Transcription
[Music] Hello, and welcome to another episode of India and Global Life. Today we have with us Alan Freeman. Alan Freeman is co-director, with Radhika Desai, of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba. He was an economist at the Greater London Authority between 2000 and 2011, where he held the brief for the creative industries and the living wage. He is an honorary life vice-president and founder member of the Association for Heterodox Economics. Currently, he is at the University of Greenwich.
Ellen: Welcome to India and Global Life.
Alan: Very pleased to be with you. I think, uh, the word "heterodox economics" is something we can begin with, also as a preface to understand who you are and what are the kind of works that you do. So just tell us why; what drew you to economics, and what do you mean by heterodox economics?
Alan: Oh, this is a very peculiar question. What drew me to economics? Almost nothing draws me to economics, um, uh, but I wanted to understand what economists did. Because I think this is maybe in accord with the experience of many of your many of your listeners and viewers, which is that, uh, economics is a quite scary activity. And it's scary for a number of, uh, reasons that are not really valid. It, it first reason, it's scary; people think it's it's it's full of mathematical formulas that they don't understand, or maybe they do understand, but they're still scary. And economists tell you what to do. I think that's the real reason. I will remember I was in Argentina in 2000 when there was the crash, and again in 2002, and I followed the reaction to this crash. History is now repeating itself with this this… man, Mle. But there's a famous, uh, economist called Dabush. And when it when it crashed—and and you have to remember that the Argentine economy crashed essentially because it took the advice of economists seriously; they tried to dollarize their economy—when the crash happened, what happened was all the dollars fled out of Argentina. They were left with enormous debts, uh, which they still haven't written off because the vulture funds have forced them to, uh, accept. So Dabush proposed that what they should do is set up a committee of economists to run the country. So he says, "Cut out the middleman, cut out the politicians; we'll do it." And the extraordinary thing was—60%, there was an OP—60% of the people of Argentina thought this was a good idea. Now, to me, these were—we have this expression, you know, it's it's letting the arsonists run the fire station. The the the advice of the economists is responsible for what happened to Argentina. And at that time, the Anub Singh, who was the—I think he was either Chief Economist or a very high functionary—I know a very, very brilliant man—came and he said to—he he met with the the leaders of the various parties and he said, "Look, you don't have any choice; what we're recommending is a terrible austerity program. You all have to suffer; you have to throw away your industries; you have to accept big cuts in welfare; you have to destroy your social services." And he didn't say, "This is my recommendation." He said, "You have no choice; I am just a technician; I'm just telling you the word." Now, this very interesting attitude, because a doctor wouldn't say that. A doctor wouldn't say, "You have to do this." They would say, "This is the best advice the profession can give, and you make a choice." Same also with a a lawyer or an engineer or whatever; they have expertise which you like, but they have two things: they they they make a recommendation which allows you to make a choice, and they also have a code of ethics, which is rather important. Because if they turn out to have acted unethically in recommending you do things that they knew full well you should not do because they had a conflict of interest, then you sack them, and you can even take them, uh, you can you can get them removed from the register of the profession. There is no code of ethics for economists. And there's a wonderful man, um, with whom I worked, produced, uh, produced a book on the called *An Economist's Oath*. And *The Economist's Oath* with a proposal for a code of ethics, and after 100 years, the American Association for, uh, economics finally adopted a pretty meager code of conduct which simply says, "If you have a conflict of interest, you should declare it." You have to think of the context of this: this was about three years after the 2008 crash, in which the recommendation of economists had led to absolute catastrophes, and in which Iceland—which is the only country ever to take its bankers to court—uh, had actually accepted a clean bill of health from, uh, two economists, one of whom, Porteus, was the head of the Royal Economic Society; the other, Berson, I think it was his name, received payments from the Chamber of Commerce of Iceland of, you know, 30, $40,000 and $150,000 in all. But I won't stick with that in case that's, uh, in case that's libel, uh, because these people are very litigious. But it was a sum of money that they were paid for producing an account, a clean bill of health for the Icelandic economy two months before it collapsed. Now, this is unethical. So why do people who are economists give, on the one hand, advice that says, "You have no choice," which is very unusual? Why are they not bound by any other any code of conduct that says they have certain responsibilities? Well, I think the reason is very straightforward: it's the equivalent of the medieval Church. See what what the medieval Church used to do: it would it would be the intermediary between the kings and the people, and they they they spoke the language which said what the king was allowed to do and the king was not allowed to do. And if anybody doubted them, they said, "Well, you know, you know we're right because we talk to God. None of you guys, you know, you guys talk to God," until Protestantism came along, right? Well, the econ—the economists—just let me finish on this one—for the for the economists, the market is God. They know the market is perfect; they talk to the market; they tell the people what the market is going to ask them and instruct them to do. But actually, they're taking the, uh, that that their paymasters are the real power classes of the time, which then was the kings; now it's it's the bankers, it's the finances, it's the money classes. So heterodox economics is an attempt to do better.
Ellen: Yeah, no, I was exactly, uh, about to say that that the king would be the business class and the market would be the God, and the economist would be… that's a that's a wonderful analogy, and I I've just, uh, heard that. And what was the influence of Marxism personally for you in all this? I'll just come back on one thing, which is the code of ethics, because George DeMartino, who was the author of this, also produced a handbook of professional economics which I recommend everybody to read, because I I think that if you look at what economists do from an ethical standpoint, you begin to understand what's going on, and you begin to understand what what is—what they talk is Orthodoxy. That there's an economic Orthodoxy, and heterodoxy is the opposite of Orthodoxy. In fact, the reason there are heterodox economists at all—there are there are no heterodox engineers, okay; there are no heterodox lawyers—there are—it is because economics is what we what the critics—we critics—call mono-theoretic; it insists there is only one solution to every problem. And heterodox economics doesn't say, "No, we have a better answer than you." It says, "We trust people to make their own decisions about what is best; we are pluralists." What are the—the way we see the professional duty of an economist is to make available to the people, to the victims of economics, the range of possible answers to their questions. Now, how is that relating to Marxism? Because Marxist—and there are, by the way, a variety of Marxist views; there's heterodox—there is an orthodox Marxism as well as a—that economics consists of a lot lot of orthodoxies in waiting. This you have to understand: the official Keynesianism, the official Marxism… genuine heterodox economics says, "No, there is no one single truth," and that includes there is no one single Marxism; that includes there is no one single Keynesianism. There are many views, and you have to make the public aware of the variety. Now, Marxism… what brought me to heterodox economics was I became interested in Marxism. In fact, I became interested in Marxism because I thought this would be the best chance of understanding what was happening in society when when when the sort of Thatcherism, when neoliberalism was taking shape. Um, I was amazed to find that what most of my fellow Marxists in the West taught as Marxism had very little to do with what Marx himself actually said. What they said was… Can you name, name, uh, some people who you have in mind? I'll make myself very unpopular, but Paul Sweezy is one of the main people. It's sometimes called the Sweezy-Morishima-Steedman standpoint, uh, it's