“Multipolarity? Maybe Sometime in the Future” An Interview with Vijay Prashad

Although the global dominance of the US is crumbling and China is emerging as a rival, the unilateral world order remains intact, according to historian Vijay Prashad. In this interview, he explains why he considers NATO to be the most dangerous organization in the world.

David Goeßmann: Iran has been bombed by Israel and also the U.S. without any credible pretext. Tehran responded with missiles on Israel and on a U.S. base in Qatar. The genocide in Gaza by Israel is still going on, no end in sight after over 600 days while the IDF keeps hitting Lebanon. All these attacks by Israel and the U.S. are aggressive acts and illegal under international law. And of course, they destabilize the region. What is your assessment of the current conflict situation and the future of the Middle East?

Vijay Prashad: Let’s go to India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan went to war for three days. In fact, in the previous month and in those three nights, it became clear that if two military powers both with what are known as 4.5 generation weapon systems, that means really good air defenses, drones, a system with the capacity to integrate with the jet fighters and so on. If two powers have similar 4.5 generation weapons, nobody can win. So neither India’s air force nor Pakistan’s air force were able to penetrate and destroy the other’s air defense systems. In fact, Indian jets didn’t cross into Pakistan, Pakistani jets didn’t cross into India. They sent drone swarms across the border.

Why I’m saying that is that in fact if you look at the conflict between Israel and Iran, just in terms of military capacity, it becomes clear that neither can prevail, that both can hit each other, but neither can really win a conflict. Israel is not going to invade Iran, Iran is not going to invade Israel with ground troops. But when it comes to air defense systems, missiles and so on they’re pretty much even balanced, just like India and Pakistan. The only thing that tips the balance is the entry of the United States, which has just the most overwhelming firepower, much more than either Iran or Israel or India or Pakistan.

But if it’s just Israel and Iran, nobody can prevail. That was clear in fact on day one and two of the fighting. And then the United States comes in to do three bombing runs. But also what seemed to be pretty inconsequential bombing runs. Iran responds with an attack on Al-Udeid [U.S. military base in Qatar], which was basically choreographed to say: “We’ve struck back”. So my feeling is that military planners in these countries are sitting down and saying, unless we have a major military technological breakthrough or Israel uses a nuclear weapon against Iran, it is impossible for these countries to prevail.

That’s the military’s perspective. From the context of a political perspective, Israel has been conducting a genocide against the Palestinians. That’s illegal. You know, there is no illegal genocide. A genocide by itself is illegal. They’re conducting a genocide, the United States is providing the weaponry. Europe is also providing weaponry, including Germany. They are participating in an illegal action. Israel’s attack on Iran is a violation of UN charter article 2.4. This is the same article that [EU commission president] Ursula von der Leyen was so upset about when Russia invaded Ukraine. But the Europeans don’t condemn Israel.

Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians and its attack on Iran are both at the same level. They are both violations of international law. Iran did not attack Israel. There was no pretext of self-defense. There is no UN security council resolution that allowed Israel under chapter 7 of the UN Charter to attack Iran. There was no Iranian provocation in terms of even verbal threats to Israel, none. There was no reason to attack Iran. In fact, Israeli high officials publicly said why they attacked Iran. They said Iran is weak right now. We should take advantage of the situation. That is a war of aggression. A war of aggression is not a phrase in the English language. It is a legal term. It’s illegal to conduct a war of aggression. It’s a war crime, it’s against the Geneva Convention.

I think the military people have come to realize nobody can prevail. Probably within two or three months Iran is going to declare it has a nuclear bomb. And then it’s game over in terms of regime change against the Iranian government.

David Goeßmann: Is the reason behind this simply to bring chaos to the region and then profit from it?

