The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South

by Vijay Prashad

In The Darker Nations , Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and traced the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement. With The Poorer Nations , Prashad takes up the story where he left off. Since the ’70s, the countries of the Global South have struggled to build political movements. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issue-based movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival—in short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful. Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism. In his foreword to the book, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali writes that Prashad “has helped open the vista on complex events that preceded today’s global situation and standoff.” The Poorer Nations looks to the future while revising our sense of the past.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, World History, India, International

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2012

About the author

Vijay Prashad is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. His most recent book is Red Star Over the Third World. He writes regularly for Frontline, The Hindu, Alternet and BirGun.

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, you’ve read Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism? Now consider the Global South perspectives…

Preamble:
--Over the past 6 years, Vijay Prashad tops my list of teachers. He is a phenomenal lecturer; playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
--His magnum opus is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, which breaks from the Global North’s Cold War framing of the post-WWII world to consider Global South perspectives (i.e. decolonization and the Third World Project).
--This book is the sequel, which continues the Global South perspectives into the Neoliberal era...

Highlights:
--Fair warning: while not steeped in jargon or abstract theorizing, this historical account is nonetheless dense reading in that it frequently jumps between many levels of analysis (from sweeping macro summaries to micro details, like the personal interactions behind negotiations) and back-and-forth in time. The new Afterword hastily tries to tie things together, but you’ll have to do a lot of work synthesizing all the events with political economic theories… Here’s my attempt:

1) Neoliberalism 101 - The Global North’s response to its crises:
--There is logic in understanding power to start from its source (i.e. Global North); indeed, Prashad cites Hudson's masterpiece Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance.
--Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism is also useful, although I prefer the epic storytelling of Varoufakis in The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy and And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future.
--To summarize, the US empire’s global plan (Bretton Woods) to preserve global capitalism after the crash (Great Depression) and creative destruction (WWII) became a burden on the US by the mid-1960’s as the US lost its surplus role to global competition and the costly war on Vietnam. In its new deficit role, the US could preserve its hegemony if it controlled the recycling of (others’) surpluses, so the US deregulated Wall Street and hiked interest rates to attract the surpluses. Thus, the shift from Industrial Capitalism to Finance Capitalism…

2) The Global South’s agency:
--In the accounts of Hudson/Harvey/Varoufakis, the actors are primarily in the Global North while the Global South reacts. Here is where Prashad comes in. Much as the “Cold War” was not just a post-WWII rivalry between the US and USSR, but part of a longer movement of 20th century decolonization (highlighted by the Russian Revolution, followed by the “Third World Project”), “Neoliberalism” also had to contend with the Global South.
--The peak of the Third World Project (refer to The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World) threatened Global North imperialism with:
a) Economic justice: the NIEO (New International Economic Order) proposal directly challenged economic imperialism by demanding regulation of multinational corporations, better terms of trade (given the Global North’s protectionism) and technology transfer, while encouraging domestic nationalization and producer’s associations (i.e. cartels) to tame commodity prices (building on OPEC!).
b) Political representation (General Assembly/G77 in the UN) and disarmament (NAM)

3) How Neoliberalism countered the Global South:
--The idea of the NIEO was indeed a threat to the Global North, symbolized by the OPEC Oil Shocks; it would also be a barrier to another aim of Neoliberalism to build a new geography of production (outsourcing + rent profits) to destroy labor unions, exploit cheap labor, and defuse the threat of nationalization; this required a new intellectual property (IP) regime (product-patenting) replacing the previous process-patenting (which allowed for innovations in new processes).
--The architects of imperialism (i.e. Kissinger/Brzezinski/David Rockefeller) aimed to divide-and-conquer:
a) Unite the Global North (G7/Trilateral Commission)
b) Divide OPEC vs. rest of NAM which needed to import oil (esp. “LDCs” Less Developed Countries)
c) Divide OPEC using puppets Saudi Arabia/Gulf Arab monarchies
d) Undermine UN democracy (General Assembly/G77) with UN Security Council; undermine UN development agencies (UNCTAD/UNESCO) with GATT/IMF/WB.
e) Divide NAM by pulling in the “locomotives of the South”
--Without the NIEO and domestic social revolutions (instead, decolonization relied on class compromises in most cases; thus, domestic elites became drawn to Neoliberalism), Third World development relied on private markets for loans (promoted by petrodollar recycling, where OPEC profits were invested in Western banks, which sought borrowers in developing states). The Volcker Shock raising interest rates buried development in the Third World debt crisis.
--Prashad's 2020 book Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations summarizes the various techniques of imperialist terror, from direct military intervention to covert arming of reactionaries to modernized "hybrid war". Also: The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

4) Global South during Neoliberalism:
a) “South from Above”:
--While many South elites embraced Neoliberalism (i.e. economic growth at the expense of social development), they were still harmed by imperialism, i.e. debt, Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), new IP, North protectionism, etc.
-For an excellent overview: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions.
-For big-picture theory: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
--Julius Nyerere led the South Commission to build institutional capacity against the overwhelming technocratic resources of the Global North. The most that could be agreed on was South-South cooperation (G15), although Prashad notes that he gained more appreciation after researching the details of the debates.
--The role models (“locomotives of the South”) started with the East Asian tigers’ export-oriented state development, but these were too dependent on Global North demand and political support (which led Japan to stumble in the 1990’s and the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis). The true locomotives became China, which offered industrial development to the South instead of the West’s “foreign aid” SAPs.
--US primacy waned from its overreaching War on Terror and 2008 Financial Crisis, and the international community pushed towards:
i) regionalism: ex. Pink Tide and ALBA against Bush’s FTAA (which highlights the significance of Chavez/Venezuela and Morales/Bolivia, and the recent US imperialist terrorism there)
ii) multipolarity: ex. Chinese diplomacy, BRICS

b) “South from Below”:
--environmental/indigenous/women’s/peasant movements (ex. Via Campesina’s “food sovereignty), slum organizing, movements in parallel with state (ex. participatory democracy in Venezuela)...

