Open Letter on Vijay Prashad and Campism

Introduction

This is an open letter calling on activists and organisations in Aotearoa and so-called ‘Australia’ hosting talks with Vijay Prashad, to rescind or cancel his invitations to these events. 

It has been recently announced that there will be a public discussion held at the University of Auckland with Prashad on Thursday 24th October, and a Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa event in conversation with Prashad later that evening also in Auckland. Prashad is scheduled to speak on a livestream for the New Zealand Fabian Society on the evening of Friday 25th October. He is also scheduled to speak at the New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies National Conference in Wellington on Sunday 27 October. The Red Ant Collective will be hosting Prashad on his Australia Tour between October 29 and November 7, at various venues in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth.

We are a network of socialist and leftist organisers united by a conviction that workers’ self-emancipation, anti-imperialism, decolonisation, anti-authoritarianism, internationalism and feminism are integral parts of a socialist politics for the 21st century. We are alarmed by the growing influence of US-centred campist politics spreading on the left. Vijay Prashad is one of the main public intellectuals spreading this ideology. 

Prashad has a well-documented history of supporting non-Western imperialist and settler colonial projects, including outright denial of and apologism for the Chinese government’s Uyghur genocide, the Ethiopian government’s Tigrayan genocide, and the Sri Lankan government’s Tamil genocide. He has also infamously attempted to cover up a political party’s involvement in the rape and murder of an Indian woman activist. This is a racist and violent politics that is painfully hypocritical in its double standards of who is deserving or undeserving of internationalist solidarity. 

While we are all actively opposed to US imperialism, we are not willing to sacrifice Indigenous and other racialised struggles for liberation or independence from non-western imperialism, authoritarianism, and settler colonialism. We call on socialists in Aotearoa and so-called Australia to not collaborate with or provide platforms for Prashad, and either rescind his invitation to any events that have been organised, or cancel the events. 

Platforming genocide denialists in the name of Palestine undermines the Palestinian struggle, and undermines the claims of socialism and the left to stand for the international liberation of all working people. 

Those of us on the left whose non-Western homelands and peoples have been subjected to the dictatorships, genocides, colonisation and repression that Prashad denies and minimises, make a special plea to the socialist communities of Aotearoa and so-called ‘Australia’ to recognise our humanity, agency, lived experiences and expertise in this area.

Signed,

People Against All Imperialisms
Auckland Peace Action
Cripps Contra Colonialism
Fightback (Aotearoa/Australia)
Free Palestine Coalition Naarm
New Bloom (Taiwan)
Peace Action Wellington
Sahabat (Aotearoa)
Uyghur Solidarity Aotearoa
ARC UP Anarchist Communists (Naarm/Melbourne)
Anonymous Signatory 1*
Anonymous Signatory 2*
Rafiqah Abdullah
Nabilah Husna Abdul Rahman
Juniper Bevensee
Scheherazade Bloul
Hannah Blumhardt
Sina Brown-Davis
Rākau Buchanan
Louise Sang Cheung Burling
Anne Campbell
Tāwhana Chadwick
Jade Cho
Byron Clark
Hera Cook
Laura Lavinia Drew
Beverly Fletcher
Mihingarangi Forbes
Christopher Fung
Pip Grimshaw
Marty H
Mandy Hager
Mandy Henk
Gayaal Iddamalgoda
A.S. Ikeda
Rebekah Jaung
Yu Le Kong-Lim
Shaneel Lal
Ben Lambell
Lizartistry
Benjamin Martelli
Tze Ming Mok
Ping Ping Mu
Hala Nasr
Jaime Nicholson
Keith Ng
Tina Ngata
Kumakain Ngtae
H Noonan
Kera O’Regan
Melanie Orchard
Ru Pirie-Hunter
Dr Gerald Roche
Tasnim Sammak
Jeremy Sauvao
Jennifer Shields
Oz Susler
Nurdoukht Taghdumbashi
Kathryn Ticehurst
Giovanni Tiso
Kevin Veale
Samuel Watkinson
Trixie Winterfell
Jimmy Wintermute

*There are signatories who wish to remain anonymous due to security concerns for themselves or their families in their countries of origin, whose governments are criticised in this letter.

Here is a Google Form if you or your organisation would like to sign this statement. If you wish to remain anonymous due to homeland country security concerns, please state this.

