Guest article by Serge Jordan.
Follow Serge Jordan on Substack.
In his recent article on Bangladesh, Vijay Prashad presents the country’s 2024–26 political transformation as the latest episode in a long series of US-backed regime change operations. Although wrapped in anti-imperialist language and containing some interesting factual material, the article ultimately reproduces a crude form of geopolitical determinism and ‘campist’ politics that disarms the left and misrepresents the mass struggle that erupted in Bangladesh in 2024.
The erasure of the masses’ agency
Prashad’s central move is to subordinate the protests of July-August 2024 to imperialist “engineering.” He initially concedes that the uprising was “real”, only to hollow this out almost immediately by recasting it as the product of a Washington-orchestrated manipulation, allegedly following a “textbook with striking fidelity.”
This claim sits uneasily with a Marxist understanding of history. Marxism rejects the idea that history unfolds according to fixed scripts and neat sequences. Social and political change emerges from living, contradictory processes rooted in material conditions and human agency. While revolts do show recurring features, their trajectory and outcomes are never pre-determined but shaped by struggles, leaderships, parties, programs, organisations —and by the initiative of the masses themselves. To speak of ready-made “textbooks” is to drift towards dead schemas and political fatalism.
Of course, it would be naive and foolish to deny the dangers of imperialist meddling. But to treat the 2024 uprising in Bangladesh primarily as a regime-change operation is to turn workers and students into passive objects of history, and to wildly exaggerate the US hand in what took place that year. Prashad claims that it was US imperialism that “orchestrated the escalation from reform demands to regime change”. Does he seriously believe that millions poured into the streets, faced the regime’s bullets, risked imprisonment, torture and death for modest “reforms”, only to be pushed into confronting the regime by some —undefined— US intervention? By all serious accounts, the tipping point that precipitated the end of Hasina’s rule, morphing a student movement into a full-blown uprising, was the exceptionally brutal crackdown and massacre of hundreds of young protesters on the streets. But on this, Prashad is conspicuously silent.
To justify his view, he writes:
“The quota protests escalated into a wholesale rejection of the Hasina government with a speed and coordination that spontaneous democratic upsurge alone cannot explain.”
That sentence reveals a profound misunderstanding —both of the depth of suffering and rage accumulated under Hasina’s rule, and of how revolutionary crises unfold in general. Anyone who has seriously studied —or lived through— revolutionary situations knows that sudden accelerations are one of their defining features, not an anomaly explainable only by some “master of puppets” pulling the strings from the outside. In such moments, political time is compressed; what took decades for the ruling class to build can collapse in days or weeks.
To see this as suspicious is to view revolt through the same eyes as the frightened elites, who always assume that popular action must be engineered because they cannot imagine people acting for themselves.
The same is true of Prashad’s cynical treatment of the “coordination” witnessed during the 2024 movement. He refuses to accept that the masses can move like this on their own. This is a bourgeois prejudice dressed up in a left-wing language, and an insult to the collective ingenuity, creative power and organisational capacity of working class people when engaged in a life-and-death struggle for their future.
Revolutionary explosions are precisely the moments when ordinary people, freed from fear and routine, begin to think, decide, and act collectively at an extraordinary scale. Informal leaders emerge, networks crystallise, new grassroots structures are thrown up, resistance tactics are improvised then swiftly replicated, and millions learn from one another in real time. To reduce the initiative of the oppressed and their instincts for self-organisation as foreign manipulation is to strip them of their subjectivity.
Prashad reinforces his argument by claiming that this pattern “mirrors Egypt 2011”. Of course, no serious Marxist would deny that western imperialist powers —along with domestic politicians, military elites, and Islamist forces— attempted (successfully, due mainly to the extreme weakness of the revolutionary left in the region) to derail the Egyptian revolution.
But the suggestion that the speed and coordination of “Egypt 2011” resulted from a foreign-orchestrated agenda is laughable. In reality, the Western ruling classes were initially paralysed by panic and caught completely by surprise —so much so that Joe Biden, then Vice-President of the United States, publicly insisted that Hosni Mubarak was “an ally of ours”, refused to refer to him as a dictator, and argued that the Egyptian President shouldn’t step aside, only two weeks before the Egyptian revolution decided otherwise. This is what revolutions look like: ruling classes scrambling after events, improvising responses, desperately trying to regain control of processes they never initiated. To retrospectively portray Egypt as a scripted operation is a rewriting of history.
Soft-pedalling the Hasina regime
Prashad’s article’s narrow geopolitical framing leads directly to a soft defence of the old order. The downfall of Sheikh Hasina is presented less as the collapse of a repressive capitalist regime than as a US-led punishment for Bangladesh’s “strategic autonomy.”
Ruthless authoritarianism, anti-union policies, unfettered corruption, electoral fraud, media control, extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances…all are treated as secondary matters. The real “crime,” we are told, was balancing between Washington and Beijing.
Prashad continues:
“Authoritarianism in US allies, from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines under Marcos, occasions no such transformation. It is sovereignty, not repression, that triggers the interventionist playbook.”