the market-based, uh, trade-based kind of, uh, somewhat combination of neo—or let's say classical economics and Marxism, I suppose. Well, no, the key thing is what I regard—and many of my colleagues, an increasingly large number of colleagues—regard as the sort of primal, the primal doctrine of economics, which is what is called general equilibrium theory, right? And general equilibrium basically is a doctrine that says the market is perfect; the market cannot fail; therefore, there can be no imbalance between supply and demand except, you know, temporarily and accidentally. And therefore, we have to understand the world as something that deviates from the perfect. There's an economist—no longer with us—called John Weeks, had this marvelous phrase: he says, "For economists, a horse is an imperfect unicorn." You have a mythical perfect market, and everything else is a deviation from it; therefore, your recommendation is always to go back to that fairyland. Perfection is always—find the unicorn and restore the economy to that state. Now, the orthodox Western Marxism shares the assumption of equilibrium, and Sweezy, in a very famous book in 1942 where he the first time attempted to make, uh, Marxism something palatable to neoclassical economists—that I'm sorry, but I think he was saying it it should be part of the canon of of of political economy, of what is accepted as as as economics—he said, "In order to do that, we have to understand that Marx was a general equilibrium theorist; he also believed in the perfection of the market." So most Marxists have a view of Marx which Marx had absolutely nothing to do with—the equilibrium which starts off by assuming that the economy reproduces itself perfectly, and then they look at the reproduction schemas, and they look at the so-called transformation problem, and they look at the falling rate of profit, and they disprove it; they say the rate of profit cannot fall. I mean, to me, this is like people who attack Galileo for saying the earth goes around the sun. This is, you know, God made the perfect universe, and this cannot happen. And and and Galileo, under torture, made this famous sort of—threatened with torture—made this famous remark: "It still moves." So they say the that that you know this is this is impossible; the rate of profit cannot fall. Well, it does; most empirical research shows it does. So the problem is to explain that. Now, orthodox Marxism, orthodox Western Marxism has been very, very lax in not accepting Marx's own explanation, and his own explanation is simply better. Now that doesn't mean I'm saying—and I'm often accused of this—that Marx is absolutely right about everything. All I'm saying is these people are not pluralists; there's only one view of Marx they accept; they don't understand that you have to read Marx; you have to look at the different understandings, and then you have to select—what it's a scientific criterion—you have to accept what explains the facts the best. That's basic—since Carl—as Carl Shain explained this—basic non—what he calls the non-bullshit version of science—is science is what explains what you see. So I'm in favor of developing Marxism into a way of looking at what happens with markets that explains what we see, and that that's how I got to heterodox economics, for what it's worth. Real—it's called—sometimes it's called real-world economics. I'm I'm a real-world economist. Let's look for an economic or political economy because, uh, really the separation of economics, as Radesi has explained, the separation out of the the special category of economics is—it's part of the sort of Veblenian reconstruction of the social sciences. Actually, you can't separate economics from class society; you can't separate it from, uh, the way politics works. So political economy is a much better description. So what you want is a a political economy that explains the world we see.
Ellen: I think, uh, this is so interesting, and I have so many follow-up questions on that. I mean, orthodoxism itself brought several questions to my mind, and I was wondering, since you mentioned falling rate of profit, I was wondering your thoughts about Brenner's work, because it was his work, *Economics of Global Turbulence*, was a—um, I think it it demonstrates empirically well and gives a very good explanation about the problem of excessive competition and overcapacity leading to, uh, follow of rate—falling rate of profit. But one can also think of Brenner as very orthodox in the the sense that he, uh, I mean, he he he does take a lot from Smith; he he he does, uh… but but but I think if one goes back to his prior work about, uh, transition to capitalism, it seemed that he was very orthodox in the sense that he believed in class struggle and expropriation of the English peasantry as the origins of capitalism, which should be considered as very orthodox today by many within the discipline. So, uh, your response to that?
Alan: Well, there are two issues. I mean, one is something that perhaps might be of very important for your Indian and and listeners from the Third World or Global South, whatever you want to call it, which is that, um, I I have great respect for Brenner because he's a historian, and historians have great respect for facts. So Brenner knows that the rate of profit falls, but he doesn't he doesn't agree with the explanation that is normally given for that. Instead, he's trying to do it within the framework of what is called analytic Marxism, and in particular, uh, this is a bit arcane, but it's it's the interpretation of Marx for which John Roemer, the, uh, American econ—USA economist, um, is is particularly well known. And it is an equilibrium interpretation of Marx, and the problem is if you have an equilibrium interpretation of Marx, it is impossible to deduce from it that the rate of profit falls. So Brenner is stuck with a theory that doesn't explain the facts that he knows to be true. So he develops quite imaginative, uh, and interesting explanations, which I think actually contradict the theory that he claims to use. I think that, um, he's not actually—he's introducing his own theory, but he's sort of loyal to the—what I think it's called political—the analytic school within Marxism. I can't remember… analytic Marx… yeah. On the Third World, on on on his analysis of class, I have deeper differences with him because he wrote a very famous article, um, called about—against Gunder Frank—and this may get us onto the sort of topic of imperialism and so on—and which he which he defined as neo-Smithian Marxism. People use these wonderful terms of abuse; they they never just say, "Well, I don't agree with Gunder Frank, and here's why." They have to think of some label because, you know, essentially economics is Jesuitical, so it labels people; they're having stuck a label… oh my God, I'm a neo-Smithian Marxist, ah, you know, or or Ben Fine—bless his soul because he's a nice guy—but he actually coined this term against yafi—that the people like us who who held to the falling rate of profit, we we were fundamentalists. So it's the fundamentalists. Now, you know, you think—in the context of the growing Islamophobia that was started in those days—you're labeled as fundamentalist; it's the next thing to be being a sort of terrorist Marxist, right? So he loves his labels. So neo-Smithian Marxism, and his view is that what defines the class, what defines whether people produce value is whether they are wage laborers essentially. And so forced labor, such as serfdom or slavery, cannot produce value. And I I don't agree with that. Um, I'm not going to stick some label on it, but it it it makes it impossible to understand what slavery was about, and it makes it impossible to understand this big phenomenon called the new serfdom, when when, uh, actually big layers of Russian and East European population were enserfed. Now, they were enserfed because they kept running away because, you know, Russia's a big place, right? So, uh, they were forced to labor in order to do what? In order to produce corn and and agricultural products for sale in Western markets. So it was the commodity possibilities, the option for the land—the land loaners—to begin to become sort of part-time capitalists that led to serfdom. You can't understand that if you have this very rigid formal notion that if it's forced labor, it can't produce value. So my differences with Brenner on the falling rate of profit are more: look, you're not reconciling a theory with the facts that you know—the facts I defend—you're better than the people you discuss with because you're a historian. But on the on the attitude that he takes towards the character of labor, the differences are larger, because I don't really—I I don't think this theoretical categories of forced labor really really really—it's whether you produce something for sale by means of labor. Southern antebellum labor was was the value-producing labor; it was sold—cotton was sold in the world; it fueled the Industrial Revolution; it was value-producing labor, in in my humble opinion.
