This page features a selection of journal articles and book chapters written by Radhika Desai.
For a full list visit Radhika’s Academia page
Articles
On 4 June 2024, India emerged from the Modi miasma into which its corporate leaders had cast it. Bankrolling by ‘India, Inc.’ had created a mystique of invincibility around the Prime Minister. This was further inflated by India’s godi [lapdog] media, which parroted claims that Modi was the most popular leader in the world.1 Beloved of billionaires and Bollywood stars, yet pure and pious, never forgetting his modest origins, bringing happiness to the humblest homes, he had unleashed the animal spirits of the Indian economy, now set to overtake China’s as a world powerhouse, a hightech and service-centre hub, while showering cooking-gas cylinders and flushable toilets upon the grateful poor. It could not last. The economic policy demanded—and received—by India, Inc. required imposing economic pain of a scale and severity that could not be electorally costless. The money- and media-driven inflation of the Modi cult could not defer payment forever and in 2024, votes finally dispelled the vapours money generated
In Spring 2024, I met Radhika Desai for the first time at the London School of Economics and Political Science when we both held visiting positions at the Department of International Development as invited scholarly visitors. Although I had not expected her presence, I immediately recognized her after having been a reader of her works on geopolitical economy when developing my own ideas about the political economy of Chinese media and communications. I introduced myself and started talking with her, first at a coffee shop, then in a small office inside LSE’s Connaught House, and later at the Marx Memorial Library in London for a book launch party. Prompted by my questions rooted in the field of media and communication, Radhika Desai shared ideas from her newly published book, Capitalism, Coronavirus, and War: A Geopolitical Economy (Routledge, 2023), which is being translated into Chinese, her critiques about imperialism, globalization and essentially the world order after decades of neoliberalism, and, furthermore, her hopes for China, BRICS, and, ultimately, for the political left. Now, these conversations are turned into a dialogue piece, and with it I hope Communication and the Public readers will sense my gains from Radhika Desai, that is, to paraphrase from the famous line from the Communist Manifesto, in the digital age when all that is solid melts into ostensibly immaterial communication, man/woman is at last compelled to face with sober senses the real conditions of life and his or her relations with their kind.
Introduction: With the world order undergoing shifts amounting to an earthquake, Mick Dunford’s (2023) article provides an illuminating historical account of the seismic activity in which that earthquake principally originated: the material development of the People’s Republic of China, its course and its determinants. While it is common to refer to this earthquake with general labels like ‘the advance of multipolarity’, ‘the rise of the rest’, ‘the shift in the centre of gravity of the world economy away from the West’ or ‘the rise of the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]’, the contribution of the People’s Republic of China in this development is so overwhelming that telling the story of this shift in the world order without singling it out is like staging Hamlet without the prince.
The “World Political Parties Forum” with the theme “World Political Parties and Building a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity” was held online on 9 November 2023. Prof. Radhika Desai made a speech “The Domestic Foundations of Multipolarity and the Role of Political Parties,” Dr. Patrick Theuret gave a speech “From Hegemonic War to Peace for a Destiny Shared by the Whole Humanity,” Associate Professor Rocco Lacorte gave a speech “Research on Governing Capacity Construction from the Perspective of World Political Parties,” and Prof. Alberto Lombardo gave a speech “Building a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity.”
The “World Political Parties Forum” with the theme “World Political Parties and Building a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity” was held online on 9 November 2023. Prof. Radhika Desai made a speech “The Domestic Foundations of Multipolarity and the Role of Political Parties,” Dr. Patrick Theuret gave a speech “From Hegemonic War to Peace for a Destiny Shared by the Whole Humanity,” Associate Professor Rocco Lacorte gave a speech “Research on Governing Capacity Construction from the Perspective of World Political Parties,” and Prof. Alberto Lombardo gave a speech “Building a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity.”
Few realise that amid rising international tensions, inter alia over Ukraine, Taiwan of China, Iran and AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States), nuclear arms control is today almost entirely dismantled and a manifestly declining and desperate US has launched a new nuclear arms, now also targeting China, making war and even nuclear war seem increasingly possible. The political and geopolitical economy of nuclear proliferation and control here highlights the singular role of the US in driving the arms race, arguing that the US desire to dominate the world economy, not the Cold War, caused the nuclear arms race; that the only surviving arms control treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has become more a channel for proliferation than a dam against it; and that the US used the NPT to justify its post–Cold War international aggression against some countries while violating it to aid allies.
Capitalism is having a bad 21st century. The East Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 heralded it, the stock market crash of 2000 inaugurated it, and the 2008 financial crisis nearly destroyed it. However, capitalist classes retained political power and neoliberal financialised capitalism, the result of the still-unresolved Long Downturn dating back to the 1970s, malingered on. While neoliberalism ideology continued celebrating capitalism, it clocked ever-lower growth, generated ever-greater inequality, and inflicted ever- more ecological damage. Millions of young people began striking school to demand governments and corporations act to halt the climate emergency, only to be interrupted by another disastrous result of capitalism’s dysfunctional relation to nature, the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic.The concatenation of public health, economic, financial and ecological crises that accompanied it threatens complete social and political breakdown.
Modern thinking about the good society has inevitably involved the conception of plenty created by the development of the social productive capacities of human societies that has been advancing so spectacularly for centuries now. This is true whether we think of Marx and Engels’s vision of ‘Scientific’ as opposed to ‘Utopian’ socialism (Engels 1970[1880]) or of Keynes’s (1963[1930]) vision of the ‘Economic possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Production and its technology were critical. Though in our own times ecological challenges – of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution – have caused many to speak of ‘degrowth’ (Victor, 2008 is a persuasive argument), and while these perspectives are certainly right to say point to the environmental consequences of growth and of the endless and mindless desire to consume, we must make at least three caveats. First, over the neoliberal decades, growth has been slower even as ecological damage has accelerated. Clearly, low growth per se is not synonymous with environmental protection. Depending on how growth is measures, a very green economy that cuts down on resource and land use and even eliminates fossil fuel consumption could register as growth. Second, the challenges themselves imply better technology that works in harmony with the natural environment even without growth. So socially determined priorities for production and a cultural sphere free of the commercial impulses that stimulate meaningless and socially destructive consumption will be critically necessary. Finally, action on the environment therefore assumes, even if this is not always specified in so many words, a democratically planned economy of precisely the sort that Marx or Keynes had in mind
This introduction frames the contributions that follow in a reflection on how the Japanese experience has been assimilated in US debates on economic policy, on the larger historical significance of the current slowdown of all advanced economies and how it relates to Hansen’s original concerns about secular stagnation.
Western discourse towards China had been hardening since it became clear to US leaders that their assumption that increasing trade and engagement with China would lead it to become a pale imitation of Western neoliberal financialised capitalisms was coming unravelled and China continued to adhere to its socialist commitments. In waging the US’s New Cold War on China with equal if not greater vigour than Trump, Biden merely replaced Trump’s “America First” stance with the traditionally hypocritical stance of imperialism that always pretends to do good for the world it seeks to dominate, oppress, exploit and otherwise destroy. The latest version of this discourse is about promoting human rights and democracy. At a time when US and Western democracies are being assailed by a toxic combination of inequality, poverty, distrust, social division and political disaffection and polarisation, at a time when US imperialism’s distinctly anti-democratic edge is becoming ever more evident, this stance is only facing mounting contradictions. The present article explores them.
