Waroholic: Why The USA Is ADDICTED To Mass-Violence | Prof. Radhika Desai

War is not an occasional outbreak of violence; in the conversation with Professor Radhika Desai, it emerges as a structural and recurrent feature of how modern states—especially imperial centers—organize their economies and secure their power. The exchange reframes war from episodic tragedy to an embedded mechanism: a means by which core capitalist states externalize crisis, appropriate resources, and manage political and economic contradictions. Reading the argument as a whole, geopolitical economy offers a corrective to mainstream social science by insisting that imperialism, the relations between producing nations, and the contest between domination and development must be central to any serious account of international life. ## Geopolitical Economy: Reclaiming Marx The conversation positions geopolitical economy as a revival and correction of both classical Marxism and conventional international relations. Rather than accepting the academic partition that treats "economics," "politics," and "society" as autonomous domains, this approach insists on their unity: political economy extended to the international plane. What distinguishes geopolitical economy is its insistence that Marx’s analysis cannot be reduced to class struggle alone; Marx also treated nations as historical agents. The exchange highlights how much of contemporary Marxist scholarship has accommodated neoclassical methods—producing a softened "Marxist economics" that abandons core insights about imperialism and uneven development. This critique links two problems: a methodological fragmentation that strips historical process from social analysis, and a theoretical compromise that accepts market harmoniousness as the baseline. Geopolitical economy thus reasserts historical change, imperial competition, and the political management of capitalism’s contradictions as organizing principles for understanding global affairs. The conversation restores the “relations of producing nations” as a primary analytic category, calling attention to how power over productive relations—not just market exchange or diplomatic maneuvering—shapes outcomes at the global scale. ## Imperialism as a System, Not a Moral Label A central clarification in the exchange is a redefinition of imperialism. Rather than treating imperialism as an attitude or merely the possession of colonies, the conversation frames it as an imperative of industrial capitalism: the need to secure markets, outlets for capital, cheap inputs, and subordinated territories so that core accumulation can continue. This is an important conceptual shift. Imperialism ceases to be reducible to 19th-century banners, formal colonies, or the moral depravity of specific leaders; it becomes a functional component of a global economic architecture. The interlocutors also push back on the contemporary tendency to label any large power “imperialist” in the pejorative sense. Historical nuance matters: the form and intensity of imperialism have changed over time. The peak of Western imperial expansion precedes the First World War; the crisis between 1914 and 1945 marks a watershed after which the old forms of territorial empires decline. From that vantage, imperialism is not timeless; it is historically variable—sometimes intensifying, sometimes retreating—yet always tied to the structural needs of capitalism. This allows for a more precise critique: states can be imperial in their economic comportment without resembling the colonial empires of earlier centuries. ## The United States and the Politics of Proxy War One of the most provocative claims in the discussion is that the United States has benefited from a mode of imperial practice that prefers proxy engagement and indirect violence. The conversation points out that wars fought by others—or wars managed through proxies while the imperial center supplies arms, finance, and political cover—have often yielded outsized economic and strategic gains for the United States. The example of the Second World War is used to underline how much of the Allied victory, and associated costs, were borne by the Soviet Union: the West’s narrative tends to underrate that contribution while the United States accrued industrial contracts, political influence, and postwar advantage. This claim reframes American militarism not as mere adventurism but as an organized strategy compatible with capitalist accumulation: promote instability where direct intervention is unnecessary, weaponize alliances, and profit from the reproduction of violence without assuming proportionate human or economic cost. Proxy wars are attractive because they export the blood and immediate fiscal burdens while maintaining commercial and geopolitical returns at home. When viewed through geopolitical economy, this preference for indirect violence is a rational, if morally fraught, adaptation of imperial practice to the costs and constraints of modern politics. ## Development, Resistance, and the Decline of Empire Another key theme is the dialectic between imperialism and anti-imperialism—between strategies of external domination and attempts at autonomous development. Geopolitical economy highlights how imperial powers actively structure global opportunity so that subordinated territories are denied the conditions for independent industrialization. The conversation traces protective developmental strategies—like those used by 19th-century Germany, the United States, and later Japan—to the logic that a rising economy must shield itself from an existing industrial hegemon. Resistance to the external imposition of dependency has material consequences. When countries managed to industrialize behind protective walls or through alternative state-led models, they moved along different paths of development. The Soviet Union and, more recently, China are invoked as large-scale experiments in building national productive power outside the terms set by Western imperial interests. Where development succeeds, imperial influence can be challenged; where it fails, subordinated regions remain sources of raw materials and cheap labor, with value captured elsewhere. Importantly, the conversation also notes a long-run decline in the classical forms of imperial domination since 1914, even as intermittent resurgences occur. That decline is not linear or uniform; the 1980s and 1990s showed expansions of Western influence that many mistook for irreversible triumph. Yet the multipolar transformations of our era—an emergent contest between several centers of production—are better understood as an outcome of this