European markets would not be able to absorb the commodities produced in China, and second, that the capitalists in China should not be allowed to become a class in the political sense and that inequality needed to be erased as much as possible. Xi Jinping’s tenure will be remembered as the era when China pivoted from the Northern markets to build a Southern market structure through the Belt and Road Initiative, when China significantly prevented its capitalists from having any political influence (the experience of Jack Ma is exemplary), and when China eradicated absolute poverty and accelerated its equality agenda. These Xi reforms are indicated by the third date, 2014. We will see where we go from here. There will be other dates in the future.
Trump
WJ: What impact will Trump’s recent return to the White House have on the Global South?
VP: Trump has rejected thirty-five years of US imperialist idealism and brought back right-wing realism of the Henry Kissinger form to US foreign policy. This shift must be registered. No longer does the US government imagine that it can shape the world in its image. I think there is a more modest agenda that the US will need to use its power to push its interests first, and that it will have to control the world as it is rather than to make it something that it is not. This is not a progressive advance by any means. The structure of US imperialism remains intact. But the means will be different. Force will be used, but to push an agenda for US interests rather than the interests of the global bourgeoisie. One does not yet know how the bourgeoisie in the Global South will react to these developments. It is likely that they have not registered that the US will no longer champion their interests but will seek to get the best deal for its own bourgeoise over all else. Will this deflate the faith in globalization that has thus far gripped the bourgeoisies in the Global South? In other words, will a patriotic section of the bourgeoisie appear in the Global South? This is not a question we can answer as yet. Certainly, something like that will likely occur in time if the bourgeoisie is able to recognize its class interests.
Trump is not a friend of the Global South. He will push an imperialist agenda as hard as possible. His advisors, particularly Elbridge Colby at the Defense Department, have made it clear that the halt to China’s economic and technological development is the primary part of their agenda, and that this halt will expand to the rapid developments in any Global South state. The attempt by a Global South state to push for its own sovereignty will be attacked by the Trump White House. The only interests that they will promote are those of the US bourgeoisie, and they will use force to ensure that. Any illusions about Trump’s fundamental commitment to imperialism has already been dispelled over Gaza.
WJ: How should the Global South respond to the challenges it brings?
VP: The Global South must remain vigilant and organize itself to advance the sovereignty of its states and the dignity of its peoples. We will require more organizational capacity, such as through the formation of more regional organizations and more institutions that harness South-South trade and cooperation. It is worthwhile to remember a paragraph toward the end of the South Commission report, The Challenge of the South (1989): “The South as a whole has sufficient markets, technology, and financial resources to make South-South cooperation an effective means for widening the development options for its economies. Intensified South-South cooperation has to become an important part of Southern strategies for autonomous, self-reliant development. The South must build its capacity to sustain a fast pace of growth even if the Northern engine is in low gear.” With the Trump tariffs set to attack the US working class and reduce its consumption by at least $2500 per year, the US markets will no longer be a place for Southern countries. South-South cooperation will have to increase. But the quality of this cooperation is in doubt. It must be harmonious, so that each country—however small and poor—is advantaged by the development and not destroyed by it.