Rehad Desai
Biographic Data
| ID | 128659 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rehad Desai |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rehad |
| FAMILY NAME | Desai |
| SIGNATURE | DESAI R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manitoba |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0518-0429 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Introduction: Secular stagnation and the end of capitalism
Imperialism in Marx, the Marxist Tradition, and Today
At the close of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, capitalism’s productive weakness and the challenge of socialist China are sending the imperial countries in a paroxysm of aggression, economic and military. Dominant approaches like “globalization” and “empire,” which also claimed many Marxist theorists, are manifestly discredited. Thanks to a more than century-long surrender to neoclassical economics, Marxists are divided between tho…
Capitalism, coronavirus, and war in the digital age: Interview with Radhika Desai
In Spring 2024, I met Radhika Desai for the first time at the London School of Economics and Political Science when we both held visiting positions at the Department of International Development as invited scholarly visitors. Although I had not expected her presence, I immediately recognized her after having been a reader of her works on geopolitical economy when developing my own ideas about the political economy of Chinese media and communicati…
Outlines of a geopolitical economy of Chinese socialism against US-led capitalist imperialism: A reply to ‘China’s development path, 1949–2022’ by Mick Dunford
Outlines of a geopolitical economy of Chinese socialism against US-led capitalist imperialism: a reply to ‘China’s development path, 1949–2022’ by Mick Dunford" published on 15 Jan 2024 by Bristol University Press
Peak Hindutva
As Modi’s BJP loses its overall majority, Radhika Desai examines the part played by India’s capitalist conglomerates in his rise—and the contradictions on which their strategy has foundered. The economic crisis of the parched countryside as brake on Hindutva’s forward march
World Political Parties and Building a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity
The "World Political Parties Forum" with the theme "World Political Parties and Building a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity" was held online on 9 November 2023. Prof. Radhika Desai made a speech "The Domestic Foundations of Multipolarity and the Role of Political Parties," Dr. Patrick Theuret gave a speech "From Hegemonic War to Peace for a Destiny Shared by the Whole Humanity," Associate Professor Rocco Lacorte gave a speech "Research…
Through Pluripolarity to Socialism: A Manifesto” One Year On
The International Manifesto Group launched its manifesto, “Through Pluripolarity to Socialism” on 5 September 2021. Then, the world’s attention was riveted to the US’s ignominious exit from Afghanistan. The following speeches, delivered at the webinar to mark the first anniversary of the event, reflect on the tumultuous events of the year since, dominated by the US-led war on Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy, its wider international reverberation…
Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy
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 …
The Long Shadow of Hiroshima: Capitalism and Nuclear Weapons
Few realise that amid rising international tensions, inter alia over Ukraine, Taiwan of China, Iran and AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States), nuclear arms control is today almost entirely dismantled and a manifestly declining and desperate US has launched a new nuclear arms, now also targeting China, making war and even nuclear war seem increasingly possible. The political and geopolitical economy of nuclear proliferation a…
The Imperialism of Democracy and Human Rights vs the Democracy and Human Rights of Imperialism
Western discourse towards China had been hardening since it became clear to US leaders that their assumption that increasing trade and engagement with China would lead it to become a pale imitation of Western neoliberal financialised capitalisms was coming unravelled and China continued to adhere to its socialist commitments. In waging the US’s New Cold War on China with equal if not greater vigour than Trump, Biden merely replaced Trump’s “Ameri…
Marx's geopolitical economy: The relations of producing nations
This short article explores the conception of the international relations of the capitalist world embedded in the last section of the Grundrisse, titled 'Bastiat and Carey'. It shows that, contrary to the widespread tendency to take Marx as a theorist of 'globalization', Marx actually took the existence of nation-states and national economies seriously and conceived of their interrelations as arising from the contradictions of capitalism
Marx's critical political economy, ‘Marxist economics’ and actually occurring revolutions against capitalism
Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory…
Introduction: Japan’s secular stagnation and the American mirror
This introduction frames the contributions that follow in a reflection on how the Japanese experience has been assimilated in US debates on economic policy, on the larger historical significance of the current slowdown of all advanced economies and how it relates to Hansen’s original concerns about secular stagnation
Introduction: International economic governance in a multipolar world
