Yves here. Many here are correctly keen fans of Michael Hudson’s work. Even though I have occasionally quibbled with Vijay Prasad’s views (see this leftist critique of China’s role in Africa), I imagine many here also know and very much respect his writing. Prasad and Hudson below make a number of important, even novel, observations about the evolving international order. Both use Lenin’s book Imperialism as their starting point; Prasad’s “hyper-imperialism” overlaps with Hudson’s Super-Imperialism, but also has some important differences (Prasad, like your humble blogger, regards the 2007-2008 crisis as a watershed and the failure to make meaningful changes as a, if not the, driver of where we are now).
Prasad is even more dismissive than we have been of the idea that the hoped-for multipolar/BRICS order is making meaningful headway against what Prasad calls hyper-imperlism. Provocatively but also persuasively, he argues that the West is losing ground in control of raw materials and in science leadership. However, the financial arena is being contested as opposed to transformed, and that in the other two key areas of power, military and information, the West is still supreme.
Hudson describes how industrializing economies developed in an unexpected manner, towards rentierism and exploitation rather than socialistic systems, and how financialization was a major element.
This is an exceptionally meaty and informative discussion, with a lot of rich historical detail and also in-depth discussions of current events, such as the Europe bizarrely de-industrializing itself as a result of its refusal to back down with Russia. Please find the time to read it in full.
Originally published at the Class Unity YouTube channel
Welcome to another Class Unity speaker event. Today, we will be joined by authors Vijay Prashad and Michael Hudson to discuss hyper-imperialism, imperialism, and the state of global politics. Michael Hudson is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, and the author of many books and papers on political economy, the history of economics, economic history, finance, and imperialism. Vijay Prashad is an Indian author, journalist, political commentator, and Marxist. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, editor of LeftWord Books, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, and a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. For donations, educational courses, and membership inquiries, please visit us at ClassUnity.org.
Class Unity: Hello everyone, and welcome to another Class Unity event. Please remember to like, subscribe, and share this video, and consider joining or making a donation at classunity.org today. Today, we are very happy to be joined by two guests: Vijay Prashad, who is a historian, journalist, and the Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. Thank you for joining us, Vijay.
Vijay Prashad: Thanks for having me.
Class Unity: And Michael Hudson, who is an economist and author of the famous book Super Imperialism. Thank you for joining us, Michael.
Michael Hudson: Good to be back.
Class Unity: Today, we will be talking about imperialism, hyper-imperialism, and the current state of global geopolitics. We usually begin these discussions by allowing our guests to make a few introductory statements before we get into some questions. So, Vijay, the Tricontinental Institute recently came out with an important study titled Hyperimperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage. Could you tell us in a few words what this study is about, what hyper-imperialism is, and what role it plays today on the global stage?
Vijay Prashad: Firstly, I am genuinely extremely pleased and honored to be with Michael Hudson, whose book Super Imperialism on the Wall Street–Bretton Woods system is a foundational work. It was also, I think, foundational for Peter Gowan’s work on the Treasury Department–Wall Street–Washington system. These books, this thinking, are actually very key to understanding the post–World War II architecture and to periodizing imperialism. I think that’s the key element.
You know, people misread Lenin’s Imperialism as a general tract about the transhistorical concept of imperialism, when in fact Lenin was doing a conjunctural analysis of why the social democratic parties, the center-left and left parties, voted for the war credits, and why Europe went to war. That was the question he was asking. And the answer to his question was imperialism—inter-capitalist conflict. In other words, capitalist firms had exceeded the boundaries of their countries, and inter-capitalist conflict then fashioned itself as inter-imperialist conflict over territory and so on. And indeed, in many ways, Lenin’s analysis covers the entirety of the long war from 1914 to 1945 that eclipsed Europe.
But you’ve also got to understand that the Soviet Union, when the revolution happened some months after Lenin finished writing that piece of work—Imperialism was written in 1916—changed the balance of forces that Lenin had to grapple with. At the time of the Soviet Republic, and then with the revolutions in Mongolia, eventually in Vietnam, China, and so on, the zone of socialism had expanded greatly.
And in that period, with the zone of socialism having expanded and the Third World emerging, trying to put itself forward as a sovereign actor on the world stage, you had in 1945 the construction, I suppose, where Michael’s term becomes very valuable to understand what happens from 1945 onward: you have a super-imperialist system imposed on the world.
You have, for instance, the IMF and the World Bank producing, using the wealth stolen from the colonized to, in fact, impose debt servitude on these new countries. It gets worse in the 1980s during the Third World debt crisis, but the roots of that are already there. You can see this in Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 book titled Neocolonialism. He’s trying to understand why we can’t break through, what happened, why we have what Fanon calls “flag independence,” and what happened to our economic possibilities. Why can’t we use our raw materials, industrialize, and advance our agriculture, and so on? W.W. Rostow’s book is [based on] lies; it’s not going to happen like that. Rostow is lying. He is a fantasist. His anti-communist manifesto is just not predicting reality. It’s an appalling theory of modernization. That’s what Nkrumah is actually saying in Neocolonialism.
So this phase, let’s say, where the United States and its Western allies, including Japan, impose a form of imperialism on the world is partly rooted in the attempt to undermine and overthrow the socialist zone to make sure it doesn’t, quote-unquote, spread into the Third World, although the Third World had its own socialism and didn’t need any spreading. It had its own histories and lineages. It didn’t need “Moscow gold.” It could do it itself, as we saw in India. Without Moscow gold, the party I belong to won the election in Kerala in 1957 to be the first political party to take power in United Kerala after the monarchy was overthrown, and it still governs Kerala today.
So the idea of this form of imperialism, where there wasn’t really much inter-imperialist conflict—okay, at some point the Chinese said the Soviets were social imperialists, but that was more a polemic than a theory—is that the United States was able to mute a great deal of inter-capitalist conflict with Germany and Japan and so on, the Plaza Accord being a very interesting example of the United States being able to mute these challenges.
Well, in a way—I’m being very quick now—we argue in our text that the credit crisis of 2007 actually created a third great depression in the Global North, which hasn’t been able to emerge from that, with very low levels of growth in the real economy. That’s there in Michael’s work, particularly for anybody who follows his blog, which is the best representation of reality out there.