Vijay Prashad: I don’t think it’s chaos that they are seeking. I think they are in fact seeking to so-called reorder the Middle East. They feel like they can obliterate Hamas from the Palestinian Territories. They’re going to remove the Palestinians from large parts of Gaza, create a secure Israel, take advantage of the situation and basically move or at least demoralize the Palestinians in the West Bank, prevent them from struggling against the settlers, just demoralize the Palestinian population.

That’s a very credible and important aim for the Israelis: demoralize the Palestinians, so they leave the Palestinian territory. Israel is no longer committed to a two state solution if they ever were, probably never. The Israelis will never allow a one state solution. They like the three state solution. The three state solution is: send all the Palestinians to Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, the three states that neighbor the Palestinian territories, get them out. That’s what they have wanted for a very long time.

It is effectively a social annihilation policy. Whether you annihilate people physically, the genocide, or you socially annihilate them, you just push them out into other countries – which is also against international law, because it’s supposed to be a protected territory under UN provisions. It gives protective status to the Palestinians. Population transfer in international law from a war zone is illegal. You’re not allowed to do that, that’s a contravention of the Geneva convention.

So that’s as far as the Palestinians are concerned. As far as the Iranians are concerned, they have been seeking since 1980 regime change in Iran. It was the West and the Gulf Arabs, the Saudis, that pushed Saddam Hussein to invade Iran illegally in 1980, start a war that lasted till 1988. They backed Saddam the whole way.

One reason Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2nd 1990 was that he was angry that they hadn’t paid up for the sacrifices of the Iraqi people. He was frustrated that the Gulf Arabs were not providing financial support to Iraq. He invades Kuwait, saying that they are drilling into the Rumaila oil fields. He said they are doing lateral drilling, in fact, he was angry: Saudis didn’t pay up, Kuwaitis didn’t pay up. The United States didn’t pay up. He said we’ve fought eight years for you to try to overthrow the Islamic Republic, didn’t succeed.

After 1988, when Iraq decided not to come in, you have punctual comments from U.S. high officials saying we’re going to attack Iran, get rid of Iran. After 9/11 the United States made a strategic error getting rid of the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 and getting rid of Saddam 2003. Two of Iran’s historical enemies, the sort of Sunni hard right in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein were removed by who? By the Americans, giving Iran enormous advantage in the region. Iran began to flap its wings. They began to influence events across the Arab world.

The U.S. said Iran has to go back to its borders. So what did Washington do? They pass the Syria Accountability Act, try to squeeze the Syrian government of Assad Junior, young Assad, that just came to power. They tried the Damascus Spring, wanted to create more democratic space in Syria. The U.S. started sanctions in order to squeeze not Assad, who was trying democracy, but the Iranians. Then 2006 they gave the green light to Israel, go and smash up Lebanon, go and try to weaken Hezbollah. That was the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, again, a completely illegal invasion.

In the middle of all this suddenly they fabricated this idea that Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon and start this process of illegal talks with Iran. These are illegal talks about Iran’s “nuclear program” because Iran is a member of the nonproliferation treaty. Iran is within the International Atomic Energy agency (IAEA) ambit. And Iran already has inspections, they’ve already talked to UN officials. There was no reason to set up an illegal process with the United States, Europeans, Iranians and the UN outside the IAEA, outside the basis of the Nonproliferation Treaty to discuss a hallucinatory nuclear weapons program, which they didn’t have. They have an enrichment issue about how much they are allowed to enrich in the country.

The whole thing is a facade, because while this is all happening India, not a member of the Nonproliferation Treaty, doesn’t have International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, has twice tested a nuclear weapon and was given a waiver by the United States to get nuclear materials from the nuclear suppliers group. Complete hypocrisy. Israel has a nuclear weapon, not a member of the Nonproliferation Treaty, gets material from the nuclear suppliers group. But Iran had to get the squeeze. So the attack on Iran now is nothing new. It’s part of a long process of attempting to overthrow this government.

