Introduction

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood

Curated By

Unlearning Capitalism

A curated directory of educational resources for radical political education focused on building a better world beyond capitalism.

About this Collection

About this Collection

For hundreds of years, the value produced by the labour of the workers of the world and the natural resources contained in the earth has flowed overwhelmingly from the nations inhabited by the majority of humanity to the centres of capitalist power in Europe and the United States - frequently referred to as the "west". This historic injustice - driven by the mechanisms of capital accumulation and unequal exchange and justified through the imposition of violent racial hierarchies and concepts like "terra nullius" - has led us to the present state of the world: a globe economically and militarily dominated by western capital at the expense of most of humanity.

However, through centuries of resistance by indigenous peoples, the decolonial struggles of the 20th century and the present day rise of China and the anti-imperialist axis the primacy of western capital is no longer certain. This collection traces the history of imperialism, resistance and the rising new mood in the global south.

Read this collection online: https://unlearn.capital/collections/unequal-exchange-multipolarity-and-the-new-mood

12 articles · 3 books · 1 documentary · 3 podcasts · 3 videos

This ebook is about 157 pages long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Towards a World Order without Hegemony: A Proposal from the Global South

12 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2025-2-world-without-hegemony-global-south/

Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横)

By Yin Zhiguang

Explores the Global South's alternative vision to hegemonic world order through China's development path and historical anti-colonial struggles.

2. Global South Struggles for Socialism and the Workers' Side of Marxism

28 pages

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/global-south-struggles-for-socialism-and-the-workers-side-of-marxism/

Monthly Review

By Chris Gilbert

Extends Marxist theory to explain socialist revolutions in the Global South by highlighting the overlooked 'workers' side' of Marxism.

3. The Bandung Spirit

21 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-the-bandung-spirit/

The Tricontinental

The Bandung Spirit of 1955, born from anti-colonial solidarity, influences contemporary Global South movements seeking economic independence and multilateralism.

4. The Churning of the Global Order

31 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-72-the-churning-of-the-global-order/

The Tricontinental

The Global South's refusal to align with Western positions on Russia is accelerating a shift toward a multipolar world order as developing countries pursue their own interests.

5. Captain Ibrahim Traore's New Year Address: Charting a Pan-African Path to Sovereignty

5 pages

https://abasimperialism.substack.com/p/captain-ibrahim-traores-new-year

Coalition for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa

President Ibrahim Traoré outlined a revolutionary Pan-African vision for Burkina Faso focused on sovereignty, security, food self-sufficiency, and rejecting neocolonial dependency in his New Year address.

6. The Great Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Cause of Asian, African, and Latin American Peoples is Invincible

1 page

https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/the-great-anti-imperialist-revolutionary-cause-of-asian-african-and-latin-american-peoples-is-in/

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

By Kim Il Sung

Kim Il Sung affirms the inevitable victory of anti-imperialist revolutions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

7. Structural Adjustment - Global Inequality

7 pages

https://globalinequality.org/structural-adjustment/

The Global Inequality Project

IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs devastated global South economies, causing widespread poverty and millions of preventable deaths.

8. Africa & Russia: The Anti-Imperialist Partnership For Our Future

11 pages

https://hoodcommunist.org/2024/12/07/africa-russia-the-anti-imperialist-partnership-for-our-future/

Hood Communist

By Coalition for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa

Russia has become a valuable anti-imperialist partner for African countries, contrasting with Western colonial powers and supporting sovereignty in the Alliance of Sahel States.

9. Against the Rule of Property: Violence, Land Reclamation, and Decolonization

14 pages

https://worldsystems.substack.com/p/against-the-rule-of-property-violence

Dr. Bikrum Gill

By Bikrum Gill

This paper applies Frantz Fanon's theories to argue that true decolonization requires violently overturning global capitalist property relations to reclaim land and sovereignty.

10. The Global South must shape the international order to come

2 pages

https://progressive.international/wire/2023-07-18-the-global-south-must-shape-the-international-order-to-come/en/

Progressive International

The Global South should actively shape the new international order through non-alignment, peace initiatives, and collective security.

11. this is the human race speaking...

17 pages

https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/this-is-the-human-race-speaking

Return to Bandung

By Pranay Somayajula

Article examines the Bandung Conference's historical significance and argues for reviving its anti-imperialist spirit to address modern global crises.

12. Iran, Zionism, and the Defeat of the Imperialist Narrative

8 pages

https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/iran-zionism-and-the-defeat-of-the-imperialist-narrative/

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

Argues that Western public opinion is permanently shifting against Israel and that Iran's resistance represents a key defeat for imperialist-Zionist narratives.

Other Resources

Other Resources

This collection also includes other media types such as books, videos, podcasts, and more.

Books

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Resource Not Added

By Walter Rodney

Africa's underdevelopment was actively produced by European capitalism through the slave trade and colonialism, expropriating surplus and distorting economies.

Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future

https://www.iskrabooks.org/books/p/ue-past-present-future

Iskra Books

By Torkil Lauesen

Industrialized countries transfer value by exchanging one hour of their labor for 5–15 hours of labor in underdeveloped nations. The work details mechanisms like global production chains, labor arbitrage, and ecological costs, examines political consequences such as the 'imperial mode of living' that fractures working-class solidarity, and shows how unequal exchange drives polarized development.

The Wretched of the Earth

Resource Not Added

By Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon's landmark work analyzes decolonization, the violence of colonial rule, and the psychosocial effects of oppression on the colonized, calling for the creation of a new humanism through national liberation and international solidarity.

Documentary

Concerning Violence

https://archive.org/details/concerning-violence-documentary

Resource Not Added

A bold visual narrative blending African liberation archive footage with Frantz Fanon's anti-colonial writings, illuminating neocolonialism and resistance.

Podcasts

Ammar Ali Jan on the Do-or-Die Fight for a New World

https://shows.acast.com/global-majority-for-peace/episodes/6a72ff88d841ad3ef1bec4bd

Empire Watch Media

By Ammar Ali Jan

Pakistani activist Ammar Ali Jan discusses Iran's defiance after US strikes, Pakistan's contradictory position between IMF elites and a pro-China future, and the urgent need for Global South solidarity against empire.

How the North Plunders the South

https://bb336368-b933-4b06-88b6-e51256ac6d81.libsyn.com/unlocked-how-the-north-plunders-the-south-w-jason-hickel

Upstream Podcast

By Jason Hickel

Jason Hickel explains how the imperial core continues extracting resources and labor from the Global South through unequal exchange.

The US Is a Drowning Empire

https://shows.acast.com/global-majority-for-peace/episodes/69cbe58216bd65d0699bc017

Empire Watch Media

By Mikaela Erskog and Gisela Cernadas

Researchers analyze how the US maintains dominance through military spending while economic power shifts to the Global South.

Videos

Anti-Imperialism and Islam in the Era of the Axis of Resistance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms10J9puLcs

Journal of International Solidarity

By Momodou Taal

Momodou Taal analyzes the shift from Marxist to Islamic anti-imperialism, examining theological frameworks within West Asian resistance movements.

How The IMF Destroyed The World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyVdPQh3NlU

Hakim

Argues that the global divide between rich and poor nations was manufactured through centuries of imperial extraction and the IMF's structural adjustment programs, which reversed postcolonial development gains by imposing austerity, privatization, and trade liberalization.

Unequal Exchange: How the Underdevelopment of the South Overdeveloped the North

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gGHrVbj5ZA

Journal of International Solidarity

By Torkil Lauesen

Torkil Lauesen explains unequal exchange theory to analyze economic disparities between the Global North and South, ecological impacts, and resistance strategies.

Towards a World Order without Hegemony: A Proposal from the Global South

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — Towards a World Order without Hegemony: A Proposal from the Global South

Towards a World Order without Hegemony: A Proposal from the Global South

Article 1 of 12

Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横)

By Yin Zhiguang

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2025-2-world-without-hegemony-global-south/

Yin Zhiguang (殷之光) is a professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of International Politics at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. He is also the chief expert for a research project on modernisation in developing countries by the National Social Science Fund of China. His research focuses on South-South cooperation and decolonisation movements in the Third World. He has authored and co-authored many books, including Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2014) and A New World: China’s Practice and Origins of Afro-Asian Solidarity (Contemporary World Press, 2022), and has published more than 60 papers in Chinese and English journals.

In 1994, Marxist political economist Chen Qiren taught a specialised course on global economic development to young doctoral students in the Department of International Politics at Fudan University.¹ China was still in the early phase of Reform and Opening-Up and the recent decline of the Cold War had ushered in an era of heightened triumphalism in the United States. This political hubris was accompanied by the global expansion of neoliberal economic policies. At such a crucial conjuncture, the question of where the world economy was headed also induced an epochal confusion about China’s own path of economic development. By contrast, the US, steeped in a triumphalist mood, exuded unparalleled intellectual confidence. Western economists, such as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Joseph Schumpeter, quickly became the focus of intense study among Chinese intellectuals and students.

In the historical context of the late twentieth century, the slogan of ‘looking to the West’ expressed the Chinese people’s genuine aspiration for modern technologies and material progress, peace and stability, and better living standards. It also reflected the bold resolve of the early Reform and Opening-Up era – a pragmatic and unconventional willingness to explore all practical and theoretical possibilities in the quest for modernisation. Amid the turbulent tides of the times, what lay ahead was not a well-trodden path mapped out by predecessors, but an open doorway shrouded in darkness. We could dimly perceive figures ahead holding torches and beckoning us forward but had no inkling whether the space separating us from them contained chasms or avenues, pitfalls or smooth paths, a sea of blood or a green pasture. How to move forward and what would be encountered along the way were matters that required self-reflection.

In this era of profound and uncertain changes, the teleological questions of why and for whom we develop were just as critical as the directional and strategic questions of how and where to develop. It was Chen Qiren’s relentless inquiry into these two teleological questions that led him, amid the great transformations of the early Reform and Opening-Up, to argue that the ‘works on development economics’ available in bookstores were, by their nature, ‘not the kind of the textbooks I was looking for’. Chen pointed out that when applied to the unique challenges faced by ‘nationally independent states’, Western development economics suffered from a ‘methodological deficiency’. This universal knowledge only studied ‘quantitative and functional relationships in economic relations without addressing the relations of production’. It failed to distinguish between different relations of production in ‘history and in real life,’ nor did it grasp how concrete, complex relations of production constrain abstract economic laws.²

The realisation that knowledge of development originating in the advanced Western countries cannot be adapted to the practices of developing countries is not a novel insight that appeared out of thin air but the outcome of a long historical process in which the Third World sought autonomous development. On 10 April 1974, in his speech to a special session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Deng Xiaoping emphasised the Third World’s common task of ‘opposing colonialism, neo-colonialism and great-power hegemonism, developing the national economies, and building their respective countries’. The purpose of such development was to change ‘the present extremely unequal international economic relations’.³ The political independence won by the former colonies and semi-colonies in the aftermath of the World Anti-Fascist War fundamentally transformed the existing international political order which had taken shape alongside the emergence of the world market. At the level of international law, empires as political entities had formally exited the historical stage. Yet the global economic structure, relations of production, and attendant cultural, legal, and social orders formed during imperialist expansion persisted despite the formal exit of empires. On the contrary, imperialism, as an epistemological framework, remained deeply entrenched in the existing structure of the world market whose foundation lies in how ‘big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other’ and ‘merged all local markets into one world market’.⁴

This imperialist epistemology emphasises the importance of hegemony in sustaining order, balance, and stability. Derived from European historical experience, this model of imperial order seeks to maintain peace through unipolar hegemonic monopoly or hegemonic alliances with balance-of-power mechanisms, and manages other countries and regions via various forms of interventionism.⁵ This model has failed to bring peace to the world. On the contrary, the old hegemonic order has proliferated the Hobbesian trap of mutual fear between nations – destructive cycles of trade competition experienced in European history have been projected on to the entire world.

Interconnected but highly uneven economic development formed the material foundation of the old order. Fuelled by a sense of panic over finite resources, the old order’s epistemology regards monopolising limited resources as a fundamental imperative for survival. Such resources include not only the natural endowments but also the foundational conditions affecting agricultural production, such as soil fertility and climatic environment. The core of the old order’s conception of land and wealth was to possess as many of these naturally finite resources as possible. Within this framework, it was assumed that one could not alter the fundamental limitation of natural resources. Consequently, the acquisition of wealth was viewed as an absolute zero-sum game: one party’s gain necessarily entailed another’s loss. All political-economic discourse under the old order correspondingly revolved around the rationalisation of unequal distribution. In other words, this hegemony-centric conception of order can be understood as a philosophy rooted in finitude and inequality.

An alternative epistemology believes in human agency. Cooperation and mutual assistance among people can not only maximise the utility of limited resources, but also transform the world into a space more suitable for harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature over a long historical process. This transformation encompasses two dimensions. The first is the material dimension: advancements in agricultural technology, the invention and discovery of new energy sources, and the exploration and innovations in engineering and science, all of which underpin the essential foundations of human survival and development. The second is at the level of social organisation: a spiritual quest – corresponding to material progress – to continuously explore organisational forms that are more inclusive and effective, better adapted to the survival of large-scale communities, better able to ensure the universal benefits of material progress, guarantee the harmonious coexistence of humanity and nature, and liberate humanity from the shackles of resource finitude and the trap of unequal development.

These contrasting epistemologies give rise to two fundamentally different approaches to understanding the international order. The hegemony-centred conception of order, premised on finite resources, sees competition as its foundational principle, treats order as a political resource amenable to monopolisation, and regards great powers as the sole leaders of the international order, with the aim of expanding their own material and political monopolies, all based on preserving the unequal status quo. This perspective is plainly evident in Western anxiety surrounding challenges to the US-led ‘rules-based order’.

The alternative conception of order finds concrete expression in the practice of resistance against the great-power monopolies. This resistance also comprises two dimensions. Politically, the independence movements of former colonial and semi-colonial nations after the World Anti-Fascist War constituted resistance to great-power monopolies. Economically, modernisation through delinking from dependency served as the material bedrock for securing political independence. Neither of these practical dimensions can be adequately theorised by a hegemony-centric epistemology. In fact, dissatisfaction with Western modernisation theories was closely intertwined with frustration at the economic and political monopolies of the great powers. The United Nations platform became an important platform for the vast number of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to express this dissatisfaction and attempt to change this monopolistic structure.

At the same UNGA session where Deng Xiaoping delivered his speech, the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order was adopted. The declaration stressed that the new order ‘shall be founded on justice, sovereign equality, mutual interdependence, common interests and cooperation among all nations’, with the objectives of ‘rectifying inequalities and existing injustices, enabling the elimination of the widening gap between developed and developing countries,’ while ensuring that equality and peaceful development are bequeathed to future generations. To attain these objectives, the declaration stipulated that countries shall have the right to integrate and develop their resources through nationalisation to guarantee benefits for their own people; formerly colonial and semi-colonial countries may claim compensation from their former colonial powers; the activities of transnational corporations must be regulated to ensure they contribute to the economic development of host nations; and the international monetary system should facilitate the development of developing countries.⁶

The emergence of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) was the outcome of the sustained struggle for sovereignty by former colonial and semi-colonial nations. These struggles took place largely beyond the United Nations framework, manifesting in localised anti-colonial and anti-hegemonic armed resistance, alongside regional initiatives of trade cooperation and mutual assistance. At the international level, the contradictions between the United States and the Soviet Union – and the competing models of international order they embodied – constituted the basic geopolitical precondition for these struggles. The contradictions between the US and the USSR included not only an arms race but also a competition to expand their respective international influence.

During the early Cold War, ‘trade wars’ took the form of the US establishing trade alliances while imposing embargoes and containment measures against the USSR. In 1949, the US enacted the Export Control Act which mandated an embargo on all products that might contribute to the USSR’s military and economic development. From 1949 to 1994, through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) – an informal, secretive international alliance – the US enforced embargoes and trade restrictions against the USSR and the entire socialist bloc. Under the pretext of ‘the countering of communist economic penetration’, the US passed the 1962 Trade Expansion Act which severely restricted imports of ‘products of any country or area dominated or controlled by international communism’.⁷

The trade wars of this era garnered broad support from US political and business elites. It safeguarded the economic and technological superiority of the Western states while undermining the hopes of developing countries to achieve economic autonomy through diversified trade circulation. In containing the USSR and its efforts to forge international trade relations, the US and its allies further ensnared developing nations in unequal, dependent relationships. The trade war waged by the Trump administration today has revived almost the same script as that of the Cold War era.

Under these pressures, politically independent nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to demand genuine freedom to trade at the United Nations. At the plenary sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964, Che Guevara stressed that ‘the right of all peoples to unrestricted freedom of trade’ must be established, and that all signatory countries should ‘refrain from restraining trade in any manner, direct or indirect’.⁸ The UNCTAD was formally established with the mission of advancing ‘trade liberalisation’.⁹ Its primary target of contention was the United States, which was then pursuing a trade war. The first Secretary-General of UNCTAD was Raúl Prebisch of Argentina, who emphasised that the body’s mission should be ‘to promote international trade… particularly trade between countries at different stages of development, between developing countries and between countries with different systems of economic and social organisation’.¹⁰ This stance stood in sharp contrast to the US-led embargo against the socialist bloc at the time.

The attempt to establish a New International Economic Order was just one in a series of historical efforts by Asian, African, and Latin American nations to pursue genuine development. In the resolutions adopted at the 1955 Bandung Conference, diverse attempts at order-building with profound implications for international law could already be seen. The resolutions reached among Asian and African countries on political, economic, cultural, and educational matters embody the basic spirit of mutual assistance and cooperation. Through solidarity movements, fragmented Asian and African nations united to resist pressure from major powers and strengthen their internal economic resilience. Through cooperation and exchange, they aimed to deepen understanding among their peoples and achieve decolonisation and liberation on cultural and educational fronts. The final communiqué of Bandung Conference, with its call for ‘fuller economic, cultural, and political cooperation’, asserted that true decolonisation and independence could only be achieved through solidarity and mutual assistance. With regard to economic cooperation, the communiqué explicitly stated that ‘proposals with regard to economic cooperation within the participating countries do not preclude either the desirability or the need for cooperation with countries outside the region, including the investment of foreign capital’.¹¹ It is evident that from at least the Bandung Conference onwards, the dual orientation of South-South cooperation and North-South dialogue had already taken shape, conceived as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

This understanding is rooted in a clear recognition of the basic developmental conditions of Asian and African nations. After gaining formal independence, former colonial and semi-colonial countries could not acquire substantive capacity for decolonised development overnight. Over the long history of colonial globalisation, colonial powers spent centuries constructing a relatively complete global colonial economic circuit centred on themselves. The circuit was primarily built on a land-based colonial economic model before the eighteenth century. The occupation of colonial territories and the transformation of production fundamentally altered the natural landscapes, ecologies, and even demographic structures of the colonies. Africa and the Americas, transformed by the colonial economy, formed the basic framework of the international division of labour that exists today. Originally diverse local economic communities were converted into components with ‘comparative advantages’, organised under colonial metropolises to form parts of the world system. These components each served distinct roles: the Caribbean as a centre of sugar production; South America and Central Africa as suppliers of minerals; Southeast Asia and Oceania as producers of rubber and fertilisers; West and East Africa as exporters of cocoa and coffee; and Asia and Africa as reservoirs of labour. During this long process of colonial economic globalisation, earlier small-scale regional or local economic circuits were entirely dismantled. Moreover, the ecological foundations that once sustained these economic circuits were severely damaged by large-scale plantations, the slave trade, and resource extraction.

Another foundation underpinning this globalisation was oceanic shipping. As the scale of the colonial land economy continued to expand, trade between different colonial settlements and between colonial powers and other major economies worldwide – including China – further impacted the land-based fiscal models of colonial nations. From the eighteenth century onwards, early mercantilist thinking, grounded in land-based finance and focused on the export of labour products in exchange for precious metals, was gradually supplanted by a new mercantilism that placed greater emphasis on economic exchange and the flow of imports and exports. In contrast to the earlier view that wealth was created through land-based production, the new theory stressed that trade itself could generate wealth. As the scale of trade flows expanded, the speed of wealth accumulation among the emerging commercial bourgeoisie in the core nations accelerated. This large-scale, rapid accumulation of capital provided the essential primitive capital for Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Such accumulation did not arise out of nothing; it was built upon the fundamental structure of the international division of labour established by the colonial land-based economy. At this juncture, a corporate global system began to take form, with industrialised metropolises as headquarters and colonies and semi-colonies as its departments.

The highly organised structure underpinning this corporate global system evolved over the long history of imperialist globalisation. By the mid-twentieth century – during the decolonisation movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America – the newly independent states were confronted with a tightly organised colonial apparatus of military, bureaucracy, and education, together with a highly developed economic and financial system. In the face of such hegemonic power, the only way out for nations seeking independence was to unite to form larger communities. They needed to build self-sufficient domestic communities as swiftly as possible through regional circulation, international aid from friendly nations, and forms of engagement that did not completely decouple from the former metropoles – all to enable the shift from formal equality to substantive equity. This entailed reducing their high dependence on industrialised Global North nations – the former colonisers – across economic, cultural, and governance spheres.

The national liberation movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America were also movements of regional solidarity. The international order, institutions, and legal principles envisaged in this process placed the empowerment and development of states at the centre. This empowerment operates at two levels: First, organisational empowerment at the domestic level. Many underdeveloped countries faced significant constraints in natural resources, fiscal capacity, and human capital, which severely limited their nation-building efforts. At this stage, modern political parties and relevant organisations were crucial for mobilising scarce social resources. Second, cooperative empowerment at the international level. Imperialism and hegemony, as systemic forms of oppression, could not be overcome through blind decoupling or by the isolated efforts of any single nation – collective struggle and mutual cooperation among underdeveloped countries was therefore critical. Such cooperation and mutual assistance were premised on non-interference in internal affairs and the voluntary and autonomous participation by all nations. Supporting ‘oppressed peoples and other developing countries in their just struggles to win and safeguard their independence and develop their economies’ is explicitly recognised in China’s constitution, Mao Zedong identified non-interference and mutual assistance as the hallmarks of ‘true internationalism’.¹² This principle of non-interference in international order comes from both China’s own historical experience and the collective historical experience of the Global South.

Whether referring to today’s Global South, the former Third World, or the earlier Tricontinental, these terms all encapsulate oppressed people’s dissatisfaction with the hegemonic order and their aspiration to end dependence and achieve modernisation through solidarity and mutual assistance. In contrast to the hegemon-centred perspective, the Global South affirms the agency of the governed and the oppressed. The Global South does not represent a ‘subaltern’ viewpoint, in the sense of late twentieth-century Western post-colonial academia, rather it represents the historical and theoretical significance of the concrete practices of resistance, struggle, and exploration. Within this long historical continuity, China’s relentless exploration for a path to modernisation, as part of this diverse practice and as a form of resistance to the hegemonic order, thereby acquires true theoretical universality. The aim of such anti-hegemonic practice is to construct an order free from hegemony.

A philosophy of practice is the only way to understand the Global South. This means that when the goal is to establish a non-hegemonic order, all attempts become transitional steps toward that future. It is precisely through conscious engagement in this transition that the Global South can truly assert its agency. In the movement towards a Global South order, all the subjects united by this historical process, in turn, imbue the Global South with meaning. This is the significance of discussing the Global South today, and the fundamental purpose of such discussions is to dismantle the structure that produces the challenges facing the Global South.

Global South Struggles for Socialism and the Workers' Side of Marxism

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — Global South Struggles for Socialism and the Workers' Side of Marxism

Global South Struggles for Socialism and the Workers' Side of Marxism

Article 2 of 12

Monthly Review

By Chris Gilbert

Originally published at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/global-south-struggles-for-socialism-and-the-workers-side-of-marxism/

"The Uprising," fresco by Diego Rivera (1931).

Chris Gilbert is professor of political studies at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela. His work condemning the recent U.S. attack on Venezuela and explaining the unified response of the Venezuelan people and their revolutionary government can be found in a range of podcasts and on MR Online.

Any theory should be adjusted when it conflicts with or diverges from salient features of reality, and Marxism is no exception. Among the best-known problems of this kind for the Marxist tradition is how the theory (at least in its initial formulation) seemed to indicate that socialist revolutions should happen mostly in the core countries of the capitalist system, but over the past century and a half they have happened almost exclusively in the periphery. In the first location—call it the Global North—one finds a sizable industrial proletariat and highly developed productive forces. These are the key material conditions that the theory holds to be conducive to socialist revolution. However, the class struggle has tended to be less fierce there, and workers’ horizons generally have not included abolishing the existing capitalist order and moving toward socialism. In fact, the theory and practice of social democracy has most often been the limit of worker consciousness in the Northern context. By contrast, in the periphery of the system, or the Global South, where there did not appear to exist the conditions for socialism—neither a sizable industrial proletariat nor highly developed productive forces—socialist ideas have often been embraced by the masses. Moreover, the class struggle has repeatedly exploded into dramatic revolutions and rebellions that, even if their first goal is the overthrowing of imperial-colonial domination, also take on a socialist character and, in most cases have communism as a strategic goal. These include the revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, and Venezuela, to name only the best-known ones. Even the Russian Revolution of October 1917 took place far from the world’s capitalist centers at that time and was coeval with a process of national liberation.

