Reading this book was like being guided down a path that has led me to our current place and time. It answers the questions that sit burning in my head, “how did we get here?” and “Where does this lead from here?”. Her approach to geopolitical conflict is dialectic, leaning on Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) theories from the Bolshevik tradition. Through her historiography of the United Kingdom’s downturn as a one-world-power, to the United States’ rise to a one-world-power, through its continued decline, she shows how these global economic policies drove UCD between both the dominate state and, as she calls them, their “contender” states, which only weakened and strained the dominate states position. In the case of the UK, the development it engendered in the world meant that, try as it might, the United States stood no chance of replicating the same dominance the UK had. It could not replicate the kind of free trade exploitation that existed between London and its colonies. Each stage of the United States’ attempt at maintaining its global role, (Hegemony, Globalization, and Empire) never manifested the level of stability each claimed it did. Each was merely an attempt to reassert itself in the global economic world, and externalize the contradictions of its national capitalism onto other nations.

This is what she refers to as the “Materiality of Nations”. Capitalism, globally, is not predicated by an absence of the state in its management, but instead in direct intervention by the state in its management. Each crisis that manifested from the United States, whose impact was felt in the global economy, was the result of explicit management by the state. This, she argues, means that nations can assert their own influence in this growing multipolar world. Each crisis being forced into the global economy to spare the price of the dollar only leads to the UCD of the global world.

This leads me to our current time. What impact will Trump’s tariffs have on the orientation of the global economy? We can already see this development now with China urging Europe to work together, China seeking stronger economic inroads with Canada, China seeking new economic deals with Brazil, potential united economic alignment between Japan, China, and South Korea. China, for the better part of the same period of time, appears to have understood this notion of UCD, and has been using its Belt and Road program to bolster national economies. This process of development not only makes these nations more self-sufficient, but that same self-sufficiency hardens them against external manipulation, and allows them to assert themselves in the international market.

Beginning in 2007, for the second time in less than a century, the United States led a massive economic downturn. For a second time financial networks centred on New York transmitted its effects around the world, and for a second time its causes were deeply intertwined with US imperial ambition and the impossibility of its realization in a world subject to UCD. But whereas the Great Depression was ended by a war that boosted US power enough to bring it closer to achieving its imperial ambition than it would ever be, the Great Recession happened because UCD forced certain policy decisions, critically the raising of interest rates beginning in 2004, and created certain conditions, most importantly the rise in long-term interest rates beginning in 2007. These brought down the last and most fragile financialization that sustained the dollar’s world role. The 2008 financial crisis spelled its end. Whether it is long-drawn-out or rapid, it cannot be avoided. The dollar had never had a stable basis, and with the greater advance of UCD and multipolarity, the United States cannot furnish even another unstable and volatile one.

It would seem that, we will be “furnish[ing] even another unstable and volatile one”, as Desia puts it. This, however, she frames rather optimistically:

Crises proverbially bring opportunities, and this one brings them in spades, although opportunities not seized also contain risks. The present multipolar moment contains more hopeful possibilities than even the end of the Second World War. Then the inordinate power that war gave the United States set the world on a long detour from the sort of international world of multilateral economic governance which contemporaries had looked forward to, and which Keynes’s original proposals had sought to realize. When the 2008 financial crisis ended that detour, history finally caught up with Keynes’s far-sighted vision (Desai, 2009a). That vision was of a world in which the economic roles of states have legitimacy and are reinforced by the institutions of international economic governance. Such a relegitimization of states’ economic roles is necessary before they can be oriented toward popular interests and even socialism. During the decades when neoliberal and cosmopolitan ideologies undermined that legitimacy, states did not stop intervening in and shaping economies, they simply did so overwhelmingly in the interests of the propertied classes. Naturally they also became less democratic. They must now be made more so, and made to intervene in economies in the popular interest if the unequal and unproductive financialized economic patterns of recent decades that are so destructive of nature and second nature (culture) are to be transformed in egalitarian, productive, green and culturally dynamic directions.

Such a reinstatement of states’ economic roles will mark the end of the long period when imperialism, accomplished or attempted, sought to write the economic role of states out of the script of geopolitical economy for reasons already discussed. No doubt the more powerful states will continue to attempt to influence less powerful ones to their own advantage, and imperialism is a term too loosely used to rule out the possibility that the ideas and concepts associated with it will shed light on such actions. However, if this book has been at all persuasive, the need to understand how historical circumstances expand or contract the scope of its operation and change its nature should also be clear.

Here she is talking about the recovery from the 2008 housing and credit bubble, but I don’t know that she could have anticipated how this history might have manifested when she published this work. In her closing section, she does make an interesting assertion about Reforms and Revolution:

In the past, working people have scored historic successes in exploiting the opportunities of mass politics to bend state action in their favour. Their gains may have given capitalism greater stability, for instance by expanding domestic markets, but they also changed national capitalisms into something much more tolerable. Moreover, the reforms that working classes won also resourced them better to demand more, leaving open the possibility that regulated national capitalisms might become transitions to socialisms. There is no inherent reason why working people should not match and surpass those historic achievements.