They want to “clean up” the Middle East, bring back the Shah’s son into power in Tehran, create some sort of process with the Palestinians that they all leave the area and then the Middle East is reshaped. There’s an Al Qaeda government in Syria, which would be pro-Israel. They’ll have some sort of government in Lebanon, pro-Israel. Everything is great for the Israelis, Benjamin Netanyahu will have a golden statue created of himself in Tel Aviv. His government will last forever. The Hasidics wouldn’t dare to leave the government on the issue of the exemption [exemption of Haredi, ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from military service], which was to come a day before the Israelis launched the attack on Iran. Some people turned to the domestic problems of Netanyahu. That’s why he’s attacking, they say. That’s not why he’s attacking Iran, but the timing is delightful.

David Goeßmann: After 500 years of Western colonialism, neocolonial or neoliberal hegemony in the Global South, with structural adjustment programs in the last decades that have strangled the poor nations, how do you view the West’s dealing with developing countries? In which way could we talk about a power shift?

Vijay Prashad: There’s two questions. The first one is a sort of attitude question. In terms of attitude, there is no shift. The attitude is that the West has nothing to owe these countries: “Listen, we colonized you, sorry about that. But we built trains and bridges, and we taught you our languages and you got reason and science.” That attitude is still there. In fact, it’s still taught in schools. You don’t have children in Germany for instance being taught about the genocide against the Herero and Nama people. It’s not happening.

You don’t get the stories in England of the concentration camps against the Kenyan people after World War II. In the Boer war, the British made concentration camps. The Nazis got the idea from the Boer war concentration camps for their camps, the Treblinkas and the Buchenwalds and so on. The British then, after the war, after the holocaust, built concentration camps in Kenya, to put the Mau Mau uprising fighters in. So it’s not like, oh, never forget, we learned the lesson. They repeated the same thing after the war. Is that taught to young children in Britain? Not at all, they still learn that Churchill is a hero. The first labor government was heroic. Of course, labor government was the one that put those concentration camps in Kenya for God’s sake.

Attitude-wise, I don’t blame people in the West for this attitude because they haven’t had the opportunity to learn the truth of what happened with colonialism. You can’t go up to people and say, how do you not know this? Well, they don’t know this because the education systems are colonial, it’s not their fault. They have a colonial education system, they don’t learn about the history. So attitude-wise, I’m afraid I don’t see a major change. I don’t hobnob with the highest elites in Western societies. So maybe they are more liberal and open-minded.

But what I hear from them in their public speeches is pretty appalling. [French president Emmanuel] Macron saying to the Africans, you should be grateful to us. That was outrageous. Any level of decency should prevent a world leader from saying to somebody they had colonized they should be grateful to them. How can you talk like that? It’s vulgar. Even at the level of bourgeois decency, that’s vulgar to say that. It’s brutal.

Secondly, in terms of policy, I don’t see a shift. A good place to look for this methodologically is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Fund is a democratic institution. Because it has member states. Every state that joins the IMF follows the IMF rules, its articles. In its own kind of charter it has various articles. Every member state, because it’s a member state organization should have the democratic right to suggest what it wants to do and what it does not want to do. I understand that there are voting shares in the IMF which are uneven. Western governments control more of the voting shares in the IMF. That’s not fair. That should be democratized.

When you put 50 dollars on the table, I put five, you should get ten times more to say because of the money you put on the table. But you and I are both living human beings. Why shouldn’t we just get one vote each, why should the money determine a voting share? This is a good debate in question, because in a democracy, in Germany for instance, when you go to the vote, you don’t see your bank account. Everybody technically is meant to vote equally. But in the IMF voting is done by the share of money you put in. I think that’s a little unfair and undemocratic.

So that means the richer countries determine the rules of the IMF. They also determine how IMF bureaucrats who are meant to serve the countries that are member states talk to these countries. So they show up in say Senegal, and they say, this is what we want you to do otherwise you are going to get a bad report from us. They basically do a mafia hustle. So when it comes to development agencies and so on, it’s a mafia game. They tell these countries if you don’t follow what we are saying, you don’t get any money. And then the price of borrowing for you is going to go up. Has anything changed? I really don’t think so.