From Immanuel Ness (ed) Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, 2016. This Chapter reviews the growing cooperation among Southern states in trade, economic assistance, and forms of economic sustenance for the mutual benefit of undeveloped countries and developing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Even as economic trade among states in the global South with the West is growing in an unequal manner, the chapter demonstrates that new more equitable economic relationships are developing among emerging countries of the South, for example, China and Africa. These new forms of trade are providing expanding opportunities which may reduce dependence on the imperialist core.
This short article explores the conception of the international relations of the capitalist world embedded in the last section of the Grundrisse, titled ‘Bastiat and Carey’. It shows that, contrary to the widespread tendency to take Marx as a theorist of ‘globalization’, Marx actually took the existence of nation-states and national economies seriously and conceived of their interrelations as arising from the contradictions of capitalism.
The argument of this paper, completed at the end of December 2020, has become more relevant today as the US withdrawal from Afghanistan underlines much of what we say about the decline of US power. They include the following: There are limits to the USs so-called exorbitant privilege and they have dictated the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Triffin Dilemma of US current account and budget deficits putting downward pressure on the dollar never went away. Today, when a decade of Quantitative Easing has been topped by even greater money creation, the dollar is sinking, generating pressures to raise taxes and cut spending. The financializations that the US has employed in recent decades to keep money flowing into the dollar creditocracy and hold up the dollar’s value have been sustained by Federal Reserve support for major asset markets.
Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production. That analysis could illuminate how capitalism’s contradictions drive its imperialist expansionism and how and why resistance to it must, equally necessarily, take national forms. As a result, major currents of Marxism in the West either have paid attention to imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance but without Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production or have insisted that their (mistaken) conception of Marx’s analysis implies that capitalism has no necessary connection with imperialism. Neither tradition can actually develop Marxism to comprehend the actual historical record of revolutions since Marx’s time. Neither can inform new mobilisations against capitalism, whether in or outside its homelands. It is high time we return to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as value production and develop it.
Mel Watkins is gone. He was one of one or two handfuls of leading figures on the Canadian left whose work marked the country and its left deeply. The Society for Socialist Studies is proud to count him as one of its founding and, for many years, active members.
The articles in this special issue are placed in the context of the crisis of multilateralism and of the post-war Bretton Woods arrangements that was already in train before the pandemic, with its economic, political and international reverberations, accelerated, widened and deepened it.
This paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, at the root of the contrasting performance of the US and China amid the pandemic are the contrasting ways in which the two societies have come to organize their economies, particularly their money and credit systems. These differences are not widely recognized, let alone analyzed. Secondly, these contrasts emerge from the longer history of antagonisms in the geopolitical economy of world capitalism and its dialectic of uneven and combined development. This dialectic between and dominant nations and those contesting their domination have typically featured contrasting monetary and financial systems.
The articles in this special issue are placed in the context of the crisis of multilateralism and of the post-war Bretton Woods arrangements that was already in train before the pandemic, with its economic, political and international reverberations, accelerated, widened and deepened it.
The idea of convergence took a blow with the demise of the USSR and another with widely diverging economic performance of the US and communist China amid the pandemic. In this short contribution, I explore how James Galbraith and George Tsagolov handle this problem with very different arguments. I then show that, if we were to trace the longer lineage of the ideas of convergence and the new industrial state to Marx and Engels, we can vindicate them more fully and thoroughly than either attempt.
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) returned to public discourse in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union imploded and globalization erupted. Best known for The Great Transformation, Polanyi’s wide-ranging thought anticipated twenty-first-century civilizational challenges of ecological collapse, social disintegration and international conflict, and warned that the unbridled domination of market capitalism would engender nationalist protective counter-movements. In Karl Polanyi and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, Radhika Desai and Kari Polanyi Levitt bring together prominent and new thinkers in the field to extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi’s life and work.
The financialisation of capitalism in recent decades has prompted a vast literature on the subject. Given the leading role of Marxist and Marxisant scholars in it, the question of the relevance of Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910) to understanding financialisation has naturally risen. However, serious discussions have judged any such relevance to be limited. Costas Lapavitsas’ verdict is that Hilferding’s concept of finance capital, which denoted the relation between banks and industry in the monopoly capitalism entered in the late nineteenth century, also considered the most developed and mature form of the relation, needs to be treated ‘with considerable caution.’
We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a‘peace dividend’– remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.
This introduction places the contributions that follow in the context of Polanyi’s rising influence, its causes and effects, and of the key twenty-first century developments that make his oeuvre more relevant than ever. It emphasizes how the contributions push the boundaries of received understandings of Polanyi. While some contributions fill gaping holes, such as those on money as a fictitious commodity, others overturn received understandings, whether that of the double movement or fictitious commodities, or the provenance (Central European or American) of his principal ideas and concerns or how he understood socialism. Yet others demonstrate how amenable Polanyi’s ideas are to further development. Last but not least, the introduction outlines Polanyi’s historical diagnosis as it emerges from these innovative contributions and argues that the stark choice he felt faced European societies, socialism or fascism, is once again before us as we face the groundswell of nationalist and far right forces.
Polanyi’s ‘great transformation’ refers to the ‘collapse’ of ‘nineteenth century civilization’ and the emergence from it of a vastly different one. The The story revolved around the unfolding consequences of the commodification of three fictitious commodities: land, labour and money. However, the consequences of the commodification of the last structured the dramatic plot of The Great Transformation (TGT). Though the gold standard, the apex structure commodifying money, was only one of four institutions whose collapse brought down nineteenth-century civilization (the others being the self-regulating market, the liberal state and the balance of power), its collapse was ‘the proximate cause of the catastrophe’ (3). By the time it failed, most of the other institutions ‘had been sacrificed in a vain effort to save it’ (3).
According to popular Western understanding, the Cold War was a political, geopolitical, and ideological confrontation between capitalism and communism, pitting the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe, North America, andJapan, led by the USA, against the Communist Soviet Union and allied Eastern Bloc. It began after the Second World War and turned nuclear when the Soviets acquired atomic weapons in1949. Though the prospect of nuclear Armageddon prompted mass movements against nuclear weapons, and though the world came very close to it at least once, there was no nuclear war: deterrence worked.