The articles in this special issue are placed in the context of the crisis of multilateralism and of the post-war Bretton Woods arrangements that was already in train before the pandemic, with its economic, political and international reverberations, accelerated, widened and deepened it
Revolutions: A twenty-first-century perspective
We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world be…
Marx’s critical political economy, ‘Marxist economics’ and actually occurring revolutions against capitalism
Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory…
The US vs China: Economic models in the pandemic stress test
This paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, at the root of the contrasting performance of the US and China amid the pandemic are the contrasting ways in which the two societies have come to organize their economies, particularly their money and credit systems. These differences are not widely recognized, let alone analyzed. Secondly, these contrasts emerge from the longer history of antagonisms in the geopolitical economy of world capital…
What is to be done? The importance of Samir Amin’s answer
We consider Samir Amin’s last political will and testament as a commission to the international left. From the perspective of geopolitical economy, which has much in common with what Samir called the world-wide law of value and delinking, accepting this commission requires the left to correct course from that on which much of the western left, at least, has been set over the past many decades, losing its way on questions of imperialism and produc…
The value of history and the history of value
This chapter argues that Marxist economics cannot explain the present crisis because, as a discipline, it is not geared to. It is an oxymoron attempting fit Marxism to the methodological frame of marginalist neoclassical economics. The latter is antithetical to Marxism because it is ahistorical. In place of Marxist economics, this chapter proposes a geopolitical economy which exploits the resources of the historical the traditions of classical po…
The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism
In this introduction, we provide an overall framing of the articles that follow by placing the Ukraine conflict which today embroils the West in confrontation with Russia, within an historical account of the geopolitical economy of contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of imperialism in the twenty-first century, taking particular account of the decline of US and Western power and the rise of other centres of economic and military power, which …
Introduction: From the Neoclassical Diversion to Geopolitical Economy
This introduction to the essays that follow argues that the chief problem with the dominant understanding of world affairs in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy, including their Marxist versions, is an a historical, non-contradictory and economically cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In their place, geopolitical economy is a new approach which returns to the conception of capitalism embodied in the…
Marxist Engagements with Geopolitical Economy: Author's Response
This response essay begins by outlining Geopolitical Economy's historical interpretation of Marxism. It then engages with Rick Wolff's suggestions for further discussion of relations between capitalist and noncapitalist parts of the world, addresses the definitions of key terms, and responds to his alternative thesis about the fate of Western working classes. It then argues that Kristjanson-Gural's concern about the book's critique of Marxist eco…
Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement
The new communists of the commons: Twenty-first-century Proudhonists
If Proudhonism in the nineteenth century was, as Marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, this paper argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by Badiou, Hardt and Negri, and Žižek is a twenty-first-century avatar of it. It speaks not for what Poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as Proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage-earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative …
Marx, List, and the Materiality of Nations
This paper contests the cosmopolitan consensus in contemporary Marxism that Marx and Engels's vision of capitalism was 'global' and that nations are essentially 'cultural' constructs. It contributes to a wider project arguing that nations are material by taking a closer look at Marx and Engels's writings on free trade and protectionism and, in particular, at Marx's notes on Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy (1841/56). This exa…
Marx, List, and the Materiality of Nations
This paper contests the cosmopolitan consensus in contemporary Marxism that Marx and Engels's vision of capitalism was 'global' and that nations are essentially 'cultural' constructs. It contributes to a wider project arguing that nations are material by taking a closer look at Marx and Engels's writings on free trade and protectionism and, in particular, at Marx's notes on Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy (1841/56). This exa…
Dreaming in Technicolour: India as a BRIC Economy
India is hardly the only country to suffer from having a brilliant future, even a glorious past, but always an unsatisfactory-if not wretched-present. The condition used to be called underdevelopment and, after centuries of capitalism and of development, it still affects most of the countries of the world, about 5/6th's of the world's population. But the word and the theories it represented-of dependency and imperialism-have all but disappeared f…