David Goeßmann: But do you see power shifts going on when France and the United States were kicked out of Niger and other African countries. At the same time China is entering developing countries and building this Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure and invest in poorer nations. Do you see in this regard a power shift while the Global South is more and more moving away from the West.

Vijay Prashad: It’s too slow. Take the case of Senegal and Sri Lanka, in which both elected center-left progressive governments have to go back to the IMF. Why? Because alternatives have not manifested themselves fast enough. The BRICS process for instance created a new development bank. Its lending is extremely slow. They created something called the contingency reserve arrangement, which was meant to be an alternative to the IMF. It hasn’t really started operating. So these institutions are moving too slow.

The Belt and Road Initiative is different. It comes in for infrastructure money. It builds infrastructure, that’s great because it builds the capacity of these states. There you have a power shift. But when it comes to borrowing for financial problems, balance of payments, external reserves and so on the only game, or the main game is IMF. It’s interesting, Chinese banks prefer not to lend towards the debt crisis. They prefer to lend for infrastructure. They don’t want to lend you to deal with your long-term debt crisis for that. Then you have to go to the IMF.

So these countries are seeing a shift, but it’s too slow, and it’s not happening in the place where the debt is ballooning. We don’t have the strength right now in the Global South to turn around to the bondholders and say, sorry, you took a risk investing in our countries. The risks didn’t pay off. You have to write off the loan. People are not strong enough to say that yet. But you are right, there is a shift happening, but the shift is happening much too slowly, and we should not exaggerate the things that are taking place.

David Goeßmann: At the same time there is a lot of talk about the rise of China on the world stage, and the demise of the United States. Economically, China is growing much faster than the US and Europe. If you look at the so called Purchasing Power Parity, China has already overtaken the United States. And sanctions and tariffs by Western countries are not working to contain China. Then there is the Belt and Road Initiative, we already talked about, by which Beijing has been building a global trade and transportation infrastructure with investments in over 150 states. Are we already living in a multipolar world – at least economically, and what does that mean for societies especially in the South.

Vijay Prashad: Your phrase “at least economically” is cheating, because nothing happens at least economically. Firstly, it is true that when it comes to the buoyancy, China is certainly in the lead. But many Asian countries, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, they’re all growing at much faster clip. It’s pretty impressive. But we should also recognize that these are growth rates and these countries are growing from a place of great deprivation. So they are still pretty far away from the richer countries in terms of absolute living standards.

And as environmentalists tell us that if everybody on the planet lives like a person in the United States, we’d need like seven planets. It’s not possible to live like that. So absolute living standards may never equalize. And I hope they don’t with the U.S. and we come up with a different way of deciding to live. Do we all really need refrigerators the size of a small apartment. I don’t think so that we need walking freezers in the house. Do we need walking closets with enough clothes for like one month without having to do a wash? I don’t think so. We have to change the way we are living as well, a little more humbly might be a good idea.

So absolute living standards obviously have not equalized. But it’s true that the growth rates are impressive. It’s also true that China is trading way more with most countries, has more surplus to invest in these countries to build infrastructure and industry. China has really produced a new development model that the IMF and the Western bondholders didn’t do. They have been lending for debt my entire life and not for infrastructure and industrialization. China has changed the rules of the game that is absolutely true, 100 percent.

But we don’t have a world yet where the balance of forces has changed. The Western countries led by the U.S. still control the weapon systems. They are dominant. Almost 80 percent of world military spending every year is done by the NATO plus countries [NATO members plus Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Israel]. It is extraordinary, their military power, and they control information. We work in the world of journalism. We are up against an enormous flood of Western media. They dominate the world. There may be media in other countries in India and so on, but when it comes to world news, they follow CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Press. They define events. How quickly there was consensus that there’s a genocide happening in Xinjiang [Chinese persecution of the Uyghur population], how quickly there is bewilderment. What’s happening in Palestine, it can’t be a genocide, must be something else, Israel is under attack.

