Radhika Desai | University of Manitoba (original) (raw)

Books by Radhika Desai

Call for Papers for the Geopolitical Economy Stream at the World Association for Political Econom... more Call for Papers for the Geopolitical Economy Stream at the World Association for Political Economy Conference, 2-4 August 2024, Athens

Institute for New Industrial Development (INID), 2022

The aggravation of global contradictions of the world civilization, which has been analysed for a... more The aggravation of global contradictions of the world civilization, which has been analysed for a long time by the leading theorists, is becoming more evident as of late. In contrast, the drastic acceleration of STP, the development of the “smart” knowledge-intensive manufacturing created the premise for the necessary qualitative changes in the existing social model, making it possible to define survival and the progress of the human civilization. Under new conditions there is an unprecedented political-economic repartition challenging the leadership of the nation states and the capabilities of the global supranational organisations. However developing a long-term and robust strategy of making a way out of this raging sea of troubles remains an open question. Assuming that the aforementioned problems seem diversified, they are essentially a single set of issues, resolving which is of current interest. The present book is devoted to finding the answers to these questions.

Routledge, 2022

Capitalism, Coronavirus and War investigates the decay of neoliberal financialised capitalism as ... more Capitalism, Coronavirus and War investigates the decay of neoliberal financialised capitalism as revealed in the crisis the novel coronavirus triggered but did not cause, a crisis that has been deepened by the conflict over Ukraine and its repercussions across the globe. Leading domestically to economic and political breakdown, the pandemic accelerated the decline of the US-led capitalist world's imperial power, intensifying the tendency to lash out with aggression and militarism, as seen in the US-led West's New Cold War against China and the proxy war against Russia over Ukraine. The geopolitical economy of the decay and crisis of this form of capitalism suggests that the struggle with socialism that has long shaped the fate of capitalism has reached a tipping point. The author argues that mainstream and even many progressive forces take capitalism's longevity for granted, misunderstand its historical dynamics and deny its formative bond with imperialism. Only a theoretically and historically accurate account of capitalism's dynamics and historical trajectory, which this book provides, can explain its current failures and predicament. It also reveals why, though the pandemic-by revealing capitalism's obscene inequality and shocking debility-prompted the most serious critiques of capitalism to emerge in decades, hopes of 'building back better' were so quickly dashed. This book sheds searching light on the dominant narratives that have normalised the neoliberal financialised capitalism and the dollar creditocracy dominating the world economy, with even critics unable to link capitalism's neoliberal turn to its financialisations, historical decay, productive debility and international decline. It contends that only by appreciating the seriousness of the crisis and rectifying our understanding of capitalism can progressive forces thwart a future of chaos and/or authoritarianism and begin the long task of building socialism. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and researchers of international relations, international political economy, comparative politics and global political sociology.

Third World Quarterly, 2020

We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the... more We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.

This Special Issue of Third World Quarterly is co-edited by Radhika Desai and Henry Heller.

As far right movements, social disintegration and international conflict emerge from the decay of... more As far right movements, social disintegration and international conflict emerge from the decay of the neoliberal order, Karl Polanyi's warnings against the unbridled domination of markets, is ever more relevant.

The essays in Karl Polanyi for the 21st Century extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi's life and work. They will interest Polanyi scholars and all interested in socialism and our future after neoliberalism. One asks whether, following Keynes and Hayek, Polanyi's ideas will shape the twenty-first century. Some clarify, for the meaning of money as a fictitious commodity. Others resolve difficulties in understanding the building blocks of Polanyi's thought: fictitious commodities, the double movement, the United States' exceptional development, the reality of society, and socialism as freedom in a complex society. And yes others explore how Polanyi sheds light on income inequality, world systems theory, comparative political economy.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Karl Polanyi in the twenty-first century - Radhika Desai

Part I: The great transformation and since
2 The return of Karl Polanyi: From the Bennington lectures to our present age of transformation - Kari Polanyi-Levitt

Part II: Money as a fictitious commodity
3 Debt, land and money: From Polanyi to the new economic archaeology - Michael Hudson
4 Commodified money and the crustacean nation - Radhika Desai
5 Double movement, embeddedness and the transformation of the financial system - Oscar Ugarteche Galarza

Part III: The double movement and socialism
6 The reality of society - Abraham Rotstein
7 Fictitious ideas, social facts and the double movement: Polanyi's framework in the age of neoliberalism - Claus Thomasberger
8 Multilinear trajectories: Polanyi, The Great Transformation, and the American exception - Hannes Lacher
9 This freedom kills: Karl Polanyi's quest for an alternative to the liberal vision of freedom - Michael Brie

Part IV: Elective affinities
10 Polanyi's democratic socialist vision: Piketty through the lens of Polanyi - Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block
11 Karl Polanyi as a precursor of world-systems theorists: An investigation of the theoretical lineage to Giovanni Arrighi - Chikako Nakayama
12 Polanyi in space - Jamie Peck

Bibliography
Index

International Critical Thought (Special Issue), 2016

Special issue of International Critical Thought Vol 6, no. 4, December 2016, co-edited by Boris K... more Special issue of International Critical Thought Vol 6, no. 4, December 2016, co-edited by Boris Kagarlitsky and Alan Freeman.

In this introduction, we provide a noveral lframing of the articles that follow by placing the Ukraine conflict which today embroils theWest in confrontation with Russia, within an historical account of the geopolitical economy of contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of imperialism in the twenty-first century, taking particular account of the decline of US and Western power and the rise of other centres of economic and military power, which are able to resist and contest Western power. We pay particular attention to how today's geopolitical flashpoints, of which Ukraine is among the most critical, emerged to belie post-Cold War expectations of a “peace dividend” and a “unipolar” world, clearly distinguishing the US and the EU roles in these processes. Given the widespread tendency in the West to label Russia “imperialist,” particularly after the integration of Crimea into the RussianFederation, we end our discussion with a consideration of this question which concludes that the term, while it continues to bean appropriate description of the pattern of Western actions, is not so for that of Russian ones.

Routledge, 2017

This book is a unique contribution to scholarship on the sources of the conflict in Ukraine. Brin... more This book is a unique contribution to scholarship on the sources of the conflict in Ukraine. Bringing together writers from Russia, Ukraine, Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia, it was provoked by a gathering of scholars and activists from all over Ukraine, held in Yalta, Crimea just after the conflict in Eastern Ukraine erupted. Challenging both the demonization of Russia which has become standard for Western writing on the topic, and the simplistic discourse of official Russian sources, this book scrutinizes the events of the conflict and the motives of the agents, bringing to the fore the underlying causes of the most critical flashpoints of the post-Soviet world order. This volume offers a refreshing, profound perspective on the Ukraine conflict, and will be an indispensable source for any student or researcher.

I am uploading the Table of Contents and the Introduction

Research in Political Economy, 2015

The papers in this volume demonstrate, each in its own way, the analytical gains to be had from p... more The papers in this volume demonstrate, each in its own way, the analytical gains to be had from putting geopolitical economy to work. They interrogate and challenge conventional wisdom in three broad areas: the international monetary system, world trade and the requirements for successful
combined development historically and today, when China’s own stunning combined development confronts other developing countries with new possibilities and constraints. The next section frames the papers with a discussion of the chief developments that have marked our age, how they
have been misunderstood by the dominant ideologies and the resources geopolitical economy can draw on to address the resulting deficiencies of understanding. It then goes on to discuss how the papers that follow advance our understanding, and closes with some necessary brief reflections on the vast agenda for future research and discussion that remains to be
tackled.

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Research in Political Economy, 2015

This work advances geopolitical economy as a new approach to understanding the evolution of the c... more This work advances geopolitical economy as a new approach to understanding the evolution of the capitalist world order and its twenty-first century form of multipolarity. It revives and redeploys the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD) as a way of uniting the understanding of domestic and international developments, and the struggles of classes and nations, into a single perspective. In it, the state is the
critical nexus of these two types of struggles. Recently dominant approaches like ‘U.S. hegemony’ or ‘globalization’ cannot explain twenty-first century multipolarity: they treat the world economy as a seamless whole in which either no state matters or only one does whereas today’s ‘BRICS’ and ‘emerging economies’ are only the latest instances of state-led or combined development that has been steadily transforming
the capitalist world economy by repeatedly challenging the unevenness of capitalism, the unequal international division of labour it created and the imperialism which undergirded it. It is this dialectic of uneven and combined development, not the spread of markets or imperialism alone, which has spread productive capacity around the world. Geopolitical economy, as developed in this volume, sheds light on the nature of contemporary international tensions as never before.

I am uploading my introduciton and the Table of Contents

Future of World Capitalism, Feb 20, 2013

"Geopolitical Economy radically reinterprets the historical evolution of the world order, as a mu... more "Geopolitical Economy radically reinterprets the historical evolution of the world order, as a multi-polar world emerges from the dust of the financial and economic crisis.

Radhika Desai offers a radical critique of the theories of US hegemony, globalisation and empire which dominate academic international political economy and international relations, revealing their ideological origins in successive failed US attempts at world dominance through the dollar.

Desai revitalizes revolutionary intellectual traditions which combine class and national perspectives on 'the relations of producing nations'. At a time of global upheavals and profound shifts in the distribution of world power, Geopolitical Economy forges a vivid and compelling account of the historical processes which are shaping the contemporary international order."

I am uploading the first, introductory, chapter.

Emerald, New York, 2011

As a few alert mainstream and corporate economists rediscover the certain elements of Marx’s anal... more As a few alert mainstream and corporate economists rediscover the certain elements of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, the essays in the first part of this volume demonstrate that they have much more to discover. To their discredit, mainstream understandings – whether of capitalism’s growth or of western capitalism’s interrelated long-term stagnation and financialization – are derailed precisely by political aversion to, or ignorance of, Marxist categories and analyses. The chapters in the second part extend Marxist insights into assessing the value of the so-called information, or knowledge-based, commodities, and offer a Marxist critique of Lenin, the only world leader who earlier had deeply studied his own country's economy. The part also presents two important works in translation. The first, read by Marx himself, raises serious questions about the relevance of Hegel in the understanding of Capital and offers its own insightful analysis. The other, by a Marxist collective in the 1970s demonstrates the centrality of politics and the class struggle in the allegedly ‘economic’ devalorization of constant capital. The final part contains a debate on the merits of ‘positivist Marxism’ sparked by an article in Volume 26.

Contents:

PART I: GROWTH AND FINANCE: MAINSTREAM LIMITATIONS AND MARXIST INSIGHTS

1. A Critique of Mainstream Growth Theory: Ways out of the Neoclassical Science(-Fiction) and Towards Marxism, by Rémy Herrera

2. From Growth Stagnation to Financial Crisis: Unproductive Labour as a Missing Link in Mainstream Theory, by Robert Chernomas and Fletcher Baragar

3. Capitalist Crisis and the Great Recession: A Personal Journey from Marx to Minsky, by Riccardo Bellofiore

4. ‘Financial’ vs. ‘Real’: An Overview of the Contradictory Role of Finance, by Ozgur Orhangazi

PART II: DISCOVERING AND RENEWING MARXIST THEORY

5. Nikolai Sieber: An Introduction to a Political Economist Approved by Marx, by James D. White

6. Marx’s Economic Theory (1874, translated by James D. White), by Nikolai Sieber

7. The Value and Price of Information Commodities: An Assessment of the South Korean Controversy, by Heesang Jeon

8. Lenin’s Economics: A Marxian Critique, by Seongjin Jeong

9. Class Struggle in Production and Devalorization of Capital (1975, translated by Paul Zarembka), by A.D. Magaline

PART III: DEBATING POSITIVIST MARXISM

10. Marxism, Crisis and Economic Laws: A Comment, by Gary Mongiovi

11. Marxism, Crisis and Economic Laws: A Response, by Alan Freeman

Routledge, London, 2009

Premature announcements of the eclipse of nation states under 'globalization' and 'empire' stand ... more Premature announcements of the eclipse of nation states under 'globalization' and 'empire' stand exposed as the 21st century's first economic crisis underlines their continuing importance. A predominantly cultural study of nationalism was unable to resist the 'globalization' thesis. Focusing on selected Asian cases, this book argues that nationalisms have always contained political economies as well as cultural politics. Placing nation-states centrally in our understanding of modern capitalism, it challenges the 'globalization' thesis. Rather than eclipse, nations and nationalisms have undergone changes under the impact of neoliberalism since the 1970s.
Classical 20th century developmental nationalisms emphasised citizenship, economy and future orientations. Later cultural nationalisms - 'Asian values', 'Hindutva', 'Confucianism' or 'Nihonjiron' - stressed identity, culture and past orientations. Amid neoliberalism's flagrantly unequal political economy, not primarily concerned with material production or productivity, they glorified static conceptions of 'original' cultures and identities - whether religious, ethnic or other - and justified inequality as cultural difference. In contrast to the popular mobilizations which powered developmental nationalisms, cultural nationalisms throve on neoliberalism's disengagement and disenfranchisement, albeit partially compensated by the political baptism of newly enriched groups. Extremist wings of cultural nationalism in some countries were a function of this lack of popular support.

