"this is the human race speaking..."
reviving the bandung spirit in a multipolar world
This is the text of a lecture that I delivered at the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago on July 4th, 2025.
In the spring of 1955, the legendary African American writer Richard Wright was traveling in Spain on literary business, collecting material for a book that would be published two years later under the title Pagan Spain. By the middle of April, his work in the country was complete. But rather than returning to Paris, where he had been living in voluntary exile for the last nine years, Wright instead took a train to Madrid, where he boarded a flight that would take him halfway around the world to Indonesia—specifically, to the city of Bandung.
Located around 87 miles southeast of Jakarta, Bandung is Indonesia’s third-largest metropolis and the capital of the country’s largest province, West Java. The city’s relatively cool climate, nestled into a mountain basin in the West Java highlands, at an elevation of some 2,500 feet above sea level, has long made it a popular resort town for Jakartans looking to escape the heat and crowds of the Indonesian capital. But what brought Wright to Bandung in April of 1955 was no weekend getaway. In fact, he had come as an observer to attend the Afro-Asian Conference, more commonly known as the Bandung Conference—an international gathering of leaders from across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, organized primarily by Indonesian President Sukarno and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and held from April 18th to 24th, 1955 in central Bandung’s Merdeka building.
Wright was one of several American journalists who had come to Bandung to attend the conference, his travel arrangements paid for by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom—an entity that, as would be revealed nearly a decade later, had been covertly funded by the CIA since its inception. Wright’s experiences and observations at Bandung were compiled into his book The Color Curtain, which was published in 1956 and remains, to this day, one of the most significant firsthand accounts of this historic gathering. In the book’s first chapter, Wright describes what went through his mind when, thumbing through a newspaper in Paris several months earlier, he first encountered the announcement that representatives of nearly thirty newly-independent nations across Asia and Africa would be gathering in Bandung to discuss, as the article put it, “racialism and colonialism.”
He writes:
The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here was class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon that Western world! (10)
In this section of the book, Wright goes on to recount an exchange with his wife, in which she presses him on why it is so important that he travel to Indonesia immediately after spending several weeks in Spain. To this, Wright replies:
I know that people are tired of hearing of these hot, muddy faraway places filled with people yelling for freedom. But this is the human race speaking… (12)
• • •
This year, 2025, marks the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. It is, I think, difficult for us now, seven decades on from Bandung, to fully appreciate the scale and ambition of what the conference represented. At a time when the world was nowhere near as interconnected as it is today, when ‘an ocean away’ still really did mean an ocean away, the Bandung Conference brought together representatives from 29 nations across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Among these were Communist states like China and North Vietnam, secular nationalist republics like India and Egypt, and hereditary monarchies like Thailand, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia. Together, they combined to represent some 1.5 billion people—more than half of the world’s population at the time.
The Bandung Conference is widely recognized by scholars and activists alike as the birthplace of Third Worldism—a political movement that swept the colonized and decolonizing world throughout the latter half of the 20th century, characterized by a spirit of solidarity and cooperation between Global South countries who, by virtue of their shared experience of colonial exploitation, remained forcibly relegated to the periphery of a world system dominated by rivalry between the great powers of the Cold War. As the Marxist historian Vijay Prashad puts it in the introduction to his seminal book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, “the Third World was not a place. It was a project” (xv).
Bandung, of course, was not the first international gathering dedicated to galvanizing a global anti-imperialist struggle—that distinction would go to the congresses of the Comintern-backed League Against Imperialism, which first met in Brussels in 1927—but what set it apart from its predecessors was the fact that by the time the Bandung Conference was convened in 1955, vast swaths of the Third World had either already won, or were in the process of winning, independence from European colonialism. The gathering at Bandung thus represented the confirmation of what millions of people across the world, from the streets of Delhi and Beijing to the boardrooms of New York and London, already knew to be true—that the tide was turning, the global order shifting, and the age of Western imperial powers acting as the sole agents of history rapidly coming to a close.
In his opening speech welcoming delegates to the conference, Indonesia’s President Sukarno declared: “This is the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples—so-called colored peoples—in the history of mankind!” I want to pause for a moment and draw attention to that parenthetical—“so-called colored peoples.” The turn of phrase that Sukarno employs here says, I think, a great deal about the significance of what Bandung represented—not just to the delegates who attended the conference itself, but to millions of people around the world whose hopes, dreams, and struggles were wrapped up in the Third Worldist project. By coming together at Bandung, the nations of the formerly colonized world—what Vijay Prashad calls “the darker nations”—were sending the message to Europe and the West that they were no longer content to be relegated to the second-class status of “colored people,” whether as colonized subjects or as a dependent, neocolonial periphery. Here, we can thus recall Wright’s assertion in The Color Curtain that “this meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon [the] Western world!”