Vijay Prashad: There’s been barely any growth in these economies. Yes, the financial sector goes up and down, but that’s got its own trajectory, its own rhythm. And as a consequence, if you take Samir Amin’s five controls as a measure to study what kind of control the imperialist bloc has over the world, it’s interesting because three out of the five, we argue—
The United States and the Western allies have basically been quite severely challenged. Those three are control over raw materials. We see it from Indonesia, of course, from the Alliance for Sahel States, and others saying, “We’re not going to give you our raw materials for nothing anymore.” That sovereignty over raw materials argument is back on the agenda, the stuff that led to the creation of the New International Economic Order in 1974, the UN resolution.
Not the real creation of the order, but the UN resolution. So control over raw materials withered. Control over finance is interesting. Partly, when you sanction a large chunk of the world, they’re going to start building their own financial systems, their own way of dealing with each other. So it’s a contested area. It’s not being transformed. I think de-dollarization is an incredibly overhyped debate and discussion. It doesn’t interest me in the least right now. More interested in seeing countries trade in local currencies and different forms, and so on. But the phrase “de-dollarization,” I think, is an internet phenomenon. It’s not at that level. It’s a little bit like the term “multipolarity”—a super-hyped, nonsensical term, in my opinion.
And the third area of control is control over science and technology. Very clear. You put China next to the United States, the Chinese are advancing in science and tech, and, I think, really scaring the tech monopolies in the West. The challenge of artificial intelligence being an interesting race is a real challenge. It’s a real race. It’s like the space race, in a sense.
Okay, those three areas of control, to use Samir’s metric, there’s a contest, a challenge in three of them. There’s no challenge in two. Those two are military power. The United States and its allies are far superior to any country on the planet in terms of military force. You can’t spend over a trillion dollars a year as the United States does, and then Trump wants to double the military budget, over a trillion a year, five percent of GDP for the NATO states, etc.—you can’t spend so much money on the military and have a bad military force. What they showed Venezuela on the 3rd of January was their real destructive capacity. They didn’t have to show the Palestinians that, because Palestinians don’t have radars, don’t have air defense systems, etc. What the EA-18A Growler can do is pretty incredible. And that’s a really expensive plane that took off from Puerto Rico and jammed the radar systems. One hundred and fifty aircraft are hovering like UFOs over the Venezuelan sky. That’s one form of power that just is incredible, what they’ve built—the ability to destroy countries.
Don’t mistake military power for political power. You can destroy countries; you can’t govern them, as shown by Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. The fifth form of power, again using Samir’s metric, is information.
The West has an absolute grip on information. I’ve been a newspaper reporter. I still work as a journalist, mostly for my livelihood, and therefore, I don’t have health insurance. Journalists know that most journalists in the Global South basically copy-paste from Associated Press, Reuters, Asian Press, CNN, NBC, whatever. Sometimes NPR comes up. That’s where you get your news. And you basically copy their line because you cannot travel all around the world, and you don’t have a budget. They control the infrastructure. They control the undersea pipelines. From here in Santiago, my pipeline goes north. The digital pipeline goes to Los Angeles. It’s owned by a U.S. company, a private company. Most of the satellites that hover over us are owned by Elon Musk. Musk owns more satellites than the Chinese government. Hardware, software, you name it, the West dominates in this sector. And they use information and warfare strategically in this contest to maintain hegemony and power. It comes out whenever the West releases a strategic document. That is why NATO is so crucial, in our opinion.
So, hyper-imperialism is a stage where the United States and its bloc of countries utilize these forms of power against any rising challenger. We reject the idea that there’s an inter-imperialist conflict. We don’t believe that there’s any counter-imperialist force in the world. And so that’s why we use the term hyper-imperialist.
We very much understand that you have to do a deep conjunctural analysis of the moment and not cut and paste from our greats. And by the way, I’m an enormous admirer of Lenin. I edited selections of Lenin for Leftward Books in India. I’m doing a collection of Lenin’s last writings, including the amazing, brilliant text Better Fewer, But Better, which is his last written text. It’s an incredible text, speaks to the cooperatives and so on. Incredible. I’m a huge admirer of Lenin, but I am not religious about what Lenin said. Because Lenin said something in 1916 doesn’t mean it’s trans-historical. It’s a great error that people make, this sort of citation game among Marxists. I completely reject that. Marxism must teach you to think for yourself along the grain of the Marxist tradition and the workers’ movement, not be a robot of the collected works of all the great fellows in the past.
So, friends in Class Unity—it’s a great name for a group—that’s our understanding of hyper-imperialism.
Class Unity: Thank you, thank you so much, so much for that explanation. Michael, do you want to respond or add anything? How do you see things today, and what do you think?
Michael Hudson: Well, Vijay has hit all the bases, and I want to follow pretty much the same outline that he’s just said with my comments. I think he was right to start with Lenin, because Lenin saw that imperialism was becoming financial in character above all. This was already before the inter-allied debts and the emergence of the United States and its dollar as the overwhelmingly dominating factor over Europe in the wake of World War I, which enabled it to emerge from World War II by dictating what the world’s economic structure was going to be.
Well, Lenin anticipated that it would be private finance capital that was going to lead to future wars, that they were going to be fighting over financial issues. He didn’t see—and there was no way anybody could have seen—that the United States, above all others, was going to emerge, and that’s what made it hyper, or what I called super-imperialism. It was one particular country over all the others, and the degree to which Britain and France and all the other countries felt so tied to the traditional idea that a debt is a debt, all debts must be paid, that they didn’t protest and say, “All this is going to lead to chaos.”
It was only Keynes, who wasn’t really a Marxist, who came out with that. Nobody had been prepared for imagining that the dynamics that Marx and all the classical economists had described as the dynamics of industrial capitalism evolving into socialism—as they relied on public investment and the state to take over basic monopolies and the keys to the economy so that they wouldn’t be monopolized and turned into monopoly rent-seeking—was not what happened.
It’s hard for anyone with a materialist approach to history to say, “Why didn’t history take the logical approach of everybody trying to act in their own self-interest?” Let me— I have to—
And Vijay mentioned the social democratic parties voting for the war. Already before the war, you had the British Labour Party supporting Britain’s African imperialism in South Africa, because that was what was supporting Britain’s economy, including its labor force. And you already had among the bourgeois economists saying, “Well, all of this is developing our economy.”
Whereas Marx had given a speech around 1844—the Chartists, I’m not sure of the date—saying that British imperialism is going to develop backward countries such as India, and it’s going to replicate itself abroad. That’s not what British imperialism, or any other imperialism, did at all. At home, it wanted to reform itself and make itself a low-cost, competitive capitalist economy, but abroad it wanted to recreate the rentier economy: land rent, natural resource rent, monopoly rent from investment in railroads and other infrastructure.