Common Dreams or Vulgar Delusions? Elite Preoccupations in Discourses about the ‘Commons’ 3 Our age is witness to a proliferation of discourses about the ‘commons’. They are emerging from more and more quarters, and the word is being applied to more things than ever before. One important strand of discourse, claiming to be communist, seeks to apply it to all kinds of spheres, from the earth and its natural bounty to culture, and to all sorts of resources, from the most immaterial, such as common knowledge, to the most material, such as the use of the earth’s finite natural resources. Internet activists refer to information and knowledge that exits on the web as the ‘digital commons’. Businesses, powerful countries, and international agencies, while they do not invoke the ‘commons’ in discussions of domestic policy, are in the forefront of invoking the notion of ‘commons’ in the international sphere, applying it to impressive array of spheres, from the high seas to airspace, to outer space and cyberspace. There is a notion to apply the term only to ‘non-excludable’ goods, goods whose enjoyment by some does not prevent that by others, either because they are plentiful, such as the fresh air, or because they are not ‘used up’ by any single user, such as a song. There is, however, the idea to also apply it to excludable goods too, such as food or housing, or health-care, or schools and universities, or social services, which, they argue, should be shared in some fashion that is fair and just beyond present, typically capitalist, arrangements.
We consider Samir Amin’s last political will and testament as a commission to the international left. From the perspective of geopolitical economy, which has much in common with what Samir called the world-wide law of value and delinking, accepting this commission requires the left to correct course from that on which much of the western left, at least, has been set over the past many decades, losing its way on questions of imperialism and productive organization. We discuss the questions of imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance, contradiction, reform and revolution and political organization as they arise from Samir’s text.
As the end of the Second World War hove into view around 1943, the British intellectual scene lit up with discussion about how to reshape British society after the war. A broad agreement that governments must cure social ills and guard against its national government, planning, rationing, “fair shares” and “equal sacrifices,” and underfeeding.” However, this consensus was rooted in the rise of welfarism and social imperialism that challenged the verities of the reigning liberalism in economic policy well before the First World War and the rise of a decidedly left-of-center Depression-era “middle opinion” that encompassed not only liberals like Keynes but also many conservative politicians.
An overview of where Classical Political Economy and the solution to its driving problems stood when Marx began his engagement with it in the 1850s. Topics include: Marx and Political Economy; Political Economy, Classical and Vulgar; Capitalism as a Historical Mode of Production; Civil Society … ; … and its Volatile Expansionism; Value, the Unseen Regulator; Distribution; Biological Economy, the Real Dismal Science; Ricardo’s Antinomies; and Conclusion.
Despite signs over the decades that the world role of the dollar has been problematic, and much recent commentary pointing to signs that de-dollarization is happening, questioning of the role of the dollar in the international monetary system has been remarkably untheoretical and unhistorical fashion. Since no heap of facts, no matter how large, can amount to an argument, this is a serious intellectual liability. Moreover, the world has been paying, at least the 1980s, a heavy price for this lack of understanding. The purpose of this paper is to clear up this misunderstanding by pointing to the largely ignored intimate and necessary relationship between financialization-of the Western economies and the pressures they generate for the rest of the world to follow suit, exposing them to dangerous financial and currency volatility-and the dollar-centred international monetary system. This relationship can only be understood by putting the dollar’s world role in the longer historical perspective of the modern international monetary system, going back to the role of the pound sterling under to so-called international gold standard.
Keynes’s writing is bookended by major exertions on international monetary subjects. Indian Currency and Finance (1913, hereafter ICF), generally regarded as a masterly description of the operation of the gold standard, opened an intellectual career centrally concerned with matters monetary. It closed with the Bretton Woods proposals for a new international monetary system for the post-war international world emerging from the Thirty Years’ Crisis of 1914–45, based on a thorough critique of the imperial one that entered it. As originally proposed, these arrangements were designed to allow ‘each country to pursue its national objectives of full employment and price stability’ (Dostaler 2007, p. 206), rather than sacrifice them to exchange rate stability as the gold standard required. These proposals were defeated by the US’s vain desire to install the dollar as the world’s currency on the model of sterling before 1914 (Desai 2013). However, the regularity with which they pop up in discussions of the reform of the international monetary system even today shows that they were in advance of historical possibilities (Desai 2009) and remain a lodestar.
The Dominant questions in Indian politics today concern Hindutva and the Modi government: What accounts fr such success as it has enjoyed? How firm and lasting is its hold on power? And, more generally, what does it mean for Indian politics? Is it just a continuation of politics as before, with the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the Sangh Parivar simply replacing Congress as the ‘dominant party’? Or do Modi’s government and through it the proximity of the Sangh Parivar to state power represent something altogether more serious and fearsome, an unbridled turn under Hindutva’s first majority government, to fascist modes of governance with all their authoritarianism, para-state violence and excoriation of public institutions? Either way, what does it portend for secular and democratic, let alone socialist, feminist and anti-casteist, forces seeking to oppose the present government and Hindutva in general?
“While the classical theories of imperialism could have been corrected, elaborated, developed and updated, their summary displacement was certainly an intellectual step backward. … In what follows, I first review three Long Ends of the First World War. While two, in their different ways, put it at the end of the Second World War, the third, Eric Hobsbawm’s (1989 and 1994) is a longer, open-ended and prescient one. I go on to introduce the new conception of the dynamics of the capitalist world order I recently proposed, geopolitical economy (Desai 2013 and further elaborated in Desai 2015, 2016a and 2016b). It permits us to link the classical accounts of imperialism and the related concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) to contemporary multipolarity. I also dwell on the intellectual shifts that have made it difficult for this to be more widely appreciated.
Access full article at Radhika’a Academia.edu page
Generally speaking, more is written about the Left than the Right. On the one hand, the Right is not particularly cerebral (in one of the rare unequivocal statements he made, John Stuart Mill called the Tories the ‘stupid party’) or politically ambitious. The politics of ‘easy as she goes’ is unlikely to yield much in the way of profound cogitation. By contrast, the history of all Left parties is that of internal political struggles over the right organizational strategy and tactics, the right analyses of political situations, domestically and internationally, and the right policies to adopt and advocate in pursuit of goals that aspire and threaten to change society quite radically, even when they pursue reforms and not revolutions. So, the self-generated literature of the Left is, unsurprisingly, far more voluminous than that of the Right. On the other hand, the established ruling classes typically scrutinize the Left, like all else they find troublesome, inconvenient and threatening, quite closely. So to the literature of debate and self-analysis is added that of inquisition.
A review essay on Jairus Banaji (ed), Fascism: Essays on India and Europe, Economic and Political Weekly
Comparisons between the Sangh Parivar and interwar European fascisms are inescapable. The founders of the Sangh were inspired by, and emulated and adapted, those fascisms (Casolari 2000). The Parivars proliferating role in Indian politics also periodically suggested the comparison, whether to politicians such as Indira Gandhi in the 1970s or to intellectuals after the demolition of the Babri Mosque (Sarkar in the volume being reviewed; Ahmad 1993; Basu et al 1993). Other scholars have questioned the relevance of the comparison (Vanaik 1994; Jaffrelot 1993), though not very successfully (Desai 2016). While political parties have often engaged in similar political tacticslet us confine ourselves to Sanjay Gandhis Youth Congress and the 1984 massacre of Sikhs or the Shiv Senas long record of union and basti-bustingno partys activities have so systematically elicited comparisons with fascism as those of the party of Hindutva.