As I previously mentioned, the grouping of nations that gathered at Bandung could not have been further from anything remotely resembling a unified or homogenous bloc. Political differences between delegates, particularly between those representing liberal-nationalist governments and those representing more socialist-oriented states, were at times stark, and the countries gathered at Bandung differed widely in their degree of friendliness or hostility towards the West—at least insofar as their bilateral relations were concerned. And yet, this staggeringly diverse array of countries was nevertheless tied together by a common thread: the shared experience of having been subjugated by centuries of colonialism and of having been forced, even after achieving nominal ‘independence,’ into a dependent and subordinate position within the capitalist-imperialist world system.
Thus, even in the absence of any shared ideological commitments amid the Cold War confrontation between capitalism and Communism, the Third World was still able to coalesce around a common political project—one aimed at radically reshaping the world order from the ground up, transforming it from a system structurally designed to facilitate the imperial core’s ruthless exploitation of the periphery into one characterized by peaceful coexistence, international cooperation, and genuine sovereign equality among states. As Sukarno put it in his opening address:
All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world.
The ethos of anticolonial internationalism that found expression at the Bandung Conference, and in the Third World project more broadly, has come to be known as the ‘Bandung Spirit.’ The essential contours of this Bandung Spirit were laid out most succinctly in the conference’s final communiqué, issued on April 24th, which calls for nations to “live together in peace with one another as good neighbours and develop friendly co-operation,” based on the following ten principles:
1. Respect for fundamental human rights and . . . the Charter of the United Nations.
2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.
4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.
5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively . . .
6. (a) Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defence to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers.
(b) Abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries.
7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.
8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means . . .
9. Promotion of mutual interests and co-operation.
10. Respect for justice and international obligations.
What we see reflected in these ten points is a radical politics of Third World solidarity—at once defiantly nationalist in its assertion of sovereignty and self-determination, and yet unmistakably internationalist in its globe-spanning reach. It was then, and remains to this day, a powerful example of what the political scientist Adom Getachew, who is speaking at this conference tomorrow evening, calls “anticolonial worldmaking.” In the first chapter of her brilliant book Worldmaking After Empire, Getachew defines this project as one of “overcoming international hierarchy and constituting a postimperial world,” and writes:
Anticolonial worldmaking was viewed not as an alternative to or rejection of nationalism but instead as a necessary vehicle for securing national independence. Central to this combination of nation-building and worldmaking was the view that the global project of European empire had radically transformed the economic and political conditions of the modern world in ways that required a similarly global anticolonial project. (23-24)
This worldmaking project, in other words, was about more than just forging closer connections between newly independent former colonies, or constructing a Third World ‘bloc’ to compete in the playing field of global geopolitics. Rather, it was about recognizing that just as the Global South’s former colonizers had constructed the international order for their own benefit and on their own terms, the nations of the Third World had both the right and the collective power to reconstruct that order into something more just, more equitable, and more conducive to human flourishing. We can see this worldmaking nature of the Bandung Spirit reflected clearly in the ten principles laid out by the conference’s final communiqué, which offers a vision for the world order that applies not just to the nations of the Third World, but to every country on Earth.
• • •
The ‘Bandung Spirit’ extended far beyond the walls of the Merdeka Building, and its echoes continued to reverberate long after the last delegate filed out of the conference hall. In the decades that followed Bandung, Third Worldism—and the politics of Cold War non-alignment that accompanied it—quickly took on a life of its own, and came to represent something even more revolutionary than the relatively muted spirit of cooperation and coexistence espoused by the Bandung Conference itself. It’s no coincidence, I think, that when we think back on Third Worldism today, the first leaders who come to mind are not respectable, pragmatic moderates like Nehru or Sukarno, but more explicitly revolutionary figures—Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, Ho Chi Minh. It’s telling that the figure we are now inclined to associate most strongly with 20th-century Third Worldism is not that of a bespectacled diplomat in a conference hall, but rather that of the Palestinian fida’i, the Vietnamese rice farmer, the Algerian mujahid. Rather than the politician’s business suit, it is the guerrilla fighter’s combat fatigues that, in our contemporary imagination, constitute the Third Worldist uniform.