Ellen: Exactly. I I think part of—so that that's it for Brenner. Sorry, that's a very good discussion. I think part of that had to do with his tremendous, I would say nationally oriented focus, at least for his, uh, you know, um, analysis about emergence of capitalism. I mean, later on he did write a little bit about the Netherlands, trying to square it off, but his whole theory about the emergence of capitalism was based on England. And so, you know, as you said, like forced—or serfdom—happening in Eastern Europe or Russia, or slave labor in the Americas, I mean, he was aware of that; he talks about that, but somehow he says, "This is not capitalism, and capitalism is what is happening at the at the heartland because of expropriation of the peasantry." I I I think that's very, very mistaken. And the further I go along the field of exploring the true origins of capitalism, which I'm very interested in, uh, the more wrong I think it is. In fact, the chapter of the book I'm now writing is tentatively entitled "Capitalism: Final Stage of Imperialism."
Ellen: That sounds like Lenin.
Alan: Well, Lenin says imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. I'm turning that around; I'm saying, "No, capitalism…" If you read Marx about the origins—the rosy dawn of capitalism—he actually says the world market was established in the 16th century, and it was established with with the voyages of exploration, with Columbus, with Magellan, and so on. And the purpose of those voyages were actually to to to produce gold much more cheaply than it could be produced in Europe, and gold was world money. So the value that they realized in that—that's why they're so obsessed with gold—is because you bring it back to the homelands, and then you can use it to buy things. It was a monetary—it was a capitalist commodity; it was one of the first capitalist commodities in that sense. And then the irony was that the people that Columbus was serving was the sort of bankrupt monarchies of of of Spain or, uh, the central parts of Spain—the the the twin monarchy—I can't remember; I temporarily forgotten what the twin monarchs were—but but basically they were going bankrupt because they went to war all the time. So they're constantly buying industrial products because if you think late medieval warfare was fought with, you know, pretty advanced machinery—like if you look at the way that the suits of armor and the swords are done, you know, you need almost factory-level production to do it—and so they were had this instant thirst for gold. So Columbus said, "All right, we'll bring you gold," and you know, he, uh, committed the world's first genocide and extinguished the Taino population of of Cuba. He never found—he never discovered America; he never—I think on his third voyage he went to Panama—but but he discovered the Caribbean. And what then happened is the next stage is that the conquistadors find the silver mines in Potosí. And Potosí in 1564 was the fourth largest city in Christendom—100,000 people worked there in conditions of destitution—slavery. Incidentally, it wasn't serfdom; they were, um, a system—indentured—they were an indentured system.
Ellen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alan: But they were sending gold back to Philip. Now, Philip wasn't a capitalist, so he didn't know what to do with it. So the people who it ended up in the hands of was was the in the—the Netherlands. That's why the Netherlands was, you know, in systems theory and—whatever—was labeled as one of the first truly capitalist, uh, first proto-capitalist countries. They were taking the money that was flowing into the Netherlands from the exorbitant military practices of the monarchs of Spain and developed modern capitalism as we know it. Then along came the British, said, "Well, you know, all this is very well, but we can do it much better. We don't just have to dig gold out of the—let's go and enslave the Indians." So so they they colonized India. Now that was a much more efficient way of, uh, extracting the labor of people of other countries—which is what imperialism is all about—than just mining gold, because you can—you can—all the rich produce of India became the Brit—it became the property of the British to sell on world markets and to use and to prevent India producing for its own use. So the colonial system came along, and I think the colonial system—and Radhika has written some marvelous stuff on this, uh, and done some marvelous videos—was the or the true origin of English capitalism, in my opinion, to cut a long story very short.
Ellen: Yeah. I'm also assuming when you said gold, you mean the money good, uh, because Potosí was more silver than silver—
Alan: No, precious metals. I was I was contracting precious metals.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alan: I think, uh, I just, uh, want to move into your recent, um, essay, uh, "The Continuation of Class Struggle by Other Means," which is very timely. But, uh, just one—I'm tempted to ask one final question on this segment. When you, uh, use the word "orthodox economics," I was wondering if you had the Marshallian equilibrium economics along with the following, um, neoliberal economics, or did you also—would you also include the neoclassical economics—sorry, did you also include classical economists like Ricardo or, um, Smith in that camp?
Alan: Well, that's an excellent question. Um, I think that my my primary culprit in my, you know, gallery of villains is Marshall. And if you read Maurice Dobb's *Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith*, he he describes very well what Marshall did. Because the original marginalists, uh, you know, the people who are often credited with the invention of neoliberalism, uh, von Mises and people like that, they were not equilibrium theorists; they had a theory of dynamics which was different from Marx, but it was a dynamic theory. Marshall then came along and said, "Look, you've got a problem, because logically you're saying that the value of a product is a result of what is called final demand, which is the marginal demand for the commodity. But," he says, "in time that doesn't work, because you don't buy the product before it's produced. So how can the marginal utility of a product, which happens at the end of the process, determine the value of that project which happens at the beginning?" So he then said—and it's an absolutely, um, what I call counter-revolutionary argument—economics—modern economics consists of a series of counter-revolutions. Every time somebody discovers something that's dangerous to the bourgeoisie, they put it back; they know a very nice idea, but let's put it in the museum of antiquities. And he said, "No, you cannot have causation in time; you have to have mutual causations." So all the variables cause each other, and you solve a system of simultaneous equations. That's one of the reasons Andrew Kliman and I call this simultanism, because all these variables have to be simultaneously true. Then in…
This Ideal World, the value, the amount of Labor that it takes to produce something, is identical with its marginal utility. Don't sort of make a few long stories short, but you you get the same solution both ways. Now that's Marshall, because he, for entirely ideological reasons in my opinion, he says the logic won't work even if it's true; the logic won't work. He actually replaced the marginalists and the Austrians and imposed General equilibrium, which then became a general, a paradigm across all economics, including Marxism. Including you have you have uh every every branch of Economics, of heterodox economics, has an equilibrium variant and a non-equilibrium variant. So Orthodox Keynesianism, post-Keynesianism, neoliberalism, the Austrians, Orthodox Marxism, TSSM Marxism, right. So that became a general Paradigm.
Now let's go back to Ricardo. Marx said, and I tend to agree with them, Ricardo is in a certain sense the last representative of scientific economics. Now he was writing before Keynes. I think that Keynes did a remarkably good job of rediscovering the fundamental flaw of neoclassical economics, which is its what what is generally called Say's Law. That it's a bit unfair on Say, but let let's use Say's Law as the as the term of abuse that is that is going to apply here. And it's the assumption that if you produce something you'll create the demand for it, which is not true, and it's not true because of money. Okay, so Marx, sorry, this is like Supply creating demand or demand creating Supply, and Keynes begins his General Theory with this uh his quibble about Say's Law that it's not supply-side, it's demand-side, and and the person he says who's got this right is this obscure Swiss Economist called Gasel. Now the evidence is that he knew damn well that Marx has said this very vigorously and many times. Marx is virulent in his criticism of Say, but he wouldn't get his book accepted by, you know, his colleague if he—so he says, oh no, it's Gasel, it's not Marx. But nevertheless, there's a scientific truth there, which is that um the commodity circulation stops in the form of money, and people hoard money, and when people hoard money the economy does not reproduce itself because the money is not spent, so the Commodities are not re—the value produced is not realized, and you have a crash, you have a crisis. So there was a certain rediscovery.