You already had, by the late 19th century, the world dividing into two different kinds of economy: the Western industrial capitalist economies and the non-capitalist economies abroad. And it was largely the financial sector that had put together the financing of the rentier grabs—the railroads, all the capital investment for infrastructure—and the promoters of their own national countries, Britain, France, other governments, standing up for their creditors when they moved their troops into Egypt, Tunisia, and other countries that were defaulting on their foreign debts.
So how did industrial capitalism evolve in this era, in the self-destructive way that it’s become in the West? Well, it’s become something other than what Marx and everyone else in his generation expected. The dynamics of industrial capitalism were to become more efficient, and efficiency led to public investment, and that led to socialism. And if there were monopolies, they would be socialized in due course into socialism. But that’s not happened.
The West has become privatized, Thatcherized, and financialized, and that’s what has led the United States today to have the foreign policy, the rules-based order, that we see under Donald Trump and his America First order. The United States, unlike the condition in 1945, is no longer an industrial power. It’s deindustrialized. It’s offshored its labor. It’s no longer the kind of Roosevelt public infrastructure developer to develop the economy. That’s all been privatized and financialized.
This has left the United States as a high-cost economy. So, without dominating the world’s industry, agriculture, technology, or even military technology, how is the United States going to maintain its living standards today? The only way it can do it is by exploitative means, and the only thing it has to offer is not industrial help, not financing; it’s the offer not to destroy other countries, not to invade them, not to bomb them, or not to do what Donald Trump did and raise tariffs to deny them the American market to which they’d become accustomed, and cause financial chaos, if they didn’t join the split in the world between American-dominated Western finance capitalism, rentier finance capitalism, and the rest of the world, which has reinvented the wheel of industrial capitalism along the lines that Marx explained and that all of the industrial nations of Europe and the United States were following in the late 19th century.
What China is doing is socialism with Chinese characteristics, but you could call it capitalism with Chinese characteristics, because it’s capitalism in its view that is evolving naturally into socialism.
So what happened in the West? Well, the rentiers fought back. They fought against socialism, and they fought against Marx. They fought against the whole concept—value theory—of classical economics, trying, in the ideal of industrial capitalism, to bring value in line with price; I should say, bringing prices down to the value, and getting rid of the rent-seeking, getting rid of the hereditary landlord class with its land rents.
Well, now that you have not ended up doing what the first claim of the Communist Manifesto is—tax or socialize the land rent—it’s been privatized in the hands of the banks. Today, real estate rent is used to pay mortgage interest to the bankers. So there’s just as much land rent as plagued the 19th century; it’s gone to the financial interest.
And Vijay mentioned the 2008 crash. That was part of the result of this financialization of real estate, with the massive fraud that went with it—the over-indebtedness of the real estate sector—seeking wealth financially instead of by industrial capital formation.
And so that’s what has left the United States. Foreign policy was something that nobody could have anticipated: the foreign policy of a country that basically has very little to offer and is purely predatory on other countries, with the ability of the United States to completely absorb the old European colonialisms and imperialism into itself, but in a way that is so self-destructive that it’s driving the world apart.
By imposing the trade sanctions on Russia, China, the BRICS, any country that’s asserting its own self-sufficiency, it’s forcing them to do the equivalent of protective tariffs—to realize we can’t depend on the United States or on Europe. We’re going to have to develop our own economies, and they’re reinventing the wheel. The result of American imperialism, ironically, is to create exactly the opposite. I guess that’s what you would call the ultimate internal contradiction of industrial capitalism turning into finance capitalism.
Class Unity: Before we go into questions, there was a lot that was just said there. So, Vijay, do you have anything to add to or respond to there?
Vijay Prashad: Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, listen: that was a master class in the question of finance, and I quite agree. It’s really an area where there are a lot of people writing about the issue of finance, and I think we need much more investigation into how finance works today.
I must say, I know this is being recorded, and he’s a friend of mine, but I thought Yanis Varoufakis’ book on techno-feudalism was just garbage.
You know, Marx and Engels wrote that socialism or communism is the real movement of history. That line is really important to me. You build your theory from the facts. You don’t develop a theory from your impressions. And you really need to understand how these systems work.
We are working—Michael, you may be interested, and I’d like to send you a draft of it—two of our economists in Brazil are working on a paper. Initially, they said, “Oh, we want to work on de-dollarization.” I cautioned them. I said, “Don’t do that.” Instead, work on a paper on how the dollar system is working today. What is the role of the dollar system today?
What I found refreshing about what Michael said now, and his work in general, is that it’s always been trying to expose the structures that are embedded in our reality. The problem with scholarship is that sometimes, because of the whole postmodern trap, people have given up the idea that there is an imminent reality that we swim through, and then there are structures that create possibilities and constraints of our imminent reality. And the role of the intellectual is to spend a lot of time doing research, thinking, and building a system that explains the structures that are not transparent. If you’re just going to write books about things that are transparent, you’re not doing the work of an intellectual, in my opinion.
Sorry, I’m going off the handle a little bit. I know you guys are all intellectuals in the left movement, but you’ve got to do a lot of work, guys. And that’s something I hope you’re getting out of Michael’s presentation: it doesn’t come from just flipping through this morning’s newspaper. It comes from a long period of trying to understand the structure.
So I cautioned them: don’t do it on de-dollarization, because you’re just sort of playing around with words. First, let’s get an accurate sense of how it works today, because the dollar system today is actually morphing, and it’s not exactly what it was 25 years ago, and we don’t fully understand it.
I had this conversation with Dilma Rousseff at the New Development Bank, the so-called BRICS Bank. They are also struggling with this exact issue: how does the system work? And the reason they are struggling is that the New Development Bank was basically designed on World Bank–IMF lines. They use the surveillance indicators from the Bretton Woods institutions. They basically price debt and punish debt based on the Bretton Woods model.
So when you talk about the dollar system, you’re not just talking about whether you’re transacting in dollars. You’re also talking about how the financial system understands itself, and whether finance is for social good, or finance is merely for the bondholders and the people who want to extract whatever they can from the system. That’s the reason why I felt techno-feudalism—this idea that we live in a rent-seeking world—is completely wrong.
