The US Order Is FINISHED. But The REAL Battle Starts Only Now | Prof. Radhika Desai

## Geopolitical economy and capitalism’s crisis The recorded discussion frames our current moment as not merely a cyclical downturn but an organic crisis of world capitalism—an interregnum in which the institutions and narratives that once underpinned Western dominance are failing to hold society together. The central claim is stark: the Western-led liberal order is in decline, and this systemic weakening is producing political violence, ideological dislocation, and a scramble among elites to preserve privilege. What distinguishes this intervention is its insistence that these phenomena must be read through political economy, not sanitized geopolitics or the atomized categories of modern social science. The economy is not a separate sphere; it is the ground upon which politics and international structures are built. Understanding capitalism as a historically specific, contradictory mode of value production leads to a very different grasp of what is happening than do prevailing mainstream accounts. Professor Radhika Desai reasserts political economy as the proper lens: a historically informed, materialist inquiry into the division and socialization of labor that traces the rise and decline of capitalist forms. This is not a return to inscrutable Marxist jargon but a practical framework that foregrounds production, state power, and international relations as mutually constitutive. The “organic crisis” she borrows from Gramsci describes a ruling class losing its ability to lead except through coercion—precisely the political violence and hollowing of consent visible across much of the North Atlantic. The analytic payoff is that we can situate phenomena like populist authoritarianism, trade wars, and sanctions within a broader systemic unraveling rather than as isolated pathologies. ## The changing world order What the discussion calls the “international system” is not an abstract arena detached from societies; it is the composite expression of their material power and productive structures. The motor of international relations is thus the dominant society’s political-economic trajectory. At present that motor is shifting. Where once the North Atlantic corner of the world exported governance and economic organization outward, it now increasingly repels the rest of the world through policies of containment and coercion. Conversely, the Western Pacific—China above all—has become a stabilizing pole, attracting trade and institutional linkages. This conversion is not merely economic but civilizational in impact: the balance of trade partners has reconfigured, with China now the most important trading partner for large swaths of the world. More than trade, however, the change is political. The historical arc that saw capitalism consolidate global dominance is entering a new phase: a multipolar world in which a socialist power effectively challenges the capitalist core. Desai insists on reading China as socialist in form and purpose; to her mind, treating it as merely state-capitalist or an exotic hybrid misses the significance of its alternative modalities of planning, state direction, and developmental strategy. The consequence is a geopolitical contest not reducible to personalities or military standoffs but rooted in conflicting models of social reproduction. ## Imperialism, nations and development A central pivot of the argument is the materiality of nations: they are not cultural ornaments but the structural units of a world divided into rich and poor. Imperialism, in this schema, is not an optional policy but a systemic requirement of capitalist expansion and stabilization. Capitalist centers have historically constructed relations of complementarity that reserve high-value production for the core and low-value extraction for the periphery. That relation enforces underdevelopment unless challenged by projects that reconfigure productive capacities. The dialectic between imperialism and anti-imperialism explains divergent development paths. In eras when imperial expansion was possible, countries could industrialize while still benefitting from asymmetric global integration. After 1914, with the world carved into imperial zones, peripheral development had to proceed without outright imperial enmeshment. Desai emphasizes that the most effective responses to this constraint were often socialist-led industrializations—Soviet Russia and modern China being the paradigmatic cases—since they could marshal state-directed planning to overcome external dependency. This theoretical framing forces a re-evaluation of so-called “catch-up” development: whenever peripheries have narrowed the gap, they did so by dismantling imposed complementarities and building capabilities internally, frequently through non-capitalist state intervention. ## Marx, monopoly and planned production Marx’s late writings—especially the fragments in the Grundrisse on the “relations of producing economies”—provide an anchor for the geopolitical economy approach. Rather than seeing capitalism as a self-correcting market system, the analysis emphasizes its inherent contradictions: value production that generates uneven development and periodic crises requiring managerial interventions. National states are indispensable in this process, not marginal actors to be squeezed out by abstract market logics. Desai draws from Smith and Marx alike to argue that the socialization of labor—the production of ever-larger interconnected units—creates the material foundations for political possibilities beyond capitalism. Monopoly tendencies within advanced capitalism, the concentration of productive capacities, and the technological potential for planned production make socialism not a utopian annex but a material possibility. The great question becomes political: will the capitalist class accept limits and redistribution, or will society be forced toward more egalitarian reorganization through struggle? In this perspective, planning and state direction are not bureaucratic excesses but responses to the systemic need to organize production at scale. ## Neoliberalism and capitalism’s decline The contemporary disorder has roots in the neoliberal era’s failures to manage capitalism’s contradictions. From financial deregulation to the hollowing out of public authority, neoliberalism promised market self-regulation while systematically eroding capacities to address the very crises it produced. Rather than renewing capitalism, these policies deferred