In the world of information, the West has dominance, globally. One example: an African stream with 5 to 6 people working for its small Instagram account. The state department of the United States went after it and had it closed down this week. It no longer will operate. They don’t allow small people to come up and say, we have a different idea of what’s happening in the world. And because of things like language and the inability to fight against so-called disinformation, the idea of disinformation, Chinese or Russian media haven’t been able to become global. On YouTube, because Western companies control the hardware, they write: “This is Russian state media, this is disinformation.” It’s impossible to control the world of discourse and ideas, the West is dominant. Multipolarity? Maybe sometime in the future. But right now I think we need to be hard boiled, hard-nosed, it is not there.

David Goeßmann: We have seen NATO’s desire to bring Ukraine into the alliance, provoking a Russian invasion. Now Sweden and Finland have joint NATO in response to the Ukraine War and the EU is on an unprecedented militarization path. Although the United States already has a huge military, Pentagon spending keeps going up. After Obamas “Pivot to Asia” military partnerships and bases – some speak of an “Asian NATO” – encircle China while Washington is provoking Beijing in the South China Sea and around Taiwan. You are heading the Tricontinental Institute. In a dossier it calls NATO the “most dangerous organization on earth”. Talk about the military strategy of the West.

Vijay Prashad: The title of the dossier is factual. It’s not a hyperbole. It’s not an exaggeration. NATO is the military pact that destroyed, dismembered Yugoslavia. NATO is the organization that entered with the United States to further the destruction of Afghanistan. NATO is the organization that basically dismembered Libya and refused to face any kind of investigation.

About war crimes in Libya, the UN security council resolution 1973 passed in 2011 merely said that there should be a no-fly zone over Libya. That’s what the UN resolution 1973 said. NATO violated the resolution immediately and started bombing the Libyan state apparatus, destroying the Libyan state, destroying Libya. There is no state in Libya anymore. It takes hundreds of years to build a state. NATO destroyed it in days, and it cannot be rebuilt so easily. It’s completely destroyed, it is dangerous. This is on the record.

No other military pact has destroyed and dismembered so many countries in the post-war era. I just can’t think of a military pact that’s done something like that. Just dismembered and destroyed countries at will, violating international law. There’s no mandate for it, there is no mandate for what it did in Libya. There are people saying it had a UN security council resolution. Go read the resolution. It doesn’t say you’re allowed to bomb state assets. It violated the UN resolution. Peter Olson, lawyer at NATO, wrote a letter afterwards, basically denying that NATO can ever be investigated. In fact, arrogantly he writes in the letter which I’ve published that NATO cannot commit war crimes.

Why? Because it is not a savage organization, it’s a European organization. But it’s not European. Mark Rutte, the current secretary general [of NATO] went to Washington sitting next to Trump, says, come to The Hague for the summit because we are going to make it a great demonstration of American power, not NATO power, not European partners, American power. So NATO is a Trojan horse for American power. They just sent a message to Trump, which Trump published at Truth Social in which he said, “we love you, you’re doing great.” The Europeans say: “We’re going to bang out five percent of GDP for you, Mr. Trump.” There is no independent European foreign policy in NATO. NATO is an instrument of American power.

What is its strategy? It’s very simple, it is to use the European allies in NATO and close allies in Asia, South Korea and Japan, to squeeze the threats to the United States, which are not threats to Europe. Is China a threat to Europe? I don’t think so. Was Russia a threat to Germany. Is the destruction of the North Stream pipeline worse for Germany than wasting its money on buying liquefied natural gas from the United States? What’s better for the climate, Green Party? A direct question to the former great feminist Green Party leader who hasn’t said a word about the women being killed in Iran by the Israeli and U.S. strikes. Where is their feminism, when it comes to the killing of these women in Iran by these strikes or the killing of Palestinian women. I haven’t heard anything from Annalena Baerbock about that. Silence on that.