This fact has generated a paradoxical situation that should lead us to re-examine our theoretical apparatus for missing mediations that would explain both the nature and the possibility of the socialist-oriented projects that have emerged so often in the context of the Global South’s national liberation struggles and also represent the main really existing socialist projects of our time. It is one thing that peoples of the Global South have continually rebelled against the imperialist and colonial order, which systematically denies them both sovereignty and dignity. Yet it is another matter—one that also needs accounting for—that they have frequently taken steps toward socialism, that is, collective, all-round emancipation from capitalist exploitation. Undeniably, the timeframe for building socialism in such contexts is usually an extended one, and there have been hard-earned learning processes about the importance of maintaining a broad popular front, avoiding both right and left errors, making compromises and creative alliances, and dedicating time and effort to national defense and technological development as bulwarks against imperialism’s hybrid wars. Even so, one after another, countries ranging from Russia (peripheral at the time of the revolution) to Vietnam and Venezuela today have all seen impressive and also durable efforts at socialist construction that have accompanied the national liberation process.¹ How do we explain this? How do we account for these socialist projects embraced and developed by the masses of working people in the Global South that go beyond the immediate problem of imperial-colonial domination and actually initiate the march toward a future of all-round emancipation, despite the apparent lack of social and material conditions?

This article attempts to extend Marxist theory in a way that allows it to explain the existence and viability of these struggles for socialism in Global South processes of national liberation from imperialism. The project of extending Marxism to account for the shifting realities and processes that accompany capitalism’s worldwide expansion has a long and glorious history, including the works of V. I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Frantz Fanon, José Carlos Mariátegui, Kwame Nkrumah, and many others. That project has drawn from the most diverse sources—Lenin drew from J. A. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding, and Mariátegui from Georges Sorel. Here, in a similar spirit, we draw on theses developed by Michael A. Lebowitz regarding Marxism that give greater agency to workers and point to an underrecognized realm of workers’ self-activity. The reason for doing so is that these theses can help explain why working peoples of the Global South take strategic steps (and often very solid ones) toward socialism in contexts where the material conditions appear to be inadequate for that project: that is, where the productive forces are little developed, and the existence of a classical proletariat is in doubt.

In books and articles, Lebowitz argued that there was a whole side of Marxism that was part of Karl Marx’s original vision that had been neglected in Marxism’s later development. The reconstruction of that other side, which Lebowitz denominated the “workers’ side,” was a lifelong project for him.² He carried out this reconstruction with the idea that it had universal validity for workers and workers’ movements everywhere. In what follows, however, I will show how Lebowitz’s theses about the “workers’ side” are relevant to the global present but have to be shorn of their abstract universality and remapped specifically onto Global South struggles. This reframing of his work is a worthwhile endeavor, since it can explain why his powerful interpretation of Marx—which might only inspire bland cooperativist projects in the Global North—actually takes on a different meaning in the Global South. There, his theses connect and coincide with mass-based movements toward socialism in processes of national liberation from imperialist domination.

Reconstructing the Other Half of Marx’s Vision

What are the relevant theses developed by Lebowitz, and how do they apply to Global South struggles? Lebowitz spent decades developing what he contended was the “workers’ side” of Marxism.³ He argued that Marx originally planned to develop two sides to his critique of capitalism: one side would approach the social totality from the perspective of capital, while the other would approach it from the perspective of the workers. The problem was that Marx only completed the first part of his critique. That was the part that viewed capitalism from the side of capital, and it is what is found in the three volumes of his major scientific work, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. By contrast, Marx only managed to give spare and scattered indications of the critique of capitalism from the side of the workers. Lebowitz pointed out that Marx had originally planned a six-book series that would have included a book on Wage Labour as the third in the sequence, where Marx could have presented the “workers’ side” in a more complete form. ⁴ However, that text—like all the other projected books, except Capital—remained unwritten.⁵ As a consequence, Marx’s reception has been shaped largely by Capital, giving rise to what Lebowitz called “one-sided Marxism.” The latter is a line of thought that remains too confined by the parameters of a work that, for methodological reasons, adopted much of the perspective of classical political economy and its relatively reductive view of workers as mere instruments of production. This historical imbalance made it imperative, Lebowitz thought, to rebuild and recover the underdeveloped workers’ side of Marxism, which gives workers greater agency, treats them as multidimensional beings, and recognizes how they push back against capital in diverse ways.

Lebowitz believed that his recovery of the workers’ side of Marxism was equally applicable everywhere, sustaining an essentially “flat-world” perspective throughout his writings. However, the spatially differentiated expansion of capitalism worldwide—and the entry of capitalism into its imperialist stage—has led to a North-South polarization that is roughly isomorphic with the two sides of Marxism as he described them. On the one hand, workers of the Global North tend toward greater subjection to capital and tend to be more fully instrumentalized by it: this comes close to incarnating the expectations of the “one-sided Marxism” that adopts the perspective of capital. On the other hand, the working peoples of the Global South are typically less fully integrated into the logic of capital, while they confront the most bald and violent contradictions of the capitalist-imperialist system. This leads the working class of the Global South to pursue radical alternatives and express their agency more fully. Since these are the very dynamics described by the workers’ side of Marxism, Lebowitz’s reconstruction is most fully applicable to that peripheral context, both its history and its present.⁶

Remapping Lebowitz’s workers’ side of Marxism onto the Global South is akin to extracting the rational kernel from G. W. F. Hegel’s thought and situating it in material reality the way Marx did. Such a transposition validates the conception of the workers’ side but takes that conception out of the world of abstractions and into concrete reality. In doing so, however, it compels us to draw conclusions regarding revolutionary organization, projects, and priorities that are significantly different than those drawn by Lebowitz himself. Specifically, it requires correcting for his tendency to privilege worker self-organization at the expense of other constitutive elements of a revolution and also for his downplaying of the role of material development in favor of human development among socialist goals. The need for these adjustments has to do with Lebowitz’s disattention to how imperialism overdetermines global material reality in our time. Nevertheless, once his theoretical innovations are placed in sustained relation to the contradiction between imperialism and oppressed nations—the principal contradiction of our time—they can help explain how horizons of socialist construction open up within national liberation processes of the Global South. These are generally state-guided but mass-based efforts at socialist construction that are difficult to account for without appealing to Lebowitz’s ideas. In what follows, we will look at what his theses can tell us about the Global South’s revolutionary processes, focusing first on what Lebowitz’s interpretation of Marx reveals about the revolutionary subject in those contexts. Then we will turn to what it teaches us about the levels of development needed to initiate processes of socialist construction in a peripheral or dependent country.

The Revolutionary Subject for Socialism in the Global South

One of the main areas that Lebowitz’s reconstruction of the workers’ side of Marxism helps elucidate is the nature of the revolutionary subject, which is, arguably, the most important theoretical question of our time.⁷ Applied to Global South contexts, his theory shows why, despite the relative scarcity of a classical proletariat in many processes of national liberation from imperialism, such processes can still embrace the socialist project in a strategic way and even take concrete steps toward materializing socialism. The puzzle about the proletariat in Global South countries emerges in great measure—I argue, appealing to Lebowitz—because the approach that Marx developed in Capital to the proletariat is framed by the purposes of that work, which was to expose the inner logic and internal laws of capitalism.⁸ However, it accordingly treats workers in a one-sided and abstract fashion, putting aside important aspects of workers’ lives, agency, and aspirations. For example, in Capital, workers’ needs are presented as fixed in each historical moment, and the whole realm of social reproductive labor is set aside.⁹ This abstraction served the aims of Capital, but it would have taken the completion of Marx’s projected theoretical oeuvre to overcome the limitations of this one-sided approach.

Naturally, when it comes to identifying the revolutionary subject for socialism, it is especially important to reconstruct the side of wage labor in a richer and more multidimensional way, if we want to avoid treating the proletariat in the abstract terms that so often appear in texts of political economy: that is, as a subject that is almost uniquely determined by the wage relation and viewed as a mere instrument of production. This can only be done by paying attention to the other aspects of workers’ lives, such as their social reproductive labor, their “nonproductive” social relations, their connections to the natural environment, and the varied strategies that workers use to push back against capital in the pursuit of their own development.¹⁰ All this belongs to what Lebowitz termed the “workers’ side” of Marxism, and only by attending to it can we move from what he called the “Abstract Proletariat”—the one-sided conception derived without mediations from Marx’s presentation in Capital—to the concrete proletariat of real struggles.¹¹

The need to incorporate the concrete, multifaceted view of the proletariat is indispensable when we turn to Global South countries. Failing to do so, and holding onto the conceptual straitjacket of the Abstract Proletariat, will lead to false conclusions about the supposed extraneousness of socialist ideals and strategies to such contexts. There is a long history of denying the possibility of socialist-oriented projects in peripheral or dependent countries, because theorists have failed to locate the Abstract Proletariat there: that is, a significant body of workers without important determinations beyond the wage relation. In that view, the “true proletariat” is being counterposed to—and thereby used to disqualify— a more complex reality that might involve a mix of informal or semi-employed laborers, along with people who manifest more as migrants, Indigenous people, or communitarian subjects and peasants rather than as workers per se. Yet, Lebowitz’s work serves as a corrective to this chimerical search for an Abstract Proletariat. He points out how the “one-sided Marxists” engaged in this search are quite often simply inverting the theory-reality relation, inasmuch as they look for a proletariat that derives wholly from the concept and not the reality. Thus, Lebowitz writes that, from the “one-sided” viewpoint, “the real proletariat has seemed to lag behind its abstract counterpart and does not appear adequate to its concept. Rather, however, than considering real workers with their expressed needs and aspirations one-sided Marxism in a doctrinaire fashion declares, ‘Here are the true struggles, kneel here!’”¹²

For anyone acquainted with debates about the revolutionary subject in the Global South, this becomes familiar terrain once this “one-sided” Marxism is identified as that of the Eurocentric theorists who claim to be Marx’s followers. Then we are faced with an old and recurring story: in a peripheral nation, a mass movement rises, struggles, and seizes political power, overturning the colonial-imperial order and raising the de facto banners of socialism. The eyes of the world turn toward this new beacon of hope; the people commit themselves to a project of comprehensive emancipation. Yet, despite the historic magnitude of these movements and the essentially socialist ideals they embrace, their leaders and followers are admonished by a one-sided Eurocentric Marxism to “kneel here!” before the abstract image of the proletariat that it holds up. Socialism, they are told, is impossible because there is no true socialist subject in their context. In this way, the “Abstract Proletariat” has served as a theoretical warhorse that has been repeatedly deployed against the living revolutionary movements of the Global South, including the 26 de Julio movement in Cuba, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in Tanzania, Chavismo in Venezuela, and the heroic Palestinian resistance. One after another, such movements have been told that they fail to conform to the abstract ideal of the revolutionary subject: that they are substitutionist, petty-bourgeois, backward, or tainted by some supposed “tribal” or religious deviation.

This is a time-worn story that alternates between distorting and demonizing (as lumpen, authoritarian, or terrorist) or simply under-considering such movements, with consequences that range from the tragic to the ridiculous. However, from the standpoint of the workers’ side of Marxism, the perceived lack of an Abstract Proletariat in societies of the Global South, and even the oft-repeated nomenclature of “semi-proletarization,” should take on a new meaning.¹³ Instead of the multifaceted character of the Global South’s working peoples being interpreted as a lack or an absence, we should recognize the presence of other aspects of concrete and real proletarians that go beyond the wage relation, including extra-laboral bonds and relations, systems of reproductive and subsistence labor, workers’ greater embeddedness in their natural and social environments, and forms of organization and use-value production that sometimes point to socialism. These “less-subsumed” social contexts in the Global South, which are richer in the dimensions of working-class life that are not necessarily functional to capitalism, provide fertile ground for diverse forms of popular power, especially that of women, while they present many elements of contestation of the existing order, sometimes including armed resistance and self-defense. In general, recognizing these aspects of the periphery’s proletarian lifeworld and environment can only result from a two-sided Marxism that acknowledges how real workers exist in the “ensemble of their social relations,” to quote Lebowitz.¹⁴ Once we do so, we will see why there are often revolutionary subjects in such contexts—proletarians in a concrete sense—that can at least begin the march toward socialism.

Intermezzo: Marx Himself Identifies Peripheral Revolutionary Subjects

Marx’s own work provides clear examples of his recognizing revolutionary subjects in peripheral contexts. Although Capital tends toward one-sidedness and the projected book on Wage Labour was never written, the “workers’ side” nevertheless surfaces in Marx’s other works and in his correspondence, as well as in Frederick Engels’s work (which is one reason the latter is a necessary complement to Marx’s).¹⁵ From Marx’s late correspondence, we get a window on how the great theorist himself responded to the challenge that so many Global South revolutionaries have faced from the nineteenth century to the present from those who deny the presence of a subject for socialist revolution in countries outside the capitalist core, because they remain trapped in the search for an Abstract Proletariat. In one well-known exchange of letters, the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich wrote to Marx in 1881, relating the claims of some of her more doctrinaire colleagues, such as Georgi Plekhanov, that a socialist revolution was impossible in their peripheral context. The problem they saw was that, instead of a classical proletariat, Russia had a huge mass of rural workers, still organized in “archaic” communes. On behalf of her group, Zasulich asked Marx if the rural communes would have to disappear, driving the displaced Russian communards to “the streets of the large towns in search of a wage” for them to become a true proletariat. Would the socialist revolution therefore have to be preceded by a long period of capitalist development for the proletarian subject to emerge?¹⁶

The responses that Marx drafted to Zasulich, manifesting the richness of an approach that includes the side of the workers, highlight repeatedly the need to “descend from pure theory to Russian reality” and look at “the unique combination of circumstances in Russia.”¹⁷ In that spirit, he encouraged Zasulich and her colleagues to examine the concrete situation and consider the whole configuration of social relations, including powerful exploiting forces and interests. Doing so would reveal that what appeared to them as simply the “lack of a classical proletariat” among Russia’s rural workers, should really be considered as the presence of a specific kind of worker: highly oppressed and burdened peasants who nevertheless maintain common land ownership and the cooperative practices of the artel. This insight allows for the possibility that the embattled rural commune in Russia could become a fulcrum of social regeneration (“point d’appui” was the term he used) and a potential nucleus of socialism. Nevertheless, Marx made clear that activating that socialist potential required a political revolution led by a vanguard “intelligentsia” who would have “to concentrate all the living forces of society.”¹⁸ They would have to defeat Tsarism in a process of national liberation, free the rural workers from parasitical usurers and an onerous tax burden, promote the coordination of communes, and incorporate the modern technological advances of the West.

There are two important themes that stand out for our purposes among Marx’s claims in the Zasulich correspondence. First, with regard to the question of the revolutionary subject for socialism, Marx insisted that we abandon the world of abstractions and descend to reality to look at the concrete, multifaceted workers of Russia in the ensemble of their social relations. This is what the workers’ side of Marxism bids us to do, inasmuch as it eschews the search for an Abstract Proletariat in favor of a concrete proletariat. Second, as we follow Marx’s reasoning in the letters to Zasulich, we can see how his nonabstract approach leads not to the impossibility of socialist revolution in this peripheral context (which was the perspective of Plekhanov and his colleagues), but rather to a complex field of possibility that in this case involves socialist potential. Because of this complexity—the multidimensional character of workers’ lives in the Russian countryside and the powerful oppressions they live under—activating their revolutionary potential requires the vigorous political work of a vanguard. In a way that has been highly relevant to Global South contexts ever since, Marx centered the national question and emphasized that the revolutionary movement needs to undertake, to quote his words to Zasulich again, “the concentration of all the living forces of the country” to make the revolutionary seizure of state power a reality.

Needless to say, that is precisely what the Global South’s most successful revolutionary movements and leaders have done over the course of history. Paradigmatic examples include Fidel Castro, who insisted that revolutionary politics was essentially the art of sumando fuerzas (uniting forces); Ho Chi Minh, with his patient work in building a coalition of the patriotic and progressive sectors in Vietnam; and Amílcar Cabral, whose very movement was based on a dynamic conception of unity and struggle.¹⁹ Through vanguard parties and/or strong revolutionary command centers inside the state, Global South leaders have worked to forge and maintain revolutionary blocs capable of national liberation and socialism.²⁰ To do so, they have appealed to unifying aspects of working people’s experience such as grassroots nationalism and the aspiration to self-determination, popular culture (including the religions of the oppressed), historical memory (for example, bolivarianismo, katarismo, or martianismo), and the endogenous mística and myth of the socialist revolution (as Mariátegui proposed).²¹ These are, needless to say, aspects of actually existing social classes that are left by the wayside in the stripped-down visions of the working class that come from one-sided Marxism. Since the latter sees the Abstract Proletariat as issuing from the mode of production through an automatic and inexorable logic, it has no need for such culturally responsive, nationalist, and vanguardist “deviations.”

A key historical reference for building unity among the Global South’s heterogeneous toilers—showing consciousness of the workers’ side of Marxism avant la lettre—is the worker-peasant alliance as it was developed in Russia’s peripheral context about one hundred years ago.²² In open rejection of spontaneism, Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary subject acknowledged that the party had to carefully establish and maintain the revolutionary bloc, doing so with a sensitivity to the expectations of the less advanced part of the alliance.²³ In dialogue with M. N. Roy, Lenin acknowledged the diverse oppressed groups and popular strata in the national revolutionary movement. Today, that model can be applied and extended to the political projects of aggregating the mass of what Walter Rodney called the working people in the context of Global South countries, who must be addressed both in their sites of labor and in their territories and communities.²⁴ Popular education, as well as mass-line-type practices—that is, repeatedly consulting the bases concerning their needs and aspirations—necessarily play an important role in maintaining the bonds among class sectors and between the masses and leadership.²⁵

Economic Conditions for Socialism: The Global South’s Productive Forces

A second major area that Lebowitz’s interpretation of Marx helps clarify concerns the level of economic development necessary to initiate socialist construction in peripheral countries. It is often asserted that dependent countries lack sufficiently developed productive forces to embark upon a socialist project.²⁶ Lebowitz’s theses, however, reveal that such claims often abstract too much from the class struggle and thus become characteristic expressions of one-sided Marxism. By contrast, the “workers’ side” of Marxism, as he reconstructs it, leads to a more nuanced understanding, one that opens the possibility of socialist construction beginning under conditions where capitalism remains markedly underdeveloped.

The one-sided viewpoint that fuels skepticism about economic conditions for socialist revolution in the Global South is based on an erroneous conception of capitalism’s limits as purely objective and quantitative. This view commonly appeals to Marx’s argument about limits in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he affirms that a mode of production never is “destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed,” and that “new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”²⁷ The core idea is that the old system must be developed to its limit—and thus be exhausted—before a new one can emerge, such that socialism will not arise before capitalism has run its historical course. Yet, one can accept the validity of Marx’s claim in this text without conceding that the relevant limit-point—the moment at which existing social relations become fetters on further development—can be determined independently from class struggle, and therefore without reference to the actions, perceptions, and capacities of historically situated subjects.

One indication that Marx does not conceive this process without the intervention of the subject is that in the very next line of the Preface, he characterizes the transition to a new mode of production as a matter of “mankind” setting itself “tasks.” Moreover, even a cursory examination of capitalism’s trajectory over the past century undermines the notion that capitalism possesses an objective limit that can be identified in advance on the basis of purely economic criteria. That trajectory demonstrates how what have often appeared to be objective limits to capitalist development in the Global North have repeatedly been transformed into temporary barriers, that are overcome through a variety of “fixes.”²⁸ A central mechanism in this process is the transfer of imperial and colonial surpluses from the peripheral to the core countries. These surpluses contribute to, among other things, the continual expansion of socially conditioned needs for a large swath of the Northern working class, generating what Marx called “golden chains” that bind them to the system. If that is the case, how and where will it be determined that the productive forces have been completely exhausted under capitalist social relations such that those relations are transformed into insurmountable “fetters”?

Lebowitz’s reconstruction of the workers’ side of Marxism teaches us that this is never a purely objective question but rather requires that workers come to recognize “the inadequacy of capitalist relations and proceed to do away with them.”²⁹ It is at this point that they set themselves what Marx called the “solvable task” of overcoming capitalism. Rejecting any notion of an automatic or purely objective determination of capitalism’s limits, Lebowitz writes:

Why does the fettering of productive forces by capitalist relations of production lead to the replacement of the latter? Not because capitalist relations of production sheepishly step aside to let the new era begin. The implicit argument is that people recognise the inadequacy of capitalist relations and proceed to do away with them. Yet, inadequate in what respect? Presumably inadequate with respect to their needs as socially developed human beings.³⁰

By bringing the implicit workers’ side to the foreground, Lebowitz resolves one of the longstanding aporias concerning the material conditions for socialist revolution. The limit to the development of the productive forces under capitalist social relations is not a purely objective threshold that can be calculated from the standpoint of capital alone but hinges on the perspective of concrete workers and their needs, who therefore constitute the real limit of capitalism, by becoming its conscious gravediggers.³¹

Despite the profundity of this insight, Lebowitz remains too abstract, because he disregards the question of where such recognition is likely to occur. That is, he does not fully locate the concrete workers, the actually existing gravediggers of capitalism, in their geographical and historical situatedness. In reality, those workers who are most prone to determine that capitalism has reached its limits and must be overcome are found within the nations of the Global South. The reason is that, under conditions of colonial or neocolonial domination, capitalist development in peripheral societies systematically takes the form of underdevelopment, as Andre Gunder Frank famously argued.³² At the same time, workers in dependent countries are bound by chains far more brutal and materially real than the “golden chains” that tie workers in the Global North to the imperial mode of life. The South’s working peoples experience capitalist and imperialist barbarity to the fullest, through multifarious assaults on their existence and dignity as human beings. In this sense, workers’ recognition of capitalism’s limits—key to determining their option for socialism—is always overdetermined by the contradiction between nation and imperialism.

In fact, the contradiction with imperialism produces a complex dynamic in the processes of national liberation of dependent countries. On the one hand, capitalist-induced underdevelopment—or what Samir Amin termed “lumpen development”—will play a decisive role in working peoples’ decision to throw off the fetters of capitalism in such contexts and pursue national liberation under an alternative economic model, meaning that the process of socialist construction can begin at low levels of development.³³ On the other hand, those same working masses in a dependent country will respond to their currently dire conditions of material scarcity by earnestly aiming to raise as quickly as possible levels of productivity and material well-being. Here Lebowitz’s work shows both its usefulness and its shortcomings. If his uncovering of the workers’ side of Marxism is helpful in revealing the possibility of socialist construction being initiated under low levels of development, his positioning of the “development of human potential” as virtually the unique aim of socialism amounts to a universalization of the condition of the Northern working classes, and shortchanges the legitimate aspirations of working peoples of the Global South to prioritize obtaining adequate levels of material development.³⁴ Moreover, the U.S.-led imperialist system’s disposition to attack, invade, sanction, and blockade countries pursuing national liberation under an alternative social and economic model will provide an additional—essentially military—motive for reaching high levels of material and technological development. For the sin of wanting to survive such imperialist aggressions, avoid recolonization, and attain an even moderately prosperous society, these liberation processes are routinely accused of developmentalism, militarism, and authoritarianism by the defeatist left.

The historical trajectory of really existing socialist revolutions is a south-pointing vector that reaches from the Soviet Union to China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela, and it speaks loudly and in bold letters for the role of working peoples in determining the limits of capitalism and the need for the socialist alternative in a way consistent with Lebowitz’s theory. What must be added, however, to make his innovations touch down in the real world is that if, as he pointed out, the degree of development of productive forces that is ripe for overcoming capitalism is inevitably conditioned by class struggle, it is a class struggle that must include not just the capitalist dimension but also the imperialist one. In fact, the real-world option for socialism begins not just anywhere in the globe but in the countries of dependent capitalism—capitalism in the colonial and neocolonial condition—for it is in these national contexts that capitalism’s fundamental inability to satisfy working people’s needs becomes evident first. It is the Global South’s workers, within the frameworks of their respective nations, who will recognize that no capitalist-oriented trajectory will result in “catching up” but will instead drive their societies to social ruin and underdevelopment, along with environmental destruction.

This is a recognition that is widespread, if often in a diffuse way, in the everyday life of Global South societies, where capitalism is typically seen as a foreign imposition, while anticapitalism expresses itself in the commitment to various kinds of moral economy that oppose purely market-determined prices and the complete monetarization of use-values. Widespread though often latent, these attitudes only become decisive during moments of crisis, and they acquire durability only through organization. This means that, as with the question of the forging of the revolutionary subjective bloc discussed above, here too we are brought face to face with a manifestly political determination and political decision that cannot be left to the spontaneous course of capitalist development. Instead, it requires the activity and educating leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party or state-based command center that will be charged with managing the project of socialist construction while safeguarding national independence and sovereignty. Ultimately, the level and character of development pursued will be shaped less by the socialist project in isolation than by its ongoing confrontation with imperialism.

Conclusion

In the foregoing, we have shown how Lebowitz’s work, specifically his reconstruction of the workers’ side of Marxism, opens up a space within the field of Marxism today that allows us to better comprehend the socialist-oriented projects that develop in the Global South. Lebowitz’s workers’ side of Marxism, a restoration of a part of Marx’s original vision that has generally been overlooked, sheds light on two key issues. First, it demonstrates how the diverse mass of toilers in Global South countries potentially constitutes a revolutionary proletarian subject for socialism. Second, it shows how the level of economic development needed to initiate a process of socialist construction turns greatly on workers’ consciousness of the need for socialism to replace capitalism at least as a strategic goal. Where such consciousness emerges is conditioned by capitalism’s uneven historical development on the globe. It does not emerge first in the Northern countries but in those of the Global South, where it is always traversed by the imperatives of anti-imperialism and the need for sovereignty, which in turn means that the really existing socialist alternative always takes shape within the framework of a process of national liberation. Lebowitz’s theoretical innovations, which are really recoveries of original Marxism, can thus be utilized to map Marxist studies onto the reality of the world today, where socialism is not “impossible” due to absent conditions, as Northern pundits often claim, but is actively being pursued in countries whose combined populations exceed 1.5 billion.