structural change in ways that made subsequent crises deeper and policy responses harder to sustain. The result is a capitalism that is simultaneously volatile and politically brittle: elites cling to power through financial instruments, monetary tinkering, and coercive politics instead of offering coherent social projects. The symposium discussion suggests that interpreting the present as “post-capitalist” or “neo-feudal” risks category error. Capitalism remains the governing mode, but it is one in decline—senile, as the speaker puts it—trying to maintain privileges through coercion rather than consent. The re-emergence of strong statecraft in the Global South and the rising attractiveness of alternative models derive from capitalism’s inability to produce broad-based prosperity within its existing international configuration. Thus, the contemporary polycrisis—health, climate, finance, geopolitics—is not merely a series of shocks but symptoms of a deeper systemic impasse. ## Q&A: Keynes, AI and multipolarity The exchange moves beyond diagnosis to policy debates that matter for the left and for governance more broadly. One notable theme is the retreat of progressive macroeconomic thinking: the political left in many countries has abandoned large-scale interventions that once underpinned welfare states and wartime mobilizations. The practical consequence is a policy vacuum in which neoliberal technocrats and reactionary forces vie for solutions. Revisiti

The US Order Is FINISHED. But The REAL Battle Starts Only Now | Prof. Radhika Desai The capitalist class will never give up if we don't force them into peace and an equitable future. And this is not a antiquated social paradigm but the only framework that can help you understand the insane levels of political violence around us. Kyoto University Symposium 2026: "Geopolitics in the Time of Monsters" Keynote 3 (Presentation 11): Prof. Radhika Desai Professor Radhika Desai examines the crisis of world capitalism through her geopolitical economy approach. She argues that Western decline and China’s rise reflect a deeper struggle over production, imperialism and socialism. Drawing on Marx, Smith, Keynes and Gramsci, she challenges prevailing accounts of world war, fascism and neo-feudalism. The discussion explores artificial intelligence, Russia’s economic system, Trump’s tariffs and neoclassical economics, concluding with an exchange with Bill Mitchell on the left’s retreat from macroeconomic policy and the role of planning. Radhika's Links: Website: https://radhikadesai.com/ Books: https://radhikadesai.com/books/ Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Geopolitical economy and capitalism’s crisis 06:06 The changing world order 17: 26 Imperialism, nations and development 27:45 Marx, monopoly and planned production 39:00 Neoliberalism and capitalism’s decline 50:37 Q&A: Keynes, AI and multipolarity 59:33 Russia, China and imperialism 1:19:17 Bill Mitchell: where the left lost its way #Radhika Desai Thank you so much, Pascal. And thank you all for being here. I really feel privileged to talk to a group of people who are actively engaged in trying to decode where we are today. And I obviously want to make my own contribution to your thinking. There's a lot I want to say, so I'm going to jump right in. I'm going to take you through a sort of whirlwind tour of some of my main ideas. I'm sure I will not be able to express all of them, so I'm looking forward to the Q&A and lots more discussions well after this conference is over. This is the title I have chosen: “The Geopolitical Economy of the Organic Crisis of World Capitalism.” Geopolitical Economy is the name of a new Marxist approach to world affairs that I have been proposing since at least 2013, when my book of the same name came out. I should also say one more thing. Many of you may think, “Ooh, Marxism, this is terrible.” But I actually have a version of Marxism that you can understand because I have taken it away from all those people who have unnecessarily mystified, complicated, and, in fact, falsified it. So bear with me. To the left is my -- 1 of 26 -- book, Geopolitical Economy. That one there. I'm a bit dyslexic. My more recent book, from 2023, is Capitalism, Coronavirus and War. Some translations in between. If I were to write the second book today, I would simply call it The Failure of Capitalism. But I wrote it in the context of the coronavirus crisis, and so that's the name I gave it. I also want to make a couple of caveats before I begin. I have to confess to being allergic to the term “geopolitics.” This is for a number of reasons. Geopolitics, in the hands of people like Halford Mackinder and his various American and German counterparts, including Carl Schmitt, was a way of thinking about the world that arose out of imperialist geography. Sorry, do I have to hold this, or am I okay? Yeah, thank you. Essentially, they looked at the world from the point of view of imperialist powers. What can we get from where? And how can we essentially exert control over these resources and trade routes and labor and whatever it may be? So that's the first thing. I don't really want to ally myself with that way of thinking. Secondly, the separation of politics from economics, from sociology, etc., is all part of the social division of labor that came into existence at the end of the 19th century, when neoclassical economics emerged. And then Weber sanctified it by saying, “Oh, well, there is this thing called the economy, which is separate from society, and we must study them separately.” So he made the fundamental separation between economics and sociology. In fact, our universities are organized on the basis of the social scientific division of labor. But there is much that we lost when we lost our connection with political economy, which is the original discipline that sought to understand what capitalism was about. What is this new form of social organization that is emerging in our midst? What is the problem with it? What are all the things that could go wrong with it? This was political economy. Sociology and neoclassical economics displaced political economy. They separated the study of society into separate spheres of human activity to be studied by separate disciplines. This is a problem that most people now understand, and that's why they talk about interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and what have you. But that is not the worst of what this shift did to us. The worst of it was two other things. One is that you privilege the