Though some would confine the applicability of the concept of fascism to Europe, others would conflate it with communism (through the concept of totalitarianism) and yet others who cannot think about the problem of fascism except in connection with anti-Semitism and the holocaust, the possibility of fascism lurks in all capitalist societies in which mass politics has arrived. To be sure, it is not the normal form of capitalist rule. However, along with dictatorshipmilitary or civilianand Bonapartism, it is one of the authoritarian forms of capitalist rule that have become possible and necessary for capitalism at times when existing forms of rule either no longer sufficed or were seen not to suffice. That is why Horkheimer said, He who will not speak about capitalism should keep silent about fascism too.
In the summer of 2016 the Indian press was awash with a jubilant nostalgia. Exactly a quarter century before, Narasimha Rao’s Congress minority government had had taken major steps to liberalize the Indian economy with former World Bank economist, Dr Manmohan Singh, at the helm as Finance Minister. Rao’s government has been elected amid a concatenation of political and economic crises – the collapse of the previous coalition government of smaller regionally based parties, the assassination of former Congress Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, on the campaign trail in the general election that ensued, the minority Congress government that was its verdict and a full-blown balance of payments crisis, complete with resort to an IMF loan with its attendant conditionalities.
Die Debatte fand am 20. Mai 2016 unter dem Titel »Widersprüche der nationalen Befreiung« statt im Rahmen eines Plenums der XX. Internationalen InkriT-Tagung, »Widersprüche des Nationalen« (19.-22. Mai 2016).
In this introduction, we provide an overall framing of the articles that follow by placing the Ukraine conflict which today embroils the West in confrontation with Russia, within an historical account of the geopolitical economy of contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of imperialism in the twenty-first century, taking particular account of the decline of US and Western power and the rise of other centres of economic and military power, which are able to resist and contest Western power. We pay particular attention to how today’s geopolitical flashpoints, of which Ukraine is among the most critical, emerged to belie post-Cold War expectations of a “peace dividend” and a “unipolar” world, clearly distinguishing the US and the EU roles in these processes. Given the widespread tendency in the West to label Russia “imperialist,” particularly after the integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation, we end our discussion with a consideration of this question which concludes that the term, while it continues to be an appropriate description of the pattern of Western actions, is not so for that of Russian ones.
The question of Hindutva’s fascist character is an old one, having exercised leaders of the Congress party well before Independence. It came up again in the 1970s when Indira Gandhi flung accusations of fascism at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as it put its organized muscle into the JP movement (led by Gandhian socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan) against her rule.
One of the least appreciated aspects of the Arab Revolutions that opened the second decade of the twenty-first century was that they toppled the most enduring dictatorships sponsored by the USA in a region of immense strategic importance to it, the most pre-eminent among them, Egypt, also the most populous Arab nation. However, a world inured to regarding the USA as more or less omnipotent has been slow to register this and to work out its implications for the complex and still-unfolding fate of the revolutions and what they herald for the world order. This only compounds the problem of understanding contemporary developments in a region already legendary for the complexity of its politics and political economy, and, we may add, its geopolitics and geopolitical economy.
This chapter argues that Marxist economics cannot explain the present crisis because, as a discipline, it is not geared to. It is an oxymoron attempting fit Marxism to the methodological frame of marginalist neoclassical economics. The latter is antithetical to Marxism because it is ahistorical. In place of Marxist economics, this chapter proposes a geopolitical economy which exploits the resources of the historical the traditions of classical political economy and the critics of neoclassical economics in a way that enables us to view the present crisis in its historical and world perspective. It proceeds by first outlining a critique of Marxist economics and follows it up with a discussion of the variety of forms of capitalist crises. These discussions clear the ground for a historical view of value production and an understanding of the drivers of its own history. A full account of the present crisis being impossible here, the chapter closes with sketches of how geopolitical economy would approach two key elements of it: consumption demand and international capital flows.
This response essay begins by outlining Geopolitical Economy’s historical interpretation of Marxism. It then engages with Rick Wolff’s suggestions for further discussion of relations between capitalist and noncapitalist parts of the world, addresses the definitions of key terms, and responds to his alternative thesis about the fate of Western working classes. It then argues that Kristjanson-Gural’s concern about the book’s critique of Marxist economics assumes that the critique is considerably milder than it is. It finds that McIntyre’s arguments about U.S. capitalist success do not translate into arguments for U.S hegemony and that his arguments about U.S. capitalism’s “Schumpeterian” victories are ill evidenced. Finally, this response provides more support for Kellogg’s arguments about the limitations of the latest attempt to demonstrate U.S. hegemony while taking up the issue of the origin of uneven and combined development (UCD) and also that of the “imperial” nature of the USSR, both questions of considerable import for any left politics.
As the 2008 financial crisis and the accompanying ‘Great Recession’ slowed growth in the advanced industrial countries, emerging economies continued to grow rapidly, accelerating a shift in the world’s economic centre of gravity towards the latter, particularly China, and giving the lineaments of a multipolar order a sharper definition. “Globalization’ and ’empire’, the dominant cosmopolitan approaches to understanding the contemporary world order as a more or less single seamless unit, lost their self-evidence. ‘Globalization’ had portrayed the world economy as unified by markets and ’empire’, by a leading state, most recently the US. For the former, no state mattered and for the latter, only one did; for both, the division of the modern capitalist world into a multitude of states was a fact of little consequence.
This introduction to the essays that follow argues that the chief problem with the dominant understanding of world affairs in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy, including their Marxist versions, is an a historical, non-contradictory and economically cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In their place, geopolitical economy is a new approach which returns to the conception of capitalism embodied in the culmination of classical political economy, Marxism. It was historical in two senses, distinguishing capitalism as a historically specific mode of social production involving by value production and understanding that its contradictions drive forward capitalism’s own history in a central way. This approach must further develop and specify uneven and combined development as the dominant pattern in the unfolding of capitalist international relations, one that is constitutive of its component states themselves. Secondly, it must understand the logic of the actions undertaken by capitalist states as emerging from the struggles involved in the formation of capitalist states and from the contradictions that are set in train once capitalism is established. Finally, it must see in the ways that class and national struggles and resulting state actions have modified the functioning of capitalism the possibilities of replacing the disorder, contestation and war that are the spontaneous result of capitalism for international relations the basis for a cooperative order in relations between states, an order which can also be the means for realising the permanent revolution and solidifying its gains on the international or world plane.
The Recent financial and economic crises have landed the world in unknown territory. Old maps no longer work. The crises have discredited not only neoclassical economics and neoliberal policy prescriptions (Independent Evaluation Office, 2011), but also (as I argue, Desai, 2013a) recently dominant conceptions of the capitalist world order, like ‘globalization’ and ’empire’, which assumed a single world economy. For the crises were neither ‘global’ nor ‘imperial’, neither imposing the same misery on all economies nor imposing more on the peripheral economies than the core ones. Instead, they widened the divergence between the stagnating advanced industrial world and the still fast-growing emerging economies even more.
This introduction contextualizes the articles that follow in a discussion of relevant elements of the critical theme of the “materiality of nations” in geopolitical economy. In particular, it focuses on the need to understand the evolution of capitalist states and their domestic and international economic roles in terms of the contradictions of capitalism; the need to unite the normally separated economic and political logics of capitalism in an overall historical understanding; the need to understand combined development as including capitalist combined development and the dialectic of uneven and combined development as the key driver of capitalist international relations.