The arguments advanced here would be open to criticism, if there were not abundant pathways from Lebowitz’s work to that of key thinkers and leaders working in Global South contexts. However, we have seen how Lebowitz’s conception of the workers’ side, both with regard to the nature of the revolutionary subject and the economic conditions for socialism, actually coincides or connects with many of the theorizations and practices developed by the most distinguished revolutionaries and theorists in the Global South. Beyond those connections already mentioned, it is worth noting how the expansion of agency in Lebowitz’s “workers’ side” resonates with the views of Fanon and Che Guevara regarding armed struggle as a formative praxis through which new political subjects are forged, as well as with Hugo Chávez’s reliance on workers’ protagonism to build a national system of socialist communes. In general, Lebowitz’s theses find themselves at home in Latin America’s extensive practices and theoretical elaborations of popular power. Further, the importance of vanguard leadership, as exemplified by Mao, Ho, Fidel, Cabral, Chávez, Xi Jinping, and Nicolás Maduro, is also validated, once we recognize (in a step that Lebowitz did not make but should have) how the multifaceted, diverse, and sometimes segmented character of working peoples that he identified—the real and not the Abstract Proletarians—requires vanguard leadership, usually within state-directed processes, to maintain unity and direction. Finally, the role of subjective, and not purely economic, criteria in determining when to embark on the socialist path echoes theses advanced by figures such as Mariátegui and Che.³⁵ Overall, such convergences underscore how Lebowitz’s recovery of the workers’ side of Marxism finds its most compelling confirmation in the historical experiences of the revolutionary Global South.

Along with his partner Marta Harnecker, Lebowitz traveled late in life to Venezuela, and lived here for seven years (from 2003 to 2011). He even worked as an advisor to Chávez and drew inspiration for his writing from the Bolivarian Process.³⁶ However, Lebowitz always considered his work as universally applicable to socialist construction and did not make any specific connections between his main theses and the conditions of countries in the Global South. As a result, he never addressed how or why the workers’ side of Marxism plays out most fully in that context. There may be various reasons for this oversight. However, they surely include Lebowitz’s tendency, like that of many Marxists in his academic context, to undervalue the actually existing socialist projects that emerged in the twentieth century, which they generally assessed without sufficient attention to the role of imperialism in putting up obstacles to real socialism’s hard-won and yet world-changing achievements.³⁷ Undervaluing real socialism, Lebowitz veered toward a utopian, model-making approach, largely detached from the geopolitical realities that structure socialist experimentation.³⁸ This abstraction from geopolitical and historical determinations is likely the main reason that Lebowitz never explicitly theorized why the workers’ side of Marxism connects most fully to the Global South and its projects of socialist construction that emerge within processes of national liberation from imperialism. This oversight was unfortunate, for whatever his work gained in rhetorical power—and it did inspire readers everywhere—it lost in terms of concrete situatedness and historical plausibility. By contrast, it is with vivid attention to both history and the battles of the present that I have endeavored to remap features of the “workers’ side” of Marxism onto Global South struggles, where they are most relevant and fruitful, albeit in a modified form.

The Bandung Spirit

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — The Bandung Spirit

The Bandung Spirit

Article 3 of 12

The Tricontinental

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-the-bandung-spirit/

The art in this dossier honours the Bandung Conference, where diverse peoples, nations, and political projects, each following their own trajectory – or orbits – came together, gravitating around a shared struggle to build a world beyond colonialism. Anti-colonial leaders and nations were brought together by the Bandung Spirit, represented by a yellow thread weaving through the pages of the dossier. From that era’s aspirations for national liberation, new threads, new trajectories, and a new mood are emerging in the Global South today.

Seven decades ago, in 1955, the heads of government of twenty-nine African and Asian countries, as well as representatives from colonies that had not yet won their independence, met in Bandung (Indonesia) for the Asian-African Conference. It was one of the high points in the process of decolonisation. This was a historical gathering because it was the first time that representatives of hundreds of millions of people from the Third World came together to discuss the enormous social process known as decolonisation and assess its implications. Sukarno (1901–1970), who headed the government of Indonesia and hosted the conference, opened it with a speech that suggested the ambitions of the people who organised it. He said that he wanted the conference to ‘give guidance to humankind’ and that this guidance would ‘point out to mankind the way which it must take to attain safety and peace’. These leaders gathered not only to celebrate the independence of India (1947), the Chinese Revolution (1949), and the devolution of power in the Gold Coast (1951) that would eventually lead to a free Ghana (1957); they wanted to ‘give evidence that a New Asia and a New Africa have been born’.¹

Sukarno’s associate Roeslan Abdulgani (1914–2005) was the secretary-general of the Bandung Conference. During and after the conference, he began to speak about a ‘Bandung Spirit’, which he described as ‘the spirit of love for peace, anti-violence, anti-discrimination, and development for all without trying to intervene for one another wrongly, but to pay a great respect to one another’.² This ‘Bandung Spirit’ was not idealistic; it had a material basis rooted in the freedom struggles of peoples in the colonised world, which the United Nations General Assembly described five years later in the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples as ‘a process of liberation’ that is ‘irresistible and irreversible’.³

This spirit was born in the mass struggles against colonialism and was then brought together by anti-colonial activists as they met in places such as the Sixth International Democratic Congress for Peace in Bierville, France, (1926) and the First International Congress against Colonialism and Imperialism in Brussels, Belgium (1927). Abdulgani later reflected that those who met at these conferences had ‘the same impassioned spirit, and they all spoke with the same reverberating voice: that is the spirit and the voice of their peoples, who were colonised, oppressed, and humiliated’.⁴ The Bandung Spirit was the voice of the hundreds of millions who had lived under colonial rule and who spoke against the horrendousness of colonialism as well as their hope for a new world.

For a range of reasons, largely spurred on by the pressures from the neocolonial structure that continued despite the end of formal colonial rule, the Bandung Spirit dissipated. Only nostalgia for it remained. Generations born after colonial rule no longer held close to them the residue of the long and difficult anti-colonial struggles. The national liberation agenda corroded within those neocolonial structures; the peasants and workers of the post-colonial era saw their own ruling classes as the problem and did not see the inherited problems of that intractable structure as their enemy. Seventy years after the Bandung Conference, it is worthwhile to ask if the Bandung Spirit remains intact, even as an ethereal fog in the Global South. That is the objective of this dossier, more an extended essay that raises some provocations rather than the fruit of a long-term research programme.⁵ We hope that these provocations will generate discussion and debate.

Part I: What the Bandung Spirit Meant

Interlopers in an Oriental World

From 5 October to 14 December 1953, US Vice President Richard Nixon went on an extensive tour of Asia, visiting fourteen countries in the region (from Japan to Iran) and two countries on its edge (Australia and New Zealand). Nixon came to Asia with a few important objectives: to reassure US allies about the armistice signed on the Korean peninsula in July; to assess the US position in Indochina, where it had already taken on the bulk of military financing from France and would later take over its military role after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954; and to understand the new role of the Chinese Revolution in Asia. In his memoirs, written two decades later, Nixon reflected on this visit and said that ‘when wishful thinkers in Washington and other Western capitals were saying that Communist China would not be a threat in Asia because it was so backward and underdeveloped’, he saw ‘firsthand that its influence was already spreading throughout the area’. Unlike the Soviets, Nixon wrote, who ‘like us, were still interlopers in an Oriental world’, ‘the Chinese Communists had established student exchange programs, and large numbers of students were being sent to Red China for free college training’.⁶ The United States, Nixon reported to his government, had to respond vigorously to the new developments in Asia that had been spurred on by the Chinese Revolution.

In September 1954, eight countries formed the South-East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) following the signing of a collective defence treaty called the Manila Pact. Only three of the countries were situated in Asia (Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand), while two were in Europe (France and the United Kingdom). The three other members of SEATO had already signed a military pact in 1951 called the Australia, New Zealand, and the United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty. This treaty and SEATO came alongside three other key treaties in the Pacific flank of Asia: the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty between Japan and the Allied Powers, the 1953 Mutual Defence Treaty between South Korea and the US, and the 1954 Mutual Defence Treaty between the Republic of China (then Formosa, now Taiwan) and the US.⁷ In 1951, John Foster Dulles, who became the secretary of state in 1953, argued that the United States needed to build an island chain of naval bases from Japan to the Malay Peninsula (which encompasses parts of Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore) to encircle the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These five treaties laid the groundwork for such a chain from Japan to Thailand.⁸ In 1956, a US State Department official received a British memorandum ‘regarding SEATO Military Planning proceeding on the assumption that nuclear as well as non-nuclear weapons will be used in defence of the area… Any planning which did not take into account nuclear weapons would obviously be unrealistic and not worthwhile’.⁹ In other words, the five treaties that encircled China encouraged the placement of nuclear weapons on the edge of Asia and authorised their use if necessary.

It is important to remember that none of this was merely theoretical. The United States had already used atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and had bombed every available piece of infrastructure in the northern part of Korea by the end of 1951 (the bombing, however, continued until 1953).¹⁰ Major General Emmett O’Donnell, commander of the US Air Force that bombed Korea, told the US Senate in June 1951, ‘Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name’. O’Donnell added that when the Chinese forces crossed the Yalu River on the border with North Korea in November 1950, the United States Air Force grounded its bombers because ‘There were no more targets in Korea’.¹¹ In December 1953, US President Dwight Eisenhower suggested to Winston Churchill that the US would drop atom bombs on China if Beijing violated the Korean armistice. Shortly after, in March 1955, the United States government made it clear to the PRC that it was willing to use nuclear weapons if the People’s Liberation Army entered Formosa (now Taiwan).¹²

Peaceful Coexistence

In the wake of World War II, the United States was slowly establishing itself as the leading force of the old imperialist bloc, particularly because of its massive military and economic advantage over a battered Europe. At the same time, Britain was prosecuting a violent counterinsurgency in the Malaya Peninsula (the Malaya Emergency, 1948–1960) and France was fighting a wretched rearguard war in Indochina (the Dutch had already been defeated in Indonesia by 1949). Blood soaked into the soil of Asia and filled the nostrils of the anti-colonial leaders who came to Bandung. That is why the discussions at the conference were so focused on peace and racism: the anti-colonial leaders in attendance feared that the old colonial mentality of the international division of humanity would persist in the post-colonial era, as would the unbridled use of violence against those seen by the colonialists as being on the other side of that division. The Dasasila, or ten principles, of Bandung elaborated on the Panchsheel, or five principles, that China and India drafted in 1954 to help guide them through their differences. These principles of ‘peaceful coexistence’ strongly opposed building military alliances and bases around Asia and threatening countries with nuclear attacks.

In 1956, four years after Turkey joined NATO, the Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet wrote an elegy to a seven-year-old girl from Hiroshima titled ‘Hiroshima Child’, most known for the line ‘when children die, they do not grow’:

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play.

This was the essence of the Bandung Spirit. It was as simple as that. That essence permeates the ten principles, which were published in the conference’s final communiqué on 24 April 1955:

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

Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.

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

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

Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.

(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.

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

Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration, or judicial settlement as well as other peaceful means of the parties’ own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.

Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.

Respect for justice and international obligations.¹³

Effectively, these principles argued for an international order rooted in the UN Charter (1945) rather than one based on the creation of military blocs and the use of military force to shape the world and subvert sovereignty. In his reflections on the Bandung Conference, Abdulgani suggested that it was a forum to ‘determine the standards and procedures of present-day international relations’ and that it championed coexistence instead of co-destruction.¹⁴ By 1955, seventy-six countries had signed onto the UN Charter, which held treaty obligations towards its signatories; about eighty territories, including most of the African continent and a majority of the Pacific islands, remained under colonial control. The UN Charter was then, and remains now, the most important consensus document in the world; as countries gained their independence from the late 1950s to the 1970s, they joined the United Nations as full members.

The Bandung Spirit travelled rapidly, touching down in Cairo for the 1957–1958 Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference and then in Accra for the 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference before continuing to Tunis for the 1960 All-African Peoples’ Conference, Belgrade for the 1961 Summit Conference of Heads of State or Government of the Non-Aligned Movement, and finally to Havana for the 1966 Tricontinental Conference. Each of these conferences established institutional organs: the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Organisation in Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. At their core was the fight against imperialism, with a focus on the nuclear threat and disarmament and the recognition that the waste of precious social wealth on weapons meant that the development agenda was being squandered. That calculation between guns and butter was at the heart of the deliberations. Any arms control mechanisms that developed during this period, such as the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, were a product of the negotiations forced by these non-aligned Third World state projects.¹⁵

Developmental Cooperation

Beyond the call for sovereignty and peace, the Bandung era also carried within it the seed for a new international economic order. South-South cooperation was the clarion call at Bandung. The first section of its final communiqué was dedicated entirely to economic cooperation and outlined the desire for economic development and technical assistance. There was also a call to establish the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development in order to finance investment in these countries. As imperialism had only seen fit to develop the colonies as sites to produce raw materials, much emphasis was placed on the need to stabilise commodity prices and develop domestic capabilities to process these commodities before export.

One of the lasting effects of the Bandung Conference was its influence in shaping multilateral institutions and processes that continue to this day, albeit in an often diminished or coopted form.¹⁶ These include the establishment of the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development in 1958, which would later transform into the United Nations Development Programme in 1965. There was also the establishment of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964 and its New International Economic Order, a set of proposals that were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974. On UNCTAD’s sixtieth anniversary in 2024, Deputy Secretary-General Pedro Manuel Moreno declared, ‘It is with the same spirit [as the Bandung Conference] that nine years later the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD, was born’.¹⁷

A World of Coups

A few weeks before the Bandung Conference, in April 1955, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles held a meeting with the British ambassador to the US, Sir Roger Makins. Dulles told Makins that he had been ‘considerably depressed’ about the ‘general situation in Asia’. This ‘situation’ was embodied by a speech made by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister following its independence, in the Indian Parliament on 31 March 1955 in anticipation of the Bandung meeting, in which he attacked SEATO as a hostile pact, NATO for giving Portugal support to retain Goa in India, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the West for ‘meddling’ in West Asia. Nehru’s speech, Dulles said, ‘had taken the general line that Western civilisation had failed and that some new type of civilisation was necessary to replace it’. This depressed Dulles, who wanted to scuttle the Bandung Conference since it was, he said, ‘by its very nature and concept anti-Western’.¹⁸

Coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) announced the West’s refusal to allow a new world order to be built. This was followed by a series of coups in Africa (against the people of the Congo in 1961 and of Ghana in 1966), Latin America (against the people of Brazil in 1964), and Asia (against the people of Indonesia in 1965). Each of these four coups produced epicentres of imperialist reaction, with the new military regimes in these countries playing a continental role in suffocating any progressive developments. The coup in Indonesia, which resulted in the murder of a million communists, was almost revenge for Bandung.¹⁹

Part II: Why Is There No Bandung Spirit Today?

Bathed in Nostalgia

In April 1965, Sukarno’s beleaguered government held a ten-year anniversary conference with delegates from thirty-seven countries. Yet, it was a pale shadow of the original conference: Indonesia had suspended its United Nations membership in January, and its military would leave the barracks in October to overthrow Sukarno. In 1965, an attempt to hold a second Afro-Asian Conference in Algiers, Algeria, had to be cancelled due to the June 1965 overthrow of Ben Bella; the Sino-Soviet dispute; and divides between the newly independent African states, with the Casablanca Group eager for a strongly aligned form of Pan-Africanism and the Brazzaville Group advocating for closer ties to the old colonial masters. Because many of the institutions that came out of the Bandung Conference remained intact and would have a marked influence on world affairs over the decades to come, the failure to hold a second conference was not as indicative as it appears. What destroyed the Bandung Spirit was the Third World debt crisis, which catapulted the countries of the developing world into a permanent situation of debt and austerity and torpedoed their development aspirations. That was when the Bandung Spirit evaporated.

The Third World debt crisis was itself an indication of the Bandung Spirit’s inability to overcome, in a short time, the material basis of the neocolonial division of labour. While the subjective conditions for cooperation and exchange existed, the objective conditions did not. All the infrastructure inherited by the newly independent states had been constructed by imperialism to facilitate extraction from the periphery to the core. In 1963, over 70% of exports from developing countries were destined for developed countries.²⁰ Ancient trade ties within what we now call the Global South had been severed by colonialism, and rebuilding them was not an easy task. Moreover, these newly independent states accounted for a small part of global trade, despite being home to the majority of the world population. Their low level of technological development also prevented any effective sharing of technical expertise.

Each of the newly independent states in the Bandung process had a unique character of capital formation and internal class structure, and each remained compartmentalised in the international division of labour determined by imperialism.²¹xvii Unable to overcome the pattern of colonial underdevelopment and the imperialist onslaught of coups and counterinsurgency, the Third World debt crisis ushered in a shift from a spirit of cooperation to the law of competition. This crisis was used to divide and discipline the periphery and reincorporate it into a global market on terms favourable to multinational capital.²²

In 2005, almost all the countries of Africa and Asia – 106 out of 177 – attended the fiftieth anniversary Asian-African Summit in Bandung (Israel was not invited, nor were Australia or New Zealand, but most Pacific Island states and Palestine participated), and several Latin American countries were present as observers. Heads of government left the Sovay Homann hotel and walked down Asian-African Street (named in commemoration of the first conference) to the venue, just as their predecessors had done fifty years previously. The gathering was bathed in nostalgia, but also in a sense that the world was in transition despite this conference being held in the midst of the ugly War on Terror that had already destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq and would soon lay waste to a range of other countries (including Indonesia itself, where the October 2002 bombings in Bali had brought this War on Terror to Southeast Asia). The final communiqué, A New Asian-African Strategic Partnership, was riddled with neoliberal concepts of comparative advantage and development targets, a departure from the anti-imperialist logic of the original declaration. The Bandung Spirit on display had been well bottled; it was not in the air. The point, then, was not to merely revive the ghost of Bandung, but to find its spirit once more.

The New Mood in the Global South

It was not until the Third Great Depression set in (2007–2008) that there was a vital realisation that the West would neither permit nor enable the advancement of the Global South. In 2009, that realisation produced the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) process, which in 2025 was expanded to include five other countries (Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates) and thirteen partner states.²³ While the early BRICS summits focused on South-South cooperation, or trade and investment across the Global South, the subsequent summits have reintroduced the idea of economic independence from the Global North and the idea of political multilateralism rather than US-driven unipolarity. Sixteen years is not enough time for the BRICS project to be subject to a full assessment. Even during these years, it has suffered from political differences between its member countries (China and India, for instance) and from the changing nature of their leaders (such as Brazil moving from Dilma Rousseff’s centre-left government to Jair Bolsonaro’s neofascistic government and then returning to the centre left under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva). Buoyancy for the BRICS process and other such South-South structures came because of the economic growth that began to define the large countries of Asia (China, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia in particular). In January 2025, on the seventieth anniversary year of the Bandung Conference, Indonesia became a full member of BRICS.

The shift of the world economy’s centre of gravity to Asia birthed the start of a new confidence, or ‘new mood’, in the Global South since the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America no longer had to rely so fully on the institutions of the Global North for finance and technology. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), adopted in 2013 in response to the Third Great Depression, was an extremely important development in this regard, as it provided objective conditions for South-South cooperation that simply did not exist at the time of the Bandung Conference. Initiatives such as the construction of railways in East Africa and the opening up of a new port in Peru create pre-conditions for internal trade between the countries of the Global South. By 2023, 46.6% of China’s trade was with countries in the BRI network.²⁴ While it is far too early to say that anything resembling ‘delinking’ has happened, it is clear that a major shift is taking place as China is now the major trading partner for over 120 countries.²⁵ Meanwhile, the BRI itself has had its share of ups and downs and requires its member countries to bring their own national development projects to the table.

In many of Tricontinental’s publications, we have used the phrase ‘new mood’ to define the present. 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. From the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), this regionalism is already being developed and has been bolstered by an increase in local currency-denominated trade, making it materially possible to achieve ‘economic self-determination’ and ‘regional complementarity’, in the words of Indira López Argüelles of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs.²⁶ Linked to this regionalism is the expansion of the idea of multilateralism, the belief that global institutes (such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation) must not be instruments of the Global North but must allow their agenda to be shaped by all of their member states.

There Is No Bandung Spirit Today

In the 1950s and 1960s, national liberation movements had a mass base (often the majority of their populations). Despite being led – in most cases – by the petty bourgeoisie and sections of the landed elite, these movements’ commitment to national liberation forced them toward a socialist path, to take over governments within the structures of neocolonialism, and to respond to their organised mass base. These ‘socialisms’ came with different orientations, whether the ‘socialist path to society’ of India’s second Five-Year-Plan (1956–1961), the African socialism of the Arusha Declaration (written by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania in 1967), or indeed the mass politics of variants of populism in Latin America such as Argentinian Peronism (¡Ni yanquis, ni marxistas!, ¡peronistas!, or ‘Not Yankees, not Marxists, peronistas!’). Despite the class orientations of the leadership of these tendencies and the narrowness of their own perspectives, the activated masses would not permit them to abandon the widest programme of national liberation. That is why we can talk of a Bandung from below.

Today, the state of people’s movements is much weaker. Only in a few countries in the Global South do they command society. The progressive governments of our times are coalitions of a range of classes – including a petty bourgeoisie and liberal bourgeoisie that can no longer tolerate the atrocities of neoliberalism but will not easily break with its orthodoxies. While the second pink tide in Latin America, for example, and the emergence of progressive governments in countries such as Senegal and Sri Lanka are an effect of the collapse of neoliberalism and a response to the horror of the right, they are not elevated upon the backs of organised mass movements, nor are they united around a programme that breaks with neoliberalism.²⁷ Across the Sahel region of Africa – in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso – anti-imperialist military coups are backed by a new wave of social movements that are still in the process of formulating a broader project for sovereignty and development. These developments are capable of a new mood – a ‘BRICS Spirit’, for example – but not yet of the equivalent of the Bandung Spirit. It would be premature, even idealistic, to announce such a phenomenon, a Bandung Spirit from below for our time, a mass phenomenon capable of driving the actual movement of history.

The fundamental context shaping this new mood, and the looming threat that necessitates the revival of the Bandung Spirit, is hyper-imperialism.²⁸ In our research at Tricontinental, we have proposed that there is only one true political-economic-military bloc in the world: the US-led alliance of NATO and Israel. Despite waning economic and technological power, this bloc retains unparalleled military might and significant control over the global information system. The use of hybrid war tactics, and the threat or use of violence against even modest sovereignty-seeking nations, requires a collective response from the Global South, which may take the form of a rekindling of the Bandung Spirit.

However, there are a set of factors that limit the emergence of a new Bandung era in the Global South:

There remains both a fear of and desire for Western leadership despite its many failures, its decadence, and its dangerousness. It is logical that the states of the Global South fear the possibility of war by all means (from unilateral coercive measures to aerial bombardment) because this is not a theoretical assumption, but an actual fact.²⁹ Yet, at the same time, there is a captivating sense that Western leadership is necessary given the remains of the Western-dominated international order.

There is a lack of clarity in the Global South about the advances made in Asia, especially by China. Other countries do not see these gains – particularly when it comes to the qualitatively new productive forces – as easily replicable, which leads to a mutual underestimation of the potential strength of a collective Global South. There is, furthermore, and against the available evidence, a growing belief pushed by the Global North that the advances of the locomotives of the Global South will be dangerous for the poorer countries. It is being suggested that the advances of Asian countries, in particular, are more of a threat than the record of danger from the Global North over hundreds of years.

There is a surrender to the reality of the West’s control over the digital, media, and financial landscapes, which is made to seem unsurpassable.

A significant portion of the ruling economic elite in the Global South remains deeply intertwined with global financial capital. This is particularly manifest in their dependency on the US dollar as a safe haven for investment and their participation in extracting wealth from their own countries to invest in the Global North’s real estate and financial markets. These class interests are readily supported by intellectuals and policymakers who cannot see beyond the theories of neoclassical economics and the Washington Consensus.³⁰ That is why we at Tricontinental have argued for a new development theory for the Global South.³¹

There are old habits in many of our social movements that the left must permanently oppose the realities of class politics and that we cannot win power in these conditions. Any compromise with reality to take power and build our agenda further is seen as a dissolution of our final aims. The failure to win is a captivating sensibility that was unknown in the national liberation era, when winning state power was the immediate and intractable goal. There is even an orientation that suggests that left movements should fight the right, build a dynamic against neoliberalism, and then, rather than demand and seize state power, deliver power to the centre left. The worst orientation is to not contest state power at all.

Until the peoples of the Global South are able to overcome some of these (and more) challenges, it is unlikely that the Bandung Spirit will be part of the actual movement of history. We are emerging slowly out of a defunct epoch of history, the epoch of imperialism. But we have not yet emerged into a new period that is beyond imperialism – the hardest of all structures from which to break.

