The New International Economic Order at 50 w/ Michael Galant & Pawel Wargan

Speaker 1: You remember Din Din Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Huckamacki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckamacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello Adnan, how are you doing today?

Adnan Hussain: I'm doing great, Henry. It's wonderful to be with you.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. Nice to see you as always. We are also fortunate to be joined by a guest host today, whom I will introduce right now. It's our friend and was a former guest on the show, Pavel Vorgin. Pavel, it's nice to see you as well. How are you doing? And can you briefly remind the listeners who you are?

Pawel Wargan: I'm doing well. It's great to be on the show again. Great to see you all. Great to have this conversation, which I think is urgent and timely. My name, as you said, is Pavel. I am a political coordinator at the Progressive International. And in my spare time, I do bits and pieces of writing here and there. So thanks again for inviting me on.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you. And we will have Pavel's previous appearance linked in the show notes in case you want to hear the episode that he was the guest on, which was a really terrific discussion. And we do have plans on bringing you back again, Pavel. Don't worry. But we also have a terrific guest today. Before I introduce him and the topic at hand, I would like to remind the listeners, though, that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually, as well as what the show is doing collectively by following us on social media at Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. And on Instagram, we're Gorilla underscore history. Again, Gorilla with two R's underscore history. So we are joined today by Michael Gallant, who is also at Progressive International. Michael, can you introduce yourself to the listeners? And it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

Michael Gallant: Yeah, it's really great to be here. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, I'm Michael Gallant. I'm a member of the Secretariat of the Progressive International, and I have been a part of the coordinating team of our project on the new international economic order.

Henry Huckamacki: Yes, so as Michael said, we are talking about the new global order. Hang on, that's not right. Not the new global order. We're not talking about conspiracy theories today. We're talking about the new international economic order. Progressive International just put out a publication on the 50th anniversary of the new international economic order, 1974 to 1924. I'm not going to say the name of the book in Spanish because, as I mentioned before we hit record, I used to know some Spanish, but my... Pronunciation was always atrocious, and I have since forgotten all of my Spanish, and therefore my pronunciation is inevitably even worse. But we do have a wonderful collection of essays within this book, which is in Spanish, and also the essays are available in English on the Progressive Internationals website. So I would like to situate this project with the opening question, and Michael, I'll turn this to you. Can you talk a little bit about what is the new international economic order? And with this being the 50th anniversary, what was the impetus for putting together this collection now?

Michael Gallant: Yeah, absolutely. And Pavel can, I'm sure, speak very well to the context of the new international economic order as well, which we very inelegantly refer to as the NIEO. Doesn't really roll off the tongue. But in short, in 1974, the UN General Assembly adopted over the protests, of the First World, over the protests of the rich nations, two documents, the Declaration on the Establishment of an NIEO and the Program of Action on the Establishment of an NIEO. And we can get a little bit more into the context of where these emerged from. But in short, they are these broad visions, a blueprint for a reordering of the global economy, the global economic architecture. including everything from broad principles, such as the assurance of sovereignty of the third world, of sovereign equality between nations, to more specifics, changes in the global economic architecture itself, how we are going to address problems ranging from debt to imbalances of trade, the assurance of liquidity in the global economy, the right to sovereignty over natural resources, really a broad and far-reaching two documents, which were meant to sort of plant a flag in the ground, say, this is the vision for a reordering of the global economy that would help to benefit the third world, that would allow for the realization of aspirations of national development. So that was 74. We'll get more into the history and the the results of that document. But in December 2022, the Progressive International initiated this project on the NAO, in part out of recognition that, yeah, the 50th anniversary is a nice time. We're coming up to the 50th anniversary. How do we reflect back on this moment? How do we understand it? But also out of recognition that we are at a global juncture of both crisis and opportunity. There is a crisis of global capitalism, a crisis of accumulation, the sort of failing of the neoliberal model, the turn to the far right as opposed to more liberal democratic forms of capitalism. You have the climate crisis. You have crises of military crises. So we have this moment of great crisis. And from moments of crisis, which way is the world order going to fall? We also have in this moment, a moment of opportunity. As your listeners will know, we have the emergence of a, we can say a multipolar world order, the seeming emergence. I'm always quick to say that multipolarity is not a single future, but it is the opening of possible futures. So at a recognition of this, we wanted to say we're in the moment of crisis. We have the declining of the unipolar US hegemonic moment. How do we build the order that we would like to see? How do we revitalize the spirit of the NIO, this concept of total world-making, the remaking of the structures of the global economic architecture? How do we revitalize this spirit and revamp it for today's moment, for the 21st century?

Adnan Hussain: That's a great overview of the purpose behind it. And I'm sure we'll get into a lot more details that you've gestured towards. But just to clarify, the first declaration in 1974 was something that passed through the UN General Assembly, as you pointed out. And it's a short but very interesting document. What you've produced at Progressive International is a new declaration. I believe that builds on something that came out of a conference in Havana the prior year that was a sort of declaration. But then building upon that, the Progressive International has put together a much more fulsome set of resources that includes a... substantial declaration, but then also a variety of essays taking up certain themes and topics. Is that a good way to kind of characterize what the new 50th anniversary, I guess, the new new economic, you know, international economic order document that's that's been created? How would you characterize what's been produced?

