- by Zhao Dinqi
- The Guardian
- Issue #2158
Guardian readers will be familiar with Vijay Prashad, Marxist writer, speaker, and academic, from the many pieces of his work published in the Guardian, as well as ‘Leg Glance’ an occasional column on cricket he writes for us. The following is an excerpt from an interview with him on mronline.org
Zhao Dingqi: Why did you grow up to be a Marxist? Could you briefly introduce your personal experience and academic career?
Vijay Prashad: I grew up in Calcutta, India, and then in northern India. During my youth, I was deeply impacted by the prevalence of urban and rural poverty. The grotesque inequalities of life and the ubiquity of feudal type social relations (especially the hierarchy of the caste system) was deeply objectionable to me. My parents raised me with the values of decency and good behaviour, which seemed impossible to sustain in an indecent society. I was angry at the world, and then when I began to get involved in small struggles and read Marx, I realized that my anger was necessary but insufficient. I needed to be in an organisation, I needed a theory of social transformation, I needed discipline. This is what drew me into both a more serious academic study of the roots of social inequality in India (the subject of my doctoral dissertation, which was on the social history of an oppressed caste community) and to struggle against the conditions that prevented social transformation (which drew me into the left movement).
ZD: What is the significance of Marxism in the 21st century? Is Marxism, as some believe, outdated, and unsuitable for today’s era?
VP: Marxism, which is an ever-evolving field of analysis, is the most accurate critique of capitalism. As long as capitalism remains with us, Marxism must remain until another form of critique – better than Marxism – appears. Thus far, no clearer critique of capitalism has been developed. It is true now as it was in 1867, when Marx published Capital, that the exploitation of the working class produces surplus value and it is this surplus value that creates the accumulation of capital in the hands of the capitalists and immiserates the worker. It is this accumulation of capital in the hands of different capitalists who compete with each other that creates the conditions for a general crisis in society. If there is a better explanation of these crises that afflict us, then I do not know it.
INDIA
ZD: In recent decades, the Indian economy has developed rapidly, but under the capitalist system, various contradictions in Indian society are also very acute. What are the main social conflicts currently facing India? What social oppression are the Indian people facing?
VP: India’s economy grows rapidly because there is a large pent-up demand that began to settle over the country after the early phase of reforms in the post-independence era. A deficit in infrastructure had to be fulfilled, which has not fully occurred, but it does account for some of the growth. The growth, however, is uneven. One of the great problems of the Indian economy is the failure of the state to conduct agrarian reform and thereby create conditions of relative social equality in the countryside. Wretched social inequality, exacerbated by the caste hierarchy, means that the old forms of subordination remain intact and are even exacerbated by the increase of wealth amongst the more powerful sections in society. So, you get growth, but very uneven and unequal growth. This creates great social turmoil, which is held down by the state’s instruments of force (both the legal apparatus that is used to designate dissenters as anti-national, and the apparatus of violence that cracks down hard on social protest, including the protest of farmers).
ZD: What is the current development status of the communism movement in India? What are the main Marxist political parties and organisations?
VP: The communist movement in India is weak due to the depletion of the reservoirs of strength for such a movement, that is the weakness of the trade union movement in the manufacturing and service sectors, and the weakness of the agricultural workers’ movement in the countryside. The organisation of the working class – both urban and rural – is weak due to the forms of disarticulation of society and the workplace that is a mark of the neoliberal era. If the working class is weakened, the left is weakened. There are three main parties of the communist movement: the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPIM, the Communist Party of India or the CPI, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation or simply Liberation. These are the legal parties that have a role in the national and provincial parliaments. There is also the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which is banned and operates in the countryside. The total strength of these parties’ numbers in the hundreds of millions, but that is still not sufficient to move a decisive agenda at this time.
GLOBAL SOUTH
ZD: When was the concept of the Global South proposed? How do you understand this concept? What does it mean in the present?
VP: The Global South is an idea that first came to world attention with the Brandt Commission (1980), where the South referred to the countries that marinated in poverty as opposed to the North, which referred to the former colonial powers. The concept was elaborated by the South Commission (1989), which was chaired by the former President of Tanzania Julius Nyerere and had a Commissioner from China – Qian Jiadong. The concept for the South Commission was developed to refer to the developing countries that had to build an agenda for their development, not just the countries that were stuck in poverty. That was an advance. The South Commission, which had studied the remarkable developments in China’s Shenzhen region, advanced the agenda that dependency was not permanent and that a break could come with the transfer of technology and the proper harnessing of domestic resources. This was far more than what had been on the table from the old modernisation development agenda.
ZD: After the end of World War II, although colonialism withdrew from the historical stage, the exploitation and oppression of the global South by imperialist countries still existed, forming neocolonialism. What are the manifestations of the neocolonialism?
VP: Neocolonialism was a term used by Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah in 1965 to refer to the situation of flag independence (he was the victim of a coup the next year). Countries gained political sovereignty but were not able to control their own economies. This lack of control took place because they had to borrow money from overseas for almost everything (even to pay their public sector bills) and they had to allow foreign companies to exploit their resources because they had neither the capital nor the technology nor the expertise to do so. This lack of financial and scientific power left these countries prey to their former colonial masters. In our time, the basic outlines of neocolonialism remain intact for many countries, exacerbated by the seemingly endless spiral of debt. The current total external debt of developing countries is $11.4 trillion, and over 98 per cent of the export earnings of these countries is used to pay off wealthy bond holders. This makes development impossible. That is the structure of contemporary neocolonialism. It was this structure that produced the theory of dependency, articulated by Andre Gunder Frank as “the development of underdevelopment.”
ZD: How do you understand the significance of China’s Belt and Road initiative for the Global South?
VP: The Belt and Road policy – first articulated in 2013 as the One Belt, One Road policy – initially had everything to do with the attempt by the Chinese government to pivot away from reliance on US and European markets after their collapse in the financial crisis of 2007. It became clear in Beijing that the markets of the Global North would not be permanently available to countries such as China. To seek new markets, Beijing looked to continue the western development policy in Western China (including Xinjiang, Tibet, and Qinhai) started by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and then to expand it into Central Asia. But beyond that, the Belt and Road sought to build infrastructure across the Global South to facilitate a more harmonious economic development between China and those regions. From 2013 to 2024, China’s BRI engagement reached a total of (AUD $1.8) trillion, including investments, loans, and donations. This is a significant transformation of the development agenda. It has been studied in parts, but not properly in totality to understand the theory of the BRI. I hope that more people will accumulate more of the evidence from the BRI sites and develop a proper theory of development from this new experience.