This introduction frames the papers in this volume with a brief critique of how and why the dominant approaches to understanding world affairs obscure our understanding of the chief developments that have marked our age, and a discussion of the resources geopolitical economy can draw on to address the resulting deficiencies of understanding. It then goes on to discuss how the papers that follow demonstrate the gains from putting the geopolitical economy framework to work. They interrogate and challenge conventional wisdom in three broad areas the international monetary system, world trade and the requirements for successful combined development historically and today, when China’s own stunning combined development confronts other developing countries with new possibilities and constraints. The introduction closes with some necessarily brief reflections on the vast agenda for future research and discussion that remains to be tackled.
This essay reconstructs Narendra Modi’s path to power. The story of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s rise is explained in terms of its ability to gain the support of the “provincial propertied classes” in certain states, mainly in northern and western India. The immediate background to the 2014 elections and the making of the nexus between the capitalist classes and Modi’s BJP is recounted. The essay also looks at the extent and limits of Modi’s electoral achievement and concludes with reflections on the possibilities of resistance.
The owl of Minerva, Hegel once remarked, takes wing at dusk. Knowledge results from reflection after the tumult of the day. This gloomy view may be too sweeping, but it certainly applies to the multipolar world order. Influential figures began hailing it in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. The American president of the World Bank spoke of ‘a new, fast-evolving multi-polar world economy’ (World Bank, 2010). Veteran international financier George Soros predicted that ‘the current financial crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other countries in the developing world’ (2008). However, the multipolar world order was much longer in the making. Developments of this magnitude simply don’t happen overnight even in a crisis (though, as we shall see, emerging multipolarity was a decisive factor in causing it), and this has important implications for prevailing understandings of the capitalist world order.
This paper contests the cosmopolitan consensus in contemporary Marxism that Marx and Engels’s vision of capitalism was ‘global’ and that nations are essentially ‘cultural’ constructs. It contributes to a wider project arguing that nations are material by taking a closer look at Marx and Engels’s writings on free trade and protectionism and, in particular, at Marx’s notes on Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy (1841/56).
This examination shows that Marx and Engels had a keen understanding of the economic roles of states, national and imperial, and thought about free trade and protection in geopolitical terms. Though Marx aimed his characteristically caustic wit and forensic critique at List’s contradictions, silences, and hypocrisies as a bourgeois thinker, he accepted that nation-states played economic and geopolitical roles in a capitalist world and that developmental states were possible, indeed necessary. The ground for these arguments is prepared by outlining the centrality of the economic roles of states in the development of modern capitalism and by showing how the recent revival of Marxist accounts of capitalist geopolitics is hampered by a purely economic, non- or anti-statist conception of capitalism.
If Proudhonism in the 19th century was, as Marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, this paper argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by Badiou, Hardt and Negri and Žižek is a 21st century avatar of it. It speaks not for what Poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as Proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage-earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative class.’
A failure to comprehend the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and a general antipathy to any general organization of labour in society, and thus to any serious politics, are common to both. In addition, the paper shows that the protection of the cultural commons, the core of the project, is but a programme aiming for the continued reproduction of the creative class within capitalism. It is also prey to a series of misunderstandings – of the concept of the commons itself, of contemporary capitalism whose dynamics forms the backdrop of their project and key economic and political ideas of Marx whose authority they seek to attach to their project.
Commentators contemplating the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat swing between anxiously wondering whether it shows where the rest of the country is headed and complacent insistence that it is exceptional. Against the background of a wider understanding of the main drivers of Hindutva, and the pattern of its differential advance in the States and regions of India, this paper argues that the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat can be explained by a combination of three factors: aspects of its inherited caste and class structure; the levels and patterns of capitalist development; and the patterns of social polarisation their combination has produced.
Given the historic fragmentation of its upper castes, Gujarat’s specificity in providing exceptionally fertile ground for the growth and stabilisation of Hindutva can be attributed to the fast pace of its capitalist development and consequently fast economic advance of its middle castes and their social and political assimilation into the formerly Savarna ruling bloc through Hindutva. Given that the differences of inherited social structure and culture are differences of degree and not quality, and that capitalist and neo-liberal development is not questioned, indeed is zealously pursued everywhere in India, and given that social polarisation is considered an acceptable cost of development, Gujarat could well be the image of India’s future.
This is a prepublication version of an article which appeared in the World Review of Political Economy. Please cite as Desai, R. and A. Freeman. 2001. ‘Value and Crisis Theory in the “Great Recession”’. World Review of Political Economy. Vol 2 No. 1, Spring 2011. Pp 35-47. This article throws light on the current disarray among Marxist analyses of the present crisis. Focusing on recent discussions of “financialisation”, in particular a recent paper by Costas Lapavitsas, this article highlights a number of difficulties in these discussions and traces them to the absence of any theory of value.
Marx’s distinction between productive and unproductive capital—which includes finance capital—provides a coherent framework to analyse such phenomena and obviates the need for the false polarisation between the falling rate of profit and financialisation as factors in the crisis. In value terms, financialisation is a withdrawal from the sphere of production into the sphere of circulation provoked by falling profit rates. A financial asset is a capitalised claim on a stream of income whether or not it produces value and is itself an unproductive asset which generates no additional value and serves only to equalise the general rate of profit as a parasitic deduction from value generated elsewhere. This deepens and exacerbates the long run tendency of profits to fall. Financialisation is thus an aspect, and a particular form, of this long-run historical tendency, not an independent phenomenon running counter to it.
The Lok Sabha elections of 2004 defeated Hindutva in the moment of its greatest “Shining India’ hubris and those of 2009 saw an even worse performance on the part of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP descended into crisis as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) attempted to reassert control over, and force stock Hindutva themes back onto, the BJP. Hardly likely to yield electoral dividends – the focus on the economy and terrorism in 2004 and 2009 respectively had probably been justified – these moves were made amid a critical leadership transition. L. K. Advani, the party’s Prime Minister designate in 2009, resigned and the party of Hindutva was, for the first time since the 1960s, bereft of the Vajpayee-Advani leadershipt. While both the party and the RSS seemed agreed that leaders in their 50s such as Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh, Narendra Modi and Venkaiah Naidu should succeed, older leaders – Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie – still hungry for power, attacked their younger colleagues for causing the 2009 defeat (Vyas 2009; Noorani 2009). While tensions around RSS control and the exact dose of Hindutva in the BJP’s political message have persisted from the very moment the erstwhile Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) sought power in alliance with other parties – in the non-Congressism of the 1960s and the JP movement and the Janata government of the 1970s – the possibility that they could become unmanageable in the new circumstances could be discounted. No wonder then that the BJP was billed as being electorally in ‘retreat’ and organizationally in ‘crisis’ and ‘decline’ (Economic and Political Weekly 2009, Lokniti 2009, Noorani 2009, respectively).