Of course, imperialist governments’ rhetorical concerns for human rights and democracy are always selective and instrumental —deployed when convenient and ignored when inconvenient. But acknowledging this obvious hypocrisy is not the same as reducing an entire mass uprising to a geopolitical plot —a thesis which, in this last quote, is laid particularly bare. After having first paid lip service to the real “grievances” of Bangladeshi protesters, Prashad now explains the existence or non-existence of “transformations” in specific countries as the sole and direct product of geostrategic choices by US imperialism. The origins of the Bangladesh uprising are thus firmly relocated in Washington and away from Dhaka’s campuses, factories, and slums. His conspiratorial views have gone full circle.
This is a dangerous inversion of what took place. The end of Hasina’s regime was not primarily dictated by US imperialism’s hostility. It was the outcome of a historic, long-maturing crisis of domestic legitimacy produced by authoritarian rule, social inequality, and mass alienation. Like every major power faced with an unexpected upheaval, Washington sought to turn these events to its advantage. But to confuse opportunistic maneuvering with historical causation is to mistake the aftershocks for the earthquake.
Campism and the myth of “progressive multipolarity”
Prashad’s analysis also rests on the premise that close engagement with China, BRICS, or “multipolar” blocs represents a progressive alternative. References to “sovereignty,” “non-alignment,” and “multilateral platforms” such as BRICS implies that Bangladesh under the Awami League occupied a more emancipatory geopolitical space —one that has now been lost. But is that really so?
First, this theory overestimates how disadvantaged and “anti-Hasina” US ruling circles and big business really were before 2024. Notwithstanding points of tension and episodic public friction, there is no credible evidence that Washington was actively pursuing a plan to get rid of that regime —at least, until the masses themselves made that choice compelling. Bangladesh’s industrial system under Hasina, with a repressed and super-exploited garment workforce earning among the lowest wages in the world, was also highly beneficial to major US corporations, and Bangladesh–US trade grew substantially during her 15 years in office. That US imperialism tried to adapt to the new situation once the uprising had become a fact of life proves nothing more than political pragmatism.
Second, the notion that a more China-tilted policy for Bangladesh pre-2024 served working-class interests better is contradicted by the reality of the uprising itself, which although reluctantly and from one side of his mouth—even Prashad admits was “real”. Chinese-funded infrastructure did not abolish the extreme exploitation of labour, nor did it empower trade unions. Whether big capital comes from Wall Street or Beijing, it extracts surplus value from Bangladeshi workers. Whether debt is owed to the IMF or Chinese state banks, it “disciplines” public spending —by different means, but with similar effects. Capitalism does not become more progressive when it flies a different flag.
Third, what Prashad terms Bangladesh’s “strategic recalibration” away from Beijing and into the US orbit —supposedly the outcome “the entire process was designed to produce”— is overblown. There is, so far, no clear indication that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)’s victory has ushered in a qualitative rupture in Dhaka’s relationship with China. To be sure, the shift in leadership will intensify the scramble for influence amongst the main global powers, which could provoke sharp pressures and realignments; but there is no basis for claiming a decisive or dramatic pivot away from Beijing at this point. Reducing Bangladesh’s foreign policy to a simple move from one great power bloc to another might fit Prashad’s schematic “US-engineering” theory, but it obscures the complexity of the situation, as well as the (limited and precarious, but no less real) maneuvering space that smaller states often seek to carve out within this great-power competition.
Fourthly, this narrative ignores that under Hasina, Bangladesh had also a very tight relationship with the regime of Narendra Modi and the BJP —hardly a model of progressive sovereignty. It is therefore unsurprising that India, whose political class has been shaken by the loss of its closest regional ally (now in exile in Delhi), has become a breeding ground for conspiracy theories about a decisive “foreign hand” in Hasina’s overthrow. This rhetoric serves an obvious purpose: to malign and delegitimise the mass movement that ended her rule, a narrative that Vijay Prashad appears all too willing to recycle.
All in all, Prashad’s campism, i.e. lining up behind arguably “less bad” powers against “worse” ones, substitutes geopolitical preferences for socialist politics. It encourages workers and the oppressed to look for salvation in supposedly “more progressive” foreign policy alignments rather than in their own, independent struggle and political organising. And it is a dead end.
Reclaiming the meaning of 2024
To be clear, the 2024 uprising was politically preyed upon and vulnerable to recuperation. Bourgeois opposition factions, the military and security apparatus, foreign governments, financial institutions, religious forces, corporate media, NGOs…all intervened, as they always do. In the absence of strong and independent organisations giving a genuine voice to the forces at the heart of the uprising —an absence compounded by the rapid swing to the right of the recently formed, student-led National Citizen Party, which entered the elections in alliance with a regressive Islamist formation— popular energy was diverted into the only “available” channels: first in the neoliberal reformism à la Muhammad Yunus, then in the traditional right-wing and Islamist forces as expressed in the recent vote. But none of this validates the theory of “foreign engineering”, nor does it diminish the authenticity of 2024’s mass uprising. It only confirms the latter’s incomplete character and the structural weaknesses of the left and labour movement, which were unable to steer that struggle in a different direction. It is this political vacuum that has, for now, allowed the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami to occupy centre stage.
The 2024 uprising was neither a CIA puppet show, nor a completed revolution. It was what most mass revolts under capitalism are today: a confused, youthful, courageous explosion of mass anger against an intolerable order. Its tragedy lies not in some hidden foreign script —however real imperialist domination and interference is— but in the absence of a political force capable of giving that anger a coherent expression, and of converting the revolt into sustained revolutionary change.