The Violent Demise of Imperialism w/Radhika Desai

Adnan Husain: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Salam, hello, peace to you all, and welcome to a very special edition of the Adnan Hussain Show in collaboration with Resistance is Fertile. We've done this a lot recently because we've been collaborating on... the iran versus the epstein empire series of live streams regularly but we have also collaborated in the past to talk about geopolitical economy if you'll recall and i'm welcoming benji from resistance is fertile to introduce our guest on this collaborative uh episode

Benji Schoendorff: Thank you, brother Adnan, and it is my absolute joy to welcome for the second time in this collaboration that I hope will be a long conversation Radhika Desai. So Radhika, you are a political economist and political scientist, and you propose the concept of geopolitical economy that we looked at in our first conversation as a Marxist analysis of international relations of the capitalist world. That is, I'm reading from a website, historical and integrates the political, the economic, class, and nation in a single framework capable of anticipating and explaining the rise of the multipolar world. If I can be a fanboy for a minute, the two people who are most shaping my current understanding and analysis of the course of imperialism are Ali Khadri on the one hand, and your good self, Radhika, on the other hand, especially your concept of US empire not being the same kind of administration as the British empire. This is absolutely enlightening to me. So I am very happy to have you. And today, we are inviting you to start a conversation about the violent demise of imperialism, or as you recently said, the epstein class or the axis of epstein so welcome radhika i think um maybe adnan you want to start with a question unless you want to say a few words first radhika in which case i just want to say that i just feel so honored by your words that's all and of course very honored and happy to be in conversation with both of you again

Adnan Husain: well that's great i mean this is a joy for us and i think for our listeners and watchers who really responded very well to our previous conversation we're looking forward because a lot has changed since the last time i mean some things have changed and some things are always still continuities and in fact that's in a way my kind of question is maybe situate us we're all right now in the midst of this ramadan war but there were developments that were taking place in what we would call this emerging multipolar world and adjustments happening to the nature of the world system. I'm wondering if maybe you could tell us before the start of the war, how would you have characterized the state of imperialism? How was it operating? Was it weakening? We had talked a little bit about the tariff situations and all of that in the first year of the Trump administration and giving it a broader perspective. historical scope. But I'm wondering, before we start talking about what the dramatic changes might be sharpening in terms of contradictions in that system and new developments, how would you characterize where we were with this system of imperialism on the cusp of the Ramadan War?

Radhika Desai: Yeah. So before, let's say on the 27th of February or maybe a few days before that of this year, I would have said, as I've been saying for a while now, that, you know, we have been living in a phase of the accelerated decline of imperialism. Pardon my dog. I can't help it. He will do what he will do. So we are living in a phase of accelerated decline of of imperialism, and that accelerated decline is occurring because of two distinct causes. One is, of course, the rise particularly of China and to some extent, you know, development taking place in the rest of the world. On the other hand, there is of course the internal decay of the financialized, productively enfeebled capitalist economies. And so both of these are sort of leading to the same result, which is that the power of the West is declining absolutely, but it is also declining relatively very fast. So that was already clear. Then I would say that in the 2010s, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was an important milestone in this process because the weaknesses of the financialized productivity and female capitalism were manifest and they were also dragging down. um the capitalist system because you see once you once you are enfeebled to some extent your ability to cope with your enfeeblement is also decreased, so that essentially everything that Western capitalist states could do in order to shore up the power of the ruling classes, which is of course the topmost priority, was further undermining the health of the economy and of course therefore the long-term prospects of these same ruling classes. So their short term advantage and their long term advantage were now going in opposite directions. So the 2008 was a major crisis. And that's why the decade of the 2010s was so eventful. That's why that's when you saw, you know, beginning with the, you know, what were they called? We will forget the name, but, you know, the Wall Street protests. we are the one percent protests against inequality and so on then you had the eurozone crisis then you had the rise of all these populist movements of which then trump rode the crest of the wave he became a president in 26 2017 etc all of these things happened then covid hit and i remember When COVID hit, I wrote an article in which I said that this is going to further accelerate the decline of the West. And it would also, of course, further accelerate the decline of the West. very difficult because the West's coping mechanisms were not working. Meanwhile, China has kept growing. I think some of the other BRICs are not doing so well. So all of this was already true on the eve. And of course, then you got Trump's second election. I was just reading the Financial Times. And interestingly, the Financial Times, Martin Wolf is saying that this is somebody who has been standing by the Atlantic Alliance for the longest time. But finally, the day has come. And literally, it is today. Today's the day. But Trump has said that, you know, he's going to make a big speech and the war in Iran could end soon. And he has basically expressed great skepticism about NATO. He said the U.S. may leave NATO, etc. And so finally, all of this, Trump is doing this because he's losing the war. Plus, in the process of trying to win the war, he has destroyed what remained of the Atlantic Alliance. Everything is going pear-shaped. So in a certain sense, this is a very important day in this process. And so Martin Wolf is saying that, look, any country that can elect the same clown twice, I mean, he didn't use these words, but is not a reliable partner. Now, this was already clear months ago. This was clear when Trump got reelected. Nobody said so because they were still somehow secretly hoping that he would not be quite so bad and so on. So I would say that, you know, on the eve of the Ramadan war, the eve of the Epstein classes war on Iran, etc., whatever you want to call it, I would say that the process was already far gone. But this war has accelerated in ways that even I did not anticipate.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, well, we'll have to obviously get right into those in a moment. But one thing that you mentioned is that there's a fragmenting or fraying of this kind of consensus because of the erratic behavior. And, you know, you could say underperformance as leader of the empire of the United States. in this but I heard my Michael Hudson I know a close friend and colleague and collaborator of yours say very recently on a program that a sudden kind of increase in Wall Street kind of stock prices and index that had happened that day or the day before was a very strange kind of suggestion, the unreality of people's thinking that still are hoping, expecting, clinging to a system that to break away from is very risky or seems like it would be very difficult and dangerous with the kind of hopeful presumption that perhaps if the war ends soon, things could just go back to the way that they have been and so i think what you're suggesting and perhaps that will be a good way to get into talking about some of the things that have changed is to reflect on whether that is possible or whether that is a total illusion and fallacy and in in fact what do you think is fundamentally being restructured as a result of the ramadan war