Michael Gallant: Yeah, yeah, that's right. So we do have actually quite a few resources, so I'll be pointing your listeners in a number of different directions. But the process that we initiated in late 2022 was a series of convenings, ultimately included over 300, I believe it was, diplomats, policymakers, scholars from over 60 countries, many, of course, predominantly from the global south. to reflect on the NIO, what we can learn from it, what succeeded, what failed, how we understand it today. So this is a process with multiple convenience. We brought this program from New York to Havana to Brussels. And from these convenings, we produced a number of things. There is this essay collection that you've mentioned where we have a number of scholars contributing to reflecting on these questions, to understanding them, really pointing a spotlight at the NIO and having a whole conversation around it from a number of these scholars. And then what we also have is what we call the program of action on the construction of a new international economic order. And I think that's really one of the key documents that came out of this process. We can get more into the specifics, but in short, the idea is at this current global juncture, how do we build the economic order that we'd like to see? If the original NIEO was this sort of laundry list of nice things that we would like to see, as you mentioned it was just a UN declaration and therefore did not have teeth, did not in itself change the world, but for a brief moment formed the basis of substantive negotiations between North and South, we have no shortage of visions of the world that we would like to see, especially today. How do we actually get there? And what we've included in this program of action is a number of actions that are under this framework of unilateral but coordinated southern action. So how do countries of the global south act unilaterally with respect to the north but coordinated across each other to find leverage in the global economy to reorder global economic relations? So this includes everything from you know, an OPEC for critical minerals to a club of detonations to the coordinated withdrawal from the ISDS system. So the goal is to have all these thinkers together and come up with more creative solutions for how we can actually achieve the vision that the original NAEO envisioned.

Adnan Hussain: Okay, that's really helpful. And I encourage all listeners to go check it out. These resources are available on the Progressive Internationals website. It's a very substantial set of discussions and also the declaration. And I want to go back, this is a history podcast, so we always like to start with thinking about the conditions and circumstances under which this original declaration came about. And I guess my question is, is how would you characterize, since this is using the UN as a forum for multilateral kinds of thinking and negotiations among Global South countries, the UNCTAD, I think they They were probably called or the group of 77 and so on that followed from a series of multilateral post-colonial meetings and organizations that developed first, you might say, out of the Bandung conference and in 55. And, you know, then the, you know, the. AAPSO, Afro-Asian People's Solidarity meetings in Cairo, and then subsequently Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, and then the Tri-Continental, which was perhaps the most substantive and radical of these. So over the course of the 50s and 60s with new nations, mostly by the time of 1974, they have been decolonized politically. I mean, not everywhere and so on. But there's been like a couple of decades here of attempts at sovereign development in the economic order as nation states in post-World War II society. and meeting a lot of challenges. So perhaps you can talk about what those challenges were and how, in that context, they framed the demands and the principles that come to be in this declaration of the new international economic order from 1974.

Pawel Wargan: Yeah, thanks, Adnan. I really think that's the central question, which really concerns what the proper historical lesson of the original NIO is for the present day. Now, if we accept, as Michael says correctly, that the original declaration was really a laundry list of international proposals for the reform of the international system, one way to approach that question is to say, okay, some of the ideas were interesting. Some of the ideas remain relevant. Some of them don't. Let's pick out those policy ideas that are still relevant today, update them for whatever the conditions are in the present day, and then put out a program. That reflects that. That's one lesson. I think it's a lesson that's, in a sense, historically shallow. And the richer lesson, and this goes back to, I really like the words that you used, Michael, world-making. It goes back to the question of, you know, what made the NIEO possible in the first place? Max Eil wrote a very powerful essay, I think, in this collection, where he posed the question, in what world was this process of world-making possible? And he makes an argument similar to arguments that I've put forth in the past, that really the NIO as the culmination of a long-term historical process, emerged at this intersection of these two parallel historical processes, these two axes of contention, which came to define the 20th century politically. The first, of course, began in October 1917. And that was the socialist revolution, the communist revolution in the Soviet Union, in the creation of the Soviet Union, and then the revolution in the People's Republic of China, which... which carved out sizable spaces from the body of imperialism and carved out spaces of sovereignty from the sphere of capital accumulation and posed a very serious threat to the legitimacy and to the continued expansion of capitalism in its international dimension of imperialism. And the second is a process that emerged in peril, in a sense, you know, supported by the winds of these revolutionary processes. And those were the national liberation struggles that gained a tremendous amount from the ideological, financial, the military, the diplomatic support of the socialist world. And as you said, Adnan, consolidated their increasing power in a series of conferences that you could say began with the Revolutionary Women's Conference in Beijing in 1949. There's a wonderful book by Elizabeth Armstrong, which talks about that as a precursor to Bandung. Then, of course, Bandung and others and... the tri-continental being the most radical among them. And at each stage in that process, you had the formation of theories and bodies of political work that helped define the parameters of what sovereignty, both political and economic, might mean for countries that are emerging from centuries of colonialism. And I think... There's a second anniversary, second 50th anniversary in 1974, just a couple of weeks away from the anniversary of the NIO, which speaks to this dialectic that led to the articulation of these demands in the international system. The second anniversary, which I think is just a week or two before the 1st of May when the declaration on the new international economic order was put forward. And that's the anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Now, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal was a mass movement that overthrew the longstanding Estado Novo regime, a fascist regime that ruled over Portugal for a long time. But it was really instigated by, if you read the literature of the time, it was really instigated by the colonial wars that, with NATO's backing and with NATO arms and with U.S. finances, successive fascist regimes in Portugal waged against Cabo Verde, against Mozambique, against Angola, and against other colonial possessions that Portugal had. And it was the exhaustion from those wars, it was the exhaustion from having to contend with these armed struggles for liberation that ultimately saw the soldiers themselves turn against the state and join a broad coalition of revolutionary forces that really brought Europe as close as it came in decades to building an actual socialist project. Really interesting moment. And so what you have there is an example of the tremendous force that armed struggles for liberation and the kind of ideas that they generated for national sovereignty, the tremendous force that those ideas played in the international system, and that as a structural force was reflected in the kinds of demands that were put forward by this broad and admittedly very loose coalition of states in May of 1974. So I think it's very important to acknowledge the structural underpinnings both in the existence of a hegemonic counterweight to imperialism in the form of the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, but also in the very militant orientation of the National Liberation Forces in countries across the South. And so, you know, Adnan, especially to you, you're a historian, but also I know all of you have studied this period. I would put the question back to you. You know, in what ways is this moment similar? We think about Yemen, Palestine, you know, now Syria, China and Russia. But in what ways also is it different?