The strategy is that the United States is debating who is a greater threat to U.S. power. Most of the people in the Trump administration believe the greatest threat is China. And they acknowledge, they’ve written about the fact that China is not a military threat. It is responsible for four percent of global military spending, the West plus countries [countries with closer ties to the EU and NATO] for 80 percent. The United States by itself for over 50 percent. China is not a military threat. It’s an economic threat. It is moving in the direction to produce greater seventh or eighth generation technology, forget 5G, 7G or 8G telecommunications.

Yesterday I took a high-speed train from Leipzig to Berlin in Germany. They said the speed was a 115 mph. But in China, you’re up to 190 mph. The trains are much faster, much better, smoother and they are on time. This is a threat. It’s not a threat to Europe. It’s a threat to U.S. multinational companies in which the European bourgeoisie has invested. The German bourgeoisie invests more in Black Rock and in Wall Street than it does in the DAX [German stock market index]. It is the so called patriotic bourgeoisie who has a vested interest in protecting the interests of U.S. companies. So Europeans are being dragged into an international conflict on behalf of the United States and it’s the interests of its monopolies. It’s not a European conflict.

What is the Western strategy? For Europe, its subordination to the United States and its interests, not European interests. And for the United States, it is to protect its dominion economically, and they will use force against China to prevent China’s development.

David Goeßmann: What is in your view the significance of BRICS+, the group of emerging countries around Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, now attracting ever more states that want to join? Economists speak even of De-Dollarization and new key currencies that could challenge the US-Dollar which would have major effects on the global financial system. Is a new world order, not based on unilateral domination by Washington, emerging before our eyes, while we see chaos, political authoritarianism and violence spreading around the globe?

Vijay Prashad: It’s a great question. It’s interesting if you look at the BRICS+ countries, the additions apart from the first five. You have the entry of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Firstly, these countries have completely different political systems. Some are monarchies, some are republics, some are led by a Communist party, some are led by far right parties, India for instance. They have completely different political worldview.

But something interesting about the plus is that the BRICS countries have brought in almost all the major oil producers except the United States. So if you add in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and so on, you have the major oil and gas producers, Egypt even. These are very important gestures, saying that it is basically OPEC+ [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]. OPEC+ includes Russia. We have actually OPEC+ inside a BRICS process. The BRICS+ and OPEC+ have an enormous overlap. And if they start thinking about alternative currency systems, they might think in the direction of basically denominating a new currency based on the asset called oil.

Now, this is not great for somebody who’s an environmentalist to hear, but frankly oil is going to be with us for a while before we can have a real transition. It’s a very sad reality that in this civilization we cannot so quickly pivot from oil to renewable fuels. It’s going to take time. So maybe initially the currency can be denominated in the asset of oil. In other words, oil becomes what the currency is relying upon, like gold in an earlier era. In the intermediate era from 1971 until the present it has been U.S. assets. Basically a currency has to have an asset behind it.

In other words, if I’m holding a lot of this paper, the dollars, I have to be able to do something with it. If nobody else is going to take my dollars I should be able to go to the United States and buy land, a company, a factory or whatever. It has to be an asset that guarantees that my money is not just going to become paper that I have to burn. In an earlier period it was gold that was called the gold standard. In the intermediate period it was U.S. assets. No country in the BRICS is currently willing to allow its assets to be alienated in order to stabilize a currency. The Chinese have capital controls. They don’t permit foreigners to come in and buy their land. I don’t think they ever will. Because otherwise the socialist process would be completely ruined. So you’re not going to get a BRICS country providing its assets as the anchor for the currency. This is just not going to happen.