See below for more information:

• Summary of Prashad’s beliefs and statements 
• Fuller discussion of Prashad’s beliefs and statements 

Summary of Prashad’s beliefs and statements

Prashad has a history of supporting non-Western settler colonial projects, genocide denialism and apologism. For example:

• Doesn’t think the Chinese state supported genocide in ‘Xinjiang’ East Turkestan directed at Uyghurs, Khazaks and other Muslim Indigenous peoples is a genocide and claims that China’s policies are a part of poverty alleviation, development, ‘deradicalisation’ and ‘modernising’ Islam. 
• Celebrated the leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/People’s Liberation Front (JVP) party Anura Kumara Dissanayanke’s victory during the Sri Lankan 2024 presidential election. The JVP are known for their oppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka and supporting Sinhala supremacy. 
• Supports the Ethiopian government’s genocidal war in Tigray  

He is also a misogynist:

• Denied the rape and murder of Tapasi Malik in 2007 by the Communist Party of India Members.
• Tapasi Malik is an activist who was struggling against the expropriation of land in Singur, West Bengal from locals against Tata — India’s largest conglomerate — trying to establish an auto factory there with the backing of the CPI(M), was raped and murdered by CPI(M) members, with Prashad instead claiming that Tapasi’s father and brother did this.
• Prashad’s original co-written article for Counterpunch in 2007: 
• Responses to Prashad’s rape cover up by Indian Marxists: CPI(M) lies about Tapasi Malik’s death – apologist Vijay Prasad disseminates untruths and Justice for Tapasi.

Apologism for the Communist Party of India (Marxist)

• Supporting the CPI(M)’s role in massacres in West Bengal. Prashad’s original article. Response to Prashad’s article.

In the context of Palestine:

• The Tricontinental institute which Prashad is the Executive Director of received $12 million funding through the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund. Goldman Sach also funded Israeli Settlers. 
• By not considering China as part of the imperialist project he also ignores how China engages in supporting security technologies, arms trade and cooperation with Israel such as HikVision’s use in the West Bank.

Campism and Tankie ideology 

• What is campism: Campism is the position that the world is divided into competing groups of nation-states (or camps) and that socialists should support one of the camps in order to promote the growth and development of socialism.
• What is Tankie ideology? Tankie ideology is based on both disinformation and a politics that denies the agency of any other imperialism outside of the West. The disinformation and fantasy is the notion that any state that calls itself ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ is a socialist/communist country when in reality, they can be forms of state capitalism where workers have little power. It is also fundamentally racist.
• Vijay Prashad is a campist of the contemporary non-Western bloc. More specifically, Prashad is a tankie, a term that was coined by dissident British Marxists to describe those members of the Communist Party of Great Britain that supported the Soviet Union suppressing the 1956 Hungarian Revolution with tanks. 

Fuller discussion of Prashad’s beliefs and statements

Who is Vijay Prashad?

Vijay Prashad is a well-known Marxist historian, author and journalist. He is the author of histories of the Non-Aligned Movement in his book “The Darker Nations” and the New International Economic Order and the IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes in his book “The Poorer Nations”. He is the editor of LeftWord Books, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter and is also the director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research who state their goal is to  “build a bridge between academic production and political and social movements in order to promote critical thinking and stimulate debates and research with an emancipatory perspective that serves the people’s aspirations.” Prashad is a senior non-resident fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of the Renmin University of China.

Prashad’s genocide denialism and apologism

Denial of genocide in “Xinjiang”/East Turkestan

Amongst other harmful discourses and actions, Prashad repeats Chinese government propaganda and talking points which ultimately undermines decolonization. He has been on record saying that what is happening in “Xinjiang” to Uyghurs, Khazaks and other Muslim Indigenous peoples occupied by China as ‘poverty alleviation‘, and later re-justified this genocide implying it is “a people’s project that struggles to find a way to undermine social hierarchies and advance the possibilities for the people”. Prashad seems to consider the mass incarceration, torture, forced assimilation, forced labour, separation of families and children, the erasure of Uyghur culture and sterilisaton of Uyghur women as such a project.

The use of Marxist and anti-imperialist language to justify such colonial violence, we see as a form of redwashing of genocide. This is a cynical strategy that Zionists have used against Palestinians. Likewise, the Chinese government has heavily borrowed from Israel and US discourses on the ‘war on terror’ to cast an Indigenous Muslim population fighting for independence as ‘terrorism’. Not only has discourse and ideology been borrowed from Western and Zionist propaganda, China is also materially and in terms of its security policies linked within the larger Western-led Islamophobic ‘war on terror’. For example, China engaged the infamous Christian-supremacist Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group for both the Belt and Road Initiative and in relation to the Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang, with Prince being the former head of the infamous US private military contractor Blackwater which committed war crimes in Iraq.