long process of imperial realignment and resistance. ## The Political Economy of Narratives and Memory The discussion underscores how historical narratives and collective memory are political resources. The example of commemoration of World War II reveals how Western discourse minimizes the magnitude of Soviet sacrifice while emphasizing other dimensions of Allied contribution. Such narrative politics serve contemporary ends: they legitimize certain present-day alignments and obscure how past sacrifices and struggles shaped current balances of power. Narrative control is integral to maintaining imperial legitimacy. By shaping who is seen as the principal defender of civilization, dominant powers cloak structural dependencies and the distributional consequences of global leadership. The conversation thus links geopolitics not only to material mechanisms of domination but to the cultural and discursive apparatuses that sustain them. ## Rethinking International Relations for an Age of Multipolarity Taken together, the points made in the exchange build toward a programmatic call: to rewrite the study of international relations around geopolitical economy. This means centering imperialism and anti-imperialist development, treating nations and classes as co-equal historical agents, and returning a historically dynamic sensibility to analyses that too often natural

Why The USA Is ADDICTED To Mass- Violence | Prof. Radhika Desai War is not a choice. War is a system—a self-perpetuating process. And in the US we have a deadly principe of mass-slaughter and violence baked into the logic of the economic organisation of the nation. Listen to Professor Radhika Desai dismantling the core of the imperial logic with her Geopolitical Economy approach to Marxist theory. Many of you will know her since she is a prolific writer and guest on many YouTube shows. Links to her work: This explains GE in short: https://valdaiclub.com/a/valdai-papers /valdai_paper_24_geopolitical_economy_the_discipline_of_multipolarity/ And this shows it is rooted in Marx: https://www.academia.edu/77369299 /Marx_s_geopolitical_economy_The_relations_of_producing_nations_2021_ More info at: http://Radhikadesai.com Goods Shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com #F1 The entire burden of Western discourse is to diminish the critical contribution that Russia made to victory in Europe—the loss of 27 to 30 million lives. This is far more than the rest of the Allies put together. Not British, not even American lives—very, very few American lives were lost by comparison. I don't have the exact figure off the top of my head. So you see, that's what I mean. Wars have been very, very beneficial for the United States, especially when somebody else fights them. And that's why the United States loves proxy wars. I mean, think about it this way: the United States was fighting a mighty proxy war, basically, between the First and the Second World War as well. With relatively few American boots on the ground, everybody else was fighting, and they benefited by supplying and getting contracts for their economy. #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to the geopolitical economist, Professor Radhika Desai. Many of you will know her, as she is a prolific writer and a guest on many YouTube shows. Radhika is a champion of using the notion of geopolitical economy as a Marxist analysis of international relations to explain the rise of the multipolar world. That's what we want to talk about today, so Radhika, welcome. #F1 Great pleasure to be with you, Pascal. I've watched many of your shows, and you do such a great job. -- 1 of 20 -- #M2 Well, that's a great honor that you say that. Thank you very much. And I've seen you on many, many podcasts, especially with people like Ben Norton, who does a wonderful job of taking geopolitical and geoeconomic issues apart. I don't know if you ever taught him or not, but I find a lot of what you're saying in his analysis and vice versa. What is geoeconomics—or, sorry, geoeconomics, the notion of geopolitical economy? How is it different from, you know, standard Economics 101 that they teach at universities? How is it different from Marxism? And how does it help you understand what's happening around us? #F1 Sure. May I perhaps begin? I mean, I'll come back to the two questions you asked about how it is different from economics and how it is different from Marxism. But maybe it's best to begin with how it is different from international relations and how it is different from the field called international political economy, which rechristened itself as global political economy towards the end of the 20th century, when talk of globalization really went viral. So basically, geopolitical economy, as you rightly said, is a Marxist approach to world affairs. And so in that sense, but at the same time, it's different from much of what passes for Marxism. Because a lot of what passes for Marxism has been very heavily influenced precisely by neoclassical economics, which, as you know, arose about 150 years ago in the 1870s in the work of three quite different writers. And you would have thought, partly because they were, you know, particularly its most ideologically hardline wings, like the Austrian wing, were directly attacking Marxism, you would have thought that Marxists would have taken up their swords and, you know, vanquished neoclassical economics. But instead, what you got was what Nikolai Bukharin, who wrote an interesting critique of neoclassical economics called The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, berated many of his fellow Marxists for following what he considered a policy of theoretical reconciliation. So since then, what you've seen is the rise of something called Marxist economics. And that's very different from what Marx did. Marx did not do something called economics. The very emergence of something called economics, which is different from sociology and political science and so on, was actually the result of the marginalist revolution and the rise of neoclassical economics, which said that there's a separate area called the economy, which is different from everything else, like society and so on. And of course, Max Weber, who was first trained in this new form of neoclassical economics, participated in the famous Methodenstreit, in which he sided with the neoclassicals against the historical school, which represented more of the old way of doing things. So, Max Weber sanctified it by saying, you know, it is a sad truth about modern life that human activity acquires autonomy in -- 2 of 20 -- different spheres like the