Better ideas do not by themselves change the world. The suffocation of the dominant social forces precludes alternative ideas from being taken seriously. There are hundreds of designs in engineering labs for smokeless chimneys and waterless toilets, but their existence has not meant that they have been adopted for mass usage. It will require a shift in social power to allow new ideas and new technologies to become acceptable in our times. In the absence of such a change, an “alternative” will simply mean a solution of a practical nature that is not capable of being fully embraced.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Prashad, you know you can expect erudition, a full-throated defence of the Southern peoples, wit and a knack for making complexity accessible. Less expected is the evenhandedness that his partisanship is tempered with. A worthy successor to The Darker Nations.

[Kaśyap · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his earlier book “the darker nations”, Vijay Prashad traced the story of the third world from its birth in the anti – colonial movements , the formation of NAM to the debt crisis when the resistance to the multinational corporations faded and the third world project died. In this book he continues the story which begins in the 1970’s with what the demise of what he calls the Atlantic liberalism and the birth of neoliberalism and traces it to the 21st century where new forms of resistance and possible alternatives to neoliberalism have emerged.

In the first chapter, Prashad analyses the death of Atlantic liberalism and the subversion of the institutional efforts of the third world to promote a new international economic order (NIEO), through coordinated and organised offensive by the G7 powers led by USA. This offensive led towards a neoliberal restructuring of the world economic order.

The second chapter provides a detailed analysis of the work of south commission under the leadership of the Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere. The outcome of the commission’s report was the rise of southern neoliberalism with a focus on “growth” taking the centre stage.

The third chapter deals with the notion of the emergence of the notion of the larger nations of the south with high “growth” as the “locomotives of the south” that will lead the smaller nations of the south. The formation of G15, IBSA leading to BRICS takes the centre stage. While the emergence of BRICS that want to play a larger role in the global economy gives new voice to the south, it is however limited by the fact that it has no ideological alternative to neoliberalism and is in fact committed to Southern neoliberalism.

This leads to the fourth part where he shifts from the institutional focus to that of the grassroots anti – globalisation struggles in Latin America. He focuses on the struggles of Women, indigenous people and the slum dwellers. One of the central questions in this section is that of internationalism. While not dismissing the importance of internationalism in the struggle against neoliberalism, he offers a critic of World Social Forum (WSF). My one criticism here is that the author speaks nothing about the discontent and the grassroots struggles in India and China.

I’m also not sure about the author’s conclusion here. Does he look at BRICS as a part of a collective transnational programme of the south? Does he think the BRICS will lead to a new economic order for the world? Or does he think of the Bolivarian model as providing a possible alternative to neoliberalism?

This is a very important book that offers a critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of the south and is a must a read for anyone. His focus here once again is mainly on the institutions and the nations of the south but he does provide some view on the people’s struggles towards the end.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The terms we use to describe what we used to call the Third World, or the Empire, or Less Developed Countries, or Developing Countries – that part of the world made up of the majority of the people who have ever lived on this small ball in the galaxy – seem to be endless and never varying … and when ‘The Global South’ came along it just seemed too perplexing; much of it was not ‘South’, but it was disempowered, deprived, made to pay the costs of global capitalism. As the Brandt Commission reported in 1980, to call the majority world the South is to be clear about global relations of power.

This outstanding book traces the emergence of the Global South from the crumbling of the Third World Project, through the struggles over neo-liberal hegemony and dominance and the emergence of new sites and forms of resistance in the slums, among indigenous peoples and those lead by women. Prasad’s grasp of the institutions and personalities is excellent while his understanding of the complex politics of regional, multilateral and shifting bi-polar world power means that this institutional focus is tempered by a clear and lucid exploration of political and ideological context and practice.

We could read this as a sequel to The Darker Nations , his 2007 history of the Third World project, but there is no need to have read that book to get this one. In this case, rather than the earlier focus on a decolonising opposition to the bi-polar politics of the Cold War as seen in the Non-Aligned Movement, the argument turns around three key strands. In the first, we have the collapse of Northern social-democratic liberalism as seen in the struggles in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s over the push for a New International Economic Order and the multi-lateral politics of structured development we saw in the work of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); these struggles resulted in the defeat of multi-lateralism and the anti-colonial/imperial NIEO in favour of the dominance of the increasingly neo-liberal Washington Consensus in the IMF and World Bank. The final fling of this Northern social-democratic liberalism came in the form of the (former social-democrat FDR Chancellor Willy) Brandt Commission’s 1980 report North-South: A Programme for Survival that laid out a vision that was largely swept away during the 1981 International Meeting for Cooperation and Development that saw a global policy victory driven by increasingly powerful neo-liberal order fronted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but driven by a rich global network (as Philip Mirowski shows).

The second strand of the argument centres on emerging Southern neo-liberalism through struggles within the states and international organisations of the South: the Non-Aligned Movement, UNCTAD and the like. Despite his great respect for some of the South’s elder statesmen, such as Julius Nyerere, Prashad is also clear that the desire for consensus and to hold together the institutions and voice of the South was in effect a victory for a neo-liberal South. The analysis here turns on the South Commission during the 1980s, headed up by Nyerere but drawing in a range of technocrats, politicians and Southern political heavyweights.

Throughout this shift to more powerful Southern neo-liberalism the notion of the locomotives of the South as part of a collective Southern development programme, Prashad’s third strand, fades; it is replaced by a focus on these Southern power houses summed up in the acronyms BRICS and IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) not as part of a collectivist South but as states whose goal is to force their way into the neo-liberal order of the G7/G8/G20. This new emerging global order of an expanded neo-liberal grouping and the enforcement of global rules that serve their interests, and not those of the South or its people, he argues, resulted in global resistance during the 1990s resulting from (1) enforced austerity (via, for instance, ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’), (2) growing unemployment as both industry and to a lesser but significant extent agriculture mechanised/technologized, (3) a neo-liberal growth strategy based in the interests of finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) and public sector privatisation leading to asset stripping and a focus on short term gains, (4) growing global hunger as a result of the growth of agribusiness and the displacement of family farmers, and (5) the rapid growth of very high rates of global inequality between and more especially within states.