This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

REVIEWS
Nationalism paradoxically has always had an aspect of universality--the great national revolutions certainly were experienced as levers for transforming all of humanity. The collective imaginaries which today are redrawing the boundaries between communities are widely seen as transnational, no longer contained by state boundaries in their claim to actual universality. But are they? Radhika Desai brings to this enterprise her own profound insights into contemporary forms of cultural nationalism, and in her choice of contributors has succeeded admirably in clarifying the similarities and contrasts between the nationalisms of old and today.

Kees van der Pijl, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex

Cultural nationalism which stresses ethnic solidarity and the primordial origins of the nation has been resurrected in many countries. Developmental nationalism which stressed citizenship and the reduction of poverty has been neglected due to this revival of cultural nationalism. This excellent study in contrast of these two types of nationalism provides important insights into the political processes of present times.

Dietmar Rothermund, University of Heidelberg

This ground-breaking study, through linking cultural politics to the political economy of nationalism in various Asian locations, challenges orthodox assumptions about nationalism, modernity and neoliberalism. In the richness of its case studies and the originality of its approach, this collection should prove a valuable resource for anyone working within development, cultural, globalization and postcolonial studies.

Diana Brydon, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Globalization, University of Manitoba

The Beijing Olympics impressed us all that the era of neoliberal globalization did not destroy but rather re-intensified nationalism. In an exciting and original enterprise Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms explores this as a historical transition from the developmental nationalisms of the early postwar era into new cultural nationalisms. Why and with what socio-economic consequences? Covering a range of Asian countries, and uniting the study culture with that of political economy, this volume is a fresh and great contribution to the study of nationalism, Asian Studies and development studies!

Makoto Itoh, member of the Japan Academy, University of Tokyo

Third World Quarterly , 2008

Special Issue of Third World Quarterly Guest Editor, Vol. 29, Nov. 3, 2008, 281 pp. That de... more Special Issue of Third World Quarterly Guest Editor,
Vol. 29, Nov. 3, 2008, 281 pp.

That developmental and cultural nationalisms had opposite foci should not imply that developmental nationalisms comprised only political economy and cultural nationalisms only cultural politics. It does mean, however, that within each of these historical types of nationalism (and presumably other such historical categories may be elaborated by improving the still rudimentary framework we propose and extending it to other periods in nationalisms’ history) both aspects acquired a distinctive settled form. This conclusion indicates the chief ways in which the contributions illuminate, elaborate and interrogate the political economy and cultural politics of developmental nationalisms and of cultural nationalisms and the transitions between them. One-sidedly, it emphasizes coherence, conformity and elaboration, where possible in the voices of the contributors themselves, leaving the task of reflecting on dissonances and the outstanding questions the contributors raise, fittingly perhaps, for a future station in the journey of this idea.

The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2008

.Forging a national essence is the business of nationalists. That of nationalism’s historians and... more .Forging a national essence is the business of nationalists. That of nationalism’s historians and theorists is to identify the historical and social parameters within which such forging (and usually considerable amounts of forgery) became at once possible and necessary. How did nations—new types of political communities founding a qualitatively new world order, an ‘international’ order—come to be?2 And how did they, and the international order, develop together, each shaping and being shaped by the other?

Three Essays, New Delhi, 2004

The three essays in this volume, focussing respectively on the international, national and region... more The three essays in this volume, focussing respectively on the international, national and regional aspects of Hindutva, provide three successive pictures of Hindutva, each, as it were, closer up than the one before, each probing progressively deeper into its dynamics. The book puts Hindutva in an international comparative perspective on the rise of the new right, stresses the roots of its emergence in the contradictions of the early Independent Indian state and investigates its regional aspects in the case of Gujarat. Together the essays in this volume analyse the structural basis, historical roots and political entrenchment of Hindutva, and assess the size of the task before the forces who oppose it.

Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1994

In this original study, Radhika Desai is concerned with the role of intellectuals in left-wing pa... more In this original study, Radhika Desai is concerned with the role of intellectuals in left-wing parties, focusing on the social democratic tradition in the Labour Party.

The disintegration of the SDP project only served to underline one of the basic propositions of the book: that the SDP was a terminal manifestation of a particular intellectual project rooted in the Labour Party, rather than the 'mould-breaking' beginning it was presented and accepted as being.

'provides an informative and refreshing contrast to other accounts'
Mark Wickham-Jones, Times Literary Supplement

'a thoughtful reappraisal of the revisionist tradition'
Dominic Wring, Political Studies

Journal Articles by Radhika Desai

New Left Review, 2024

On 4 June 2024, India emerged from the Modi miasma into which its corporate leaders had cast it. ... more On 4 June 2024, India emerged from the Modi miasma into which its corporate leaders had cast it. Bankrolling by ‘India, Inc.’ had created a mystique of invincibility around the Prime Minister. This was further inflated by India’s godi [lapdog] media, which parroted claims that Modi was the most popular leader in the world.1 Beloved of billionaires and Bollywood stars, yet pure and
pious, never forgetting his modest origins, bringing happiness to the humblest homes, he had unleashed the animal spirits of the Indian economy, now set to overtake China’s as a world powerhouse, a hightech and service-centre hub, while showering cooking-gas cylinders and
flushable toilets upon the grateful poor. It could not last. The economic policy demanded—and received—by India, Inc. required imposing economic pain of a scale and severity that could not be electorally costless. The money- and media-driven inflation of the Modi cult could not
defer payment forever and in 2024, votes finally dispelled the vapours money generated.

The Japanese Political Economy, 2020

This paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, at the root of the contrasting performance of... more This paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, at the root of the contrasting performance of the US and China amid the pandemic are the contrasting ways in which the two societies have come to organize their economies, particularly their money and credit systems. These differences are not widely recognized, let alone analyzed. Secondly, these contrasts emerge from the longer history of antagonisms in the geopolitical economy of world capitalism and its dialectic of uneven and combined development. This dialectic between and dominant nations and those contesting their domination have typically featured contrasting monetary and financial systems. The original dominant country, Britain inherited a creditor-oriented financial system providing short-term credit that preyed upon, rather than expanded, the productive economy. Britain fostered this system and projected it abroad through the gold-sterling standard through which it exercised a financial dominance long after its industrial dominance. The US, which sought to emulate such financial dominance, also reverted to the UK's archaic financial model. By contrast, countries interested in challenging the domination of powerful countries, with their need for stronger productive economies and growth, have had financial systems that have subserved productive expansion with longterm ‘patient’ credit, considered the interest of debtors–usually productive investors–as well as creditors, and usually managed or controlled inter- national capital flows. The predatory system of the originally dominant country, Britain, should have declined after the out- break of the First World War in the face of the strength of countries with production-oriented systems. However, a complex twist of history gave it a second life as the post 1970s US financial system.

International Critical Thought, 2022

Western discourse towards China had been hardening since it became clear to US leaders that their... more Western discourse towards China had been hardening since it became clear to US leaders that their assumption that increasing trade and engagement with China would lead it to become a pale imitation of Western neoliberal financialised capitalisms was coming unravelled and China continued to adhere to its socialist commitments. In waging the US's New Cold War on China with equal if not greater vigour than Trump, Biden merely replaced Trump's "America First" stance with the traditionally hypocritical stance of imperialism that always pretends to do good for the world it seeks to dominate, oppress, exploit and otherwise destroy. The latest version of this discourse is about promoting human rights and democracy. At a time when US and Western democracies are being assailed by a toxic combination of inequality, poverty, distrust, social division and political disaffection and polarisation, at a time when US imperialism's distinctly anti-democratic edge is becoming ever more evident, this stance is only facing mounting contradictions. The present article explores them.

The Japanese Political Economy, 2020

The articles in this special issue are placed in the context of the crisis of multilateralism and... more The articles in this special issue are placed in the context of the crisis of multilateralism and of the post-war Bretton Woods arrangements that was already in train before the pandemic, with its economic, political and international reverberations, accelerated, widened and deepened it.

Institute for New Industrial Development (INID), 2022

Routledge, 2022

Third World Quarterly, 2020

This Special Issue of Third World Quarterly is co-edited by Radhika Desai and Henry Heller.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Karl Polanyi in the twenty-first century - Radhika Desai

Part I: The great transformation and since
2 The return of Karl Polanyi: From the Bennington lectures to our present age of transformation - Kari Polanyi-Levitt

Bibliography
Index

International Critical Thought (Special Issue), 2016

Routledge, 2017

I am uploading the Table of Contents and the Introduction

Research in Political Economy, 2015

I am uploading the introdcution and the table of contents

Research in Political Economy, 2015

I am uploading my introduciton and the Table of Contents

Future of World Capitalism, Feb 20, 2013

I am uploading the first, introductory, chapter.

Emerald, New York, 2011

Contents:

PART I: GROWTH AND FINANCE: MAINSTREAM LIMITATIONS AND MARXIST INSIGHTS

1. A Critique of Mainstream Growth Theory: Ways out of the Neoclassical Science(-Fiction) and Towards Marxism, by Rémy Herrera

2. From Growth Stagnation to Financial Crisis: Unproductive Labour as a Missing Link in Mainstream Theory, by Robert Chernomas and Fletcher Baragar

3. Capitalist Crisis and the Great Recession: A Personal Journey from Marx to Minsky, by Riccardo Bellofiore

4. ‘Financial’ vs. ‘Real’: An Overview of the Contradictory Role of Finance, by Ozgur Orhangazi

PART II: DISCOVERING AND RENEWING MARXIST THEORY

5. Nikolai Sieber: An Introduction to a Political Economist Approved by Marx, by James D. White

6. Marx’s Economic Theory (1874, translated by James D. White), by Nikolai Sieber

7. The Value and Price of Information Commodities: An Assessment of the South Korean Controversy, by Heesang Jeon

8. Lenin’s Economics: A Marxian Critique, by Seongjin Jeong

9. Class Struggle in Production and Devalorization of Capital (1975, translated by Paul Zarembka), by A.D. Magaline

PART III: DEBATING POSITIVIST MARXISM

10. Marxism, Crisis and Economic Laws: A Comment, by Gary Mongiovi

11. Marxism, Crisis and Economic Laws: A Response, by Alan Freeman

Routledge, London, 2009

This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Kees van der Pijl, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex

Dietmar Rothermund, University of Heidelberg

Diana Brydon, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Globalization, University of Manitoba

Makoto Itoh, member of the Japan Academy, University of Tokyo

Third World Quarterly , 2008

Special Issue of Third World Quarterly Guest Editor, Vol. 29, Nov. 3, 2008, 281 pp. That de... more Special Issue of Third World Quarterly Guest Editor,
Vol. 29, Nov. 3, 2008, 281 pp.

The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2008

Three Essays, New Delhi, 2004

Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1994

'provides an informative and refreshing contrast to other accounts'
Mark Wickham-Jones, Times Literary Supplement

'a thoughtful reappraisal of the revisionist tradition'
Dominic Wring, Political Studies

New Left Review, 2024

The Japanese Political Economy, 2020

International Critical Thought, 2022

The Japanese Political Economy, 2020

Das Argument, 2016

Zunächst eine grundlegende Vorüberlegung: Die Expansion des Kapitalismus ist immer eine globale g... more Zunächst eine grundlegende Vorüberlegung: Die Expansion des Kapitalismus ist immer eine globale gewesen und immer auch eine polarisierende. Von ihremBeginn an hat sie Zentren geschaffen und Peripherien. Es ist vor diesem Hintergrund problematisch, vom Imperialismus als dem letzten Stadium des Kapitalismus zu sprechen. Er ist ihm vielmehr immer einbeschrieben. Im Folgenden werde ich drei Konsequenzen dieses konstitutiven Zusammenhangs von Imperialismus/Zentralisierung und Kapitalismus skizzieren: 1. zur Bedeutung nationaler Souveränität kraft Entkopplung von der kapitalistischen Globalisierung; - 2. zur Bestimmung der gegenwärtigen Krise und ihrer geschichtlichen Einordnung; – 3. zur Analyse der den globalen Kapitalismus treibenden Dynamik.