Now what happens whenever people discover something that is is dangerous for the stability of of of the rule is they put the genie back in the bottle, and they say, well, you can't quite say it that way, could could you say it a slightly different way that allows me to continue making money? And the slightly different way is to revert the whole thing back to a Doctrine and a religion. So I think Ricardo certainly, and Smith—Smith, if you actually read Ricardo and Smith, most of the things that people nowadays quote about them, they they didn't say. I mean, for example, just take take just one thing, um the theory of comparative advantage. Everybody since Ricardo discovered comparative advantage blah blah blah. Well, actually he didn't. The theory of comparative advantage, which is attributed to Ricardo, was counted in terms of Labor theory of value, and it only applies if goods are exchanging at Value. The modern version is not a theory of value version at all. It was invented in 1936, I forget the guy, but who essentially said, let's recast a theories of factors of production. So when you read theories of international trade, you're told, well, there's labor and there's capital, and some countries have lots of capital and they're wonderful, like the United States and Germany and Brit—so just do what they say because they—all you have lots of Labor, so you should specialize in labor, and they can specialize in capital. Now that that is a straight-up justification for saying the West must maintain a permanent Monopoly of high high technology, which is which is the root of its domination of the world today. So you get a distorted version of what Ricardo was saying that has been sanitized so that it plays well and provides that Jesuitical justification of what the financiers and the Traders and the World Trade Organization and the IMF really want to do, but it's dressed up as a fancy Theory.
So my attitude to to Ricardo and Smith is that, you know, I'm not saying what they did was perfect, but it it's mostly they don't say what people say they said when you when you read them. This also—I'm not saying go back to them; what I'm saying is at least understand what the buggers were saying. Same is with Marx. Right, right, absolutely. Excuse my language, but you can you can cut that bit out if people are offending. No, no, no, no. We we we don't edit; we don't edit in the middle. That's absolutely necessary. But yeah, this ties so well to where we began with in the the Argentinian case, of which is like deregulate labor, deregulate every regulation so that you can become labor-intensive because that's the only way you can bring in capital, and that's the only way you can export something, and that's the only way to save you from the balance of payment crisis, which is it doesn't I mean it it never saves it because part of the capital inflow is then repatriated, so that doesn't that counts as a negative balance of payment anyway.
Um, I think we should come to your very timely uh I don't know if you have published it, but I enjoyed reading it, and I think there is a lot there to unpack, uh the essay called The Continuation of Class Struggle by Other Means. Tell us why did you write it and uh what's the central thesis? The central thesis—this it's it's a complex article, but it's a very short one, and um I haven't finished it. That's I I thought I'd finished it, then discovered I hadn't. But it arose because of a discussion that big a huge meeting I went to in China where everybody was discussing uh modernization. Now modernization, in the way that this is being developed in China, has a very different meaning, as an intentionally different from the way that modernization is appear is in the sort of Western Canon, which is not catching up with the West, but inventing a new and different concept of how a society should function and actually putting that forward as one of a number of possible models, not imposing on the world, putting saying this is the model of development that we have, which is beyond the Common Prosperity. We've been doing Common Prosperity. Common Prosperity was the Chinese program to eliminate absolute poverty. So the discussion was essentially, okay, we we we haven't quite finished that job, but it's time to say now we have to say what is the next phase of development, and they define that in terms of modernization. So there was a very big discussion which always happens when uh there is a new idea that comes out in China. Everybody uh is attempting to understand what might be meant by that word, which is fine, but I said, well, um one thing you've got to surely agree is that if we want to be modern we should not be backward. It's just an antithesis. Even in new terms, it's got to be—you're saying we want something new in the future that's going to be different from what went before. So what went before, I said, war. War—the world has been completely dominated by inter-imperialist Wars, and you know 50 million people have died in these wars in the space of a hundred years, and this is absolutely horrible. That includes 20 million Chinese, more 20 million Russians, the the the slaughter, the Holocaust, the slaughter of, you know, an entire population in Central Europe or its expulsion, uh never mind what happened in Latin America or what happened in Indonesia or whatever. So what explains war? And I said, well, you have to understand war is an outcome of a it's a form of anti-inter—it's a form of competitive struggle; that's how you have to find it. And it's so it's a way in which imperialist nations compete with each other is by making war with each other. Now that's quite restricted because you also have to explain why they make anti-colonial, you know, colonial wars. You have to explain Wars of intervention. Um, you have to explain what NATO is about. So I was just focused on what makes imperialists fight each other. Now there's a great myth that is around and which been around with this for a long time that Pax Romana put an end to war, and I was trying to deal with that myth because it goes with the notion that the best way to avoid war is to trade. So globalization was part and parcel an ideology that said the American way of life is good because everybody will trade with each other, and then there will be no Wars. So I said, and the argument was that in trade creates a better incentive than War because you can't get enough money out of War. So I set out to say, ask was that true, and it's not—it's not—the profits that are made by the imperialist countries as a result of the certainly the Second World War are far greater than anything they got by trade. What stopped them from making war was not that it was making less money; it was that it provoked revolutions. So the conclusion they drew from the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution uh and and you know they haven't drawn the same conclusion yet from the Vietnamese Revolution, but they should, and we'll see what conclusions they draw from what's happening now. But the conclusion they drew was we cannot afford to continue fighting each other because it will provoke a revolutionary wave so great that first of all we'll lose our grip on the Third World—it's more or less what's happening now—and secondly they'll actually provoke Revolutions in our own country. Now in actual fact what is unprofitable is not going to war, and I've got graphs—I haven't got them here—but when the article is published or maybe I can maybe you can publish it first, but you know you will see that the the rate of growth of the Axis economies and the Allied economies from 1930 onwards was massively greater than before the war got them out of the recession; that that's what actually happened. What's unprofitable is losing a war. So the point at which Germany crashed—France crashed first because they were invaded by by by Germany—so so the Germany—the French economy goes down from about 1940 onwards; the German economy crashes in 1944; the Japanese economy crashes in 1944 and a half, right? And then that there's a it's a qualitative drop; they they the the Russians go ahead of Germany for the first time in 1944 in terms of production. So it's not that you—the reason that the imperialist countries stopped going to war with each other was not that it was less profitable; it was because the fear of Revolution outweighed outweighed the fear of of loss of profits. Now then you have to say what is the PRI—the fear of Revolution, and this is why I called the article The Continuation of Class Struggle by Other Means, because I said the working class reacts to war in a very different way to the—the point of—Bushi don't go to war themselves; they said workers to war—it's actually the highest form of exploitation because you—not say the workers are people who have nothing to sell but their labor, well now they even get rid of their labor; they're killed. You send them to to kill other workers, and generally that's a very hard thing to do; it's a very hard thing to get workers from one country to kill workers from another country. So you do it by means of fascism, which is one way to do it, or you do it by virtue of uh essentially racism because you share part of the Imperial profits with your working class; your working-class leaders then become corrupted by that; you get the phenomenon of social democracy, and they become the intermediaries between the Bourgeois and the working class itself. And then what you say is what we're doing in India is because the Indian people are so backward; it's good for them. How do you know? Because you're better off than they are. So you take a fact that is actually caused by uh, you know, the Imperial exploitation of foreign labor in a massive sense, and you say you make—you have a racist explanation for it: the workers of of of Africa and and poor peasants as well uh of India, China, they are poor not because you are exploiting them; it's not because of what we're doing to them; it's because they're inferior, and if they're inferior they're dangerous; they're terrorists; we have to stand up to them; they threaten our way of life. Look at the way that the West is now reacting to, you know, what's happening in Ukraine or or what's happening in in Israel; that they say our values, our cherished freedoms are being threatened by this; they're not being threatened at all; all that people want is some sort of equality and the same kind of rights that you already have in your own countries. But you can get Workers to fight Wars in foreign lands if they're going to win by using highly Superior technology. So it's a—you know, to wrap up, it's a class struggle is continued in two senses: the imperialists are struggling with each other for a share of the right to exploit the workers of the rest of the world; this is an explanation given by M.N. Roy, which I I pay great attention to, is that what what the imperialists are actually competing for is a share of the Surplus value, super super Surplus value, super profit produced by the workers of the colonial world; and then the workers themselves are basically trying to restore uh and they always revert to that—the traditions of international solidarity in which they say I don't want to die fighting other workers, and I don't think they should die fighting me. But that stage is—we're at an early stage of that second process, but I think now if you look at what's happening in the way people are reacting to uh what's going on in Gaza, there is a a Reawakening of that sentiment of international solidarity even in the West where it's been very sorely lacking for a long time. So a very condensed and protracted answer to your question, but I hope that it it gets across that's what the article is about. I'll have to publish it someday, then people can read it for themselves. Absolutely. I uh really enjoyed reading it, and thanks for sharing.