Radhika Desai: uh again there's a lot to say but very quickly on the stock market movements and what michael was saying i would say that it's in fact it's even worse i think that a lot of the people who are sending the stock market up right now they know that they're doing something exceedingly risky. But the fact is there has been so much money sloshing around the system and it has to go somewhere. And so that's partly why markets, you know, and so that's the first thing I wanted to say. Second thing I wanted to say. So in a certain sense, it shows the desperation that, you know, when you knowingly take a risk that is basically practically guaranteed to go badly, but you do it because there is no other choice. That's the first thing. Secondly, you know, as far as the stock market is concerned, I would say that, you know, it's part of the morbidity of the capitalist system that the stage that we are in right now, that actually there's been a considerable commentary, including again in the Financial Times, on the BBC, because I'm in London, so I end up listening to BBC for my mainstream news. They are saying that Trump has actually timed his announcements. So he always announces some big climactic thing. I'm going to bomb Iran's energy facilities and so on. He announces it on Friday. And then when markets drop on a Monday, a few hours later, he says, oh, no, I'm not going to do it. You know, everything's fine. And in those first couple of hours, the insiders who know he's going to do it, can take profits. So in a certain sense, he's actually manipulating the markets because as you know, if the markets are going up and down on the basis of what you say, of course you and your insider friends can benefit from it. So this is really, it shows that basically the people who are in power in Washington DC are not looking further than their own noses, their own benefit. It's like a primal deluge, you know, let's make whatever money we can because quite frankly what's coming after you don't even want to imagine they I'm sure they have some inking those of them who can think I don't think there are very many of them but those of them who can think so so that that's a Couple of things I wanted to say and then the larger point you were asking about which is you know, what does you know? What is this decay of this system, you know, and and I would say that basically You know, the way I understand the Ramadan war and by the way, I also the way I understand all the militaristic shenanigans that Trump has been engaged in for the last several months, I would say since late last year, you know, the massing of the armada. Just imagine like dusting off this ancient word, massing this armada in the Caribbean, the 3rd of January and all the talk about the 3rd of January war. a stunt in Venezuela, then followed by all the talk about Greenland and you know what have you and before that he was talking about, you know, everybody was talking about the Donro doctrine before the Ramadan war and I actually just recently published a column called whatever happened to the Donro doctrine because it was by attacking Iran Trump has himself blown it out of the water. No sooner had he announced it than he has basically repeated it. But whatever. The point is that all of this unpredictability, this chaos, it can only be explained by one thing. And that relates directly to the question you're asking, which is what's wrong? What's really wrong in the capitalist countries? What's really wrong in the biggest and most important capitalist country name in the United States is that nearly 50 years of neoliberalism which has transferred wealth from the ordinary people to the rich, which has enfeebled the United States and other capitalist economies productively, which has financialized economies and so on. All of these tendencies, and there are many others, they have simply led to such a weakening, first of all, of the economy. Then the creation of social division, because once you create a certain level of economic inequality, there's going to be social division, whether it manifests itself in the form of racism or something else, anti-immigrants, it doesn't matter. Something's going to happen. And so that's what's going on. Then there is political logjam. I mean, you have a political decay to the point where only clowns like Trump can get elected. So, and I call him a clown, of course he's much worse, but I can't think of a, you know, like this venal clown that he is, that only people like that can get elected, people who have no scruples, people who don't mind saying one thing now and then the absolute contradictory thing two minutes later. So these are the sorts of, you know, like the absolute decline in the quality of leadership. And then add to that, and it's ironic that I'm saying this because while we are publishing this on social media, but social media have been wrapped up in the cultural degeneration of this society. So all of these things are going on within the Western countries, and it is leading to a level of decay, which I don't think anybody could have imagined, I think, you know, and this kind of reminds me, you know, at some times, I know that it sounds like a cliche, you know, Marx said, and Rosa Luxemburg said, you get socialism or barbarism. Since we do not have socialism, since we have for 50 years put up with neoliberalism and not replace it with socialism, and In fact, the West did not make a revolution 100 years ago. We are looking at barbarism of the most, and of course, I haven't even mentioned the wars. And finally, then the wars are because you see, Trump was elected by telling American people that there's something very wrong with their economy, that he's going to fix it. But of course, he had no intention, nor does he have the ability to fix it. So his numbers have been tanking. And what he wants, the reason he has started all these militaristic shenanigans is that he wants something. that will resemble a victory, whether it's a diplomatic one or a military one, or from any one of these foreign policy crises he has created, so that he can say, look, I have won something, and this will somehow magically restore his numbers, because they are tanking, and this is a midterm election year, and his party is in a big crisis, and his mega base is deserting him.