The Churning of the Global Order

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — The Churning of the Global Order

The Churning of the Global Order

Article 4 of 12

The Tricontinental

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-72-the-churning-of-the-global-order/

In January 2023, a reporter from Yomiuri Shimbun asked the press secretary of Japan’s foreign ministry, Hikariko Ono, for a definition of the term ‘Global South’. ‘The government of Japan does not have a precise definition of the term Global South’, she responded, but ‘it is my understanding that, in general, it often refers to emerging and developing countries’.¹

The Japanese government struggled to find a more accurate assessment of the Global South, which it attempted to provide in the Diplomatic Bluebook 2023. In a long section on the idea of the Global South, Japanese officials acknowledge that the former Third World seemed to have developed a new mood. When the countries of the Global North, led by the United States, demanded that the countries of the Global South adopt the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) position on the war in Ukraine (namely to isolate Russia), they refused, accusing the West of ‘double standards’, since, as Japan’s foreign ministry notes, it justifies its own wars while decrying the wars of others. In light of this new mood in the Global South, Japan’s foreign ministry stated the need for a new attitude with ‘an inclusive approach that overcomes differences in values and interests’. As Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi wrote in the preface to the bluebook, ‘The world is now at a turning point in history’.²

This turning point is exemplified by the fact that few states in the Global South have been willing to participate in the isolation of Russia, refusing, for instance, to support Western resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly. Not all the states that have refused to join the West in its crusade against Russia are ‘anti-Western’ in a political sense; rather, many of them are driven by practical considerations, such as Russia’s discounted energy prices. Whether they are fed up with being pushed around by the West or they see economic opportunities in their relationship with Russia, increasingly, countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have refused to capitulate to the pressure coming from Washington to break ties with Russia. It is this refusal and avoidance that drove France’s President Emmanuel Macron to admit that he was ‘very impressed by how much we are losing the trust of the Global South’.³

At a Munich Security Conference panel discussion on 18 February 2023, three leaders from Africa, Latin America, and Asia developed their argument about why they are unhappy with the war in Ukraine and the campaign pressuring them to break ties with Russia. As Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, ‘We are promoting a peaceful resolution of [the Ukraine] conflict so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities’. When asked why Namibia abstained from the United Nations vote on the war, Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, ‘Our focus is on resolving the problem… not on shifting blame’. The money used to buy weapons, she said, ‘would be better utilised to promote development in Ukraine, in Africa, in Asia, in other places, [and] in Europe itself, where many people are experiencing hardships’.⁴

A series of reports published by leading Western financial houses repeat Macron’s anxiety about the West’s declining credibility in the Global South. BlackRock notes that we are entering ‘a fragmented world with competing blocs’ while Credit Suisse points to the ‘deep and persistent fractures’ that have opened up in the world order.⁵ Credit Suisse’s assessment of these ‘fractures’ describes them accurately: ‘The global West (Western developed countries and allies) has drifted away from the global East (China, Russia, and allies) in terms of core strategic interests, while the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and most developing countries) is reorganising to pursue its own interests’.⁶

In order to understand these major changes taking place in the world and the Global North’s bewilderment about the new mood in the Global South, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produced dossier no. 72, The Churning of the Global Order, based on research carried out with Global South Insights and our collaboratively produced study, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage (January 2024).⁷

On the Terms Global South and Global North

The United Nation is made up of 49 countries in the Global North and 145 countries in the Global South. In this dossier, we use the terms ‘rings’ to describe the Global North and ‘groupings’ to describe the Global South, based on the depictions in the figures that follow. The rings of Global North are organised around the United States and its closest allies at the centre, with each ring that encircles this centre, or inner core, made up of states in the Global North that, for different reasons, are not in the inner core. These rings do not suggest any fragmentation of the Global North, which operates as a bloc. The Global South, on the other hand, is not a bloc, but an emerging project that is formed by different groupings, each of which has its own logic, as we will explain below.

The Global North

The war in Ukraine has shed light on and accelerated certain geopolitical shifts. On one side, a group of countries that follows the direction of the United States reacted to the entry of Russian forces into Ukraine as an integrated military, economic, and political bloc. These countries participate in certain platforms, of which NATO and the Group of Seven countries (G7) are the most significant. This reflects a dynamic that has been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 in which NATO and the G7 act together to drive an agenda largely defined by the United States, with Europe and Japan as secondary powers in the alliance.

Over the past few decades, the contradictions between the NATO and G7 countries were smoothed over and faded into the background. Despite secondary differences within these countries’ military, economic, and political positions and capacities (such as the disagreement between the US, UK, and France over who would export submarines to Australia in 2021), the Global North can be best understood as a bloc that is willing to unite around core issues.⁸

The Egyptian intellectual Samir Amin wrote, in 1980, of the ‘gradual consolidation of the central zone of the world capitalist system (Europe, North America, Australia)’. Soon thereafter, Amin began to use the term Triad to refer to this ‘central zone’ of imperialist powers that emerged after World War II.⁹ The ruling classes in Europe and Japan, he argued, had subordinated their own national self-interest to what the United States government had begun to call their ‘common interest’. Building on Amin’s conception, we organised the Triad into four rings, with modifications that reflect the current trends in international and regional relations.

These four rings are:

The inner core of US-led imperialist Anglo-American settler states, which is made up of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (all part of the Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council, a network of intelligence agencies bound by undisclosed agreements), as well as Israel. These countries – rooted in forms of white supremacy – are the most advanced in the military, economic, and political arenas, with the United States maintaining dominance over the group.

The next layer is made up of the nine core European imperialist powers: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. All of these countries are members of the ‘Fourteen Eyes’ spy network (formally known as SIGINT Seniors Europe), and all of them are NATO members (with Sweden’s membership all but guaranteed). These powerful European countries nonetheless subordinate their national interests to the inner core, operating almost as vassal states. Take the case of Germany, which – despite having one of the largest economies in the world and dominating the European Union – has nonetheless vitiated its ability to take care of its citizens since the war in Ukraine began in 2022 so as not to challenge US hegemony over European foreign policy. As the economist Michael Hudson described it, this is ‘the third time in a century that the United States has defeated Germany’.¹⁰

The third ring is made up of Japan and the secondary European powers, such as Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Greece, and Finland. Although loyal to the United States, these countries do not have as much influence on the world order as the European imperialist powers based on their military, economic, and political capacities. Some of them, like Portugal, Finland, and Iceland, are part of NATO but are less integral to US military strategy. In the case of Portugal, for instance, despite being a former colonial power, its relatively smaller GDP is a factor in its exclusion from the ring of secondary European powers.

The fourth, outer ring is made up of nineteen countries in the former Eastern Bloc. These countries, which were not colonial powers, were drawn into the imperialist bloc in the post-Cold War era mainly through economic subordination and with NATO’s eastern expansion. Some of these countries are governed by pro-NATO right-wing regimes (i.e., Poland, Ukraine, and Estonia), which play a frontline role in the West’s efforts to contain Russia. Others attempt to keep their distance from NATO (such as Serbia), though Western pressure often leaves them with little choice.

In 1945, the US began to consolidate its hegemony over the Global North countries through three major axes:

The United States’ military domination of Europe through NATO and the spread of US military bases in the defeated axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan).

Japan, Western Europe, and Anglo-American settler states’ economic integration with and dependence on the United States. This began with the Marshall Plan (1948) in Europe and the initial military occupation of Japan (1945–1952).

The political subordination of the European, Japanese, and white settler state elites to the US elite structure by selecting which political parties would be permitted to be in power. This was accomplished through the creation of a pro-US global elite by, for instance, opening US universities to elite students from these parts of the world and forming a set of networks (such as the Bilderberg Meeting in 1954) that sought to create a common understanding of the world fashioned by the United States.¹¹

In addition to the Global North’s subordination to the United States along these three axes – which took great effort and struggle to achieve – three other factors are key to understanding both the concept of the Global North and the logic of the four rings into which we have divided these countries.

1. A shared history of brutality. The term Global North is not a neutral geographical term. In fact, it is decidedly not geographical, given the inclusion of countries such as Australia and New Zealand in the inner core. Rather, the term Global North is synonymous for other terms such as the West and the advanced countries. These are all polite designations for the most adequate term: the imperialist bloc. It is worth noting that most of these countries – whether the US-led Anglo-American core (such as the United Kingdom and the United States); the core European powers (such as Germany and Italy); or secondary European powers (such as Portugal and Austria) – have shaped the modern world through a shared history of violence that opened with the Atlantic Slave Trade and continued with the use of nuclear bombs against the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. There is no comprehensive account of the hundreds of millions of people killed by colonialism.¹²  

A core feature of this violence is the drain of wealth from the colonised regions of the world to the colonial powers. This drain not only lined the coffers of these powers and paid for the opulent infrastructure that still exists today; it also shaped the neocolonial system that continues to leech wealth from the colonised states long after formal colonialism ended.

2. The drain of wealth from the South to the North. Despite making up only 14.2% of the world population, the 49 countries of the Global North account for 40.6% of the world’s GDP based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).¹³ By controlling capital and the production of raw materials, intellectual property, and science and technology – all part of the legacy of colonialism – the Global North states continue to ensure that they accumulate a greater share of the planet’s wealth. One example of the enormous colonial theft of wealth is the nearly $45 trillion that the British drained from India between 1765 and 1938, which accounts for almost the entire period of British rule in India (1757–1947). This wealth flooded the British banking system, enabled capital accumulation for British industrialisation, and created built in advantages that have lasted for generations.¹⁴ Meanwhile, average life expectancy declined by 20% between 1870 and 1921, and the literacy rate when India won its independence in 1947, after three hundred years of colonialism, was a mere 12.2%.¹⁵

A recent paper shows that, based on unequal exchange, $152 trillion was plundered from the Global South between 1960 and 2017. The authors point out that, in 2017 alone, the Global North appropriated $2.2 trillion worth of commodities in the Global South – ‘enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over’.¹⁶ Imagine if we could calculate the entire drain of wealth from the (former) colonies and the social impact this had on their health and education systems.

3. A common condition of militarisation and intelligence. The role of intelligence networks is frequently underestimated in assessing the power of the Global North. The category of ‘intelligence’ is no longer merely about espionage of the old type but now includes digital surveillance and warfare (including cyberattacks on key infrastructure). Each of the Global North countries participate in high-level military coordination and intelligence sharing, driven by the inner core. The closer a country is to the inner core, the more synchronised the level of intelligence and military coordination. This does not mean that the countries in the outer rings are not yoked into the systems of the inner core, but only that they are not invited into the inner sanctum of information and weapons systems. The structure of the four rings is reflected in global intelligence networks, as exemplified by the distinctions between the Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes intelligence networks. The Five Eyes intelligence network (made up of five of the six inner core countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States – with Israel as a de facto ‘sixth eye’) works closely with but maintains a distinction from the Nine Eyes countries (Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway, added onto the Five Eyes countries) and, finally, with the Fourteen Eyes countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, added to the Nine Eyes countries), which are privy to an increasingly depleted level of intelligence sharing the further they are from the inner core.

The Global South

Unlike the Global North, the Global South is not an integrated bloc. The countries of the Global South have different economic realities, military capacities, political systems, and governments, often with conflicting political traditions. Though several of these countries share certain characteristics and interests, the concept of the Global South is not defined by their commonalities but by a set of other factors. Nonetheless, these countries share the facts that:

They are former colonies and semi-colonies that have been subject to five hundred years of humiliation.

They, in some cases, have and do pursue socialist projects, for which they have been punished by the imperialist bloc.

They are – for a variety of reasons – victims of imperialist overreach using extra-economic force, such as coups and sanctions.

They have often come together around various common interests, such as to seek debt relief, establish their right to build economic democracy, and access global health measures, including vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite these commonalities, it would be an overreach to call them – as we did the Global North – a bloc. Instead, we think of the Global South as being made up of six groupings with interlocking relationships (as well as antagonistic disputes amongst some of them). These groupings are:

1. Socialist independent states. This grouping includes six countries (China, Viet Nam, Venezuela, Laos, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Cuba) that remain committed to the socialist trajectory, with all of its complex zigs and zags. Since 2016, China, a key member of the group, has had the largest GDP (PPP) in the world and an economy that is almost three times greater than that of India (a country with a comparable population).¹⁷ The Chinese people have achieved the greatest feat in modern times in terms of human development by lifting 800 million people out of poverty.¹⁸

2. Strongly sovereign seeking states. This grouping is defined by states that have, more recently and despite the many internal differences between them, taken steps to assert their sovereignty but have not established a formal socialist process. Many of these states, such Eritrea and Mali, are part of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter, which formed in July 2021 under the leadership of the Venezuelan government. The West has, in turn, punished this posturing through extreme hybrid warfare.¹⁹ Russia, a special case in this grouping, is a primary target for regime change and coercive measures that seek to dismember and denuclearise it.

3. Current or historic progressive states. The societies in these countries have been shaped by national liberation movements – such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa – and by movements against dictatorships – such as in Brazil – the impact of which has imprinted itself deeply onto their political cultures. Despite the limitations of the governments in this grouping, their severe internal contradictions, and the difficulties of becoming emancipated from the global capitalist system, they have not wilted before US interference. However, none of these countries benefitted from a socialist revolution that might have weakened their national bourgeoisie through substantial land reform or through socialising advanced sectors of the economy, for instance.

4. New non-aligned states. These countries, with rising GDPs, are outgrowing their dependence on the West. The size and scale of their economies have given them some independence to pursue national economic interests without actively advancing political sovereignty. They have realised that the US seizure of foreign reserves and use of sanctions against at least 31.5% of the world population have become severe threats to the global majority and that the United States is no longer either a market of last resort or a major provider of foreign direct investment.²⁰

5. The diverse Global South. This grouping includes the 111 countries that lack any clear political, economic, or military unity. They vary in the degree to which they align with the Global North.

6. Heavily US militarised states. The two countries that make up this grouping – the Republic of Korea and the Philippines – are effectively military colonies of the United States, though their populations strain against the limitations of being subordinated to US military and security needs.

Together these 145 countries (which includes Palestine as a UN observer) account for 85.8% of the world population and 59.4% of world GDP (PPP).²¹ As we will see in the final section, these six groupings are part of major regional and international projects (such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Union of South American Nations and BRICS10 and the G77, respectively) that reflect the new mood in the Global South – one that is shifting toward regionalism and multilateralism and away from the singular dominion crafted by the imperialist bloc.

On the Idea of the Five Controls

The Marxist assessment of imperialism over the past century has been shaped by Vladimir Lenin’s theoretical and practical contributions, rooted in the experience of the Russian Revolution. In Lenin’s classic work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), he argued that, through its more competitive stage, capitalism advanced to produce oligopolies in important sectors – such as finance – and that these oligopolies clashed with each other, drawing their states into a conflict over markets in the colonies and into direct military confrontations with each other. The wave of formal decolonisation that began after the end of World War II in 1945 – which had a prior history in Latin America in the 1800s but was then restarted with the Cuban Revolution (1959) – created new conditions for imperialism. The territorial retreat of the imperialist powers was not matched in any way by a loss of their control over the world economy. To the contrary, they had fashioned what Kwame Nkrumah called neocolonialism.

Over the past few years, however, we have witnessed the slow attrition of the West’s control over the world economy as well as the gradual delegitimisation of the entire neocolonial structure. To better understand this attrition, we adopted a method that Samir Amin developed almost thirty years ago to assess the nature of imperialist power.²² Amin argued that the neocolonial structure did not require Western-based transnational corporations to own most of the world’s assets. Instead, he explained, what was needed was for them to have monopoly control over many of the assets in key sectors and ensure that the ultimate beneficiary of these assets would be the Triad, or the Global North, and its ruling classes. Amin identified five forms of control that lie at the heart of the neocolonial structure:

Control over natural resources

Control over financial flows

Control over science and technology

Control over military power

Control over information

In The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory (July 2023), we argued that the West’s control over natural resources, financial flows, and science and technology is being challenged by the emergence of the Global South’s major economies: China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and Mexico, which were all among the top thirteen largest economies in the world by GDP (PPP) in 2022.²³ China’s impressive rise out of abject poverty has been key to weakening the Global North’s hold over these first three controls.

Two exaggerations by the United States and the imperialist bloc from the mid-1990s to the 2010s also contributed to weakening this hold:

1. US wars, from the global war on terror to the wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

2. US economic overextension, from the over-credit in the US housing market to the lax regulation of the Western banking system.

These US wars and the Third Great Depression of 2007–2008 provoked a crisis of the Global North’s leadership of the world system. It is in this context that Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that the world does not need ‘one master’.²⁴ Great doubts began to arise across much of the Global South about the role of the US as the buyer of last resort, the anchor for the world monetary system, and the political stabiliser of the world order.

New developments in China and Russia, which were taking place at the same time as these US wars and the chaos in the world capitalist system, began to accelerate new changes:

1. China. In the last years of the Hu Jintao government (2003–2013), China’s leadership began to reassess its reliance upon the US market and US political leadership. The formation of BRICS in 2009 was part of this new posture. This reassessment was then translated into a new policy framework under the leadership of Xi Jinping. This included establishing alternatives to the US market and leadership, such as by creating an internal market through large-scale capital investment, eradicating extreme poverty, and building the One Belt, One Road (later Belt and Road) Initiative. Furthermore, China began to use the BRICS process to encourage the formation of new monetary systems and new political leadership.

2. Russia. Towards the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the Russian government began to undo the damage that the destruction of the Soviet Union had done to its people. Firstly, the government, led by Putin, began to claw back the energy sector from the ‘oligarchs’ and organise the basis of the economy around principles of self-sufficiency, including holding capital within the country and not allowing profits to be taken out into the Western-controlled banking system. Secondly, the government began to increase Russia’s role in OPEC+ (the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as ten non-members) and build up its energy sector in order to sell oil and natural gas to Europe in a context in which the Global North’s wars on Iraq and Libya and sanctions-driven hybrid war on Iran interfered with Europe’s major sources of energy.

The economic magnetism of China and Russia – in the context of a long-term economic crisis in the Global North – led countries of the European Union to become more integrated with Eurasia. This took place on two levels: European countries began to rely increasingly on Russian energy (a third of Germany’s energy needs were fulfilled by Russia, for example) and on investment and technology from China (18 European Union countries joined the Belt and Road Initiative, including Italy, Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic).²⁵ Europe’s integration with Asia was historically logical and necessary and, alongside the rise of China, threatened the general unipolar structure of the Global North as well as the neocolonial structure of the world economy. Unable to roll back this integration and the rise of China, the US, alongside its allies in the Global North, accelerated a hybrid war against both China and Russia. The frontlines of this war were initially economic (through a trade war, for example) but quickly began to focus on two areas: Ukraine and Taiwan. The war in Ukraine had two important consequences on the world order: first, it increased the cost of food and fuel across the globe, and second, it was met by a refusal by many developing countries to bow down to the West and its posture on the war. Together, these consequences generated a new mood in the developing world and the emergence of a new non-alignment.

The Global North’s control over military power and information, however, has not withered. At a time of economic listlessness and political fragility, the Global North – led by the United States – is exercising the remainder of its power with great force and, in doing so, endangering the planet’s existence. As our research shows, the Global North countries – especially the United States – expend significant amounts of their budgets on the military, building systems that threaten every aspect of human life and wasting human ingenuity on ways to destroy life rather than affirm it.

The Control of Arms

Unable and unwilling to build a social and political project to address the dilemmas of humanity on a global scale, the United States and its bloc have instead pursued a strategy to maintain their domination over the planet. This dominance began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist state system in Eastern Europe in 1991 as well as with the weakening of the Third World through the debt crisis, which started to spiral with Mexico’s default in 1982. Intellectuals in the United States began to speak as if this dominance would last for eternity, with the ‘end of history’ pronounced against any challenge to the US order. However, cracks in this narrative began to widen as the G7’s dominion, with the US at the helm, was deeply shaken by its military overreach in the global war on terror (especially the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003) and by the Third Great Depression of 2007–2008 (triggered by the collapse of Western housing markets).

The United States and its allies made every effort in the second decade of the twenty-first century to reassert their control over the planet. NATO’s war on Libya in 2011 sent a strong signal of Western assertion, which was a prelude for the discussions about using a global NATO as a platform to advance Western military aggression, from the South China Sea to the Caribbean. Sanctions attempted to discipline anyone who would cross the lines drawn by the United States and its allies, locking countries out of the international financial system and thereby depriving entire populations of access to medicine, food, and other basic goods. (It is worth noting that sanctions, which have increased by 933% over the last twenty years, have become a favourite form of US-led intervention).²⁶ Finally, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned with a renewed austerity agenda, which was deepened even during the pandemic, forcing dozens of poor countries to pay more to wealthy bondholders than they did to their own health care and education systems.²⁷

In 2018, the United States declared an end to the war on terror and clearly stated in its National Defence Strategy that its main problems were the rise of China and Russia. US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis spoke openly about the need to prevent the rise of ‘near peer rivals’ – China and Russia – and suggested that the entire panoply of US power be used to bring them to their knees.²⁸

Not only does the United States have hundreds of military bases that encircle Eurasia; it also has allies, from Germany to Japan, that provide it with forward positions against both Russia and China. In 2015 and 2019, respectively, the naval fleet of the US and its allies began aggressive ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises against the territorial integrity of both China (in the South China Sea) and Russia (mainly in the Arctic). These manoeuvres, as well as the 2014 US political intervention in Ukraine and massive 2015 US arms deal with Taiwan, further threatened Russia and China’s sovereignty. Then, in 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which upset the apple cart of nuclear arms control. This withdrawal, alongside the US’s stated goals in the 2018 National Defence Strategy, showed that the US was contemplating the use of ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ against both Russia and China.

Thus far, US allies in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Australia and the Republic of Korea, have not been eager to allow intermediate nuclear weapons into their territory, although these weapons could be positioned in US bases elsewhere, from Guam to Okinawa. It is impossible to understand Russia’s intervention in Ukraine without understanding this longer history of threats perceived by Moscow. It is not beyond reason to worry that the United States might position its intermediate nuclear weapons in Ukraine – whether or not Ukraine joins NATO.²⁹

To affirm their position of domination over the world order, the United States and its allies have increased military spending beyond belief. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) calculated that, in 2022, US military spending was roughly $877 billion, or roughly 39%, of estimated global military spending.³⁰ However, as a recent report published in Monthly Review shows, this figure is vastly underestimated: actual US military spending is closer to $1.537 trillion – nearly double SIPRI’s calculation and the official US numbers.³¹ Adding in the 2022 estimated expenditures of other NATO states ($360 billion) and all US-dominated, non-NATO military allies ($234 billion), based on official figures, brings the total military spending of the US-led military bloc to $2.13 trillion, though this could well be below actual spending. This calculation brings the global military spending in 2022 to $2.87 trillion. In other words, the US-led military bloc accounts for 74.3% of world military spending, and the US spends 12.6 times per capita above the world average (Israel, coming in second, spends 7.2 times above the world average per capita, with the other imperialist powers spending two to three times more than the world average).³²

China, meanwhile, accounts for 10% of world military spending ($292 billion), and its per capita military spending is 22 times less than that of the United States.³³ Fear mongering about Chinese military spending is not substantiated by the facts. What is substantiated by facts is that China spends more of its social wealth on infrastructure and industry than on military waste. Meanwhile, the US spends a mere $252 billion on education, for instance, according to the Centre on Budget and Policies Priorities, but $1.537 trillion on the military, part of which goes to pay for its estimated 902 military bases across the world.³⁴

The only area in the world that is free of the US military apparatus is large sections of Eurasia: China, India, Iran, and Russia. Since 1992, the United States has dreamt of vanquishing this region, including through the use of military power. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, cautioned that ‘potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances’. ‘For America’, Brzezinski wrote, ‘the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia’, which, he said, ‘is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played’.³⁵ To avoid this scenario, Brzezinski and others warned that the US should try to win over either China or Russia to isolate the other and to thereby dominate the Eurasian ‘chessboard’. However, for the past several decades, the United States has done just the opposite, electing instead to pressure both China and Russia through its New Cold War, which has, as Brzezinski predicted, brought these two countries together into a strategic bilateral and multilateral alliance. Furthermore, US Congressional Research Service data reports that the US Armed Forces have been deployed to 101 countries between 1798 and 2023.³⁶ According to the Military Intervention Project, between 1776 and 2019, the US carried out at least 392 military interventions worldwide. Half of these operations were undertaken between 1950 and 2019, and 25% of them occurred in the post-Cold War period.³⁷ In 2022 alone, 317 imperialist forces were deployed to countries in the Global South and 137 to Global North allies for a total of 454 deployments.³⁸

Perhaps the single best evidence of the racial, political, military, and economic plans of the Western powers that have manifested through the New Cold War can be summed up by a recent declaration of NATO and the EU:

NATO and the EU play complementary, coherent, and mutually reinforcing roles in supporting international peace and security. We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.³⁹

 On the Emergence of New Organisations

On the last day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August 2023, the five founding states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) welcomed six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.⁴⁰ Though the new right-wing led government of Argentina under Javier Milei officially withdrew from joining BRICS on 29 December 2023, the ten BRICS countries now encompass 45.5% of the world population, with a combined global GDP (PPP) of 35.6%. In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10% of the world population, their share of the global GDP (PPP) is 30.4%. While the countries that today form BRICS10 are responsible for 44% of global industrial output, their G7 counterparts account for a mere 21.6%.⁴¹ All available indicators, including harvest production and the total volume of metal production, show the immense power of the newly expanded BRICS10. Celso Amorim, advisor to the Brazilian government and one of the architects of BRICS during his former tenure as foreign minister, said of the new development that ‘[t]he world can no longer be dictated by the G7’.⁴²

Certainly, the BRICS10 nations, for all their internal hierarchies and challenges, now represent a larger share of the global GDP than the G7, which continues to behave as the world’s executive body. Twenty-three countries applied for membership before the South Africa meeting (including seven of the thirteen countries in OPEC), though over forty expressed an interest in joining BRICS, including Indonesia, the world’s seventh largest country in terms of GDP (PPP).