One of the questions that came to my mind um while I was reading it was, are you—when you you are talking about wars, you—it seems very clear to me you are talking about Imperial Wars um and not necessarily all kinds of Wars, right? And that leads to a sort of possible question, which is that this kind of economistic reading of War, what does it do to, let's say, contradictions of nation states? Because I was thinking about Benedict Anderson's dilemma, which was during the wake of the Vietnam, Chinese conflict, uh obviously it's very different from uh Imperial War, and we we that's that that's important to, you know, you know uh highlight, but uh is it—that was my dilemma, like this kind of—so what's your response, I wonder? Well, the difficulty of understanding is is produced, as usual, by commodity fetish, which is that people mistake the real relations between humans for a relation between things. And in the colonial era, it was fairly clear what the colonialists were up to, and there was actually quite a vigorous anti-colonial movement in in in America—in USA, sorry, I must stop saying America because America is not just North America—but in the USA in the 19—in the late 19th century, there's very strong Anti-Imperialist movement, and this was directed around the fact that they—America was basically—the USA was essentially uh in enslaving Cuba and enslaving Philippines, having said they were in those countries to liberate them from the rule of the Spanish and the the old Imperial Powers. So you have this mythology that, you know, we we're a new enlightened power, and then they said, well, actually we're so enlightened we're not going away; we we're going to govern the Philippines; we're going to govern Cuba. That root of the Revolutionary movement in Cuba is actually that fateful decision, as Basovitch and others have said. But the movement was against that was really quite strong, the Anti-Imperialist movement. Um, it's an un—it's underrated factor in American history, and I wish the people go on about, you know, being Patriots and having patriotic socialism in America would actually refer to the experience of the Anti-Imperialist movement because that was probably one of the most honorable things that ever happened in in US history. But you see this is obvious because people were in the colonies, and they were doing very horrible and violent things. No, they're killing very large numbers of people in very bar baric and brutal ways, as we know from the history of India and Africa; we know how bad they were. But when it's being done by money, it's not clear; it's not clear; it's not obvious how it's happening. So the resistance doesn't take the form of, Mor—like, you know, um the Irish Republican Army or whatever, which just—get out of our country, remove your troops. Well, there are a lot of troops around, but they're not doing what the colonialists did; they're bft; they're just enforcers. If a government gets too Uppity, they get rid of it, but they they they don't run things, except perhaps a little bit in the Middle East where they directly rob people of their oil, but but exceptional—essentially they're bailiffs. So what you take—what you get is the form of national resistance is a struggle for economic sovereignty, and this was particularly important in the 1960s because in the 1960s the development economists, particularly in Latin America but also in Africa and certainly in India, had a model of development that said essentially we have to develop our own economies; we should not be dependent on the Imports of high Western technology; we should climb up the value-for-chain and produce it ourselves; we should have import substitution, capital controls, all these measures that are designed to protect your economy. Now that went overboard in 1982 with the Volcker Shock and the in the debt enslavement. So if you look at a graph which I've produced of how world inequality goes, it gets worse and worse till the 1960s when you get developmentalism that starts to catch up, starts to catch up with the with the with the Imperial Powers because of economic sovereignty, then neoliberalism squashes it, and then inequality shoots through the roof, shoots through it, doubles in in in in five, 10 years. Then you get the anti-IMF riots; you get the modern form of the anti-colonial movement, which is quite confused but becoming clearer; you get the rise of Putin; you get the turn of Chinese leaders towards, you know, more Marxist sort of nationalism, uh return to the classical notion of capital controls being a Central Development Goal, economic sovereignty. So the resistance to Imperial domination doesn't take the form of a military struggle except in places that are still colonized like Palestine; they are sadly the exception, not the rule, and long may it remain so; may there be no more exceptions; that that's, you know, one of the chief unaccomplished tasks of even the bis Revolution. But um you don't have this direct military resistance; it—what you have is an economic resistance which then becomes militarized because the USA intervenes; the US goes to war against against Iraq; the US sticks troops all over the Middle East; the US goes into Afghanistan; the US goes into Vietnam. So then you get a struggle of resistance which is not uh not a movement to establish an independent state because one already exists, okay, is to defend the powers of that State against the depredations of Imperial Monopoly Finance. So I think that's—people don't see it that way; they see it as a kind of backwardness. Why are you standing in the way of globalization? We all know globalization, free trade is wonderful, freedom for everybody; it may be destroying your economy, but that's because of your terrible leaders; you know, get rid of your terrible leaders, put in Bolsonaro, put in Bay, and everything will be fine. Well, you know, it's not working out that way, is it?
I think what I want to discuss next is, and I think this ties to uh your your your last comments, is is is the role of the PRC and uh how how do you look at what that does to our some of our understanding about uh the relationship between the West and the global South, about capitalism itself, about nature of export capital, for instance. The Soviet Union didn't export Capital as such; I mean, they gave some aid, but they were not net exporter of capital. But with the PRC as more and more productive forces that they have developed, they are exporting Capital now. I'm not suggesting in any way that that takes the same form as Western Capital because, you know, there are IMFs, institutions, all of that backing behind Western Capital which makes it a particularly vulgar form of capital, but nevertheless—and just tell me if you agree or disagree—it it is within a sort of um capitalist framework. When I say capitalist framework, I'm not referring to a very uh, you know, IMF-led framework, but nevertheless, debt resolution, sovereignty of interest rates, whether it's lower uh, you know, high or low, uh these contradictions would always be carried with themselves. I mean, to what extent would Chinese be able to give haircuts or moratorium or just write up debts if something under the Belt and Road Initiative doesn't take off, and it wouldn't take off; I mean, some of them wouldn't take off because these are real infrastructure investments; these are not investments in pension funds where you have to just appropriate the Surplus. So yeah, just this very broad sense of um thinking out loud in in a way to make uh in a way to allow you tell us a little bit about uh China.