Firstly, you have enormous investments being made. Elon Musk’s company made an enormous investment in Tennessee to build this AI supercomputer in record time. It’s not like they’re not investing in things. It’s not just clouds, by the way; clouds have to be made with actual engineering. So there is a lot of industrial investment taking place. It’s just that we don’t really know how to understand all of it. Anyway, this was a little rant, just feeding off Michael’s comments.
Michael Hudson: I’m glad that Vijay asked about the context, because the context is the laws of motion. We’re talking about a system, an interconnected system. I want to give an example of the oil trade, since you’ve just mentioned how much the character of imperialism has changed in recent years.
The key to oil in the 20th century was that you wanted to own and gain control of oil resources because every country needed oil. And if you want to isolate them and force them to do what you want them to do, you cut off the oil supply. And then they can’t run their factories, or heat their homes, or light their phones.
Well, that began to change with the petrodollar. The Americans said, “You want to quadruple the price of oil? That’s wonderful.” Most of the oil companies in America, England, and Holland had their oil domestically, at home. And when OPEC quadrupled its price, that made huge profits for the American oil companies on their own oil. They welcomed it. But there was one condition that OPEC had to do: you have to invest all of your oil earnings in United States banks, or bonds, or Treasury securities. And it was the petrodollar inflow into the dollar that financed America’s military spending buildup throughout the late 1970s.
Well, you had the same thing in Iraq. America seized the oil, and what did it do? Well, China came in to develop a lot of Iraq’s oil resources, but all of the sales of Iraq’s proceeds are turned over to the Iraqi government, which turns them over to the United States. Same thing with Venezuela. In the last week, Donald Trump said all of Venezuela’s oil is going to be sent by ship to Florida, it’ll be unloaded, and from there it’s going to be exported; and we may export some to China, because Venezuela has some deals with it, but all of the proceeds of oil are going to be deposited in U.S. banks.
“And I, Donald Trump, will decide personally what’s going to happen to it.” Well, it’s the financialization of the oil trade that has become the key. And I was saying before you came on board, Vijay, that on the Democracy Collaborative site, I have a whole analysis, just published this morning, on how America’s rule of law is centered basically on the oil trade as the key to controlling the world economy via American control.
And you could apply the same thing to the copper trade and all of the other trades. It’s become financial in character, not simply a natural resource rent, but financial rents and dollarization. All of this is part of dollarization. When I went to the White House in 1974, I was actually a consultant to the White House and the State Department on oil, because I had a background in analyzing the oil industry for Chase Manhattan. It was the only way I could have learned about it, working with Standard Oil and writing. And the State Department—Kissinger—said, “If you don’t deposit all of your earnings in dollars, it’ll be treated as an act of war.”
Donald Trump echoed this last week. He said, “We’re going to fight BRICS, because what if BRICS has its own currency?” I don’t see that as happening yet, but he said he’s appalled that Venezuela was already, in 2017, saying, “We’re going to begin pricing our oil in other currencies.” And finally, the rumor was that just before Trump’s invasion, Venezuela was going to be pricing its oil in Chinese currency because it was selling the oil to China, after all. And the dollar was going down against the Chinese yuan as it was going down against the euro and against even sterling.
So the laws of motion are financial in character, not simply the old, familiar conflict between employers and wage earners. We’re talking about what Marx said: finance is external to the economy. It’s not part of the industrial sector. It’s external, from above. It’s the sphere of marketing. It’s not the sphere of production. That distinction has to be drawn.
Class Unity: Michael, both in this meeting—but I’ve heard you numerous times before—characterize the conflict between rentier capitalism and industrial capitalism. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Vijay just sort of argued—or you can correct me if I’m wrong, Vijay—that it is wrong to see today’s phase of capitalism and imperialism as merely the dominance of rentier capitalism over industry, given the heavy investments we’re seeing from companies like Tesla. So, Michael, what do you make of that? What do you make of the investment in industry today, and how do you see that developing?
Michael Hudson: Well, one of the reasons that America’s been deindustrialized is because it’s become financialized. And finance has always lived in the short term. It’s exploitative. It scratches the surface. And if you’re a financier, you had, amazingly enough, a very good criticism by Donald Trump of Raytheon and the military-industrial complex.
He said, “We’re not going to deal with companies like Raytheon anymore, because we know that they were ripping us off. We know they were overcharging and having huge monopoly rent, because the Defense Department never even audits its budget; you can grab whatever you want.” But Trump said, “We know they’re overpriced, but they’re not producing good arms. Look at how Russia and China have pulled ahead.”
And he said, “What has Raytheon used its money for?” It’s done stock buybacks, and it’s paid out dividends. And the American economist Lazonick has shown that 92% of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies have paid their cash flow—profits and cash flow—out as dividends and stock buybacks, leaving only 8% for new capital investment.
Well, the whole dynamic of financial capitalism was to use the profits to reinvest in new factories, means of production, and hiring more labor. And Marx said that’s what makes profits an element of value. The industrial capitalist, unlike the landlord, unlike the usurious banker, plays a productive role in mobilizing industry, organizing supply chains, organizing markets, and then using the profits to expandinton new factories. And this is what makes industrial capitalism so expansive today, leading ultimately to monopolies.
Well, that’s not the case anymore. The industrial companies today—not only Raytheon, but the entire sector—use their money to create fortunes, wealth, financially; not industrially, not by tangible capital for a nation, not by increasing the means of production, but financial claims on the economy and its means of production.
So what I’ve been advocating is: to understand this dynamic, you need to get rid of the anti-classical concept of GDP. There are two parts of GDP. Rent is not a product. When credit card companies raise their interest rates and their penalties, this is called providing a financial service; it’s a product. And when landlords collect rent, that’s the landlord’s product: “Who am I going to rent to, and what am I going to charge?” And all of these, which appear to be profits, are economic rent. Well, that’s what Marx wrote Theories of Surplus Value all about.
What is a profit as opposed to rent? What distinguishes the industrial capitalist from the landlord, banker, or other rentiers? And that distinction has been dropped. And if you look at the composition of America’s GDP, England’s, and Europe’s, you find it’s almost all rentier. Less and less is industry.
That’s what makes the U.S. GDP so overstated relative to, say, China’s GDP, which is actually focused on reinvestment. And obviously, China has gone overboard and financialized its real estate market; there’s still a fight over that over there, but you see the difference.