This pro-CCP stance also exists in a context of funding from ‘Maoist’ millionaire Neville Roy Singham to the Tricontinental Institute through the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund. It is no secret that Singham has business interests in China and has actively funded the spread of pro-CCP talking points through The People’s Forum, and BreakThrough News, and through Indian media.

Support for the Ethiopian government’s genocidal war in Tigray and Sahel military dictatorships

In addition, Prashad has repeatedly defended the Ethiopian government and worked with both Ethiopian government officials and pro-government diasporic grounds toward that end, with him claiming that it is being subject to hybrid warfare at the hands of American imperialism. Prashad did this in an event with a representative of the Ethiopian government and an Ethiopian diaspora organisation, both of which espoused the Ethiopian government’s position, which denies they engaged in a genocide against the Tigrayans and framed their genocide as a counter-terrorism operation against Tigrayan rebels. Such claims ignore that the Ethiopian government since 2020 has been engaging in a genocide against the Tigrayan people in order to restore Amhara supremacy over the other nationalities in Ethiopia as it existed under the Ethiopian Empire. This genocide denial is in direct contradiction to any claim to oppose genocide as part of an emancipatory politics.

Prashad’s support for reactionary regimes in Africa does not stop with Ethiopia, with Prashad also praising the Alliance of Sahel States, which is made up of the military juntas that rule Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Prashad supports the alliance on the basis that they oppose French neo-colonialism in Africa and they are putting the three countries on the path to genuine independence. Such a sanguine position on the Sahel military juntas is flawed for three reasons. First, supporting military dictatorship is a complete negation of a foundational principle for socialists, which is that the emancipation of the workers, peasants and the oppressed must be conquered by the workers, peasants and the oppressed themselves. Second, military dictatorships historically and today implement extremely reactionary policies that are anti-worker, anti-peasant, anti-LGBT+, anti-ethnic and religious minorities etc. with the military junta in Burkina Faso recently criminalising homosexuality. Third, the alliance has built ties and strong geopolitical, military and economic dependency with the far-right Russian government that is engaging in a settler colonial invasion of Ukraine, showing how the Sahel has traded French neo-colonialism for Russian neo-colonialism. Given this, Prashad’s support for these military dictatorships is a total abandonment of the principles of workers self-emancipation and of decolonisation.

Support for the Tamil genocide-denying People’s Liberation Front/JVP

Prashad has also publicly celebrated the leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/People’s Liberation Front (JVP) party Anura Kumara Dissanayanke’s victory during the Sri Lankan 2024 presidential election. The JVP are known for their oppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Sinhala supremacy that the party espouses. More specifically, Anura and the JVP supported the Sri Lankan military during their genocide against the Tamils, opposed every international investigation into the Tamil genocide as well as any attempt to hold the genocidaires accountable and opposed the implementation of the 13th Amendment of the Sri Lankan constitution that grants political devolution to Tamils during and after the genocide. Sri Lanka is an ethnocracy, the JVP even cosied up to the most overtly fascist Buddhist clergy to win the election. This is similar to how Israel feigns liberalism and even socialism while genociding. Such support for genocide, opposition to any accountability measures and a refusal to support political autonomy and policies that reduce racial, national and ethnic discrimination are in flagrant contradiction to socialist principles and conceptions of internationalism, anti-imperialism and decolonisation.

Denial of gendered violence in the Communist Party of India (Marxist)/CPI(M)

When Prashad is not engaging in genocide denial and supporting military dictatorships, he is busy denying that members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) engaged in gender violence against women. More specifically, in 2007, Vijay Prashad denied that Tapasi Malik, an activist who was struggling against the expropriation of land in Singur, West Bengal from locals against Tata — India’s largest conglomerate — trying to establish an auto factory there with the backing of the CPI(M), was raped, burned and murdered by CPI(M) members, with Prashad instead claiming that Tapasi’s father and brother did this. In reality, subsequent arrests and court trials revealed that two CPI(M) members were behind such horrific gender violence. 

