In this extract are three short speeches by Viyay Prashad (nephew of Brinda Karat, who I was sort of in indirect contact with because he was doing his PhD at U of Chicago while I was doing mine at Johns Hopkins and he used to contribute articles to a monthly Sanskriti being brought out by my friend Biju Mathew who was doing his PhD in MIS at U of Pittsburgh, who now is prof at U of Ryder [last I know] and wrote a book “Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York” https://www.amazon.in/Taxi-Cabs-Capitalism-York-City/dp/0801474396), a Marxist historian and director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
These form a devastating critique of renowned Marxist David Harvey’s insistence that the concept of imperialism is not relevant to understand today’s world.
While the world is divided between a small handful of rich nations and a large majority of poor ones, Professor Harvey, finds it “too easy” to describe the contemporary world system using the term “imperialism”. In this 2013 book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism Harvey did not rank imperialism even among capitalism’s top seventeen contradictions.