I think once you look at the statistics, you’re going to see the laws of motion, and you need the statistics in order to show what’s happening. That’s why most of my life I’ve spent actually doing statistics on these, because people won’t believe it otherwise, even if you clearly explain everything. Once you actually show where the money is going into capital investment, you just see the shrinkage, and how self-destructive industrial capitalism is as it’s parasitized into this. The fight against socialism has destroyed industrial capitalism. That’s what’s so ironic.
Class Unity: If anyone has a question, feel free to type it into the chat. I want to start with a question on labor exploitation and regional conflict.
So, I really appreciated your book and your comments, Vijay. And I think I just want to frame this a little bit for everyone else. I’m trying to get at how your work is both contributing to, but maybe also different from, the last generation of dependency theory, of theories of de-development, of a kind of a more third-world orientation to Marxism. And you mentioned Samir Amin, so that’s a great place to start.
Part of his whole explanation of the second half of the 20th century is that the North–South relationship is based around super-exploitation. And what that means is that you don’t need to do layout into industrial production to increase surplus value. You can massively increase the relative surplus value by lowering the standard of living, by pauperizing people, by destroying their institutions, by producing—not just extracting—but producing vast numbers of dispossessed free labor. And that perhaps that’s why the U.S. can then redistribute super-profits through financialization.
Because, of course, to Amin, that surplus of super-exploitation must enable you to reproduce a comprador class in the Third World, that you have all this extra money to play with, so you can put them on the board of your company or whatever else it is. So let me try to ask, I guess, my question of how that fits into your scheme.
I get what you’re saying, and I think it’s well supported that capital is moving south—both liquid capital and sort of fixed assets, technology expertise. And I’m with you on China. I mean, that’s not what my question is about. But do you think that what Samir Amin called super-exploitation—as a model, as the rules of motion, or whatever you want to call it—will vanish?
Or do you think it’s fragmenting onto regional scales? And so, just to give a specific example, and then I’ll shut up: you know, we have now competing systems of labor arbitrage. We have the kind of, you know, American-led Anglo settler-colonial system, but we also have more and more states adopting what I would call a kind of regional Indian Ocean/Arab Gulf system, where you have many features of super-exploitation. You have citizens of rich states who import migrant labor and create a comprador class within poorer states of brokers and recruiters, and they become a permanent political interest group.
So I know forecasting is hard, but just thinking about how we can fit this into sort of where it’s coming from, and how it’s different from some of those older theorists: do you think this is something that will disappear, or something that will just fragment into a regional-scale thing?
44:07
Vijay: Thanks. Firstly, that was such a well-articulated question. I’m really happy to entertain it. You know, I, like Michael, play a lot with statistics. And you can see that in the Hyperimperialism text. We spent a lot of time going over data sets—whether it’s Comtrade or IMF numbers—trying to get an accurate picture.
I was very happy to read Jason Hickel and his team doing, in a sense, an upgrade of the unequal-exchange numbers, where in their paper that they published, I think, two years ago, a year and a half ago, it was a fantastic number for 2021. It was that the global labor arbitrage—or let’s call it unequal exchange, or drain, whatever you call it—amounted to 18.4 trillion from South to North.
So there is no vanishing of that tribute payment that continues. I mean, that is a reason why my comrade Kwesi Pratt, who is the head of the Socialist Party of Ghana, wrote a book on reparations. And the foreword to the book was written by John Manama, who is the president of Ghana, and is not a Marxist but a center-left Marxist.
President of Ghana: he wrote the foreword to a book on reparations. Or why the prime minister of Barbados has been convening a working group on reparations. I mean, they’re thinking of climate finance. They are thinking of the long-term structural debt that they just can’t pay off. You know, that’s part of the tribute—this 18.4 trillion in 2021.
I don’t think one should mistake what has happened since 2008—roughly 2008—with the end of the unequal-exchange system. What has happened, in fact, is that many of these large countries made a calculation that the Western economies, particularly the United States, cannot be the buyer of last resort; that it is impossible to keep lending the U.S. Chinese surpluses to be given out as credit to unpaid U.S. workers so they can buy Chinese goods.
I mean, that is what Raghu Ram Rajan called the satanic cycle. Yeah, he was the chief economist of the IMF and then the head of India’s Federal Reserve. Very critical of that, saying it’s completely unsustainable—which it is. Yeah, a completely unsustainable system.
So these countries then come to the arrangement called BRICS, which is basically saying—taking the old South–South cooperation concept and essentially reducing it to trade—that these countries need to trade with each other. That’s the Belt and Road. I mean, you can’t exaggerate BRICS as some big political phenomenon. It effectively is to build a trade body, to create, you know, different kinds of free-trade areas, let’s say.
You know, the RCEP is an example of this in Asia. The SCO, the Shanghai Cooperation, started as an anti-Taliban group. Now they are thinking of development banks, free trade, et cetera, et cetera. This is about enhancing South–South trade because they are afraid, I think correctly, that the Global North doesn’t have an exit from the declining buying power—purchasing power—of its population.
That even with the tribute, the tribute is not being distributed through transfer payments or anything into the population, so they can buy plastic buckets and whatever you buy from China. Yeah, the tribute is just not being distributed.
Hence, you know, Jeff Bezos can have the ambition of being the world’s first trillionaire. Sorry, his divorce screwed that up a little bit, or at least screwed up the timeline. But that’s his ambition, guys. I mean, is that a legitimate civilizational ambition in the United States—that I want to be the world’s first trillionaire? It’s disgusting.
If I said that to my father, he would have slapped me. You know, he would have said, “That’s the most repulsive thing to say, son.” I told my four daughters—I still tell them—that my ambition for you is not to be boring, because there’s nothing worse for a parent than to have a boring child. I hope you guys all agree with me, okay?
That’s my ambition, man. I don’t give a shit about how much money they make. My eldest daughter is a comedian. She’s definitely not boring. OK, that’s great. Not to be a trillionaire.
It shows, by the way, a certain cultural deterioration of what’s happening. I mean, people say, “I want to become famous, so I want to become rich.” These are not ambitions. To become famous or to become rich should not be a legitimate ambition. But in fact, it is. That’s a real cultural problem that has to be dealt with.
So these countries are going in a different direction. Whatever you call China is irrelevant to me. I’m uninterested in the debate: is China socialist or capitalist or whatever? What it is is deeply productive. It’s efficient. It’s been able to marshal its resources. It will always struggle with the balance between finance and productive activity, a nd so on.