Prashad himself was born and lived his childhood in Kolkata, West Bengal in India. His aunt is Brinda Karat, a prominent CPI(M) member, who was elected to the Politburo of the CPI(M) which is the highest leadership body within the Party in 2005. The targeted campaign of harassment resulting in the rape and murder of Tapasi was ordered by a powerful local CPI(M) West Bengal leader Suhrid Datta, at the time the Singur Zonal Committee Secretary of the CPI(M). It is unlikely that the CPI(M) leadership, especially the CPI(M) West Bengal leadership — would not have been familiar at least with the controversies around Tapasi’s death and the circumstances around their land expropriation campaign in Singur, West Bengal. Prashad’s spreading of falsehoods around Tapasi’s rape and murder is one of many examples globally of sexism and rape culture within Marxist parties and mileus, starkly demonstrates why any revolutionary socialism today must be feminist.

Campism

What is “campism”?

Campism is the position that the world is divided into competing groups of nation-states (or camps) and that socialists should support one of the camps in order to promote the growth and development of socialism. Campism arose during the inter-imperialist First World War, where socialists, be they anarchists or Marxists, became divided over whether they should support the Allied/Entente Powers (led by Britain, France, Russia and the United States of America), the Central Powers (led by Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire) or oppose both camps and organise to transform the inter-imperialist world war into a civil war and then a world revolution. In the lead up to and during the Second World War, socialists were split based on whether to support the anti-fascist Allies (led by Britain, France, the USA and the Soviet Union) or oppose them as well as the fascist Axis (led by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Japanese Empire) and organise for a world revolution. 

This was then followed by the Cold War, where there was the Western bloc (the capitalist countries led by the United States), the Eastern bloc (the Soviet-type societies led by the Soviet Union) and non-aligned countries, with different socialist tendencies either supporting the Eastern bloc, the non-aligned countries or opposing both of these as well as the Western bloc and instead develop a revolutionary socialist camp. With the end of the Cold War, new camps have arisen, consisting of the Euro-American bloc led by the USA, a non-Western bloc led by Russia and China as well as non-aligned countries, with a major debate among socialists today being whether to support the non-Western bloc or non-aligned countries or to oppose all capitalist camps and instead focus on building an internationalist, anti-imperialist and decolonial socialist movement.

Vijay Prashad and Campism 

Vijay Prashad is a campist of the contemporary non-Western bloc. More specifically, Prashad is a tankie, a term that was coined by dissident British Marxists to describe those members of the Communist Party of Great Britain that supported the Soviet Union suppressing the 1956 Hungarian Revolution with tanks. Since it was coined in the late 1950’s, the term tankie expanded to describe those who supported the Soviet-type societies throughout the Cold War. After the Cold War, the term tankie has changed in meaning, with it these days referring to those who support the five states that claim to be socialist and have Marxist-Leninism as their state ideology (China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and Laos) as well as their allies who claim to be anti-imperialist (such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria etc.).

What is campist ideology? 

Campist ideology is based on both misinformation and a politics that denies the agency of any other imperialism outside of the West. The misinformation and fantasy is the notion that any state that calls itself ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ is a socialist/communist country when in reality, they can be forms of state capitalism where workers have little power. It is a racist ideology that leads to justifications of state violence against dissidents, in the case of China of the Uyghur genocide either as necessary to ‘eliminate poverty’, or as all CIA propaganda to fuel a Cold War with China. It is couched in ‘Marxist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ language that denies the realities on the ground, presenting a black and white, good vs evil narrative.

In regards to China, Sino-Russian campists see anything anti-China as Sinophobic and pro-US, even when the critiques come from socialists, anarchists, and Chinese dissidents. While their analysis and opposition to US imperialism is well-justified, it transitions in apologism or direct promotion of Chinese state policies and propaganda that allow for oppression, imperialism, settler colonialism and genocide. In effect, that gaslight those with lived experiences of genocide and Chinese state violence by denying it altogether or justifying it. It reflects a limited political imagination to go beyond both superpowers and make the connections that their oppressive tactics are actually entangled and uphold each other.

Issues with campism

More broadly, there are multiple issues with campism. First, by arguing that certain capitalist states are imperialist, it ignores how there are other forms of imperialism such as the Russian and Chinese capitalist states.

Second, it centers states in its analysis, tactics and strategy, more specifically which state blocs to support or oppose. Such a centering of states completely disregards some elemental socialist analysis and principles, more specifically that states exist to reproduce the world system through ideological, repressive and other means’ that a socialist society that will genuinely bring about emancipation must be stateless; and that the only agents who have the interest in and the capacity to build such a society through revolution is the global working-class and peasantry. 