Benji Schoendorff: When we talk about the violent demise of imperialism, I think you sketched out broadly the general parameters of the situation. highly financialized imperialism that doesn't produce anything anymore. And it's just, you know, blowing bubbles, inflating bubbles. And ruling class is also a ruling class that has gotten enriched by inflating bubbles. You look at Trump's cabinet, you know, the whatever the economy minister, I forget the name, is this guy who actually cut his chops by rug pulling the currencies and sterling. And they're all people who do this kind of stuff. I call it now the empire of rug pull. They're literally crypto bros that just blow up bubbles. that will then deflate. And there is this mother of all bubbles in the AI bubble. Everybody knows it's all nonsense and it will collapse. So that may be part of the kind of material conditions that force them to go to war in the sense that up until now, when you go to war, everybody goes to the dollar, to the reserve currency. and all the rest of it. But also another element that's very important is we're coming at the end of a cycle in which the ruling class itself has degenerated intellectually. They got high on their own supply of white supremacy. They can't imagine that other people can think, can learn from them, actually know the Western ruling class better than it knows itself. And in the case of Iran, has been literally preparing for this for the past 40 years, whereas in the assault on Iran, you got a sense, and I don't think it's false, that this was literally done you know, over a weekend, it's like you're a student that does nothing all semester and gets his master's thesis written by Chad GPT on the night before he has to give it back. And they even brag that they got all their, you know, target list done by AI. And that I think is one of those, you know, this is why Marxism has to come back because one of those contradictions of the system that pushed it in a situation where, Even the way they conduct this war, the only thing they can do is rug pull, rug pull, pump the market, and then bring it down. But then, as the other side knows them, you have Halibaf literally now giving investment advice, say, well, when the US goes up by doing exactly the opposite thing. And now people are publishing, hey, my God, I've made money following the advice of Halibaf. So the whole thing is kind of collapsing in on itself. What is your sense of that?

Radhika Desai: I think you've described it very well. And the only thing I could add to that is that, you know, like these financial shenanigans, basically what you're looking at, you know, Keynes has said somewhere that, you know, bubbles of speculation on a steady stream of enterprise do no harm. But when speculation itself becomes a whirlpool and, you know, basically that essentially imagine that, you know, if your productive base is this big and then you have a little bit of speculation on it, it doesn't matter. But now your productive base is this small and the speculative bubble is this big. And it's like the productive base cannot carry anything. Now, you were asking earlier about the violence, you know, and I think, you know, in order to understand the violence, I think that you really have to, of course, all the elements of hubris, etc. matter. But I think that in order to understand how the violent phase of US imperialism was launched, It has, of course, everything to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which I think Putin, although he's not exactly a socialist, once called the greatest geopolitical disaster in the world. So the Soviet Union is no longer there to constrain the United States. Then the United States and the elites in the United States interpret the demise of the Soviet Union as somehow vindicating capitalism. So that and therefore they become even more full of hubris. And then along with that, there is this talk of how they are going to revolutionize warfare and that somehow the United States can undo the damage of Vietnam, that somehow the United States can avoid a Vietnam like defeat by simply engaging in what I call capital intensive warfare. And, you know, there are grand terms like revolution in military affairs that have been used. But the basic idea is that with the use of computers and technology and so on, what you can have is a situation in which you can simply bomb from afar. You don't need to put boots on the ground or put very few boots on the ground. And then somehow you can tame the world, you can intimidate the world by the shock and awe. And remember when this expression was first used in the second Gulf War in 1991. And so the shock and awe of your great military might is going to cow the rest of the world. And of course, you know, in the meantime, what has happened is that on the one hand, the United States has felt free to use force every time. And of course, every time it's failed, every time it's failed, there is no serious military victory that the United States can claim its own. Even in the Second World War, I mean, the United States was on the winning side, but it did not really do much of the fighting. I mean, the Soviets and the Chinese did most of the fighting, but that's another matter altogether. So in this situation, they have basically and, you know, they are, you know, like the investors we were talking about earlier. It's like if you have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. So they have lost any carrots that they may have had by sort of positive incentives to make the world follow you. That they don't have. So then the only thing that they can do is they can try to cow the world into following them. And even this is now not proving possible. And it is astonishing in my mind You know, it really requires us to think a lot about world history, just thinking about the fact that it is Iran you know, which everybody used to dismiss as a kind of, oh, this mad theocratic republic, et cetera, et cetera. But it is Iran who is probably going to be at least if not have brought down. But I mean, you can say they will have been the most proximate cause of the demise of the American empire, because what it seems to me all this is leading to is the expulsion of the United States from the region. And if the United States is expelled from this region, there are not that many other regions that they can muscle into. So that, you know, and it is also really interesting that right now there are three fronts. And this is the final point I'll make. I'm sorry I'm going on for so long. But there are three fronts. Think about this. They have got a front against Russia. They have got a front against Iran and they have a front potentially against China on Taiwan. And so and these are the three countries that have proved the most resolute. But also, I mean, you know, Venezuela is also resolute, but Venezuela has less power. But Iran, Russia and China have both the resolution and the power. And it is really an interesting trial of powers that the West has taken on to which it will some it's something it will regret greatly.