Finance is essential for a modern economy. It’s wrong to think of finance as some sort of superstructural excrescence that you eventually get rid of. Tell that to a farmer who relies on loans. OK, the loan should be maybe no-interest loans from a government entity because food is so important. But you’re going to have finance of one kind or another. It’s not in itself a bad thing.
So, in my opinion, the way in which we have to understand what’s happening in the South is important. In China, the share of manufacturing is much higher than in the United States.
Now, part of the problem is we don’t know how to actually calculate finance—the share of finance. We don’t know how to calculate it because we have real estate numbers, and we have service numbers. Finance is very bad— I think, I don’t know if Michael agrees with me—but statistically this is not an easy task, you know, to say, “Oh, you know, this is the share of finance in an economy.” It’s just not easy to do.
In India, it’s really hard to do because, in India, manufacturing itself is a disputed number. Where do you start? Is it gross value added? Is it the share of output? I mean, what are you looking at to get numbers for manufacturing? Do you use, for instance, what deflators do you use? All of these things are important. I mean, if you know statistics, these are the key issues.
And in India, it’s a huge debate about all the statistics that the government is fudging the stats, but still, we know that industry is about 20-some percent, maybe 18 to 20. It’s still not insignificant. And if you add construction to that, and logistics is pretty— in China it’s higher than that, but anyway.
The point, what I’m just trying to say, to your question, is that the tribute continues; the unequal exchange continues; it is a serious problem.
But there are also geographical issues here. This month I’ll be publishing a book with the Zambian economist Grief Chelwa. The book is called How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa.
On the African continent, the issue of tribute and finance is a grave problem. You just can’t compare the numbers for an African country—a rich country, one of the richest countries in the world, Democratic Republic of Congo, over $2 trillion of resources—yeah, but it’s an enormous debt overhang. Enormous.
If you look at South America, the debt overhangs are incredible. So this is geographical. You know, in Asia it’s different from what it is in Africa and South America. And you’ve got to have some, you know, disarticulation of the figures here and look at these things carefully.
If you look in the Arab world, it’s a very chaotic picture because different countries, depending on oil exporting or not, if you take out oil exporting, the numbers become a little clearer, but not really. Not really. It’s still very geographically divided. So there is a tribute, but there’s a kind of hardness in the way that circuits of the tribute work.
Unequal exchange is so much more intense on the African continent. It kind of replicates the division of Africa at the Conference of Berlin. It’s almost like there’s been no overcoming that.
In South America, despite the pink tide, the situation is really terrible. I mean, apart from Bolivia and Venezuela, with commodity prices high, the situation is very poor. Brazil’sl deindustrialization rates are really quite alarming. And the government has not been able to, you know, quote-unquote, reindustrialize or to industrialize differently. I mean, for God’s sake, they sold the airline manufacturing company—you know, Embraer—that used to produce the small planes that you might fly in the United States. Those small jets were produced in Brazil. They sold that. I mean—
The asset stripping has taken place right through high commodity prices, and they are ending up just selling soy and things like that. You know, it’s—so it’s very uneven.
Your question is right. My answer is a little hedgy because reality is hedging me as well. I’m not ducking your question. It’s just that there are immense geographical issues. And I think also temporal issues: like, we are not yet clear—because we don’t really have good finance numbers—not yet clear about what, say, the emergence of the Chinese economy is going to look like in 20 years. It’s not yet clear.
Like the FT and others are constantly saying, China is going to collapse. Yeah, the economists, they’re just obsessed with “when is China collapsing?” So they already have an idea that it will collapse: “This cannot continue.” My idea is: let’s see what happens. You know, we don’t know.
Forecasting China is very complicated and difficult. Partly, we have never seen anything of this scale do the kinds of things it’s doing: the enormous internal market, the enormous investments in science and technology. We just don’t know. So I’m hedging because of the temporal issue as well.
54:58
Michael: Vijay, I’m so glad you made that point. I want to make one comment about statistics. It took me an entire year in my mid-20s to work on the balance of payments of the oil industry—the U.S. oil industry—which I was asked to do.
And what I found is that oil exporters only—if you look at the trade statistics, it looks like they have a huge surplus. And oil, just like Chile, has a huge surplus in copper. But the country’s only got a small portion of the value of this trade.
Most of the value of the exports of Chile oil companies were retained profits abroad; imports of machinery to make the oil; interest payments to the banks to finance their capital investment so they didn’t have to put in their own capital; management overhead fees; payments to foreign labor that’s imposed there; payments for other imports that are used in the production. And only a small proportion of the reported trade balance actually accrued to these countries.
Well, I used this methodology to spend another year of my time in mylater 20s for the chart in my Super Imperialism, showing that the entire balance-of-payments deficit of the United States was accounted for by overseas military spending. The private sector was exactly in balance.
Obviously, now that I’m in my mid-80s—60 years later—I’m not going to spend another year on these charts, but there really has to be a group effort to do this, and we don’t have people to do it.
I want to make one other comment on, I guess, the previous comment about imperialism and exploitation. The aim of imperialism is not surplus value. Imperialism aims to prevent surplus value. It’s to get economic rent. It’s to act as a rentier, not as an employer.
The one thing that America opposes is any other country creating surplus value by employing its labor in industrial production—by employing labor to make a markup and selling the product of labor for more than the employer pays for it—because that means the country is industrializing.
That’s what China did. If you make surplus value, you’re considered a threat to America because America is deindustrializing, and the more other countries industrialize, the more they’re leaving America way behind.
So today’s imperialism is against surplus value because it seeks rentier and financial gains, not to industrialize other economies as people expected to be the natural development way back in the 19th century.
Class Unity: One question on the global alliances. According to the hyper-imperialism study, you went into detail about the Northern Bloc, and so the question is: what is the U.S.-led Global North military bloc, NATO, and so forth, and how has its composition and purpose solidified in recent years? In addition to that, are the developments in Venezuela that we’re seeing today, potentially in Colombia and Cuba, and the EU and Greenland, threatening to destroy that bloc now? Is Israel really committed and bound to the West?
Prashad: What a great question. Firstly, I want to say that we spent a very long time sitting around a smart board, a Huawei smart board, which is not available in the United States. A very big Huawei — they make the best smart boards in the world. And we said, look, we use these terms “Global North,” “Global South.” Let’s take a list of UN member states and start seeing where. Let’s just start. Let’s be analytical about it. Let’s not be metaphorical.
I had written a book called The Poorer Nations, where I analyzed the Brandt Commission report. I read the archive on that report. I understood that for that report, Willy Brandt saw this as a sort of meridian of inequality: the rich countries and the poor countries.