Well, I think that you've said a lot of what needs to be said, um so I'm going to try and put together a few thoughts that um put this in context, and the first is just to quote one of the most neglected Indian uh political economists of all time, which is M.N. Roy. Now M.N. Roy was the person who drafted the thesis that I think it was the fourth, maybe the third conference of the fourth of the uh of the Communist International uh adopted, and he came up with a definition—what I think is a definition of imperialism—and you must realize that he was in the tradition of Communist leaders like Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, all of whom were trying to understand this very new and for them quite inexplicable thing, you know, because imperialism of the old feudal character, everybody thought was the thing of the past, and suddenly it reappears. So well, everybody's grappling with why this is, and and basically you have two views: the the US stand—the Wilsonian—what I call the Wilsonian view and and and and the Communist View. And the Wilsonian view is it's all about it's all about the old European powers attempting to impose Imperial uh control of other countries. And I think the idea that China is doing this, that Russia is doing this, is essentially Wilsonian. It's—if you're a big country and there is a smaller country with whom you're in a conflict or whose occupiers you're in a conflict with, then you you're an imperialist, pad, just because you're big. And I think the attitude that many people—people take towards the war in Ukraine—it's just—they don't think because they don't understand, for example, that um Ukraine was and still is, to a large extent, a multilingual and multi-ethnic state in which 43% of the population are not native speakers of Ukrainian. So that if you have a law, as is actually being imposed by by quasi-fascist means in Ukraine, that makes it illegal and criminal to speak any language but Ukrainian, that is an act of national suppression. And if you are shelling Donas, as happens for for for nearly uh 10 years since 2014, right, 10 years, yeah, uh without remit and without any remit, and you you you you refuse to implement all agreements that give some degree of national autonomy, then you're actually violating National rights. Now that's the Communist concept of national rights; it's not only that Nations have rights, but that minorities within those Nations—very relevant to India, I think—also have rights. Okay. So the—it's a Wilsonian concept that we're dealing with when people try and say that China and Russia are imperialists. Now the reason I mentioned that is because you always have to understand things in a non-economic form before you can understand the economic form. So if you get into one of these obscure debates between economists about whether they export or capital or not or whether they conform to Lenin's definition or Luxemburg's, you're you're missing the point. The point is What's Happening Now. M.N. Roy had a wonderful and very simple definition, which I'm—
To read out which is in the thesis, he said, "As a result of the war, the world finds itself divided today into two great colonial empires. The United States of America endeavors to assume supreme and exclusive right of exploiting and ruling the entire New World, while Great Britain has annexed to its Empire practically the entire continents of Asia and Africa."
The destruction of its monopolist right of exploitation in the vast Eastern Colonial Empire is a vital factor in the final and successful overthrow of the capitalist order. Now, the two phrases I want to draw your attention to: the United States seeks exclusive right of exploiting, and that the destruction of Britain's monopolist right of exploitation is its goal. What? What's that to say? What imperialist competition is really about is exploiting the labor of people outside their own countries. That's the real substance, just as value is the real substance of price—the exploitation of foreign labor, which yields a super-profit, a much higher than average profit.
Now, if you think about it in that way, the value you can appropriate from world labor by colonialism—either in the direct material military form or or or modern form, which is essentially unequal exchange, uh, realized by means of a monopoly of high technology—the super-profit you can make through or or finan or directly through financial debt enslavement or or rent, you know, monopoly rents or whatever all the various means that they use—it's far greater than you can get from exploiting your own worker. You can, if you can exploit the labor of 500 million, a billion people the world over, there's not there's nothing you can do to your own workers that can equal that. Better to pay them off the profits of those you get from from from murdering those 500 million people, and that's the choice that people take.
Now, so the question you have to ask is, again, you have to ask the real question, not the pseudo-economic question, which is: Are China and Russia exploiting the labor of people who receive the money that flows from China and Russia to those countries? There's absolutely no evidence that that's happening, absolutely none. It's not. And we, International Manifesto group, are very pleased to have produced a number of videos and to contributed to the work of many other people. Uh, I won't even start mentioning names because whenever you mention a list of names you miss somebody out, and then it sounds as if they aren't doing it, but but you you know anybody who's familiar with them, the blogosphere will know that there are many people who've said debt enslavement is not happening. This famous remark, I remember that was attributed to, including including World Bank-funded reports uh on on on on B, for instance.
Well, there's this wonderful phrase of an African leader, and I'm afraid I've forgotten—though it's so true—he said, "Um, when you talk to the Americans, they give you a lecture; when you talk to the Chinese, they give you an airport." You know, there's a developmental purpose of the investment, and there are many, many indicators of that—the fact that a lot of the money, for example, goes into community development, education; that the goal of the Chinese investors is often to actually get the workforce up to a point where they can actually take over; that there's not the dependency on Chinese labor which many people accuse them of. Now, in part, there's a class struggle going on, of course, between the Chinese communist state and some of the investors, so I'm not saying, you know, everything the Chinese investors do is wonderful. You can always find something that somebody's doing that's wrong, no matter how good they are. No, but there's always a little bit of evil in a great gallon of virtue. But the key point is: how is this resolved when when something like that happens? Does the Chinese State and law step in and say, "Stop it, that's not right, do it this way instead, because we need that to have the, you know, Belton Road relations with these people as honest trading partners who are respected"?
So China doesn't have any interest in allowing its investors to exploit African labor. To the contrary, what it wants is to develop African economies to the point where it can trade with them as producers of high-value goods, which means at low prices, so they can get a better deal because they're encouraging those countries to become producers of goods that are not at the monopoly prices of the West. Right, inter-Global South trade demonstrates how far that's going. So now you've got all the facts in place; all you have to do is now now go back and look at how the ideology disguises it, and the way the ideology of economics disguises it is this damned word "capital." If you if you what is capital export? Capital export doesn't mean you have, um, you know, money flowing out of your country. If if capital export simply defined as as the reverse of saving, right, in the in in the way that some people do, was the defining feature of an imperialist power, then the whole world is is is exploiting America because it's importing capital massively from the rest of the world. That's not capital import; that's not capital export. Capital export is when you send money abroad in a form that maintains the control of your private investors, your private investors over the proceeds, given them an undisputed right to take profits out of that country and exploit the foreign labor of those countries. That's imperial capital outflows.