Adnan Husain: That's very, I think you're absolutely right about these fronts. And it is quite interesting that the tip of the spear, as it were, is Iran in this case. And you were mentioning about its sort of significance in world history and that it's interesting that it is Iran. A lot of people have commented on, and there is, of course, the presumption in all the US proclamations and claims about Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which of course is not closed, it's just restricted to them. That's the political question of, you know, if, you know, where you, political and financial question. I mean, if you're an enemy of Iran in this war or an ally of its enemies and, you know, or, and, you know, pay what is emerging as a kind of toll for control over the strait then yes it's close to you but the the idea that this um you know narrow waterway um you know somehow belongs to the united states is what's behind you know and the west and um of course it's iran that controls it of course it's yemen that controls the the babel mandib should it also be restricted because these are old ancient societies cultures and civilizations that grew up in the context of developing world systems of trade and so forth that grew around control over these very key geostrategic points of access and and movement so this is not some kind of like new development who are these upstarts to be trying to take over control of the straight but we are it seems also on a cusp of a big historical shift or change that strikes me as in some ways a return to these older kind of geographic and historical paradigms of development centuries, the long history, and that there was a kind of atypical period where through certain forms of violence, certain kinds of technical developments connected with war making and being unrestricted in wielding that violence, you know, in the last 500 years, a corner of the world that sort of developed and, you know, had a hegemonic position that was outsized to its historic and geographical significance, and that perhaps that period is ending, which is the longer kind of conditions. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about the way in which Iran is the tip of this spear of anti-imperialist combat, is doing things that are reorienting and undermining and moving the world away from the imperialist world system. What kinds of things do you think are very significant about what it's doing in this Ramadan war?