The significance of this global resistance was that it was grounded in civil society and popular movements, in contrast to the 1950s and 1960s struggles based in state building and national liberation. These new movements are fluid, but centred on three principle sectors – women, indigenous peoples and slum dwellers; that is, they are based in the excluded within the states in the South. This new form of Southern power, Prashad argues, is building strength through emerging institutional forms (such as the World Social Forum, and increasingly regional and international networks based in and across these and other sectors). It is always risky to prognosticate on these kinds of struggle as they are underway, but Prashad’s argument that we are seeing power struggles based in neo-regionalism and multi-polarity that are undermining (it is far too early to say destroying) US hegemony 21st century is a powerful one for an analysis at this stage. (Crucially, Prashad argues that China’s economic power and global dominance is, at this stage, overstated.)

The case is both rich and dense, with a close focus on the global and regional multi-state and corporate institutions of both states and social forces – so we, as readers, need to keep on top of these groups. The institutional focus is brought to life by his detailed grasp of the personalities involved, personalities who often shift between groups and roles, as well as a regular reminder of who these characters are and where we last met them.

This is a major contribution to our understanding of global struggles for justice, and is essential reading for new internationalists.

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

In terms of how much I learned and how thought-provoking I found it, this book gets five stars. The overarching analysis brings the score down a bit, because I feel Vijay falls into the trap of calling everything he's not too keen on 'neoliberalism'. China's development model (being the most important example) is heavily regulated, planned, and is dominated by state-owned enterprises; it doesn't conform to any sensible definition of 'neoliberalism' that I've come across. A couple of other little quibbles here and there, but honestly it's a very interesting book, well worth reading.

[Thomas Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, Vijay Prashad, 2012, 292 pages.

A clear-eyed statement of where we're going, why we're in this handbasket, who did it, why, and how.

Written at a moment when global protests and Latin American leftist electoral successes seemed to provide reason for hope.

Introduction:

The rich ate everybody's lunch. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

That's a social problem that needs a political solution. p. 11.

Gross Domestic Product was the only variable that mattered at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank by the 1980s. p. 6. The Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs changed the intellectual property regime so that reverse engineering or transfer of technology became illegal. https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/... The North and its businesses would be able to outsource the production of commodities to the South, but the bulk of the profits for their sale would be preserved as rent for intellectual property. (In the North, this gave us jobless growth, debt-fueled consumerism, a housing bust, and personal-credit crisis.) p. 7. Austerity, financialization, privatization, unemployment, high food and fuel prices, disparity and deprivation, neoliberalism's iron fist, concentration of wealth, theft of the commons, theft of human dignity and rights, undermining of democratic institutions. The global South is a world of protest. pp. 7-9. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent $7.6 trillion on its wars and national security apparatus, deeply cut social spending and cut taxes on the rich. (In 2011, under President Obama, the top 1% got an average tax cut greater than the average income of the other 99%.) Locomotives of the South pull the wagons of the North. p. 10.

Chapter 3 The Locomotives of the South

The boot of northern banks and business remains on the neck of the global south. Much of the public sector was sold to predators at fire-sale prices. Northern manufacturing relocated south. p. 173. The rich few gained at the expense of the poor. p. 175. Ninety percent of Indians now work in the "informal sector." p. 177. Rich governments subsidize agribusiness, to dump commodities on the world market, devastating farm livelihoods. p. 191. No crumbs fall from the North's plate. It eats everyone's lunch. p. 193. The International Monetary Fund destroyed Argentina's economy in 2001. p. 194.

China privatized state-owned enterprises, and ended welfare programs, in 1994. p. 202. Peasants suffered. p. 203.

The 2008 financial meltdown led to calls for austerity for the poor, bailouts and a free ride for the rich. p. 219

Chapter 4 A Dream History of the Global South:

Governments now are tools of the rich, crushing dissent. p. 234. The World Trade Organization began in 1995, under President Clinton. p. 237. In the United Nations, the Security Council has usurped policy making. p. 241. Dictatorship of financial markets, uncontrolled transnational firms. p. 243. States around the world are forced to act on behalf of capital and against the interests of the great mass of people. p. 251. Pain for the many, gain for the few. p. 259. In 1998-2011, South Americans elected leftist governments. p. 260. This after the cataclysm of 1980s dictatorships and 1990s neoliberalism. Half of Latin Americans lived in poverty by 2000, 25% in extreme poverty. p. 261. The new governments had little ability to help their people, against the powers of the U.S., international finance, international corporations, the local moneyed elite and their pet militaries. p. 262. Oil revenue enabled Venezuela to constitutionally mandate public-funded medical care for its people, and provided social security to housewives. pp. 262-263. Women are the poorest. p. 264. Venezuela and Bolivia import 70% of their food, largely from the U.S.; 5% of landowners hold 75% of the land. Agriculture is devastated. pp. 265-267. Poverty in Venezuela was cut from 48.6% to 27.6% of the people from 2002 to 2008, by government efforts. p. 269.

The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States was formed in 2010, without the United States or Canada. When the U.S. is present, democracy, peace, and social equity are not guaranteed. p. 270.

Large slumlands dominate the great cities of the third world. p. 271. State intrusion brings bulldozers, and policemen in search of a bribe. p. 273. Violent criminal gangs rule. p. 274 and see A History of Violence, Óscar Martínez, 2016. 44% of urban Iranians live in slums. p. 275. Elites are besieged by angry hordes, and rely on militaries to subdue people. U.S. and European cities have slums too. p. 276. See /Planet of Slums/, Mike Davis, 2007.

Tiny type!

[Eric Bottorff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely recommend reading Prashad's *The Darker Nations* before reading this. It works on its own, for sure, but they're best read as two volumes of a possible or people's history of the global south.

[Ervin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an excellent summary of the struggles of the South to become self-sufficient in a world dominated by the North. It's a call for a new world order. It's a necessary read for everyone who lives in this planet, who want explanations of that immense difference between the rich countries and the poor ones.

