Radhika Desai | Geopolitical Economy, Imperialism, and Multipolarity

Class Unity recently spoke with political economist Radhika Desai about geopolitical economy, imperialism, the dollar system, and the emergence of a multipolar world. Drawing on Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire and Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy, Desai explains why state-led combined development challenges conventional accounts of globalization and successive hegemonies. The conversation examines political realism, the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, Israel and U.S. foreign policy, monetary sovereignty, financialization, deindustrialization, and the position of the American working class. It also considers anti-imperialist political organization and the intellectual decline of Marxism and the historic parties of the left. Readers can watch the original Class Unity video, visit the Class Unity event page, and find Desai’s publications and biography through the Geopolitical Economy Research Group.

Class Unity: Welcome to another Class Unity speaker-series event. Today we are speaking with Professor Radhika Desai, professor in the Department of Political Studies and director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of numerous books, including Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, which will be central to today’s discussion, and Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy. She is also the convenor of the International Manifesto Group. Professor Desai, thank you very much for joining us. To begin, could you introduce Geopolitical Economy? What topics does it explore, and why do you believe that we need a new discipline of geopolitical economy?

Radhika Desai: Thank you very much for inviting me. I am very pleased to discuss these ideas with people who are interested in them.

I have always been dissatisfied with the idea of globalization. I was around when it first emerged: I had just become an assistant professor in the early 1990s, and by the middle of that decade the word was everywhere. By the end of the 1990s, one could hardly discuss anything without mentioning globalization. I was among a small group of people, including Robert Wade, Grahame Thompson, Linda Weiss, and others, who questioned the notion because it implied that the state had become irrelevant.

The state has always been deeply involved in the economies of capitalist countries. Neoliberalism did not roll back the state; the state remained involved up to its elbows. What changed was the orientation and purpose of state intervention. During the era of the Keynesian welfare state, intervention was at least partly oriented toward some conception of popular welfare. Under neoliberalism, it became overwhelmingly oriented toward corporate and capitalist welfare.

I originally intended to write a critique of globalization that used the idea of U.S. hegemony. I thought I would portray globalization as a strategy through which the United States attempted to manage its hegemonic decline. As I researched the matter, however, I realized that the idea of U.S. hegemony was itself deeply problematic. Both “globalization” and “U.S. hegemony” have nearly as many definitions as they have writers, and individual writers often change their definitions. They are like slippery eels: one cannot get hold of what they are trying to say. The book therefore became a critique of U.S. hegemony as well as globalization.

What I was criticizing more broadly were traditions of economic cosmopolitanism that treat the world economy as a single, seamless whole. That includes theories of globalization, U.S. hegemony, nineteenth-century free trade, and similar ideas. From the beginning, I was influenced not only by Keynesian ideas and Keynesian-welfare-state conceptions of the economy, but also by developmental-state thinking and the long critique of free trade associated with Friedrich List, Alexander Hamilton, and others. Every one of what Ha-Joon Chang calls the “now-developed countries” used an extensive array of state interventions to develop. Why, then, should we speak as though globalization had rendered the state irrelevant?

There is not a great difference between the two dominant cosmopolitan accounts. In globalization theory, no state matters and markets unite the world seamlessly. In theories of successive hegemonies, a single state supposedly unifies the world economy – the United States today, Britain before it, the Netherlands before Britain, and the Italian city-states earlier still – after which the economy remains a seamless whole. I found both ideas problematic because nation-states, national economies, and borders continue to matter.

I therefore needed a different way of understanding the world economy, and I returned to the concept of uneven and combined development. I had been vaguely familiar with Michael Löwy’s work on the subject, but I was dissatisfied with the way the concept was usually deployed. Most Marxists subscribe, in one form or another, either to globalization or U.S. hegemony. Some argue that Marx was the first theorist of globalization and cite the first pages of The Communist Manifesto, while others champion the idea of U.S. hegemony. Neither position, in my view, adequately represents Marx.