Radhika Desai: yeah so you know let me just say that one a simpler way perhaps of putting this very important point that you made would be to say that you know and you know a lot of people date capitalism from 500 odd years ago but i feel of course you know there were those so-called voyages of discovery and so on. But really, capitalism itself, particularly in its industrial form, which was really productively dynamic for a while and made the West temporarily productively superior to the rest of the world, because just before the Industrial Revolution, the West was not productively superior. It was China, India, places like that that were productively superior, which is why, of course, routes to the East, trade with the East was so important and so on. So Essentially, if you take the Industrial Revolution as the cutoff point, it's really only about 200 years. So it is like, imagine the history of humankind as being thousands of years long, and the history of capitalism will constitute a 200-year blip in history, where temporarily, temporarily, I forget who it was, a Russian guy who first called it this, the Western Peninsula of Eurasia. The Northwestern Peninsula of Eurasia became superior militarily, economically, technologically, etc. Whereas in the past, of course, the populace parts of the world, particularly in Asia, had always been superior. Fine. So you had this blip in history. Temporarily, they became superior. And of course, they used that temporary superiority, which, or let me rephrase that, because their temporary superiority was based on an extremely contradictory, turbulent, violent system, which caused, first of all, wars within Europe, which is why, you know, if you look at a map, if you ever wonder, like, why is Europe divided into such so many tiny little countries? It goes back to the beginnings of capitalism. And of course, it suited capitalism, because the more small countries you have, the more capitalists can easily control each small country. Anyway, forget that. But the point is, you have this temporary superiority. And they use it very briefly to dominate the whole world. But in my humble opinion, this process had already reached its peak. You know, when you say something has reached its peak, it means it's only downhill afterwards. Right. So this peak has already been reached in 1914. And this because it to me, you know, everybody can understand the imperialism part. So, you know, the competitive imperialism of the European powers led to the First World War. And and and I would say that the First World War and then the Second World War was militarily tied to it because we can go into that. beginning in the First World War, imperialism began declining. And you had the Russian Revolution, which was then such a huge support for the Chinese Revolution and eventually various anti-colonial movements in the Third World as the formerly colonial world, etc. So all of these things happen. And so there is this just, you know, and so since then, the power of the West has been declining. But we are now seeing the acceleration of that decline. So that's that's one part. And the second part is that then Iran. I mean, you know, I would say that, of course, Iran on its own would not have been able to do it. It was the fact that there is Russia and what Russia is today in large part is a legacy of the Soviet Union. What China is today, China is, I would consider still to this day, meaningfully socialist. So I think that these developments have and of course, Iran itself is the revolutionary regime. And as a result, no matter that it has this overlay of Shia Islam, etc., but the secular movement of that society is in a direction which you would not expect if you thought of only Shia Islam in the context, you know, the position of women, etc., etc. So all of these three revolutionary societies have, of course, therefore come together. So people have also mentioned, of course, that the large part of the spirit of the Iranian people is fired by the legacy of the Karbala and all of that which of course I'm sure that helps but to me I really see this in the context of imperialism because all these three revolutions are anti-imperialist revolutions and they are all these three revolutions that are anti-imperialist revolutions that have had a productively successful, relatively successful. Iran would be the least successful but still it is relatively more successful than say Cuba or Venezuela which is not to diminish Cuba or Venezuela, but to say that for whatever reason it has been able to be an industrial, military and technological power in addition to a revolutionary power.

Benji Schoendorff: It's very interesting because when we think about the shape of the anti-imperialist struggle in this moment you know clearly um the soviet union couldn't conduct it to its uh successful end and china chose this very specific path which i called the sunsu go and hug your enemy until they can't do anything anymore that is nefarious to you But Iran has been put in this position that they knew from the beginning, from when the West pushed Saddam, who, by the way, was a CIA agent originally, to attack Iran. They knew they had to prepare for this war that's happening now, and thereby their concept of freedom. strategic patience. But you have on the one side, China, who is playing this very subtle, non-violent anti-imperialist game. I believe it comes also from the fact that it's a nuclear power and so is the US. But Iran is put in this position where The violence is forced on it and is now really the spear of, I literally call it, you know, I have this image, historical parallels of what they are, but that Gaza was the Stalingrad. And what we're seeing now is the corks and then the Operation Begration, the counter-offensive that will lead to not Berlin this time, but probably Al-Quds. And it's very interesting that It gets violent in this part. And I also believe that it's a part that the empire can't lose because of the lock it has on energy and fossil fuels, which are still so central to the world economy. And so how do you see this articulation on the one side of this kind of new, non-violent, let's say, internationalism of China? and this more violent direct counter offensive in which Iran has been pushed by the contradictions of imperialism.