It is written with passion. One feels the author ranting, but always providing primary sources to back up his frustration. However, one cannot say the author is biased. He points out the disingenuous, conditional help provided by the world super powers to developing countries. He expands his narrative to also show the lack of coordination of the South, their biggest flaws in organization.

I enjoyed reading it. One of my complaints, however, is the numerous use of acronyms for the myriad of organizations. At points all of them become confusing and the author helps this by not constantly explaining what they mean.

[Nicolien · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Gerald Ford opened the conversation at Rambouillet with a plea that the mean thrust had to be for the leaders "to ensure that the current world economic situation is not seen as a crisis in the democratic or capitalist system." The G7 had to prevent the capitalist crisis from becoming a political one; it had to be handled as a technical economic problem."
(p. 4)

"Disparity and deprivation do not sit well with the commonplace ideas of fairness and justice. The powerful know this. The way they divide the national budgets of their countries demonstrates their values. More goes to the military, police, and prisons than to schools, to the Mukhabarat than to the ministry of health, to guns than to bread. Given the social consequences of neoliberalism, it is far more effective and logical for the 1 percent to build a security apparatus, to cage people into devastated cities or to hold them in congested high-security prisons. There is nothing irrational about the prison-industrial complex; from a neoliberal perspective, it is perfectly reasonable."
(p. 8)

"One of the most notable features of this era is that, despite its demographic majority, the states of the Third World Project petitioned the global bodies, whereas the North simply acted. There is no better illustration of the uneven geometry of imperialism than the mood of international deliberations. The North's wishes are multiplied, the South's pleas are sometimes added, mainly subtracted."
(p. 26)

"In London, in 1975, at a meeting on development, Nyerere thundered: 'I am saying it is not right that the vast majority of the world's population should be forced into the position of beggars, without dignity. In one world, as in one state, when I am rich because you are poor, and I am poor because you are rich, the transfer of wealth from rich to poor is a matter of right; it is an appropriate matter for charity. The objective must be the eradication of poverty, and the establishment of a minimum standard of living for all people. This involves its converse - a ceiling on wealth for individuals and nations, as well as deliberate action to transfer resources from the rich to the poor within and across national boundaries.'"
(p. 91)

"In a handwritten addition to his prepared remarks, Nyerere pointed out, "We do not seek unity as an instrument of domination over others. We seek unity as an instrument of liberating ourselves, and resisting those who dominate us. Comrade Chairman, the Non-Aligned Movement cannot afford to forget that imperialism is not dead.""
(p. 92)

"But what Castro disparaged was the idea that the market was a natural, and not a social, institution. Cuba had fewer resources, so it would be dependent on the outside world for investment; but it could not afford to allow allocation decisions to be left to the "market," which, in the absence of statutory authority, would mean the whims of plutocrats and financiers. The "market" did not make decisions; powerful institutions, hiding behind the anonymity of the "market," made the choices."
(p. 140)

"The force of transnational capital acts in a similar way against states - in each case, it adopts a neoliberal attitude, pushing for minimum state regulation of capital and its business enterprises, and uncomfortable with demand management (stimulus spending, for instance) unless it directly benefits capital itself. States around the world, whether in the advanced industrial zone or not, are forced - on pain of expulsion from the "international community"- to act on behalf of capital and against the interests of the vast masses of the people."
(p. 251)

"It is because cultural change from below is so slow-moving that there is a temptation towards impatience; many might want to be critical of the modesty of the demands by this or that emergent voice. But change does not happen by being right all the time; it comes from the creation of a new set of voices who are able to tackle social brutality and to articulate a path out of it."
(p. 265)

"There are elements in these movements that make a fetish of the local, which has a tendency to produce parochialism. Trade across regions, even in foodstuffs, is essential for our cultural diversity and the enrichment of our diets. What is central here is not the local as such, but the capacity of people to control their environment and not be subordinated by the immense power of transnational firms over the production and distribution of food."
(p. 268)

"Kalpana Sharma puts the case from Mumbai's millions: 'They will tell you that they are secure in their neighborhood because everyone knows everyone else, no outsider can enter without someone noticing the person, and at times of need people come out to help. Gadgets like CCTV cameras cannot enhance their sense of security. What they want is "secure" housing, a place where they do not need to worry about the municipality's demolition squads, or the design of a builder wanting to redevelop the land on which they have lived for decades. No one speaks of that kind of "security." They want security from the people who set fire to a slum. That is also terror of a kind. People lose their lifetime of belongings. A builder steps in to redevelop the land. And those who lived there peaceably for generations are told they have to prove their "eligibility" by producing the very documents that have been destroyed. Can there be anything more terrifying than finding yourself homeless and document-less in a city like Mumbai? Everyday life is terrifying for the majority in the city. It is a terror to which you get inured; you do not even think of it as terror.'"
(p. 276)

"To be tolerated is not a sufficient political condition. As Mike Davis puts it, "the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism.""
(p. 277)

"One of Marx's great prophecies was that the remarkable advance in technology would not necessarily benefit humanity, particularly if it was controlled by those of property, who would use science and machines to protect their gains rather than for the social advancement of all of humanity. That has been the case, machines having been used to displace people into desperation rather than liberate them from work - and intellectual property rights protecting wealth rather than advancing scientific solutions to social and natural problems. Banks deployed their accumulated capital to perform financial wizardry. Mathematics is the lead science, not chemistry, physics or biology. It is no longer necessary to make things in order for profits to be harnessed; it is enough to manipulate numbers. Finance makes its own maps; money takes wide detours around the human imagination. Disposable people are needed to sign the forms for attractively packaged credit that they cannot properly afford; and then they are needed to take the blame for the system's torments. Their hopes and dreams, their visions and needs, are not at the center of things."
(p. 279)

[Jon Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited for this after really enjoying Prashad's The Darker Nations last year. Compared to that, this book is much narrower in scope, focusing largely on the global South's attempts to assert itself since the 1980s in international, multilateral, and regional fora. This can get fairly dry at times - for instance, the second chapter's rehashing of policy making in UN member agencies. That said, Prashad has a lively style, and his writing is always focused on the larger question of how the global South can tackle unipolarity (or pending multi polarity, if the fabled American decline is really in the offing).