When Marxists invoke uneven development, they often use it merely to say that the world is unequal: a small part is highly developed and the rest is not. This can resemble modernization theory, because the developed world is treated as though it simply developed through capitalism’s own genius while underdevelopment remains the problem of everybody else. “Combined development” is then taken either to mean a juxtaposition of developed and less-developed institutions, or the skipping of an entire stage, as when Russia moved from feudalism toward socialism.

If one examines Trotsky’s locus classicus on uneven and combined development, the first chapter of The History of the Russian Revolution, a more precise meaning emerges. Capitalism does not develop throughout the entire world at once; it develops in lumps and clumps, and some countries move further than others. Once certain parts of the world develop, they confront the rest with what Trotsky called the “whip of external necessity.” Other societies must either industrialize behind protectionist walls, using state intervention, or remain underdeveloped and become still more so. Germany enjoyed the advantages of backwardness while Britain increasingly suffered the disadvantages of priority. Combined development, properly understood, is state-directed development. This is where Marxism and developmental-state thinking meet.

The dialectic of uneven and combined development is also the dialectic of imperialism and anti-imperialism. A society that wishes to contest imperial domination must undertake some form of combined, state-directed development. That development took capitalist forms before 1917 and also assumed socialist forms afterward, first in the Soviet Union and later in China and elsewhere. The concepts of globalization and U.S. empire are unable to explain the multipolarity that they now belatedly acknowledge.

My argument is that U.S. hegemony never existed. Through the combined-development efforts of various powers, the world had already become multipolar by the late nineteenth century. The United States had the misfortune of trying to emulate Britain’s dominance over the world economy at a moment when such emulation had become impossible. Much of the case for U.S. hegemony also rests on the dollar’s role as world money. I therefore examine the contradictions of the dollar system and the reasons it has never served stably as the world’s money.

The world economy since the advent of capitalism is best understood as a spreading multipolarity. More countries – not an enormous number, but a growing number – have successfully pursued combined development. By the late twentieth century, it was clear that socialist countries had often been the most successful, with China foremost among them today. Some form of combined development is the only route to development and an imperative for societies that wish to escape underdevelopment. That, in a nutshell, is the framework of geopolitical economy.

Class Unity: Your book and related essays contain an extraordinary amount of political, economic, and historical detail. We would like to test a simplified interpretation of your argument. Political realists treat states as the fundamental actors in an anarchic international system, focusing on military power while often neglecting the economy; John Mearsheimer, for instance, has comparatively little to say about the dollar. Liberal cosmopolitans, free-market theorists, and many Marxists take the opposite view: they posit a global economic system in which states are secondary to markets.

Your account seems to reject both camps. Capitalism provides a wider international context, but financial assets, debts, currencies, and capital are denominated in monetary units issued or sustained by states. Capitalism cannot exist without the state, and there are many states rather than one. Is that a reasonable approximation of geopolitical economy: a larger capitalist system that is necessarily organized through multiple states and therefore tends toward multipolarity?

Radhika Desai: Let me respond to those points and then return to your summary. Geopolitical economy is a critique of globalization and empire, the two paradigms that dominate international political economy. International political economy is an odd discipline. It often presents a realist tradition alongside a liberal-cosmopolitan tradition, replicating the usual model of international relations. Yet it is not really political economy. It is largely neoclassical economics, and most of its practitioners accept some form of cosmopolitanism. Politics consequently appears as an interference with the normal and proper operation of markets: unions and weaker business sectors cause protectionism, for example, when otherwise free trade would prevail. Politics is a residual element in a field whose basic commitment is to free markets.

Realism is also peculiar. I should probably write a companion critique of realism in international relations. Realism emerged in the twentieth century as a way of excusing the international aggression of the United States and other imperial countries. If every country behaves in the same way, or would behave that way if it possessed sufficient power, then one never has to explain why the United States is so internationally aggressive.