Henry Huckamacki: Well, one thing that I'm going to just reflect a bit more on what you were saying, Pavel, before you pose that question, and perhaps I'll touch on the question a bit as well. It's quite interesting when you talk about the Carnation Revolution that a decolonial struggle directly led to the fall of a fascist dictatorship in the colonizing country. That is something that usually we don't see anything like that. We see people rising up against the colonizing power. Just think about national liberation struggles that have been fought against colonizers previously. Think about what happened with France and their intervention in France. at the time, French Indochina. Think about what happened even in the US during the US intervention in Vietnam. There was mass protests and draft card burnings across the United States, but there was nothing akin to the fall of the entire political system in the United States. France was a little bit different, but France is always a little bit different. But if we're looking at the Carnation Revolution, it really is this almost paradigmatic example of the imposition of change within the colonizer as a direct result of a decolonial struggle in the colonies. Now, as you said, Pavel, that time was not unique, but it was very different in that there was this counterpole in the Soviet Union and in China in terms of a different political system. And this is the main thing that I want to reflect on and then turn the question back over to everyone else, which is that, and I guess we're just going to keep kicking the question back and forth between each other. That's what it seems like anyway. You know, if we're looking at this period in the 1970s, there was a real alternative systemically. You know, there was this alternative system. the socialist system that was being experimented in the Soviet Union and China in various ways. And of course, there were variegated forms that they took over the years, but there was a fundamentally different system in play, not only a different pole. And that's where we see some similarities and some differences today. If we're looking at structures like BRICS, and I have people ask me about BRICS pretty frequently because I live in Tatarstan and the recent BRICS summit was here. And of course, I have a lot of thoughts. In fact, I did some work for the BRICS summit recently, which I think I told you about, Pavel. But in any case... What is similar? There is another poll now, as there was in the 1970s, that was not existent through much of the 90s and up through about 2020. You know, there was this hegemonic capitalist system complete control of the international system. Yes, China was continuing to strengthen during this time, and China is a socialist project, but the way in which they put themselves about on the international stage was very different than the way that China did under the Maoist era and the Soviet Union did during its period. That being said, there still is a different pole that can be tried. The difference is that BRICS is not an ideologically coherent alternative pole. It's not a different systemic structure economically and politically speaking in the same way that the Soviet Union and China were previously. So there was an alternative that provided some space both in terms of being a counter to the capitalist hegemon But also it was a systemic and structural different poll at the time, whereas today we do have new polls emerging, but we don't necessarily have that complete, very strong example of an alternative economic and political structure, save China. So I will just kick that over. Perhaps somebody else wants to reflect on that or push against something that I said.

Adnan Hussain: I would be really interested to hear, you know, Michael's views on this, since I think that's probably something they had to wrestle. What's similarity? What's what's similar and what's different about these eras? And it's a great question. I think it's the real work of social and dialectic material theorizing and conceptualizing is that you have to kind of work together. you know, with the conditions that exist and, you know, by studying the past, you know, really engage those conditions and then try and think about what's new or what's different. So what could be recovered and saved? You know, one thought that I had about The difference is, is that in the moment in 1974, you had nation states very confident in the existence of possible alternatives and that collectively they could make that demand through the UN, which, you know, Michael pointed out, didn't itself have any teeth, but it was the possibility of being able to imagine collectively, and that there were multilateral kind of fora for these kinds of discussions to create this new international economic order and envision a different future. And there were nation states who were sponsors and participants, at least in this declaration. And I think what happened, you know, in the counter sort of revolutionary response by imperialist and global capitalist powers of the North is that they very quickly not just sidelined this, but made it apparently obsolete by, you know, you know, destroying the welfare state, even in the North. And, you know, all of the kinds of developments that we characterize now as the era of neoliberalism, neoliberal capitalism that globalized even further and undermined state sovereignty so that there wasn't really the possibility later for collections of states to really think collectively about, you know, that kind of a demand. I think that's a different kind of situation. And it's evident that, you know, it's the progressive international that is the sponsoring body that's organizing this. And there may be buy-in when, you know, various state actors and institutions and so on. But this was something that was promoted by nation states in the international system from the global south. That was itself maybe a weakness, you know, in some ways. I mean, one of the critiques of Bandung and post-Bandung is that, you know, these nation states really didn't have full sovereignty. Their sovereignty has been even further undermined by the processes of neoliberalism. But They didn't necessarily, you know, these weren't, and that's why I think it was an interesting move with the Tri-Continental and with the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organizations is that there was a kind of demand from peoples themselves to be engaged in these processes, to democratize. This vision, and maybe that's a possible strength now, you know, is that there can, you know, people's movements, social movements can be recruited, you know, to this. And that's maybe a little bit of a difference. But the last difference, I'm sure we'll talk a lot more about this, is that the whole discursive field has shifted away from reparation and restoration as a consequence of colonialism and social and economic justice having to follow national liberation. And now the major framework for really rethinking, reorganizing the global economy is through you know, the climate crisis and environmental concerns and articulating the demands that way. And I think there are some opportunities and strengths to that. But there are also perhaps, you know, possible, you know, weaknesses where we still have to emphasize things like genuine national sovereignty and so on. So that's a lot to work out. I think we're in a very different space. But one of the things that is similar, so I'll say just one thing that I think is similar, as we've seen, essentially, particularly for the region of the Middle East where fossil fuel energy sources have been contested and a source for the inequities of the global economy, while also at the same time a potential strength of global south economies. of the region is that they've been subjected to colonial, neocolonial, and imperial intervention and disruption in ways that really are just very reminiscent, I'm sorry to say, you know, with older, you know, essentially recolonization in various ways of the region after, you know, brief periods and hopes in the 50s in particular for, you know, national liberation and And so on. And so I think that's one thing that's a little similar is that, you know, when it comes to the Middle East region or the Southwest Asia region, is that it has been such a target of wars and intervention, the sanctions regimes and so on, that it has definitely disrupted the possibility for a broader regional or global south project to for reordering the economy. So anyway, those were just some kind of thoughts. But I'd love to hear, Michael, how you and your team was kind of thinking through exactly this kind of an issue.