As the current economic crisis, sometimes called the Great Recession, unfolds, a new phase in the history of capitalist development has clearly begun. three changes have come together. First, the economic and financial crisis has conclusively discredited neoliberalism, the free-market dogma responsible for the development crisis of recent decades. Second, growth in the rich countries, whose ‘Long Boom” of the 1950s and 1960s ended long ago in the persistent ‘Long Downturn” (Brenner, 2006), slowed to a near halt. By contrast, though most poor countries remained mired in the stagnation that hd plagued them since the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s, some of them, the so-called emerging economies, continued the rapid growth they had recently enjoyed, at least beginning to narrow the enormous gap in incomes and welfare with rich countries. Closing that gap had been the goal of the development project launched after World War II. For decades, substantial progress on it had eluded all but a few rather small countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan. Now, however, economic vibrancy has become possible for more countries, including two – China and India – that between them account for a third of humanity. This is a momentous development even though it leaves out too many countries and too many people even in the rapidly developing countries. Finally, less spectacular, but equally important, has been the turn during the 2000s, primarily in Latin America, to progressive policies that flout the tenets of neoliberalism and put popular welfare at the centre of the development agenda once again. This political shift has signalled at least a start in confronting the legendary inequality of the region.
It would appear that India is having a good crisis. Despite initial appearances to the contrary, the Great Recession turned out to be anything but ‘global’. While the advanced industrial countries, pre-eminently the US, were hardest hit, growth in the emerging economies, India prominent among them, slowed only momentarily. As the crisis wore on and growth differentials widened, it became clear that the emerging countries were increasingly becoming the motors of world growth, thereby signalling an acceleration of the geopolitical shift of capitalism’s centre of gravity away from the US and the advanced industrial world and towards them. This shift was announced by Goldman Sachs in its famous ‘BRIC’ thesis almost a decade ago. But its pace was slower then, thanks to the US-dominated world financial system funnelling so much of the world’s capital, and demand, into the US economy.
This chapter challenges the denial of “underconsumption” – the role of consumption demand in capitalist reproduction and its paucity in crises – in contemporary Marxism. At stake are better understandings not only of crisis theory but also, inter alia, of imperialism, “reformism,” and Marx’s intellectual legacy. The chapter shows how the centrality of consumption demand is underlined in the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse, and goes on to discuss the origins, weaknesses, and persistence of this denial. The chapter also shows that Marx did not regard underconsumption as a moralistic argument about unfulfilled need. The denial originates not in Marx but in productionism, the idea that capitalism is a system of ‘‘production for production’s sake.’’
The first Marxist theories of capitalist geopolitics emerged in the early 20th century as theories of imperialism and uneven and combined development. They were also the first theories of capitalist geopolitics. While they explained the intensification of imperialism through new interpénétrations of politics and economics in national states and economies, the revival of Marxist thinking about capitalist geopolitics in the English-speaking world in recent decades suffers from a pure, purely economic, conception of capitalism, uncontaminated by politics, by nation-states. It is, as a consequence, also a cosmopolitan conception of capitalism.
In it the very object of study disappears. This article argues that it does so because so many Marxists have come to share the cosmopolitan biases of mainstream thinking by accepting the discourses of “globalization” and “empire” and shows how this is so in the case of two pioneers of the recent revival of Marxist geopolitical thinking, Justin Rosenberg and Benno Teschke.
This introduction provides the historical and intellectual historical context for our thesis of the transition from developmental to cultural nationalisms. After settling issues of definition and periodisation in relation to nations, nationalisms and the international order, I outline how, in all the main phases in the three-century long birth of the international world out of one of empires, capitalist and precapitalist, in tandem with the spread of capitalism (and initially, imperialism), nations and nationalisms were understood and, often revealingly, misunderstood. Three main distorting factors accounted for the misunderstandings: 1) the implication of nations and nationalisms in the spread of capitalism was ignored; 2) their role, in comparison with imperialism, the other major geopolitical dynamic of the past few centuries, was underestimated; and 3) capitalism was understood, one-sidedly, as a universalising force, a prejudice reinforced by imperialism (especially when it was largely the imperialism of one country, England, in the 19th century). The universal Enlightenment intellectual temper also played a role and it is not surprising, in retrospect, that scholarship on nationalism burgeoned precisely at the time, in the last third of the 20th century, when attention to difference and particularity and the questioning of universal thinking became the leading intellectual trend. This scholarship, however, only accentuated the dominant tendency to understand nations culturally, in separation from political economy and it proved unable to stall the force of the mistaken ‘globalisation’ thesis about the decline of nations and nationalisms. Throughout this discussion critical insights which more-or-less escaped these distortions and detected the intertwining of culture and political economy in nationalism are noted.
In this article, I argue that Keynes relevance in the current crisis goes deeper than these extensive but superficial references to him reveal. Like several others e.g. Susan George (2007), George Monbiot (2003) and Joseph Stiglitz (2006) I take Keynes original proposals at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 as the starting point for reconstructing world economic and monetary governance for a post-neoliberal world. Unlike them, however, I explain Keynes defeat at Bretton Woods, historically and argue that prospects for an acceptance of his ideas are better today. Unlike them, I also attempt to restore to Keynes ideas their original coherence and integrity. This is necessary because the real inspiration behind Keynes original Bretton Woods proposals is only dimly understood; because these proposals are not easily separated from his ideas about the management of domestic economies for full employment; because, taken together, these ideas constitute a far more radical critique of capitalism than is usually appreciated; because, and partly as a consequence, important disputes over the interpretation of Keynes own ideas, especially between his influential followers who sought to assimilate him into the neoclassical economics he criticised and the small band of those who sought to rescue him from this fate, persist; because the left, for the most part, has tended to see Keynes as a mere reformist and thus not worthy of attention; and because the reasons why so many of the key elements of Keynes proposals were rejected at Bretton Woods remain unclear.
The twenty-first century opened with the world’s sole superpower fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq and threatening war against several other states in a new unilaterally aggressive and militarist mode. Only a decade before, having triumphed over communism, the United States had attempted a combination of multilateralism and commercialism, festooned with themes of human rights and democracy, in the discourse and practices of globalization. Although many had legitimately criticized globalization and its military interventions in the name of human rights and democracy as imperial, the brazen swagger of the new imperialism of the twenty-first century seemed a dramatic reversal. The tide of literature on globalization, which had risen so high so fast during the 1990s, now ebbed just as rapidly, and the waters of a new wave of writing on imperialism rushed in.
The twenty-first century opened with the world’s sole superpower fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq and threatening war against several other states in a new unilaterally aggressive and militarist mode. Only a decade before, having triumphed over communism, the United States had attempted a combination of multilateralism and commercialism, festooned with themes of human rights and democracy, in the discourse and practices of globalization. Although many had legitimately criticized globalization and its military interventions in the name of human rights and democracy as imperial, the brazen swagger of the new imperialism of the twenty-first century seemed a dramatic reversal. The tide of literature on globalization, which had risen so high so fast during the 1990s, now ebbed just as rapidly, and the waters of a new wave of writing on imperialism rushed in.