[Brumaire Bodbyl-Mast · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ultimately somewhat disappointing read, which focuses moreso on the nature of the Third World as a bloc at the United Nations, rather than a look at more bottom up movements in these countries. As such, its scope is largely limited, focusing on UNCTAD, and other such attempted proposals at the UN, rather than the more separated from the UN NAM, which though it is shouted out often, isn’t discussed extensively herein. I suppose it’s possible I had no idea what exactly the book was about prior to reading, but needless to say I find much of its prognosis and diagnosis fairly disappointing. The question of national and international behavior at the UN is one which far exceeds the power of most people to even attempt to tackle, and while there is doubtlessly an independent third world bloc in the UN, this does not mean much when the UN itself is largely unactionable as a body. The possible history section is much shorter than the rest of the book, and proves far and away the most interesting, looking at more grass roots movements.

[Albert Zhou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whilst I love Vijay, and there's a lot to learn from this book, I found the level of details of the various bi- or multilateral negotiations, the various diplomats rather cumbersome. There is, however, extremely interesting discussions on the various economic ideologies in the Global South, and how the neocolonial policies of the Global North started to emerge in the North itself (c.f. Vijay's comments on Greece vis á vis the European debt crisis). The book is not romantic in its treatment of the project and struggles of the Global South and has a lot of constructive criticism, as well as illuminating structural barriers.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Explica como el norte históricamente busca dominar económicamente al sur global, y los desafíos que resultan de esto. En ciertos momentos propone una regulación económica más "sustentable", especialmente teniendo en cuenta el rol que China ahora mismo tiene en la economía mundial y el impacto que las políticas (neoliberales) tuvieron en los países ricos del norte, que resultaron en la expansión de "problemas tercermundistas" en esa parte del mundo.

Muy accesible y breve, y creo que ilustra muy bien el punto de que la desigualdad económica en cualquier lugar es un problema global.
Solamente no me gustó que en momentos parecía tirar datos sueltos sin llegar a ningún lado.

[Ştefan Tiron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, I must humbly admit that this is the first book I read by Vijay Prashad, a known Indian historian, Marxist analyst, journalist, and internationalist, founder of the Tricontinental Institute. It is a book well worth reading if not required reading - especially if the perspective of the Third World/Global South means something to you outside usual foreign policy Western propaganda. There are many better reviews of his work here than mine, so I will try not to overlap too much with them.
The cover says it all, all our current maps should stay on their head, South side up, and remark in this sense that capitalism presents us with a skewed, upside-down version of the world (and I am not talking about Stranger Things here). The Euroatlantic love affair and the post-WWII Washington Consensus (Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe) which is somehow in a continuous spiral of decay and fascist resurgence (When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s)- has been monopolizing, under-developing, and exploiting the rest (the vast majority) of the globe. Maybe for those versed in dependency theory and world system theory - this history is not a mystery.

A turning point was the Global South since the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian solidarity and pacifism, organized by Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, and Pakistan. This international gathering that took place on April 18–24 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia struck an exemplary special (third) way, trying to balance and mitigate great power rivalry btw the US and Soviet blocs. The Romanian Popular Republic (R.P.R. was the official title till 1965) as it was called at the time only had open diplomatic relations with Nehru's India, but they nevertheless tried to send radio journalists using Chinese connections.
Those countries (even if South and Latin America were missing) already comprised half of the population of the world. Anti-colonial and independence movements all over the world were practically converging in their anti-imperialist struggle since the late 19th c and early 20 c against tremendous odds (check out the essential Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Overthrow of Europe's Empires in the East) - because this normal, historical progression did not mean that the struggle ended, or that imperial powers gave up easily on their former colonies and dominions.

If the years since the Bandung Conference have been characterized by something - it is a worldwide counter-revolutionary (and counter-insurgency) activity and neoliberalism imposed at the barrel of a gun (also check The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World). It is funny how most right-wing mainstream conspiracy talk nowadays is about world governments, shadow governments, UN intrusion, and "deep state" fears - but in reality, the coagulation of the interests of those that were down-trodden, forgotten, exploited, of the "poorer nations" (in Vijay's apt title) was considered the very first conspiracy by the powerful ex-imperial powers.
France, Britain, and later on the US supplanted the older imperial powers (Imperial Spain in the Philippines or Cuba after the Spanish-American War) were basically obsessed with a conspiracy of the poor and The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World- with interlinked secret police and colonial administration attempts of tracking down, labeling, buying off, thwarting, surveilling, questioning, and identifying what was at that time - "the stateless" clandestine element, that fugitive apatride (according to the powers that be) that actively confronted the imperial apparatus and questioned its legitimacy and global reach.
Even today's racist anti-immigration propaganda seems to largely follow such historical attempts to exclude, vilify, and control 'foreigners' or the displaced labor force of the world harking back to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and Chinese Immigration Act of 1923.
A varied, world-savvy internationalist revolutionary conspiracy (if you insist on calling it by the name the imperialist stooges called it) of globalist proportions with Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Malay, and Indonesian intellectuals, from The Ghadar Movement or Work-Study Movement (Chinese: 留法勤工俭学运动) gathered various revolutionaries of socialist, pan-Islamist, nationalist, communist, feminist and anarchist orientation (altough their political orientation was always fluid, adaptive and rapidly evolving) gained experience, suffered setbacks, defeats but also learned, transferred and improved on revolutionary tactics and planning. Imperial powers always tried to use colonial troops from one nation against another nation - British troops from India against China. There were of course various tensions and intergenerational changes within the revolutionary movement itself - older respected but more spiritualist cosmopolitan leaders (such as Rabindranath Tagore) at odds with newer generations of anti-imperialist militants (trained in modernizing Japan) that developed a more materialist (and Marxist) understanding as well as anarchist propaganda of the deed (that often backfired). These were generations that kept going and groping for a better anti-imperialist future. These had huge consequences for the whole international law and Internationalism at large. To the chagrin of their former masters, these former exiles and expats founded new states, even new blocs, and started cooperating for a common goal among themselves.