Dienstag, 2015

12 THEMA n Radhika Desai ist am 10. Januar Gast der XX. Internationalen Rosa-Luxemburg-Konferenz.... more 12 THEMA n Radhika Desai ist am 10. Januar Gast der XX. Internationalen Rosa-Luxemburg-Konferenz. Ihr Thema sind Kriege und Macht aus globaler Perspektive. Desai arbeitet am Institut für Politikwissenschaften an der Universität Manitoba in Winnipeg/Kanada. Ihre Schwerpunkte sind die globale politische Ökonomie sowie die gegenwärtigen politischen Verhältnisse in Großbritannien und Indien. In ihrem aktuellen Buch über geopolitische Ökonomie untersucht sie die historische Entwicklung der hegemonialen Weltordnung und zeigt auf, wie in der gegenwärtigen globalen Wirtschaftskrise eine multipolare Struktur entstand. jW veröffentlicht mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Autorin einen Auszug aus dem ersten Kapitel. n Übersetzung aus dem US-Amerikanischen von Jürgen Heiser n Lesen Sie morgen auf den jW-Themaseiten:

International Critical Thought, 2022

Few realise that amid rising international tensions, inter alia over Ukraine, Taiwan of China, Ir... more Few realise that amid rising international tensions, inter alia over Ukraine, Taiwan of China, Iran and AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States), nuclear arms control is today almost entirely dismantled and a manifestly declining and desperate US has launched a new nuclear arms, now also targeting China, making war and even nuclear war seem increasingly possible. The political and geopolitical economy of nuclear proliferation and control here highlights the singular role of the US in driving the arms race, arguing that the US desire to dominate the world economy, not the Cold War, caused the nuclear arms race; that the only surviving arms control treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has become more a channel for proliferation than a dam against it; and that the US used the NPT to justify its post-Cold War international aggression against some countries while violating it to aid allies.

The National Question and the Question of Crisis ( …, 2010

This chapter challenges the denial of "underconsumption" - the role of consumption demand in capi... more This chapter challenges the denial of "underconsumption" - the role of consumption demand in capitalist reproduction and its paucity in crises - in contemporary Marxism. At stake are better understandings not only of crisis theory but also, inter alia, of imperialism, "reformism," and Marx’s intellectual legacy. The chapter shows how the centrality of consumption demand is underlined in the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse, and goes on to discuss the origins, weaknesses, and persistence of this
denial. The chapter also shows that Marx did not regard underconsumption as a moralistic argument about unfulfilled need. The denial originates not in Marx but in productionism, the idea that capitalism is a system of ‘‘production for production’s sake.’’

Soundings, 2010

It would appear that India is having a good crisis. Despite initial appearances to the contrary, ... more It would appear that India is having a good crisis. Despite initial appearances to the contrary, the Great Recession turned out to be anything but 'global'. While the advanced industrial countries, pre-eminently the US, were hardest hit, growth in the emerging economies, India prominent among them, slowed only momentarily. As the crisis wore on and growth differentials widened, it became clear that the emerging countries were increasingly becoming the motors of world growth, thereby signalling an acceleration of the geopolitical shift of capitalism's centre of gravity away from the US and the advanced industrial world and towards them. This shift was announced by Goldman Sachs in its famous 'BRIC' thesis almost a decade ago. But its pace was slower then, thanks to the US-dominated world financial system funnelling so much of the world's capital, and demand, into the US economy.

Economic and Political Weekly, Jun 19, 1999

The bulk of comment on the recent revolt in the Congress Party focuses on the rebel trio's stated... more The bulk of comment on the recent revolt in the Congress Party focuses on the rebel trio's stated objections. It ignores the elementary political truth that politicians leaving a party to form a new one make statements which have more to do with their political future in their new party than their political past in the old one. All the earnest discussion - of the quality of the nation's natural progeny or the pro- visions of other constitutions - makes one wonder at the alacrity with which the bourgeois public suspends its normal cynicism, even that especially reserved for the regional politicians, provided principles in question are sufficiently reactionary. And since practically everyone believes that despite the controversy over her ori- gins, Sonia will be the Congress's electoral deliverance ('The un-passported, un- visaed masses, my dear, what else do you expect?!'), allegations of political calculation have failed to stick on the rebels. This configuration of attitudes obscures the possibility that the Maratha satrap's revolt might prove the last act in the long death of the Congress Party, not the first of its revitalised command over another century of Indian politics. What happened, and what can now happen, have little to do with the topics being most loudly discussed - dynasticism, nor that family and certainly nothing with Sonia - either
her origins or even her competence. They have to do with others which have been
silently passed over.

World Review of Political Economy, 2010

The first Marxist theories of capitalist geopolitics emerged in the early 20th century as theorie... more The first Marxist theories of capitalist geopolitics emerged in the early 20th century as theories of imperialism and uneven and combined development. They were also the first theories of capitalist geopolitics. While they explained the intensification of imperialism through new interpenetrations of politics and economics in national states and economies, the revival of Marxist thinking about capitalist geopolitics in the English-speaking world in recent decades suffers from a purely economic conception of capitalism, uncontaminated by politics, by nation-states. It is, as a consequence, also a cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In it the very object of study disappears. This article argues that it does so because so many Marxists have come to share the cosmopolitan biases of mainstream thinking by accepting the discourses of "globalization" and "empire" and shows how this is so in the case of two pioneers of the recent revival of Marxist geopolitical thinking, Justin Rosenberg and Benno Teschke.

New Left Review, 2004

If, as Gramsci said, the counting of “votes” is the final ceremony of a long process—a process of... more If, as Gramsci said, the counting of “votes” is the final ceremony of a long process—a process of persuasion and alliance-building—the 2004 Indian elections were an apparent anomaly for the Gramscian schema.The surprise installation of the Congress-led United progressive Alliance in New Delhi could be called neither final nor ceremonial. Rather, a grim new dynamic has entered the unfolding political developments of the last decades. The rise of Hindutva—authoritarian Hindu nationalism—and its party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, were central to these. The two successive National Democratic Alliance governments—coalitions of the BJP with the majority of the country’s regional parties—in 1998 and 1999 had constituted their climax. The 2004 verdict has now entwined the Congress within this vortex.

Osgoode Hall LJ, 1998

Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman’s joint work hitherto comments generally on the legal and constitu... more Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman’s joint work hitherto comments generally on the legal and constitutional implications of the rise of the Hindu Right in India and specifically as they relate to women. The work is already distinguished by a keen historical
understanding of Indian law and discernment about what is at stake: the fate of India’s enduring, but hardly flawless, liberal democratic constitutional polity. Subversive Sites represents an extension and deepening of this progressive and feminist engagement. The book’s fine and thorough research, as evinced in extensive and careful notes, places
the Indian women’s movement’s engagement with the law and the perplexities with which it confronts Indian feminism in the historical perspective of the working of colonial and independent Indian law. Only such an account is capable of demonstrating the historical relationship between the formatively-flawed liberalism of the Indian state and
constitution on gender issues (and related ones of cultural difference), and the contemporary challenge the Hindu Right represents by advancing along precisely these fractures of Indian liberalism.

Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung, 2006

Brasilien ist nicht das einzige Land, das darunter leidet, eine glänzende Zu- kunft, vielleicht ... more Brasilien ist nicht das einzige Land, das darunter leidet, eine glänzende Zu-
kunft, vielleicht eine rubmreiche Vergangenheit, aber immer eine erbärmliche
Gegenwart zu haben. In diesem Zustand. Unterentw1cklung genannt,
verhar. ren immer noch drei Viertel der Weltbevölkerung, nach mehreren Jahrhunder-
ten Kapitalismus und vielen Jahrzehnten Entwicklung. Das Wort , Unterent-wicklung' und die diese erklärenden Theoreme - Abhängigkeit und Imperia-lismus - sin nicht aus dem Diskurs der Sozialwissenschaften verschwunden. Sie waren war niemals Tell des Mainstream, spielten in den lyover unc 1970er Jahren aber eine erhebliche Rolle als
Knitik an den orthodoren Moder-nisierungstheorien: Diese behaupten, dass freie Märkte und I der ungehinderte Euss von Warn und Kapital! Entwicklung erzeugten und Rückständigkeit be-endigten. Die Dependenztheorien dagegen bestanden darauf, dass Unterent-wicklung (nicht Rückständigkeit) das Ergebnis eben dieser Politik sei. In den
etzten drei Jahrzehnten. 11 dem Make we neoliberale und rechte Positioner an Gewicht gewannen, wurden unter verschiedenen Vorwänden Debatten über Imperialismus, Abhängigkeit und Unterentwicklung an den Rand gedrängt.

Rethinking Marxism, 2012

This paper contests the cosmopolitan consensus in contemporary Marxism that Marx and Engels' visi... more This paper contests the cosmopolitan consensus in contemporary Marxism that Marx and Engels' vision of capitalism was ‘global’ and that nations are essentially ‘cultural’ constructs. It contributes to a wider project arguing that nations are material by taking a closer look at Marx and Engels' writings on free trade and protectionism and, in particular, at Marx's notes on Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy (1841/56). This examination shows that Marx and Engels had a keen understanding of the economic roles of states, national and imperial, and thought about free trade and protection in geopolitical terms. Though Marx aimed his characteristically caustic wit and forensic critique at List's contradictions, silences, and hypocrisies as a bourgeois thinker, he accepted that nation-states played economic and geopolitical roles in a capitalist world and that developmental states were possible, indeed necessary. The ground for these arguments is prepared by outlining the centrality of the economic roles of states in the development of modern capitalism and by showing how the recent revival of Marxist accounts of capitalist geopolitics is hampered by a purely economic, non- or anti-statist conception of capitalism.

Economic and Political Weekly, Aug 26, 2014

This analysis of the majority the Hindu nationalist BJP won in the 2014 elections has been made i... more This analysis of the majority the Hindu nationalist BJP won in the 2014 elections has been made in accordance with the framework within which I have analysed the previous two elections – 2004 and 2009 – and which I developed over more than two decades of teaching and researching Indian politics. The analysis also takes into account the implications of the fascism of the RSS, to which the BJP is closely related, and the novel elements the advent of Modi has introduced into the political process in India.

Rethinking Marxism, 2015

This response essay begins by outlining Geopolitical Economy’s historical interpretation of Marxi... more This response essay begins by outlining Geopolitical Economy’s historical interpretation of Marxism. It then engages with Rick Wolf's suggestions for further discussion of relations between capitalist and noncapitalist parts of the world, addresses the definitions of key terms, and responds to his alternative thesis about the fate of Western working classes. It then argues that Kristjanson-Gural's concern about the book's critique of Marxist economics assumes that the critique is considerably milder than it is. It finds that McIntyre's arguments about U.S. capitalist success do not translate into arguments for U.S hegemony and that his arguments about U.S. capitalism's “Schumpeterian” victories are ill evidenced. Finally, this response provides more support for Kellogg's arguments about the limitations of the latest attempt to demonstrate U.S. hegemony while taking up the issue of the origin of uneven and combined development (UCD) and also that of the “imperial” nature of the USSR, both questions of considerable import for any left politics.

World Review of Political Economy, 2015

This introduction contextualizes the articles that follow in a discussion of relevant elements of... more This introduction contextualizes the articles that follow in a discussion of relevant elements of the critical theme of the “materiality of nations” in geopolitical economy. In particular, it focuses on the need to understand the evolution of capitalist states and their domestic and international economic roles in terms of the contradictions of capitalism; the need to unite the normally separated economic and political logics of capitalism in an overall historical understanding; the need to understand combined development as including capitalist combined development and the dialectic of uneven and combined development as the key driver of capitalist international relations.

Research in Political Economy, 2015

Abstract This introduction to the essays that follow argues that the chief problem with the domin... more Abstract This introduction to the essays that follow argues that the chief problem with the dominant understanding of world affairs in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy, including their Marxist versions, is an a historical, non-contradictory and economically cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In their place, geopolitical economy is a new approach which returns to the conception of capitalism embodied in the culmination of classical political economy, Marxism. It was historical in two senses, distinguishing capitalism as a historically specific mode of social production involving by value production and understanding that its contradictions drive forward capitalism’s own history in a central way. This approach must further develop and specify uneven and combined development as the dominant pattern in the unfolding of capitalist international relations, one that is constitutive of its component states themselves. Secondly, it must understand the logic of the actions undertaken by capitalist states as emerging from the struggles involved in the formation of capitalist states and from the contradictions that are set in train once capitalism is established. Finally, it must see in the ways that class and national struggles and resulting state actions have modified the functioning of capitalism the possibilities of replacing the disorder, contestation and war that are the spontaneous result of capitalism for international relations the basis for a cooperative order in relations between states, an order which can also be the means for realising the permanent revolution and solidifying its gains on the international or world plane.

International Journal, Oct 1, 2007

India is hardly the only country to suffer from having a brilliant future, even a glorious past, ... more India is hardly the only country to suffer from having a brilliant future, even a glorious past, but always an unsatisfactory—if not wretched—present. The condition used to be called underdevelopment and, after centuries of capitalism and decades of “development,” it still affects most of the countries of the world, about 5/6th’s of the world’s population. But the word and the theories it represented—of dependency and imperialism—have all but disappeared from the discourse of social science. These theories were never part of social science’s dominant discourse, but in the 1960s and 1970s they enjoyed a substantial presence, challenging the orthodoxies of modernization theory, the reigning discourse articulating the economic position and prospects of the third world in the 1960s. Against modernization theory’s arguments that free markets, free trade, and free financial flows would foster development and end “backwardness,” dependency theory insisted that underdevelopment (not an original backwardness) was the result of precisely these policies. While many dependency theorists concluded that no development was possible under capitalism, others suggested that with extensive state intervention, managed trade, and control over international financial movements a version of it could be achieved. Soon after dependency theory emerged, however, the neoliberal offensive commenced. Neoliberalism’s political success (it was never an intellectual one) came in tandem with the broader advance of the “new right” globally. The result was to occlude talk of imperialism, dependency, and underdevelopment.