Third, by focusing on states as the main actors with agency in the realm of international politics, it leads to the dehumanisation of the workers and peasants that live under those states. This is because by ascribing agency only to states, those populations living under such states are seen as incapable of achieving anything or deserving any better than what they current have under the states they live by, which feeds into racist stereotypes, particular around non-Western peoples living under non-Western states. This is illustrated through the racism against Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tigrayans, Tamils and other peoples living under non-Western states espoused by Sino-Russian campists.

Fourth, by dividing the world into competing blocs of capitalist states, it results in selective solidarity towards certain peoples based on if they are working with or struggling against states that are part of one camp or the other. It even obscures the ways in which states in this so-called anti-Western camp have helped suppress movements for liberation in ways inconsistent with tankies’ own support of socialist movements. This can be seen in numerous examples such as China’s support for Pakistan’s genocidal war against Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, China’s support to Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile through loans, China’s support for the Western-backed right-wing anti-communist UNITA in the Angolan Civil War, China’s invasion of Vietnam in support of the US-backed Khmer Rouge regime — and with other tankie-supported non-socialist regimes like Iran’s suppression after the 1979 Revolution of the shoras workers’ committees, the Fedaʾiyan-e Khalq and the Mujahideen-e Khalq and the workers’ and women’s liberation movement, and with the Asaad regime in Syria’s repression against leftists, the workers’ movement and intervention in favour of right-wing forces in the Lebanese Civil War, and much more. More broadly, both China and Russia — diplomatic gestures otherwise — are extensively imbricated in the Western-led imperialist world order in their own ways, with China and Russia engaging in security technologies, arms trade and cooperation with Israel (such as HikVision’s use in the Palestinian West Bank), Indonesia (in relation to Indonesia’s occupation of  Timor Leste before its independence and West Papua), the Myanmar military junta, and much more.

Fifth, as a result of the previous point, campism leads to the limitation of our collective power. This is because support for any capitalist camp’s actions and denial of the genocide and settler colonialism that they are engaging in leads to the workers and peasants that are part of the communities that are being subjected to both by any of the capitalist camps being alienated by socialists who hold such positions. As a result, they lose interest in socialism, which makes the pivotal task of building a revolutionary socialist movement amongst the workers and peasants of the world even more difficulty than it already is.

For the above reasons, it is pivotal that socialists reject campism in all its forms and recommit themselves to developing the theory and practice of an anti-imperialist, decolonial and internationalist revolutionary socialism so that we can bring about the emancipation of the workers and peasants of the world once and for all.

Call for internationalism, anti-imperialism and a principled commitment to revolutionary socialism and decolonisation

On the basis of Prashad’s genocide denial, support for settler colonialism and misogyny, we call on socialists in Aotearoa and so-called Australia to not collaborate with or platform Prashad, and cancel any events that have been organised with Prashad as a speaker. We are ultimately doing so because we argue that Prashad’s campism, genocide denial, apologetics for settler colonialism and misogyny is contributing to the liquidation of the decolonial, anti-imperialist and feminist principles that are an integral part of contemporary socialist theory and practice. If this is allowed to happen, then this will result in a socialism that cannot successfully bring about a social revolution that will genuinely bring about the emancipation of the workers of the world in their entirety. Instead, it will deradicalise socialism to such an extent that it will at most be a movement to reform the world system, as happened to the workers parties of the Second International in the early 20th century. In the context of the ongoing genocides, femicides and ecocides that are happening across the entirety of the world system, this must not be allowed to happen to socialism, as it has been repeatedly proven that this system’s problems cannot be solved through reform. Instead, it is incumbent on all of us to help construct a principled internationalist, anti-imperialist and feminist socialism that will bring about intersectional workers emancipation, with rejecting genocide deniers, settler colonial apologists and misogynists like Prashad being part of that process of construction.

As people that are committed to a liberatory politics, revolutionary socialism and decolonisation our actions and the people that we collaborate with and platform speak for who we are. Giving a platform to someone who denies and engages in apologism for imperialism committed by non-Western powers goes against a principled approach to our politics. It denies the ways in which power structures shapeshift and borrow from each other, adopting different ‘faces’ with the similar supremacist and violent ideologies that undergird them. There is one world-system of capitalism, imperialism, statism, settler-colonialism and cisheteropatriarchy — and defending or apologising for any part of it, failing to uphold or be in solidarity with the exploited or oppressed anywhere and everywhere will be an obstacle against our struggle for a world liberated from oppression and exploitation.