One can check out his varied activities, rousing speeches, podcasts, and lectures of Prashad if you are interested in going deeper check here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list....
You cannot probably judge someone's work from one single book - but the reality is that VP took me on a journey I would never have ventured on - a possible history of the slow institutional history of the Global South through such organizations such as the NAM (Non Aligned Nations) and NIEO (New International Economic Order) economic justice proposals and political representation struggles (General Assembly/G77 in the UN - of which Romania was also a part, altough its amnesia is long).
Why possible and not impossible?
As the old slogan of the student radicals of 68 (themselves deeply influenced by the liberation and anti-colonial struggles around the world): Be Realistic and Demand the Impossible.
The world's history is not just about actualized and existing formations and institutions that may break, disappear or become defanged, but also about potential horizons (Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality) - that are real because they are shaping struggles and ongoing efforts nevertheless. Vijay brings this to the fore - and from a dialectical standpoint as well - the possibilities show themselves precisely were they're denied and preemptively contained - or how Mark Fisher formulated it:

The impress of "a world which could be free" can be detected in the very structures of a capitalist realist world which makes freedom impossible"(Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

At the other end of the world, largely denied and ignored by the West, tremendous changes are happening and these so-called impossibilities make the possibility apparent. Intellectuals (especially Western Marxists) seem to have given up on alliances with internationalist struggles for national liberation and economic justice after 1968 and especially after 1978 (Afghanistan invasion, Iranian Revolution, and Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia) and turned toward apolitical humanistic paradigm (human rights/aid). For some, it might bit of a heavy read - to go through all the various tentative steps, missed opportunities, and tryouts that have characterized the slow coagulation of a South-to-South trading partnership. But in my case, it is necessary to familiarize oneself with an evolving international framework and archives in a thorough way. It is the loss of those who choose to classify VP as a tankie, an Assadist (I heard that being thrown at him), or an apologist of authoritarians or make accusations of virtue signaling (alas from a professor on TW/X) in this case. It makes for a poor excuse of willingly ignoring or not reading his works.
Secondly (for why VP might be the bane of Chinawatchers) - he is making an ample case for the potential of China to become a "locomotive of history".
The locomotive metaphor is particularly fitting in an age of decarbonization, mass transport, and where speed trains have been one of the most visible and admired achievements of Chinese industrial prowess amidst its global rise. One may scoff at memes with speed train networks growing since the 1990s in China but one cannot deny their existence. It is a grave mistake to just obsess over a trade war with China and not realize that we are witnessing something entirely different: Europe and the US becoming third-choice partners in a trade war that now foregrounds South-to-South rapprochement. By imposing tariffs combined with constant sabre rattiling, US and European allies are making sure that China will finally embrace its Tricontinental legacy. Finally, maybe Chinawatchers are unable to grasp that there is a long working class and the socialist grassroots story behind that. Railway unions often played a key role in emerging and developing nations like Romania, where traditionally communists or labor activists organized their first strikes. So yes, mass transportation and locomotives are important - but I am also reminded of Walter Benjamin's critique towards capital suicidal accelerationist forces (Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism), a fragment from The Arcades Project unfinished project: "Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.”
Yes indeed pull the emergency brake, but let us put it in its proper context -at a moment of catastrophic climate emergency, runaway reactionary alliances, resurgent fossil industries supported by fossil fascism (White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism). China had to develop its scientific & productive forces following Deng Xiaoping's speech in 1978 in order to pull the brake on fossil capitalism. The "emergency brake" of history can only work out if China continues steadfastly against negative environmental impacts and at the same time pull the Green Big Government act together. While the more and more isolated US and its anarko-capitalist allies (the US and Argentina pulling out of WHO made that amply clear) are retreating from international forums, China needs to continue pushing the green transition, pushing prices down, making it technologically and materially cheaper and easier to achieve decarbonization for those areas of the globe where leap-frogging over the 'fossil' stage is essential. Becoming a locomotive of Green transition is essential.

[Faaiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent companion to Vijay Prashad's The Darker Nations. This book charts a history of the dynamics of the relations between the US and the West (Global North) and the Global South (an eclectic mix of countries across continents whose main uniting feature was emergence as nation states after the overthrow of colonialism) in the aftermath of world war 2, into the Cold War, and through the demise of the USSR. His previous book focused on most of the same countries but from a more explicitly political lens, in the construction of the Third World as a bloc of countries not aligned with the US or USSR. Here, the focus is much more on the economic aspects such as finance and trade which are political, of course, but the focus here is not explicitly on the different modes of politics that the Third World aspired to practice. Here, the focus is on how development aid, structurally imbalanced trade terms, stringent intellectual property laws and debt entrapment suffocated the Global South forcing it to acquiesce to the emergent neoliberalism of the 80's through to the various Structural Adjustment Programmes of the IMF/World Bank which were anathema to the aspirations of the people of the Global South.

The book gives a detailed look at some of the behind-the-scenes going-ons at the major intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank and some UN agencies like the UNCTAD. I found that particularly interesting and telling as it showed how the UN was squeezed by the Western powers to be an inhospitable and unsuitable place where countries of the Global South could build power. Instead, we ended up with an intergovernmental system dominated by the WTO, IMF, World Bank and the G7. In fact, it was unnerving how the formation of intergovernmental organizations just seemed to give the Global North more and more avenues where they could even more effectively coalesce and organize against the Global South. The converse did not happen and in the one or two instances that it did, it only managed to delay and not prevent.

The South tried to come up with alternatives but it lacked the power to affect them in meaningful ways. Financing was the biggest constraint - they were after all poorer. The South also suffered from a lack of coherence and alignment: it was a hodgepodge of countries with different political orientations, many of them were at war with one another at different times, and some of them (Asian Tigers) managed to escape the poverty trap through patronage of the West. South-South Cooperation remained elusive. Efforts to present a united front failed for the most part, concessions were mostly gained on bilateral grounds with strings attached.