Radhika Desai: yeah i mean i think that you uh so i'll make two quick points number one or one quick point and one slightly longer point so the quick point is that i agree with you that i think in considering you know a lot of people have been asking why aren't russia and china doing more to defend iran earlier they were asking the same question vis-a-vis gaza which i think is relevant of course we are also distressed at looking at what happened particularly in gaza and now in iran that you people will ask that question i don't uh at all blame them. But the important thing to remember is that the moment Iran, China or Russia do anything overtly to defend, they are coming closer to converting the war into a nuclear war. And I think that this is something, and unlike Western discourse, which portrays Western nuclear powers as being somehow responsible and everybody else being a rogue power, Actually, it is the West that has been a rogue power. They have used nuclear weapons irresponsibly and so on. So we can discuss that. But I think the point of nuclear weapons is a very important one. A slightly greater link. The way I understand China's foreign policy position is not so much that you hug your enemy until they can no longer do wrong. It's more that the way I look at it, China had very few options back in the 1970s. They had to have some sort of opening up. There was a Sino-Soviet rift, of course, which I would say was another, you know, if the demise of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster, the Sino-Soviet split was another geopolitical disaster. If that had not happened, China would not have needed to do that. It would have got what it wanted from the Soviet Union, but it did happen. And so China needed capital, it needed technology in order to industrialize. And so it made peace with the enemy. Of course, Kissinger also, the enemy, made peace with China because even they were coming to the point where they knew they could not dominate the world without splitting the Soviet Union from the People's Republic of China. So in a certain sense, it was compulsion on both sides. But the thing is, the United States was happy to relate more closely to China because it was under the illusion that China would always remain a low-cost, low-technology, low-productivity producer of cheap goods to complement the high-value goods that the United States produced. And the moment they began realizing that, that this was not the case, that China had every intention of going up the technological ladder the things change. So this did not happen with Trump. It did not even just happen with Obama's a pivot to Asia. I remember very clearly George Bush Jr. imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on China. So already in the early 21st century, they became aware that China is shaping up to be a bit of a threat to America's economic, technological, financial and other forms of dominance over the world. And since then, the hostility has just been growing.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, I wanted to come to, this has been so helpful in framing and analyzing. And of course, as a historian, I always love when we use history to really contextualize what's happening now. I wanted to move to a couple of things about Iran's response during this war, what we can learn from that. It seems to me they have adhered in moving from strategic deterrence, whatever we think that meant, to a different modality, I think they've still been very calibrated, very kind of restrained and targeted in their approach, but they have insisted rather firmly on a principle of reciprocity. if you do this to us, then we can respond in kind and we are not going to submit sort of meekly to some kind of choreographed response. We are going, but they haven't gone to full out sort of war either. I think that's kind of interesting then to look at what they actually have done and how that might uh illustrate for us beyond just defense of iran and perhaps even a kind of decolonization in a kind of direct way or obvious way of west asia through trying to remove u.s military bases where they're located in the gulf and elsewhere that they have attacked thing you know kind of points of uh geopolitical economy you might say um you know by you know controlling the strait of hormuz uh insisting upon uh payments being made you know in uh yuan and moving off of the petrodollar attacking u.s assets like uh and corporate assets and like uh financial institutions for their kind of complicity in kind of how imperialism works data centers and the new economy that is so energy, AI and so on, that is so energy gluttonous, you could say, so that they've moved where energy is supposed to be, you know, freely and readily available to power this kind of world changing kind of control mechanism of AI, etc., It seems that in those things they are exposing what are the real crucial kind of elements of how imperialism is operating today. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that targeting and whether their impression of what's important is correct strategically, economically in moving away from the imperialist system.

Radhika Desai: Yeah, I mean, I think that there are two elements of it. One is the geopolitical economy element, and the second is the restraint element. Let me deal with the latter first. I mean, I think that we will all agree that basically what the Iranian authorities have done is they have calibrated their response. And they have not just been restrained in the sense of, you know, we will do, you know, eye for an eye sort of thing. But it's also that they have been very strategic. So, for example, I have read from military analysts who know better than me that, for example, in the first phase of the war, the first couple of weeks, all the missiles that Iran was using were the old stock missiles. So that this would then force the Israelis, the Americans, etc. to use up their interceptors and so on. And I think that they have been very good on that. And I think they have also exposed another element of the weakness of imperialism, which is that de-industrialization has made the West less capable of manufacturing the arms that they need. This was already clear, by the way, at the time of the Ukraine conflict. I think within a couple of months of the Ukraine conflict, I remember reading a story that came out from the Royal United Services Institute, which is a kind of defense-related think tank here in Britain. And they said that basically, you know, the West does not have the capacity to produce enough ammunition to supply Ukraine. And we are now several years down the road from there. And the West has not added any capacity. And by the way, the reason it has not added any capacity is because they live in systems where the defense, the military industrial complex is a profit making entity. It is devoted primarily not to the defense of the realm. but to the defense, but to the making of profits. And you can't get defense, adequate defense. You can't get satisfactory defense in those contexts. So Iran, I think, has exposed this ugly underbelly of even the defense apparatus of the West, let alone capitalism and all that. I mean, if you're a serious country, you should be able to defend yourself and they cannot defend themselves. which is astonishing to say about an imperialist country, because they're not just defending themselves, they're also being imperialist in the rest of the world. So this is really an ironic thing. But yeah, and then you also pointed out about the geopolitical economy. I mean, this whole point about, you know, all these other, you know, like the Strait of Hormuz, the supply of oil, the supply of fertilizers, the supply of various other important chemicals and so on that the world needs. I mean, all of this is absolutely fascinating. And to me, you know, a lot of people, you know, when they think of imperialism, you know, when we think of imperialism, you think of, you know, the heroic Vietnamese fighting and the heroic Mozambicans fighting and whatever. And all of these are absolutely true. But ultimately... What is at stake in imperialism? What is at stake is economic domination and subordination. And what Iran is doing right now is, and I often say, speaking of China, that China has essentially done the anti-imperialist thing by quietly focusing on its economic development. Nothing could be more anti-imperialist than that. You focus on your development because at the end of the day, what you want to show is that socialism is productively superior to capitalism. This is a very important thing. But coming back to Iran, I would say that everything that has happened, I mean, what Iran is doing now, I mean, now people are accepting that if Iran had been one of the Western countries, definitely it would charge it. It would have long been charging a toll on passage to the Strait of Hormuz. And now I think that by simply asserting such rights, by simply saying, regulating the flow of ships through the Strait of Hormuz based on its preferences. You know, you must pay us this, you must pay it, etc. All of these things are absolutely part of essentially essentially denying the West the economic privileges to which it has become very used. And that is part of what this war is about. It's not some external thing and I think it's also forcing the whole world. It's forcing Asian countries, it's forcing Japan, it's forcing Europe. to rethink their relations, because, you know, we know that earlier I was saying that Trump has cast doubt on NATO, but the other members of NATO are also beginning to rethink their connection with the United States. That's why I pointed to this Martin Wolf claim. You know, it is extraordinary that it should be published on a day like this. And at the same time, entirely expected, because at the end of the day, The first choice of the Japanese and the West European capitalist leaders is, of course, to have a wonderful hunky dory alliance with the United States. And they can have a kind of a, you know, a single space of the advanced capitalist countries. And then there's the rest of the world and the advanced capitalist countries can exchange capital, goods, technology, people amongst one another, but the rest of the world can be kept out. That would be ideal. But now they have to look at plan B. Plan B is to retreat to their regional borders. It's not as attractive, and particularly if it means retreating to the national borders, it means that the less internationally mobile capital is, the more easy it is for the workers and working people of these countries to control capital. So if we are seeing that disintegration of NATO, which I think we are, we are looking at that option too, which will also accelerate the advance, if not to socialism, to forms of popular power, which the capitalists are going to hate.