Of course, it’s also telling that when we think back on Third Worldism today, we do so primarily in the past tense. From the outset, the very task of survival for the Third World proved to be a Herculean one. Not only had centuries of colonial plunder placed Third World nations in a structurally disadvantaged position, trapping them in patterns of neocolonial underdevelopment and dependency that continued long after the achievement of nominal independence, but these same nations, in their pursuit of sovereignty and self-determination, also found themselves tragically caught in the crossfire of Cold War geopolitics. Of course, one of Third Worldism’s central tenets was non-alignment in the great-power rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. This, however, mattered little to the U.S.-led capitalist-imperialist bloc, for whom the Bandung Spirit’s assertion of Southern agency and calls for a more just and equitable world order were, simply put, too communist for comfort.
As a result, throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Third World governments whose rhetoric and policies challenged the foundational assumptions of the imperialist world system found themselves the targets of Western-orchestrated coups, invasions, and assassinations. Leaders like Indonesia’s Sukarno, Chile’s Allende, Congo’s Lumumba, and Burkina Faso’s Sankara were overthrown and replaced by neocolonial puppet regimes and U.S.-backed military dictatorships. These new regimes were all too happy to dismantle the developmentalist state-building projects of their predecessors in favor of throwing the doors open for their countries to be penetrated—and exploited—by foreign capital. Meanwhile, those who survived were subjected to a devastating neoliberal onslaught at the hands of multinational corporations and Western-dominated institutions like the IMF, which sought to bring the Third World to its knees by weaponizing a growing debt crisis and imposing brutal regimes of austerity, privatization, and deregulation in the name of ‘structural adjustment.’ By the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell and the United States cemented its position as the undisputed hegemonic force in a newly unipolar world order, the worldmaking potential of the Bandung Spirit seemed like little more than a distant memory.
Today, we are living through the devastating consequences of that worldmaking project’s untimely demise, as the structural injustices of the world system that Third Worldism sought to challenge continue to grow starker with each passing day. Global inequality has grown steadily for the last six decades and is now reaching unprecedented heights, with the per capita income gap between the core and periphery increasing from $14,000 in 1960 to nearly $52,000 in 2023. The underdeveloped countries of the global periphery collectively owe more than $11.4 trillion in external public debt, and some 3.3 billion people around the world live in countries that spend more on debt payments than on health or education. Despite making up just 15 percent of the world’s population, the so-called ‘advanced economies’ of the imperial core control more than 59 percent of voting shares in the International Monetary Fund and more than 56 percent in the World Bank—all while these same institutions continue to impose punishing neoliberal reforms that open debtor countries up even further to foreign capital at the expense of their most vulnerable populations.
As these structural injustices have been exacerbated alongside the demise of the Third World, so too have the more existential threats that the Bandung Conference recognized and sought to avert. The entire latter half of the 20th century, of course, was haunted by the terrifying specter of nuclear war, and Bandung was no exception—the conference’s final communiqué declared that nuclear disarmament was “imperative to save mankind and civilisation from the fear and prospect of wholesale destruction.” Famously, after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, the liberal establishment across the imperialist West brashly proclaimed that the rise of a unipolar world would usher in a new era of perpetual peace and global stability—but recent escalations of nuclear tensions around the world betray the dangerous shortsightedness of this triumphalism. The recent cross-border clashes which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of all-out war, the United States’ entry into the Zionist entity’s war of aggression against the people of Iran, the U.S. and NATO’s persistent military hostility and provocation towards China and Russia—these are all sober reminders that insofar as the prospect of nuclear annihilation is concerned, the current arrangement of the imperialist world system has not, in fact, made the world a safer place.
To this dire state of affairs, of course, we must also add the existential menace of the rapidly-worsening climate crisis, whose devastating beginnings are already upon us and whose worst impacts still remain to be felt. The delegates who gathered at Bandung, three quarters of a century ago, could not have known the scope or scale of the threat that anthropogenic climate change would come to pose for the survival of humanity—a threat on par with that posed by the nuclear question which featured so prominently on the conference’s agenda. And yet, the emergence of climate change as one of the defining issues of our time—an issue that cannot be meaningfully separated from the historical and current realities of the imperialist world system—only underscores the crucial need, now more than ever, for precisely the sort of worldmaking anticolonial internationalism that the Third World project represented.