Michael Gallant: Yeah, I think you all have pointed very astutely to a lot of the contradictions in the original project and the contradictions of the process today. And I would agree wholeheartedly with Pavel's assessment of this sort of dual anti-systemic projects of socialist construction and national liberation and how they interact. informed the original NIEO. And that led to, as you've alluded to, a very heterogeneous grouping of countries that were under this banner of the Third World Movement. You had countries that were sort of a part of socialist construction, those that were much more influenced by the Marxist-Leninist project, but you also had countries that were even virulently anti-communist domestically. Christy Thornton does a lot of scholarship on this. The Mexican government was a major advocate for the new international economic order and the related charter on the rights and duties And part of their argument towards the North in relation to these projects is this is like it's this or it's communism. You know, listen to us at the same time that they were violently suppressing leftist movements domestically. So it really is a heterogeneous grouping, one with a great deal of. contradictions, but it wouldn't have gotten as far as it did. It would not have had as radical of aspirations if it did without, as Pavel points out, the counterweight of the alternative system. The neoliberal model, I think, part of the reason for that at the time is that even these non-socialist governments often were the governments of political liberation. So the context of, you know, these countries have emerged politically independent, at least nominally politically independent, and after this wave of decolonization in the 60s. And we're coming into this moment now a decade out. realizing, many of course had realized this already, but that political independence was not necessarily translating into the realization of developmental aspirations. So there were so much energy, so much excitement of the possibilities of political independence. And now all these years out, development was simply not being fulfilled. So you had nationalist governments, even if they were not anti-capitalist, who were seeing the limits of the system, were realizing that they had been These new nations had been born into a sharply hierarchical global economy. And so even they were a part of this project of trying to understand what the problems were, why that was the case, and how to solve them. So you had this moment, I think, Adnan, mentioned this, the development of the emergence of a number of theories to sort of explain these polarizing tendencies of global capitalism, why it was that the third world was still failing to achieve its development aspirations. You had the structuralist school out of St. Paul, you had Nekrumah's neocolonialism, you had the emergence of dependency theory. And all of these, I think, thanks to the counterweight of the more radical anti-systemic possibilities were very much in the ether, even for the governments that were not particularly radical. So through institutions like UNCTAD, which you mentioned, like the G77, which you mentioned, despite how heterogeneous they were, there was a consensus around the idea that the failures of rich development were the result of the hierarchies in the global system and the need to resolve those hierarchies. I think one of the challenges that we have faced in the last few decades, of course, in the neoliberal era, is that the neoliberal model was able to co-opt many domestic elites into at least realizing development for themselves, even if it was not a equitable development, even if it wasn't a sovereign development, when it very much was not the resolution of these hierarchies in the global system. And so that was able to co-opt a lot of domestic elites into moving away from such a project. But if the neoliberal accumulation model is failing today, I think we are starting to see even domestic elites across the global south seeing the failures of the current model, even for them, and looking to China as the possible solution.

Pawel Wargan: Michael, you made the point that anti-communist states were very much part of the coalition that led to the formation of the proposals and the new international economic order. And it seems to me that that was really a part of the weakness of that model, because the failure in many parts of the South to construct a powerful political project that was able to consolidate and unite the masses is what allowed them to be undermined and overthrown. And we think about the way in which neoliberalism really took root. I mean, it arguably really began in Latin America, and that was the same decade in which the NIO was proposed. You had the coup against Allende just a year earlier in Chile in 1973. You had Argentina in 1976. You had Bolivia in 1978. There were three changes of government in Honduras, I think, in the 1970s, culminating in the near the end of the decade, I think, 77 or 78, when the military junta took over for a successive time. And each of those states, among many others in other parts of the world, became the laboratories for neoliberal expansion and neoliberal experimentation and really prefigured what would turn into a global assault against the Third World Project as a whole. Paris Yeros writes about this in a few papers. This idea that you had a moment beginning in the 70s, really picking up pace in the 1980s, in which there was a renewed and in a sense refreshed assault on the third world, no longer primarily taking the form of of military aggression, but taking the form of various other forms of hybrid war and economic pressure, including dollarization, sanctions, indebtedness, just the placement of military bases, structural adjustment policies, and so on and so forth, which produced the kind of coalition that Henry hinted at channeling my least favorite poll, Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the worst of my compatriots, who said once in... There's some tough competition there. Sorry to say. There is. I said one of my least favorite poems. There's a lot of competition there. But he said, he wrote this quote that people love to cite. And in fact, I used to love to cite in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard. He said that the biggest threat to the United States is a coalition united not by shared ideology, but by shared grievances. And I actually think he was fundamentally wrong about that because what's lacking in a lot of these spaces, a lot of these third world projects of regional and or global integration is precisely the shared vision of what a space alternative to the model of global imperialist accumulation might look like. And within that, within the context of the national struggle, what it would take to build up towards a kind of delinking, you know, to use Samir Amin's language. And again, Samir Amin emerged as part of the intellectual legacy of these national liberation struggles in the 20th century. So what would it take to build at the national level to achieve a meaningful delinking from imperialism that would allow you to start to think about the construction of a sovereign political project? And then how do you unite that vision with, you know, others in the global south that might want to advance it too? And I think we're just not there yet historically, right? If you look at the kinds of policies that are being adopted by what we might broadly call the anti-imperialist bloc, These are not necessarily policies born of conviction. They are the boomerang effect of those ingredients that were introduced into the international system by the imperialist countries in the 1970s and 1980s. These are a response to dollarization. These are a response to sanctions. These are a response to debt. These are a response to the domination by the United States of all the voting rights within the International Monetary Fund. They are responses to conditions that have been imposed on the world, which compel countries like Russia, like Iran, like many others, to pursue policies that are sovereigntist, to pursue policies that seek to bolster national industrial development, national economic capacities more generally. But they are not policies that are producing a fundamentally different political project from capitalism. And so it remains to be seen whether the coalitions that are now taking shape are going to be able to have or to build the kind of coherence and the kind of unity and the kind of durability that can resist what looks like a rapidly and violently escalating period of imperialist backlash. Now, maybe the last point I'll make is that it seems to me that the forms of resistance picked up by states exist in a dialectical relationship with the forms of oppression that they contend with. And so there was a period in which the primary struggle was the pursuit of political sovereignty, was the construction of new political units from the stranglehold of colonial domination. And that necessarily had a much more militant orientation than the phase that came after, which was, in many respects, a confused period. We had, in some cases, national bourgeois forces sitting at the helm of formerly colonized states without sufficiently robust national projects to really push back against the assault that later came, which states like Cuba withstood. which states like Venezuela much later were able to withstand, which states like the DPRK and China for many reasons, and Vietnam were able to withstand precisely because of their underlying socialist orientation. So you enter this new period in which it was much more difficult to identify the culprit, right? You can't pick up an AK-47, go into the jungles and fight IMF structural adjustment policies. And I've been thinking a lot about this recently. I haven't really developed a coherent thesis, but my sense is that if you look at the counter-hegemonic role that China is playing today, It is a kind of internationalism for the age in which political sovereignty has largely been achieved, but economic sovereignty remains to be constructed. It's a politics of debt forgiveness. It's a politics of massive infrastructural investment. It's a politics of building bridges, building roads, building train lines, building transport links, etc. of providing the kinds of infrastructural support that weren't available to large parts of the world for centuries, precisely to allow in the long run their sovereign development. And what's interesting is that, you know, there remains a central site of colonialism today. Of course, Palestine, there are others, but this is a key point of global contention. And we see that the forms of violence and the forms of counterinsurgency there are very different from the kinds of counterinsurgency we see elsewhere. They're exterminist, they're genocidal, right? So wherever you have still these old pockets of armed anti-colonial resistance, which in themselves have a very potent structuring role on the international system, right? Palestinian, Yemeni, Lebanese, well, no longer Syrian, but Syria played a very critical role in that access, Iranian and so on. Resistance... fundamentally transforms the way many people think about the international system and the way it works. But in large parts of the world, those forms of struggle are no longer the case. And so the question remains, at what point will the kind of the kind of national projects, at what point will states across the South be able to reconstruct the kind of national projects that allow them to forcefully push these kinds of ideas onto the international stage as offensive measures rather than as defensive policies that seek minor forms of protection, whatever protection they can achieve from the multifrontal and multifaceted assaults of imperialism.