Second-Hand Dealers in Ideas: Think-Tanks and Thatcherite Hegemony
[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the
The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: Engaging Imagined Communities
Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism London: Verso, 2006, second revised edition (first published 1983, revised edition, 1991). xv + 240 pp. ISBN 9781844670864
Marx’s critical political economy, ‘Marxist economics’ and actually occurring revolutions against capitalism
Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory…
Introduction: Nationalisms and their understandings in historical perspective
This introduction provides the historical and intellectual historical context for our thesis of the transition from developmental to cultural nationalisms. After settling issues of definition and periodisation in relation to nations, nationalisms and the international order, I outline how, in all the main phases in the three-century long birth of the international world out of one of empires, capitalist and precapitalist, in tandem with the sprea…
Gujarat's Hindutva of Capitalist Development
Commentators contemplating the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat swing between anxiously wondering whether it shows where the rest of the country is headed and complacent insistence that it is exceptional. Against the background of a wider understanding of the main drivers of Hindutva, and the pattern of its differential advance in the States and regions of India, this paper argues that the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat can be explained by a combination …
From national bourgeoisie to rogues, failures and bullies: 21St century imperialism and the unravelling of the Third World
The East Asian financial crisis, the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the launching of the war on terrorism can be seen as three aspects of a single historical moment that marks the passage from one strategy of US imperialism to another. No longer based primarily on financial globalisation as the means through which the power and control of the corporations and government of the USA is extended over the world, as it was in the 1990s, US strateg…
Introduction: Japan’s secular stagnation and the American mirror
This introduction frames the contributions that follow in a reflection on how the Japanese experience has been assimilated in US debates on economic policy, on the larger historical significance of the current slowdown of all advanced economies and how it relates to Hansen’s original concerns about secular stagnation
What is to be done? The importance of Samir Amin’s answer
We consider Samir Amin’s last political will and testament as a commission to the international left. From the perspective of geopolitical economy, which has much in common with what Samir called the world-wide law of value and delinking, accepting this commission requires the left to correct course from that on which much of the western left, at least, has been set over the past many decades, losing its way on questions of imperialism and produc…
Forward March of Hindutva Halted
Ambiguous reasons for the unexpected relief of the BJP’s ouster in New Delhi: less a clear-cut verdict on Hindutva or neoliberalism than vicissitudes of regional power-broking and first-past-the-post electoral lottery? Congress caught between loyalty to the stock market and pressures of the poor, as it seeks to recover its position as the mainstream reference of Indian capital
Peak Hindutva
As Modi’s BJP loses its overall majority, Radhika Desai examines the part played by India’s capitalist conglomerates in his rise—and the contradictions on which their strategy has foundered. The economic crisis of the parched countryside as brake on Hindutva’s forward march
The Imperialism of Democracy and Human Rights vs the Democracy and Human Rights of Imperialism
Western discourse towards China had been hardening since it became clear to US leaders that their assumption that increasing trade and engagement with China would lead it to become a pale imitation of Western neoliberal financialised capitalisms was coming unravelled and China continued to adhere to its socialist commitments. In waging the US’s New Cold War on China with equal if not greater vigour than Trump, Biden merely replaced Trump’s “Ameri…
Introduction: International economic governance in a multipolar world
The articles in this special issue are placed in the context of the crisis of multilateralism and of the post-war Bretton Woods arrangements that was already in train before the pandemic, with its economic, political and international reverberations, accelerated, widened and deepened it
Revolutions: A twenty-first-century perspective
We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world be…
The US vs China: Economic models in the pandemic stress test
This paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, at the root of the contrasting performance of the US and China amid the pandemic are the contrasting ways in which the two societies have come to organize their economies, particularly their money and credit systems. These differences are not widely recognized, let alone analyzed. Secondly, these contrasts emerge from the longer history of antagonisms in the geopolitical economy of world capital…