That was then but it would be of great interest to explore some of the current developments of the 21st century where there has been a resurgence in the efforts to create and explore alternatives through the rise of China and Russia as challengers to the US. However, knowing the history of the struggles, learning lessons and combining that with astute analysis of changing global conditions especially in the backdrop of climate catastrophe are highly useful endeavors in the efforts to revitalize the fight for a just and equitable world order.

[Juan Lovera · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit less readable than The Darker Nations but still an excellent book. More of a intellectual history of the idea of the Global South since 1980.

The demise of the third world project and the precarious position of the Global South can not only be explained by imperialism, neocolonialism and obstructionism/non-cooperation by the Global North. There are also intrinsic factors, among which the tendency of revolutionary governments to not “complete” the revolution by leaving the power of the domestic elites largely untouched is an important factor. This would later lead to these elites, largely educated in the West/Global North, advocating for growth over equity. This would lead them to develop neoliberalism with Southern characteristics as a way of trying to accommodate the global system set in place by the North. Here a fundamental mistake would be made as the relation between North and South was depoliticized. The question asked by these elites was how to best perform in this system and not why the system is organised in this way by questioning the institutions set up by the Global North after WW2 such as IMF/World Bank/GATT/WTO/UN security council. This is one of the reasons why the BRICS, in spite of being and economic challenge to the power of the US/EU, are not an ideological rival even if there was some kind of ideological unity between the BRICS this can best be characterized as neoliberalism with Southern Characteristics. We also see this form of neoliberalism undermining the potential of the South Commission, where more “pragmatic” voices carried heavy weight and defanged the final rapport by the commission. On the other hand, it must be stressed that the Global North was never really willing to cooperate in solving some of the larger challenges for the Global South of the late 20th century, especially pertaining to trade, Intellectual property, and debt.
Prashad looks with optimism to social movements and some radical experiments by the people for the people (such as communes in Venezuela or slumdwellers organisations in other regions). He does signal what we now in hindsight can say about these movements: that if they depoliticize they are usually not able to challenge the status quo. He thinks these movements can pressure governments into regional arrangements such as those in Latin America in the 10s that can contest waning US power and assert sovereignty. For this it is necessary that those movements upend the social elites in their country. Only in this way can we reach the multipolar regionalism that Prashad sees as a desirable next step.
The key message of the books is that it is not enough to try to change the rules but it is important to try and change how the rules are made. This means to go beyond marginal improvements and to fight for a comprehensive overhaul of what class is in power and can thus make the rules.

[Jason Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is sort of a sequel to Vijay Prashad’s “The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World”, which was a broad post-colonial history of the many countries that emerged as sovereign states after the Second World War. It’s a great book that attempts to construct a shared history across these different nations around the world by tying together their common struggles for self-sufficiency, local leadership, and international support. This book continues that narrative and dives deep into the history of the many organizations and trade agreements that were formed and developed over the post-war decades in order to unite these previously colonized nations.

An important idea is that the concept of a “global south” with a shared history of problems was consciously constructed by leaders from those nations in order to learn from each other and better understand the best ways to organize their societies and relations with the West for the benefit of their citizens. Prashad exhaustively goes over the many proposals and conferences that took place around the world, as well as the reasons why most of them were unable to find common ground, consensus, or a way to progress forward as a united group. He also goes into some of their ideological successes, the small steps that have led to a more fruitful collective understanding of the post-colonial situation, such as the realization that a common cause for many of the major issues across every region were the austerity and neoliberal policies forced onto countries by the IMF and the World Bank to secure debt payments.

It’s a very ambitious book and so it can occasionally be difficult to read fully with all the names to remember of political figures and theorists across the Global South from Latin America, Africa, and beyond. But because of this it will likely be a useful reference text to go back to in the future once I become more familiar with each of the critical nations’ histories. A possible flaw of the book is that it ends on a fairly positive note in reference to the growing socialist programs in Venezuela and Bolivia, as it was written before their countries eventually fell into crises. But I don’t really know too much about the specifics of those histories yet, so I look forward to learn more soon.

[Holly Cruise · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled with this book. The idea behind it and the story it was telling were good, and some of the individual details were really interesting. As a polemic and as a spotlight on a situation that needs to be better known in the West, it was covering important ground.

But I didn't get on with the prose. Each chapter was dense with information - too dense much of the time. The flood of events, quotes, and personalities meant it was easy to lose track of what was going on (and I have managed to keep track of some very difficult books in the past). The problem was that a lack of obvious narrative in each chapter meant it was hard to know what was the main point and what was digression.

The best bits stood out and were memorable. The latter half was better than the first half, and the bit about the Zapatistas as an example of the rise of indigenous groups was great, more focused and more readable rather than being an impressive but unengaging collection of notes about everything.

It's worth a look if you want to know something about the global south and its political battles, and don't mind wading through words to get there. I'm glad I got through it, but it was hard work.

[Andres Guzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Neoliberalism is not in crisis, neoliberalism is a crisis!”

- Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)

The international economic order is an international colonial order. It is an arrangement organized by colonial empires and settlers that colonized the world over. It is a worldwide colonial-capitalist system upheld by colonialism, resource extraction, white supremacy and patriarchy.

This book traces the development of neoliberalism, the political-economic relations between the Global North and Global South, and the formation of BRICS. It also describes the institutional tools of Western colonial empires: NATO, the World Bank, IMF, and the World Trade Organization. These organizations form military alliances, promote economic development, uphold economic stability and regulate international trade. They operate under the parameters of colonial empires.

If the world is a dictatorship of financial markets, this book describes how the Global North’s neoliberal order affects domestic arrangements in the Global South. Assimilating to the worldwide economic order is assimilation to the capitalist-colonial order.

Neoliberalism hands the control of the economy from the government to the private sector. Neoliberalism opens third-world markets, lowers taxes on corporations and the wealthy, encourages private investment, defunds the welfare state, destroys labor unions, and exploits cheap labor. Under neoliberalism, the emphasis is on “growth” rather than equity; meeting the needs of the market, rather than the material conditions of the people.