Then, when Julius Nyerere assembled the South Commission, it was not a meridian of inequality as much as it was about power. He was interested in political power. And so the South Commission report, which is called The Challenge of the South— it’s a really good report — tried to analyze the strategies available for the South to break out of the dependency trap. And they, in a way, invent the “locomotives of the South” strategy, which we need to allow our locomotives. And they talk explicitly about China. It was published in 1990. China has to grow, and China will pull the rest of us along. It’s actually a very prescient report in many ways.
Then we said, well, okay, we’ve got these terms. What are they? And so we started looking at political formations — who belongs to what grouping? G-77, the older ones, NAM — are these the Global South? And among the Global South states, which ones have close military relationships with the United States, and which have U.S. military bases?
We then figured out that the term to best interpret the Global South was sovereignty. The ones that have the highest sovereignty are in the middle of the circle, and the rings as we go out have less sovereignty. The outer ring, like South Korea, has the least amount of sovereignty. It’s closest to the sun of the United States. So we used the category of sovereignty to analyze the Global South, how it operates, and so on.
With the Global North, it was a lot easier, because unlike the South, the North actually has binding agreements and treaties and blocs and so on. Politically, in 1974, they created the G7, which is actually a conspiracy of leaders. In The Poorer Nations, I quote from the opening meeting, where the chancellor of Germany — a Social Democrat — says that the head of the textile union is a friend of mine. He says this; it’s in the record. He’s a friend of mine, but we’re going to have to let the textile industry finish. Not that it’s not profitable, he said. It’s just that we don’t want it. We want to buy high-value goods.
They are conspiring. What is the definition of conspiring? They’re conspiring against their own working class. These minutes were private until I went and read them and published large parts of them. The Italians say the same thing: our textiles are also unproductive, but we actually have a high-end textile which we have to protect, and so on. It’s a bloody conspiracy. It’s incredible to listen to them talk.
So the G7, NATO is an actual military treaty, and NATO+ includes people who join the military treaty and train with them, and so on. So we built this around that, looked at financial systems — whose money is where? The German bourgeoisie invest their money in BlackRock, on Wall Street, not in the DAX. That’s actually interesting. German pension funds — stupid idiots — are invested in the DAX. But the German bourgeoisie is investing in New York.
When we use the term “vassal,” a lot of people, like the Communist Party of Germany, were pretty angry with the characterization of Europe as a vassal, because they said there’s a European imperialism. And I said, I really don’t think so. I think Europe has been, for a long time,e a vassal of the United States. It’s partly because the European bourgeoisie is so integrated financially with the dollar system that they cannot afford to see the dollar system threatened. The petrodollar, eurodollar market — all of these things show you the bourgeoisie’s complete integration.
So we looked at all these things and tried our best, again using the facts, to develop these concepts as tangible concepts, not as metaphors to describe inequality or unequal power relations. I think we did a pretty good job. By the way, we did write, excuse us for errors, because we don’t know much about Romania. And I will say that our section on Eastern Europe is abysmal, because we sent a draft to political parties of the left around the world to comment. Eastern Europe, France — political parties of the left — where are they? They’re really, unfortunately, non-existent.
But we got really good feedback from political forces in Africa, Asia, Latin America — from the landless movement in Brazil, trade unions in India, student movements. We got really, really good feedback because people were trying to understand their own strategic understanding of the world vis-à-vis the theory we were laying out. So in a sense, we produced an invitation to dialogue in that text, based on a kind of collective production. The text is not written by one person. It’s written by hundreds of people. Initially, the methodology was created by a small number of people, which is the nature of these things. And the methodology was exactly what I just said: can we produce tangible categories rather than just “Global South,” “Third World,” and so on? I think we got to something interesting, with all itslimitations. In Israel, this is a very complicated question. I don’t want to give a formula. But very quickly, South Africa, Kenya, Rhodesia — these were not settler colonies in the same way as Israel. To use Elon Musk’s terms, these were not replacement projects. There were enormous reserves of colonized labor in these projects. The white minority was a white minority. It’s not the same in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and parts of South America, where the project of settler colonialism was implemented, with massive displacements and killings of people. You just don’t see that. You can’t compare South Africa and Israel on that.
I think Israel can do things in its own interest because it plays such an important role as America’s proxy army, controlling the Middle East and its oil. As long as the United States says this is the country we depend on to make sure oil remains under the control of Western-friendly governments, such as Saudi Arabia, and we will make war on non-Western-friendly governments — Iraq, Syria, and ultimately Iran — that’s its role. So Israel uses that leeway for whatever it wants to do, and who’s going to stop it?
Class Unity: I want to ask a question about de-dollarization. You commented on that earlier, and I’ve got my copy of Super Imperialism, third edition, right here. This topic is dear to my heart, and I always struggle to understand it and put itinton words, so have patience. I want to get your take on this. Tell me what you think.
I understand the sort of problem with wishful thinking, let’s say, of many people out there, like, oh, BRICS, this is going to be some really radically different thing, an alternative which can challenge American hegemony. And I think you’re right to say, in a sense, this is just a trade thing. It’s not meant to be political. It’s not a military alliance. It’s not a deeply political thing in the classical sense. That makes sense. And I think that wishful thinking is dangerous, and people are getting kind of giddy and carried away about it in some respects.
But nevertheless, I have an intuition, and I may be mistaken here, but it seems that if the rest of the world, apart from the United States, ceases to accept dollars, then the state will not be able to deficit spend for its military expenditure, creating money in the process. Dollar surpluses will not be able to build up in foreign accounts outside of the United States, and then they will no longer be able to be cycled back into the United States in bond purchases. That means dollar surpluses, reserves denominated in dollars, won’t be held in foreign accounts. And so the whole system of America’s free lunch, or maybe not just America, let’s call it the transatlantic rentier group, their free lunch will be over if the world stops accepting dollars and if they stop holding their reserves in dollar-denominated assets like bonds.
So while I agree that BRICS itself is not — we should not be looking to BRICS for the political response to challenge this — nevertheless, if de-dollarization happens, and every country which has tried to de-dollarize has been toppled — Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and so on — if that happens, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. If that happens, big changes are in store for the states and that imperialist bloc, and Trump has said as much: if you try to do this, we’ll ruin you.