Benji Schoendorff: yeah um you know you suggested we keep this around one hour because apparently this is what the algorithm uh recommends and hopefully we can very soon reconvene to continue this conversation uh i would like to finish maybe on this you know marx's analysis starts from the abstract and goes to the concrete and i think at the moment what we are seeing is this moment of dialectical inversion, in a sense. Ali Khadri, in his Accumulation of Waste, says, for a while now, the only subject of history has been imperialism, and everybody else is an object. The working class in the North, uh colonized or neo-colonized countries in the south and it's really this totalizing system but what we are seeing at the moment it strikes me is like an inversion of subject and object like iran has been pushed into a situation where it has actually become the subject of history and capitalism become the object Similarly, you see the inversion of those bases that were there to protect supposedly the Gulf satrapies, they are actually turning into the guarantee not of protection, but of being targeted. And you see a lot of those inversions happening, which leads me to think, you know, having tried to be an anti-imperialist since 9-11, 1973, I was 10 years old. that we are at this point of inflection where things are really moving like the movement of history even within iran like this mobilization that is even bigger than it was in 79 is going to push this thing to a place where i don't think empire can actually retreat in a way that it can preserve itself so well. So I don't know how you see it at this general, maybe very abstract level, but I think which is also very useful to look at what is going on.

Radhika Desai: Yeah, I mean, personally, by the way, you know, by saying that, you know, things like, you know, United States was never hegemonic, that imperialism, both imperialism and capitalism, because they are intertwined, they cannot be separated. Imperialism and capitalism have been declining since the early 20th century. By saying things like that, what I'm actually saying is that the real subjectivity has always been in the hands of the people. I think that sometimes people don't realize, you know, like there is a lot of, you know, I've had this debate with a lot of people, you know, people say, well, look at the third world, you know, people say third world is developing, you know, and even in the so-called golden age, when people say the third world was better off than it became, in the couple of neoliberal decades at the end of the 20th century and they say but see you know the per capita income of people did not expand but you know i'm not so sure about that your per capita income did not expand this is partly because there was a large population explosion in in particularly in the third world countries but you know the very fact that people more people lived is an achievement. I think we forget that. Under colonialism, India's population barely expanded for most of the time because people were so deprived. So I think that I'm not trying to say that I don't want people people to get the wrong message. But, you know, there is this kind of Malthusianism around, you know, like I remember I get my students, you know, people who take my development studies course, I make them read this very wonderful little book. It's called The No Nonsense Guide to Population. And it's written by a wonderful demographer called Vanessa Baird. who says you know if if what people generally say were true then i shouldn't be here because she's like the seventh of eight children or something like that but whatever the point i'm trying to make is that she says that if you were to put now this is a while back but still maybe 10 15 years ago but if you were if people were willing to accept the density of population in new york then we could put the in population of the entire world in a territory the size of texas Go figure. So to me, I would say that working people, okay, they have failed a lot of the times and development has failed and anti-imperialism has sometimes failed. But on the whole, you cannot have the long-term decline of capitalism and imperialism if you didn't have some kind of subjectivity of the people. And the fact is that, or take Latin America, for example, the pink tide, arose then it went into remission but it is still coming back and you know what at the end of the day there is no other way for people in latin america to have a better life which is what they all want within the confines of capitalism and imperialism so it has to go the only question is how many detours and wrong roads will the people take will we all take before we get to the main point and the whole point of conversations like this the whole point of thinking about these things is to shorten shorten that long transition right because let me let's get there already sort of thing yeah absolutely i mean that's a problem i mean i think you pointed out earlier in your remarks that really the peak of capitalism under this imperialist uh

Adnan Husain: you know, era was 1914. So it's been a long, if steady, but decline.