Let’s say, India says we’ll do it. What assets do I want to buy in India right now? You know, if I have like 20 billion rupees, what will I buy? Or will the rupees just sit in a bank account? I don’t think that’s credible. But for most of the OPEC+ and big BRIC+ countries, futures in oil could be the asset. So if I have BRICS currency and nobody else takes it, the oil reserves would be mine. I could buy ten years of oil with my enormous wealth. Something needs to be alienable to me in exchange for the currency. So it could be that.

David Goeßmann: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock was set to 89 seconds before midnight in this year. We have never been this close to the end of humanity. A key threat is nuclear war, which would ultimately wipe out human civilization. How do you assess the nuclear risks and what needs to be done?

Vijay Prashad: I think the doomsday clock is actually anachronistic. It should be closer to midnight. The attack by the United States and Israel on Iran has sent a very serious message around the world to many countries. A message that was already sent a decade ago, which is that if you don’t have a nuclear weapon we’re going to destroy your state. This message was sent when the NATO countries went in and attacked Libya and destroyed the state. Why? Because Libya had a nuclear weapons program. They willingly gave it up in order for integration into the world system.

They were paid with a very strong price after that, the state was destroyed. Meanwhile, North Korea has a nuclear weapon, nobody dares attack them. I predict that the Iranians will have a nuclear bomb before the year is out, they will announce that they have a nuclear bomb. They are going to start enriching to have a bomb, why not. They need to protect themselves. They’re going to do that. In fact, this bombing run against Iran was not for nonproliferation, it was for proliferation. I can guarantee you the junta in Myanmar has already called the North Koreans and said, send us a bomb, send us missiles. Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, all these countries are going to go nuclear. So the doomsday clock will go to 59 seconds.

David Goeßmann: Another key risk factor is the climate crisis or climate catastrophe. Industrialized countries are mainly responsible for this. But they refuse to take the necessary steps to respond to the emergency. They continue to produce enormous amounts of greenhouse gases and are not prepared to provide adequate climate financing. Climate injustice also affects the consequences, which are borne primarily by developing countries. How is this refusal of rich countries viewed in the Global South?

Vijay Prashad: It’s actually a familiar sight. It’s not unfamiliar that at these meetings and events there’s a lot of high-minded speeches made about not only climate, the climate catastrophe. This goes back decades. The West will come to meetings and talk about development, the importance of development and then pledge some finance. It doesn’t happen. Overseas development aid is meant to be 0.7 percent of GDP. It’s never been there ever. So this is a familiar dance.

They talk about women’s rights, they talk about the importance of reproductive health. There’s no money on the table. They come to these meetings, they talk about the importance of dealing with the problems of disarmament and how war is terrible. Then they increase arming each other and building up the weapons industry. What’s new in this? Why should the climate issue be any different from the basically ontological hypocrisy of Western democracies? They are hypocritical on all issues right back to World War II, when they said “never forget” after the holocaust. The convention on genocide was passed. What is happening in Palestine now? Where is the “never forget”?

And not just Palestine. What is happening in Sudan and in the Congo? Maybe there’s no Western player acting there, but who are the arms companies? I’ve been very interested in arms companies and dealings. I jointly with Jeremy Corbyn and others published a book called “Monstrous Anger of the Guns”. We shine a light at the arms companies. They profit unbelievably. In fact, right now with this five percent of GDP and this “Let’s build up a European military”: they’re like pigs at the trough, they are just gobbling away. There’s all this public money they’re going to get. It’s disgusting. So it’s ontological hypocrisy of Western democracy.

David Goeßmann: Social movements and in general the so called Left seem to be in a weak position in many countries around the world. They often loose while extreme right or neo-fascist parties are on the rise. On the other side, there have been powerful protests and campaigns in the last decades from Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring to climate campaigns and political resistance to repression especially in the Global South. But still, the world races to the abyss and the crises are deepening. What is your take on that and what gives you the “optimism of the will”, to put it in Gramsci’s words?