Now, the problem is that all the categories that the economists use in their statistics don't allow you to unpack that. So don't look at the capital flows; don't look at them; they don't they don't tell you anything because they're constructed on an ideological basis, the purpose of which is to, you know, make it look good, make it look good. So what you have to do is you have to look at the non-economic, the political, the social facts: Are these countries developing faster as a result of being recipients of money from China than they were as a result of being recipients of or Russia money from from the UK, from France, for God's sake, uh, Germany in the case of Namibia, uh, and the United States of America? The answer is: they're better off. So if you have a theory—this is Karl Marx again—if you have a theory that says China and Russia are imperialist countries, it doesn't accord with the facts, so your theory must be wrong. So I I I don't even start by refuting the the I say, "Look, the Sun goes around the—how do I know the Earth goes around the Sun? You know, because the facts demonstrate this. If you have a theory that says it doesn't, that's your problem; it's not it's not my problem. You have to adjust your theory." So to anybody who says China is exporting capital and that makes an imperialist country, I would say, "You have a crazy theory of capital export; sort it out, mate." Yeah, I think uh that's a that's a very good response, and I think it's a uh it's a very interesting discussion, and I think I don't agree at all that export of capitalism. Nevertheless, I think what I was getting at, and I think this should be uh I want to stay with that for a little while, which says, and I think it boils down to this basic question of whether one thinks of the SE, the the the party in China, U being in absolute command over market, or whether one sees as market being in greater command over the Party by now. And I think my Su, I mean, I suspect my difference from from let's say some of my comrades, uh, you know, it lies the fact that I'm increasingly seeing the market uh guiding uh sort of, you know, forcing things. For instance, if you look at some of the things that happened in the 90s in uh within the Chinese uh uh labor relations, like destructions of IND industrial relation, uh the part of the problem goes back into uh uh surplus production. So the Chinese economy used to be a scarcity economy, and it started to produce for surplus, and when you start producing for surplus, the market brings you to uh certain rules. So what I am saying is I'm not talking about imperialism when I when I'm discussing China; what I am talking about is whether market would force you toward certain direction, for instance, takes uh say the the whole real estate boom. I mean, that was in a way to uh not just save Chinese uh economy but also save global capitalism in a way uh after the global financial crisis by uh through huge public uh investment. Some of that has now led into uh huge bubbles, which is coupled with rising inequality in China uh is where people have stopped buying homes, so demand for uh uh homes and also with the fact that home ownership in China is very high. I mean, we should not suppress that fact as well.
So I think my basic point is about markets being in total command, and that's my concern; my concern with uh rise of China is not uh because I don't see any imperial—I'm I I all the evidence I see uh with the BR and everything is what you said—like whether uh integration leads to uh net benefit for, and that has always happened, like German economy could reindustrialize with very cheap form of labor because it integrated with uh uh with the US, or or same is the case with Japan, and and China has done that, and for the rest of the global South that has never happened. So one of my one of the things that I'm researching on is how global capital doesn't allow most of the economies to not reintegrate into itself uh and and and that perpetuating the divide between between the sort of low productive forces versus high. So uh yeah, your thoughts on that? Well, I'm not a China expert; I I must insist on this, so anything I say about China is is is is starting from a standpoint of picking up small pieces that I've received, however, from people I respect, um, and attempting to make sense of them. So the first thing that I think occurs to me is that this is a discussion that should involve uh China experts, particularly Chinese experts. I mean, there's um I go to a conference—well, I went to a conference last year, and I'm going again—I can't say it's regular—of the IIP, International Institute for the Promotion of Political Economy. You may have heard of it; it's a it's a meeting of economists, but you know, good guys, good guys and girls, particular in general, and there's a circle there that is run uh on China by some marvelous people, and there's very good discussions that take place in that. I think most of them are recorded, and you may want to look at some of those because they they're very well informed. Um, and there's one person in particular called Dick Lo, diic L at SOAS, whose contributions were very well informed, and essentially the way he puts it—if I hope I'm not misrepresenting him—is that the institutional legitimacy of the ch the Communist Party of China is the overriding concern of government when they're making policy decisions, and that therefore every time there's a—look, it's a mixed system; there is there are multiple forms of ownership; they describe themselves in that way when they call it socialism with Chinese characteristics. All writers say that means that there are various forms of property, and there's a class struggle between them. So the issue is which side the government takes. Whenever you have a class struggle, the deciding thing is what does the government do, and the government always intervenes to prevent the economic difficulties created by the market becoming unmanageable or existential in character, and by and large they do that. So during the 2008 slump, they had, you know, massive expansion of state investment, and essentially that stopped China going through a slump. They uh were at one stage having an intensive debate about capital controls, and I think there were some attempts made to liberalize the Chinese currency, which would have been a disaster, absolute disaster, because it would then the Yani should absolutely under no circumstances see itself as a rival to the the dollar, because then they'll get all the problems of the dollar, dollar imperialism, um, and then then there would be a serious risk of that being exploited by sections of the Chinese capitalist class for imperialist purposes because they could do what the American Banks do, you know, just use their money to exploit people, um, and they stopped short; they didn't do it; they didn't do it.
Now, I think there's so much guff being talked about the housing crisis, and I'm trying to follow this, but there was um actually a report this morning by one of the people—there are a number of bloggers who deal with that; Cyrus Janson comes to mind; there are many others—uh who who who say, "Look, the crucial question is: has it reached the point where you have negative equity? Has the housing crisis reached the point where people who've invested money in purchasing houses now find their houses are worth less than they were invested," which certainly happened to us householders and uh UK householders. Do no, he says your houses are not falling in value, so what is the crisis? It's a real estate crisis; it's a crisis of the investors, but the government so far is not allowing that to become a crisis for the population. I'm not saying people are not affected by things that happen that are disturbing and are caused by the market; what I'm saying is institutionally—um, I'm simply repeating the wise words, as I see them, of Dick, Professor Dick Lo—the relation of forces is such between the classes in Chinese society, and it's always a question of relation of forces, that the government will intervene at the point when forces, social forces unleashed by the market, negative social forces unleashed by the market become threatening to large sections of the population; they intervene to stop it against capital. So the general impression I get is that they don't let things go that far, and of course they're up against, you know, all sorts of attempts to manipulate the market by uh by by the USA and so on, which is the same as all all countries of the global F face the same problem. So that's a sort of half an answer. Excellent. I think we ended on a very similar note with Professor Des uh when I said when we had the very similar discussion, and I said that I hope Professor Des, you are right and I am wrong uh in the sense of what history will—I don't think I don't think you're wrong; you're just what in terms of what history will prove us—in the sense that I am seeing an increasing—even though I agree with you like with the sort of uh how the state clamped down on the Ed Tech business in China, for instance, uh and a whole range of issues—I I I completely age age with you that the it would be very wrong to think about the Chinese State as completely subservient to markets, but I think where we slightly—and it's not a difference of I guess fundamental at a level of analysis; it's a difference at a level of extent, I guess—I do think that markets are increasingly guiding uh a lot of things, and some of which are uh I I find uh neg there are negative consequences. If you look at uh this distribution of wealth uh uh uh it's it's disturbing if you believe in what World Inequality Lab reports and all—our just interrup—markets are a very um very general abstract term. Market in what market? Market in the sense of capitalist uh form, which says the profits and uh uh interest rates and uh constraints that banks set on you uh what you can and can't do with uh debt structure, debt resolutions, because your financial institutions don't allow you to do that. I mean, in all these regards, so you're talking about financial markets uh essentially.