Consider Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby. I am not denying that the Israel lobby is powerful or that it donates large sums to members of Congress. But why was it systematically necessary for these realists to write that book? Without the lobby thesis, they cannot explain why the United States acts in ways that appear contrary to what they construe as its national interest. What they lack is a concept of imperialism. Capitalism is inseparable from imperialism, and the United States is an imperial – or would-be imperial – state. Its aggression cannot be explained by the realist billiard-ball image of an anarchic international system.

There are patterns in world politics. States are not empty shells; they are defined by the classes that stand behind them. Whose class power does a given state secure? That question does not even occur to a realist who treats the state as a black box.

Introductory international-relations courses commonly teach that the field began with the failure of Wilsonian idealism and the subsequent rise of realism, citing E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis. That is simply untrue. The first systematic theories of international relations in the capitalist world were the works on imperialism published in the early twentieth century by Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir Lenin, and Nikolai Bukharin. They sought to understand how capitalism operated internationally, why imperial competition was intensifying, and how this related to the capitalist character of the states involved. Elements of uneven and combined development can already be found in Marx. One cannot understand the international system since the rise of capitalism without understanding imperialism, and once one understands imperialism, one must also understand anti-imperialism.

The literature on globalization is maddening partly because the phenomenon is dated differently by nearly every writer. Some say globalization began with neoliberalism in the 1980s or 1990s; some place it in the postwar period; some describe two waves, one peaking in 1914 and another today; still others push it back thousands of years. But what peaked in 1914 was imperialism, not globalization. Calling it globalization is a way of avoiding imperialism. If one sees a McDonald’s in Beijing and declares, “Look, globalization,” one has not explained why the restaurant is there.

For a properly Marxist politics, class and nation are both important. Imperialism is as important as capitalism, and the two cannot be separated. Too many people on the Western left think about class while never thinking about imperialism or the nation. Marx did not complete his projected work on imperialism, but he took the problem seriously, and the elements developed by later Marxists are present in his work.

Marx’s approach was neither economics nor political science. He called it a critique of political economy. He worked within the broad political-economy tradition while criticizing its limitations. Only a few years after the publication of Capital in German, the marginalist revolution created neoclassical economics. It separated the economy from the rest of society, dividing intellectual life into economics, sociology, political science, and other specialized spheres. Max Weber later justified this division by saying that these spheres had acquired autonomy in modern life – where he often should have said capitalist life – and must therefore be studied separately.

The sphere whose autonomy most concerned Weber was the economy. An organized working class was demanding higher wages, welfare, pensions, unemployment compensation, and other measures from the state. Declaring that the economy should be left alone was a means of resisting those demands. This was the beginning of what I call the social-scientific division of labor. The disciplines born from it are also ahistorical: they tend to assume that essentially the same system repeats itself. Marx, by contrast, understood capitalism as a new and distinctive phase of history, with its own history, a beginning, and an end.

International relations belongs to this larger division. It tries to separate international politics from international economics, but this cannot be done. The international relations of the capitalist world are governed by its states – not only capitalist states, particularly after 1917, and not even exclusively capitalist states beforehand, but states operating in a world increasingly shaped by the most powerful capitalist countries.

You are also right that one cannot have money without states, although I am not a chartalist in the sense of believing that states completely create money. Capitalism makes many contradictory demands of states, and the creation and maintenance of stable money is one of them. Capitalism also requires a medium of exchange at the international level. When Marx was writing, that medium was gold. In his account, gold at the international level was a commodity rather than national money; money and commodities stand opposed to each other in this respect.

The sterling system later functioned as an imperial currency. It could not have existed without the surpluses Britain drew from non-settler colonies, chiefly British India, and exported to Europe and the settler colonies through the famous British capital exports. The United States has never possessed a comparable, stable basis for the dollar as world money. People frequently imagine creating a world currency, but as long as capitalism exists, I do not think a stable world money is possible. The inability to create it is among capitalism’s contradictions.

Class Unity: We would be very interested in your fuller critique of realism. Mearsheimer explicitly treats the nation as a black box, but once the state is disaggregated, one sees that some people’s interests and investments are protected much more vigorously than others. The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran is a classic example: when Iran tried to retain more control over its oil, the most powerful states intervened to protect the owners of those assets. Marx’s phrase about the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie seems more illuminating than the black-box model.

Radhika Desai: I would have to develop the critique in detail, but I can offer another example. I have been grateful to John Mearsheimer for his work on the Ukraine crisis and have listened to many of his lectures. He is right that the crisis is the West’s fault and that NATO expansion is central, but he does not ask why NATO is being expanded. He treats expansion as an error rather than as a systematic requirement of U.S. imperialism.

If U.S. imperialism is to continue, it requires NATO. For imperialism to end, a powerful political force in the United States would have to take state power and declare that the government would no longer serve large corporations, but the American people. There would then be no need for the United States to behave aggressively toward the rest of the world. Mearsheimer cannot envisage this transformation. He imagines that if enough people can be persuaded that the policy is mistaken, the error will be rectified. That is not how the system works.

Class Unity: We have a related question about The Israel Lobby. Our reading is that Mearsheimer regards U.S. support for Israel as counterproductive to the country’s broader strategic ambitions. Because his theory treats states as black boxes, he needs an exceptional explanation – the lobby – for conduct that appears to diverge from the national interest. Does this show that he fails to understand imperialism, or that he fails to understand the heterogeneous economic interests within the state?

Radhika Desai: That is a very good question. Mearsheimer assumes that all states are internationally aggressive and calls that imperialism. He treats expansionism as an innate feature of states. But imperialism is specifically connected to capitalism and arises from capitalism’s contradictions. Capitalism requires the state, yet the needs of capital spill beyond the boundaries of any given state. A sufficiently powerful state is therefore pressed to control the rest of the world. Dominant capitalist states have a particular kind of foreign policy that is not replicated by socialist states.

The Soviet Union and the United States were not equally aggressive or equally culpable, as E. P. Thompson once put it. The Soviet position during the Cold War was generally defensive, while the American position was aggressive. This was not simply because the United States, considered abstractly as a state, wished to dominate other states. It was because powerful American capitalist interests wanted their government to secure markets, raw materials, investment outlets, and cheap labor abroad.

Migration and population are not disconnected from capitalism. Anyone thinking about this should read chapter 25 of Capital, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” Most readers expect a chapter with that title to concern quantities of capital and rates of return, but it is about population. Capitalism cannot exist without migration because it requires a mobile and replenishable labor force.

American corporations want the government to discipline other governments so that American goods and capital can enter freely, profits can be repatriated, and other societies will produce cheap inputs for their enterprises. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik’s recent work on imperialism emphasizes how the suppression of consumption – and therefore, to a considerable extent, production – in the Global South is critical to keeping those inputs cheap. Imagine the effect on the prices of wheat, rice, copper, uranium, and other resources if India’s population could demand them at much higher levels. Imperial governments are not abstractly expansionist; they pursue clear economic and political purposes.

Class Unity: That clarifies the general point. The remaining question is how to understand the apparently counterproductive character of U.S. policy toward Israel.

Radhika Desai: From the standpoint of imperialism, U.S. support for Israel does not require the Israel lobby, although the lobby certainly exists and reinforces that support. Israel has long functioned as the United States’ unsinkable aircraft carrier and its cat’s-paw in the Middle East. Where else would the United States find such a dependable ally?

The United States is attempting to achieve imperial domination in circumstances where that domination has become impossible. Some capitalists may conclude that the effort no longer makes sense, but other capitalists will continue to benefit from it. Capitalism has never been a perfectly coherent system. The state is called the executive committee of the bourgeoisie precisely because the bourgeoisie is plural and its different parts are continually in conflict. In the United States today, one section favors confrontation with China while another favors doing business with China.

U.S. policy toward Israel may now look incoherent even from the standpoint of retaining an unsinkable aircraft carrier, but the momentum of the past is powerful. A president who has spent an entire political lifetime backing Israel does not easily abandon that commitment. The United States has independent imperial reasons for supporting Israel; AIPAC is not merely distorting an otherwise rational, non-imperial American policy.

Class Unity: Disaggregating the state by class and following the flow of money suggests another possibility: perhaps we should speak of a weapons lobby rather than only an Israel lobby. Permanent wars permit deficit spending that channels public money to arms manufacturers, while the countries that buy American weapons become designated allies and reinforce a monopolized market. Once the black box is opened and the interests of asset owners are examined, the policies no longer look irrational or exceptional.

We also have a broader political question. Your book repeatedly reveals moments when the conventional account is ahistorical and the real political-economic causes are quite different. How can Class Unity turn those insights into organization and activism? Beyond simply handing everybody a copy of Geopolitical Economy, how can this analysis help change political consciousness and practice?

Radhika Desai: You should certainly offer everybody a copy of Geopolitical Economy, but the serious answer is that every country needs political forces capable of taking power for its people. This is especially urgent in the imperial countries, and the United States is the belly of the beast. “Power for the people” must explicitly mean an end to imperialism, because imperialism sustains the power of the bourgeoisie against which working people are struggling. If the capitalist class could no longer extract wealth from working people throughout the world as well as at home, it would be far less powerful.

The first struggle is national. That does not mean abandoning international socialism. I support international socialism, but the genuine free movement of people, goods, and ideas is unlikely before socialism. Capitalism depends on maintaining the boundary between imperial countries and the rest.

In the 2024 U.S. election, the closest practical approximation was Jill Stein’s candidacy. Cornel West was also antiwar, but he was not part of a party and faced serious ballot-access problems. Before leaving for India to observe the elections, I worked fairly closely with people developing Stein’s platform. Anti-imperialism must be at the forefront. A movement has to address class and nation together and seek to make the United States an ordinary country rather than an imperial or “exceptional” one.

The aim should be a productive and egalitarian economy that is not imperialist. Most of the Western left confines itself to redistribution and equality because it does not understand imperialism. Yet a peaceful and equal society in the United States will require radical economic reorganization. A substantial part of American wealth and privilege rests on imperial power. As that power is dismantled – and it is already receding rapidly as other countries assert their interests – the economy must be rebuilt on a new productive basis.

That requires planning and political parties; it cannot be accomplished through network politics alone. It requires a substantial degree of state-level planning. The state need not decide how many striped dresses and polka-dot dresses should be produced. Small producers and markets can handle many ordinary consumer goods. But the large questions are readily planned: how much electricity to produce, how to green the economy, and how to organize transportation, health care, education, steel, and other essential systems.

Class Unity: Many left organizations criticize American imperialism but struggle to make the case politically effective. People do not like being told that they are the villains or that becoming morally better requires accepting a lower material standard of living. It is important to show that dollar hegemony and financialization are not in the interest of most Americans. A strong dollar hurts workers employed in production, while the reserve-currency system promotes deindustrialization and enriches a narrow financial class. Anti-imperialism need not be framed as altruistic sacrifice; it can be presented as a route to a higher national standard of living for the majority. Imperialism is not in the interest of most Americans.

Radhika Desai: Exactly. It strengthens the argument to add that the United States has been attempting something impossible and damaging its own interests in the process. Financialization is integral to the effort to make the dollar the world’s money. Because the dollar system is inherently unstable, ever more financialization has been required to manage its contradictions, creating new problems in the process. Nothing has been more ruinous for ordinary Americans. It has driven enormous inequality and undermined the productive economy.

This point becomes clearer in Capitalism, Coronavirus and War. Capitalism is past its sell-by date. The United States likes to imagine itself at the technological frontier and accuses China of stealing American technology, but China increasingly creates its own technology. Meanwhile, American corporations receive extraordinarily lucrative government contracts, often selling public agencies products at many times their reasonable cost. That kind of swindle impedes the country’s technological development.

Digital technology is a good example. Information and communications technology can realize its potential only when developed under public auspices as a public utility. Under Meta, Google, and other private corporations, it is denatured and directed against human welfare because it must yield a profit. It harms children and adults alike. The further development of technology increasingly requires public direction.

Some supposed Marxists are better described as capital worshippers because they remain convinced that capitalism is productively superior to socialism. That is less and less plausible, and in relation to China it is manifestly untrue.

Class Unity: We have another question about production, U.S. deindustrialization, and the position of the working class. Your book argues that the United States could not attain durable global hegemony because other states developed their own productive capacities. It might therefore seem that the United States should maintain and expand its own production to strengthen the dollar and preserve its power. Instead, American industry has declined, although the United States remains one of the world’s major producers. What caused deindustrialization, and why did the ruling class permit a process that weakens the country? What has deindustrialization and dollarization done to the political power of the American working class?

Radhika Desai: First, if the United States were a great export power in the way Germany and Japan once were, or China is today, it would have even more difficulty making its currency the world’s money. A large export surplus would continually draw dollars back from the rest of the world, leaving too few dollars abroad. This is also why the renminbi is unlikely to become a direct replacement for the dollar.

When people debate whether dollar hegemony is ending, they often say that no other national currency can replace it and conclude that the dollar must therefore remain. But the central problem is not that the dollar is weakening while another national currency waits to assume its place. The dollar system contains severe internal contradictions that damage both the world and the United States. It should be replaced by an international settlement mechanism resembling Keynes’s bancor. The design requires careful discussion because many misunderstandings persist about money at the international level.

The United States briefly encountered the opposite problem in the immediate postwar period. It exported so much that it drew dollars back from the rest of the world, contributing to a dollar shortage. This was one reason for the Marshall Plan. I do not want to exaggerate that program: it was comparatively small and not the fundamental cause of Europe’s recovery. Gabriel and Joyce Kolko’s The Limits of Power contains excellent chapters on the Marshall Plan that should be read before repeating the standard account.

Class Unity: Could you return to the causes of deindustrialization and the political class’s acceptance of it?

Radhika Desai: Several forces converged. The career and ideas of Charles Kindleberger deserve closer examination. He believed that the dollar could reproduce sterling’s international role, but he never adequately appreciated the extent to which Britain’s colonial surpluses were indispensable to the sterling system. He imagined that the United States could compensate by expanding the financial sector and creating “broad and deep financial markets,” a phrase dollar advocates continue to repeat.

Going off gold, removing capital controls, and deregulating finance were central to this vision. The process began in the 1970s, accelerated in the 1980s, and reached a decisive turning point with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. If one graphs international capital flows, the dramatic increase occurs after the 1999 repeal. That laid the groundwork for the enormous bubble and the 2008 financial crisis.

Perry Mehrling’s recent book on Kindleberger adds, in my view, new layers of mystification. The contrast becomes clearer if one reads Marcello De Cecco’s Money and Empire. Kindleberger’s project moved against the grain of De Cecco’s analysis of the monetary foundations of empire.

There is also a second factor that became much clearer to me while writing Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: capitalism has become senile and incapable of productive dynamism. In the early years of neoliberalism, even many Marxists believed that deregulation would strengthen capitalism. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy could still publish a book titled Capital Resurgent in the mid-2000s. After four decades of neoliberalism, however, it is apparent that neoliberalism has revealed how unproductive capitalism has become.

Capital in the United States and United Kingdom used its new freedoms not to invest and produce more, but to shrink its productive footprint and outsource production. Outsourcing should not be confused with foreign direct investment. It means that corporations do not want to produce either at home or abroad; they want somebody else to produce and sell the goods to them.

Financialization concentrates investable money in ever fewer hands and gives those actors privileged positions in financial markets. They gain the most during booms and lose the least during busts because they possess privileged information and function as market makers rather than market takers. However sophisticated its appearance, the system resembles insider trading: the game is structured to favor those who make its rules. Once such returns are available, ordinary production – shirts, shoes, or even computers – seems unattractive. The attitude becomes, “Let the Chinese do it.”

Class Unity: One last question. A passage in Capitalism, Coronavirus and War describes the conversion of the historic parties of the working class to neoliberalism and the formation of a cross-party establishment operating through parties, corporate foundations, think tanks, and even countries. Its discourse is enforced by preferment and pay on one side and silencing or exclusion on the other. You note that sections of the left act as freelance vigilantes for this establishment by attacking challenges to the neoliberal consensus – calling defenders of Palestinian rights antisemitic, for example, or branding critics of wars of “democracy promotion” as admirers of dictators or Russia. What has happened to the left and to contemporary Marxism?

Radhika Desai: That is an enormous question. My first book, Intellectuals and Socialism, examined the intellectuals of the British Labour Party and traced the historical connection between intellectuals and the parties of the working class, going back to Marx and Engels. The overwhelming majority of serious thinkers once tended to align with parties of the left. John Stuart Mill famously called the Conservatives the “stupid party,” while the Liberals and later Labour could be regarded as the thinking person’s parties.

That connection is now broken. The professional-managerial class, which effectively constitutes today’s intellectual class, has expanded enormously and taken over politics. Conservative parties are no longer dominated by businesspeople, and labor parties are no longer dominated by workers. Across the Conservatives and Labour in Britain and the Republicans and Democrats in the United States, members of the political class are overwhelmingly lawyers, doctors, professors, and other professionals.

The shift began in the 1970s. Conservative parties moved toward the neoliberal right, and instead of opposing them from the left, the historic parties of the working class also moved rightward. They became sections of the same intellectual class. These formerly left parties accepted neoliberalism and placed over it a layer of what I call social liberalism. This is highly tokenistic: it professes concern for women, Black people, and other groups, but addresses inequality by promoting a small number of representatives to prominent positions while leaving the conditions of the majority unchanged.

Deep-rooted problems within the left made this process easier. The populations and working classes of imperial countries have benefited to some degree from imperialism and have therefore often failed to criticize it. More fundamentally, Marxism is the most intellectually powerful tradition on the left, and its denaturing has been central to the left’s decline. That denaturing began as early as the 1880s.

After the marginalist revolution, generations of people called themselves Marxists while being educated in neoclassical economics. Once one accepts the foundations of neoclassical economics, it becomes impossible to make sense of Capital. Such readers may understand exploitation in a limited way, but they do not understand value, dialectics, contradiction, or Marx’s statement that communism is “the real movement.”

Many academic “critical Marxists” raid the treasure house of Marxist thought, carry one attractive fragment into the dominant intellectual tradition, and present it as their contribution. They use Marx for professional advancement without understanding what Marx was doing. What has gone wrong with the left therefore runs very deep. It would be valuable for people to rediscover Marx’s actual project, although history itself will increasingly force a confrontation with reality as the recession of U.S. power becomes impossible to ignore.

The subject deserves an entire book. The left’s compromises with imperialism are particularly damaging. Watching the British election, I find Keir Starmer’s movement of Labour so far to the right nauseating. It is difficult to identify what he would do differently from Rishi Sunak, and neither side understands imperialism. George Galloway gets many things right and has had an effect because people are enraged by the political parties’ response to Gaza, although I would not necessarily trust him on questions of feminism. There is much more to discuss.

Class Unity: Thank you very much for speaking with us. Before we finish, is there anything you would like listeners to know about upcoming projects, and where can they find your work online?

Radhika Desai: I am working on a personal website, which will eventually be at radhikadesai.com. In the meantime, my Academia.edu page is kept reasonably up to date, and most of my work can be downloaded there. I am also easy to find through the University of Manitoba.

Class Unity: Thank you to everyone who joined us, and especially to our speaker.

Radhika Desai: Thank you very much. These were excellent questions, and I am very glad to have had the conversation. Good luck with your projects.