Second question, if I may, relatedly, I wonder sometimes in this context whether World War III hasn’t already started, so to speak, or perhaps World War II never really stopped when it turned into the Cold War. It’s just one long war, which has taken different forms, where the sort of cannibal, rentier, zombie thing just tries to eat the whole world. And sometimes it seems to me like the world outside of the English-speaking rentier capitalist core, the Global South, doesn’t really realize that this World War III might have already started, or that World War II may have never ended, when it still tries to work with America as so-called partners in international law institutions like the UN.
Here, Russia and China still talk about international law like America plays by those rules. And it seems like the American military is just an asset manager for all the rentiers and the ruling class of the English-speaking countries. And sometimes I think the American empire is just going to bring the whole world down with it because the American ruling class — not us, we have to stop saying “we,” we have to disaggregate nations into classes — because it’s not nations, it’s a class of owners who use the state as an asset manager. But they’d rather that the world didn’t exist than that there were assets out there which it didn’t privatize and own.
So I wonder, has World War III already started, or did the previous conflict ever really end?
Hudson: Japan has never signed a peace treaty ending World War II. That’s why Russia and Japan are still fighting over the islands between them. The United States picked up all of the cards after World War II. But what you’re having today — for Germany — they now are refighting, literally, World War II. You have Merz come out and say the Wehrmacht is going to win again, we can fight, and this time we can win.
He’s nutty. He thinks that instead of America defeating us, he imagines that America defeated Germany, not the Russians. How can we lose to the Russians? Well, you know what’s going to happen. Once a missile comes from Germany to Russia, Russia is going to just go kaboom, and there goes Wiesbaden, where the missiles are steered from, and other countries.
And Japan wants to fight World War II. This time, we’re going to beat China. We’re going to defeat Nanjing, and we’ll get America’s support because we’re going to join with the Taiwanese people and attack it. The losers of World War II still want to fight, thinking that they can win this time if only they have the United States on their side. That’s what’s so ironic. And the United States is all for it. It’ll go down with them.
Prashad: Personally, for somebody who starts by saying I have some questions, you asked an amazing question, and you asked it extremely well. The only thing that made me trip while sitting here was when you said the United States might think it would bring the world down. I think that ambition of destroying the world before letting go of its control is, I think, palpable. It’s not something you’re imagining.
But I want to come back to de-dollarization. It’s not like I’m against the idea of de-dollarization if it happens. My problem is with unrealistic expectations. First, it’s very important, as I said earlier, to understand how the dollar system works. Michael is right — there’s a free ride. The dollar system provides a free ride. But let’s look at the alternatives.
The euro, for instance, can’t be a credible alternative. There’s no proper unifying financial authority there. The sovereign debt issue is also a problem for Europe. The euro is just not a credible account. The Chinese are never going to collapse capital controls, allow their assets to be transferred, and so on. They’re never going to allow that. The yuan can’t, in conventional terms, be the replacement for the dollar. Unless the financial system changes, the yuan cannot just replace the dollar as is. It’s just not going to happen.
Bundles of currencies are not super credible because it’s not about the currency. It’s about trust. It’s about faith that you’ll get an asset for the value that you’re holding. You’re holding a piece of paper. You have to be able to get something for it. Bundles of currencymeans multiple people securing it. I wouldn’t trust it. Forget it. A real capitalist — you’ve parceled out trust. That sounds like a derivative to me. I don’t know. Is everybody’s commitment as good as everyone else’s? I’m not sure about that.
So these bundles, I’m not really clear about. UN currency, IMF — we haven’t come up with a good idea. What we’re going to see in the interim period is a patchwork system. You’re going to get more of what you have in Asia already. Russia–China trade taking place in rubles and in yuan. Very uneven trade, by the way. Russians are not in a great situation in that trade. India–Iran trade takes place in rupees. Increasingly, India–Russia trade, rupee, ruble. There’ll be a lot of this so-called local currency trade. There’ll be patchwork arrangements.
Most use of currency is not for storing value for long periods of time. Most use of currency or money is for reconciling trade. It’s for short-term usage — remittances, things like that. It’s not really a long-term store of value. In economics textbooks, that’s always the first thing: it’s a store of value. Well, for whom? Who has savings? Let’s discuss the class bias of Samuelson. The whole of Samuelson’s textbook is completely class-biased.
Hudson: The national currencies are not the solution. There couldn’t be a South American currency anymore than there could be a euro without a unified political structure. What you can do is create a new international institution,n very much like the kind of bank that Keynes wanted to start, to create a measure of obligations of how to handle debts and credits among different countries that are running payment surpluses and payment deficits. You need a different financial system, not working within the present system. That’s what they should work on. The solution cannot be national by itself. It has to be part of a global grouping.
Prashad: I really want to urge you to spend time doing empirical research. To read the classics is super important. But the solution to the present will not be found in Marx’s writings alone. Marx will lead you through the reality of today to the reality of tomorrow. But if you become a Marxologist, you’ll understand Marx. You won’t understand the world. To understand the world, you’ve got to dig. Bourgeois statistics are the only game in town because they have the capacity to generate them. We have to build our own methodology to read them for our purposes.
Hudson: The one thing you need from Marx is the distinction between price and value. Economic rent is the excess of price overthe intrinsic cost value. Rent is not surplus value. When you talk about the iPhone, much of what it makes is not really value-added in Marx’s sense. The economic surplus there is rent added — monopoly rent. That’s not earned income. That’s unearned income. That’s the difference.
Hudson: And so, long before I began doing the statistics, I had spent a year of my life studying Marx’s theories of surplus value. At the beginning, only volume one was translated. Russia fought against its being translated, and the Communist Party actually destroyed the printer’s plates for volume two because it was so upsetting. Same thing in China. They’re not very happy at all to hear discussions of volumes two and three of Capital. But if you’re going to do statistics, you have to distinguish between rent and surplus value, between price and value. That’s the whole concept of what the cost of production and what is something imposed from outside the economy onto the cost of production. That’s what I’ve done the last few years of my statistical analysis on, and in the articles that I’ve written with Dirk Bezemer that are financed by the Democracy Collaborative, which finances statisticians to do the work that I no longer have to do, and who are much better at operating with Excel spreadsheets than I am, in my generation.
Class Unity: Excel spreadsheets?
Prashad: Oh, you’ve got to move on to Microsoft PBI. Sorry. Much better than Excel.
Hudson: Okay, I have to leave, guys. You’re all brilliant and amazing people. Okay, bye. Thanks.
Class Unity: Thank you. Bye.