Radhika Desai: With reverses, you know, the neoliberal 80s and 90s were reverses for the people and for third world countries. But just one point, you know, I also dislike the term flag independence, that somehow you got independence, but it meant nothing. It always meant something, perhaps not as much as you thought, but it always meant something.

Adnan Husain: Well, I mean, that is, of course, a really important point because we have these fantasies. I think it's complete braggadocio. It must not be related to much of anything. But when Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, goes to the Munich Security Conference and essentially argues to try and recruit Europe back into some kind of alliance. Maybe they're worried about Mark Carney's middle power and suggestions that perhaps we might uncouple a little bit and be more independent in order to make sure that doesn't happen. He's going and arguing for recolonizing the world for Western Christian civilization. you know, national liberation meant something. It was very important. People spent a lot of effort and a lot of blood, you know, to free themselves from direct colonial rule, which sometimes seems to be the aspiration of the imperialists again today, even if I think it's a total fantasy. And we're seeing that Iran in this moment, I mean, there has... we still wait for some alleged uh ground attack but up to this point after a month of you know intensive uh warfare against it has yet to uh give up any territory or have to fight on its own ground in that sort of a way which shows us we are at a different stage of history and those are hard-fought gains it's just that of course the geopolitical well the economic you know system of and components of imperialism uh you know mean that you can have an end to direct colonization but still be trapped in a system that prevents your full sovereignty and development yeah yeah exactly and i should say iran has not only not lost territory it might even be considered to have gained territory because now it controls the state of almost that's true it nationalized it effectively just like nasa nationalized the uh i think that's a great moment actually to kind of compare it to is the 56 you know suez nationalization and we have at least a bipartite aggression taking place even though in the background there are other countries supporting but you know we want to be respectful of your time and your suggestion that this is good for a first round of what we hope will be a continuing series of conversations we had many other topics related to these we've covered you know bits of some of them but there's always so much to discuss about this rapidly changing and developing kind of situation. But the point is that because it has such potential world historical significance, we will want to come back at it and have the valuable insights as a geopolitical economist that you are so capable of providing and which are so much appreciated by uh people um uh and our audience and just looking at the chat how much um you know uh value people are are receiving it's it's really great so we will definitely want to have you return soon inshallah and before giving the last word to you um radhika

Benji Schoendorff: i just wanted to also mention the fact that you're the convener of the international manifesto group that you know we put it in the description you are you guys are doing great work of political education you have lots of seminars lots of things i am myself a signatory of of that international manifesto and it's one of the places where you can really get good analysis, good conversations with, you know, people coming from all sorts of directions. So thank you very much for not just being an academic out there and a talking head on the podcast, but also, you know, putting in the work to try and articulate some kind of international movement behind it through your efforts with the International Manifesto Group. So thanks for this and I hope we can redo this very soon.

Radhika Desai: Absolutely. Listen, I mean, Trump's going to give a talk tonight. Speak to the nation. I'm sure we'll have to analyze that. And thanks so much for mentioning the International Manifesto Group, Benji. If anybody is interested, please look it up at www.internationalmanifesto.org. uh you the manifesto itself is worth a read uh please read it if you can and uh sign it come to our webinars um and yeah please check us out and thank you so much and i hope to be back to discuss i mean you you guys have such deep questions that i they make me think in a radically new way so i really appreciate our conversations very much that's very kind and we hope to continue the dialogue soon and i put the link to the

Adnan Husain: international manifesto group in the chat and we'll put it in the description of the YouTube and also just to remind people that you also have a channel uh at rod desai people should go check out the youtube channel you've been sharing a lot of your own commentary as well as other discussions with other people it's very valuable you alluded to your i mean we had one question about that to follow up on the you know what happened to the monroe doctrine which was supposed to be defense strategy we heard about you know last spring so it's been a year it seems that they've so there are many things that people will learn they should also go to your channel and i just in closing for listeners just one i didn't mention it uh at the start but i put it in the chat uh please do donate to spox for gaza the small private online courses that mit students have organized through their platform i'm going to this summer they need um you know, internet access and data packages, as well as hiring local Gazan graduate students as TAs to realize the kind of course objectives. I myself will be teaching one this summer called Guerrilla History, Anticolonial Resistance History Theory Practice. And please help make it possible for Gazan students to continue their education. So I put the link. Please donate generously. And so until next time, comrades, peace with solidarity, free Palestine.

Benji Schoendorff: Sweet victory today.

Radhika Desai: I have a Palestinian flag right there. I have to relocate it.

Adnan Husain: Again, thank you so much, Radhika, and to all of you for listening and joining. We'll see you soon, inshallah.

Radhika Desai: Inshallah. Thank you.

Adnan Husain: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.