The new communists of the commons: Twenty-first-century Proudhonists
If Proudhonism in the nineteenth century was, as Marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, this paper argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by Badiou, Hardt and Negri, and Žižek is a twenty-first-century avatar of it. It speaks not for what Poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as Proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage-earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative …
Conclusion: From developmental to cultural nationalisms
That developmental and cultural nationalisms had opposite foci should not imply that developmental nationalisms comprised only political economy and cultural nationalisms only cultural politics. It does mean, however, that within each of these historical types of nationalism (and presumably other such historical categories may be elaborated by improving the still rudimentary framework we propose and extending it to other periods in nationalisms' …
The Right Politics to Come
Fundamentalism and the new right
(1990). Fundamentalism and the new right. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 53-55
Fundamentalism and the new right
(1990). Fundamentalism and the new right. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 53-55
Second-Hand Dealers in Ideas: Think-Tanks and Thatcherite Hegemony
[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the
Reports on the Biennial conference of the South African historical journal and on the women's history workshop, Rhodes university, July 1995
Hindu Nationalists in India: The Rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party
The Right Politics to Come
From national bourgeoisie to rogues, failures and bullies: 21St century imperialism and the unravelling of the Third World
The East Asian financial crisis, the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the launching of the war on terrorism can be seen as three aspects of a single historical moment that marks the passage from one strategy of US imperialism to another. No longer based primarily on financial globalisation as the means through which the power and control of the corporations and government of the USA is extended over the world, as it was in the 1990s, US strateg…
Forward March of Hindutva Halted
Ambiguous reasons for the unexpected relief of the BJP’s ouster in New Delhi: less a clear-cut verdict on Hindutva or neoliberalism than vicissitudes of regional power-broking and first-past-the-post electoral lottery? Congress caught between loyalty to the stock market and pressures of the poor, as it seeks to recover its position as the mainstream reference of Indian capital
License for the New Barbarism
The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States
The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States, Pradeep K. Chhibber and Ken Kollman, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. xvi, 276.Mining electoral data to arrive at theories about the relationship between political party performance and party system determination and electoral and governmental institutions forms the main stream of political science. And…
The last empire? From nation-building compulsion to nation-wrecking futility and beyond
Even as the literature on US imperialism proliferates, US military and political failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have become apparent, and the hollowness of the economic and financial foundations of the US imperial enterprise has been revealed. This article attempts a new interpretation of the more important dynamics of US imperialism from the birth of the republic to its present quagmire in the oil-lands of the East, focusing on its weaknesses.…
Dreaming in Technicolour: India as a BRIC Economy
India is hardly the only country to suffer from having a brilliant future, even a glorious past, but always an unsatisfactory-if not wretched-present. The condition used to be called underdevelopment and, after centuries of capitalism and of development, it still affects most of the countries of the world, about 5/6th's of the world's population. But the word and the theories it represented-of dependency and imperialism-have all but disappeared f…
Introduction: Nationalisms and their understandings in historical perspective
This introduction provides the historical and intellectual historical context for our thesis of the transition from developmental to cultural nationalisms. After settling issues of definition and periodisation in relation to nations, nationalisms and the international order, I outline how, in all the main phases in the three-century long birth of the international world out of one of empires, capitalist and precapitalist, in tandem with the sprea…
Conclusion: From developmental to cultural nationalisms
That developmental and cultural nationalisms had opposite foci should not imply that developmental nationalisms comprised only political economy and cultural nationalisms only cultural politics. It does mean, however, that within each of these historical types of nationalism (and presumably other such historical categories may be elaborated by improving the still rudimentary framework we propose and extending it to other periods in nationalisms' …
Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms in Historical Perspective