Henry Huckamacki: I want to turn away from our own thoughts for just a second. We're talking about our various reflections of the new international economic order, the historical moment that it was born out of in 1974, the continuities and differences between then and today. But I want to turn towards the collection of essays, once again, that we opened the discussion with. Because within this collection of essays, there's many reflections as well. And not all of these reflections look at it in the exact same way. So I'm curious if particularly Michael, I know you were very involved with this collection in terms of organizing it. Can you talk a little bit about some of these essays that are included in the collection and perhaps the various ways in which they reflect on the new international economic order as well? And that might provide further room for us to continue our discussion on this. But I do want to take it away from our thoughts for just a second and turn toward the collection that we're trying to put the spotlight on.

Michael Gallant: Yeah, I mean, I think the areas of divergence and the points of contention within the essays are the very ones that we've been circling. You know, what are the lessons that can be gained from this moment, from its successors, and recognizing its failures? I think what Pavel has pointed out about the... potential limits of a coalition that includes anti-communist forces, how these can be learned from today. I think they're very much the same bits of contention that we've been circling around. But I do also want to point to the program of action as a separate document in addition to this collection of essays and how that sort of fits into the equation here, which is, as Pavel's point about the terrain of struggle, the goal of this program of action is to recognize that one such terrain of struggle is in the realm of the economic architecture. And I think that's something that a lot of us will lose sight of because of the fact that they are perhaps not as... It's a bit more esoteric. It can be a bit less interesting and harder to understand. What does it mean to denominate trade in non-dollar currencies and the like? But the goal of this program set of proposals is to understand how countries in the Global South could wield more of a collective leverage, a collective pressure, in order to assert themselves on the world stage and to assert their shared interests on the world stage. To take one lesson from the original NIO, this was also the time in 1974, this is right around the time of the oil price shocks, right? OPEX oil price shocks is a really key turning point in this larger history. And Well, we in the Global North, you know, OPEC is often remembered as, you know, this created these price shocks, these crises, like just, you know, oil-rich countries being greedy or whatever. There's a lot of great scholarship now in remembering the OPEC moment as a moment of the assertion of Southern sovereignty, right? Giuliano Garavini has a wonderful book on this topic. So, if one of the key relations of dependency between North and South is that the South are the exporters of primary commodities and are stuck in that position in the global hierarchy, if the North's relation toward the South is source of cheap primary commodities, source of cheap oil, source of natural minerals, source of cheap primary agricultural commodities, OPEC is essentially an inversion of that, right? It is a collective of countries that are primary commodity exporters who are coming together to say, in fact, we will no longer be simply a source of natural resource extraction for your value. We will make sure that we are gaining more for our value of this extraction. And so that was a muscle that had really recently been flexed around this 74 moment. And it was something that really put the fear in the global north. They saw this is a real threat, not only to profits of monopoly corporations, but also something that every person in the Global North feels and that threatens our political aspirations, right? This has a real destabilizing economic and political effect. For once, the countries of the Global South are holding up a weapon to the Global North via OPEC. Now, of course, OPEC for... had many of these contradictions as well. The U.S. is an oil producer. Many countries in the third world were dependent on oil imports. So riddled with contradictions. But at the same time, it was an inversion of the relations of dependency. Now, I go on this digression about OPEC to point to that as an example of the areas of potential leverage for the Global South today. It is still true that dependency runs in both directions, that the North is dependent on the South for, among other things, natural resources, cheap natural resources. So what this program of action seeks to achieve is to delineate and to seek out and to creatively find what are these points of leverage. Often it is a similar model of what the South can withhold from the North. It is a model of what the South can do together. And all that to say, this is... One of the major questions today, it's not just what do we seek to achieve, but to really dig into the strategy of what is possible within this moment.