Financial Market? Yeah, I'm not talking about like people exchanging uh goods and services; I'm talking mostly about—that's where that's a big that's a big difference. Yeah, yeah, when always have to use words, words like imperialism or economy or Marx, you always have to say, "Well, let's contextualize this a bit," so we're talking about financial markets, yeah, because that's where the power of capitalism lies at the moment; it's it's not uh the sellers of vegetables in deep inter hland of India, Bangladesh borders that control the economy; it's uh it's the BlackRocks uh you know. So yeah, but I mean the reason one has to be careful is there's considerable parts of the world of of of Communism—I mean, in the sense of not communist nations but communist parties—that are very critical of China, uh, and I'm going to raise the particular case of the Philippine Communist Party, who who just say, "Well, it's it's a market economy, so therefore it's capitalist, so therefore it's it's originalist and it's not socialist." Well, I think there's just an insufficiency of uh of of precision that if you don't say, "Well, hang on, no, you can't just say 'market,' you have to say 'What markets are used for, what purpose, by whom'" uh in order to answer that question. So that's that's why I'm sort of focusing a bit on the issue of what—I'm glad—I mean, I'm not anti-market; I'm in fact I do think that if you look at history, the history of markets go far beyond history of capitalism, and I don't think a centralized some of absolute centralized planning of the whole global economy can be done. I mean, I was not suggesting that, but uh I yeah, no, I I know, I know. Yeah, I I I think uh um it's a mixed economy; I mean, that's what all my sort of empirical uh uh study that I do—like if if you look at ownership of big uh means of production—it's a economy um so uh yeah, I I I find both very disturbing when one says that, "Oh, China is capitalist because there are markets." I think that's a very silly sort of superficial analysis, but I also have a little bit of trouble, and that's why I asked this question to you and also Professor Desai when we simply say that China is socialist and then move on uh and then you know like and and Professor Desai did a good job in in the video to to to demonstrate what she means uh you know when she says China is socialist, and I agree with that, so uh but I say I mean I I'm not a I'm not a China expert; I know less about China than Professor Desai or many of my Chinese colleagues, and so I'm more in listening mode when it comes to finding out what's happened in China uh than in uh but that there's one thing that does interest me, which is intellectual property, because I think intellectual property is a classic example of a property form that mutates. Now, a property form that mutates—we don't pay enough attention to this; we say, "Oh, this private property," as if private property was the same in every instance. Now, one can ask the following question: uh before the English Revolution, there was private property in land, okay? After the English Revolution, there was private property in land, but it had a very different meaning after Cromwell because land became alienable and became a capitalist—it was capitalist private property, and this was not so—it wasn't a bang stroke; it is now a capitalist property, and it was previously there was a gradual change, but there was a a quantity turns into quality to such a point that when you had the restoration, the English restoration, um the the basically the the restorationist monarchy could not sustain itself against the political forces uh uh that the revolution had set in place. So the reason for that is the huge class of people had become capitalist landowners, so the class relation of forces had transformed. Now, I think the relation of class forces in China by the you know the enrichment of the of the working class and the restriction of uh the the rights of the capitalist class probably has reached and and had always reached after the Revolution, but it's maintained after a few challenges, a qualitative point where where it's on one side, not the other. That doesn't mean it can't go backward; it could go backward; it could be a counter re ution, and you have to be alive to the dangers of counterrevolutionary policies, but the form of intellectual property is very different because the purpose of intellectual property in the United States, and I'm I'm hoping because I know that the BRICS are going to be discussing IP, and I I'm trying to encourage people engaged in that to say, "Actually, you you are in a position to redefine intellectual property in a way that is a beneficial to people." From the American point of view, US point, the laws of intellect property which were imposed in about 1995, you know, with the formation of the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Uruguay Round and all that stuff, the purpose of it is to allow people to use IP to stop the spread of knowledge. The purpose of a patent taken out in the United States of America is not to use it; it's to prevent other people using it so that you can sell that technology and stop—know third world—look at generics, look at drugs—stop people getting access, right? The Chinese approach to IP looks the same; they say, "Yeah, we're very interested in IP," but the purpose of IP is to diffuse the technology, so there's a clash of cultures. I mean, Trump boasts a lot of what he says is, "They're stealing, they're stealing our property, they're stealing our knowledge," and I mean Chinese people I speak to, scientists and others, educators, look at this in sort of blank incomprehension: "We—no, we're not stealing it; we're using it; we're spreading it; isn't that a good thing?" So you have something very curious which is the same property form actually means two different things, and um I think that is probably what needs to happen with finances: you you have to change the meaning of the ownership of financial assets by going back to going back to the regulation of financial assets but stating the purposes for which finance may legitimately be used and the purposes for which it may not be legitimately they used. If you do that, then you change a property relation to something different, so that you should not measure just by "Is there private property in land or finance or IP or is there not?" You should measure by what that property relation actually works out to be in practice, and that's why I say I'm not an expert because that's the kind of thing that I am just, you know, I'd have to travel around in China and talk to many people for years and years, and even then I might not know MH. You know, India is closer to China, so has a better opportunity to find these things out. Maybe you can you can explain something to me, which is that I find the level of hostility to China even amongst the Indian left is is um unnecessarily high. I mean, do you have any explanation for that?
Yeah, I think there are two defining points: one was the critical moment of 1962, and then there is another is 2014. So I think the border skirmishes or you know conflict, however way you define it, of 1962 is seen as a humiliation by uh most people in India, and uh that split the left uh at the right from the moment—like there was a very small fraction of the Communist Party who said that you know the the Nehru government is a bumbling government and uh you know it's working as an imperial or with the West and stuff, and so China is the more progressive and so Mal intervent—I don't think that resonated with a lot of people, and so there was a baggage of that, but then we must understand that China was never the centerpiece of Indian dark nationalism; the centerpiece of Indian nationalism always used to be Pakistan, so it was driven by hatred of Pakistan until 2014, where it changed and obviously with 2028 or 2020, sorry, 20 2019 or something where the doam incident happened, where Chinese uh armies and Indian armies uh shot bullets after since 1962 for the first time uh in the border, that obviously escalated that Stu. So I think there is a lot of—when you say hostility—uh uh within the Indian left, I think uh there is a political constituency, you know, where you are also a a a which I don't have because I don't have to fight elections, but you know when you have to fight elections, then you uh it's these are contradictions of nation-states and nationalism that that uh bind, but then there were multiple traditions; the Naxalite movement in fact went to the other extreme and defined Chairman Mao as uh their chairman, which Ma uh you know intelligently rejected. So uh yeah, that would be my sort of very shorthand answer uh to your question, but uh thanks a lot for your time; this was a…
Very interesting conversation for me. I don't know what you think about it. I thought it was wonderful.
I mean, my name is Aishman. I, along with Jotis Man, have started this platform the last two years. We have tried to build content for the left and Progressive forces. We have interviewed economists, historians, political commentators, and activists so far.
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