It is important to note that BRICS10 does not operate independently of new regional formations that aim to build platforms outside the grip of the West, such as the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Instead, BRICS10 membership has the potential to enhance regionalism for those already within these regional forums.

Why did BRICS welcome such a disparate group of countries, including two monarchies, into its fold? When asked to reflect on the character of the new full member states, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, ‘What matters is not the person who governs but the importance of the country. We can’t deny the geopolitical importance of Iran and other countries that will join BRICS’.⁴³ This is the measure of how the founding countries made the decision to expand their alliance.

At least three key issues lie at the heart of BRICS’s growth: control over energy supplies and pathways, control over global financial and development systems, and control over institutions for peace and security.

Control over Energy Supplies and Pathways

BRICS10 has now created a formidable energy group. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are also members of OPEC, which, with Russia, a key member of OPEC+, now accounts for 26.3 million barrels of oil per day, just below 30% of global daily oil production.⁴⁴ It was China’s role in brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April that enabled both of these oil-producing countries to join BRICS. Egypt, another new addition to BRICS10, though not an OPEC member, is nonetheless one of the largest African oil producers, with an output that accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s oil production.⁴⁵ What is at stake here is not just the production of oil, but the establishment of new global energy pathways.

The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative, alongside the development of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, have already created a web of oil and natural gas platforms around the Global South, integrated into the expansion of Khalifa Port and natural gas facilities in Fujairah and Ruwais (in the United Arab Emirates). There is every expectation that BRICS10 will begin to coordinate its energy infrastructure with other energy producers. For instance, tensions between Russia and Saudi Arabia over oil volumes have simmered this year as Russia exceeded its quota in an attempt to compensate for Western sanctions placed on it as a result of the war in Ukraine. Now these two countries will have another forum, outside of OPEC+ and with China at the table, to build a common energy agenda. This expanding platform also threatens to undermine the petrodollar system, with more countries – such as Saudi Arabia – planning to sell oil to China in renminbi, or RMB (China’s two other main oil providers, Iraq and Russia, already receive payment in RMB).

Control over Global Financial and Development Systems

Both the discussions at the BRICS summit and its final communiqué focused on the need to strengthen a financial and development architecture for the world that is not governed by the triumvirate of the IMF, Wall Street, and the US dollar. However, BRICS does not seek to circumvent established global trade and development institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF. For instance, in its concluding declaration of the summit, BRICS reaffirmed the importance of the ‘rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation at its core’ and called for ‘a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced [IMF] at its centre’.⁴⁶ Its proposals do not fundamentally break with the IMF or WTO; rather, they offer a dual pathway forward: first, for BRICS to exert more control and direction over these organisations, of which they are members but have been subordinated to a Western agenda, and second, for BRICS states to realise their aspirations to build their own parallel institutions (such as the New Development Bank, or NDB). Saudi Arabia’s investment fund alone is worth close to $1 trillion, which could partially resource the NDB.⁴⁷

BRICS’s agenda to improve ‘the stability, reliability, and fairness of the global financial architecture’, BRICS chair Cyril Ramaphosa explained, is mostly being carried forward by the ‘use of local currencies, alternative financial arrangements, and alternative payment systems’.⁴⁸ The concept of ‘local currencies’ refers to the growing practice of states using their own currencies for cross-border trade rather than relying upon the dollar. Though approximately 150 currencies in the world are considered to be legal tender, cross-border payments almost always rely on the dollar (which, as of 2021, accounts for 40% of flows over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, network).⁴⁹

Other currencies play a limited role, with the Chinese RMB comprising 2.5% of cross-border payments.⁵⁰ However, the emergence of new global messaging platforms – such as China’s Cross-Border Payment Interbank System, India’s Unified Payments Interface, and Russia’s Financial Messaging System (SPFS) – as well as regional digital currency systems promise to increase the use of alternative currencies. For instance, cryptocurrency assets briefly provided a potential avenue for new trading systems before their asset valuations declined, and BRICS10 recently approved the establishment of a working group to study a BRICS reference currency.

Following the expansion of BRICS, the NDB said that it will also expand its members and that, as its General Strategy, 2022–2026 notes, 30% of all of its financing will be in local currencies.⁵¹ As part of its framework for a new development system, its president, Dilma Rousseff, said that the NDB will not follow the IMF policy of imposing conditions on borrowing countries. ‘We repudiate any kind of conditionality’, Rousseff said. ‘Often a loan is given upon the condition that certain policies are carried out. We don’t do that. We respect the policies of each country’.⁵²

The entry of Ethiopia and Iran into BRICS10 shows how large Global South states are reacting to the West’s sanctions policy against dozens of countries, including two founding BRICS members (China and Russia). China has long traded with Ethiopia, whose capital city, Addis Ababa, is the headquarters of the African Union. Drawing Ethiopia into BRICS ensures that this large country (with a sizeable population and important agricultural land) will not drift back into the Western orbit.

Control over Institutions for Peace and Security

In their communiqué, the BRICS nations write about the importance of ‘comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council’.⁵³ Currently, the UN Security Council has fifteen members, five of which are permanent (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US). There are no permanent members from Africa, Latin America, or the most populous country in the world, India. To repair these inequities, BRICS offers its support to ‘the legitimate aspirations of emerging and developing countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including Brazil, India, and South Africa, to play a greater role in international affairs’.⁵⁴ The West’s refusal to allow these countries a permanent seat at the UN Security Council has only strengthened their commitment to the BRICS process and to enhance their role in the G20.

Three major interregional platforms, still in an embryonic stage, define the new regionalism and multilateralism:

BRICS10 (an expansion of the 2009 formation of BRIC), which is largely strategic but also an economic powerhouse, has ten official members and several unofficial partners.

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001), which was largely formed around security issues in Central Asia, has advanced into conversations about development and trade.

The Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter (2021), which is mainly a political platform, brings together twenty UN member states that are facing the brunt of illegal US sanctions, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Many of these states attended the BRICS summit as invitees and are eager to join BRICS10 as full members.

It is no accident that there are three countries, all primary targets of pressure campaigns by the imperialist bloc, that are in all three of these organisations: China, Iran, and Russia.

There are several shared challenges and opportunities that have emerged in the Global South and that have brought many of its countries together around the need for a common framework for discussion and collaboration. These common interests include the need for:

Multilateralism and regionalism that is centred on the creation of Global South-anchored cooperation.

New modernisation that is centred on constructing regional and continental economies that use local currencies in place of the dollar for trade and reserves.

Sovereignty, which would create barriers to Western intervention. This includes military entanglements and digital colonialism, both of which facilitate US intelligence interventions.

Reparations, which would entail collective bargaining to compensate for the West’s century-old debt traps and abuse of the excess carbon budget as well as its much longer-reaching legacy of colonialism.

Tectonic changes are taking place in the world, accelerated by the wars in Ukraine and the rapidly escalating genocide in Palestine. These changes are shaped, on the one hand, by the Global North’s loss of economic power alongside its increase in militarisation and, on the other, by the Global South’s new mood regarding sovereignty and economic development. This dossier is a preliminary exercise, based on original research and analysis, to make sense of these changes and – consequently – the new mood in the Global South.

Captain Ibrahim Traore's New Year Address: Charting a Pan-African Path to Sovereignty

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — Captain Ibrahim Traore's New Year Address: Charting a Pan-African Path to Sovereignty

Captain Ibrahim Traore's New Year Address: Charting a Pan-African Path to Sovereignty

Article 5 of 12

Coalition for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa

Originally published at https://abasimperialism.substack.com/p/captain-ibrahim-traores-new-year

In his address to the Burkinabé people on December 31st, 2025, President Ibrahim Traoré – who now also serves as President of the AES Confederation – presented not merely a status update on national affairs, but a conscious and coherent revolutionary Pan-African vision rooted in self-determination, mass mobilization, and steadfast rejection of neocolonial dependency. This speech was both an accounting of concrete advances – military, economic, and social – and a broader roadmap unveiling the kind of state and society Burkina Faso is attempting to build under conditions of imperialist terror and war.

Far from denying the severity of the situation, the young revolutionary president framed the present dynamic as one of historical rupture – a decisive break with the political and economic arrangements that have, for centuries, preserved western control over security, resources, and development against the righteous sovereignty of colonized peoples the world over.

Security as Territorial Sovereignty: Operation Ice Wall

Central to Traoré’s address was the question of security, which he defined not in abstract terms of “counterterrorism cooperation” (the tired procedural language of Western international institutions and their neocolonial mouthpieces) but in terms of territorial control and civilian return.

He highlighted Operation Lalmassga, also known as “Ice Wall”, a large-scale military operation that allowed Burkinabè forces to reclaim several key zones previously outside state control, having been occupied by western-backed terrorists for years. “This daring operation enabled our fighting forces to land in enemy sanctuaries where for the past five or six years, it was impossible to reach,” he said. “Our units have set foot and recaptured these areas.”

Among the areas cited were localities in the Nakambé region, zones surrounding the Kompienga Dam, and strategic communities such as Namungu in Gulmu, and Namsiguia near Djibo and Toulfé, which are vital for both civilian resettlement and agricultural production. Captain Traoré stressed that these were not simply symbolic advances, but concrete recoveries of land where people live and work. He emphasized that the operation was designed not as a temporary show of force, but as a lasting transformation of the security situation. By combining military operations with civilian reintegration, the state ensures that reclaimed areas are not just temporarily “liberated,” but are permanently stabilized and able to support productive life.

Traoré praised both the army and the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (VDP), noting that the army and internal security forces would continue to increase in strength: “Operations will continue to the very limits of our borders to defeat this terrorist hydra.”

Food Sovereignty: A Weapon Against Imperialism

Agriculture occupied a central place in the address, framed as both an economic foundation and a strategic imperative. Traoré reported strong harvests in 2025 — proudly announcing Burkina Faso has officially reached food self-sufficiency — and attributed them to rainfall, farmer resilience, and expanded state support.

The government assisted producers through subsidized plowing, fertilizer distribution, improved “quality seeds produced by our researchers,” Traoré emphasized, livestock vaccination campaigns, and the expansion of fish farming using dams and water basins. Looking ahead to 2026 he noted: “By then, each village, we hope, will have a water reservoir” so that “it will no longer be a question of cultivating at the end of a single season, but…to cultivate two or three times during the year.”

Breaking the country’s dependence on single rainy seasons marks an attempt to transform the subsistence-based agriculture artificially reproduced by imperialism into a planned, year-round system of production; rather than a gamble for survival, agriculture becomes a solid foundation for food sovereignty and national independence.

“Food self-sufficiency is a daily struggle we are waging,” the president affirmed.

Traoré sharply criticized the classic imperialist formula and inherited economic model whereby Burkina Faso exports raw materials while importing finished goods. The president highlighted industrialization and economic transformation as key pillars of the revolutionary process. The goal is clearly outlined: to process domestic resources locally rather than exporting raw materials. He outlined steps toward domestic processing and industrial development, particularly in the cotton sector and other raw material industries, where local transformation is expected to expand in 2026.

Traoré also noted measures to increase state oversight of mining in effort to curb illicit exports of precious mineral resources (gold) and retain value within the country. This is a critical battlefront for sovereignty and economic independence in the protracted struggle against neocolonial patterns of resource extraction. “The mineral resources that we will exploit ourselves now should allow us to make a considerable leap in GDP by 2026,” declared Traoré, “so that Burkina Faso can become an emerging economy in the world in a short period of time.”

Against western imperialist schemes to underdevelop Africa, Traoré boldly proclaimed an anti-dependency, production-oriented vision for Burkina Faso to fully control its resources and economic destiny: a shining model at the heart of the AES Confederation, for the whole of Africa and its diaspora.

The president also addressed the moral and cultural dimensions of national reconstruction. “We cannot import a justice system, apply it, and expect to have social cohesion,” he insisted. Judicial reforms seek to balance formal legal institutions with traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution, emphasizing reconciliation and social cohesion. Cultural and ancestral values are treated as essential to national development, with schools being tasked with instilling integrity and patriotism from a young age.

Linking transformations in justice and culture to educational objectives, the President summarily asserts: “By returning to technical and vocational education and combining this with our values and endogenous knowledge, we create and innovate from what exists.” This is scientific Pan-Africanist self-determination in motion.

Regarding prison reform and rehabilitation, Traoré explained that 2025’s initiatives will expand in the coming new year: “We will ensure that all prisoners have the opportunity for rehabilitation. Instead of sleeping in prison, we will ensure that they can participate, learn jobs, and reintegrate into society. This new way of viewing justice ensures that no one is left behind. Everyone who wants to build the country will have their say. Whether you are free, or in detention, we will ensure that you can participate in building the country and redeem yourself and return to society.”

These efforts mark a conscious return to endogenous African values of restoration of relationships and communal harmony. In tandem with such moves as the Confederation’s withdrawal from the ICC (International Criminal Court) in September of 2025, Traoré is leading Burkina Faso, and the AES Confederation broadly, to “gradually return to our values, to our roots. Only in this way can we assert ourselves and develop our nation.”

As the Western unipolar order continues to decay, Burkina Faso and the AES Confederation are positioning themselves within a multipolar world where partnerships are evaluated on their material contributions to a people’s struggle and respect for national sovereignty. This diplomatic repositioning reflects a broader realignment away from western security architectures that have themselves produced insecurity while deepening dependency. The growing engagement of AES states with partners such as Russia and China – particularly in security assistance, infrastructure development, and technology transfer – signals not a shift from one patron to another, but an attempt to operate within a multipolar world on terms defined by mutual benefits rather than subordination.

Traoré proudly reaffirmed Burkina Faso’s iron-hearted commitment to the Alliance of Sahel States Confederation alongside Mali and Niger: “2025 was a year in which we were entrusted with a heavy responsibility to lead the destiny of the Confederation. We have taken on this responsibility and we have promised to ensure that the AES shines throughout the world, and we will keep our word.”

“Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” In line with this famous revolutionary dictum, Traoré’s far-reaching address did not deny the magnitude of the challenges faced by Burkina Faso and the AES Confederation. Instead, it situated them within the global war against imperialism. Captain Traoré did so with the spirit of revolutionary optimism. His speech presented a revolutionary Pan-African path for a people seeking to reassert control over its land, resources and destiny.

Against the manifold forces of imperialist misinformation, the president wrapped up his speech by directly emboldening the counter-propaganda offensive: “To all those who fight imperialism through communication, I congratulate them and encourage them to redouble their efforts, because all the wars of imperialism begin first with communication, and during wars, communication makes all the difference in battles.”

As he concluded, “Burkina Faso will prevail…terrorism will be overcome, and we will ensure that the face of Burkina Faso that we know today will be unrecognizable in five years…I urge everyone to redouble their efforts to make 2026 better than 2025. Happy New Year, 2026. Homeland or death. We will prevail.”

Long live Captain Ibrahim Traore!

Long live Burkina Faso, land of the upright!

Defend the Alliance of Sahel States Confederation!

Forward to the Pan-African Revolution!

The Great Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Cause of Asian, African, and Latin American Peoples is Invincible

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — The Great Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Cause of Asian, African, and Latin American Peoples is Invincible

The Great Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Cause of Asian, African, and Latin American Peoples is Invincible

Article 6 of 12

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

By Kim Il Sung

Originally published at https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/the-great-anti-imperialist-revolutionary-cause-of-asian-african-and-latin-american-peoples-is-in/

The Great Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Cause of Asian, African, and Latin American Peoples is Invincible

February 1, 2026

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Editorial Note: This essay by the Korean revolutionary leader Kim Il Sung was published in 1968 on the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The below link takes the reader to a PDF of the essay.

The Great Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Cause of Asian, African, and Latin American Peoples is Invincible

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Structural Adjustment - Global Inequality

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — Structural Adjustment - Global Inequality

Structural Adjustment - Global Inequality

Article 7 of 12

The Global Inequality Project

Originally published at https://globalinequality.org/structural-adjustment/

The success of the anti-colonial movements in the middle of the 20th century triggered a crisis in the core states, as it constrained their access to cheap labour and resources. In the 1980s, they retaliated to restore the colonial structure of the world economy. For the South, the consequences were devastating. 

After winning independence, many global South governments introduced progressive and radical policies to rebuild economic sovereignty: land reform, public services, capital controls, labour protections, nationalization of key resources, plus tariffs and subsidies to support national industry. These policies delivered rapid development and improved social indicators.¹

But the core states were not pleased, as this shift constrained their access to cheap labour and resources, and reduced their control over Southern markets, triggering supply-price inflation and contributing to a crisis of capital accumulation in the 1970s. The US Federal Reserve responded by raising interest rates toward 20%, hoping to crush wages. This triggered a debt crisis across the global South, and governments took steps toward default. To protect Wall Street banks, the US sought to enforce debt payment by using the World Bank and the IMF to impose structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) on Southern governments.²

SAPs forced governments to cut public spending and divert resources to debt service.  They also privatized public assets and abolished protective tariffs, subsidies and regulations, rolling back the progressive reforms of the post-colonial era. SAPs were the mechanism by which neoliberalism was imposed on the global South, as a backlash against the anti-colonial movement. From 1980-2004, SAPs were imposed on 129 countries, representing 83% of the world population, shifting control over macroeconomic policy from the parliaments of the global South to bankers and technocrats in Washington and New York.

Structural adjustment “kicked away the ladder” to sovereign industrialization,³ but also re-cheapened Southern labour and resources, forced open Southern markets, and organized Southern production around supplying Northern firms through global commodity chains. SAPs therefore restored the basic tenets of the imperial arrangement.⁴ This arrangement has enabled the core to achieve a massive appropriation of wealth from the global South through unequal exchange.⁵

For the global South, the consequences were disastrous. Structural adjustment induced a prolonged economic crisis across most regions, with national income stagnating for the rest of the 20th century.  SAPs compressed Southern consumption, caused poverty to increase, reduced healthcare access and slowed progress on other social indicators.⁶ See our entry on global poverty for more.

This chart illustrates the crisis in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. After three decades of impressive gains, income contracted dramatically under SAPs and did not recover until more than two decades later. This decline in living standards triggered widespread protests which eventually forced the IMF and World Bank to abandon some of their more draconian policies.

In China and India, structural adjustment did not lead to a collapse in national income. On the contrary, their income growth accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s. They had strong nationalist governments that had come to power through popular anti-colonial struggle, and were able to negotiate more reasonable terms with the IMF and World Bank.⁷ By contrast, many of the major African and Latin American countries were governed by military regimes that came to power through Western-backed coups against anti-colonial leaders, and were willing to align with Western economic interests.

Even so, SAPs had a serious impact on food security in China and India. In 1988, China entered into a SAP with the World Bank, under which it agreed to dismantle its socialist system of public provisioning and price controls, which had previously guaranteed access to food at low cost.⁸ This caused a dramatic spike in the cost of basic subsistence in the early 1990s. Even though national income increased in China during this period, rising food prices pushed over 60% of the Chinese population into extreme poverty, measured in terms of access to basic needs.

Something similar happened in India, where the proportion of the rural population consuming insufficient calories increased from 56% in 1973-4 to 76% in 2009-10.⁹ There was a similar increase among the urban population. According to the Indian economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, this occurred because neoliberal reforms reallocated agricultural production away from food for working-class people and towards cash crops for export to the global North.

Only a few countries managed to resist SAPs and avoid succumbing to neoliberal policy. Cuba is one of them. Cuba managed to maintain universal public provisioning systems while they were dismantled or prevented across the rest of the global South.  As a result, Cuba has some of the best social indicators of any country in the global South today.¹⁰

This is clear when it comes to nutrition. Since the revolution of 1959, Cuba’s socialist government has funded a public food programme designed to ensure universal access to basic nutritional requirements.¹¹ Thanks to this system, Cuba has one of the lowest death rates due to malnutrition in the world, lower even than in many high-income countries, such as the United States and France. Remarkably, Cuba has achieved this while subject to an illegal US-imposed blockade that prevents them from importing essential goods.¹² This demonstrates the power of public provisioning, and illustrates what could have been achieved elsewhere in the global South if structural adjustment had not been imposed.

This map illustrates recent research showing deaths due to malnutrition in excess of Cuban levels over the period 1980 to 2021. The map tells us how many people died who would not have died if their country's death rate from malnutrition were equivalent to Cuba's. This includes 33 thousand deaths in the US; 708 thousand in Mexico; 1 million in China; 2 million in Indonesia; and 4 million in India. In total, 21 million excess deaths could have been prevented with Cuba-style policies.¹³ 

These results illustrate the enormous human toll of neoliberal policy. The data demonstrates that millions of people have died in neoliberal economies where public food systems have either been dismantled or prevented.

Of course, neo-liberalism is not the only factor that has prevented countries from achieving similar health outcomes to Cuba. North Korea, for instance, has suffered 836 thousand excess deaths from malnutrition since 1980, despite having spent a relatively short amount of time under SAPs (4 years). This is a result of North Korea's authoritarian and undemocratic government, which oversaw a major famine in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, given the role that SAPs have played in deflating incomes and exacerbating hunger over the last 50 years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that neo-liberal policies bear substantial responsibility for these 21 million preventable deaths.  

Africa & Russia: The Anti-Imperialist Partnership For Our Future

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — Africa & Russia: The Anti-Imperialist Partnership For Our Future

Africa & Russia: The Anti-Imperialist Partnership For Our Future

Article 8 of 12

Hood Communist

By Coalition for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa

Originally published at https://hoodcommunist.org/2024/12/07/africa-russia-the-anti-imperialist-partnership-for-our-future/

Neo-colonial governments have been toppled in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger (henceforth “the Alliance of Sahel States”). Revolutionary governments, backed by popular movements, have seized power and resurrected the flame of revolution in Africa. From the outbreaks of the rebellions that toppled neo-colonialism to today, it is common to see the people raising Russian flags along their national flags. For Africans, Russia represents a win-win cooperation and a partner against Western hegemony. Despite Western media’s desperate strategy to paint Russia as an imperial power and a colonial force that Africans should be wary of, a thorough study of history and a proper understanding of imperialism demonstrates that Russia has never been an imperialist or a colonial force in Africa, nor is it now. 

Pre Soviet Union Tsarist Russian empire had limited contact with Africa as it didn’t have the resources nor the wish, although it didn’t lack the colonial ambitions. Its focus was more towards Asia and Europe. Tsarist Russia was invited to the Berlin Conference, but it did not claim any territory in Africa. With the October Revolution of 1917, the political landscape of both Russia and the world changed. It was the beginning of the new multipolar world and a weakening of colonial powers of the West. Africa and the colonized world took notice of that and immediately went to work on their liberation struggles. The Soviet Union for its part championed national liberation struggles because of Lenin and the Bolsheviks analysis of imperialism and the necessity to defeat it for the world to be at peace. That necessity remains true to this day as capitalism and imperialism are wreaking havoc all over the planet and especially in the continent. 

The Soviet Union, in which Russia was an integral part of, supported African liberation movements and was a critical part of the independence wave of the 1960s. This included bolstering calls for independence at the UN and using its major political sway to advocate and support African anti-colonial movements. They also trained and funded revolutionaries and intellectuals not just in Africa but from the global African diaspora. They supported the African struggles in the US against Jim Crow apartheid, liberation movements like FLN in Algeria, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and the newly liberated nations like Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nassar. The Soviet Union provided an alternative to the imperialist world system and allowed us to build an autonomous national and regional economy and provided access to technology that would have been otherwise kept outside of our reach by imperialist knowledge and technology gatekeeping. 

All the while, the imperialist West, with the consolidation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) after WW2, had been the antithetical vanguard defending the colonizer’s world order. They provided arms to the Portuguese against PAIGC, FRELIMO and MPLA, they worked with the settler colonial government in South Africa, and labeled liberation movements and their leaders as terrorists to constrain the support they received in all fronts. 

After a long imperialist onslaught, the Soviet Union was overthrown. Russia emerged as an independent political economy working along the lines of world capitalism but still antagonistic to Western imperialism. Russia’s position in the now unipolar world created new contradictions but also new opportunities for nations struggling against Western hegemony.

The modern day relationship between Russia and African countries predates the founding of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). A little known fact amongst Pan-Africanists is that the Central African Republic (CAR) signed a defense agreement with Russia and chased out the French army before the AES did. France, which had over 1500 troops in the CAR began withdrawing in 2016 and the country signed a defense agreement with Russia in 2018. Despite the presence of thousands of imperialist troops including the so-called stabilizing mission of MINUSCA (United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic), the CAR continued to be disrupted by violence perpetrated by various Western-backed rebel groups which lead to severe losses amongst the national armed forces. The president of CAR, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, stated that France’s refusal to give them weapons to fight against terrorists prompted him to turn to Russia. 