We know, for example, that the United States, the European Union, and the other countries of the Global North are collectively responsible for 86 percent of all carbon emissions beyond the planetary limit, and that the Global South countries who bear the least responsibility for these emissions are nevertheless the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We know also that, under existing political-economic arrangements, the so-called ‘green transition’ that is increasingly being invoked by political and business elites in the imperial core risks simply opening up a lucrative new avenue for the exploitation of the Global South through resource extraction and unequal exchange. The conclusion to be drawn from these sobering facts could not be more clear—the only politics capable of meeting this existential challenge is a resolutely anticolonial one, rooted in international solidarity and foregrounding the sovereignty of the Global South countries who are being made to pay the price for climate change.
• • •
So where does all of this leave us? There can be little doubt that the moment we find ourselves in now is one of profound and deepening crisis. It is, however, also a moment of heightening contradictions—which means it is therefore a moment of opportunity. The structural antagonisms that have long simmered beneath the surface of the U.S.-led ‘liberal international order’ are finally reaching a boiling point, and as a result, cracks are beginning to emerge in the very foundations of that order. Decades of failed neoliberal governance have fueled a right-wing national-populist backlash across the West, with Donald Trump and the MAGA far-right leading the charge here in the United States. The result, even in just a few short months of the second Trump Administration, has been an unprecedented withdrawal of the U.S. from the leadership role that it has traditionally occupied on the world stage. This withdrawal has manifested in numerous ways, from the embrace of protectionist trade wars to the abandonment of liberal internationalism in favor of a retreat to the crude hemispheric expansionism of the Monroe Doctrine. Among the most significant such manifestations of America’s international withdrawal under Trump has been the fracturing of the transatlanticist consensus of U.S.-Europe cooperation—a consensus that emerged in the aftermath of World War II, and that was cemented in the early 1990s with America’s ascendance as the sole hegemon in a unipolar world.
Alongside the United States’ protracted imperial decline, which has been accelerated by Trump’s withdrawal but whose roots in fact run far deeper than that, we have also seen the meteoric rise of socialist China as a new superpower on the world stage, which has sparked panic among the U.S. ruling class and fueled the intensification of a New Cold War. China’s growing international presence has opened up crucial new avenues for the development and empowerment of countries across the Global South—particularly in Africa and Latin America. To these countries, China offers not only an alternative source of foreign investment and assistance that is far preferable to the predations of Western-dominated financial institutions, but also a deeply compelling alternative model of development and international engagement—one that elevates sovereignty over dependency, cooperation over antagonism, and mutual benefit over narrow self-interest.
Meanwhile, the Zionist entity’s barbaric genocide against the Palestinian people—a genocide that was inaugurated not under Trump, but under the liberal Democrat Joe Biden, and that has been materially supported for nearly two years now by governments across the imperialist West—has, in spectacular and horrific fashion, given the lie to the so-called ‘rules-based international order,’ laying bare its blood-soaked hypocrisy for the entire world to see. The world-historical significance of this particular veil being pulled back cannot be overstated. Beyond shattering the veneer of liberal internationalism that has long underpinned the U.S.-dominated imperial order, the genocide in Gaza has also empowered Global South countries to stand up to the West and challenge this order in new and unprecedented ways—as evidenced by South Africa’s historic genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, or the recent formation of the ‘Hague Group,’ whose nine member states are convening later this month in Bogotá, where they will announce “concrete actions to enforce international law through coordinated state action.”
These are just a few especially prominent examples of the tectonic shifts that have been underway in the global order over the last few years, as the contradictions of the status quo reach a breaking point and the world becomes increasingly multipolar with each passing day. This list, of course, doesn’t even take into account the rapid expansion of the BRICS geopolitical grouping, whose 19 members and partner states collectively comprise more than 55 percent of the world’s population and more than 42 percent of the global economy. Nor does it take into account the growing interest among Global South countries in pursuing alternatives to the currency hegemony of the U.S. dollar—an interest fueled not only by declining trust in the United States’ own economic stability, but also by a desire to escape the stranglehold of U.S. sanctions that dollar imperialism enables.
Taken together, these myriad upheavals herald a crisis of imperial legitimacy, on a scale unlike anything the world has seen since European empires began to collapse in the mid-20th century amid the first wave of decolonization movements and national liberation struggles. As a result of these shifts, we have seen the emergence of what Vijay Prashad and the Tricontinental Institute have called a “new mood” in the Global South, as Southern countries take an increasingly assertive stance against the pressures and predations of the West. In a recent dossier on the legacies and lessons of the Bandung Spirit, Tricontinental researchers define the ‘new mood’ as follows:
The principal objectives of the ‘new mood in the Global South,’ are rooted in two concepts, regionalism and multilateralism, both motivated by a desire to democratise the world order in economic and political terms.