That developmental and cultural nationalisms had opposite foci should not imply that developmental nationalisms comprised only political economy and cultural nationalisms only cultural politics. It does mean, however, that within each of these historical types of nationalism (and presumably other such historical categories may be elaborated by improving the still rudimentary framework we propose and extending it to other periods in nationalisms’ history) both aspects acquired a distinctive settled form.
This conclusion indicates the chief ways in which the contributions illuminate, elaborate and interrogate the political economy and cultural politics of developmental nationalisms and of cultural nationalisms and the transitions between them. One-sidedly, it emphasizes coherence, conformity and elaboration, where possible in the voices of the contributors themselves, leaving the task of reflecting on dissonances and the outstanding questions the contributors raise, fittingly perhaps, for a future station in the journey of this idea.
… National cultural particularity was further occluded by universal principles in the French case and by shared culture and language with the mother … RADHIKA DESAI … it enjoys this absolute right as the bearer of the world spirit, the spirits of other nations are without rights, and like …
Das kommerzielle Hindi-Kino Bombays spiegelt nicht nur die indische Politik wider, sondern gestaltet sie oftmals mit: zwischen beiden besteht eine enge und reflexive Beziehung. In den 1950ern besaß das Hindi-Kino einen weitgehend entwicklungsfokussierten, proto-sozialistischen und egalitären Charakter. In den 1960ern reflektierte es die enttäuschten Hoffnungen der nationalistischen Bewegung. Die Filme der 1970er Jahre griffen soziale Themen wie Kaste, Gender und Klasse auf und brachten eine beträchtliche Anzahl von Filmen hervor, denen die Verbindung von hoher Qualität, komnierziellem Erfolg und Sozialkritik gelang. Nach der „verlorenen Dekade“ der 1980er, in der die Videorevolution die Demografie des Kinopublikums grundlegend veränderte und das Kino Bombays in einem Morast aus Unterfinanzierung, schlechter Qualität und einem Übermaß an Sex und Gewalt versank, erlebte es in den 1990ern und zu Beginn des neuen Jahrhunderts einen neuen Aufschwung. Der Kontext, in dem sich dieser vollzog, wurde durch eine Reihe wichtiger Entwicklungen bestimmt, von denen die Politik des Hindu-Nationalismus die bedeutendste darstellte. Seine enge Beziehung zum Hindi-Kino ähnelte der zur entwicklungsfixierten Politik der Kongressregierung in früheren Dekaden und spielte eine Schlüsselrolle im jüngsten Revival des Kinos.
Nations imagine themselves eternal and immutable just as fervently as they must reinvent themselves continuously. If they are, as Tom Nairn puts it, “a modern form of community,” they embody the contradiction between the noun and the adjective. They can be, at best, precarious balancing acts between modernity’s capitalism and commodification, which corrode community, and the compulsion to create minimal meanings and solidarities. As modern capitalist societies, nations are not serial sums of their members. National communities are hierarchically structured by the inequalities that capitalism creates among the groups that constitute them, and national cultures and ideologies of nationalism must somehow manage to articulate community out of, and despite, the inequalities. Changes in the orders of inequality which nations really are must be articulated in the national discourse by changes in its characteristic themes, idioms, and figures, by new inclusions, exclusions, and reorderings. This paper is about an instance of such changes.
India is hardly the only country to suffer from having a brilliant future, even a glorious past, but always an unsatisfactory—if not wretched—present. The condition used to be called underdevelopment and, after centuries of capitalism and decades of “development,” it still affects most of the countries of the world, about 5/6th’s of the world’s population. But the word and the theories it represented—of dependency and imperialism—have all but disappeared from the discourse of social science. These theories were never part of social science’s dominant discourse, but in the 1960s and 1970s they enjoyed a substantial presence, challenging the orthodoxies of modernization theory, the reigning discourse articulating the economic position and prospects of the third world in the 1960s. Against modernization theory’s arguments that free markets, free trade, and free financial flows would foster development and end “backwardness,” dependency theory insisted that underdevelopment (not an original backwardness) was the result of precisely these policies.
While many dependency theorists concluded that no development was possible under capitalism, others suggested that with extensive state intervention, managed trade, and control over Radhika Desai is professor in the department of political studies at the University of Manitoba, and the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics. This article was first published as “Indien: Endlich ein Land der Gegenwart?” In Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung 17, no. 67 (September 2006): 60-75, tr. Jörg Goldberg. International Journal | Autumn 2007 | 781 | | | Radhika Desai | international financial movements a version of it could be achieved. Soon after dependency theory emerged, however, the neoliberal offensive commenced. Neoliberalism’s political success (it was never an intellectual one) came in tandem with the broader advance of the “new right” globally. The result was to occlude talk of imperialism, dependency, and underdevelopment.
Even as the literature on US imperialism proliferates, US military and political failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have become apparent, and the hollowness of the economic and financial foundations of the US imperial enterprise has been revealed. This article attempts a new interpretation of the more important dynamics of US imperialism from the birth of the republic to its present quagmire in the oil-lands of the East, focusing on its weaknesses. It argues that, while the US state has been expansionist and imperial from its earliest days the reality of its imperial achievement has been shallower than that of any previous empire, prompting the need for qualifiers like ’empire like no other’, ‘soft power’, etc. The article concludes tentatively by pointing to the chief elements in the contemporary conjuncture which lead us to expect the end of empires altogether.
Neoliberalism was always more than a set of economic theories and they were far less successfully or consistently applied. Building on my earlier work on the Thatcherite think-tanks which attempted to place them in their wider political context, this paper explores one aspect further – the close political relations within the new right between neoliberalism and a host of socially and culturally authoritarian tendencies, here dubbed cultural nationalism.
Brasilien ist nicht das einzige Land, das darunter leidet, eine glänzende Zukunft, vielleicht eine ruhmreiche Vergangenheit, aber immer eine erbärmliche Gegenwart zu haben. In diesem Zustand, Unterentwicklung genannt, verharren immer noch drei Viertel der Weltbevölkerung, nach mehreren Jahrhunderten Kapitalismus und vielen Jahrzehnten Entwicklung. Das Wort ‚Unterentwicklung’ und die diese erklärenden Theoreme – Abhängigkeit und Imperialismus – sind nicht aus dem Diskurs der Sozialwissenschaften verschwunden. Sie waren zwar niemals Teil des Mainstream, spielten in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren aber eine erhebliche Rolle als Kritik an den orthodoxen Modernisierungstheorien: Diese behaupten, dass freie Märkte und der ungehinderte Fluss von Waren und Kapital Entwicklung erzeugten und Rückständigkeit beendigten. Die Dependenztheorien dagegen bestanden darauf, dass Unterentwicklung (nicht Rückständigkeit) das Ergebnis eben dieser Politik sei. In den letzten drei Jahrzehnten, in dem Maße wie neoliberale und rechte Positionen an Gewicht gewannen, wurden unter verschiedenen Vorwänden Debatten über Imperialismus, Abhängigkeit und Unterentwicklung an den Rand gedrängt.