While capitalist-colonial states unite behind neoliberalism, the third-world/Global South have yet to propose an alternative to this exploitative economic system. The struggle with the formation of BRICS and Non-Aligned Movement is the lack of unity behind a coherent alternative, economic system: communism.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, because I'm looking for a good history of global south resistance movements, but I feel like it got a bit too bogged down in details (for my tastes, at least) and lacked much of an overall or within-chapter narrative. Basically, it contains a ton of research and interesting quotes from world leaders at various meetings (lots of Kissinger, the Brandt Commission, the formation of OPEC, etc.) but I had a hard time keeping track of why these quotes were important, in the sense of like "what ideology/movement does this person represent?" or "what country/group of countries is this person referring to with this decontextualized statement?" So yeah, it'd probably be good for someone who already has a good grasp on what all the different Non-Aligned Movement countries were and their coalitions, but without that background I found my eyes glazing over the quotes :(

[Tor Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are enemies are not in the poorer nations of this planet, but in fact, in the richest ones. A consistent theme after the Second World War is covered here; every time nations of the global south coalesce to defend their interests, they are met with obstinacy and derision by the conjoined interests of the Global north (IMF, World Bank, G7). The Global North-South divide is an effective framework to view our postmodern world; where surplus outflows from the poorer nations are reinvested in the overfinancialized markets of the Atlantic. Not one LDC has ever risen to developed status by taking on an IMF loan(s). The Post WW2 Neoliberal framework for development has created mass poverty, inequity and obscenely uneven wealth distribution. Another defining feature of the Post WW2 World Order is the global Norths continued struggle to subvert the unified effort of OPEC— among other movements of the global south to give their commodities more value on the international market.

[Shanta Deva · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing, well researched, he made an effort to make it understandable for people who don’t know a lot about economics, and his understanding of how these issues are intersectional comes across clearly in the text, I hope he’s working on something new from when the book left off to the present. 100/10 would recommend I took a long time to finish because I learned something new almost every other paragraph and I had to sit and think and write notes about it.

[Arthur Vincie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic look at the recent history of the conflict between the Global South and Global North, from the point of view of the South. Ends with an inspiring look at the resistance movements to Northern hegemony.

[Paschalia · Rating 4 out of 5]

It discusses the history of the Global South as seen mainly from the archive trail of UN agreements and other international bodies like the IMF. Full of info and references sometimes overwhelms you and the narrative thread might be lost in places.

[Rachel Hackett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Focuses on the economic histories rather than the personal, but still somewhat interesting, even for a humanities focused person.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somehow along the way, I became a diplomatic historian, or anyway passed a comps field in US diplomatic history and have spent a lot of time with the kind of sources diplomatic history uses. There are some real triumphs of diplomatic history out there -- Alfred McCoy, Arno Mayer, etc. -- but diplo can also be some of the most perversely boring historical writing you can find. A LOT of "this dude sent this memo and then that dude sent THAT memo." The old-time "great men" historians could at least jazz things up with completely arbitrary commentary and moralizing- our contemporary historians can't or won't.

Radical diplomatic history is its own thing and comparatively rare, and Marxist historian Vijay Prashad has two books of it charting the Non Aligned Movement, the second of which is "The Poorer Nations." Prashad's diplomatic histories are written in a much more loose sort of way than most, and the subject matter is at least relatively novel- the efforts by the Third World (the leaders of which used to bear the term proudly) to create a power base for themselves in the midst of the Cold War and even perhaps a new basis for international diplomacy. Prashad does his best to make it interesting, but especially as the revolutionary fervor burns down some after the seventies, the point when "The Poorer Nations" begins, it has some unavoidable drag- this conference and then that conference and this paper and that debt negotiation, etc.

The point is reasonably important though also a bit predictable if you're used to this genre of left writing. We go through all the attempts of developing world leadership to forge an independent path, for their countries and the developing world at large. Very smart, ambitious people with serious plans, like Julius Nyerere and Manmohan Singh, appear. Models like Japan's state-assisted development and Venezuela's exploitation of oil combined with bolivarian populism crop up. Numerous international organizations are started to go to bat for the developing world. And they all collapse. The US and its cronies are too strong, and, Prashad argues, real solidarity is impossible because the ruling classes in the developing world don't believe in it. Ultimately, those classes want to advance -- want money, lifestyles, and respect on the world stage -- more than they want their countries to do well or for the international order to change. And so it's the usual lesson- class society will dicker everything up and any force that wants radical change needs to do several impossible-seeming things simultaneously. True enough, probably. ****

https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book at the start of a three month journey through South Asia. It is engaging and easy to read.

If I were to describe the concepts of the book to a fifth grader:

Many of the world's rich people build really expensive equipment to sell to poor countries,who go to loan sharks/banks to afford it. Sometimes the poor countries can't pay their debts after all the usurious hidden terms in the deal rise to the surface, they are then forced to default on debt or to sell off their state-owned assets to rich foreign investors who partner with greedy people from the poor countries who channel the proceeds from the investments into themselves instead of the poor country's people. Meanwhile, the global loan sharks put enormous pressure on poor countries to export resources to come up with cash as quickly as possible to pay back their loans, of which the principal is spent on equipment that the poor countries could be developing themselves were it not for all their cash being "appropriated" for loan repayments and the unfair intellectual property laws created by some of the world's rich. On top of it, an unjust portion of the aid money that is sent by foreign taxpayers ends up going into the pockets of the planet's rich.

And in the background of all this looms the threat of terrible violent reprisals for getting to far out of line.

This is only what I saw the mechanism of neo-liberalism to be from the author's work. The author also accurately portrays the actual affects of neo-liberalism:slums, hunger, inequality, violence - as this is what I was seeing in my 3 month trip to South Asia.

Anyone taking a heady trip through the developing world should take this with them; it will correctly tint the view of the Taj Mahal sunset ;-)

[Philip Mckenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great read and essential if one wants to understand and appreciate how the Global North and Western countries have influenced and shaped the development of the Global South. It illuminates connections between soft and hard power and brings to light important policy decisions over the last 40-50 years that are relevant to understanding the current global power structure. It's a great resource and highly recommend it.

[Scott Neigh]

Reviewed here.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Poorer Nations,


Our bad!


Sincerely,

The Richer Nations