Despite claims that Russian soldiers were committing human rights abuses by mouth pieces of imperialism like Human Rights Watch, many protests took place in the capital of CAR, Bangui, in support of Russia after the war in Ukraine began. The people support Russia because Russia has been a reliable partner. In 2021, Russian soldiers working alongside the Central African Armed Forces, successfully neutralized rebel groups that were attempting to capture the capital. In May 2024, Russia in collaboration with the CAR army, liberated 21 Chadian soldiers who had been captured by Western-backed militants. Chad’s defense minister expressed gratitude to Russia, noting that Russia had always been a reliable partner for African countries, unlike France, Great Britain and the United States, which only benefited from Africans. 

Russia has been collaborating with the heavily sanctioned Zimbabwe for several years. The country was punished with brutal sanctions following the land reform in 2000 which took the land from white settlers and returned it to the indigenous population. The Zimbabwean Vice President, Constantino Chiwenga, stated that the country had lost more than $150 billion due to those sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States. Africa is the most sanctioned continent on the planet and thanks to the rise in power and influence of Russia and China, these sanctions do not asphyxiate African countries the way they used to. Russia and China offer us alternatives without interfering in our internal affairs and respect our sovereignty. 

Russia’s partnership with the countries of the AES is subject to much speculation. The AES currently represents the greatest threat to western imperialism and a partnership with an undeniably anti-imperialist country like Russia, is our enemies worst nightmare. That is why the Western media is working overtime to demonize Russia and encourage Africans to reject any collaboration. Unfortunately for them, Africa’s closeness with Russia is strongly supported and encouraged by the masses because they recognize the material advantages of this partnership. 

Prior to the arrival of our beloved Captain Ibrahim Traore in Burkina Faso, 60% of the national territory was controlled by NATO-backed and sponsored mercenaries and death squads. In an interview, President Traore spoke of the difficulties they had purchasing lethal weapons from NATO countries. Thanks to their military agreement with Russia, the Burkinabe armed forces have been able to acquire high tech military equipment which has enabled them to recapture their territory. On November 14th, 2023, the Malian army finalled reclaimed Kidal, a town in northern Mali which for the past decade had been a stronghold of NATO-backed mercenaries and death squads. Such an achievement wouldn’t have been possible without the military agreement between Mali and Russia. Today, the FAMA’s (Malian armed forces) is one of the most powerful armies in Africa and the state now has control over the entirety of its territory. While the real imperialists (USA and France) sponsor the destabilization of the region, Russia is helping Africa combat it. 

Due to the severe underdevelopment of the continent by the imperialist camp, Africa lacks the science and technology that is necessary for economic and social progress. The Sahel, like most of Africa, suffers from terribly low energy production. Niger, a country massively rich in high grade uranium, a mineral needed to produce energy, has a terribly low electricity generation. Less than 20% of Nigeriens have access to electricity 24hrs a day. Without energy we cannot develop industry. That is why the Nigerien government has partnered with Russia to build a solar power plant which will increase generation capacity by 60 percent. In Mali, construction has begun on the largest photovoltaic solar power plant in West Africa. The 200MW plant, built in partnership with Russia, is expected to boost national electricity production by 10%. You will not find a single example in history where an imperial power has helped an African country develop industries. You will not find a single example where an imperialist country has brought light to Africa. While less than 20% of Nigeriens have access to consistent electricity, one in three lightbulbs in France is powered by uranium stolen from Niger. The imperialists view Africa as a zone of extraction that provides the resources needed for them to develop industries in their metropoles. The partnership with Russia has not only allowed for the military growth of the AES countries but it has also benefited their social and economic progress due to the transfer of scientific and technological knowledge needed to develop thriving societies capable of defending their sovereignty. 

While Russia has undeniable interest in the resources of the Sahel, the way it goes about acquiring these resources is vastly different from the methods of the imperialists which are generally economic intimidation and violence. Russia comes in when asked and cooperates with us in a respectful manner that doesn’t threaten our sovereignty. Like the people of the Sahel like to say, cooperation with Russia is a win-win. 

We do not deny the contradictions that exist in the presence of Russia in Africa. Its role in Sudan has been rightfully criticized due to their previous support of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group that is destabilizing the country to facilitate the extraction of the national resources for US proxies like the United Arab Emirates. Despite this contradiction, Russia can still not accurately be described as an imperial force or a country seeking to colonize Africa. An error in judgment or a poor decision does not warrant Russia (or China) to be lumped in with imperialist countries like the United States of America that have been sponsoring genocide, tyranny and mass suffering in Africa for centuries. The contradictions created by neo-colonialism cannot be blamed solely on external factors. It is the duty of Africans to organize to overthrow the neo-colonial governments that hold most of Africa hostage rather than expecting other nations to close the door to them. Russia, nor China, should not be expected to only work with progressive governments in Africa. What we do expect is that countries who wish to partner with Africa do not intervene in our internal affairs nor do they compromise our sovereignty. 

Beyond the African continent, Russia has developed relations with other countries that resist Western imperialism. While NATO continues to occupy Syria, it is Russia who is assisting them in defending their sovereignty. Russia has been instrumental in helping Iran develop its defense and security sector which allows Iran to be a critical member of the Axis of Resistance and to play a significant role in defending Palestine against the Euro-American Zionist aggression. Russia has also stood by countries, such as Venezuela and Cuba by offering diplomatic backing against the imperialist camp led by the United States of America. 

In his seminal book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney, clearly lays out who the enemies of Africa are. The underdevelopment of Africa can be traced back to the colonial exploitation, dispossession of our land, economic extraction, and systemic disfranchisement imposed by European powers and their settler colonial creations like the United States of America, Australia and Canada. Rodney asserts that, “[The] association of wealth with whites and poverty with blacks is not accidental. It is the nature of the imperialist relationship that enriches the metropolis at the expense of the colony.’’

Through their institutions such as NATO, the IMF, the World Bank and the United Nations, the imperialists are able to capture the sovereignty of many African countries using military, economic and ideological means. 

In 2008, under the leadership of Barack Obama, the United States heightened its aggression in Africa through the expansion of AFRICOM, the US Africa Command. In one of the greatest act of contemporary destabilization of Africa, AFRICOM, along with its NATO allies, lead a military invasion of the Great Socialist Libyan Jamahiriya which ended in the assassination of the revolutionary Pan-Africanist Muammar Gaddafi and Libya, which had once been the most thriving state in Africa, was turned into a failed state where slavery thrives. 

The murder of Gaddafi and the destruction of socialist Libya had massive consequences for the African continent. NATO-backed mercenaries got a hold of Libya’s arms stash and spread throughout the region occupying major zones and wreaking havoc on behalf of their employers, the imperialists. Mali and Niger have stated at the United Nations that they have proof that NATO countries are sponsoring terrorist groups in the region. In July 2024, Ukrainian officials working alongside these mercenaries orchestrated an attack against the Malian armed forces in the northern city of Tinzaouaten which led to the loss of 47 Malian and 84 Russian soldiers. 

The presence of NATO countries and their proxies such as Ukraine and Israel has created a situation of prolonged low-intensity genocide in Africa. In 2007, prior to the establishment of AFRICOM, only 1% of global terrorism deaths were in the Sahel. By 2023, deaths in the Sahel constituted 47% of terrorism deaths. It is imperative for Africans to understand once and for all that AFRICOM, which was created under the guise of combating the spread of terrorism in Africa, is in fact the greatest sponsor of terrorism in Africa.The imperialist have created a vicious cycle where they arm and sponsor terrorism in order to expand their presence in Africa under the guise of combatting said terrorism. The real purpose of AFRICOM, like all other western imperialist occupations, is to kill Africans and seize our resources. 

Today, the imperialists continue their aggression against African sovereignty by targeting the Alliance of Sahel States. Captain Ibrahim Traore, president of Burkina Faso, has already survived numerous assassination attempts by the NATO proxy state Ivory Coast. Through the NATO controlled ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), they implemented genocidal sanctions against the AES in an attempt to break the spirit of the masses and block the progress of their revolution. Using their propaganda apparatus, they have launched a disinformation campaign against the AES leadership, accusing them of targeting certain ethnic groups, siphoning funds and even went as far as accusing their armies of cannibalism. This is part of the interventionist technique of painting revolutionary governments as authoritarian despots and its population needing to be ‘saved’ by the imperialists.

In other parts of Africa, NATO countries continue to bomb Somalia, orchestrate a genocide in the Eastern part of Congo and cripple the economies of Eritrea, Central African Republic and Zimbabwe through brutal sanctions. Today France still controls the economies of 14 African countries through the colonial currency, the CFA franc. To compare Russia to the imperialists, is to deny the savage crimes they have committed and continue to commit against Africa. NATO, led by the United States of America, is the single greatest enemy of the African continent. 

The reflex to view Russia as an enemy is by design. From a young age, the American entertainment industry— a crucial arm of western imperialism— has prepared us to view Russians as inherently cruel, corrupt, and criminal. The most common Russian stereotypes in American Media reflect the political context of America and Russia. During the cold war, Russians were depicted as secret agents, supervillains and nuclear threats. Post Cold-War, the image shifted to Russians as symbols of lawlessness, organized crime, and governmental corruption. Today, America continues to project its imperial anxieties onto the Russian people by portraying them as technological hackers, gangsters and corrupt Russian oligarchs. These Hollywood stereotypes carry over into imperialist news outlets such as CNN, BBC and France24 that proliferate russophobia by distorting and sensationalizing information from that country. While Russia is painted as the villain, imperialist countries are portrayed as defenders and saviors of humanity. This is all designed to manufacture bias against Russia and sanitize the image of our enemies. To make us fear an alleged future colonization by Russia and ignore the current colonial powers who continue to expand their occupation of our continent and murder our people. 

Perhaps your first question now is: Why would the West put in so much resources and energy against Russia and why should it concern Africans? Because Africa will be free, but not in isolation and our enemies know that. We need partners who will respect our sovereignty and share our struggle against western imperialism. After several centuries of underdevelopment at the hands of the imperialist camp, Africa is scientifically and technologically underdeveloped. 

Without assistance in waging our struggle for genuine sovereignty, the price in blood would be extremely high. The emergence of Russia and China has opened a path that will benefit all colonized people fighting for their emancipation. The multipolar world is back and similar to the time of the counter hegemonic presence of the Soviet Union, it will allow for great strides for the liberation movements in the struggle for Pan-Africanism. 

Under US/NATO-hegemony, African countries have limited choice but to align with the nations that oppress them due to the fear of economic intimidation and/or military aggression. A multipolar world reduces this vulnerability and gives African countries more choice and flexibility in how they decide to engage on the world stage. In addition, African countries are able to express their sovereignty by allowing the people’s needs and voices to guide the economic and social policies of their country. This sort of self determination is difficult when our continent lives under the fear of displeasing the imperialists who could ‘punish’ them with impunity.

Today, the world is divided into two camps, the imperialist camp and the anti-imperialist camp. Russia is a long time member of the latter and Africa has the greatest potential to destroy the former. After all, the strength of the imperialist camp lies in its exploitation of African resources, both material and human. A partnership between Africa and Russia allows for greater progress in the Pan-African struggle which then accelerates the demise of the imperialist camp. Like the great Pan-Africanist Ahmed Sékou Touré stated, imperialism will find its grave in Africa. If we are to live up to our historical duty to bring about that outcome, then we must stop deceiving ourselves by thinking that Africa should free itself using only its current internal capacities. We must also not be deceived by our enemies, the imperialists and their lackeys, who wish to stop us from developing strategic relationships. The multipolar world is here and if Africa is to play a critical role in it then we must strengthen our ties with new powers like Russia, China and Iran and advance our struggle to liberate our continent. 

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Against the Rule of Property: Violence, Land Reclamation, and Decolonization

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — Against the Rule of Property: Violence, Land Reclamation, and Decolonization

Against the Rule of Property: Violence, Land Reclamation, and Decolonization

Article 9 of 12

Dr. Bikrum Gill

By Bikrum Gill

Originally published at https://worldsystems.substack.com/p/against-the-rule-of-property-violence

Against the Rule of Property

What I aim to demonstrate in this paper is that material questions of sovereignty and land reclamation remain paramount to advancing and achieving decolonization. I do not mean to minimize the importance of epistemic and ontological decolonization, but rather intend to foreground how the empowerment of ‘other’ ways of knowing and being requires first an overcoming of the ongoing sovereign power exercised by Western/Northern capital over the territories of colonized and imperially subjugated peoples. To do so, I will closely engage the work of the pre-eminent theorist of decolonization, Frantz Fanon, in order to clarify first how colonialism emerges and is reproduced through specific material-conceptual relations and modes of power – global capitalist property relations – that are both premised upon, and in turn further reinforce, the violent denial of sovereign capacity to colonized peoples. The upholding of the “rule of property” – that capital is the most rational and productive agency for managing labor and land – affirms white/Euro-Western sovereignty over the planet’s resources and denies such capacity to non-Western/racialized peoples. The colonial register of the “rule of property” functions to effectively appropriate, in service of the accumulation imperatives of the capital of the colonizing core, the surplus value of world-scale production relations that simultaneously impoverish and “underdevelop” the colonized periphery.

Having recalled and clarified the material foundations of colonialism, I then, continuing to follow Fanon, turn to arguing that decolonization is at its most fundamental level premised upon overturning the “rule of property” that has denied sovereign capacity to colonized peoples. As the rule of property is ultimately itself grounded on the violent seizure of colonized lands, so Fanon argues that it can only be overturned through a violent response that compels the holders of colonial property to give up the land so that it can be then redistributed on a broad collective basis to emergent independent peoples. It is only through violence, Fanon argues, that stolen land and wealth can be reclaimed, and thus other “non-violent” routes to decolonization can only inevitably produce a quasi-sovereignty lacking in the material means - reclaimed and redistributed wealth and resources - necessary for the practice of effective political sovereignty.

The conceptual clarity regarding the imperative of violence in overturning the colonial “rule of property” has not, however, translated into a smooth historical road to decolonization. The constraint here is that those individual decolonizing states that have successfully overturned the colonial rule of property find themselves simultaneously violating the precise elemental condition that the broader colonial world order insists that they satisfy in order to be recognized as possessing sovereign capacity. Thus, while such revolutionary states have gone the furthest in securing the material conditions - eg nationalization, land redistribution, domestic capital formation - for decolonization, they continue to confront a hostile colonial “international community” that racializes them as authoritarian and despotic for having “irrationally” subjugated the colonial rule of property beneath a form of collective state power. In violating the rule of property, decolonizing states are denied recognition as sovereigns and thus subject to forms of intervention - military, financial, etc - that threaten re-colonization. On the other hand, those reformist anti-colonial movements which pursued a conciliatory route to decolonization, based on negotiation and compromise that enshrined the sanctity of global capitalist property rights into the postcolonial era, were more readily welcomed as sovereign state actors by the colonial “international community.” The contradiction here, however, is that in upholding the colonial rule of property such states remained dependent on capital, or development aid, based in the Imperial core for their economic development. Such dependence functions to re-inscribe the Euro-Western sovereign sign and undermine the sovereign capacity necessary for effective decolonization.

In light of the contradictions and constraints confronting both the violent revolutionary path and the non-violent reformist/conciliatory path, it is perhaps not surprising that the material foundations for a decolonization of world politics have yet to be realized. Nonetheless, this paper argues that the revolutionary path, that overturns the colonial rule of property by any means necessary, has advanced the project of decolonization more so than the conciliatory path that has upheld the sanctity of global capitalist property rights as a means of attaining formal sovereign recognition. The revolutionary path has more effectively reclaimed land and resources from colonial capitalist property holders and redistributed them on a broad socialist basis, enabling thereby the mobilization of national resources towards aims such as food self-sufficiency, poverty alleviation, and livelihood security. The consistency with which the hostile colonial world order has intervened to undermine the sovereign capacity of such revolutionary decolonizing states has, however, meant that the conciliatory/reformist path has been the more predominant one through the long era of formal decolonization. This has meant that the great majority of decolonizing states have not sufficiently implemented policies of nationalization and land redistribution capable of overturning the colonial rule of property and, as a consequence, remain dependent, for their development objectives, on the dead end of foreign direct capital investment or “aid” from the colonial/imperial core. The decolonization of world politics thus necessitates the defense of the sovereignty of revolutionary decolonizing states and the expansion of the challenge to the rule of property through the transformation of quasi-sovereign conciliatory/reformist recolonized states into effectively sovereign revolutionary decolonized states.

The argument regarding the necessary material foundations of decolonization will be demonstrated in this paper through a comparative analysis of particularly representative case studies of states that have challenged, or upheld, the colonial rule of property across three eras corresponding with the rise, fall, and potential renewal of the project of decolonization. I will begin with a comparative analysis of two of the most prominent decolonial and anti-imperial projects associated with the rise of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century: the revolutionary communist path in China and the conciliatory liberal path in India. Both China and India suffered some of the worst excesses of colonial and imperial rule across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the triangular opium trade between China, India, and the UK generating severe hunger and poverty in China and India and vast wealth and capital formation for the UK and the colonial powers more generally. While the colonial-international community has long heroized the conciliatory liberal decolonization path adopted in India it has, on the other hand, vilified and denigrated the revolutionary communist path adopted in China. Such value judgement, it will be demonstrated, has less to do with an anxiety or concern with human rights or good governance, and more to do with how China’s armed peasant led communist revolution fundamentally overturned the landed order instituted by imperialism and thus substantively developed the material foundations of decolonization. The Chinese revolutionary program of nationalization, land reform, and rural communes effectively ended the claim of Western capital to sovereign right over China’s labor and resources which is what ultimately accounts for the villainization of the Chinese revolutionary state by the colonial-international community. The Indian liberal conciliatory path, on the other hand, was necessarily incapable of overturning the colonial rule of property and functioned instead to largely protect the landed order instituted by the colonial state. This hindered India’s capacity to generate an inclusive broad based path of decolonization that could generate forms of domestic resource mobilization that could more fundamentally break free from dependence on Western capital investment and development aid.

The Chinese revolution opened an armed peasant led trajectory, centered upon land reclamation, that would come to constitute a prominent path of anticolonial revolution pursued across much of the twentieth century. This path would culminate in the peasant led Vietnamese revolution and the contemporaneous calls in the UN for a New International Economic Order that would enshrine the rights of decolonizing states to “permanent sovereignty over natural resources” and transfer investible resources, in the form of reparations, from North to South. This path would, however, come to be largely abandoned due to the Neoliberal debt crisis imposed upon the Global South and the post Cold War geopolitical context that removed a vital “alternative” source of resource mobilization. This paper will further consider how post-apartheid South Africa and the Oslo peace process in Palestine would come to signify, in particular, the consolidtion of the “non-violent” reconciliatory approach that constitutionally enshrined colonial property rights and thus necessitated the abandonment of the land question that had hitherto been central to the decolonial revolution. It is within such a context, I argue, that the return of anti-colonial land reclamation in Zimbabwe and Palestine in the early twenty-first century assumes world-historical significance, interrupting the liberal “end of history” thesis of the “rule of property” with the ontological re-emergence of those dispossessed by colonial property regimes.

Foundations of Colonialism: Property, Sovereignty, and Race

The clearest articulation of the premise of colonization remains the one offered by Frantz Fanon in his seminal text on decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon arrived at this clarity by counterposing what he felt to be the “truth” embodied by the fellah/peasant in the colonized countryside against the

deception which had fallen upon those who had been most integrated into the colonial system - urban intellectuals, trade unions, etc. The colonized intellectuals and union leaders of the city conceded too much ideological ground to the colonizers in centering questions of culture, identity, values, progress, and political and economic reforms in the colonial contestation. This functioned to conceal, and hence reproduce, what the fellah/peasant, owing to their structural location in the countryside, had not forgotten: that the material foundation, and most definitive relation, of colonialism consisted of the colonizer’s violent appropriation of land and usurpation of sovereignty from the colonized. Fighting for increased political representation, recognition of one’s culture and identity, or a greater share of economic value without questioning the sovereign right of the colonizer to adjudicate upon such matters further consolidates colonialism and works against decolonization.

What Fanon centers as the material foundations of colonialism - the violent appropriation of land and usurpation of sovereignty - gives rise to, and is in turn legitimated by, what I characterize as the distinctive colonial-capitalist register of the “rule of property.” This concept is a deliberate play on the exalted role assigned, by the Western bourgeois tradition, to the rule of law in securing modern state formation and unlocking sustained economic development (Weber; Rostow; North). The victory of the rule of law is held to have enabled a rationalization of governance by replacing the arbitrary, or despotic, rule of the absolutist king with a rule of law that would be equally applied to all regardless of their role as either the governing or governed. The rule of law involves, significantly, the constitutional enshrinement of property rights that protects the property of citizens from arbitrary seizure by the state. This then instills in the property holder the necessary motivation to invest in their property in order to improve it. The rule of law is assumed to set in motion economic development and modernization by transferring ultimate control over the mobilization of labor and land from the ‘irrational’ and ‘wasteful’ logic of the absolutist state to the ‘rational’ and ‘productive’ logic of private self-interested capitalist property.

The Marxist tradition has complicated the bourgeois thesis of modernization by demonstrating the violent and irrational foundations of the property relations the rule of law sets out to defend against the ostensibly despotic designs of the absolutist state. Specifically, Marx uncovered capitalist property’s emergence through waves of enclosures in Western Europe that created a class of property owning capitalists, on the one hand, and, on the other, a dispossessed class with no other means of surviving than selling their labor power to those who now exclusively owned the means of production. Peasants contesting their dispossession, or laborers advocating for welfare measures that would reduce their dependence on the property owning capitalist class, would seek justice from the very state that the bourgeois modernization thesis reduces to despotism (Polanyi). The enshrinement of property rights amounts, thus, to the legal ‘absolutist’ - in the sense that the state could only enforce and not impinge upon property - consolidation of the dispossession through which capitalist property emerged. The rule of law must be apprehended, in significant part, as effecting a shift towards the “rule of property.” The modernizing entrepreneurial spirit unlocked by this logic of rule has built into it a premise of inequality and exclusion that generates investable capital through the appropriation of surplus value from the exploited labor of the dispossessed class.

The rule of property operates, from its inception, as a world-scale system of power and production encompassing, in addition to the capital-labor relation identified above, an underlying colonial relation. Enclosure in the originary colonies of the Americas generated a distinctive register of property that both instituted, and was itself premised upon, the denial of sovereign capacity to dispossessed colonized people. As Antony Anghie (2004) has shown, it was the refusal of Indigenous Americans to submit to Spanish colonial encroachment that constituted the motivating problem for the development of modern international law. The founding legal theorist of international law, Francisco de Vitoria, argued that European Christians and Indigenous Americans were bound to respect one another’s sovereignties under principles of natural law. If, however, Indigenous sovereigns denied the Spanish the “right to trade” in their territories they would effectively forfeit their sovereignty over the lands in question. In so much as Indigenous presence, in and of itself, constituted a sufficient threat to the Euro-Christian right to trade, this founding doctrine of international law called forth, as legal right, the European sovereign right over Indigenous lands. Vitoria held that Indigenous Americans, though possessing the capacity for rational perfection, had not been able to autonomously realize such perfection and thus remained trapped in an earlier ‘irrational’ stage of development from which the Spanish had progressed. Such irrationality was confirmed whenever Indigenous people would inevitably refuse Spanish encroachment on their lands. The irrational refusal of the “right to trade” would, through an emergent logic of race, come to stand as evidence of a broader irrational incapacity to convert nature into property for the purposes of productive resource mobilization (Sluyter, 2001). European Christians, on account of their distinct rational capacity for generating and upholding property, were thus, according to emergent international law, the rightful sovereigns of Indigenous peoples and their lands. Under European sovereignty, moreover, the conditions were secured for both Indigenous peoples to move towards rational perfection and for their resources to be mobilized by rational and productive, rather than irrational and wasteful, logics of rule. Similar to how the rule of law enshrines property, and legalizes its founding enclosure, in the story of modern state formation and capitalist development in Europe, international law functions to protect European colonial enclosure from contestation on the part of Indigenous peoples. In so doing, it generates and upholds a distinctive colonial rule of property that accords sovereign right over colonized land, labor, and resources, to European Christian states. The rule of the “law among nations” may perhaps secure the necessary framework with which sovereign states feel secure to trade with, and invest in, one another, but it must also be apprehended as upholding a “colonial rule of property” that generates sovereign right for colonizing states through the enclosure of the territories of colonized peoples who are subsequently denied that same right.

This global rule of property, encompassing both the classed capital-labor relation and the racialized denial of sovereign right, has operated as the structuring logic of the colonial-capitalist international system since its inception in the long sixteenth century. In colonized space, it has classically taken a range of forms including the plantation, encomienda, hacienda, and latifundia in the Americas (Sauer; Wynter; Blackman), the invented customary authority, or quasi-sovereignty, that colonized states instituted in colonized African territories (Fanon, Mamdani), and the zamindari and ryotwari systems in South Asia. These property regimes were premised upon a racialized assumption of an ‘irrational’ capacity on the part of colonized peoples to productively and efficiently utilize the lands they inhabited, and the need therefore for sovereignty over these territories to be held by the rational colonial state that was distinct in its capacity to apply the productive logic of property. Colonial sovereignty is envisioned to both bring colonized lands to productive life and to instruct colonized people on how to become capable of upholding the rule of property. In practice, the instituted colonial property regimes function by constructing, and legally empowering, an ostensibly authentic Indigenous or local intermediary - say the zamindar or the tribal chiefly authority - who exercises a quasi-sovereign authority that forcefully orients colonized labor and land towards satisfying the material needs - industrial inputs, cheap wage-goods - of the colonizing core. This has the effect of concentrating the capital generated from colonial production in the colonizing core, and intensifying material deprivation, poverty, and hunger in the colonized peripheries. Significantly, the uneven development further reinforces the rule of property, as it renders colonized space dependent, for the sustenance of its social reproduction, on investable resources exclusively owned as “capital” in the colonizing core.