economy. The economy, left to itself, is going to produce the best possible results. All the other social sciences must privilege the workings of the economy. And secondly, it prevented us from thinking historically. Political economy was nothing if not historical. It was a way of understanding the trajectory of capitalism from its earliest beginnings. The scholars who constituted political economy could see that capitalism was also going to end. It was not going to be here forever. So it was a question of beginnings and endings, and therefore fundamentally historical thinking. And this is what we have given up. So that's the first caveat. Second caveat: monsters. Nell already referred to this, but I've put the entire quotation here for your benefit: what Gramsci really said about organic crises. And there are indeed many elements of our -- 2 of 26 -- current situation that correspond to this understanding of organic crisis. He spoke about organic crisis as essentially consisting in the inability of the ruling class to exert any leadership over the rest of society and its becoming more and more dependent on force. So essentially, he says that in this context of organic crisis, the ruling class is no longer leading but becomes only dominant and exercises coercive force alone. And this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideology, something that we are experiencing every day, and no longer believe what they used to believe. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear, morbid symptoms like Trump and Farage and what have you. And the monstrous thing is really, from what I understand, something that Žižek sort of introduced. Let's not even go there. So what is the key question? The key question that Pascal has posed for us, and that all of us have in fact posed explicitly or implicitly, is: how is the international system changing? What is it becoming? And in answering this question, the way I understand things is that the international system is not suspended above societies. It arises from these societies. Its evolution reflects their evolution. Obviously, it arises from the more dominant societies more than others, but which society is dominant is also changing, and we are living in a time of very profound change. The evolution of the international system reflects the evolution of societies, and its dynamic is determined by its leading society. So what makes international relations tick? What makes it go forward? What is the motor of international relations, driving it forward? That's what we want to understand. Today, the international system is undergoing historic change. In China, people speak of changes unseen in a century. And of course, they are referring back to the thirty-year crisis of 1914 to 1945: a single crisis, not two world wars with a Great Depression in between, but a single gigantic imperialist crisis. I also think of the current moment as involving the trajectory of capitalism's rise and decline, a two- to three-hundred-year chapter in world history, a chapter that essentially established Western dominance and is now closing. Maybe this is just the beginning of the closing, but it is now closing. #Radhika Desai And, you know, in terms of this idea of an interregnum, I do not believe that a new world is unable to be born. I believe a new world is being born. And it is a multipolar one, and it is led by socialist China. And I would insist that we must understand China as socialist. Otherwise, we fail to understand a lot of what's going on in our world. So Mao once said, “There is chaos under the heavens, and the situation is excellent.” And in many ways, I feel that this is true. There are many distressing things that are going on in our time, but there are also many hopeful developments. And I also have a sense that, quite frankly, we may try all sorts of wrong ways of resolving this crisis, but these wrong ways are going to fail. Willy-nilly, we are going to be pushed in a certain direction. -- 3 of 26 -- We can talk about that as well. So a while back, I wrote this article. It’s in the top left-hand corner: “The Fate of Capitalism Hangs in the Balance of International Power.” Marxists are used to thinking of the fate of capitalism hanging in the balance of class power. But today, it hangs in the balance of international power because part of geopolitical economy is the understanding, which I believe is also Marxist, that classes are not the only historical agents. Nations are also historical agents. And by the way, given our previous discussions, let me just say that I refer to nations in a very general fashion. I’m not going to get into discussions of civilizations, states, and nations and so on. We can, but this is not strictly necessary for me. So the future of capitalism is hanging in the balance of international power because, for the second time in the last century, there is a socialist power challenging capitalist power and doing so effectively. The first challenge came at a time when capitalism was still robust. Today's challenge comes at a time when capitalism is increasingly senile and in decline. And in an effort to hang on to their privileges and power, the homelands of capitalism, which are in the North Atlantic region, are spewing out the chaos that the world is being subjected to. Because if you think of our world as being in chaos, it's all emanating from the North Atlantic corner of the world, from which the world is being repelled. Whereas once, the North Atlantic corner organized—or at least, after a manner of speaking, organized—the world economy. Today, it is repelling the rest of the world, and the Western Pacific, China in particular, is emerging as the calm center, the calm shore to which the rest of the world is increasingly drawn. It is not a coincidence that, whereas even 20 or 25 years ago, the United States was the most important trading partner for the majority of the economies of the world, today it is China. So the chaos is coming from the imperial world, the homelands of capitalism and imperialism. It is an effort to prevent the emergence of an anti-imperialist world. And in itself, it is the outcome, on the one hand, of the decline of capitalism itself and, on the other hand, of the advance of multipolarity along largely non-capitalist lines. So, in outline, I want to give you a few current, prevailing interpretations. I then want to introduce you very, very briefly to what I call geopolitical economy, which Marx, in this wonderful passage at the end of the Grundrisse, calls the relations