Henry Huckamacki: I have one very quick point that I want to make, and then I'll let Pavel continue here, which is when you mentioned resources, of course, thinking about the resources that are extracted and exploited from the global south to the global north is always critical for us to think about particularly within a framework of unequal exchange, world systems. But I think that we're in an era, since you mentioned OPEC and oil, we're in an era where this is going to be thought about even more by the global north than it has recently. And I'm specifically thinking about the case of Germany. who for many years was getting really cheap oil from Russia and was allowed to continue its industrial production and profiting by utilizing this cheap oil from Russia. What has happened since 2022 is that they have had to rely much more heavily on more expensive sources of these natural resources, including oil, particularly the United States. And what that has caused is a dramatic increase in production costs. And essentially what we're seeing is deindustrialization within Germany. This is leading to a lot of discontent within Germany, a lot of frustration with the fact that The government is essentially shooting themselves in the foot by choosing to take a more expensive resource rather than focus on developing economically and continuing industrial production in whatever way is the cheapest, essentially, for them to do so, to remain competitive on the international market. The reason I bring this up is because, of course, this is all driven by a individual resource, the cost of oil for German production. Now, if we expand that to think about a lot of other resources that are being used, think about rare earth metals and things like that that are increasingly being used within production, the location of these resources is highly concentrated within the global south. And we now have global north countries such as Germany with direct first-hand experience today seeing that they have to be able to get the absolute cheapest natural resources as possible to remain competitive in the international market. And when your economy is entirely based on profiting and utilizing that international market as much as possible, the impetus for having as cheap of resources as possible only is increased. And so they have this acute understanding that these resources must be cheap. And then if they are not able to rely on developed semi-periphery countries like Russia in order to get cheap resources, they're going to have to exploit even more heavily the global south than they potentially were in the past. It's just something that they're going to have to grapple with. Michael, you want to have a very quick point and then we'll turn it to Pavel.

Michael Gallant: Yeah, no, just to say, I think you point that out. It's a very important thing to point out. And because of this, you also see the countries of the North forming buyers cartels, right? They're forming groups of critical mineral importers because they see what is coming. They see that this is one of the terrains on which the struggle will be waged. And I think that is another one of the reasons why this program of action calls for the Global South to recognize the same.

Pawel Wargan: I want to add just one other aspect to the work that we were doing that I think brings into relief some of the more practical dimensions of the thinking that's been happening. And this concerns a very widely known case around Honduras and Honduras' exit from what's called the investor state dispute settlement mechanism. Now, the infrastructure of global imperialism and global neoliberalism has many different facets, many different faces. It's codified in all kinds of different international treaties and laws and bilateral agreements and so on. So it is, as I said earlier, a multifrontal assault. And one of the ways in which imperialism has been able to sustain a grip on nations in the South is through this legal mechanism that allows corporations essentially to sue states for lost profit in what are private courts, private arbitration courts that are often staffed by former managers of firms and so on, or at least corporate lawyers and others. And so Honduras found itself in this situation, having gotten through a coup led by the U.S. and the local kind of bourgeoisie in 2009, where a new government came to power led by Xiomara Castro very recently. And in the period after the coup, basically a group of crypto bros from Silicon Valley showed up in the country and decided to build a crypto paradise, a self-regulating city that's beyond the reach of the state, beyond the reach of state regulation, that's untaxed on one of these beautiful islands in Honduras. And so they built this thing and it turned out to be a nightmare for the country. It was sapping resources. It was poisoning the local water, depriving locals of water. It was evicting people from their land. And the new Honduran government decided that they want nothing to do with it. And so they were hit under the investor state dispute settlement mechanism with a lawsuit that amounted to roughly half of their budget for that year, half of their annual state budget. And so they made the decision to withdraw from that legal mechanism, a convention that they had been a part of, I think, since 1989, if I'm not mistaken, and making them one of the first states, if not the first, to leave that mechanism. And as part of this NIO project, we spent a lot of time thinking about not only what it would look like, for a state to do that and what kind of practical and popular support that state might need, but also about how we can use one state's exit to mobilize or motivate other terrains to follow suit. So it's a very concrete way in which the thinking produced here was taken off the page and is now attempting to chisel away at a very specific part of the imperialist international economic order. So I just wanted to bring that campaign to people's attention. That's a campaign that's kind of on a tangent from the NIO project, but there's significant overlaps in terms of the people involved and the kind of thinking that has taken place. And we're certainly now trying to take the ideas from those two campaigns further afield in bilateral and multilateral discussions and fora in different parts of the world.