Aakar Books, 2019

The Dominant questions in Indian politics today concern Hindutva and the Modi government: What ac... more The Dominant questions in Indian politics today concern Hindutva and the Modi government: What accounts fr such success as it has enjoyed? How firm and lasting is its hold on power? And, more generally, what does it mean for Indian politics? Is it just a continuation of politics as before, with the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the Sangh Parivar simply replacing Congress as the 'dominant party'? Or do Modi's government and through it the proximity of the Sangh Parivar to state power represent something altogether more serious and fearsome, an unbridled turn under Hindutva's first majority government, to fascist modes of governance with all their authoritarianism, para-state violence and excoriation of public institutions? Either way, what does it portend for secular and democratic, let alone socialist, feminist and anti-casteist, forces seeking to oppose the present government and Hindutva in general?

Future of World Capitalism, 2013

The owl of Minerva, Hegel once remarked, takes wing at dusk. Knowledge results from reflection af... more The owl of Minerva, Hegel once remarked, takes wing at dusk. Knowledge results from reflection after the tumult of the day. This gloomy view may be too sweeping, but it certainly applies to the multipolar world order. Influential figures began hailing it in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. The American president of the World Bank spoke of 'a new, fast-evolving multi-polar world economy' (World Bank, 2010). Veteran international financier George Soros predicted that 'the current financial crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other countries in the developing world' (2008). However, the multipolar world order was much longer in the making. Developments of this magnitude simply don't happen overnight even in a crisis (though, as we shall see, emerging multipolarity was a decisive factor in causing it), and this has important implications for prevailing understandings of the capitalist world order.

Three Essays Collective, 2003

Routledge, 2022

Capitalism is having a bad 21st century. The East Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 heralded it... more Capitalism is having a bad 21st century. The East Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 heralded it, the stock market crash of 2000 inaugurated it, and the 2008 financial crisis nearly destroyed it. However, capitalist classes retained political power and neoliberal financialised capitalism, the result of the still-unresolved Long Downturn dating back to the 1970s, malingered on. While neoliberalism ideology continued celebrating capitalism, it clocked ever-lower growth, generated ever-greater inequality, and inflicted ever- more ecological damage. Millions of young people began striking school to demand governments and corporations act to halt the climate emergency, only to be interrupted by another disastrous result of capitalism’s dysfunctional relation to nature, the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic.The concatenation of public health, economic, financial and ecological crises that accompanied it threatens complete social and political breakdown.

Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2018

Keynes’s writing is bookended by major exertions on international monetary subjects. Indian Curr... more Keynes’s writing is bookended by major exertions on international monetary subjects. Indian Currency and Finance (1913, hereafter ICF), generally regarded as a masterly description of the operation of the gold standard, opened an intellectual career centrally concerned with matters monetary. It closed with the Bretton Woods proposals for a new international monetary system for the post-war international world emerging from the Thirty Years’ Crisis of 1914–45, based on a thorough critique of the imperial one that entered it. As originally proposed, these arrangements were designed to allow ‘each country to pursue its national objectives of full employment and price stability’ (Dostaler 2007, p. 206), rather than sacrifice them to exchange rate stability as the gold standard required. These proposals were defeated by the US’s vain desire to install the dollar as the world’s currency on the model of sterling before 1914 (Desai 2013). However, the regularity with which they pop up in discussions of the reform of the international monetary system even today shows that they were in advance of historical possibilities (Desai 2009) and remain a lodestar.

Will Secular India Survive, 2004

This essay examines the caste dynamics of the rise of Hindutva. Contrary to the widespread assump... more This essay examines the caste dynamics of the rise of Hindutva. Contrary to the widespread assumption that middle caste politics in India is opposed to Hindutva, it argues that the two phenomena have been remarkable amenable and indeed, that the rise of Hindutva cannot be explained without this dynamic.

The Hindutva, as represented by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the fraternity of organizations linked to it, the Sangh Parivar, is the greatest threat to secularism in India is a relatively uncontroversial statement. The BJP's long spell at the margins of Indian politics until the late 1960s, its meteoric rise during the 1980s and 1990s from a low of two seats in the lower house to its present strength of 182 (out of 543) and, finally, the formation of a government under its leadership, is a story that has been told many times. It is a story which is told largely in terms of the strategies and ideologies of the RSS and the Sangh Parivar. The surrounding terrain of their activity - Indian politics, culture, society and economy, is conceived in these accounts largely as resistant to Hindutva, even innately secular, in a way that Hindutva's successes appear largely magical, if not ephemeral.

Handbook of the International Political Economy of Production, 2015

The Recent financial and economic crises have landed the world in unknown territory. Old maps no ... more The Recent financial and economic crises have landed the world in unknown territory. Old maps no longer work. The crises have discredited not only neoclassical economics and neoliberal policy prescriptions (Independent Evaluation Office, 2011), but also (as I argue, Desai, 2013a) recently dominant conceptions of the capitalist world order, like 'globalization' and 'empire', which assumed a single world economy. For the crises were neither 'global' nor 'imperial', neither imposing the same misery on all economies nor imposing more on the peripheral economies than the core ones. Instead, they widened the divergence between the stagnating advanced industrial world and the still fast-growing emerging economies even more.

Arab Revolutions and Beyond, 2016

One of the least appreciated aspects of the Arab Revolutions that opened the second decade of the... more One of the least appreciated aspects of the Arab Revolutions that opened the second decade of the twenty-first century was that they toppled the most enduring dictatorships sponsored by the USA in a region of immense strategic importance to it, the most pre-eminent among them, Egypt, also the most populous Arab nation. However, a world inured to regarding the USA as more or less omnipotent has been slow to register this and to work out its implications for the complex and still-unfolding fate of the revolutions and what they herald for the world order. This only compounds the problem of understanding contemporary developments in a region already legendary for the complexity of its politics and political economy, and, we may add, its geopolitics and geopolitical economy.

Social Movements and the State in India, 2016

The Modi government represents the greatest threat Indian democracy has faced and this paper seek... more The Modi government represents the greatest threat Indian democracy has faced and this paper seeks uncover better what it represents, the dangers it contains and the possibilities for resistance to it. To understand the current government better, and to better distinguish it from the wider rightward drift in Indian politics that has long been evident, this paper presents an original understanding of the shifts in India’s political economy in marketist direction, dating it back to the late 1960s. It was the work of the middle caste landed classes whose power is not often recognized and their transformation into more and less successful Provincial Propertied Classes (PPCs) is the key social development that explains the political changes – the decline of Congress, the rise of the Parties of the Provincial Propertied Classes (PPPCs) and the rise of Hindutva – in the decades since that have moved Indian politics to the right. The Modi government represents, however, an even narrower class, the Indian corporate class, than previous governments and could be endangering the social alliance that brought it to power.

Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) returned to public discourse in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union implode... more Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) returned to public discourse in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union imploded and globalization erupted. Best known for The Great Transformation, Polanyi’s wide-ranging thought anticipated twenty-first-century civilizational challenges of ecological collapse, social disintegration and international conflict, and warned that the unbridled domination of market capitalism would engender nationalist protective counter-movements. In Karl Polanyi and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, Radhika Desai and Kari Polanyi Levitt bring together prominent and new thinkers in the field to extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi's life and work.

Reading the Postwar Future, 2019

As the end of the Second World War hove into view around 1943, the British intellectual scene lit... more As the end of the Second World War hove into view around 1943, the British intellectual scene lit up with discussion about how to reshape British society after the war. A broad agreement that governments must cure social ills and guard against its national government, planning, rationing, "fair shares" and "equal sacrifices," and underfeeding." However, this consensus was rooted in the rise of welfarism and social imperialism that challenged the verities of the reigning liberalism in economic policy well before the First World War and the rise of a decidedly left-of-center Depression-era "middle opinion" that encompassed not only liberals like Keynes but also many conservative politicians.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2021

From Immanuel Ness (ed) Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Basingstoke: M... more From Immanuel Ness (ed) Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, 2016. This Chapter reviews the growing cooperation among Southern states in trade, economic assistance, and forms of economic sustenance for the mutual benefit of undeveloped countries and developing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Even as economic trade among states in the global South with the West is growing in an unequal manner, the chapter demonstrates that new more equitable economic relationships are developing among emerging countries of the South, for example, China and Africa. These new forms of trade are providing expanding opportunities which may reduce dependence on the imperialist core.

Rudolf Hilferding, 2020

The financialisation of capitalism in recent decades has prompted a vast literature on the subjec... more The financialisation of capitalism in recent decades has prompted a vast literature on the subject. Given the leading role of Marxist and Marxisant scholars in it, the question of the relevance of Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital (1910) to understanding financialisation has naturally risen. However, serious discussions have judged any such relevance to be limited. Costas Lapavitsas' verdict is that Hilferding's concept of finance capital, which denoted the relation between banks and industry in the monopoly capitalism entered in the late nineteenth century, also considered the most developed and mature form of the relation, needs to be treated 'with considerable caution.'

Campus, 2018

“While the classical theories of imperialism could have been corrected, elaborated, developed and... more “While the classical theories of imperialism could have been corrected, elaborated, developed and updated, their summary displacement was certainly an intellectual step backward. … In what follows, I first review three Long Ends of the First World War. While two, in their different ways, put it at the end of the Second World War, the third, Eric Hobsbawm’s (1989 and 1994) is a longer, open-ended and prescient one. I go on to introduce the new conception of the dynamics of the capitalist world order I recently proposed, geopolitical economy (Desai 2013 and further elaborated in Desai 2015, 2016a and 2016b). It permits us to link the classical accounts of imperialism and the related concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) to contemporary multipolarity. I also dwell on the intellectual shifts that have made it difficult for this to be more widely appreciated.

Third World Quarterly, 2020

We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the... more We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a‘peace dividend’– remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.

Manchester University Press, 2020

This introduction places the contributions that follow in the context of Polanyi’s rising influen... more This introduction places the contributions that follow in the context of Polanyi’s rising influence, its causes and effects, and of the key twenty-first century developments that make his oeuvre more relevant than ever. It emphasizes how the contributions push the boundaries of received understandings of Polanyi. While some contributions fill gaping holes, such as those on money as a fictitious commodity, others overturn received understandings, whether that of the double movement or fictitious commodities, or the provenance (Central European or American) of his principal ideas and concerns or how he understood socialism. Yet others demonstrate how amenable Polanyi’s ideas are to further development. Last but not least, the introduction outlines Polanyi’s historical diagnosis as it emerges from these innovative contributions and argues that the stark choice he felt faced European societies, socialism or fascism, is once again before us as we face the groundswell of nationalist and far right forces.

Manchester University Press, 2020

Polanyi's 'great transformation' refers to the 'collapse' of 'nineteenth century civilization' an... more Polanyi's 'great transformation' refers to the 'collapse' of 'nineteenth century civilization' and the emergence from it of a vastly different one. The The story revolved around the unfolding consequences of the commodification of three fictitious commodities: land, labour and money. However, the consequences of the commodification of the last structured the dramatic plot of The Great Transformation (TGT). Though the gold standard, the apex structure commodifying money, was only one of four institutions whose collapse brought down nineteenth-century civilization (the others being the self-regulating market, the liberal state and the balance of power), its collapse was 'the proximate cause of the catastrophe' (3). By the time it failed, most of the other institutions 'had been sacrificed in a vain effort to save it' (3).

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

According to popular Western understanding, the Cold War was a political, geopolitical, and ideol... more According to popular Western understanding, the Cold War was a political, geopolitical, and ideological confrontation between capitalism and communism, pitting the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe, North America, andJapan, led by the USA, against the Communist Soviet Union and allied Eastern Bloc. It began after the Second World War and turned nuclear when the Soviets acquired atomic weapons in1949. Though the prospect of nuclear Armageddon prompted mass movements against nuclear weapons, and though the world came very close to it at least once, there was no nuclear war: deterrence worked.

Manchester University Press, UK, 2017

Geopolitical Economy promotes fresh inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the most pressi... more Geopolitical Economy promotes fresh inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the most pressing new realities of the twenty-first century: the multipolar world and the renewed economic centrality of states in it. From a range of disciplines, works in the series account for these new realities historically. They explore the problems and contradictions, domestic and international, of capitalism. They reconstruct the struggles of classes and nations, and state actions in response to them, which have shaped capitalism, and track the growth of the public and de-commodified spheres these dialectical interactions have given rise to. Finally, they map the new terrain on which political forces must now act to orient national and the international economies in equitable and ecological, cultural and creative directions.

Series Editors: Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman

The world is undergoing a major realignment. The 2008 financial crash and ensuing recession, Chi... more The world is undergoing a major realignment. The 2008 financial crash and ensuing recession, China’s unremitting economic advance, and the uprisings in the Middle East, are laying to rest all dreams of an 'American Century'. This key moment in history makes weighty intellectual demands on all who wish to understand and shape the future.

Theoretical debate has been derailed, and critical thinking stifled, by apologetic and superficial ideas with almost no explanatory value, 'globalization' being only the best known. Academic political economy has failed to anticipate the key events now shaping the world, and offers few useful insights on how to react to them.
The Future of World Capitalism series will foster intellectual renewal, restoring the radical heritage that gave us the international labour movement, the women's movement, classical Marxism, and the great revolutions of the twentieth century. It will unite them with new thinking inspired by modern struggles for civil rights, social justice, sustainability, and peace, giving theoretical expression to the voices of change of the twenty-first century.

Drawing on an international set of authors, and a world-wide readership, combining rigour with accessibility and relevance, this series will set a reference standard for critical publishing.

Canadian Dimension, 2020

The tensions that emanated from the US assassination of General Qassam Soleimani on January 3 led... more The tensions that emanated from the US assassination of General Qassam Soleimani on January 3 led the world to believe, for a terrible week, that it was on the brink of a Third World War. The tensions may have abated. The news cycle may have quickly switched to the momentously tragic shooting down of Ukrainian International Airlines PS752 amid these high tensions and then to the Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

Unsettling Economics, 2008

Karl Marx's influential articles on India had less to do with India than Marx's efforts to take c... more Karl Marx's influential articles on India had less to do with India than Marx's efforts to take control of the leading Republican paper in the United States. I am posting an ancient copy of my work on the subject. The article also suggests the complexity of reading Marx, who had multiple objectives in its writings.

Global Times, 2018

In Das Kapital or Capital, Karl Marx resolved the key conundrums of the classical political econo... more In Das Kapital or Capital, Karl Marx resolved the key conundrums of the classical political economy: what was value, where surplus value came from, why crises occurred, why the profit rate declined and how wages were determine. - in the only way possible, by exposing its exploitative, crisis-ridden and internationally aggressive character.

New Left Review, 2022

Ottawa political circles must have heaved secret sighs of relief when Liberal Prime Minister Just... more Ottawa political circles must have heaved secret sighs of relief when Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh announced their confidence and supply agreement on 21 March. In return for advancing some social spending priorities, the NDP will keep the minority government in power until 2025. No party wants an election anytime soon. Decades of neoliberal predation have diminished their vote-pulling capacities, as the national ballot in September 2021 testified. Voter turnout fell, the NDP gained a single seat, the Conservatives lost two and, most importantly, the Liberals once again falied to win a majority. In the aftermath of the vote 55% of Canadians said that Trudeau should step down, and he is now reportedly tempted to leave harried public life for lucrative retirement. That would mean giving way to heir apparent Chrystia Freeland, the so-called 'Minister of Everything': Deputy PM, finance minister and lead on the Ukraine crisis. With politics this unreliable, backroom deals are needed to shore up Canada's ruling bloc.

De coronapandemie leidt tot een ernstige economische en sociale crisis, en tot een afrekening met... more De coronapandemie leidt tot een ernstige economische en sociale crisis, en tot een afrekening met de onbestuurbaarheid van het kapitalisme. Het is misschien meer dan een toeval dat de ernst van de coronavirusdreiging het grootste deel van de westerse wereld trof rond de Iden van maart, de dag waarop traditioneel de uitstaande schulden afgerekend werden in het oude Rome. De week daarvoor was een echte rollercoaster. De Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie (WHO) noemde de besmetting eindelijk een pandemie, regeringen begonnen halsoverkop een respons te zoeken, het virus domineerde zowel nieuwsberichten als de overvloed aan mis-en desinformatie op sociale media, steden en zelfs hele landen gingen dicht, markten van elke denkbare soort stortten in en bedrijven kondigden ontslagen en productieonderbrekingen aan. Ook al waren de oorsprong, verspreidingsroutes en dodelijkheid ervan nog niet duidelijk, dat het zogeheten Covid-19

The Manitoban, 2016

As one of us wrote in these pages a few weeks ago, the recent University of Manitoba Faculty Asso... more As one of us wrote in these pages a few weeks ago, the recent University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) strike stood to win historically significant gains in the ongoing battle against the commodification and corporatization of education. Sensing this, faculty unions across the country and around the world were watching us, sending us funds and messages of support. However, the strike settlement we ratified on Nov. 21 shows that we have squandered that opportunity. Understanding this in a clear-eyed fashion – and discussing the implications – is critical since we must struggle for these goals in the structures of university governance in coming rounds of bargaining and in the overall battle for public legitimacy.

CGTN, 2021

President Biden may have returned the U.S. to the Paris Agreement but this alleged renewal of mul... more President Biden may have returned the U.S. to the Paris Agreement but this alleged renewal of multilateralism goes hand in hand with much harsher pursuit of Trump's "new Cold War" against China. Given the U.S. and China's centrality to the climate effort as the world's two largest economies and leaders in green technologies, such U.S. belligerence threatens the world's ability to keep climate change within manageable limits.

CGTN, 2021

As NATO leaders gather in Brussels, U.S. President Joe Biden's "America is Back" approach is expe... more As NATO leaders gather in Brussels, U.S. President Joe Biden's "America is Back" approach is expected to revive the alliance former U.S. President Donald Trump had dismissed as "obsolete" and demoralized by demanding members fulfill their never- hitherto-enforced obligation to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, even upping the demand to 4 percent. About then, French President Emmanuel Macron also proclaimed the alliance "brain dead."

However, for all the pomp and circumstance about America being, in President Biden's words, being "back at the table" and "back at leading the world," his foreign policy has continued in much the same groove as his predecessor's. So can he really revive NATO?

CGTN, 2021

President Biden is taking his "'democracies' against China" show to the London Group of Seven (G7... more President Biden is taking his "'democracies' against China" show to the London Group of Seven (G7) Summit. His agenda, set out in his op-ed piece in the Washington Post, was to convince fellow Western leaders that the U.S. can "both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age." Biden wants to lead "democracies" against China on practically every major issue, from COVID-19 to climate change, to offer "a high-standard alternative to China for upgrading physical, digital and health infrastructure," unite against "autocrats" on AI and ensure that "democracies," "not China or anyone else, write the 21st-century rules around trade and technology."

Can the "democracies" of which President Biden speaks bear the weight he is putting on them? Certainly, his own is in a parlous state, and so is its governance.

CGTN, 2021

The inflation debate is undoubtedly about class. While no one benefits from very high or hyperinf... more The inflation debate is undoubtedly about class. While no one benefits from very high or hyperinflation, mild inflation typically accompanies robust economic activity and increased employment. Inflation-intolerant policies, while ensuring that wealth does not lose its value, tend to raise unemployment, penalizing working people. The problem with the debate is that it is not about Federal Reserve policy. That is determined not so much by levels of inflation or unemployment as the financial sector needs.

CGTN, 2021

President Biden has promised a Summit of Democracies during his first year in office. It will aim... more President Biden has promised a Summit of Democracies during his first year in office. It will aim to shift his China policy from inconvenient trade disruptions to the high-minded plane of democracy and human rights, rope in the US allies to bolster an otherwise weakening effort and weaponized democracy in a new way.

The decay of U.S. democracy is easily outlined. Abraham Lincoln famously defined Democracy as the "rule of the people, by the people and for the people." How well does U.S. democracy fare by these three standards?

CGTN, 2021

U.S. climate envoy, John Kerry, arrived in Shanghai on April 14 laden with expectations of millio... more U.S. climate envoy, John Kerry, arrived in Shanghai on April 14 laden with expectations of millions who supported President Joe Biden because he promised a cooperative approach to dealing with global problems like climate change.

However, a powerful undertow appears to be pulling the U.S. towards an aggressive China stance. Now, even before Kerry stepped foot in China, the aggressive slip was showing below the realist skirts.

Canadian Dimension, 2020

This is the fifth in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitle... more This is the fifth in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitled “What is to be Done? A Manifesto for Politics Amid the Pandemic and Beyond.”

International relations amid the pandemic suddenly acquired definition when the United States launched its new Cold War against China. No Trumpian discontinuity, it follows Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ signalling defeat after decades trying to win China over to neoliberal capitalism. Like the original Cold War, the new one responds to an existential threat. Only stupefying ‘end-of-history’ triumphalism prevents most from recalling the seriousness of the Soviet threat and the strenuousness of the West’s original Cold War. The challenge of China today is even more serious.

Understanding the new Cold War against China therefore requires explaining how neoliberal financialized capitalism and the world creditocracy emerged. … By the mid-twentieth century, most critical observers believed capitalism had matured to the point where its private property form was no longer compatible with progress. Conscious popular control–effectively some form of socialism–were both possible and necessary.

History vindicated this consensus at least partially. The post-war world of productive ‘organized’ Keynesian welfare state capitalism, actually existing socialism and developmentalism leaned towards socialism. Only a twist of history reincarnated archaic, predatory financialized capitalism, complete with a world creditocracy, in the late twentieth century US. Four destructive decades later, however, we find history smoothing out that twist as more productive regulated economies once again outpace the liberal ones. The new Cold War against the most powerful of the more regulated economies, China, is only the US’s desperate attempt to appeal history’s inevitable verdict.

Canadian Dimension, 2020

This is the fourth in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitl... more This is the fourth in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitled "What is to be Done? A Manifesto for Politics Amid the Pandemic and Beyond."

The pandemic is revealing the racist foundations of the liberal and neoliberal capitalist West. Will they be dismantled? It is a real possibility. The present crisis is no ordinary recurring recession. It represents the comprehensive exhaustion of neoliberal capitalism. The pandemic merely accelerated the long-overdue reckoning. Since no other type of capitalism is possible—and has not been since the late nineteenth century—it is a crisis of capitalism per se. Necessarily multi-faceted, it can and will throw up powerful new forces demanding change practically overnight. However, to give effective battle, the left that seeks to organise these forces must know itself, its resources and the limitations it must overcome. It must also know the resources, strategies and aims of the right and the capitalist classes. “Know your enemy”, said Sun Tzu in The Art of War.

That, today, also involves knowing the enemy’s contradictions. Great as the resources of capitalist and right forces are, and long as their experience in permanent counterrevolution is, what they want and need–to launch a new phase of neoliberalism –is almost certainly unobtainable. Given that, the left must prepare to deal with the sheer destruction their efforts will wreak. It must prepare to carry society out of it and place it on a radically different, preferably, socialist and anti-imperialist foundation, one that is ecologically sustainable and geared towards gender and race equality. This is the responsibility of the left today.

Canadian Dimension, 2020

This is the third in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitle... more This is the third in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitled "What is to be Done? A Manifesto for Politics Amid the Pandemic and Beyond."

Great political hope has been aroused by the breakdown of neoliberal economies and their politics in core capitalist countries. Staunch neoliberal governments have been forced into spectacular policy U-turns such as income support packages of unprecedented size. Strikes and other actions are breaking out, while unions are demanding a greater role in how lockdowns and their easing are implemented. Intellectuals are competing to propose radical new ideas, from a universal basic income to deeply negative interest rates to resurrecting anti-trust legislation to breaking up large monopoly corporations. Even European governments are proposing non-repayable bonds to deal with the debt crisis and organs of the capitalist press are demanding a reversal of neoliberalism unbelievable only two months ago. However, this political hope must be realised, if at all, in complex conjuncture and against the odds posed by the long-term weakening of left forces.

Canadian Dimension, 2020

This is the second in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitl... more This is the second in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitled "What is to be Done? A Manifesto for Politics Amid the Pandemic and Beyond."

The present crisis mixes public health, economic and political crises. Each consists of the pandemic bringing decades-long processes of decay and decomposition to a head. As more and more governments move to relax lockdown restrictions while curves of infections and deaths flatten (and some, like Russia, do so despite little evidence of such flattening), rather than letting up, each of these crises is intensifying.

Successful countries like Germany and Singapore eased their lockdowns after early victories in reducing infections only to find infection rates rising again. While they are likely to contain the new outbreaks with their already proven methods, the chaos caused by the easing of lockdowns in the core neoliberal countries implies that a new surge is practically inevitable. This means that further lockdowns are equally likely, testing the resilience of already weakened economies further. Moreover, even where easing can continue, it is not clear how much of economic activity will revive.

Canadian Dimension, 2020

This is the first in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitle... more This is the first in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitled "What is to be Done? A Manifesto for Politics Amid the Pandemic and Beyond."

The COVID-19 pandemic appears to be peaking in the mostly Western countries worst affected so far, though it will continue to scythe down thousands for weeks to come. The virus could also return for a far worse second wave, and may yet break out on a large scale in more populous countries in the Third World, with unimaginable consequences.

Certainly, the lockdowns the pandemic has necessitated are unlikely to be lifted in their entirety anytime soon and, if they are, social and economic activity may still fail to return to the production and consumption levels and patterns of the recent neoliberal capitalist past. Though fatalities remain a fraction of the Spanish flu total, the public health emergency and the response to it have become profound political and economic crises of the neoliberal order, the only order of capitalism possible today, and thus a profound political crisis of capitalism itself, both domestic and international.

Valdai Club, 2020

Practically the first response of Western authorities, when they finally acknowledged the gravity... more Practically the first response of Western authorities, when they finally acknowledged the gravity of the threat posed by the novel Coronavirus amid the Stock market collapse and the World Health Organization proclamation of a pandemic, was monetary. Led by the United States Federal Reserve, which promised to use its full range of tools to support the financial market, Western central bankers lowered their already low interest rates to zero, announced further trillions of asset purchases.

This time, however, it is clearly not enough. The present crisis is not, fundamentally, a financial crisis but an economic crisis. It originates in the productive economy, not the financial sector, Main Street, not Wall Street. Decades of neoliberal prioritising of the financial over the productive economy were already coming to a head when the pandemic hit. It has only accelerated advance toward a reckoning that was becoming long overdue after more than four decades of neoliberal policies inaugurated by Thatcher and Reagan.

Canadian Dimension, 2020

The present pandemic is certain to be different not because it is more lethal than previous ones ... more The present pandemic is certain to be different not because it is more lethal than previous ones (it is not), nor because it is causing havoc in financial markets (as most crises of neoliberal era have), but because it is exposing the weaknesses, distortions and imbalances of the productive apparatus that neoliberalism has shaped over four decades.

Valdai Club, 2019

At some point in time between when the US Department of Commerce issued a press release giving th... more At some point in time between when the US Department of Commerce issued a press release giving the latest US trade deficit figures on September 3 (which had narrowed less than expected), and the announcement of new US-China trade talks on September 5, President Trump issued another tweet on trade issues to let the world know he was going to remain tough. The full set of tweets is worth considering as a whole:

Sweater Weather, 2021

In this episode of Sweater Weather, Radhika Desai joins to discuss capitalism, geopolitics, the p... more In this episode of Sweater Weather, Radhika Desai joins to discuss capitalism, geopolitics, the pandemic and more.

How have neoliberal economies fared during the coronavirus crisis, compared to more planned economies? How does capitalism structure the geopolitics between states? What is the role of the US dollar? And as a bonus: we discuss the relationship of intellectuals to left politics, in reference to Prof. Desai's first book, Intellectuals and Socialism (1994).

Marxist Education Project, 2020

This talk with Radhika Desai took place September 30th, 2020, and was hosted by the Marxist Educa... more This talk with Radhika Desai took place September 30th, 2020, and was hosted by the Marxist Education Project and the Geopolitical Economy Research Group.

If Proudhonism in the nineteenth century was, as Marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, Radhika argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by Badiou, Hardt and Negri, and Zizek (among others) is a 21st century avatar of the Proudhonism that was a perennial obstacle to developing a broad opposition to capital during the 19th and 20th centuries. The 21st Century Proudhonist speaks not for what Poulantzas called the‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as Proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative class’. A failure to comprehend the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and a general antipathy to any general organization of labor in society, and thus to any serious
politics, are common to both. In addition, the protection
of the cultural commons, the core of the project, is but a program aiming for the continued reproduction of the creative class within the dictates of capital. The sum of what the 21st Century Prodhonists put forth as innovation, is instead prey to a series of misunderstandings – of the concept of the commons itself, of contemporary capitalism whose dynamics forms the backdrop of their project and key economic and political ideas of Marx whose authority they seek to attach to their project.

Socialist Action, 2020

Among the many ideas the pandemic has revived for reforming our broken economies, two have domina... more Among the many ideas the pandemic has revived for reforming our broken economies, two have dominated. One is the idea of universal basic income and the other is Modern Monetary Theory, which claims that there is no limit to our governments’ ability to print money and thus undertake all the social expenditure we want and need, including UBI. There is, as the saying goes, a magic money tree.

However, often ideas that erupt in the early stages of crisis are ideas that have lain, neglected and unexamined, for far too long. Amid the very practical scrutiny, they often melt away. Ideas of UBI are melting under scrutiny. In this lecture, we will raise some important questions that will enable us to separate the rational kernel of MMT from its less credible elements. Yes, governments can print money and lots of it. However, there are two limits: external pressure for devaluation must be managed by capital controls and the economy has to be organised to produce or procure the things the money will buy. So, our answer will be, ‘Yes, there is a money tree but it is not magic’.

With Radhika Desai, Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, and discussants Yasin Kaya in Toronto and Gary Porter in Victoria, B.C.

Venezuela Peace Committee, 2020

The Winnipeg Venezuela Peace Committee observed May Day with a webinar on the issues raised by th... more The Winnipeg Venezuela Peace Committee observed May Day with a webinar on the issues raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. Topics include Venezuela's response to the crisis, the impacts of COVID-19 on Indigenous Peoples, escalating tensions between the US and China in the wake of the pandemic, and more.

New Cold War, 2020

The coronavirus continues to devastate lives across the world and stopping it must be the top pri... more The coronavirus continues to devastate lives across the world and stopping it must be the top priority for humanity. This global crisis requires global cooperation and learning from one another to help defeat this virus. To discuss this, Learning From China hosted a live online seminar with John Ross (Chongyang Institute, Beijing), Dai Suyue (Guancha.cn – China), Martin Jacques (author, When China Rules the World), Ma Hui (minister at the Chinese Embassy in London), Radhika Desai (politics professor at the University of Manitoba, Canada, New Cold War website) and Brian Mier (Brasil Wire). The seminar was chaired by peace campaigner Kate Hudson.

Online seminar held by Learning from China, Apr 18, 2020

May 20, 2018 - Seattle, Washington

Northwest Film Forum - May 19, 2018

April 1 2017, Global Research News Hour host Michael Welch interviewed two geopolitical analysts about some of the developments in the South China Sea

EN DEFENSA DE LA REVOLUCIÓN BOLIVARIANA Y POR LA PAZ EN VENEZUELA - 2017

Talk held at "The Long End of the First World War: Ruptures, Continuities and Memories" , 2017

Radhika Desai Presents her book 'Geopolitical Economy' at the Autonomous University of Mexico, 2016

In her interview Prof. Radhika Desai describes the new conceptual approach of ‘global political economy’ for the analyses of the perspectives of the world economics - 2015

This event marked the inaugural conference of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group on "From the Thirty Years’ Crisis to Multipolarity: the Geopolitical Economy of the 21st Century World."

GLOBALFAULTLINES SEMINAR SERIES, 2014

The Valdai Club, 2021

«За пределами долларовой кредитократии: геополитическая экономика» – так оза- главили своё исслед... more «За пределами долларовой кредитократии: геополитическая экономика» – так оза- главили своё исследование, посвящённое восхождению доллара на финансовый олимп и возможной дедолларизации, экономисты из США и Канады Майкл Хадсон и Радика Десаи. Слабый рост мировой экономики, низкие и отрицательные процентные ставки, риски бесконечной стагнации и роста инфляции, перспективы длительного спада – такова, к сожа- лению, экономическая реальность. Становится очевидно, что модель финансового суперкапитализма, основанная на глобализации, бенефициаром которой долгое время оставались Соединённые Штаты, на бесконечном кредитовании, на финансиализации, когда все товар- ные и сырьевые рынки превратились в финансовые, исчерпала свои возможности.

People's Day

Economia e Lavoro, 2018

Gli studiosi di relazioni internazionali sono stati a lungo complici del dominio occidentale e so... more Gli studiosi di relazioni internazionali sono stati a lungo complici del dominio occidentale e sono stati incapaci di prevedere e spiegare il multipolarismo. Una nuova disciplina si contrappone alle finzioni della scuola economica neoclassica e fornisce strumenti per cambiare le politiche statuali.

Donnerstag, 2020

Except from the the German translation of Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization ... more Except from the the German translation of Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire - In diesen Tagen erscheint im Kasseler Man- groven Verlag von Radhika Desai das bereits 2013 publizierte Buch »Geopolitical Econo- my: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire« in einer deutschen Übersetzung. Wir veröffentlichen daraus redaktionell bearbei- tet einen Auszug aus dem letzten Kapitel und danken dem Verlag für den Vorabdruck. (jW)

Mangroven Verlag, 2020

„Geopolitische Ökonomie: Die Nachfolgerin von US-amerikanischer Hegemonie, Globalisierung und Imp... more „Geopolitische Ökonomie: Die Nachfolgerin von US-amerikanischer Hegemonie, Globalisierung und Imperialismus“ interpretiert die historische Entwicklung der multipolaren Weltordnung radikal neu, welche momentan aus dem Staub der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise hervorgeht.
Die Autorin, Radhika Desai, übt dazu zunächst eine radikale Kritik an vorhandenen Theoriekonstrukten der US-Hegemonie, der Globalisierung und des Imperialismus, welche die Internationale Politische Ökonomie (IPÖ) und die Internationalen Beziehungen (IB) bis jetzt dominiert haben und nach wie vor dominieren. Dabei enthüllt sie nicht nur ihre ideologischen Ursprünge, sondern auch die aufeinanderfolgenden fehlgeschlagenen Versuche der US-Regierung, die Welt durch den Dollar als Weltwährung zu dominieren.

Anschließend revitalisiert Desai revolutionäre intellektuelle Traditionen, welche klassenspezifische und nationale Perspektiven auf die Beziehungen zwischen produzierenden Nationalstaaten verbinden. In einer Zeit globaler Umwälzungen und tiefgreifender Verschiebungen in der Verteilung der Weltmacht formuliert „Geopolitische Ökonomie“ somit eine lebendige und überzeugende Darstellung der historischen Prozesse, die die gegenwärtige internationale Ordnung geprägt haben.

Lava Media, 2020

La pandémie fait éclater une grave crise économique et sociale. Si les gouvernements interviennen... more La pandémie fait éclater une grave crise économique et sociale. Si les gouvernements interviennent et prennent réellement les mesures nécessaires, c’est tout l’avenir du capitalisme qui sera remis en question.

Lava Media, 2020

et is misschien meer dan een toeval dat de ernst van de coronavirusdreiging het grootste deel van... more et is misschien meer dan een toeval dat de ernst van de coronavirusdreiging het grootste deel van de Westerse wereld trof rond de Iden van maart, de traditionele dag van de afrekening van de uitstaande schulden in het oude Rome. De week daarvoor was een echte rollercoaster. De Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie (WHO) noemde de besmetting eindelijk een pandemie, de regeringen begonnen halsoverkop hun reactie uit te werken, het virus domineerde alle nieuwsberichten en de overvloed aan mis- en desinformatie op sociale media, steden en zelfs hele landen gingen dicht, markten van elke denkbare soort stortten in en bedrijven kondigden ontslagen en productieonderbrekingen aan. Het werd duidelijk dat Covid-19, zoals het virus nu heet, wat zijn oorsprong en dodelijkheid ook moge zijn, het Westerse kapitalisme en zijn veerkracht zwaar op de proef zou stellen. En dat zou vrijwel zeker gebrekkig worden bevonden. De problemen en onevenwichtigheden in het Westerse kapitalistische systeem hebben zich immers gedurende vier decennia opgehoopt, voornamelijk sinds de crisis van de jaren zeventig, toen men de neoliberale weg is ingeslagen en altijd op die weg is blijven gaan, zonder rekening te houden met de crises en problemen die deze met zich meebrachten.

Rabkor, 2020

Пандемия коронавируса вызвала тяжёлый экономический и социальный кризис, в ходе которого приходит... more Пандемия коронавируса вызвала тяжёлый экономический и социальный кризис, в ходе которого приходится расплачиваться за бесконтрольность капитализма Есть что-то символическое в том, что эпидемия коронавируса нанесла серьёзный удар по западному миру примерно в мартовские иды, день, когда в Древнем Риме по традиции происходила выплата долгов[1]. Предыдущая неделя напоминала поездку на американских горках. Всемирная организация здравоохранения (ВОЗ), наконец, объявила, что распространение болезни носит характер пандемии, правительства мобилизовались, коронавирус стал основной повесткой дня в новостях, СМИ оказались заполнены как непроверенными слухами, так и откровенной дезинформацией, города и даже целые страны закрылись на карантин, всевозможные рынки и биржи рухнули, а корпорации объявили о приостановке производства. Стало ясно, что какими бы ни были происхождение, способы распространения и смертность от вируса, называемого сейчас Covid-19, пандемия станет суровым испытанием для западного капитализма и его механизмов противостояния угрозе. С самого начала было практически очевидно, что в них возникнет нужда. В конце концов, проблемы, накапливавшиеся в западной капиталистической системе, усиливали дисбаланс в течение десятилетий, по крайней мере, с тех пор, как после кризиса 70-х гг. прошлого века был избран неолиберальный путь, которого и придерживались, не задумываясь, к каким проблемам и кризисам он ведёт.

Dado el crecimiento en China y la extensión del poder productivo y político de otras economías em... more Dado el crecimiento en China y la extensión del poder productivo y político de otras economías emergentes mucho más allá de sus bastiones originales en Occidente y Japón, la idea de que el mundo se está convirtiendo rápidamente en multipolar, si es que ya no lo es, no debería ser controvertida. Y sin embargo, lo es. Las dos disciplinas que estudian los asuntos mundiales en el mundo occidental, las relaciones internacionales (en adelante, RRII), que se centra sólo en los aspectos políticos, y la economía política internacional (en adelante, EPI), que se fundó en la década de los setenta con el propósito explícito de tener en cuenta también los aspectos económicos, no fueron capaces de anticipar o explicar la multipolaridad. Y cuando tuvieron que afrontar su existencia tras la crisis del 2008 – que, al hundir a Occidente en el estancamiento mientras las economías emergentes seguían creciendo rápidamente, aceleró el avance de la multipolaridad–, reaccionaron con negación y hostilidad más que con ecuanimidad y análisis. Al insistir en la realidad y/o conveniencia de la supremacía estadounidense y occidental a pesar de la creciente evidencia, no logran discernir el potencial progresivo de la multipolaridad. Sin duda, este es el signo más claro de la obsolescencia de estas disciplinas.

Le Journal des Alternatives, 2018

Plus de 100 ans après les thèses Marx et d’Engels, la perspective anti-impérialiste demeure au cœ... more Plus de 100 ans après les thèses Marx et d’Engels, la perspective anti-impérialiste demeure au cœur de l’analyse marxiste et continue d’orienter les nouvelles générations militantes. Depuis quelques années, de nouveaux débats sont en cours compte tenu des interrogations sur l’hégémonie américaine, sur la mondialisation (ou la « globalisation » comme cela se dit en anglais) et sur l’« Empire ». Diverses « relectures » de Marx et d’Engels sont proposées pour appuyer ces hypothèses et c’est sur ces débats contemporains que je veux me concentrer dans cet article. Ces réflexions, que j’ai développées dans mon dernier ouvrage Geopolitical Economy[1], me semblent importantes pour décortiquer le monde multipolaire dans lequel nous nous trouvons en ce début de vingt-et-unième siècle.

The idea of convergence took a blow with the demise of the USSR and another with widely diverging... more The idea of convergence took a blow with the demise of the USSR and another with widely diverging economic performance of the US and communist China amid the pandemic. In this short contribution, I explore how James Galbraith and George Tsagolov handle this problem with very different arguments. I then show that, if we were to trace the longer lineage of the ideas of convergence and the new industrial state to Marx and Engels, we can vindicate them more fully and thoroughly than either attempt.

In late 2019, I accepted an invitation to join the Editorial Board of Canadian Dimension (CD). CD... more In late 2019, I accepted an invitation to join the Editorial Board of Canadian Dimension (CD). CD describes itself as “the longest-standing voice of the left in Canada. For more than half-a-century, CD has provided a forum for lively and radical debate where red meets green…”

On March 13, 2021, two other members of the CD Editorial Board and I tendered our resignations for shutting down debate in its pages. Those two other Editorial Board members are Alan Freeman, Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group and Dimitri Lascaris.

Our letter of resignation was addressed to CD‘s founding editor, Cy Gonick.

Keynote address at the Global Economy and International Politics beyond Neo-Liberalism Workshop at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Brussels, 22-23 November, 2018., 2018

would like to argue that though the crisis of multilateralism is very real, it is neither recent ... more would like to argue that though the crisis of multilateralism is very real, it is neither recent nor very lamentable. Postwar multilateralism, of the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF, World Bank, GATT) for instance, actually embodied vast power differences rooted in the history of imperialism. It did, however, unite former imperial powers in in this sense, it was a distinctly western multilateralism, which was, as we shall see, more an attempted supranationalism masquerading as, and often forced to be, multilateralism. As such, it was never very attractive to the vast majority of the world’s countries and people. Their opposition to it initially culminated in the formation of the G77 and its demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Though later ‘globalization’ institutions, such as the WTO or the ICC, claimed to lessen these power differentials, they remain largely still-born.

transform! europe, 2018

By Lutz Brangsch , Patrick Bond , Radhika Desai , Ingo Schmidt , Claude Serfati, 19 Apr 18. At th... more By Lutz Brangsch , Patrick Bond , Radhika Desai , Ingo Schmidt , Claude Serfati, 19 Apr 18. At the invitation of the transform! Europe Yearbook, scholars from three continents discussed their experiences with Marx. The discussion initiated and coordinated by Lutz Brangsch included Radhika Desai (Canada), Patrick Bond (South Africa), Claude Serfati (France), and Ingo Schmidt (Canada/Germany).

Red Pepper, 2017

A 'review' of Capital Vol I at its sesquicentennial arguing that it's a fundamentally historical ... more A 'review' of Capital Vol I at its sesquicentennial arguing that it's a fundamentally historical work.

The original title was History in Capital and Capital in History.

It was published in Red Pepper, August-September 2017

Valdai Club Paper, 2016

In this report, the authors argue that, underneath the surface of liberal dismay and right wing t... more In this report, the authors argue that, underneath the surface of liberal dismay and right wing triumphalism which characterizes much commentary on Brexit, two sets of developments are critical to understanding the British vote on leaving the European Union last June and how developments have unfolded and will unfold since then.

There is, firstly, the electoral crisis of the Conservative Party which prompted David Cameron to promise a referendum on EU membership in the 2015 general election. It has led to the party’s lurch toward unabashed xenophobia under Theresa May’s leadership.

There is, secondly, the British financial sector, whose needs have long dictated the nature of Britain’s relationship to the EU and whose role as the link between the very different worlds of Anglo-American and EU financial sectors has taken considerable beating since 2008.

The 24th Valdai paper argues for a new academic discipline, geopolitical economy, which is better... more The 24th Valdai paper argues for a new academic discipline, geopolitical economy, which is better to understand the multipolar world, reconstruct its historical evolution and assess its progressive potential.

With growth in China and other emerging economies spreading productive and political power far beyond its original strongholds in the West and Japan, the idea that the world is fast becoming multipolar should be uncontroversial. But nevertheless, to the author’s mind, the two disciplines that study world affairs in the Western world, international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE), failed to anticipate or explain this phenomenon. The author suggests to found a new discipline – geopolitical economy, best suited to informing institutions and practices that might exploit multipolarity’s potential for a more equal and just world.

The author of the article is Radhika Desai, Professor at the Department of Political Studies, Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba,Winnipeg, Canada.

Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entren... more Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy. First, arts and culture are largely excluded from R&D by definitions based on its Science and Technology (S&T) origins. Second, the arts and cultural sector relies on a conception of creativity that mystifies too much of its work, preventing it from accessing valuable public resources.

Not confined to novel products or processes, arts and cultural innovation will yield altogether new ways in which arts and culture are embedded in the knowledge society and economy. So, for example, experimental development will trial new ways of engaging audiences, or explore new forms of collaboration between producers, and between them and consumers, through digital technologies. It will investigate how arts and cultural organisations can re-imagine their relationship with private sector businesses, social enterprise and public service delivery. In short, arts and cultural R&D will expand the sources of cultural, commercial and public value.

Politikon , 2007

There has been an outburst of literature on hindutva and fascism in contemporary India and Radhik... more There has been an outburst of literature on hindutva and fascism in contemporary India and Radhika Desai’s book is an expression of the keenness of this response. The essays in the book seek to examine ‘the structural basis, historical roots and political entrenchment of Hindutva’ (p. xxiv). The main thesis of the book is that ‘Hindutva in India is a political trend which has deep roots in the evolution of modern India’s capitalist economy and society’ (p. xii). Hindutva is the politics of fascism in contemporary India.

Times Literary Supplement, 1995

I n February 1981, two months before he left the Labour Party, David .Owen published a long perso... more I n February 1981, two months before he left the Labour Party, David .Owen published a long personal political testament called Face the Future. In it, he provided a trenchant critique of many of the party's policies. When it came to articulating an alternative, he was less decisive; many of his proposals were ambiguous, wijile some were incompatible with each other. The

Blackwell, 1996

Hotbed of socialism, spiritual hoe for a particular brand of right-wing economists, platform for ... more Hotbed of socialism, spiritual hoe for a particular brand of right-wing economists, platform for divers philosphers from Laski to Oakeshott (and beyond), breeding ground for all sociologists, stepping-off place for collectivist lawyers, 'the School' had everything. Dahrendorf does it proud, thoroughly, entertainingly and perceptively.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2008

Economic & Political Weekly, 2016

Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue …, Jan 1, 2005

American Political Science Review, Jan 1, 2001

Canadian Journal of Political Science-revue Canadienne De Science Politique, Jan 1, 1996

... Radhika Desai a1. a1 University of Victoria. ... xx, 201. Radhika Desai (1996) Canadian Journ... more ... Radhika Desai a1. a1 University of Victoria. ... xx, 201. Radhika Desai (1996) Canadian Journal of Political Science, Volume 29, Issue 04, December 1996 pp 806-806 http://journals. cambridge.org/abstract_S0008423900014657. Radhika Desai (1996). ...

Pacific Affairs, Jan 1, 1995

The 14th WAPE Forum on “Class, State and Nation in the Twenty-First Century’ will be held 19-21 J... more The 14th WAPE Forum on “Class, State and Nation in the Twenty-First Century’ will be held 19-21 July 2019 at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada in conjunction with the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba. The theme is designed to address the interaction of class, nation and state at the domestic and international levels. It will address the centrality of the state in tackling issues societies face domestically – such as the continuing economic malaise after 2008, the polarization of politics and the re-emergence of class politics and the hopeful signs of a resurgence of wider progressive politics – including feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist and indigenous movements and parties. It is also designed to draw attention to the central role of states in the increasingly multipolar world order, transformed by the rise of China and other developing nations, as evidenced in trade wars, proliferating sanctions, the role of new powers in the middle east, the challenges to the international role of the dollar and so on. Finally, it will also cover the interaction of nation-hood with all these, from progressive to reactionary national movements to the interaction of nations and nationalisms with international institutions and structures.

19-21 July 2019
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

The revolutions that ushered capitalism in, and those that have sought to usher it out, have been... more The revolutions that ushered capitalism in, and those that have sought to usher it out, have been a central phenomenon of modern history (1500-2016). The Russian Revolution was, by common consent, the most important event of the twentieth century, shaping the outcome of the two world wars and the Cold War. “Revolutions,” also share a fraught history with the broader democratization of life the world over. They have reshaped the structures of colonialism and imperialism, patriarchy and racism and the promotion of, or reaction to, revolutions constitutes central part of social and political thought. Our conference will consider who carries out revolutionary change, the extent of that change and its cost. Attempts to contain or spread revolutionary ideologies and forces have played, and continue to play, pivotal roles in international affairs. Our conference therefore aims to both deepen understanding of the social, political, economic and cultural factors that led to revolution and the past history of revolution and their contemporary relevance.

September 29 to October 1, 2017
St John’s College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

This link takes you to the website of the inaugural conference of the Geopolitical Economy Resear... more This link takes you to the website of the inaugural conference of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group, September 25-27, Winnipeg, Canada

Thirty Years' Crisis to Multipolarity Conference: ALL KEYNOTE AND PLENARY SPEAKERS CONFIRMED and ... more Thirty Years' Crisis to Multipolarity Conference: ALL KEYNOTE AND PLENARY SPEAKERS CONFIRMED and final deadline extension to 26 JUNE 2015.
Please circulate widely

Call for Papers
for a Multi- and Inter-disciplinary International Conference on
‘From the Thirty Years’ Crisis to Multi-polarity:
The Evolution of the Geopolitical Economy of the
21st Century World’
at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
25-27 September 2015
Abstracts should be 300 to 400 words. They should be single spaced and use 12 point Times New Roman font. They should include the author or authors’ full name, affiliation, a brief biography, and e-mail address. We ask they be sent by May 15, 2015 to contact@gergconference.ca

Call for Papers
for a Multi- and Inter-disciplinary International Conference on
‘From the Thirty Years’ Crisis to Multi-polarity:
The Evolution of the Geopolitical Economy of the
21st Century World’
Abstracts should be 300 to 400 words. They should be single spaced and use 12 point Times New Roman font. They should include the author or authors’ full name, affiliation, a brief biography, and e-mail address. We ask they be sent by May 15, 2015 to contact@gergconference.ca
at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
25-27 September 2015

In the 100 th anniversary year of the Russian Revolutions, which inaugurated the series of revolu... more In the 100 th anniversary year of the Russian Revolutions, which inaugurated the series of revolutions that marked and defined the twentieth century, our conference focuses on the theme of revolutions. We want to speak to the widespread and widely varying causes, contexts, conditions and consequences of modern revolutions. There are many types, of course, but we are primarily interested in the often-spectacular political, social or economic events that confront particular institutional, social and ideological regimes and the unfolding consequences and actions in the days and years that follow. The revolts of colonized, enslaved and indigenous peoples from Tyrone, Toussaint, Tupac and Tecumseh, through the revolutions which defined the West like the English and the French to today's Bolivarian, Arab Spring, and colour

DEADLINE TOMORROW KEYNOTES CONFIRMED Call for Papers for a Multi- and Inter-disciplinary Inter... more DEADLINE TOMORROW
KEYNOTES CONFIRMED
Call for Papers
for a Multi- and Inter-disciplinary International Conference on
‘From the Thirty Years’ Crisis to Multi-polarity:
The Evolution of the Geopolitical Economy of the
21st Century World’
at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
25-27 September 2015
Abstracts should be 300 to 400 words. They should be single spaced and use 12 point Times New Roman font. They should include the author or authors’ full name, affiliation, a brief biography, and e-mail address. We ask they be sent by May 15, 2015 to contact@gergconference.ca

WAPE Forum 2019 Call for Papers, 2019

CALL FOR PAPERS Class, State and Nation in the Twenty-First Century The Fourteenth Forum of the W... more CALL FOR PAPERS
Class, State and Nation
in the Twenty-First Century
The Fourteenth Forum of the World Association for Political Economy
19 -21 July 2019, 21 July 2019,
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada University of Manitoba.

The 14th WAPE Forum on “Class, State and Nation in the Twenty-First Century’ will be held 19-21 July 2019 at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada in conjunction with the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba. The theme is designed to address the interaction of class, nation and state at the domestic and international levels. It will address the centrality of the state in tackling issues societies face domestically – such as the continuing economic malaise after 2008, the polarization of politics and the re-emergence of class politics and the hopeful signs of a resurgence of wider progressive politics – including feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist and indigenous movements and parties. It is also designed to draw attention to the central role of states in the increasingly multipolar world order, transformed by the rise of China and other developing nations, as evidenced in trade wars, proliferating sanctions, the role of new powers in the middle east, the challenges to the international role of the dollar and so on. Finally, it will also cover the interaction of nation-hood with all these, from progressive to reactionary national movements to the interaction of nations and nationalisms with international institutions and structures.
Topics for

Call for Papers for a Multi- and Inter-disciplinary International Conference on ‘From the Thi... more Call for Papers
for a Multi- and Inter-disciplinary International Conference on
‘From the Thirty Years’ Crisis to Multi-polarity:
The Evolution of the Geopolitical Economy of the
21st Century World’
at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
25-27 September 2015

The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was marked in Canada and around the world in 2014. 2014 also marked the centenary of the opening of what noted historian, Arno Mayer, called the ‘Thirty Years’ Crisis’ of 1914-1945, spanning the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War. This long crisis birthed a new world. The old world of the nineteenth century expansion of the empires of industrial capitalist countries, often mistakenly termed ‘liberal’, met its end. It gave way to an inter-national one populated by a variety of welfare, Communist and developmental orders in national economies whose states had, moreover, greater legitimacy among newly enfranchised women and men than the imperial and colonial regimes they replaced. The Thirty Years crisis also radically redistributed economic, political, military and cultural power within countries and among them. Critical cultural and intellectual changes – new movements in art, new media, and new paradigms of understanding, particularly in economics, inevitably accompanied these historic shifts.

As we stand at the cusp of another wave of complex changes to the world order, this time towards multi-polarity, our conference aims to understand the major changes of the past century better than hitherto dominant paradigms, such as neo-classical economics, globalization and empire, have so far done and to bring that re-assessment to bear on how best to understand problems of and prospects for the world order of the 21st century.

Algerie patriotique, 2021

Radhika Desai est professeure au département d’études politiques de l’université du Manitoba (Can... more Radhika Desai est professeure au département d’études politiques de l’université du Manitoba (Canada) et dirige actuellement le Geopolitical Economy Research Group, un groupe de recherche sur l’économie géopolitique. Elle est l’auteure de Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013, Pluto Press) et co-éditeur de Karl Polanyi and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (Manchester University Press, 2020) (avec Kari Polanyi Levitt). Dans cette interview qu’elle a bien voulu nous accorder, elle aborde la question de l’hégémonisme américain et les moyens d’y mettre fin.

The still-developing line of thought I offer on this theme today stands at the intersection of tw... more The still-developing line of thought I offer on this theme today stands at the intersection of two strands of my work. A couple of years ago I engaged in a critique of the ‘new communism of the commons’ of left popstars, Zizek, Hardt and Badiou. It was, I argued, nothing so much as 21st century Proudhonism whose original form Marx had criticised for its economic errors, political ineffectuality and ideological complicity. The second strand my participation in a wider effort (Desai 2010, Desai and Freeman 2011, Desai 2013) to save Marx’s political economy, and in particular, his value theory, from those Alan Freeman calls ‘Marxists without Marx. We argue for their continuing relevance and explore how it overlaps with the analysis of the more perceptive thinkers since Marx and Engels’s time, foremost among them, Keynes.

There is no greater indicator of the identification of capitalism and individualism on the left than the opposition of many socialists to 20th century communism in its name, though some at least would invoke socialist conceptions of individualism instead. Such invocations, however, remain just that, for two reasons.

First, given that in the Marxist variant of socialism at least, capitalist individualism is rooted in the commodity form and the production of value (abstract value based on abstract labour), rather than use values, the abandonment of value as a category by so many Marxists blocks any real critical engagement with capitalist individualism.

Secondly, socialist individualism required taking 20th century socialism seriously, studying its experience to sort out just how and why it went wrong. Instead too many socialists celebrated its collapse, claiming it relieved them and the socialist project more generally, of the burden being associated with it. Thus unburdened, socialism was to come closer to realization than ever. I wonder what could be keeping it, seven years into crisis.....

So, what does individualism, an ideology, have to do with value, a social reality, however contradictory it may be?

The myths that shroud Canada’s world role – about peace keeping, development, humanitarian assis... more The myths that shroud Canada’s world role – about peace keeping, development, humanitarian assistance, democracy and human rights – are so durable that even the Harper decade shred them only a little. One reason, no doubt, is that the dominant tradition of left scholarship since the 1970s has taken the form of left nationalism. Taking its cue from the contemporaneous emergence of World Systems analysis, it was chiefly concerned about Canada’s ‘dependent’ status – its domination by the US, its reliance primary commodities or, in Innisian parlance, ‘staples’, and corresponding weakness in manufacturing (Levitt 1970, Laxer 1973, though Watkins 1963 was more Innisian), leaving little room for any investigation of Canada’s imperial role, past and present, external, in the Third World, or internal in relation to our indigenous peoples, let alone see their linkages.

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung , 2013

I would like to argue that though the crisis of multilateralism is very real, it is neither recen... more I would like to argue that though the crisis of multilateralism is very real, it is neither recent nor very lamentable. Postwar multilateralism, of the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF, World Bank, GATT) for instance, actually embodied vast power differences rooted in the history of imperialism. It did, however, unite former imperial powers in in this sense, it was a distinctly western multilateralism, which was, as we shall see, more an attempted supranationalism masquerading as, and often forced to be, multilateralism. As such, it was never very attractive to the vast majority of the world’s countries and people. Their opposition to it initially culminated in the formation of the G77 and its demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Though later ‘globalization’ institutions, such as the WTO or the ICC, claimed to lessen these power differentials, they remain largely still-born.

An in-depth analysis of the confusion underlying contemporary discussions of emerging markets, pa... more An in-depth analysis of the confusion underlying contemporary discussions of emerging markets, particularly India, and the financial crisis. Niall Ferguson's commentary exemplifies the common and mistaken view: 'The US is at the centre of the crisis but Europe and Japan may suffer even larger aftershocks. As for the much feted emerging market “BRICS ” – Brazil, Russia, India and China – their stock markets have been dropping like, well, bricks.' (FT, 19 December 2008). This sets up the straw man of 'decoupling' so it can be knocked down . This article points out that stock markets in countries like India are shallow and its slowdown in growth predated the onset of the present crisis. Economic growth will slow, in emerging economies like China, India. But, thanks to the limited coupling of the past decade or so, these slowdowns in growth can hardly be equated to a recession, which is what the advanced countries are about to experience. The drivers of India's growth, and the contradictions on which it may yet stumble, are endogenous. Awareness of this underlines the related prescription: India can grow much faster but not until she addresses the problems of inequality and poverty in the only reliable market she has, her own people.

A reflection the origins of the distinction between developmental and cultural nationalism which ... more A reflection the origins of the distinction between developmental and cultural nationalism which formed the basis of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) funded multi-disciplinary, collaborative Research Development Initivative which resulted in Developmental And Cultural Nationalisms (Routledge 2009)

Marxist Education Project, 2020

This event is co-hosted by the Marxist Education Group and the Geopolitical Economy Research Grou... more This event is co-hosted by the Marxist Education Group and the Geopolitical Economy Research Group. The event will take place via Zoom on October 31.

Marx’s remarks on pre-capitalist economic formations, whether in the Grudrisse or The German Ideology have given rise to a vast literature on the subject all seeking to apply what they take to be a historical materialist method to analyzing diverse modes of production across time and space. While much of this effort has been erudite and enlightening, in this lecture Radhika will propose that Marx’s purpose in these investigations and commentaries had nothing to do with either a stagist or a determinist view of history. Against these accusations, often levelled at Marx and often put forth by the exertions of many a “Marxist”, there are reasons to believe that Marx was going beyond the statism and determinism of received accounts to something far more sophisticated and radical.

For more information and information related to tickets, visit the event page.

US Elections 2020 and the Future of the World Order: A Panel Discussion, 2020

US elections 2020 could produce clear results or, as also seems likely, an uncertain outcome. Eit... more US elections 2020 could produce clear results or, as also seems likely, an uncertain outcome. Either way, they will mark another, possibly momentous, milestone in the downward trajectory of the country's political and geopolitical economy of recent decades. Developments in the US will reverberate around the world, affecting political trends within countries and the shape of the world order. They are certainly set to further accelerate China's rising prominence in it. Panellists with expertise on different regions and themes will dwell on the significance of the outcome.

WAPE Forum 2019, 2019

Speakers (30 mins for each speaker): Michael HUDSON (Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economi... more Speakers (30 mins for each speaker): Michael HUDSON (Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, USA) WEN Tiejun (Renmin University of China, China) Discussants (15 mins for each discussant): Beverly SILVER (John Hopkins University, USA) Remy HERRERA (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France) Paulo NAKATANI (Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil) Ackbar ABBAS (University of California, Irvine, USA; Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China) Radhika DESAI (University of Manitoba, Canada

International Critical Thought, Oct 1, 2016

International Critical Thought, Apr 3, 2022

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2015

Two-volumes: This work advances geopolitical economy as a new approach to understanding the evolu... more Two-volumes: This work advances geopolitical economy as a new approach to understanding the evolution of the capitalist world order and its twenty-first century form of multipolarity. It revives and redeploys the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD) as a way of uniting the understanding of domestic and international developments, and the struggles of classes and nations, into a single perspective as critical to this task. Geopolitical economy, as developed in VOLUME 30A, sheds light on the nature of contemporary international tensions as never before. VOLUME 30B then advances geopolitical economy as a new approach to the study of international relations and international political economy. Following upon the theoretical limitations exposed in Volume A, the analytical limitations are explored in this volume.

Third World Quarterly, Jul 2, 2020

Abstract We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and r... more Abstract We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.

Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy, Dec 8, 2022

International Critical Thought, Apr 8, 2022

Pluto Press eBooks, Dec 20, 2021

Social Scientist, May 1, 2001

A century of the greatest political confrontations in the history of capitalism has ended with th... more A century of the greatest political confrontations in the history of capitalism has ended with the complete surrender of the left. But victory has been paradoxical for the victor: triumph has been accompanied by dissipation. No clear electoral or political dividends have come for ...

Research in political economy, Jan 7, 2016

Abstract This introduction frames the papers in this volume with a brief critique of how and why ... more Abstract This introduction frames the papers in this volume with a brief critique of how and why the dominant approaches to understanding world affairs obscure our understanding of the chief developments that have marked our age, and a discussion of the resources geopolitical economy can draw on to address the resulting deficiencies of understanding. It then goes on to discuss how the papers that follow demonstrate the gains from putting the geopolitical economy framework to work. They interrogate and challenge conventional wisdom in three broad areas – the international monetary system, world trade and the requirements for successful combined development historically and today, when China’s own stunning combined development confronts other developing countries with new possibilities and constraints. The introduction closes with some necessarily brief reflections on the vast agenda for future research and discussion that remains to be tackled.

International Critical Thought

Scientific Works of the Free Economic Society of Russia, 2020

Viento sur: Por una izquierda alternativa, 2017