This characterization of the outcomes of colonial-capitalism has, of course, been articulated countless times. Yet, this paper insists, we must continue to center and recall the horrific nature of this unequal global system precisely for the reason that it persists even so long after much of the colonized world was formally decolonized. I now turn to considering how the long era of decolonization has confronted the ‘rule of property’ at the root of colonialism, and particularly focus here on what the effective overturning of this rule would entail and why such an imperative, though clear in its moral urgency, has failed to take hold to a broad enough extent to overcome the poles of material excess and deprivation that continue to stubbornly persist.

Foundations of Decolonization: Reclamation, Redistribution, and Reparations

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” - Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

In the light of Fanon’s clarity, the material foundations of decolonization need not require over theorization but rather can be stated quite simply as the restoration of sovereign right to colonized peoples, the necessary condition of which is itself the overturning of the rule of property so that land can be reclaimed, redistributed, and mobilized on a broader collective basis than that of the plantation, hacienda, or zamindari. Though Fanon, again, arrives at this clarity through his encounter with the fellah/peasant in the colonized Algerian countryside, it is an experience that is generalized across the anti-colonial space more broadly, as seen, for example, in the characterization of anti-colonialism as the “peasant wars of the twentieth century” (Wolf, 1969). The armed peasant led revolutions against the colonial rule of property in China and Vietnam were of particular inspiration for Fanon, as evidenced in his citing of the Vietnamese victory against French colonialism as signifying both the world-making promise of decolonization and the peril this brings for the reinscription of the sovereign sign of Western capital:

The Great Victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bein Phu is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory. Since July, 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been, ‘What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu? How can we manage it?’ Not a single colonized individual could ever again doubt the possibility of a Dien Bien Phu; the only problem was how best to use the forces at their disposal, how to organize them, and when to bring them into action. This encompassing violence does not work upon the colonized people only; it modifies the attitude of the colonialists who become aware of manifold Dien Bien Phus. This is why a veritable panic takes hold of the colonialist government in turn.

The armed confrontation, and ultimate anti-colonial victory, at Dien Bien Phu pre-figures a decolonized world in which the liberated peoples of the global South and settler colonies have reclaimed effective sovereignty over their land and labor by demonstrating their capacity to return to the colonizing world the material force - violence - with which it had usurped their sovereignty in the constitutiting space-time of colonization. For this reason, Fanon warns, the colonialist world finds itself preoccupied with what it views as its most urgent imperative - the derailment of further Dien Bien Phus through a re-colonizing project that appropriates the symbols and language of decolonization in order to intensify the dependence of the colonized world on the colonial core and re-secure, ultimately, the rule of property and the exclusive sovereign right of Western capital:

Their [the colonialists] purpose is to capture the vanguard, to turn the movement of liberation toward the right, and to disarm the people: quick, quick, let’s decolonize. Decolonize the Congo before it turns into another Algeria. Vote the constitutional framework for all Africa, create the French Communautae, but for God’s sake let’s decolonize quick….And they decolonize at such a rate that they impose independence on Houphouet-Boigny. To the strategy of Dien Bien Phu, defined by the colonized peoples, the colonialist replies by the strategy of encirclement – based on the respect of the sovereignty of states”

The colonizer responds to the pre-figurative world of Dien Bien Phu by being the first to pronounce “yes, let’s decolonize,” but this appropriating utterance works to foreclose the realization of the material foundations of decolonization. The yes is to a decolonization devoid of effective sovereignty, one in which the flight of colonial capital back to the metropolitan core in order to consign newly independent countries to a condition of dependence on the ‘former’ colonizer for access to the necessary investable resources with which they can overcome the material deprivation effected by colonization. Where this succeeds and the colonial rule of property is reaffirmed, now through the guise of a quasi-sovereign dependent ‘decolonized’ state, Fanon laments that here

the apotheosis of independence is transformed into the curse of independence, and the colonial power through its immense resources of coercion condemns the young nation to regression. In plain words, the colonial power says: Since you want independence, take it and starve.

To avoid the “curse of independence,” Fanon insists that anti-colonial movements must

flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us…We are not blinded by the moral reparation of national independence; nor are we fed by it. The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too…Europe is literally the creation of the third world. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples…So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: It’s a just reparation which will be paid to us.

The material foundations of decolonization consists of the reclamation of effective sovereignty over land and labor, the redistribution of these bases of wealth on a broader collective basis than the colonial rule of property, and the securing of investable resources from the former colonizers in the form of reparations. The institution of such foundations instigates, however, a renewed project, on the part of the colonial-international community to re-secure the material foundations of colonization. Here, we find that the colonizing core calls forth Vitoria’s founding dictum that set forth the colonial rule of property. They argue, that is, that nationalization and collective redistribution constitute a violation of the “right to trade” and thus racialize revolutionary states as ‘irrational’, ‘authoritarian’, and thus ‘dangerous’ in their exercise of sovereign right. Only those global South states that prove their ‘rational’ capacity to uphold the rule of property are welcomed into the international community of sovereign states. This condition, when satisfied, constitutes a yes to decolonization only in name; it more fundamentally re-secures the material foundations of colonialism insofar as it maintains the sovereign right of Western capital over the land and labor of the global South. For Fanon, it was only through a comprehensive program of land reform, one that structured the postcolonial state on a peasant rather than bourgeois/landlord basis, that effective political sovereignty, and thus substantive decolonization could be realized. Such a program would thus necessitate a convergence between the “national” and “agrarian” questions.

The Global South must shape the international order to come

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — The Global South must shape the international order to come

The Global South must shape the international order to come

Article 10 of 12

Progressive International

Originally published at https://progressive.international/wire/2023-07-18-the-global-south-must-shape-the-international-order-to-come/en/

We are the world’s majority, the voice of the vulnerable, and the keeper of the global consensus. Our position is for peace, sovereignty, and principled non-alignment.

The international order is undergoing a tectonic transformation. For the Global South, this process carries the promise of a new path of dignity and peace long denied to our people. But it also carries the risk that this tectonic shift will once again squeeze, sink or swallow our nations.

The war in Ukraine has already claimed many thousands of lives, destroyed livelihoods and critical infrastructure and created fear, loss and displacement.

But it has also had a marked impact on the nations and peoples of the Global South. From dramatic increases in the prices of food and fuel to the stifling pressure to choose sides, we have all felt the impacts of this war.

That is why we choose the path of non-alignment.

We choose peace at the diplomatic table over victory on the battlefield, because humanity is the first victim of war.

We choose not to impose sanctions, because economic warfare is still war — and cannot be the basis for solving humanity’s collective dilemmas.

We choose cooperation, because our common resources must be used to better our societies and halt the irreversible destruction of our climate, not accelerate their demise.

The Global South represents over 80 percent of the world’s population and more than 70 percent of global economic growth. Yet, we face relentless economic exploitation, political exclusion, and cultural erasure.

From the Sahara to the Sierra Maestra, from Bandung to Yan’an, our peoples have waged a long struggle for liberation from the indignities of that order.

For daring to seek our own path, we, too, have faced sanctions, interventions, and invasions — and the repeated demand of our involvement in conflicts not of our making.

Our history demands that we choose a different path — one that is pragmatic, that brings prosperity to our societies, and that recovers peace from the frictions of geopolitical antagonism.

We welcome the proposals advanced by the government of Brazil to form a Peace Club on Ukraine, and the 12-point position paper published by the People’s Republic of China, which calls for respect for the sovereignty of all countries and presents a positive vision for peace, collective security, and reconstruction.

These initiatives represent a starting point for a renewed project of non-alignment — a politics that is often mistaken for apathy or neutrality. It is neither. It reflects, instead, the continued struggle to chart a new world order — to create new political institutions that reject the zero-sum mentality of the Cold War and build a foundation for cooperation and peace.

As the architects of the non-aligned movement, Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote in 1954, non-alignment is a “positive, active, and constructive policy that, as its goal, has collective peace as the foundation of collective security.”

That is why we, progressive forces from around the Global South, reaffirm our commitment to non-alignment — and reject attempts to rob us of the capacity to chart our own futures.

Signatories:

Haqooq-Khalq-Party, Pakistan

Progressive Democratic Lawyers Forum, Pakistan

WAELE Africa, Pan-African

Congreso de los Pueblos, Colombia

Coalition for Revolution, Nigeria

Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, India

Wiphalas Across the World, Bolivia

Zimbabwe People's Land Rights Movement, Zimbabwe

this is the human race speaking...

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — this is the human race speaking...

this is the human race speaking...

Article 11 of 12

Return to Bandung

By Pranay Somayajula

Originally published at https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/this-is-the-human-race-speaking

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).

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.

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.

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:

Iran, Zionism, and the Defeat of the Imperialist Narrative

Unequal Exchange, Multipolarity and the New Mood — Iran, Zionism, and the Defeat of the Imperialist Narrative

Iran, Zionism, and the Defeat of the Imperialist Narrative

Article 12 of 12

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

Originally published at https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/iran-zionism-and-the-defeat-of-the-imperialist-narrative/

Editorial Note: In July 2024, AISC member Louis Allday was interviewed on the Iranian TV channel Ofogh. What follows is a slightly amended transcript of that interview.

Ofogh: Let’s begin with your field of expertise: suppressed histories and silenced texts.

How has this dynamic—of erasing or distorting historical narratives—contributed to the catastrophe and ongoing genocide in Palestine?

Dr. Allday: This dynamic has of course had a major role and that continues up to the present moment.

From the very beginning of the zionist movement’s propaganda campaign to justify their racist colonial venture , it both erased and distorted history in multiple ways, perhaps best exemplified by the well-known zionist phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land” which among other things deliberately erased the existence of the Palestinian people and their very long-standing connection to the land.

This idea was propagated in multiple different ways, including in literature as analysed by Ghassan Kanafani in his 1967 work On Zionist Literature . I mention Kanafani specifically as it was the 53rd anniversary of his murder by Israel yesterday. Anyway, tragically these zionist propaganda efforts had a lot of success and at least in the West, for the first few decades after the Nakba in 1948, the Palestinians were frequently either genuinely unknown or ignored and when they were acknowledged often actually considered the aggressors - supposedly backwards Arabs motivated by antisemitism and opposition to the ostensibly progressive forces of modernity as represented by Jewish, primarily European, settlers. This was true even among many on the Western left who largely accepted Israel’s self-mythologising narrative as a brave little state surrounded by hostile Arabs.

Things began to change for the better in the late 1960s and early 1970s in part because of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's (PFLP’s) activities in that period, including plane hijackings, that were intended specifically to bring the plight of the Palestinian people to global attention and raise awareness of their cause.

Generally speaking, the zionist narrative is ever-shifting and deeply cynical because it has no purpose or principles beyond justifying the unjustifiable and perpetuating the zionist project. So it shamelessly moves from, for example, denying the Nakba ever took place one minute, to the next, saying it was justified, and then threatening to commit another, which of course it is now actually doing today in front of our eyes.

So there are many crude, offensive and obvious zionist insults and lies but there are also more nuanced erasures and distortions that are also very damaging as they are often accepted by people who consider themselves allies of the Palestinians, these include the idea that the occupation began only in 1967, not 1948, that Israel became a racist, apartheid entity at some point not long ago rather than being one inherently, and the commonly repeated notion that someone like Netanyahu is an “extremist” who does not represent the state he leads, rather than being the perfect embodiment of it as he actually is in reality.

Another frequent and damaging erasure is the very important role that Israel plays in the U.S.-led imperialist system and how it serves U.S. interests, not manipulates or uses the U.S. Israel’s aggressions are sanctioned because they serve the U.S. agenda ultimately, not the other way around.

Yes, zionism is inherently violent and expansionist but it is only able to act on those instincts habitually without red lines or consequences because of the function it performs for the U.S. as its attack dog and battering ram in West Asia. I think it is extremely important for that point to be understood everywhere, but especially in those places subject to U.S. aggression such as Iran.

Related to this point, is the deliberate removal in much Western coverage of the Palestinian cause from the broader regional, and global, struggle against U.S. imperialism, a situation which results in many supporters of the Palestinians in the West simultaneously believing and often spreading imperialist lies and demonisation campaigns against the very movements and states that support the Palestinian cause, such as the Syrian Arab Republic up until December last year, and notably, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Ofogh: Now let’s turn to Iran. How has the general unfamiliarity of Western public opinion with Iran’s history—particularly its experience with colonialism and its complex relationship with the United States—contributed to the success of Zionist propaganda and the promotion of militaristic narratives?

Dr. Allday: This is an important question and major issue. As with virtually all important topics that it reports on, in Western media there is generally a kind of enforced historical amnesia when discussing Iran which is routinely portrayed in a very simplistic and deliberately ominous way that plays into broader Islamophobic ideas and Orientalist notions of non-Europeans, especially Muslims, being irrationally violent and aggressive and wanting to harm the West and its people.

In the UK recently, there has actually been a campaign in the media by its intelligence services intended to portray Iran and the IRGC in particular as a threat to Britain and the British people. Unsurprisingly, the modern history of U.S. and UK violence, sabotage and interference in Iran is frequently not mentioned at all and when it is, it is often downplayed or even subtly justified in some way. Likewise for Israel’s aggressions against Iran.

This point is related to what I already mentioned about divorcing the Palestinian struggle from the broader regional struggle against zionism and imperialism, which means that some who support Palestine in the West saw the recent war on Iran as being a “distraction” from the genocide in Gaza, rather than being a continuation and extension of the same fight and struggle.

When Iran’s support for Palestine is acknowledged, it is often dismissed as cynical and it is accused of using the Palestinians as pawns to serve its own interests. As a result, the deep intertwined history of revolutionary Iran and the Palestinian cause, as well as the anti-zionist and anti-imperialist cause more generally, is typically overlooked and misunderstood.

A simplistic sectarian frame is also sometimes utilised by the West in this context, and used to explain, for example, previous periods of tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia in a way that is misleading and deliberately obscures the role of U.S. imperialism and the countries fundamentally different relationships to it after the revolution in Iran in 1979. Instead a crude Shia-Sunni lens is imposed as though that explains everything.

What all of this means is that – though there are signs of change – generally speaking Iran is often seen by much of the Western public as an extremist and irrational aggressor and its legitimate aspirations and well-founded fears are not understood or acknowledged. Similarly as Dr. Max Ajl wrote about recently on the Lebanese website, Al Akhbar English, a false distinction is frequently drawn between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people, as though no Iranians actually support their government and state, which is of course absurd.

Ofogh: Let’s talk about the recent wave of awareness among younger generations in the West regarding Palestine and Gaza, particularly after October 7. In light of university protests, cultural events like concerts, public opinion polls, and generational divides—do you think we are witnessing the signs of a cultural or social revolution?

Do you believe the future of Western public opinion is shifting in favor of Palestine? Or will Zionist forces, through media and financial power, manage to manipulate public discourse once again?

Dr. Allday: I think the last eighteen months or so have demonstrated very clearly the stark and growing disconnect between vast swathes of public opinion across the West and the stances of their governments that supposedly rule on their behalf. I think this attitude is especially true of younger generations, but not unique to them. Zionists and their supporters routinely try to dismiss the Palestine solidarity movement as antisemitic or use other false and insulting labels, and they also dismiss artists and musicians who speak out as cynically jumping on a trend. The reality is that the ongoing protests and expressions of support for Palestine in the cultural sphere are the result of a genuine, heartfelt and organic movement that is outraged, heartbroken and shocked by the genocide and their governments’ unremitting support for it.

The various forms of suppression, censorship and intimidation that we have seen in the West – perhaps above all in the U.S., the UK and Germany – are only deemed necessary from the perspective of these states because of the size of the disconnect between government policy and public opinion, and the fear they feel as a result of that. They are clearly worried they are losing or have lost control of the narrative and are seeking to regain control through whatever means they have at their disposal, whether it's the police beating people in the street as we see in Germany especially often but also elsewhere, or officially classifying direct action protest groups as “terrorist” organisations as the UK state has just done. This has meant casting aside many of their own state norms and brutalising their own people regularly, even in supposedly liberal bastions like the Netherlands, whose police have repeatedly attacked peaceful student protestors for example.

What has been revealed once again is that Western democracies are perfectly happy to jettison what they claim are their defining traits - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, human rights etc - whenever the status quo feels threatened. Where this is all going to lead and how successfully these governments will be able to reassert their control and their narrative is an open and ongoing question.

My personal feeling is that something has shifted permanently and though even before October 7, Israel was already unpopular on a popular level generally in many Western countries, that has now shifted to a whole new level of disgust and outrage, and it is going to be very very hard for the zionist-imperialist narrative to regain common acceptance. That does not mean they won’t try of course, and I think we will see all sorts of deception and propaganda campaigns to try and shift things back and imply that there is a redeemable and non-genocidal Israel. This could involve the removal from power of Netanyahu and others at some point.

But for now, I would say that the public image of Israel has been majorly hit, if not entirely demolished, and more and more people are seeing it as the violent colonial entity that it is. I do not imagine that it will ever have a meaningful tourist industry ever again for example.

A key question is to what extent these Western publics will be able to accept or comprehend that their governments’ support for the genocide accurately reflects their role more broadly in the imperialist system, rather than simply being a result of zionist manipulation or interference.

Ofogh: Finally, how do you analyze the global consequences of the recent war? Given the scale of protests against Israel and the U.S., and the growing expressions of support for Iran, what are the long-term implications of this war on international politics and public sentiment?

Dr. Allday: I think in many ways it is too soon to say anything with certainty, and we must also be honest that the war is not over and most likely is only paused temporarily while the U.S. and Israel re-arm, re-group and re-strategise.

Militarily, it is now clear that even with assistance from all of its regional allies, and the U.S. and the UK militaries, the zionist state cannot adequately intercept Iran’s ballistic missiles, especially for any sustained period of time, and the significance of that cannot be overstated. It is a huge development and despite how they have tried to portray it, it is clear that Israel and the U.S. did not win the recent war. It is clear that the damage caused by Iran in only twelve days has been significantly downplayed and covered up by Israel and the Western media. That of course has enormous political implications.

But how exactly this will play out and what role public opposition to war and support for Iran in the West could play in any future conflict, or avoiding one, is an ongoing question.

In the UK context specifically, where I am, it is possible, maybe even likely, that the IRGC will be listed as a terrorist organisation and that will then be used to clamp down on expressions of support for Iran as a whole. I hope to be wrong but I am sad to say that I think the UK state, especially the current government under Keir Starmer, is willing to enter into a conflict with Iran in an even more direct way than it already has, even if it has little or no public support for such an action. They have demonstrated very clearly their disdain for transparency and democratic accountability.

What I think can already be said for sure is that Iran’s conflict with the U.S., Israel and the West is one of the key fronts in an ongoing global struggle in which the U.S. is desperately trying to hold on to its global hegemony and break any movement or state that stands in its way.

As such, a victory for Iran in that struggle would be a victory for the overwhelming majority of humanity, and especially for the peoples of the region who are suffering so much in manifold ways because of the imperalist-zionist dominance of it.

Citations

Citations

Towards a World Order without Hegemony: A Proposal from the Global South

Notes

¹ Editor’s note: Chen Qiren (1924–2017) was a Marxist political economist from Xinhui, Guangdong Province, who taught at Fudan University and made major contributions to the study of imperialism and colonial political economy. He authored 25 monographs and over 150 articles, and led a National Social Science Fund project on Marxist international political economy. In 2012, he received the Shanghai Academic Contribution Award in Philosophy and Social Sciences.

² Chen Qiren, Research on World Economic Development (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2002), 298.

³ Deng Xiaoping, ‘Speech at the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly’, People’s Daily, 11 April 1974.

⁴ Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism, vol. 1, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 81–97.

⁵ See A. F. Pollard, ‘The Balance of Power’, Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs 2, no. 2 (1923): 51–64.

⁶ United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 3201 (S-VI), Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, A/RES/3201(S-VI) (1 May 1974).

⁷ Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment, CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 63.

⁸ Ernesto Che Guevara, ‘On Development’, 25 March 1964.

⁹ UNCTAD, Proceedings, I: 26, 27, 32, 41.

¹⁰ UNCTAD, Proceedings, I: 15.

¹¹ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, ‘Final Communiqué of the Asia-Africa Conference’ (24 April 1955).

¹² The State Council, ‘Constitution of the People’s Republic of China’, The People’s Republic of China; Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Literature Research Office, Chronology of Mao Zedong (1949-1976) Vol. 5 (Beijing: Central Party Literature Press, 2013), 212.

Global South Struggles for Socialism and the Workers' Side of Marxism

Notes

In this article, the concept of national liberation is used in a broad sense to refer to the process of overcoming not just the colonial but also the neocolonial condition.

Lebowitz frequently referred to the “side of wage labor” as well as to “the side of workers.” However, I prefer the formulations “the side of the workers” or “the workers’ side,” since, as Lebowitz himself argued, it is misleading to reduce workers to wage labor alone.

Lebowitz first expounded his interpretation of Marx in Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). However, it was a lifelong project, and he further elaborated his main theses in later books, including a reworked version of Beyond Capital (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave McMillan, 2003), and in his final book, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020). All references to Beyond Capital in this text refer to the 2003 edition.

In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx described the six projected books as follows: “1. On Capital (contains a few introductory Chapters). 2. On Landed Property. 3. On Wage Labour. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market” (letter from Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, February 22, 1858). Marx also repeatedly mentioned this six-book plan in the Grundrisse.

Note that Lebowitz’s argument never turned entirely on Marx’s intention to write the projected book on Wage Labour. From the beginning, he insisted that, whether or not Marx intended to write such a book, it would have been necessary to do so. See Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 50.

My claim here is not that the working class of the Global North is completely and permanently integrated into the system, which was the erroneous argument of Western Marxists, but rather that it is relatively more instrumentalized and relatively more bound. For an excellent critique of Western Marxist defeatism in this regard, see John Bellamy Foster, “Western Marxism and the Myth of Capitalism’s Adamantine Chains,” Monthly Review 77, no. 9 (February 2026): 1–11.

“With the objective material bases of anti-imperialism deepening today, the chief question becomes one of the subjective material basis, that is, the revolutionary subject.” Notes from the Editors, Monthly Review 77, no. 4 (September 2025): 63.

“[I]t is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society,” Marx wrote in the Preface to the first edition of Capital. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1976), 92.

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, chapter 3.

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 151.

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 138.

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 138.

The thesis of semiproletarianization has been widely employed by the Agrarian South Network. See, for example, Lynne Ossome and Shirisa Naidu, “The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour” in Praveen Jha, Walter Chambati, and Lyn Ossome, eds., Labor Questions in the Global South (Singapore: Palgrave, 2021), 77, 79, 81–82. An earlier use is that of Cristobal Kay in “Latin America’s Agrarian Transformation: Peasantization and Proletarization” in Deborah Bryceson, Cristobal Kay, and Jos Mooj, eds., Disappearing Peasantries?: Rural Labor in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Rugby: Practical Action, 2000), 123–38.

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 155.

Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England has a fascinating and holistic perspective on the working class, addressing reproductive labor, and workers’ territorial and environmental embeddedness—in brief, workers’ lives and not just their labor. Also, the much-criticized presence of “Weltanschauung Marxism” in Engels’s Anti-Dühring should be understood as a valuable attempt to encapsulate and develop the workers’ perspective, even if Engels’s effort is necessarily limited by representing the workers’ side at a particular historical place and time.

Vera Zasulich to Karl Marx, February 16, 1881, Marxists Internet Archive, Marxists.org.

Karl Marx to Vera Zasulich, February/March, 1881, First Draft, Marxists Internet Archive, Marxists.org.

Marx to Zasulich, First Draft.

During a visit to Salvador Allende’s Chile in the early 1970s, Fidel lectured members of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, saying: “The art of revolution is the art of joining forces…joining…joining…joining…and joining” (Punto Final, September 22, 2000, author’s translation). On the views of Hồ (Nguyễn Ái Quốc), see Simin Fadaee, Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 60. Cabral called for “a broad front of unity and struggle that is vital for the success of the national liberation movement,” pointing out how building it requires “a rigorous analysis of the indigenous social structure and the trends of its evolution” (Amílcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979], 132).

The configuration of the revolutionary bloc is not fixed but changes over time. Part of the genius of both Lenin and Mao lay in their ability to draw the boundaries of the revolutionary bloc and, crucially, to revise those boundaries in response to shifting circumstances and the advances or setbacks of the struggle. Similarly, Cabral distinguished between the population (a demographic category) and the people (who belong to the struggle), emphasizing that the latter is a historically variable category. As Cabral put it: “We have to understand clearly, therefore, that in each phase of a nation’s history, of a land, of a population, of a society, the people are defined in terms of the main stream of the history of that society, in terms of the highest interests of the majority of that society” (Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 89–90).

Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik observe that Third World anti-imperialist nationalism has historically been inclusive, not looking for internal enemies, as in the case of right-wing chauvinist nationalism. Moreover, the nationalism in Third World contexts has not positioned itself above the people but in the service of them, nor has it been aggrandizing but rather seeks “fraternal links with anti-imperialist struggles elsewhere” (Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021], 335–36). On the question of revolutionary mythmaking, Mariátegui is the most salient theorist. He understood myth as a revolutionary force, both in the capacity of socialist ideals—such as the concept of the Final Struggle—to mobilize the masses in dependent countries, and in the way millenarian imaginaries, including the rebirth of the Incan Tawantinsuyu (Four Regions) in contemporary Peru, could be articulated with modern socialism. José Carlos Mariátegui, El Alma Matinal y Otros Estaciones del Hombre de Hoy y El Artista y la Época (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2011), 51, 53–56.

It may be objected that many peasants are proprietors and some live by exploiting the labor of others. However, most peasants in Lenin’s context, as in the world today, subsist primarily through their own labor, while being exploited indirectly by creditors and through the monopolies that buy their products and sell them agricultural inputs. Unlike Plekhanov, who dismissed the peasantry since they were not industrial workers, Lenin saw revolutionary potential in them, and he included the poor and middle peasants in the overarching category of the toiling masses.

In considering how to maintain the worker-peasant alliance, “Lenin constantly stressed the fact that workers’ power was, as it were, ‘on trial’ before the peasants. The proletarian leaders would take the initiative in guiding the transition toward socialist agriculture, but they could not function properly if they tried to put over measures which the poorer peasants did not yet understand and desire, even if such measures seemed to express the underlying hope and purposes of these peasants” (Anna Rochester, Lenin on the Agrarian Question [New York: International Publishers, 1942], 109).

Rodney’s term “working people” has antecedents in the language of the Comintern such as “toiling population” and “toiling folk.” For a discussion of Rodney’s term and its continuing relevance, see Issa G. Shivji, “The Concept of ‘Working People,’” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 6 no. 1 (2017): 1–13.

Cabral writes: “Whether in Cape Verde or anywhere else in the world, education is the fundamental basis that underpins the work of the emancipation of every human being and the conscientization of mankind.” Cabral quoted in The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation in Guinea-Bissau, 1963–74, Studies on National Liberation, no. 1 (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

First in a long line of Eurocentric naysayers, Karl Kautsky dismissed the Bolshevik’s socialist ambitions, referring to “the impotence of all revolutionary attempts made without regard to objective social and economic conditions.” Forty years later, many intellectuals with comparable biases adopted a similar position in their debate with Che Guevara about the transition to socialism in Cuba. Karl Kautsky quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (Madison: Iskra Books, 2023), 104; Ernesto Che Guevara, El gran debate: sobre la economía en Cuba 1963–1964 (Melbourne/New York: Ocean Press, 2006).

Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London: Penguin, 1975), vol. 29, 26.

Using Hegelian terminology, Marx distinguished between limits, which are incapable of being surpassed, versus barriers that can be overcome. For Marx, capitalism continually pushes against and surpasses numerous barriers, but it ultimately encounters its true limit in the working class itself. See Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 13–15.

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 163.

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 163.

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 14–15.

Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review 18, no. 4 (1966).

See Samir Amin, “Contemporary Imperialism,” Monthly Review 67, no. 3 (July 2015).

It is true that human development is the essential and long-term aim of socialism, and material abundance is ultimately subordinate to that aim, with which it has a profound dialectical relation. However, distinguishing between the two aims is analytically useful, given the tendency, expressed in Lebowitz’s work and many others, to downplay the pressing issues of material scarcity in Global South contexts. Here I defend the importance of material development in the Global South’s socialist-oriented projects (while recognizing that a rational planning that transcends the growth-degrowth contradiction, but most likely manifests as “degrowth” in the countries of the Global North, is the overarching framework of the socialist project). This should not be confused with an argument for stage theory, since I have already pointed to both the need for and possibility of building new social relations in Global South contexts. Importantly, the distinction between material and human development is not the same as the distinction between productive forces and social relations of production. Consequently, making a priority out of material development does not mean neglecting transformations in social relations.

In a similar spirit, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik argue that it is not GDP growth rates but capitalist barbarism that establishes the “historical obsolescence of the system…from which only socialism can rescue it” (Patnaik and Patnaik, Capitalism and Imperialism, 338).

Lebowitz’s books Build It Now!: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006) and The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) both refer frequently to the Bolivarian Process in Venezuela.

Lebowitz’s main treatment of Eastern Bloc socialism was in The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). In the preface, he explains that, although he originally intended to trace the history of the Soviet Union’s emergence and development, he ultimately abandoned that approach. Would the abandoned historical account have forced him to consider the concrete material conditions of socialist development, and so led him to assume a more sympathetic position toward real socialism and its achievements?

The ahistorical, abstract-universal character of Lebowitz’s work, which treated socialism more as a categorical imperative than as a historically grounded process, is evident in his book titles, such as Build it Now! and The Socialist Imperative.

The Bandung Spirit

Notes

¹ Sukarno, ‘Opening address given by Sukarno (Bandung, 18 April 1955)’, Asia-Africa Speak from Bandung (Djakarta: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia, 1955), 19–29.

² Roeslan Abdulgani, Bandung Spirit: Moving on the Tide of History (Djakarta: Prapantja, 1964) and The Bandung Connection: The Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 (Singapore: Gunung Aguna, 1981), 89.

³ The poetic resolution was formally placed before the UN General Assembly by the Soviet diplomat Vasily Kuznetsov. See United Nations General Assembly, Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (A/RES/1514), December 14, 1960. The president of the General Assembly at that time was the Irish diplomat Frederick Boland. Boland’s daughter Eavan became a famous poet and in 1998 published ‘Witness’, which contains these lines:
What is a colony
if not the brutal truth
that when we speak
the graves open.
And the dead walk?

⁴ Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection, 11.

⁵ The overall narrative in this dossier draws heavily from Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007) and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (New Delhi: LeftWord, 2013). It will form part of the basis for The Brighter Nations (2026).

⁶ Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 136. Also see Richard Nixon, ‘Asia After Viet Nam’, Foreign Affairs, 1 October 1967, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1967-10-01/asia-after-viet-nam.

⁷ For more on the San Francisco Treaty, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The New Cold War Is Sending Tremors through Northeast Asia, dossier no. 76, 21 May 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-76-new-cold-war-northeast-asia/.

⁸ For a full sense of the argument, see John Foster Dulles, Policy for the Far East (Washington: US Government Publishing Office, 1958).

⁹ ‘Memorandum of a Conversation Between the Counsellor of the Department of State (MacArthur) and the British Ambassador (Makins), Department of State, Washington, February 29, 1956’, US Department of State, Conference Files: Lot 62 D 181, CF 656, Secret; John P. Glennon, Edward C. Keefer, and David W. Mabon, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, East Asian Security; Cambodia; Laos, Volume XXI, (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1990), 180–181.

¹⁰ Su-kyoung Hwang, Korea’s Grievous War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

¹¹ I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950–1951 (New York: Little Brown, 1969), 312.

¹² At a press conference on 15 March 1955, John Foster Dulles explained the doctrine of ‘less-than-massive retaliation’. If China crossed into Formosa, Dulles said, the US would use tactical nuclear weapons against the Chinese forces. See Elie Abel, ‘Dulles Says US Pins Retaliation on Small A-Bomb’, New York Times, 16 March 1955, https://www.nytimes.com/1955/03/16/archives/dulles-says-us-pins-retaliation-on-small-abomb-lessthanmassive.html.
When Eisenhower was asked to confirm Dulles’ statement the next day, he said that tactical nuclear weapons should not be used ‘just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else. I believe that the great question about these things comes when you begin to get into those areas where you cannot make sure that you are operating merely against military targets. But with that one qualification, I would say, yes, of course they would be used’. See William Klingaman, David S. Patterson, and Ilana Stern, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, National Security Policy, Volume XIX (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1990), 61. For Churchill’s diary notes, see John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), 687. On the broader question of nuclear retaliation, see Matthew Jones, ‘Targeting China: US Nuclear Planning the “Massive Retaliation” in East Asia, 1953–1955’, Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 37–65.

¹³ Asia-Africa Speak from Bandung, 161–169.

¹⁴ Abdulgani, Bandung Spirit, 72.

¹⁵ For example, L. C. N. Obi of Nigeria was a key, but now forgotten, figure in the debate around the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while Ismael Moreno Pino of Mexico was the central negotiator for the 1967 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, known as the Tlatelolco Treaty, the first to establish a nuclear weapons free zone.

¹⁶ Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed Books, 2008).

¹⁷ Pedro Manuel Moreno, 60 years of UNCTAD: Charting a New Development Course in a Changing World, UN Trade and Development, 14 May 2024, https://unctad.org/osgstatement/60-years-unctad-charting-new-development-course-changing-world-session-1.

¹⁸ John P., Harriet D. Schwar, and Louis J. Smith, eds., ‘Memorandum of a Conversation, Department of State, Washington, April 7, 1955’, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, China, Volume II (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1986), 454.

¹⁹ Alan Burns, the governor of the Gold Coast and Nigeria from 1941 to 1947, was appointed to be the United Kingdom’s permanent representative at the UN Trusteeship Council from 1947 to 1956. Soon after leaving the UN, Burns published a book that went after Bandung and argued that it represented ‘the resentment of the darker peoples against the past domination of the world by European nations’. See Alan Burns, In Defence of Colonies (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), 5. For more on the coup in Indonesia, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Legacy of Lekra: Organising Revolutionary Culture in Indonesia, dossier no. 35, December 2020, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/20210127_Dossier-35_EN_Web.pdf.

²⁰ Bela Balassa, Trends in Developing Country Exports, 1963–88, Policy, Research, and External Affairs working papers no. WPS 634, World Bank World Development Report, 31 March 1991, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/561401468766799448/Trends-in-developing-country-exports-1963-88.

²¹ Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 16.

²² S. B. D. de Silva, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (London: Routledge, 1982), 506.

²³ For more on the Third Great Depression, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World in Economic Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, notebook no. 4, 10 October 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-notebook-4-economic-crisis/.

²⁴ The State Council Information Office, ‘China’s Trade with BRI Countries Booms in 2023’, press release, 12 January 2024, http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/pressroom/2024-01/12/content_116937407.htm#:~:text=China’s%20trade%20with%20countries%20participating,2022%2C%20customs%20data%20showed%20Friday.

²⁵ Alessandro Nicita and Carlos Razo, ‘China: The Rise of a Trade Titan’, UN Conference on Trade and Development, 27 April 2021, https://unctad.org/news/china-rise-trade-titan. For more on delinking, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Globalisation and Its Alternative: An Interview with Samir Amin, notebook no. 1, 29 October 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/globalisation-and-its-alternative/.

²⁶ For more on regionalism, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Sovereignty, Dignity, and Regionalism in the New International Order, dossier no. 62, 14 March 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-regionalism-new-international-order/.

²⁷ For more on the second pink tide in Latin America, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, To Confront Rising Neofascism, the Latin American Left Must Rediscover Itself, dossier no. 79, 13 August 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-neofascism-latin-america/.

²⁸ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, Contemporary Dilemmas no. 4, 23 January 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Churning of the Global Order, dossier no. 72, 23 January 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-72-the-churning-of-the-global-order/.

²⁹ For more on unilateral coercive measures, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Imperialist War and Feminist Resistance in the Global South, dossier no. 86, 5 March 2025 https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-imperialism-feminist-resistance.

³⁰ For more on the role of intellectuals on both sides of the class struggle, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The New Intellectual, dossier no. 12, 11 February 2019, https://thetricontinental.org/the-new-intellectual/.

³¹ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Towards a New Development Theory for the Global South, dossier no. 84, 14 January 2025, https://thetricontinental.org/towards-a-new-development-theory-for-the-global-south/.

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The Churning of the Global Order

Notes

¹ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, press conference by Foreign Press Secretary Ono Hirariko, 25 January 2023, https://www.mofa.go.jp/press/kaiken/kaiken24e_000202.html.

² Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Diplomatic Bluebook 2023: Japanese Diplomacy and International Situation in 2022, 29 September 2023, https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/other/bluebook/2023/pdf/en_index.html, i and 3.

³ Emmanuel Macron (President of France), ‘France in the World’, Munich Security Conference, Germany, 17 February 2023, https://securityconference.org/en/medialibrary/collection/munich-security-conference-2023/.

⁴ Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila (Prime Minister of Namibia), Francia Márquez (Vice President of Colombia), Mauro Luiz Iecker Vieira (Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil), Enrique Manalo (Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines), and Christoph Heusgen (Moderator, former German Ambassador to the United Nations; Chairman of the Munich Security Conference), ‘Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order’, Munich Security Conference, Germany, 18 February 2023, https://securityconference.org/en/medialibrary/collection/munich-security-conference-2023/.

⁵ BlackRock Investment Institute, 2023 Global Outlook: A New Investment Playbook (New York: BlackRock, 2 October 2023, https://www.blackrock.com/ca/institutional/en/literature/market-commentary/bii-2023-global-outlook-ca.pdf?switchLocale=y&siteEntryPassthrough=true, 13; Credit Suisse, Investment Outlook 2023: A Fundamental Reset (Zürich: Credit Suisse, 2022), https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/news-and-expertise/investment-outlook-2023-a-fundamental-reset-202211.html#:~:text=We%20now%20expect%20the%20euro,manages%20to%20avoid%20a%20recession, 14.

⁶ Credit Suisse, Investment Outlook 2023, 14.

⁷ Read our full report, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, Studies on Contemporary Dilemmas no. 4, 23 January 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism.

⁸ Flavia Krause-Jackson, Ania Nussbaum, and Kitty Donaldson, ‘The French Won’t Forget Being Snubbed Over Submarines’, Bloomberg, 22 September 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-22/how-france-can-respond-to-australia-u-s-u-k-submarine-deal; Vijay Prashad, ‘Clear Away the Hype: The US and Australia Signed a Nuclear Arms Deal, Simple as That’, Peoples Dispatch, 22 September 2021, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/09/22/clear-away-the-hype-the-us-and-australia-signed-a-nuclear-arms-deal-simple-as-that/.

⁹ Samir Amin, Class and Nation, Historically and in the Current Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 104; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Resurrecting the Concept of the Triad, newsletter no. 22, 1 June 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/triad/.

¹⁰ Michael Hudson, ‘America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century’, Counterpunch, 1 March 2022, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/01/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century/.

¹¹ Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020).

¹² Nonetheless, there is evidence that by 1600, at least 56 million Indigenous people in the Americas had perished due to colonial violence and the introduction of deadly pathogens; at least 15.5 million Africans were captured and sold in the Atlantic Slave Trade; at least 10 million people died in the Congo between 1515 and 1865 due to the rapacity of Belgian colonialism; and between 1880 and 1920 alone (a small sliver of British colonialism in India), at least 165 million Indians died as a result of British colonial violence. See: Alexander Koch et al., ‘Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492’, Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (1 March 2019): 13–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004; Steven J. Micheletti et al., ‘Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas’, The American Journal of Human Genetics 107, no. 2 (6 August 2020): 265–77, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2020.06.012; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Fritz Blackwell, ‘The British Impact on India, 1700–1900’, Association for Asian Studies 13, no. 2 (Fall 2008), https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-british-impact-on-india-1700-1900/; and Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel, ‘Capitalism and Extreme Poverty: A Global Analysis of Real Wage, Human Height, and Mortality since the Long 16th Century’, World Development 161 (January 2023): 12.

¹³ Global South Insights own elaboration based on data from ‘World Development Indicators’ [WDI], World Bank, accessed 20 October 2022, https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/ and ‘World Economic Outlook’ [WEO], International Monetary Fund (IMF), accessed 20 October 2022, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2029/October.

¹⁴ Utsa Patnaik, ‘Revisiting the “Drain”, or Transfers from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism’, Agrarian and Other Histories – Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, ed. Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2019).

¹⁵ Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, ‘Capitalism and Extreme Poverty: A Global Analysis of Real Wages, Human Height, and Mortality Since the Long 16th Century’, World Development 161 (September 2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.106026; Navinchandra R. Shah, ‘Literacy Rate in India’, International Journal of Research in All Subjects in Multi Languages 1, no. 7 (October 2013): 12–16, https://www.raijmr.com/ijrsml/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IJRSML_2013_vol01_issue_07_04.pdf.

¹⁶ Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, ‘Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018’, New Political Economy 26, no. 6 (2021).

¹⁷ Global South Insights own elaboration based on IMF WEO.

¹⁸ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China’, Studies on Socialist Construction 1, 23 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.

¹⁹ For more on hybrid war, read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future, dossier no. 36, 4 January 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-36-twilight/ and Venezuela and Hybrid Wars in Latin America, dossier no. 17, 3 June 2019, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-17-venezuela-and-hybrid-wars-in-latin-america/.

²⁰ Global South Insights own elaboration based on ‘World Population Prospects 2022’ [WPP], Department of Economics and Social Affairs, United Nations, 1 July 2022, https://population.un.org/wpp/ and ‘What Are Sanctions?’, SanctionsKill Campaign, September 2022, https://sanctionskill.org.

²¹ Global South Insights own elaboration based on UN WPP and IMF WEO.

²² Samir Amin, ‘The Challenge of Globalisation’, Review of International Political Economy 3, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 216–259. Also see: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Globalisation and Its Alternative: An Interview with Samir Amin, notebook no. 1, 29 October 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/globalisation-and-its-alternative/.

²³ Global South Insights own elaboration based on IMF WEO; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, dossier no. 66, 4 July 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-66-development-theory/.

²⁴ Vladimir Putin, speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy Munich Security Conference, Munich, Germany, 10 February 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034.

²⁶ Francisco R. Rodríguez, ‘The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions’, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 4 May 2023, https://cepr.net/press-release/new-report-finds-that-economic-sanctions-are-often-deadly-and-harm-peoples-living-standards-in-target-countries/; The Treasury Sanctions Review 2021, US Department of the Treasury, 18 October 2021, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-2021-sanctions-review.pdf, 2.

²⁷ A World of Debt, United Nations, 12 July 2023, https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt. For more on the debt crisis, read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Life or Debt: The Stranglehold of Neocolonialism and Africa’s Search for Alternatives, dossier no. 63, 11 April 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-63-african-debt-crisis/.

²⁸ Jim Mattis, ‘Remarks by Secretary Mattis on the National Defence Strategy’, US Department of Defence, 19 January 2018, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/1420042/remarks-by-secretary-mattis-on-the-national-defense-strategy/.

²⁹ For more on Ukraine, see: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, This Is Not the Age of Certainty. We Are in the Time of Contradictions, newsletter no. 14, 7 April 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ukraine-2/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, We Are in a Period of Great Tectonic Shifts, newsletter no. 11, 17 March 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/shifting-world-order/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, In These Days of Great Tension, Peace Is a Priority, newsletter no. 9, 3 March 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ukraine/.

³⁰ ‘World Military Expenditure Reaches New Record High as European Spending Surges’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 24 April 2023, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2023/world-military-expenditure-reaches-new-record-high-european-spending-surges.

³¹ Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, ‘Actual US Military Spending Reached $1.53 trillion in 2022 – More than Twice Acknowledged Level: New Estimates Based on US National Accounts’, Monthly Review, 1 November 2023, https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/actual-u-s-military-spending-reached-1-53-trillion-in-2022-more-than-twice-acknowledged-level-new-estimates-based-on-u-s-national-accounts/.

³² Global South Insights own elaboration based on adjusted figures from ‘SIPRI Military Expenditure Database’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), accessed October 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex; and Monthly Review.

³³Global South Insights own elaboration based on adjusted figures from SIPRI and Monthly Review.

³⁴ ‘Policy Basics: Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?’, Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, 28 September 2023, https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go; ‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/. For more on US military bases, read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity’, dossier no. 42, 5 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-42-militarisation-africa/.

³⁵ Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 55; 30–31.

³⁶ ‘Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023’, Congressional Research Service, 7 June 2023, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42738.

³⁷ Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 67, no. 4 (2023): 752–779. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027221117546?icid=int.sj-full-text.citing-articles.1.

³⁸ The Military Balance 2023, International Institute for Security Studies, 15 February 2023, https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/the-military-balance/.

³⁹ Jens Stoltenberg, Ursula von der Leyen, and Charles Michel, ‘Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 10 January 2023, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_210549.htm.

⁴⁰ To read more about BRICS, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, BRICS: Uma alternativa ao imperialismo? [BRICS: A New Alternative to Imperialism?], 31 August 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/brasil/brics-uma-alternativa-ao-imperialismo/.

⁴¹ Global South Insights own elaboration based on UN WPP, World Bank WDI, and IMF WEO.

⁴² ‘BRICS’ Credibility Growing as World Not Willing to Live by G7 Dogma – Brazilian Adviser ’, TASS, 22 August 2023, https://tass.com/world/1663753?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.com.

⁴³ Anthony Boadle, ‘Brazil’s Lula Says BRICS to Pick New Members Based On Geopolitical Weight’, Reuters, 25 August 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/brazils-lula-says-brics-pick-new-members-based-geopolitical-weight-not-ideology-2023-08-24/#:~:text=%22What%20matters%20is%20not%20the,join%20BRICS%2C%22%20he%20added.

⁴⁴ Sean Hill and Owen Comstock, ‘What Is OPEC+ and How Is It Different from OPEC?’, US Energy Information Administration, 9 May 2023, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56420#:~:text=OPEC%20and%20OPEC%2B%20countries%20combined,instability%20in%20crude%20oil%20output.

⁴⁵ ‘Egypt: Oil Production’, The Global Economy, accessed 15 November 2023, https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Egypt/oil_production/#:~:text=Oil%20production%2C%20thousand%20barrels%20per%20day&text=The%20latest%20value%20from%202022,423.53%20thousand%20Barrels%20Per%20Day.

⁴⁶ BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development, and Inclusive Multilateralism, XV BRICS Summit II Declaration, Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 August 2023, https://brics2023.gov.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Jhb-II-Declaration-24-August-2023-1.pdf, 3.

⁴⁷ Abeer Abu Omar and Vivian Nereim, ‘Saudi Sovereign Fund Targets $1.1 Trillion in Assets by 2025’, Bloomberg, 24 January 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-24/saudi-sovereign-fund-targets-1-1-trillion-in-assets-by-2025?leadSource=uverify%20wall; Jiaxing Li, ‘Saudi’s US$700 Billion Wealth Fund Is a Fan of Alibaba, Pinduoduo, Flat Glass Stocks as Middle East-China Ties Spur New Deals’, South China Morning Post, 23 June 2023, https://www.scmp.com/business/markets/article/3224986/saudis-us700-billion-wealth-fund-fan-alibaba-pdd-flat-glass-stocks-middle-east-china-ties-spur-new.

⁴⁸ Cyril Ramaphosa, media briefing remarks announcing the outcomes of the XV BRICS Summit, Johannesburg, South Africa, 24 August 2023, https://brics2023.gov.za/2023/08/24/brics-chair-president-cyril-ramaphosas-media-briefing-remarks-announcing-the-outcomes-of-the-xv-brics-summit/.

⁴⁹ Hector Perez-Saiz, Longmei Zhang, and Roshan Iyer, ‘Currency Usage for Cross-Border Payments’, IMF Working Papers 72, 24 March 2023, https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2023/072/article-A001-en.xml.

⁵⁰ Perez-Saiz, Zhang, and Iyer, ‘Currency Usage’.

⁵¹ General Strategy for 2022–2026: Scaling up Development Finance for a Suitable Future, New Development Bank, accessed 15 November 2023, https://www.ndb.int/about-ndb/general-strategy/.

⁵² Michael Scott, ‘BRICS Bank Strives to Reduce Reliance on the Dollar’, Financial Times, 22 August 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/1c5c6890-3698-4f5d-8290-91441573338a.

⁵³ BRICS and Africa, XV BRICS Summit, 2.

⁵⁴ BRICS and Africa, XV BRICS Summit, 3.

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Structural Adjustment - Global Inequality

Notes

Suggested citation: Sullivan, D., Hickel, J., & Zoomkawala, H. (2025). "Structural adjustment", Global Inequality Project. Accessed at: https://globalinequality.org/structural-adjustment

Header image: Reuters

1. Chang (2008), Hickel (2017).

2. A good overview of the causes of the 1980s debt crises, as well as the structure of the IMF and World Bank and the effects of SAPs, can be found in Toussaint and Millet (2010). 

3. Chang, (2002).

4. Patnaik & Patnaik (2021).

5. Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland, & Suwandi (2022), Hickel, Sullivan & Zoomkawala (2021). 

6. Biglaiser & McGauvran (2022), Weisbrot, Baker & Rosnick (2020), Davis (2006), Klein (2007), Abouharb & Duchesne (2019), Vreeland (2003).

7. For a discussion of how China avoided the most extreme reforms see Weber (2021).

8. Deckers (1990) notes that in March 1988, World Bank president Barber Conable announced that China would begin to remove subsidies aimed at maintaining low consumer prices for grain, and that the World Bank would lend $300 million to support this policy. According to Deckers, "This will mark the first time the Bank has become involved in an important policy reversal in a socialist country." On the timeline of subsequent reforms and the effect they had on extreme poverty see, Sullivan, Moatsos & Hickel (2023).

9. Patnaik & Patnaik (2016). 

10. Pandey (2019); Yaffe (2020); Fitz (2020).

11. For a discussion of Cuba's food system, including its limitations, see Cumbrera et al. (2021) and Benjamin (2015).

12. Lamrani (2013).

13. Sullivan & Hickel (2022). Note that our estimate is higher than that given in the original study (21 million vs. 16 million). This is because the original study looked exclusively at the period 1990 to 2019, whereas we make use of more recent data covering all years from 1980 to 2021.

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