Adnan Hussain: I think that's a very interesting example, however, because it does bring up some points and questions that I had about the document itself of the framework, which is organized in five main kind of arenas. It begins with climate, energy, natural resources, a second one on industry, labor, and international trade. And then relevant to this discussion, money, debt, and finance, so how the architecture of financial institutions and global international trade is organized. And what you were just talking about, Pavel, certainly suggests that one of the targets has to be not only mechanisms to avoid, you know, those, you know, tactical kinds of questions there, but also, you know, what is the vision for a different kind of architecture overall in which these kinds of exploitations and protection of global north capital, you know, over people's, you know, sovereignty and their welfare, you know, wouldn't be so privileged. But for technology, innovation, and education, so an area of, you know, interest to me is, you know, somebody who teaches in a university and thinking about public digital infrastructure and other kinds of, you know, very interesting knowledge decolonized, you know, some very interesting kind of sections here. And then lastly, governance multilateralism And international law, which is, you know, connected again to what we were talking about, trade law, but then also other kind of forms of protecting sovereignty and establishing democratic multilateralism. This is basically, this is a very kind of comprehensive approach. outline of arenas in which there needs to be change. But one of the things that you were just saying, Pavel, reminded me of what I think is one of the great essays there, Max Eil's essay, about the importance and need for ideological kind of commitment. This can't just be done without you know, really targeting and understanding how capitalism undermines these efforts and has created the conditions under which, you know, we're in. So one question that I had as a result is how much of this, and this may be to Michael, I mean, how much of This framework of these five topics with the, you know, subtopics and suggestions, a concrete kind of arenas that, you know, where things could be organized otherwise or where, you know, there are problems that need to be addressed. How much of it is an attempt to work within kind of the existing capitalist framework and push back in various arenas to weaken it? And how much of it is it a pathway and a vision towards what a kind of democratic, socialistic, international reorganization might practically look like? not just as a kind of question of, you know, a national revolution, but here as a global project. And I wasn't sure which is it, what is kind of the ultimate, I guess, ideological underpinning in a way to These concrete suggestions and proposals in these five very key arenas. I don't know if that question makes sense, but that's something I was wondering about.

Michael Gallant: Yeah, no, I would say, you know, our real aim in this project was to start from the present conditions, not to put forth a utopian vision, though I think many would even point at these concrete proposals and still say they're particularly ambitious, but ambitious, but non-utopian, right? pursuit of sovereign development pathways. And so a lot of these are what you're saying about weakening relations of neo-colonial dependency, finding targets within the world system, the global economic architecture, to undo those relations, as we pointed out. Currency, you know, debt being a big one, the formation of a debtors club in order to push back on the creditors, which themselves have already formed clubs. The building of alternatives to dollar dominance, the alternatives to swift, you know, payment systems, all these little aspects of the current global economic architecture. which it is true their immediate goal is to carve out space for the national development projects, the development of national productive forces. And in that sense... Perhaps it is not necessarily in and of itself explicitly an anti-capitalist document. But I would say that it is founded on solidarities, right? Internationalist solidarities. And any of these projects would require such. These are solidarities that are often all too lacking in the international system. But that will be required in order to overcome relations of dependency. And I would say that that in itself... has a tinge of the utopian in that it is something above the price signal. It is above the profit model. It is the pursuit of development between countries of the third world in order to allow for a de-linking that would allow the space for the elaboration of more radical projects. I think that's how I tend to conceive of it. Pavel, you might have other thoughts.

Pawel Wargan: I think you've said everything that needs to be said. The only thing I might add is that the way I see this essay collection, it is very diverse, is that in a sense, it is a catalog of the existing perspectives of these questions from different countries, different parts of the world, recognizing the different places in which that thinking is currently situated. So I don't think that there is an ideological thread that connects a lot of the work, but there is certainly an attempt in a lot of it to think through these questions of where those fault lines in the international system lie and how they can be exploited and what that will mean in the years to come.

Michael Gallant: Yeah, I would agree with that on the program of action side as well. It would not be very humble of us to claim that we are looking at the world system and identifying these points that others are not already seeing, these points of leverage. These are, as Paolo points out with Honduras, struggles that are already being waged, but this is an attempt often to catalog all of those. If the BRICS are building an alternative to SWIFT, how do we put that in the context of a broader project of subversion of relations of dependency?

Adnan Hussain: I had one question, given that, that these are meant to be maybe more practical directions, you know, within kind of an analysis of the current system, what may be possible and techniques and pathways to create greater equality and sovereign development. I mentioned that one of the big differences or key differences between the original document in 1974 passed through the General Assembly was that these were sponsored by a coalition of states. And that... Doesn't yet exist in the same formal sort of way. But yet this is a very important and useful document where, you know, components of this could be adopted in state policies and also have broader consequences and effects. So one question I have is in envisioning this. And it's array of practical questions and then accompanying discussions, which I love the fact that this isn't just a declaration. Here's what should happen. But there's, you know, there's accompanying discussions by policymakers, scholars and others that, as Henry pointed out, sometimes might have, you know, different views on on certain things. But it opens it up to say this is a document that's a living document. It needs to become a practical one for policymakers. you know, and be updated according to experience in people's struggles, what works, what doesn't, and so on. But I'm wondering, you know, how should peoples, you know, who are seeking sovereign development in the global South, and maybe even their allies in the North, how should they respond to this document and to this call? Is there some sense of a program of you know, how this should be a political document for peoples who want to see changes like these come into force? In other words, the people who read this document, what should they do?

Michael Gallant: Sure, sure. I mean, well, one, we are not, our aim is not just to put a document together out there and say, what a nice document we've put together. We hope you all read it and learn from it, right? This is just the initiation of the next phase in our NIEO program, which very much does involve working with those that already form a part of the PI network, whether they be policymakers in government, whether they be friendly governments, whether they be popular movements that are themselves waging struggles at Porter in relation to their governments. So... For all of these actors, we are hoping Our goal, I think, is that they might be inspired by, might draw from some of these ideas, but also be inspired by their particular form of creative and strategic thinking towards unilateral coordinated Southern action and the necessity thereof. So as we continue to build on particular projects, such as the ISDS project, how do we socialize within these actors the form of strategic thinking that is imbibed in this document? When it comes to the listeners in the Global North, those of us in the, you know, we're putting out there a project that is very intentionally meant to be a project about Southern action that is unilateral with respect to the North. So where does that leave us as allies who are in the North? And the answer to that is that it's Nothing new under the sun. It is what it always is, which is to build popular radical movements in the North that are able to do whatever we can to attempt to, from within the belly of the beast, I'm in Washington, D.C., really in the belly of the beast, to push back to limit some of the reach of empire in order to allow these Southern projects to more thoroughly flourish. Yeah. So I think that is our project. And if there's a single lesson of this, it's just a reminder of this struggle, the ongoing struggle exists across many terrains. We are not saying that this economic architecture terrain supplants or is more important than any of the others. Of course not. But this is a terrain that is, I think, often forgotten. And so those of us who are parts of solidarity movements or what have you, incorporating this sort of thinking of the necessity of subverting global relations of dependency as they exist in the global economic architecture.