The aforementioned response of Southern nations to the Gaza genocide is a clear example of this ‘new mood,’ as is the wave of anticolonial and pan-Africanist sentiment sweeping across the African continent, manifesting most notably in the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States by the governments of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.
As these unprecedented global shifts play out before our eyes, it’s hard not to be reminded of the heyday of the Third World, and of the worldmaking potential that this radical project of anticolonial internationalism contained within it. The parallels between the ‘new mood’ and the Bandung Spirit are certainly there, and they’re certainly striking—but we must be careful not to overstate the case. As Prashad puts it in a recent newsletter for Tricontinental, “this mood is not the same as a spirit. It is merely a hint of a new possibility.” The sobering reality is that unlike during the ‘golden age’ of Third Worldism, when the Global South’s pursuit of national sovereignty was accompanied by and intertwined with a profound emphasis on international solidarity, the ‘new mood’ that we are seeing take hold in the Global South today does not quite have that same internationalist dimension—at least, not to the same degree.
Instead, the fracturing of the current international order and the emergence of an increasingly multipolar world has largely been characterized by individual countries pursuing more favorable terms for their own national integration into the capitalist-imperialist world system. There is, undoubtedly, a greater emphasis on multilateralism and South-South cooperation than in the past—but this still functions more as a means to an end than as an end in itself, in the sense that many Southern governments have still shown a general willingness to align themselves in various ways with the imperial core as and when it suits their national interest to do so. In other words, unlike with the Bandung Spirit of the 20th century, what we are witnessing today is the emergence of a new politics of non-alignment without Third Worldism. This new ethos complicates the logic of the imperialist world system without directly challenging it—a world-altering project, certainly, but not quite a worldmaking one.
What, then, would it take to revive the Bandung Spirit for our present moment? There is no easy answer to this question, but I think a crucial first step is to rekindle anti-imperialism as a central concern of left politics. For too long, the left in the imperial core—particularly here in the United States—has failed to place the appropriate amount of emphasis on anti-imperialism, at best relegating it to secondary status and at worst ignoring or even abandoning it altogether. This abject failure of political vision stems largely from pervasive misconceptions about what imperialism is and how it functions in the world today—treating it either as being merely synonymous with ‘war’ and ‘militarism’, or else as a bygone historical injustice in need of retrospective redress rather than as a central pillar of our contemporary world order.
This myopic approach can and should be contrasted with the anti-imperialist politics of the Bandung Spirit. What ultimately made this politics so revolutionary, and underpinned its worldmaking potential, was the crucial understanding that imperialism is first and foremost a system of globally stratified political economy, characterized by an international division of labor and unequal exchange between the nations of the core and periphery, which continues to exploit the latter even after they have achieved nominal independence from formal colonial rule. This system is not separate from the capitalist system that we as socialists oppose—it is capitalism, manifesting on a global scale and, as Lenin famously observed, at its highest stage of development. This means, therefore, that rather than being ancillary to our anti-capitalist struggle, anti-imperialism and international solidarity must in fact lie at the very heart of it. This is true for socialists and communists across the world, but it is especially true for those of us who are located in the imperial core and working to resist empire from within, even as we benefit from it.
• • •
As I prepare to close out these remarks, I will leave you today with the words of the revolutionary Palestinian writer, freedom fighter, and martyr Ghassan Kanafani. Before his assassination by Zionist intelligence forces in 1972, Kanafani said:
Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.
Reviving the Bandung Spirit for our time means taking Kanafani’s words to heart, never forgetting that the struggle against imperialism is not just part of the world revolution—it is the world revolution. To engage in that struggle is to take part in the same worldmaking project that millions of people across the Third World took part in when they rose up to break the shackles of colonial oppression and declare with one voice that, as Richard Wright put it, “this is the human race speaking.”
We must never lose sight of the fact that as different as today’s world may seem from the world that those freedom fighters inhabited, our contemporary struggles are nevertheless a part of that same revolutionary lineage. We must recognize that if we want to overcome the structures that continue to exploit and immiserate vast swaths of the world’s population, then our efforts—like those of the Third World revolutionaries who came before us—must be aimed at nothing less than the complete and total remaking of the entire global order as we know it. That is an ambitious project, to be sure, but if we want to ensure humanity’s survival in the face of the myriad existential crises confronting us, it is also a profoundly necessary one, and one for which we simply have no other choice.
The world, dear comrades, is not just ours to win—it’s ours to build.
culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox: