CLASS UNITY  |  TRANSCRIPT

Radhika Desai and Paul Gottfried: Marxism and ‘Woke’ Ideology

Class Unity recently brought political economist Radhika Desaiand political theorist Paul Gottfried together for a wide-ranging discussion of Marxism, ‘woke’ ideology, and the changing meanings of left and right. Speaking from Marxist and paleoconservative perspectives, respectively, Desai and Gottfried agree that contemporary wokeness should not be confused with Marxism, while disagreeing about liberalism, capitalism, culture, material interests, and the historical effects of imperialism. Their exchange also examines the old and new left, the managerial state, neoliberalism and social liberalism, postwar social democracy, colonial extraction, the 2024 U.S. election, immigration, and the prospects for a renewed egalitarian politics. Desai is professor of political studies and director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, while Gottfried is an intellectual historian and former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College. The original Class Unity video, Desai’s Geopolitical Economy Research Group profile, and Gottfried’s Mises Institute profileprovide the recording, biographical information, and further reading.

Class Unity: Hello everyone and welcome to another Class Unity event. Before we get started, I want to clarify that the views expressed here do not reflect the views of Class Unity. Since the Cold War, it has been commonplace for liberalism to get smeared by association with Marxism. This is the familiar charge that liberalism is ‘red’. More recently, it has been common for Marxism to get smeared by association with liberalism. For example, when we hear about radical leftists calling for the abolition of the family, conservatives point to that as an example of Marxism coming for your family. The confusion results in a sort of circular reasoning by which liberalism is bad because it’s Marxism and Marxism is bad because it is liberalism. And the confusion persists because of intellectual dishonesty on both the left and the right. These two things are not the same. Liberalism and Marxism are not the same.

And the fact that they have become conflated has obscured the present political moment. The latest cultural hysteria centers around a new word, woke. Depending on who you ask, woke is a kind of liberalism or a kind of Marxism or both. So today we will be asking what is Marxism and what is wokeness. Our two guests have written on both of these topics. Radhika Desai is professor in the Department of Political Studies and the director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba. Paul Gottfried is former professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College and his doctoral adviser was the late Herbert Marcuse. Although they come at these topics from different backgrounds and perspectives, our two guests share two things in common. First, they draw a sharp distinction between Marxism and wokeness. They believe these are different frameworks for understanding the world and different guides for political action. Second, they agree that Marxism is preferable to wokeness.

We are holding our panel today to compare the perspectives of these two academics in order to shed light on the contemporary world. For our first question, we want to talk about what is the left and what is the right. We anticipate that these terms might get thrown around a lot without agreement on what they mean. So, we want to get clarity on what they mean before we move forward. And I would like to read a quote from Friedrich Hayek, a thinker with whom we agree very little, but we think will be a good starting point for our discussion. The picture generally given of the relative position of the three parties, liberalism, socialism, conservatism, does more to obscure than to elucidate their true relations. They are usually represented as different positions on a line with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading.

If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third. So our first question is do you agree with Hayek that the left-right distinction obscures more than it clarifies? Do you think that the better distinction is between liberalism, socialism and conservatism? Finally, how do you understand these terms liberalism, socialism, conservatism, left and right from your perspective? We’ll start with Professor Desai.

Radhika Desai: First of all, the first point to underline is that the difference between the left and the right has changed over time. It is not static. As politics changes, as the terrain of contestation in politics changes, then the meanings of left and right will change. The terms, we are told, date from the French Revolution; early on, it was really a distinction between conservatives and liberals. At the time, there was only a nascent socialist current and so that’s the first point I want to make. The second point I would make about that is that I understand to some extent what Hayek means when he talks about a triangle instead of a continuum. But before we get to the triangle, let me say one other thing. The way in which politics has evolved over time in most countries if not all what has happened is that conservatives and liberals basically merged.

Classically this happened in the case of Britain where the Liberal Party more or less disappeared and it was absorbed by the conservative party on the whole. So and basically what that represented was a coalition protecting the rights of private property whether it was landed property predominantly in the case of the conservatives or it was other forms of property industrial property commercial property etc in the case of the liberals. So in that sense this triangle doesn’t quite make sense but yes the sense in which it makes sense is that liberals are actually the outliers in this field because they imagine that you can have at least the most extreme liberals imagine that you can have a society based entirely on these essentially a regime of private property and the cash nexus standing in for social relations and that I would say and here I would be agreeing with Polanyi more than anyone else is not really possible.

Nor has it been necessary. Today, even the most advanced capitalist societies today are not entirely based on the cash nexus because it would not be possible and my final point is that the word conservative today does not make very much sense I would say that the first couple of decades after the Second World War were still decades in which there was a substantial landed property interest of the old sort that had not become completely commercialized and that did represent a persistence of some kind of conservatism in the sense of conserving old social structures. Since the 1980s and the rise of the new right, what you’ve had is a form of new politics which shades more easily into more plebeian forms of right-wing politics, which take the form of what’s often called populism or also the form of course fascism.

So in that sense in the sense that every right-wing politics in an age of mass politics needs a mass base it would have that sort of mass base not a mass base based as in the old days on deference to traditional forms of authority that is no longer around. So that would be my opening response to your question. I hope that works. Yeah.

Class Unity: Thank you. Professor Gottfried?

Paul Gottfried: I find myself actually agreeing with Professor Desai on much of what she said, although I’m supposed to be the man of the right, which I actually am. But I find the statement by Hayek both tendentious and problematic. Since I think the distinction today is not between conservatives and liberals. It’s between right and left. And we come to the left. Wokeness, I think, has a dialectical relationship to Marxism. The right to me is actually a post-conservative movement as I think professor Desai is aware of and it develops after the old deferential society where traditional authority structures have gone or weakened. And it is essentially a reaction to the left.

What calls itself the conservative movement in the United States is basically a form of social democracy as is the Democratic Party but they’re allied with different groups and I would say the Democratic Party is the more woke of the two parties right now although the conservative party the so-called conservative side very definitely has absorbed a lot of wokeness in order to maintain itself as a political force and this would probably also include the movement around newly elected President Trump. So when we talk about conservatism, we are really talking about a movement which reacts against the French Revolution which develops in the 19th century and represents mostly landed interests. The Liberal Party represents the rising bourgeoisie located mostly in cities who become the economic leader the economic and political leaders of the 19th century.

As I argue in my book After Liberalism, much of this changes in the 20th century with the rise of the managerial state and with democracy basically as a form of government control by scientific experts. Right now the conservative movement in the United States is definitely pushing the argument which all of us dispute that wokeness is a form of Marxism. And I think they’re doing so for several reasons which to me are obvious as a student of American politics. One reason is that American Republicans are used to anti-communism. That was the mantra of the Republican Party and of the conservative movement since the 1950s. And if you say we’re fighting Marxism, this has a very familiar ring to American conservatives. I sometimes listen to this fellow Mark Levin going on and on about American Marxism, the title of a book he wrote. There isn’t a single American Marxist in his book. John Dewey was not a Marxist.

This is his leading Marxist. He was a pragmatist and a progressive. But the attacks on Marxism do resonate and unfortunately I am not very popular on the right because I say that wokeness has nothing to do with Marxism although it does belong I suppose to a genus called the left and is universalist egalitarian and so forth like Marxism but is culturally radical in a way that Marxism is not and less concerned about socialism and more willing to ally itself with corporate capitalism obviously. So that’s one reason that the American conservative would attack Marxism. The other reason is it is very eager to make an alliance with woke people. You turn on Fox News and you see a transgender Republican, whom they’re interviewingand these people give money to the conservative movement, support the Republican Party, the so-called conservative movement, we’ll make an alliance with them.

So, I know that some of these things must be very strange, coming from a person who is identified as a member of the right, which I am. But I’m a member of the right who is hated by everybody else in the conservative movement and has been for the last 40 years. And I think that it is very important to understand that the basic polarity is right and left. And the right is reactionary. It is reacting against the left whether it’s the Marxist left or now the woke left. And I think that Donald Trump has been able to win over these people on the right because he does dare to attack some of the excesses of wokeness in the United States whereas the Democratic Party is perfectly aligned with wokeness. He also is able to appeal to the working class and I think again as professor Desai said, we’re living in an age of mass political movements.

We’re not living in a deferential society. So the right as the successor of the conservative movement as it reacts against the left to whatever extent it reacts against the left is going to work to pick up the working class. Corporate capitalism in the United States is perfectly satisfied with being allied to the woke left. Which is not going to hurt them. If they raise taxes, it’ll be paid for by workers and be passed on to the consumer, but these people are doing fine, and get contracts for green energy and other things that benefit them. So, they’re not necessarily going to break their alliance with the woke left, but the working class has been left out and right now is firmly allied to Donald Trump and his movement.

Class Unity: Professor Desai, would you like to add anything to that or respond to anything?

Radhika Desai: Actually, I was going to wait for my turn, but if you want me to go now, I did want to say that at one level, I’m personally not that surprised that Paul and I agree with so much. I hope it’s okay, Paul, to call you Paul. I know my name is harder to say, so maybe we should stick to Professor Gottfried, but anyway, the point is that I’m not so surprised. The reason is very simple and I should have completed a thought that I inserted in my earlier response and that is that the reason I say that the liberals are the odd ones out among socialists, conservatives, and liberals; the liberals are the odd ones out because the conservatives and the socialists actually agree that there’s such a thing as society. It’s the liberals who don’t and Mrs. Thatcher, is famous for saying there is no such thing as society.

Although even she had to qualify that by saying there are only individuals and their families. Well, family is then the foundation of society and of course there have been historically very different family forms and even today around the world there are various different family forms. So that’s one thing I wanted to say. The second thing I would say is that of course the coalescence of liberals and conservatives into a single party in the defense of private property and I think this is also the key by the way left and right can be defined by the extent to which in given historical circumstances you wish to protect the unfettered right of private property versus if you wish to impose certain restrictions on private property in certain wider social interests. But the coalescence of conservatives and liberals is actually dated back to around 1848 when Marx—who was, I would say, fairly precise—came to political maturity around this date of 1848.

His Communist Manifesto was written in order to inspire the revolutions of 1848. Unfortunately, those revolutions failed and whatever little working-class organization there was put down and in the aftermath of that the conservatives and the liberals began to coalesce into a single party and as Marx said the honest political inquiry that you could up to that point witness in the field of political economy was finished. You no longer got honest inquiry of the sort that you got with Adam Smith or David Ricardo and instead you got all sorts of what Marx would have called intellectual hirelings and hypocrites, and other people simply producing justifications of an increasingly illegitimate capitalism. So that’s the second point and then I don’t know whether you want me to say these things now because I know you have some other questions maybe I’ll reserve my other points for later because in fact they go better with the other questions that I know you’re going to.

Class Unity: Yeah sure the next question is about the contemporary left and the Old Left and the New Left—the history of the left so it is generally understood that the history of American leftism can be divided into two periods called the Old Left and the New Left. The consensus is that the Old Left was defeated, destroyed or failed, and that the New Left has taken its place for better or worse. What do you think? What do you make of the distinction between the Old Left and the New Left? Do you think there is a meaningful difference between the two that is relevant for the contemporary moment? And if so, what do you think the contemporary left is? What does it consist of and what does it do? I’m asking, combining two questions here. What do you think of the distinction between the Old Left and the New Left? And furthermore, what do you think the contemporary left is?

What does it consist of today? Professor Gottfried, would you like to go first on this one?

Paul Gottfried: Yeah, perhaps I should go first since I’ve written so much on the subject. I think there is a continuity between these two lefts. One continuity is there is some kind of revolutionary Marxist impetus in both of them although obviously it’s much more present in the Old Left. The New Left becomes somewhat diluted and mixed with other elements. I think the late Eric Hobsbawm described this as Marxism plus exotica like glorifying third world societies rejecting gender distinctions and so forth. This is all from a traditional Old Left perspective exotica. But the other continuity which is more important is that people who come out of what are called in America red diaper baby homes. The people who are raised as radicals very often will move from one left into the other. Now this does not mean that the two lefts are identical but their association with the left expresses alienation from white Christian male American society or western society.

So we have like somebody like Carl Bernstein whose family were communists living in Washington and they were obviously unhappy with McCarthy and the McCarthy era and so forth. Well, he becomes a leftist. He goes after Richard Nixon if you remember who rose as an anti-communist politician. He hated Nixon. And then he became perfectly happy with the woke left. Which he has been glorifying ever since. Betty Friedan is another one. She grew up as a communist. She then became a feminist afterwards and ceased to be, a believer in dialectical materialism if she ever was one. Many of the people who worked in the DDR in Germany then, went to work in the Bundesrepublik and there became woke leftist rather than Marxist. So I think one can see a continuity in terms of human type. The people who are radicalized by their sense of unhappiness or unease with the dominant American culture.

I remember this, growing up like 70 years ago that we always had people in class, our class, and certainly I remember in graduate school at Yale, they were very unhappy, because they thought that, white male American Christian society was bigoted and they, became Marxist of sorts. And if they’re still alive now, I’m sure they’re woke leftists. But this doesn’t mean that the ideological content is the same. It means that both forms of the left allow them to express their sense of alienation and their desire to transform American and other western societies. So that’s what I see as the continuity. Obviously cultural radicalism in the United States has very little to do with Marxism. And I’ve been saying this for years. And I’ve been attacking the conservative movement for calling Marxist what is clearly not Marxist. I was a Cold Warrior during the Cold War, but this has nothing to do with the Cold War anymore.

This has nothing to do with Marxism. I have also always made a distinction between Marxist theory and communist societies and found much more value in Marxist theory than I did in communism in practice. But clearly this is in fact I would argue as some other people on the right who are friends of mine would say that we on the right can learn a great deal from studying Marxism much more perhaps than from looking at the contemporary American conservative movement.

Class Unity: Professor Desai.

Radhika Desai: Yeah, sure. Again, as Paul said earlier, I agree with so many of the things he said surprisingly given that I do speak as a Marxist. But let me plunge into the two questions you asked and I think the agreements and disagreements should become clear as I speak and if when compared to what Paul said. So first of all the Old Left and the New Left. So the Old Left obviously you’re looking at a sort of a wide arc of left-wing mobilization going back to the late 19th century and into the late 20th century. So that arc defines mostly the Old Left and to me that Old Left was Marxist. People don’t realize that today many of us Marxists use the term social democracy in a derogatory fashion. But in its day in the late 19th century and the early 20th century the social democratic parties were the Marxist parties.

They were called social democratic because they were very clear that their first task was to achieve political democracy and then on the terrain of political democracy although not necessarily exclusively on the terrain of political democracy they were not merely parliamentarians but nevertheless among other struggles they would struggle on the terrain of political democracy in order to seek working-class power. That is what they were about, and therefore they would achieve socialism in that way. So it was democracy and socialism hence social democracy. Now a lot of people thought and I don’t want to go on for too long but I would say that relatively early on in my humble opinion social democracy made political compromises and intellectual compromises. The political compromise we can summarize as a guns and butter compromise an agreement with the respective ruling classes that they would accept imperialism and not criticize them.

Many social democrats even came to talk about things like the civilizing mission of western countries vis the rest of the world. So they would accept the imperialism of their ruling classes in return for reform. Reform in terms of the extension of things like the welfare state and so on. So the earliest versions of things like a bit of unemployment benefit, disability benefit, pensions etc. Go back to the late 19th century particularly in Germany with Bismarck. So you have that and so the Old Left very early on made this political compromise. It was accompanied by what I feel is an important intellectual compromise which practically nobody talks about. And that is that Marx analyzed society. Marx analyzed capitalist society or capitalism as a contradictory value production and all three words are important. It was contradictory. It focused on the production of an elusive but nevertheless very real thing called value. And it was about production not exchange.

This way of analyzing capitalism and of criticizing the hitherto-existing efforts of classical political economy to understand capitalism yielded in Marx and Engels’s hands the most damning indictment of capitalism you could find. And something else. And they basically made even classical political economy useless for justifying capitalism. A new justification was needed and a new justification appeared. It was in a sense not very different from what Marx disparaged as vulgar economics. And it was given systematic form in neoclassical economics and after some initial skirmishes between the likes of the neoclassicals and Bukharin and the neoclassicals and Hilferding essentially Marxists capitulated to neoclassical economics. They criticized it for not understanding exploitationbut they agreed with it that there was something that could be separated from the rest of society which they would call the economy and that this economy was broadly harmonious. It was not suffering from it did not suffer from contradictions.

And I only bring this up all this sounds may sound very technical but I bring it up because it is an intellectual compromise which was close to the political compromise because this made Marxists unable to understand imperialism. They could not if you gave up the idea of contradictions then you cannot say that capitalism’s tendency to imperialism arises from its contradictions because capitalism is this kind of anarchic and exploitative society but which cannot be contained within a society. It is necessarily expansionist because it produces so many problems they cannot be resolved within the context of a given society. So it becomes inevitably imperialist and the imperialism is in a sense the imposition of the costs of capitalism’s contradictions on other societies. So we can go on about that. But this Old Left was already heavily compromised. Then you got the 30 years crisis. What Arno Mayer the historian calls the 30 years crisis.

A term I favor a great deal because it includes the two imperialist wars and the great depression. It puts capitalism in extremely bad repute by the time the 30 years crisis has ended. As I like to say in the 1940s and 50s Uncle Joe was much more popular in Europe than Uncle Sam. Because the Soviet Union had great prestige, it had demonstrated how a backward economy could be massively industrialized under the aegis of socialism. And the contribution of the Soviet Union in defeating the fascists was indispensable, something that working-class people in Europe knew very well. So the left was very strong. But nevertheless, the left was not revolutionary. It was already compromised. It did not make a revolution during the Thirty Years’ Crisis; it buckled, failed, and then fascism emerged but in the postwar period this kind of left did achieve a lot of reforms and then came the New Left.

It represented a rediscovery of imperialism and this rediscovery—through the Vietnam War, etc.—went hand in hand with a range of other movements with the women’s movement which was also rooted in objective historical developments women began to participating more and more in the workforce and that inevitably gave rise to new issues. The civil rights movement, of course, the anti-Vietnam War movement. So all of these things came together to create a New Left. But now I’m going to criticize it as well because I would say that while the generation of 68 was very radical it was in touch with a lot of very deep rooted problems. And while many of its members have remained true to the causes to which they subscribed. I would say that as a generation as this generation matured and occupied positions of power both in what Professor Gottfried called the managerial state but also in managerial corporate capitalism.

These groups, this generation essentially organized a capitulation to the new right. So in the 1970s the new right emerged as the postwar order entered its crisis because although it was heavily reformed its underlying character remained capitalist and it entered crisis when there were two possibilities. One was to say well in the post-Second World War period our reforms did lead to many improvements and much suppression of capitalism’s contradictions and the solution is to go forward towards greater socialistic reforms or you say no these socialist reforms were the problems to begin with you remove them you give capital ever greater freedom and that would be the solution and that was the side that won that’s what we call neoliberalism today. It’s not about competition. It’s not about markets. It’s about giving big corporate capital as much freedom as it wants. Although you dress it up in other rhetoric. So the this generation organized this and the wokeness comes in here.

And by the way, I’m going to say something more about this later, but I do not like the term wokeness. I would rather call it the interweaving—the conjoining—of neoliberalism with tokenistic social liberalism and by social liberalism awareness about women’s rights black people’s rights non-white people’s rights whatever and other such things gay people’s rights etc so sexual minorities whether of sexual identity or sexual orientation doesn’t matter but okay so you want to do this fine but this is all done in a tokenistic fashion this is the key point I want to make the Barack Obama may become the president but the lot of most working black people remains the same if not worsens so this is the point I’m trying to make and that to me is the most important thing and this class of people who led social democracy to the right by becoming the leaders of social democratic parties. These were all members of the professional middle classes.

They essentially organized this marriage of neoliberalism and tokenistic social liberalism and they thought they were going to rule on the basis of that for a very long time. But what we’ve seen in the last election is that this social formation has not lasted more than about 20 years. You think about Blairism as its initiation or high point and less than 20 years later I would say that today there will be a knockdown crisis in the Democratic Party and the content of the crisis will be what sort of strategy we should now adopt now that this marriage of neoliberalism and social liberalism does not work. I don’t think the Democrats can easily get out of it. But I think I’ll end here because I’ve spoken too long. Yeah.

Class Unity: Thank you. We do have a great question from the audience for Professor Gottfried. But maybe Professor Gottfried, if you have something to say about what Professor Desai has just said, we can start with that.

Paul Gottfried: Listening to Professor Desai for the last five minutes, I find I do disagree with many of her points. Our historical perspectives are different. Let me just begin by pointing out that I don’t think 19th century liberalism is anarchic or just exploitative. I think liberalism creates a civilization in the 19th century and it is essentially the bourgeois idea. It organizes society around certain principles: merit, a defense of private property but not corporate capitalism certainly not in the beginning. In religion, it is predominantly Protestant in Catholic countries there’s obviously a struggle between the church and liberal ideas and constitutional monarchy becomes the characteristic form of government. Much of what we consider in the United States, biblical morality, bourgeois values, etc., are really products of 19th century liberalism.

And I think it depends also on maintaining power in the hands of what the French prime minister Guizot called the capacitaires—the people who are capable of governing society and upholding what are the bourgeois values of the time. Now I understand Marx did not like this but what would succeed would, in my view, not be socialism but managerialism and the managerial class does make alliances with both the working class or leaders of the working class and with corporate capitalism. And what we see in the United States today are interlocking power structures consisting of the state church, which is wokeness or intersectionality and I’ll get to that in a few minutes after discussing what exactly this alliance is. And the corporate capitalism is obviously part of this and the political managerial class may perhaps be holding the best hand of all.

And they all cooperate and the war against sexual distinctions white privilege all of the xenophobia in the form of trying to maintain national borders. All of these things furnish a kind of cultural social cement in the United States. They’re not just things that are being used to defend a corporate capitalist structure. They’re deeply believed by many people and they’re imposed on other people by those who are in a position to impose these ideas. And I think in some way there was an effort to strike back at this with the election of Donald Trump. I don’t think however the people the working class or the Trumpites and so forth are in a position to replace the political social economic order that is now in place. And I think that order will maintain itself in power even if Donald Trump is elected to the presidency. But another thing somebody asked what do you mean by liberalism?

By liberalism the dominant ideology of the 19th century not people who want to find some middle ground between capitalism and socialism. And I think capitalism I think liberalism does bring with it a world view which is different from the democratic managerial order of the 20th century is different from socialism and is different from the older conservative aristocratic view of society. So I that is really my understanding of liberalism. If you want to find that argument fleshed out, read my book after liberalism which Princeton published about 25 years ago. The identitarian politics obviously does not mean that everybody is able to preserve his or her identity. The identities that we’re allowed to preserve are those of the cultural-political hegemons want us to preserve which are groups that are seen as victims of the historical past. So we have to make war on gender traditional gender distinctions.

We have to make war on the white race and its achievements since these people are associated with oppression in the past. Not economic oppression but cultural social oppression. I think for the identitarian woke left, economics are much less important than cultural transformation. And in this respect, they’re influenced by the Frankfurt School whose ideas they take and radicalize because I think most of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, one of whom was my teacher, would not have been very comfortable with the degree to which cultural transformation has been pushed by what today is the left. And by the managerial state. So I think one has to see in wokeness or identitarianism a new political-social order. It is not simply neoliberalism. It is not an effort to maintain the liberal capitalist order by transforming the world culturally. I think the cultural transformation is very important and may be irreversible at this point.

And one reason is that they are allied with people who have political and cultural power and economic elites are supporting this transformation. Although I don’t think the transformation that we see can be reduced to economic factors and to the dominance of corporate capitalism. I think they are actors in the process of change that we’re seeing. I don’t think however they’re all determining.

Class Unity: One question for you before we move on, Professor Gottfried. To what extent are the left and right elements that you describe liberal and is there any anti-liberal right or anti-liberal left politics today?

Paul Gottfried: Right. I think the left is pretty much abandoned even the pretense of being liberal. I think it has just gone away and they’re all in favor of a left-wing totalitarian government, which is not Marxist, but it is a form of woke totalitarianism, which will suppress differing views as being reactionary, fascist, whatever they decide to call it. I think the conservative movement in the United States is committed to some aspects of the old of the traditional liberalism. But they’re basically doing it in a polemical fashion. Fighting people on the left with whom they share many of the same assumptions. But I think they are clinging to some vestige of liberal freedoms as understood by an earlier generation of Americans.

They’re not entirely tolerant obviously, but I think they are more tolerant than the people on the left who are pretty much thrown away the message of liberalism except I think as professor Desai would point out in the sense of wanting to maintain corporate capitalist allies and that they’re very clearly willing to do. I don’t take them seriously as socialists of any kind. I think they’re basically cultural radicals and political totalitarians. I don’t however view them as people who are interested in economic transformation.

Class Unity: So our next couple of questions will be what is Marxism and what is wokeness or what is woke ideology. But before we move on, Professor Desai, is there anything you wanted to say, or should we move on?

Radhika Desai: Yeah, honestly Professor Gottfried has said a lot of interesting things again some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t agree with. But let me just take a couple of points without being too long-winded. The first point I would make is that in terms of the objective social interests that are at play in the current confrontation between the Democrats who represent a combination of neoliberalism and tokenistic social liberalism and the Republicans who today, under Trump, represent an opposition to this tokenistic social liberalism. But not necessarily an opposition aimed at the tokenism but an opposition that is aimed at the social liberalism.

So in this context then the objective interests are that on the one hand the democrats are totally aligned with the corporate capitalist class as I see it the mainstream of the corporate capitalist class and it is in the interest of the corporate capitalist class to promote this sort of tokenistic social liberalism not least because I don’t think we appreciate the extent to which it relies on expanding its numbers through immigration. That is to say, it relies on picking off the best talents from around the world and integrating it into a broader managerial class that is going to organize things for corporate capitalism. So in that sense it is a spontaneous ideology of the corporate capitalist class which wants to employ your Africans, your Asians, your Middle Easterns, Latin Americans and so on, and wants them all to get along. So that’s one thing.

As for what Trump is doing, Trump himself would dearly love to be the chosen political instrument of the same corporate capitalist class but he knows he isn’t. He has had to assail its fortresses from the outside and he has done so by essentially mobilizing small capital and the privileged sections of the white working class and this is the coalition and he tells them that he’s going to solve that problem by any number of means by stopping immigration by attacking China by whatever it is but historically small property has of course been very much part of this constituency and as I say the privileged members of the working class who may also have a bit of personal property if not private property and so these are the people who become part of his coalition. So that I agree with.

One thing I did want to say is that Professor Gottfried referred to the white race and its achievements and I have no doubt that like all races in the world the white race has its achievements but I do want to say that there is a sense in which and again I’m not attributing this view to Professor Gottfried but in general I know that it exists out there which assumes that today’s rich countries—predominantly white countries—are rich because they have been technologically, scientifically, productively superior. But I think that if we forget to mention the role of imperialism in making the rich countries rich and the poor countries poor in the same mechanism, then we’re making a mistake. So I just wanted to put that there and maybe I will say one other thing private property I would say that the old conservatism would have the old sort of conservatives would have acknowledged at least some limitations on private property.

And I would say that today the neoliberal right recognizes fewer and it does so even though private property in our time has ceased to create an order of vigorously competitive productively dynamic capitalism and has rather become an order of a senile monopoly capitalism that is unable to reinvigorate economies. It has also become highly financialized. That’s another whole issue altogether. But okay, I’ll stop there.

Class Unity: Our next two questions will be about Marxism and wokeness first. What is Marxism and then what is wokeness? Sofor the first question I’d like to start with professor Desai. In your view, what is Marxism?

Radhika Desai: A very important and good question. So I would say that Marxism is a way of understanding capitalist society that understands it like I said as contradictory value production that understands it as both exploitative and anarchic. So I feel that value production has two axes. So there is a vertical axis which draws value from the workers to the capitalist and then there is a horizontal axis in which competition among capitalists redistributes that surplus towards the most productive capitalist—towards the most efficient capitalist I won’t get technical, but that is the mechanism. Every society we know in the world has produced use values. If it needs schools, it produces schools. If it needs hospitals, it produces hospitals. If it needs food, it produces food etc.

Capitalist society is unique in the history of humankind that believes that everybody should aim at producing value and somehow as a byproduct of the production of value, everything human beings need in their daily life will become available. But this is a complete fiction and nonsense. So Marxism is the ability to understand that and then it is one more thing. It is the ability to see that because this system is unsustainable and it is necessarily prone to crisis and eventually because it will eventually exhaust itself. It will eventually become unable to produce productive advances, which it once did. It will necessarily have to give rise to a different form of society which will in some Hegelian Aufhebung be a transcendence of its contradictions but while preserving the productive advances of capitalism. So Marx believed and I think Marx says that perhaps the most important thing that Marx says is that communism is the real movement.

Most people fail to understand this but he sees that because capitalism’s contradictions make capitalism unsustainable, with greater or lesser consciousness humanity will be driven towards some kind of socialism. So that’s what I believe Marxism is.

Class Unity: Professor Gottfried.

Paul Gottfried: Yeah, I think my answer may be different because I would emphasize those aspects of Marxist thinking which influenced me. First of all he makes a distinction which I think is important between Stände, the older social orders which is replaced in a liberal capitalist society by classes and we have very definite classes in the 19th century into the 20th century. One can distinguish a working class from a bourgeoisie. This of course in time will be replaced by some notion of income strata in which we no longer have classes.

We talk about something called the middle class but it is not in a sense in which Marx would have understood this or I understand this it is rather in terms of people who fall somewhere in the middle of the socioeconomic ladder but I think Marx’s notion of class is very important and I think he understands some of the aspects of the emerging bourgeoisie of his own time although I do not share his economic determinism another important aspect of Marxism is that he understands history as moving in a certain direction. The history is not a haphazard process but is going to culminate at an end point which for him is living in a socialist society. And I generally agree that history is not haphazard. I think we understand it in some sense as being structured and moving in a certain direction from one point to the other.

And I think what Marx does is take one might say is the Judeo-Christian view of history as having purpose—a telos—and seeing it ending in a harmonious society. And I think that vision has perhaps driven the western world for a very long time. Although what Marx does is express this in a secular fashion. I would finally say that his understanding of elites is very important to me because I think what the way he understands society is through ruling classes and I think that is correct. And where I suppose I differ is and I suppose I might differ professorDesai in this respect is that I see culture and religious belief as being very important and infusing an understanding of class. I therefore do not understand the woke left as being neoliberal. I’m not even sure what neoliberal means at this point.

They’re not liberal certainly in the 19th century sense although they do cling to capitalist interest and corporate capital and their understanding of property is corporate it is not individual property or family property they have no conception of the family by the way if there’s anything the 19th century bourgeois liberals had was a very strong sense of the family of what today we’d call the nuclear family. And also a sense of traditional gender authority which has been totally removed. And I think partly and here I would agree with professor Desai because capitalism has developed in this direction. But I would also say that many of the things which Marx would say are part of the superstructure for instance religious belief ideology I think is something that people believe in very deeply. I would not dismiss these out of hand simply as an attempt to clothe economic interest. I think people believe in woke ideology.

I’ve met many of them and they believe in it very deeply and it is not reducible to their economic interest. I would say that, at the end of the day, Professor Desai is excessively rationalistic. She thinks that people are acting always out of economic interest. And this is what drives society. Economic interest is obviously a factor in why people act as they do. But I think people do believe in ideology. I met enough of them. I also used to have this debate with another person on the right Sam Francis who wrote on the managerial class and he believed that everything the managerial class does was driven by material and political interests. They believe nothing other than what served their interest. I do not believe that. I’ve lived long enough in this world to believe that people believe in some pretty crazy ideas. And sometimes crazy ideas take over an entire society, as they do in Nazi Germany.

And I think also in the case of wokeness, we’re seeing something similar. It’s not just that the capitalist class, desires to be nice and needs a lot of, a lot of labor to come into the country, although I would not deny that as a factor in why it acts as it does. But I think people take woke ideology very seriously and having worked in an university for over 40 years I found many people who believed very deeply in ideas which were not driven necessarily by economic interests.

Class Unity: Yes, there’s a lot there specifically it’s interesting your critique of materialism or economic determinism. Professor Desai what would you say about that or anything else that Professor Gottfried said?

Radhika Desai: Sure. No, I wanted to come back on economic determinism. Look, I think that if you assume that the economy is separate from the rest of society, then it sounds very peculiar to say that the economy which is this one system should determine society which is this other system or ideology which is this yet other system. But of course Marx and classical political economy up to and including Marx never thought of things that way. They thought of society as a historically evolving whole which they sought to analyze. And one thing that I do thank Professor Gottfried for mentioning which I didn’t mention but of course is very critical. Marx, like Adam Smith and Ricardo, thought of society in terms of classes.

There had been a distinction between classes and estates—two different categorizations of society that existed in pre-capitalist times depending on which society you’re talking about and then capitalism converts them into well even in feudalism you had classes but they may also have had other names but anyway the point is that there were the class structure of society changed and that’s what changed society. If capitalism is contradictory value production, it involves one group of people who own the means of production having expropriated them from the rest of society which previously had if not ownership at least the rights to use those means of production. And those with the transformation of feudal property into capitalist private property, these people lost those rights and they were evicted and so on and it’s a process that continues to this day.

So, to come back, economic determinism seems only odd, but the idea that the way in which we produce and reproduce our society should have some kind of determining influence on the rest of what we do and even what we believe is not so far-fetched. And some of the best historians even though they may not be Marxist will somehow when telling the story of for example how a given religion arose in a given society will relate the material organization of that society with the spiritual and ideological organization of that society. You can’t have the two completely unrelated to one another. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that economic determinism sounds odd. So the reason why the economy is going to determine why capitalist societies will transform themselves into something else is because capitalist society is contradictory and is not sustainable. That’s what Marx was writing about.

In his analysis of the movements of capital and how it operates and what it does, he’s very clear that it requires such a radical restructuring of society. And quite frankly if you read him closely enough in my reading that reorganization never succeeds. The kind of organization capital requires will never be achieved. But in the process of creating it eventually societies will be fed up to here of trying to conform to it and plus capitalism itself according to Marx will get to the point where it’s past its sell-by date and then society will recreate it and yes if we were to produce a society as Marx indeed imagined we would and perhaps there is some Judeo-Christian millenarian element where everybody would live in a society or land of milk and honey where there would be plenty for everybody.

Then yes, if we were spending an hour a day making our living or less, why should you not have or why should that hour a day determine everything? It won’t. But as long as we are spending a lot of time a day all of us producing and reproducing our living it’s going to have a fairly important effect whether you call it determinism or not I don’t really mind do you have anything to add to that.

Class Unity: Professor Gottfried or should we move on to the next question?

Paul Gottfried: Yeah one point that comes to mind professor desai says that economics and culture—or economics and society are not totally unrelated. Well, I can see that point readily. It’s the all-determining nature of economic relations in Marxism that I’m questioning at this point. It is not that I’m certainly not questioning that there is a relationship between economics and politics. The other thing that sort of enters my mind thinking about what Professor Desai has said is that there is no example of something she would accept as a socialist society that conforms to our image of Marxism. We’re mostly talking about an ideal that has never been realized. And I’m not against ideals that have never been realized. But I think one has to understand the sustaining power of capitalism in whatever form it takes. And there are many points that I can see that what we would call capitalism today looks very different from what it did in the 19th century.

But the idea of private ownership of the means of production is something that seems fairly widespread in the world. Whereas there are very few examples that I can find of Marxian socialism that has been put into practice in which societies have done very well have benefited so not only socioeconomically but have enjoyed some high measure of political freedom. So while I can complain about how capitalism functions and I find its alliance with the woke state church and the managerial class in the United States to be abhorrent. I really don’t think that the record of capitalism as an irrational form of production really looks that bad. No, I know that professor Desai is gonna pull out imperialism and tell me that all these societies outside the west are suffering enormously because we have capitalism in western countries and so forth. I’m just not convinced of that argument.

You have to show me that a country like India has suffered enormously because the English exploited it back in the 18th century. There also were benefits that were derived from imperialism which in some case set these countries on the road of industrialization and modernization. So I think our view of capitalism may actually be dimmer than it has to be.

Class Unity: I do want to note the time. We’re coming up towards the end of our event. I don’t feel as though this specific question is exhausted but it depends on how the speakers feel like.

Paul Gottfried: Well, I think professor Desai should have the right to respond to my point.

Class Unity: Sure.

Radhika Desai: Very quickly, if there’s anything you particularly want me to address because I did want to say a lot of things about what Professor Gottfried did again both in agreement and disagreement but let me stick to the two points that were mentioned last which is the exploitation of colonies by the west and actually existing socialism. The first is that by now we have a lot of quantification of the economic harms of western colonialism and there is absolutely no doubt that through a series of mechanisms including the outright plunder and transfer of surpluses of the colonies —let me rephrase that—the plunder and surplus extraction in the colonies was directly related to the extent and pace of industrialization in first world countries. So this what I was saying earlier that the riches of the west are directly connected with the poverty of the rest of the world is a very important point in my humble opinion.

If we were to have a webinar on that we could then each marshal our facts and so on but let me just name a couple of points. SoUtsa Patnaik in her calculations has shown that the extent of surplus extraction just from India. Remember of course that at the time British India consisted of what is today India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But yes, British India was responsible for ensuring that the pace of investment in early industrial Britain remained fast enough for the transformation to be labeled a revolution. Without that additional investment there would not have been an Industrial Revolution. And, by the way, the British were not there only in the 18th century. Their presence actually began in the early 17th century, the British maintained presence right through to the mid-20th century.

Jason Hickel has also done some critical calculations about the economic resources, let me just give you one example and this is completely by chance that I alighted on this. I was just idly looking at some news and I alighted on a commentary in the Guardian which is a paper I find far too ‘woke’ to read with great interest but anyway this one was very interesting because they were basically talking about how in Senegal there is an enormous crisis of migration because people who live in this particular village that was the example people relied on fisheries. But with the arrival of big European trawlers into the region which simply vacuum up the fish, there is basically nothing to fish. There is a huge crisis of livelihood. So these are all the ways in which the harms are still going on and like I said people like Hickel have done enormous calculations and I think they are worth looking at.

People would say that just the ways in which the social structures were altered and harmed in some ways also made India particularly vulnerable to famine and India was not alone by the way Ireland also became more frequently subject to famine precisely because the changes in social structure which drove people which displaced food production with cash crop production which even at the height of famines would be exporting food from the famine afflicted region or country and so on. So these harms are very real and I think that would require many webinars drawing on different parts of the world to discuss them. So that’s the first thing I want to say.

The second thing I want to say is that while I completely agree with Professor Gottfried that all the socialisms we’ve seen so far of course remain far short of the kinds of visions by which we are all inspired but that doesn’t mean that they are just not worth looking at for two reasons. Number one in most cases socialism has not come because people thought it would be better than the existing system. Socialism arrived because the existing system became untenable and that moment is not far from arriving in many places in the world including I might add your own country the country where most of you are located. The levels of productive debility and financialization have reached great peaks. Meanwhile, financialization as your mechanism of choice to act as a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks up value produced elsewhere in the world and pours it into the United States. This is not working.

One small sign is that the Federal Reserve balance sheet is expanding at a great rate of knots or has been expanding at a great rate of knots precisely because the asset markets which have existed until recently to make private individuals and entities from all over the world pour their money into the United States. These asset markets are not doing very well. And if the Federal Reserve were not buying these assets, the asset prices would crash. And if the asset prices crash, so would the dollar system. And the dollar system itself if it ceased to function, then the United States ability to continue to incur these deficits that it incurs, which is essentially a surplus of imports over exports, which the United States as an economy is not paying for. This is huge and it is going to affect the U.S. standard of living very badly.

Now I cannot predict whether this will happen day after tomorrow or whether this will happen in 15 or 20 years but I suspect it is somewhere between these two marks.

Class Unity: We can move on now I think to the next question about what is wokeness and we’ll start with Professor Gottfried but before I ask it I would like to motivate it if that’s all right so please excuse the long windup one might think that wokeness is just a shibboleth indicating political affiliation one might also think that wokeness is just another word for liberalism or radical left liberalism one might instead think that wokeness is a new and distinct ideology. But one might also wonder where it comes from. One might wonder about its ideological origins or its material basis. One could wonder who it serves and what role it plays in society today. We have seen the CIA use woke terminology in its recruitment campaigns. Neoconservatives have used woke language to motivate efforts to quote unquote decolonize Russia. Can wokeness be taken at face value? Or is it just an opportunistic use of do-gooder rhetoric to justify state power?

What is wokeness or woke ideology? Professor Gottfried.

Paul Gottfried: Yeah. I like your examples because I think they’re all telling. Neoconservatives, want to bring down the Russian government in the name of gay marriage or whatever they decide is going to become a human value or a human right or something like that. There I have to concede that there is definitely opportunism and there are people who take over woke shibboleths in order to increase their power to unleash wars on countries and so forth. All of this is true but I think there is an underlying ideology. This is the same as saying that people use Christianity to expand empires to fight wars to colonize the new world etc. Yet Christianity as a religion had many adherents millions and millions of adherents and I think as a structure of ideas has to be taken seriously. One has to understand why it is appealing. And I don’t think it is simply to further economic interest.

I think wokeness does represent almost the sort of the other side of the left. It is not Marxist. It is not characterized by excessive economic rationalism or materialism. It represents the deep alienation that some groups feel from as I say from white male Christian society all of which they’re reacting against. And when I use the term white civilization that is exactly what the left is reacting against. And I agree that not everybody who produced that civilization was an Aryan or came from Northern Europe. And of course the religious underpinnings came from the Middle East. And probably even going back even further to India and other places but the woke left sees itself as being at war with whites, being at war with Christians and particularly with white Christians.

And I think it does represent the sense of alienation on the part of the people who adopt this ideology and who take it seriously that to some extent they feel themselves to be victims of white male society. And this does appeal obviously to a lot of women, particularly to college educated women, who look back at the past and notice that women are not in the same social socially dominant position as men. And also attribute an exclusive evil or wickedness to their own western civilization for not conforming to their social cultural vision. Many of these people favor a replacement of population because the people who have been living here are so evil and their civilization is so evil that it has to be entirely replaced.

Now one of the reasons I have argued that people do arrive at this position or at least when I said much of the capitalist class does is because this does not and here I think Professor Desai would actually agree it does not advance socialism very far. It does not take your money away, right? It just pretends to take your money away, but the effects of their economic policies will be felt by the working class, right? And there’ll be lots of nice cushy deals for culturally radical woke supporters of the Democratic Party, right? We’ll have green energy, all the things that will make these people wealthier and also make them feel good about themselves.

I think though in order to understand the one might say the intellectual and cultural origins you have to look at things like anti-colonialism in Europe which is not necessarily take an orthodox Marxist form in the United States a civil rights movement and to some extent the antiwar movement but I think the civil rights movement segues very quickly into feminism and into gay rights and so forth. And we have a very large political mechanism created to enforce equality to help us overcome discrimination and prejudice. And this becomes really a vehicle for woke reform later on. So I think many people who see as capitalists throwing money into the Democratic Party to push woke ideology probably feel that they benefited a lot. They could afford DEI. It’s not going to hurt them very much because they’ll also get more government favors.

What you really have in the United States is parasitic capitalism and these are the capitalists who are allied to the managerial class. Now I really don’t look forward to a socialist future because what it means is more power for the managerial class that’s running things right now. They’re the ones who are going to take over and enact socialism, which they’re not going to do anyhow because they’re in alliance with corporate capitalism. But if we did move towards something called socialism, the people who are now certainly the political class who are now in power would benefit enormously. And we would not be living in Marxist harmonious society where we read Aeschylus and Goethe in the morning and then go fishing after we work. It would be more of the same. It would be more political control and greater economic control.

Although I’m not sure because I really don’t see the corporate woke capitalist being or the parasitic or crony capitalists being replaced. I think they’ve now become an essential integral part of the woke order. I see wokery at the end as becoming something like a state church. It sort of replaces what Christianity had been or Protestantism in bourgeois capitalist countries. It is a new religion. And it is being forced on us, those of us who despise it as I do. And we really have very little control over it. And I’m not sure that even if we move towards something called socialism, we’d be rid of this pestilence. I think it would continue at this point. And I don’t think Trump’s victory is going to end it because too many people have an investment in this and too many people who believe this.

Many of the people who voted for the Democratic Party they were not Marxists they were supporters of woke ideology. Some benefit from it like the corporate capitalists. Others are women who are enraged by discrimination but at the same time don’t seem to mind having their children taken away and their genitals removed in the name of gender transformation or whatever the government is going to do in Canada it seems to be very extreme this wokeness and I don’t think it has anything to do with Marxism or socialism like I it is sort of as of some kind of vague relation but I think mostly in terms of the people who at one time were Marxists, let’s say people in Germany who worked for the DDR and became supporters of woke ideology. I’m not quite sure that it’s going to be defeated. I think it any more than Christianity was defeated once it became the established religion of the Roman Empire.

And I think the United States has a deep investment in this. We were sort of making fun of this that they were going to start a war, but this is happening in the United States and anytime we become involved in some other country it’s for gay rights or to give women equal rights or to fight bigotry of one form the war against bigotry is sort of the point of departure of all this and of course bigotry gets redefined more so that it’s not just if you don’t give a job to a person whose father was Jewish or something but it becomes in the end something like discriminating against wokeness or discriminating against somebody who’s transgendered and so forth. I think this is a driving cultural force driving political cultural force and I don’t see it ending very soon.

Class Unity: Professor Desai, in your view, what is wokeness or woke ideology?

Radhika Desai: Right. So, I would say the way I understand wokeness, as I said, is this connection or is this combination of neoliberalism and tokenistic social liberalism. Now, it’s too bad that Christian Parenti couldn’t be there because there were one or two points he made that I agree with which is that it is a way of not talking about class. That is true. However, the problem is not the social liberalism. The problem is the tokenism because to say that it’s a way of not talking about class does not to me necessarily imply that it can simply be replaced by a homogenizing class ideology because the working class is diverse. If you look at the working class of today and what do I mean by the working class? By the working class everyone who must work for their living whether they are employed or not.

So it includes the unemployed and whether they are paid for it or not which includes a lot of people who do unpaid care work. Okay. So this is a pretty big class, and this class is feeling very badly done by rightly so because I think that we have seen over the four or four and a half neoliberal decades that we have been through already a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary working people both in the rich countries and in the world as a whole to a small and ever shrinking elite. So the working class is diverse. It has a lot of problems. But, as I say, I don’t like calling it wokeness. And the reason I don’t like calling it wokeness is because ‘woke’ is a word that came out of the black movement and more generally the movement representing these marginalized groups as a way of saying that I have awoken to my deprivation my marginalization my exploitation etc.

And so I don’t want to disparage that term and that’s why I’m saying and of course the fact that in any country women and minorities of various sorts were typically over representedamong the worst off and so on. This has always been true. It has never been untrue. And so the left must address these things. You’re not going to create an unified working-class movement because that’s what you are about. You’re about Class Unity. Well, you’re not going to create Class Unity if you do not address the problems of discrimination. Now, that does not mean that you have to start de novo. Historically, both what the currents we call social democracy and the currents we call communism have been in the forefront of defending the rights of women of religious and ethnic minorities, racial minorities, etc.

So I would say that there is a long history of the combination of or long history of the recognition that the working class is diverse and the unity of the working class is not a given. It has to be built. So to me, this is not news; it is an old fact. What is different about the left is that the left has accepted neoliberalism and the left has tokenized diversity or social liberalism whatever you want to call it and these two go together because once you adopt neoliberalism you have nothing material to give to women non-white people and every kind of minority you care to list there is no material gain. There is no equality to be offered them.

All you can do is you can ask them to be satisfied with the fact that one or two of them or a handful of them get promoted to senior positions that Obama becomes president and Kamala Harris becomes vice president and so on and somehow Black people and women are supposed to take satisfaction out of this. What a load of rubbish and therefore it is not surprising that even with Harris I would have thought that women would have rushed to Harris and non-white women particularly this has not happened even the issue of reproductive rights has not brought women flooding to the Harris campaign and ensuring her victory because at the end of the day it’s about more than that and what’s more by the way on these tokenistic issues Trump can afford to make concessions as he did on reproductive rights. He made it very early on. He said he’s not going to interfere.

He’s going to let states do what they want. So people understood what was going on. And of course the Democrats have a long record of keeping the abortion issue alive rather than addressing it and dealing with it once and for all which they could have done for decades and they chose not to. So this is what is a historic party of the working class converted to neoliberalism. Now as I have said Professor Gottfried made another point which I do think is an important one and I’ve written a fair bit about this. So let me just give you a potted version of this. He said what is neoliberalism anyway and he’s quite right to raise this question because since 1979 when Mrs. Thatcher was elected or 80 when Ronald Reagan was elected a lot of water has gone under many bridges.

So exactly what is neoliberalism and I would have argued that neoliberalism which is actually by the way the same ideology that was born with neoclassical economics in particular in its Austrian version because its Walrasian version for example lent itself very well to not only welfare economics but even to socialistic forms of thinking. So I’m going to leave that aside but particularly its Austrian very rigidly free market free trade Austrian version this type it was born precisely around the time when capitalism was entering its monopoly phase Marx had said that once capitalism enters its monopoly phase it’s finished it’s past its sell by date it’s no longer going to do to advance the forces of production which after all no matter how brutally it did so, how chaotically it did it, that’s what it did. But it’s going to cease to do that as well.

And then you had this big 30 years crisis within a couple of decades from 1914 to 1945. And then a lot of people think that everybody like Karl Polanyi or John Maynard Keynes who expected that at the end of the Second World War the world would take a very definite turn to the left even to forms of socialism that these people who expressed these ideas in the 30s and 40s were belied because we had this golden age. The fact is the golden age was not just the golden age of capitalism. It was not simply capitalism’s golden age. It was least golden in the United States. It was most golden in the recovering economies in the communist world and in the developing countries. Those were the parts of the world economy which made it boom.

And it did that because in all these parts of the world you either did not have capitalism or you had a highly modified welfareist developmental type of capitalism with a lot of state control and so on. So you got this golden age and unfortunately a lot of Marxists said this proves that people were wrong that capitalism has got its mojo back but the 40 years of neoliberalism in which every freedom has been given to capital shows that you can give all sorts of freedom to a senile monopolistic capitalism and it is not going to get back its productive dynamism. It’s not going to get back its productive mojo. So this is what we’ve seen. Sothese people essentially the historic parties of the working class were converted to neoliberalism precisely when it could no longer work. So what I’m trying to emphasize is that neoliberalism was from its beginning false.

It claimed to revive capitalism but it could not and will not revive capitalism. So at the end of these 40 years all we’ve seen is a senile capitalism and which is not going to do very well. That’s a long story, but neoliberalism could not work; it was never accurate. So what we’ve seen now is that roughly every decade of neoliberalism’s existence it has taken a slightly different form. So you got the classic neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher. State bad, markets good. Then already by the end of that decade, all sorts of people including the IMF and the World Bank were saying this is not working. Free markets and free trade don’t work. You need some amount of state intervention. So then you got globalization. Globalization involved two things. Number one, you got people saying no the state must play some role at the very minimum it must play a role in promoting competitive corporations and so on.

And on the other hand this was the decade during which neoliberalism moved into the historic parties of the working class. Your Blair and your Clintons essentially transformed their parties through an ideology in which they said look folks to their working-class social base. They said look we would love for you to have higher wages. We would love for you to have better working-class pensions and welfare state and regulations and so on but we can’t. Our hands are tied because of globalization. The following decade you got empire and there were many different meanings of it but one of them was that the United States was the leading economy. Europe and Japan was suffering from secular stagnation, Eurosclerosis and so the US had it all great but that hardly lasted well a little over half a decade when again it was in crisis by 2008. Then you’ve got austerity and now I call what we have now pseudo-Keynesianism.

Essentially a way for governments to give more and more lucrative contracts to big private corporations because there is nobody else to give them contracts and do it in the name of things that people need. Everybody needs vaccines. We’re going to give corporations huge subsidies to produce vaccines. Everybody needs education services, health services. We are going to allow big corporations to give you these. So the big corporations are going to take all the taxpayers’ money. We’re going to pay for it. You’re going to pay for it in one way or all of us are in our different countries. But we are not going to get anything like the quality and quantity of the services and products that corporations will promise the government to provide. So this is going to be a huge boondoggle. I don’t think Donald Trump is particularly different on this front.

He also represents a type of neoliberalism except that his neoliberalism will come with various forms of authoritarianism and so on. So we will see what happens but so neoliberalism has had to shapeshift practically every decade because it was never right to begin with.

Class Unity: We’re running up against time again but I think this is a very important topic. So before we move on, Professor Gottfried, is there anything you wanted to say on this topic?

Paul Gottfried: Yeah. I’m not sure that I buy Professor Desai’s definition of wokeness as tokenistic neoliberalism. I’m not sure what is liberal about any of this, as I understand liberalism. It is a form of cultural-political authoritarianism. And, it seems to be very strong. And I think there are cultural, religious, all kinds of other reasons that we’re dealing with this. And I don’t think it is reducible to the failure of capitalism to move on to socialism. Although as I’ve indicated before, I do think that corporate capitalism has been incorporated into what is now the woke ruling class. I also don’t see any indication that corporate capitalism is now senile, that the economy is terrible and that the solution to the problems from which we suffer would be to create a socialist society. If the socialist societies that existed in Eastern Europe and in the third world are any indication of what socialism will look like. Let’s get back to this problem of imperialism.

There’s a very good book, several books by Peter Bauer which show that the standard of living in most countries that are subject to western imperialism actually goes up throughout the imperialist period and then they fall afterwards. Now this is not to deny that the British do exploit India. They grow cotton there and they’re required to send it back to England where they produce garments which are then inflicted on the inhabitants of India and so forth. Or that the Irish were treated miserably by the British for religious and other reasons. But I’m not sure that imperialism on balance ruins the economies of third world countries. It does have other bad effects like throwing together tribes that are incompatible and start fighting with each other afterwards. But economically from all the indications I have seen there is an improvement in the standard of living of third world countries on balance.

The other thing is that most Western countries do not benefit very much from imperialism. Most of their trading goes on within Europe itself. And this is true before the first world war. England and Germany are major trading partners yet they go to war against each other in 1914. Trade does not prevent this from happening but most of the trade and economic development that occurs in the western world from the late 19th century on takes place among advanced capitalist countries. Imperialism is peripheral to this to the economic development. But getting back to my other point, I’m not sure that the people in western countries are living with the senile capitalist economy that has caused them tremendous harm. If anything, the standard of living has gone up in most western countries since 1950, gone up dramatically.

What I see, however, is that the working class now is living badly because of government policies and because their interests have been surrendered particularly by the Democratic Party. I don’t think the Republican Party has been a significant political actor in recent years. I’m not sure that I see any authoritarianism in Donald Trump. This still hasn’t been proven to me. I think that one of the problems of the government that he’s replacing is that there was authoritarianism. They were putting their political enemies in jail. They were talking about removing disinformation by throttling our First Amendment rights. And they also carried on lawfare against Trump. This is not to present him as a model citizen and wonderful leader. But I think that his election is largely a response to very bad government into very arbitrary government on the other side.

Class Unity: Okay, we’re going to probably skip the last question and go into closing remarks. Unless Professor Desai wanted to briefly respond to anything that I said that Professor Gottfried said.

Radhika Desai: Well, I again I’ll just try to be very brief. Number one, you Professor Gottfried said that imperialism couldn’t possibly have delivered a lot of benefits to the imperial countries because most of the trade was among the imperialist countries rather than between the colonial countries and the imperial countries. This is first of all not true. On the whole I would say that trade was very much North–South. I hate those terms but I’m going to use them for now because they are widely understood in the period before 1950 and since then yesit has become very much an Atlantic phenomenon or phenomenon of the OECD countries. Yes it’s true. Secondly, this was true.

That is to say that the trade was predominantly North–South even though the value of what the third world exported to the rest of the world which is what benefited the mother countries so-called must have been extremely bad mothers but nevertheless they were mother countries when because they were devalued. The exports were through a variety of mechanisms the value of the primary including currency manipulation for example in the case of India and other countries because, remember, the currencies were under the control of their imperial masters.

So through currency manipulation the volume and value there was often a big disparity enormous volumes of exports went out but the first world countries managed to get the benefit of this at bargain-basement prices so that’s and as I said those were not the only trade was not the only mechanism there was outright plunder there was the British government in India for example arranged for the government of India to be charged for the privilege of being ruled by the British to occasionally whenever needed for the government of India to give the government of the UK gifts whatever that meant and so on. So there’s a whole lot of things you have to understand before you try to and as I say the I have not compiled the statistics but I gave you a couple of names of those who have compiled them. So that is without doubt and this is beginning to be recognized.

Senile capitalism all you have to do is look at the rate of growth and the rate of investment it is very low and I don’t think that it is any surprise to certainly anybody here to know that wages in real terms in even in rich countries like the United States have been essentially stagnant for the last 40 years this is not news so in that sense capitalism is unable to produce broad-based prosperity even in the rich countries let alone elsewhere. Donald Trump and authoritarianism, I agree with you. I personally find it very offensive when these Democrats try to impose such thought control over the world. But authoritarianism is about more than thought control.

And I would not be surprised if under Donald Trump we would see, as we have already seen, under Donald Trump an increasing militarization of police forces and increasing repression of minorities and immigrants and remember immigrants are not just there they’re not just people who don’t have passports or whatever they are people who are contributing to the American economy without immigrants if Donald Trump actually carries out his threat to deport all illegal immigrants. The economies of vast parts of the United States will collapse. The whole trick of immigration is to permit vast quantities of it which is needed. If you are not going to have the requisite number of babies, you’re going to need the immigrants. And so you have a very high degree of immigration because you need it.

But then you also keep up a high decibel rhetoric of anti-immigrant rhetoric so to keep the working class divided to prevent them from uniting across these boundaries and to prevent them from posing an unified challenge to an increasingly decrepit capitalist ruling class. So I think I’ll just keep myself confined to those remarks for now.

Class Unity: Okay. Thank you. We won’t have time for the last question. The last question was about identity politics in the Democratic Party versus material politics and whether there was a possibility of the possibility of a left being grounded in material class politics that is not hostile to the majority. If either of our guests want to touch on that point in their closing remarks, you’re free to do so. But we’ll move into closing remarks and Professor Gottfried, we will start with you.

Paul Gottfried: Yeah, I would just like to respond to something that Professor Desai said about immigration. There’s no evidence that we need those 10 or 20 million people, whatever number the Democrats brought in to give as future Democratic voters, and that’s the only reason I think they brought them in. Even if some of the corporate capitalists might be able to benefit from them, there’s no evidence that we need them because they are not contributing that much to the economy right now. And the country would easily have survived without their coming here. And in fact much of the American workforce hates having them here because they drive down their wages further. They have a very high crime rate particularly in cities. They’re disproportionately involved in crimes because many gangs came into the United States.

I doubt, however, that all of them are going to be deported because there are many Democratic judges who will probably issue due process judgments to keep them in the country because they do want them as future Democratic voters. But obviously the United States has benefited from immigration. The country has constantly taken immigrants since the time it was founded in the 1790s. But we have not taken immigrants all the time. We’ve taken them when there’s an economic need for immigrants and when we think we can sort of fit them into the general culture. We continue to take immigrants legal immigrants into the United States. We do not need 10 or 20 million whatever the numbers of illegal immigrants who have come into the United States. And I’m very cynical for the motives why they were allowed to come in and it was done quite deliberately by the Democratic Party. Secondly, I see absolutely no indication that Trump has militarized anything.

As far as I can see, the Secret Service was politicized under President Obama who made sure they all agreed with him. And he also changed the nature of the politics of his generals and the military staff because he wanted people who agreed with him politically and would carry out his policies. Trump has done absolutely nothing of this kind. In fact, he spent four years sort of dodging the attacks of his enemies in the media and in the Democratic Party. He may have some kind of nasty agenda that he’s going to unleash on us in the next four years but I see absolutely no evidence for it.

Class Unity: Professor Desai your closing thoughts.

Radhika Desai: I think, once again, I agree with Professor Gottfried that the current Democratic Party represents an abhorrent form of politics but to me so does Donald Trump. Soto me there was very little to choose between them and full disclosure not that I contributed much but I did work closely with Jill Stein on her campaign. I believe that she was the only candidate who spoke for people for the planet and for peace. And this is an element that we have not really talked about very much. I think that one of the characteristics of woke ideology is actually to play the same role in international discourse that the old notion of standard of civilization used to play. So there are some countries in the world that are below this standard and therefore it is open season on them. You can do whatever you like to them.

You can dehumanize them to any extent and that’s what we are witnessing in two contrasting ways. Of course, Israel is dehumanizing Palestinians today in an astonishingly vile fashion. And of course the West is dehumanizing Russia. Even at the height of fascism I do not believe we denigrated—or, let me say, devalued— German culture of Beethoven or Hegel or Bach or whatever in the way that today we are doing by cancelling Dostoevsky or Russian musicians or what have you. So all of this is to me abhorrent and wokeness, as I say, is also part of this new ruling ideology in the international sense or what I call tokenistic social liberalism. We did not invade Afghanistan to protect Afghan women against Afghan men. This is completely ridiculous. Again, the level of hypocrisy involved in that is simply crazy. And meanwhile the American government is sitting on Afghan reserves when that country is going through some of its worst conditions.

If you really care for Afghan women, you should not be depriving their government of the minimal means to support them, I’m sure they will benefit then they’ll be better off than what they were right now. So this whole ideology of war, sanctions, etc., it’s all part of it. And if Donald Trump represents less war, and I hope he does, at least he didn’t start one in his previous term, which I’m grateful for, that would be a good thing. If he’s right, that it’s time to focus on the internal problems of the United States, of which not only are there plenty, but those are the only reasons why he is elected. Remember even many of I would say most of his sympathizers would find it very difficult to produce a full-throated defense of him as a man and of his principles and his every bit of policy and rhetoric that he has engaged in. This is not possible.

People have held their nose and voted for him because the other side is pretty abhorrent as well. So that’s what you have. But what I want to say about the revival of Marxism is that and I don’t know I don’t care whether you call it Marxism or not but some sort of ideology which is about social egalitarianism and about removing the various discriminations that still exist in our society and let me just say one thing vis-à-vis conservatism and family ideology. I think that I’m a feminist, but I do think that as feminists, we have made a mistake by not valuing the work women have already been doing for centuries. We should have valued our work as mothers or as caregivers and so on. And because we did not value it, a lot of women have suffered a great deal.

So please don’t get me wrong, but feminism in this broader version is absolutely necessary as is anti-racism, anti-imperialism, all these things are necessary. And a socialism that embraces all of these and addresses all of these really rather than tokenistically is not only like desirable, it is the only way that is going to get us out of this mess because we have not come out of this mess with the election of Donald Trump. What this election represents is the defeat of the Democrats.

Funnily enough I don’t always agree with him but Francis Fukuyama wrote an article in the Financial Times in which he said that even a few weeks ago we may have regarded the election of Donald Trump and his presidency of 2017 to 2020 as an odd aberration but now it is very clear that it was the election of Biden that was the aberration and that we are now back to a change that was initiated by Trump’s election. But the problem is that this outcome, whatever you want to call it, this outcome of the election is not solving anything. And we are going to remain in this one damn thing after another type of history until we get to a situation in which something like what Jill Stein represents and there are other forces emerging in Britain. There was an enormous hope behind Corbyn. I’m not saying Corbyn was completely perfect. He had his faults. But I’m not talking about the leaders.

I’m talking about the hope and the objective necessity of an alternative. And I come back here. I think that Professor Gottfried and I agree that Marx understood what is meant by objective necessity of history. And I think this is where we are all headed. If we are not sufficiently conscious and we do not devise alternatives, we will simply make more mistakes on the way to arriving at those alternatives. But that is the only way to go otherwise humankind in any recognizable form and the planet for that matter cannot survive. So there we are. I think I’ll leave it at that.

Class Unity: Well, thank you for everyone for coming for this discussion. Great discussion. Thank you, Professor Desai, and thank you, Professor Gottfried for coming to speak with us today.

Paul Gottfried: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it enormously.