Therefore, the apparently radical idea that reforms are useless since the capitalist state cannot be reformed, only overthrown by ‘revolution’ in ways that are never specified, is actually profoundly conservative. Without a credible conception of how people might expect to achieve such a revolutionary overthrow, it simply derides the reforms they are able to achieve. Instead, we need to recognize that reforms enable working people to build more just societies, and through multilateral international action, for constructing a more just international order.

In recent decades left and progressive intellectuals agreed with the globalization and empire analyses, and even espoused them all the more ardently to demonstrate the power and exploitative nature of capitalism. In doing so, however, they too wrote the state’s economic role out of the script of capitalism, and of any viable strategy for socialism. It is time to take stock of the real basis of these cosmopolitan ideologies, and appreciate once more that the state was and remains central to capitalism. This is capitalism’s political Achilles’ heel. A strategy of reforms forcing states to serve the interests of working people and democratizing them so they contribute to strengthening working people’s power and organization is a viable strategy for meaningful reform and even, potentially, revolution leading beyond capitalism (Patnaik, 2009b). The distinction between the two does not rest on the nature of the demands: whether given demands are reformist or revolutionary depends on whether the ruling classes are willing and able to fulfil them, and if not, whether popular forces are sufficiently organized to realize the demands themselves and take on the inevitable opposition to their doing so.

These are ideas that manifest in the last section, in the final few paragraphs of this book. It is, I think, something that demands expansion to be understood. She presents Reforms and Revolution in a dialectical way, and I’ll admit that “Reform or Revolution” by Rosa Luxemburg has been on my “To Read” list for a while, but this statement, to my understanding, runs counter to the position Luxemburg presents. One cannot make such a statement without sufficiently providing counterarguments. I do believe much of what is covered in this book remains true. That we are indeed entering into a phase of multipolarity within the world. What this means for popular forces, and working-class mobilization, remains unclear to me. Clearly, there is a rise in working-class sentiment within the Imperial Core, a sentiment it is attempting to squash violently through the use of concentration camps and deportations. I don’t foresee a world where the decline of this 250+ year old project happens gracefully, and in a way that allows for “reforms”. If anything, it would seem to me that this pendulum is swinging in the other direction, towards revolution, that is unless something happens that dramatically eases the tensions within the US. This pendulum is also swinging globally, in the direction of China. It is swinging regardless of the desires and wishes of China, regardless of whether they are interested in becoming the “leader of the free world”, the pendulum is swinging fast and in their direction. Their moves as of late signal that they are positioning themselves to catch this pendulum, what they do with it, is yet to be seen.

While I don’t agree with some of the closing statements in this book. I do think it paints a fairly hopeful and optimistic future. With the United States exit from the dominant position in world economic affairs, and China rising to the moment which could lead to a recentering of world affairs around them, we might see the emergence of structures and formations that allow for more egalitarian development of nations then seen for the last several hundred years. If Imperialism sustains Capitalism, as noted by Luxemburg, but Imperialism also fosters Uneven and Combined Development, which stifles the effectiveness of Imperialism, what sort of opportunities does that open us up to in the future ahead?

I’ll leave you with the last three paragraphs of the book:

Nowhere is the need for mobilization for popular demands clearer than in the United States. In pursuit of imperial ambitions, US governments jettisoned the toolkit of combined development with the partial and rather perverse exceptions of military Keynesianism and military Schumpeterianism. So such attempts as it made to improve its economic performance were made, as it were, with one hand tied behind its back. They failed its manufacturing sector, its international competitiveness, the skills of its working people and the integration of its marginalized minorities, particularly black and Hispanic. There is a wide range of policy options available for addressing these problems, but to avail itself of them the US government will need to abandon the economically liberal ideological straitjacket of the vainly imperial decades. Ross Perot’s surprisingly successful third candidacy in the 1992 presidential elections broke out of this straitjacket from the right. The left has yet to show that it can do so.

When it does, the United States will be better able to come to terms with its status as one national economy among many, albeit a large and potentially very dynamic one, and support rather than vainly trying to thwart the underlying trend towards ever greater multilateralism (Ruggie, 1992). The replacement of the G-7 by the G-20 was an important recent marker, and while it remains true that the G-20 is not the G-192, just as the enfranchisement of capitalist classes and their mutual competition made political openings for working-class political assertion in so many capitalist countries historically, this widening of the circle of countries involved in world economic governance beyond the formerly imperial powers cannot but open up spaces for the assertion of the interests of countries farther down the geopolitico-economic hierarchy.

While the rest of the world has long resented US imperial attempts, and done much to counteract and undermine them, Americans themselves have so far been slow to count the cost they themselves have paid for their governments’ imperial pursuits, let alone those they inflicted on others. These costs were mainly not those of the military build-up and wars, although these costs were substantial. The greater price came from the neglect of the US economy’s productivity and competitiveness, and the pursuit of financialization. Exactly how the United States’s imperial pursuits – its military misadventures and support for dollar-denominated financial capital – will be wound down is impossible to predict. But if an upsurge of popular anger such as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, but socially even wider and deeper, plays a central role, the American people will have reclaimed the respect and affection of the rest of the world that their governments have done so much to squander.