Vijay Prashad: You look out of the window [the hotel lobby in the middle of Berlin], and within ten seconds you’ll see a delivery person go by or an Uber driver. In fact, when I was looking out just now two delivery people went by. The working class around the world has been “uberized”. People are working long irregular hours, low pay. Even if they are not working long hours they’re working in a way that’s largely disorganized. They don’t work together in factories. If they work together in factories they are not allowed to talk to each other. It’s highly regimented, very difficult to unionize people. Unionization rates have gone down.

In other words, people are not organized around the world. But this is the reservoir of the Left which is an organized working class, a trade union movement and organized peasant movement. Those are much weaker now. As our organization is weaker, it’s harder for us to build big movements. But that doesn’t stop mobilizations, because to mobilize people to a demonstration, you don’t need them to be organized. You don’t need two million people organized. You need them to get an Instagram post, saying that, come and protest against what’s happening in Palestine. People show up. But they aren’t necessarily organized with each other.

Mobilization actually helps the right rather than the left, because the right doesn’t need to build mass organizations of the working class and the peasantry. They can survive through mass mobilizations. The right in many countries isn’t benefiting from the election game. In Germany you are seeing the AfD grow, but in many countries, the far right is still not electorally able to prevail. It’s actually when the traditional right and the far right combine that you get big gains. Because the traditional right brings its money and apparatus, they have a money advantage. You can mobilize people to come and vote in elections with a lot of money.

The left has to have volunteers. We can mobilize people to marches easier than mobilizing them to the polls, to go and vote for a certain strategy. But mobilization actually favors the right if it has the traditional right with it. And we are in an era of mobilization, not organization. It’s easier to mobilize than organize. Social media has made mobilization easy. You put posts out there, they circulate, people come to things and so on. But we should not mistake a mass mobilization, huge protests for Palestine for an organized left in Berlin or wherever.

On the other hand if there are breakthroughs like now with a democratic socialist won the primary in New York City, Zohran Mamdani. I know his parents very well. His father is a Ugandan intellectual, his mother an Indian filmmaker, Mira Nair. She made terrific films like Mississippi Masala and so on, she’s a great filmmaker. Her son is a great 33-year-old democratic socialist. He comes from a Muslim family, middle name is Kwame, named after Kwame Nkrumah [the first president of Ghana]. These breakthroughs happen, you can have them in Germany at any moment. Some dynamic person can show up, because that’s part of modern telegenic electoral politics. You mobilize lots of people, enthusiastically, you can have an electoral victory.

Our problem which our institute is working on is what happens when you take power. What happens when you win without the balance of forces being changed? If you became the mayor of Berlin, what’s the agenda? What would you do? We have a whole bunch of ideas we’ve put together. I would say public transport is free. Anyway we pay for it with our taxes. Why should you buy tickets, just board the bus. You don’t need to tax the working class double by taxing them to pay for transport and taxing them every day to go to work. It’s ridiculous. I would say, make it free.

How would we pay for it? We’ll find a way. We’ll tax the businesses, we’ll tax every hotel that has two branches in the city. Why should there be two Ibis hotels? The second one gets taxed eight percent more. Maybe people say you’re chasing the Ibis out. Fine, let a family own the hotel, let them run it. So there are hopeful signs always there. You can have breakthroughs. There are mass organizations in the world. Two million peasants in Brazil are part of the landless workers movement. They produce the most organic rice in Latin America, it’s incredible.

We need to learn more about these organizations. There needs to be more knowledge transfer from North to South or South to North, depending on where you live. It’s very important that we bring the stories of work we all do from unlikely places. It’s inspirational that a young person, a young girl, a twelve-year-old, fifteen-year-old kid that reads an article gets moved and involved by something. She wants to build an organization and starts a reading group in her neighborhood, begins to drive a politics saying that we need to clean up our streets. That person builds a name for themselves, gets elected in the neighborhood, does one or two good things, inspires other people. That’s how change happens.

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