If, as Gramsci said, ‘the counting of “votes” is the final ceremony of a long process’—a process of persuasion and alliance-building—the 2004 Indian elections were an apparent anomaly for the Gramscian schema. The surprise installation of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in New Delhi could be called neither final nor ceremonial. Rather, a grim new dynamic has entered the unfolding political developments of the last decades. The rise of Hindutva—authoritarian Hindu nationalism—and its party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, were central to these. The two successive National Democratic Alliance governments—coalitions of the bjp with the majority of the country’s regional parties—in 1998 and 1999 had constituted their climax. The 2004 verdict has now entwined the Congress within this vortex.
Discussions of democracy are usually bloodless, fleshless affairs.1 The focus is on things like institutions, constitutions, electoral systems, bills of rights, charters of freedoms and what-not; modular prefabricated components of a structure which can be assembled and built anywhere. One gets very little sense of the local social, political, economic and cultural condition in which these democratic institutions and practices must surely be embedded. Indeed, particularly in its post-1989 version, the discourse of democracy has been supplemented with its own, almost equally modular, discourse of the necessary social ambience for democracy, its potting soil as it were: the discourse of civil society. ‘A set of diverse non-governmental institutions which is strong enough to counterbalance the state and prevent it from dominating and atomising the rest of society’ (Gellner 1994: 5), civil society’s own health determines, we are told, that of democracy and, in post-1989 conditions, the malingering of democracy in the former communist countries, or parts of newly democratic Africa or Asia, is usually traced to a less than robust civil society.
This essay examines the caste dynamics of the rise of Hindutva. Contrary to the widespread assumption that middle caste politics in India is opposed to Hindutva, it argues that the two phenomena have been remarkable amenable and indeed, that the rise of Hindutva cannot be explained without this dynamic.
The East Asian financial crisis, the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the launching of the war on terrorism can be seen as three aspects of a single historical moment that marks the passage from one strategy of US imperialism to another. No longer based primarily on financial globalisation as the means through which the power and control of the corporations and government of the USA is extended over the world, as it was in the 1990s, US strategy is now more openly based on the direct control of productive assets and territory. This historical moment has also marked the definitive end of the idea of the Third World and its associated ideology of Third Worldism. Although this end has, of course, been repeatedly proclaimed, and contested, over the past two decades, this article argues that the idea of the Third World, and the associated ideas of development and non-alignment, were predicated upon the core concept of the national bourgeoisie and associated notions of the inherently progressive potential of nationalism. It traces the historical emergence of this idea in the work of Lenin and its subsequent trajectory during its cold war heyday. I emphasise that the idea of a united and rising Third World had a greater reality as a hope than it had as an objective historical possibility. The present moment in US imperialism is one where even that hope cannot be sustained—thus the definitive end of the idea of the Third World.
Cultural Studies was a creature of a historical moment which is now past. The onset of the stage of permanent war in the trajectory of US Imperialism-the passing of the preceding phase of Pax Americana with the dawn of a sinister new Bellum Americanum-makes the progressive political vocation of Cultural Studies far more important. However, it also brings its inadequacies into sharper relief, and makes their rectification that much more urgent.
The Bush administration would like the world to think otherwise, September 11 changed little. A new, more violent world order was already taking shape well before that. But, suffering from a rather sizeable legitimacy deficit, the U.S. government seized on the events of September 11 as the closest thing to a license that it was going to get. Like the “containment of Communism” and the defense of “democracy” and “human rights,” the “War against Terrorism” veils the pursuit of the United States’s real goals.
The Mumbai attacks revealed the real – bad and deteriorating – relations between India and Pakistan. They did not cause them. This 2002 paper now appears prescient from today’s perspective. It examines the sources of tension between India and Pakistan going back to partition and in the context of evolving geopolitics. It stresses that the language of diplomatic overtures between the two countries needs to be decoded bearing in mind that each country is keen to pose itself as America’s lead ally in the region. Finally, this paper argues that the conflict will remain unresolved until its very terms and those defining partition, the relationships between communities too, are revisited.
A century of the greatest political confrontations in the history of capitalism has ended with the complete surrender of the left. But victory has been paradoxical for the victor: triumph has been accompanied by dissipation. No clear electoral or political dividends have come for parties of the right. This is commonly attributed to nature of the victory itself: the acceptance of the basics of neoliberalism in all nations by parties of the centre and social democratic left, along with their new closeness to particular sections of the capitalist classes, has simply blurred the old political lines and identities making party system increasingly similar to the US model of two parties of capital (of which Julius Nyerere was known to have said, “The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them”). In this sense almost all politics today is the politics of the right, the politics of the classes of property and older parties of the right can no longer expect any special purchase on the political situation. And all parties suffer many problems in common: Disoriented policy, corruption scandals linked to the increase in election expenses, erosion of traditional social bases, and significant sources of dissatisfaction with globalization, not least from among capitalist classes themselves.
Given that certain progressive post-structuralitst theorists have turned to the revolutionary conservative and ‘Crown Jurist’ of the Nazi regime, for the ‘hard and valuable’ lessons he offers on the nature of politics, lessons, we are to understand, will lead the left to theorise politics better, this essay argues that ‘the political’ that underlay Schmitt’s conservative and fascist politics was not just the true root of his anti-democratic actions, it was a rather unrealistic and bizzare conception, fetishing power and sovereighty. Far from offering lessons on anything, it introduces confusion and leads to error.
The regionally-based, ‘vernacular’-speaking, rural, but also rapidly urbanising, lower caste propertied and more or less bourgeois groups have been central to the Congress’s decline and have already restructured the polity, regionalising it. The 1999 elections will hinge on the fate of these forces, whether or not the real issues and principles finally emerge from the outrageous opportunism these forces currently display.
The formation of a Hindu nationalist government in May 1998 at the crest of hindutva’s recent electoral surge clearly testifies to the increasingly authoritarian urges of India’s ruling class. Hindutva’s chances of holding state power more securely lie in a more complete hegemonisation of this now overwhelmingly capitalist class. Hindutva pursues this political aim in part by adapting its hitherto excessively shrill and narrowly petty bourgeois ideology to the more settled nature, proclivities and imperatives of the ruling class. To this end it commands the resources of contemporary culturalism and neo-Gandhian discourse, must be seen as part of this broader effort to change and update hindutva.
Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman’s joint work hitherto comments generally on the legal and constitutional implications of the rise of the Hindu Right in India and specifically as they relate to women.1 The work is already distinguished by a keen historical understanding of Indian law and discernment about what is at stake: the fate of India’s enduring, but hardly flawless, liberal democratic constitutional polity. Subversive Sites2 represents an extension and deepening of this progressive and feminist engagement. The book’s fine and thorough research, as evinced in extensive and careful notes, places the Indian women’s movement’s engagement with the law and the perplexities with which it confronts Indian feminism in the historical perspective of the working of colonial and independent Indian law.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. . .sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
An early activist’s account of the complex and inclusive feminism of Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) at the time of the Rushdie affair. WAF sought to fight fundamentalism as well as the racism which so often fed it. This piece also confronts Fay Weldon’s argument at the time in her Sacred Cows (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989).