Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy

by Radhika Desai

Capitalism, Coronavirus and War investigates the decay of neoliberal financialised capitalism as revealed in the crisis the novel coronavirus triggered but did not cause, a crisis that has been deepened by the conflict over Ukraine and its repercussions across the globe.

Leading domestically to economic and political breakdown, the pandemic accelerated the decline of the US-led capitalist world’s imperial power, intensifying the tendency to lash out with aggression and militarism, as seen in the US-led West’s New Cold War against China and the proxy war against Russia over Ukraine. The geopolitical economy of the decay and crisis of this form of capitalism suggests that the struggle with socialism that has long shaped the fate of capitalism has reached a tipping point. The author argues that mainstream and even many progressive forces take capitalism’s longevity for granted, misunderstand its historical dynamics and deny its formative bond with imperialism. Only a theoretically and historically accurate account of capitalism’s dynamics and historical trajectory, which this book provides, can explain its current failures and predicament. It also reveals why, though the pandemic—by revealing capitalism’s obscene inequality and shocking debility—prompted the most serious critiques of capitalism to emerge in decades, hopes of ‘building back better’ were so quickly dashed. This book sheds searching light on the dominant narratives that have normalised the neoliberal financialised capitalism and the dollar creditocracy dominating the world economy, with even critics unable to link capitalism’s neoliberal turn to its financialisations, historical decay, productive debility and international decline. It contends that only by appreciating the seriousness of the crisis and rectifying our understanding of capitalism can progressive forces thwart a future of chaos and/or authoritarianism and begin the long task of building socialism.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and researchers of international relations, international political economy, comparative politics and global political sociology.

Genres: Economics, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 9, 2022

About the author

Radhika Desai is Professor of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya (Three Essays Collective, 2004) and Geopolitical Economy (Pluto, 2013).

Reviews

[Angel Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suggest this book if you would like a discussion based on these questions:

What is the relationship between finance capital and productive industry and how has it changed in form since WWI? How does this relationship differ among countries like the USA/UK vs Japan, Germany? Where do China, Russia, and the Ukraine conflict fit into all of this?

How has Marxism been distorted in the West since the failure of the Second International (right before WWI when there was a split between socialist parties that rallied around defense their imperialist nations vs socialist parties who argued that WWI was an inter-imperialist conflict where workers/peasants had nothing to gain)? How do these distortions relate to the failures of the Western left as it fails to provide alternatives to neoliberalism?

How does Capitalism's tendency of uneven development within and among nations lead to crises in international relations? How does this tendency prevent the development of a 'One World Government', as some conspiracy theorists fear (looking at you QAnon and WEF folks)?

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This new book from Desai was written using the analytical perspective developed in her last book, Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, applied to the global upheavals since it was published in 2013. And like that last book, she makes some pretty strong claims.

In Geopolitical Economy the strongest claim was that, while the US sees itself as the global hegemon or "sole superpower," hegemony has been something it has never been able to fully achieve. "Since the early twentieth century, the United States has sought to emulate the domination it thought it has seen the UK exercise over the world economy in the nineteenth century, but never succeeded."

More specifically:

Its first attempt to establish the dollar as the world's trading currency also failed. On the one hand, the United States was forced to back it with gold to persuade reluctant allies to accept the arrangement. On the other hand, having no capital to export, supplying the world with liquidity by running deficits which only devalued the dollar, forced its own allies and trade partners to opt for gold over dollars of doubtful value. After exhausting all avenues for salvaging this fundamentally unsatisfactory arrangement, the United States was forced to delink the dollar from gold in 1971. To the productive and monetary slide, we must add the military. Notwithstanding the astronomical sums spent on the US military, the United States was unable to win any significant war in pursuit of its ambitions except against tiny countries. In its two major wars of the Cold War era, it had to accept the victory of Communism in North Korea and was defeated in Vietnam.

In the profound class and international struggles that ensued when the Long Boom ended, the United States laid new foundations, this time financial, for a second attempt to establish the dollar as the world's money and, from the 1980s onwards, along with the United Kingdom, sought the neoliberal path out of the economic downturn. However, rather than resolve or reverse the slump, neoliberalism only prolonged it, also ensuring the resumption of imperial decline in the long run.

Since I found her argument ultimately convincing by the end of that work, I've been quite interested to read this one ever since it was published at the end of 2022. Her strongest claim here is US-style finance capitalism is in a severely weakened state, and poised on the edge of becoming so more or less permanently:

This was just another episode underlining that, whether the major neoliberal capitalisms face class forces organised for socialism domestically or not, their miserly and punitive imperialism can only hasten other countries' drift away from the capitalist world the United States still seeks to lead. The attractiveness of China's developmental offer, and its respect for its partners' sovereignty, contrasts strikingly, making it the pole towards which they will drift and, given its success at development, the example they will seek to learn from.

Essentially, while the balance of class power remains heavily tilted in favour of capital in its homelands, the balance of international power is tilting markedly away from capitalism, driving all outside the charmed circle of the United States, Europe, Japan and the settler colonies bit by bit, with advances and reverses, steadily away from the major capitalist countries and probably, from capitalism. This process began with the Russian Revolution and, after the reverses of the 1990s, resumed in the new century as an alliance of countries seeking to assert their economic and security sovereignty—including Russia, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran—began forming with China as its economic centre. The pandemic and the war have accelerated these processes.

Overall, the tendency which Desai describes are indeed quickly taking shape, but they are still forming. While her analytical framework is very informative and her message quite inspiring, history is still in the making and the ground still shakes. We simply do not know what shape things will take over the next decade or two, or to whose benefit they will rebound, if any (one can only hope the path there doesn't lead through mass violence).

Nonetheless, if nothing else, this is certainly true:

In sum, while the United States aims at the violent defence of all aspects of the imperialist system on which its economy depends, its abilities to achieve them are more questionable than ever. Though this has been clear since the Iraq quagmire at the latest, US ruling circles have proved unable to undertake a serious re-evaluation of their foreign policy, to come up with a plan B, one that would accept the role of an 'ordinary' if still important economy. The evolution of the strategy of and legitimacy for such a plan B has to be the aim of any serious left alternative in the United States. As yet, however, it is not yet on the horizon.

[Daniel Quintanilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive review of how neoliberal policy and neoclassical economics have got us where we are. The text has a couple of moments where it is a bit convoluted, throwing a lot of concepts at the same time, but overall it is an excellent and easy to follow Marxist critique of our Western geopolitical economy. Great launching point into a lot more reading about diverse issues regarding the economy.

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading! Proper review soon.