This is the first of a two article series on developmental and cultural nationalism. The articles by Radhika Desai and Laura Hein are both substantially excerpted versions of essays that form part of a special issue of Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2008, pp 397 - 428. Other essays in the collection discuss China, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East
The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: Engaging Imagined Communities
Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism London: Verso, 2006, second revised edition (first published 1983, revised edition, 1991). xv + 240 pp. ISBN 9781844670864
Consumption demand in Marx and in the current crisis
This chapter challenges the denial of “underconsumption” – the role of consumption demand in capitalist reproduction and its paucity in crises – in contemporary Marxism. At stake are better understandings not only of crisis theory but also, inter alia, of imperialism, “reformism,” and Marx's intellectual legacy. The chapter shows how the centrality of consumption demand is underlined in the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse, and goes on…
The new communists of the commons: Twenty-first-century Proudhonists
If Proudhonism in the nineteenth century was, as Marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, this paper argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by Badiou, Hardt and Negri, and Žižek is a twenty-first-century avatar of it. It speaks not for what Poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as Proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage-earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative …
Marx, List, and the Materiality of Nations
This paper contests the cosmopolitan consensus in contemporary Marxism that Marx and Engels's vision of capitalism was 'global' and that nations are essentially 'cultural' constructs. It contributes to a wider project arguing that nations are material by taking a closer look at Marx and Engels's writings on free trade and protectionism and, in particular, at Marx's notes on Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy (1841/56). This exa…
Gujarat's Hindutva of Capitalist Development
Commentators contemplating the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat swing between anxiously wondering whether it shows where the rest of the country is headed and complacent insistence that it is exceptional. Against the background of a wider understanding of the main drivers of Hindutva, and the pattern of its differential advance in the States and regions of India, this paper argues that the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat can be explained by a combination …
Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement
Introduction: From the Neoclassical Diversion to Geopolitical Economy
This introduction to the essays that follow argues that the chief problem with the dominant understanding of world affairs in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy, including their Marxist versions, is an a historical, non-contradictory and economically cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In their place, geopolitical economy is a new approach which returns to the conception of capitalism embodied in the…
Marxist Engagements with Geopolitical Economy: Author's Response
This response essay begins by outlining Geopolitical Economy's historical interpretation of Marxism. It then engages with Rick Wolff's suggestions for further discussion of relations between capitalist and noncapitalist parts of the world, addresses the definitions of key terms, and responds to his alternative thesis about the fate of Western working classes. It then argues that Kristjanson-Gural's concern about the book's critique of Marxist eco…
The value of history and the history of value
This chapter argues that Marxist economics cannot explain the present crisis because, as a discipline, it is not geared to. It is an oxymoron attempting fit Marxism to the methodological frame of marginalist neoclassical economics. The latter is antithetical to Marxism because it is ahistorical. In place of Marxist economics, this chapter proposes a geopolitical economy which exploits the resources of the historical the traditions of classical po…
The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism
In this introduction, we provide an overall framing of the articles that follow by placing the Ukraine conflict which today embroils the West in confrontation with Russia, within an historical account of the geopolitical economy of contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of imperialism in the twenty-first century, taking particular account of the decline of US and Western power and the rise of other centres of economic and military power, which …
What is to be done? The importance of Samir Amin’s answer
We consider Samir Amin’s last political will and testament as a commission to the international left. From the perspective of geopolitical economy, which has much in common with what Samir called the world-wide law of value and delinking, accepting this commission requires the left to correct course from that on which much of the western left, at least, has been set over the past many decades, losing its way on questions of imperialism and produc…
Political science (36 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (29 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (22 works) · Economics (18 works) · Political economy (18 works) · Capitalism (15 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (15 works) · History (12 works)