The imperialist nature of US-led wars against the Global South – ft. Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad recently joined us on 99 Media for a long conversation that moves between two urgent questions. The first is immediate: what’s really driving the ongoing economic and military conflict – of which Iran is just the latest episode? The second is deeper, historical, and theoretical: what role does imperialism, and more broadly plunder and value extraction, play as a constitutive element in the emergence and ongoing functioning of capitalism as a mode of production? Let’s take each in turn. On the present: structure, not just bad actors Prashad doesn’t dismiss contingency. Of course the Zionist lobby matters. Of course the Trump administration’s arrogance matters. Individuals and ideas co-drive history. But these elements, he insists, are rooted in an overarching structural context that we have to fully grasp: the ongoing crisis of US-led Western imperialism. Without that structural analysis, we fall into gross misinterpretations. In the current moment, that doesn’t just mean exaggerating Trump’s personal responsibility while letting the Democrats off the hook for theirs. It also means externalising guilt – treating the problem as exogenous to the system itself. As if the system isn’t fundamentally corrupted, only captured by a bunch of baddies: Trump, the Zionist lobby, some ill-defined “kings” and autocrats ruining an otherwise good machine. Sound familiar? A few years ago, when Democrats were in power, a similar magical-thinking theory made the rounds. The story then was that Trump would be an anti-establishment figure who’d dismantle imperialism from within – an unlikely emancipator of the betrayed American working class, a champion of a multipolar world. Little more than fairy tales. But dangerous ones. Whether they come from genuine naivety or from carefully planned narratives with very different political goals, the result is the same: we stop looking at the structure. Why the second part of the interview matters to understand the intrinsic contradictions of Western imperialism, we need a theory that explains how plunder and value extraction – what Marx, in Capital Vol. I, called “primitive accumulation” – is not a one-off prologue but a constitutive and ongoing element of capitalism as a mode of production. And here we must not be fooled by the word “primitive.” It doesn’t mean “long ago and only in the British countryside”. That’s precisely the interpretation Prashad pushes back against – the one offered by Vivek Chibber (editor of Catalyst, part of the Jacobin intellectual milieu). Chibber argues, in effect, that it was empirically mistaken to believe that “the Global North continues to stay rich because of the plunder of the South”. Prashad helps us see why that reading is wrong, and which are its political implications. He takes us on an intellectual and historical journey that rejects the use of Lenin’s conjunctural thesis of “opposite imperialism” as an analytical tool to understand the current situation. Instead, he sheds light on the very different nature of the two main contenders on the international scene: a war-provoking United States, and a China that increasingly acts as an agent for stabilisation and peace.