economy, society, politics, and so on, and therefore must be studied by separate disciplines. And his "Economy and Society" was the first to divide economy on the one hand and society on the other. And Weber sort of spoke in very neutral terms, but his real goal—like, you know, he said all these are different fields—was to say that the economy in particular should be autonomous. And why was that? Because it's roughly around this time that you begin to see the presence of an organized working class, who must be told—before the organized working class emerged, nobody cared if the state intervened in the economy, because the state intervened in the economy only to help the capitalist classes, you know. But now, if the working people were going to say, "Now we want reforms that will favor us," then they had to be told, "Well, no, no, the workings of the economy shouldn't be interfered with." And so what better theory was there? So anyway, you get this. And so what has happened is... Marx has essentially ended up compromising with this. Of course, they always criticized neoclassical economics for ignoring exploitation and all these things. But for all the rest, they basically said that Marxism and neoclassical economics can be made to work together. And this has given rise to, as I say, Marxist economics, which says Marxist value analysis does not work, there is no demand problem, Marx was wrong about profits falling, and generally about contradictions. So really, we have a Marxism here which has lost touch with Marx's original analysis. So it's different from Marxism. Now, if we come to international relations and international political economy, international relations participate in what I call the social scientific division of labor, in which we study all these things separately. So we study international relations as the political actions of states. You know, these days the terms "geo-economics" and "geo-politics" are becoming very current. But of course, that assumes that these two things can be studied separately, whereas in fact you have a single whole, which is political economy. And when you look at it on the international plane, I wager we should call it geopolitical economy. So that's what we study. And one final thing I'll say on this is that, in addition to dividing up the study of society into these separate disciplines, there was another harm that was done with the advent of the modern social sciences: we lost the knack of thinking historically. That is to say, thinking about change—how the world has changed. So social sciences tend to eternalize the modern, that is to say, the capitalist social system, which means that we're never looking for how it changes. Capitalism is the same, more or less. Society is the same. Modern society is the same, etc. And I think that, therefore, we can't think about it. International relations, as a participant in this social scientific division of labor, thinks only about relations between states rather than looking at the underlying material basis of these relationships. International political economy emerged originally—the rationale was, it emerged in the 1970s—and the rationale was that there was an artificial separation of economics and politics, and they were going to unite them. But actually, they never succeeded in doing this. So they essentially assumed the neoclassical -- 3 of 20 -- explanation of the economy, which is that the world economy—the capitalist economy—functions harmoniously and wonderfully, and we eventually take over the world, the world is flat, blah, blah, and so on. This kind of understanding remained at its core, and politics was only brought in when you wanted to explain why things were going wrong with it. So politics was seen as interference with the economy—something that should not be allowed, that was not desirable, and, in the end, was futile. You know, you can even go to Albert Hirschman's points: perversity, futility, jeopardy. If politics interferes, you will have perverse results, or it will not work, or it will create new dangers. So this was the kind of discourse you also found in international political economy. And of course, international relations also, broadly speaking, takes the idea of a smoothly functioning world economy and domestic economies as a given. So all you have to do then is try to understand why states are interfering. This is clearest, of course, in the liberal model, but I doubt that even the realist model can actually work because it doesn't take account of material interests. And a final point I'll make before I come to what geopolitical economy does, is that as a consequence, partly of the policy of theoretical reconciliation with neoclassical economics, Marx is said to have only theorized the relation between classes and considered classes to be the only agents of history. But actually, if you look at Marx—and I've done that a lot and I've brought this out—he considered both classes and nations to be equally, side by side, agents of history. He also considered that the exploitation of one class by another had to be understood side by side with the exploitation of one nation by another. So any accurate, and certainly any Marxist, understanding of the international relations of the age of capital, since capitalism began, has to be rooted in an understanding of imperialism. But of course, a lot of Western Marxism has proved incapable of understanding imperialism. Because they assume, you see, in Marx's understanding, imperialism arises because of the contradictions of capitalism. In order to manage these contradictions, states can do two types of things. They can manage capitalism domestically in various ways—regulate it, bail it out, all those things—and they try to externalize the costs of capitalism's contradictions onto subordinated territories, whether they are formally independent or not. So imperialism, therefore, has to be put at the core, but you'll see that it is not at the core of international relations, it's not at the core of international political economy, etc., no matter which flavor of these disciplines you look at. So geopolitical economy wants to correct both Marxism as well as mainstream discourses of international relations and international political economy, to arrive at a more accurate understanding in which imperialism is central. And then there's one further thing, and that is that, of course, domination is never accepted gladly by those who are dominated. Those who can resist, do resist. And so it's not just imperialism, but the dialectic between imperialism and anti-imperialism, the substance of which is actually economic development. --