Henry Huckamacki: Pavel, anything to add or should we wrap it up here?

Pawel Wargan: The only thing I'll say is that I agree with Michael's remark, but I also think that popular movements in the process of constructing their struggles will necessarily with time come to their own conclusions about the types of demands that are going to be made in the context of both their national project and its relationship to the international system. And so it's really not... in our place now to use this document to dictate terms of political action to movements. But the document did seek in parts to draw on the kind of thinking that is being generated by organized political forces in the South, whether they're resisting the IMF in Pakistan or Kenya, or they're resisting the impositions of the ISDS in Honduras and elsewhere.

Henry Huckamacki: That's a great note to end on. Adnan, I'll have you read yourself out first because I know you have to go. So can you tell the listeners where they can find you and your other excellent podcast?

Adnan Hussain: Sure. And I just want to thank both Pavel and Michael for a really, you know, interesting discussion and also for Michael in particular for working on, you know, what is a really fascinating document that I hope listeners will consult and incorporate in their own movement thinking and organizing. It's a great resource. It's a major work. A hopeful work, actually, to me, that there is a concrete set of, you know, visions, policies, recommendations, and that it's connected to a lot of the key, you know, questions and problems we're all wrestling with. So thanks so much for that and for joining us for this discussion. listeners, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain, H-U-S-A-I-N. And you can check out my other podcast, The Majlis, M-H-A-L-I-S, about Middle East Islamic world, Muslim diasporas, and so forth.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. Highly recommend that. I will go with my guest host today, Pavel Vorgin. Can you tell the listeners first what you're working on now? I'm sure that there's some interesting things that you have in the works at the moment. I know there's some secret things too, but is there anything that you can share with the listeners and then tell them where they can find more of you and your work?

Pawel Wargan: Yeah, there's a kind of sacred unspoken rule about not sharing unfinished things, but I might break it just to answer your question. There are a lot of exciting things happening in the pipeline. I'm working now with a fantastic group of third world scholars to try to build an international program of political education, and hopefully we'll be in a place to announce that at the start of next year or in the first months of next year. There's a lot of work happening at the Progressive International, some of which I could share, but that would take perhaps a whole other podcast session. We've been doing a tremendous amount of work with the Palestinian youth movement on stopping ships carrying arms to occupy Palestine. We've been working as part of other coalitions as well that have been targeting ships in the region. We've been working to catalog different levels of complicity in the corporate world. And beyond that, on a more personal level, I've been working a couple of writing projects that are a little bit closer to home and that have to do with trying to understand the legacies of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe. And the first piece is about what I'm calling the neoliberal Holocaust, which is the structural extermination of 7 million people that resulted from the reimposition of capitalism on the countries of the former socialist bloc, and trying to conceive of that in a way that, you know, that chisels away at the triumphalism with which that historical period is often treated.

Henry Huckamacki: I'm really looking forward to that project. Believe it or not, I just had a very long discussion about that yesterday with somebody who does not live in Russia. No, listeners, you know, I have these sorts of conversations all the time with people who are Russian and remember that period firsthand. But yeah, yesterday I had a very long conversation with a non-Russian about that. And Somebody who's politically well-informed but does not know anything about the consequences of the structural adjustment shock therapy that was imposed on the former Soviet Union immediately after the collapse. Somebody who was politically conscious at the time. It's amazing how little is actually understood in the West. It was somebody from the West. Somebody who I'm very close with. family member. I'm not going to say any more than that. But in any case, a very long and actually very generative and useful discussion. So I am very much looking forward to the work that you're doing with that, Pavel. And anything that comes out of that project will certainly be shared with this unnamed family member of mine who was very receptive to what I was saying.

Pawel Wargan: Pleasingly. You got to one step away from giving us the name. You've got to give us the name. Next podcast, we're going to have the name. We're going to get the name out of you.

Henry Huckamacki: She, there's some more information, will surely be listening to this at some point. So she'll know who I am talking about. Michael Gallant, our guest for today. Thank you very much for coming on the show. It was your first time on the show, hopefully. if you agree, will not be your last time on the show. Can you tell the listeners what work you're getting up to these days and where they can find more of your work?

Michael Gallant: Yeah, really a great pleasure to be here. Thank you for such a stimulating conversation. And I should have mentioned at the start, a fan of the show, of course, and a great privilege to be on. In addition to continuing to follow the Progressive Internationals NIO project and the exciting events that will be coming up there, thanks in large part to Pavel's work, I Not sure what else I could point to in terms of my work. I'm about to embark on an extended research project about coordination between debtor countries, the concept of and aspirations towards debtor cartels, debtor clubs. So keep an eye out from that, possibly years down the line.

Adnan Hussain: And folks can find me, unfortunately, on Twitter.

Michael Gallant: I'm in the process of trying to take an extended break from it. But if I ever come back to it, they can find me at Michael underscore Gallant. That's a Gallant with a one L.

Henry Huckamacki: Excellent. And of course, we will have that linked in the show notes. So listeners, you'll be able to just click and follow each Pavel and Michael on social media. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck1995, H-U-C-K-1-9-9-5. You can keep up to date with everything that Guerrilla History is doing, as well as what Adan and I are doing individually by following the show on social media, guerrilla underscore pod on Twitter. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. And on Instagram, it's guerrilla underscore history. with two r's again and guerrilla underscore history and of course listeners you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history and guerrilla with two r's history and of course that's linked in the show notes as well so you can just click on that if you would like to throw a couple dollars to cover our platform fees and whatnot so on that note then listeners and until next time solidarity