CC BY
25DOI: 10.37930/1990-9780-2020-2-64-194-206
R Desai1
RUSSIA IN THE GEOPOLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORLD CAPITALISM2
This article introduces Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire to readers in Russia on the occasion of its translation into Russian. It outlines geopolitical economy as a new approach to understanding world affairs in the age of multipolarity or pluripolarity. It is an approach that takes the contradictions of capitalism seriously, emphasises that these contradictions require that the states play critical roles in economies and the evolution of the world order of capitalism is best understood as a dialectic of uneven and combined development in which dominant states seek to dominate other states and territories so as to impose the consequences of their capitalism's contradictions on them, and many of these territories oppose this through autonomous industrializations, capitalist and, beginning with the Russian Revolution, in 'communist' ways. The article goes on to highlight the central role that Russian history and ideas have played and can be expected to continue playing in the evolving geopolitical economy of the capitalist world and its transcendence.
Keywords: geopolitical economy, the materiality of nations, classes, states, capitalism, contradictions, uneven and combined development, Russian Revolution, multipolarity.
УДК 330.354
One of the more puzzling developments of recent times is the so-called 'New Cold War'. When the 'old' Cold War ended with the break-up of the Soviet Union, the world expected that it would become unipolar, with the United States, the sole surviving superpower, enjoying unchallenged 'hegemony', that it would enjoy a 'peace dividend' and that Russia would re-join its natural European home. None of these expectations were fulfilled. Instead, over the past three decades, the world has witnessed the opposite outcomes. Rather than uni-polarity, multipolarity was heralded (most famously by Goldman Sachs economist, Jim O'Neill 2001) and then realised with the rise of China, the stabilization of the Russian Federation after the horrors of 'Shock Therapy', the rise of the other BRICs and the Assuring of the Western alliance, including in its military form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
1 Radhika Desai, Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, President of the Society for Socialist Studies, e-mail: [email protected].
2 Based on the Preface to Desai, Radhika. (2013). Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire. London: Pluto Press; основано на предисловии к российскому изданию: Десаи, Р. Геополитическая экономия: после американской гегемонии, глобализации и империи / науч. ред. российского издания С. Д. Бодрунов. М.: ИНИР им. С. Ю. Витте, Центрката-лог, 2020. 328 с.
These developments posed new challenges to the United States and Western power, and the West has reacted not with a peace dividend, but with an intensification of its economic and military aggression around the world, and particularly against Russia, unsurprisingly mimicked and resisted by many other powers (see Desai 2015a).
If these developments are puzzling, it is chiefly because neither of the major approaches that have dominated our understanding of world affairs in recent decades - 'globalization' and 'US hegemony' or, in the parlance of the George Bush Jr administration, 'empire' - anticipated or can explain them. Moreover, given that such major and weighty developments do not come out of the blue, but are deeply rooted in history, these neoliberal approaches would appear to have been inaccurate all along. My recent book, Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, now translated into Russian as Геополитическая экономия: после американской гегемонии, глобализации и империи, proposes a radically different approach to world affairs - the geopolitical economy. It can explain the new Cold War and the preceding evolution of the world order of capitalism, at least since the middle of the nineteenth century. Refracted through its prism, recent developments are no longer puzzling.
Russia has been and remains historically critical to the evolving geopolitical economy of world capitalism reconstructed in Geopolitical Economy. Intellectually, in making Russia's singular history, its leaders operationalised and developed many of the key ideas and theories that form the necessary conceptual foundation of geopolitical economy as an approach, and we may expect Russian intellectuals to contribute to it further.
This article, which introduces you to Geopolitical Economy, concentrates on four elements of Russian's importance to geopolitical economy: two relate to Russia's historical role, and two to its intellectual contributions; two belong to its twentieth century past and two to its twenty-first century present.
Most critically, there is the idea of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), essentially a dialectic of imperialism and resistance to it explained further below, which was integral to the self-understanding of the historic Russian Revolution. It forms the core of geopolitical economy. Historically, there is the October Revolution itself. It is perhaps most famous for placing a future beyond capitalism on the historical horizon of the capitalist world more effectively than ever before. Within the framework of geopolitical economy, however, Soviet Russia is also important for having pursued a new type of combined development, a non-capitalist one in contrast to that of countries like Germany and the United States in the decades before the First World War.
Moreover, Russia's historical and intellectual roles do not lie only in the past. We have already alluded to the challenge the Russian Federation poses to the United States and Western power amid the New Cold War despite the demise of the USSR. It is both military and - by challenging the supremacy of the United States dollar and hastening its demise as world money - also monetary. Moreover, as we shall see, the historical experience of a life beyond capitalism, with its limitations as well as its achievements, may well have provided the Russian people and intellectuals with a special capacity to contribute to the advance of our fast-changing world towards a future that fully realizes human potential. I hope Geopolitical Economy will make a distinctive contribution to that capacity, no matter how small, if only by reminding Russians of the importance of what they have done and thought so far.
In what follows, I explain geopolitical economy and its distinctiveness as an approach to understanding world affairs before going on to discuss Russia's intellectual and historical roles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Needless to say, this discussion has benefitted from the many ways in which geopolitical economy as an approach has developed since the publication of Geopolitical Economy in 2013. First, in 2015, the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG, www.geopoliticaleconomy.org) was created at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Secondly, GERG has held three conferences: 'From the Thirty Years' Crisis to Multipolarity: the Geopolitical Economy of the 21st Century World' in 2015, 'Revolutions: A Conference' in 2017, marking the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and 'Class, State and Nation in the Twenty-First Century', the 14th Forum of the World Association of Political Economy. It has also organised many talks and working groups. Thirdly, a number of edited collections have emerged from the activities of GERG. Two volumes emerged from the first two conferences: Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism (Kagarlitsky, Desai and Freeman, 2017) and Revolutions (Desai and Heller eds, 2020 Forthcoming). Three others, involving dozens of writers from around the world, engaged with and elaborated geopolitical economy: Theoretical Engagements with Geopolitical Economy; Analytical Gains of Geopolitical Economy; and The Materiality of Nations (Desai 2016a, 2016b and 2015c). Finally, the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press has published two books - Jude Woodward's The US vs China: Asia's New Cold War? (Woodward 2017) and Kees van der Pijl's MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War (van der Pijl 2018) - and many others are in progress, including a major work by Russian representatives of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism, Aleksandr Buzgalin and Andrey Kolganov.
The Distinctiveness of Geopolitical Economy
The currently dominant approaches to understanding world affairs are cosmopolitan, that is to say, they understate, if not deny, the importance of national states and economies and assume that the world economy is a seamless whole whose division into national states and economies is, depending on the writer you are reading, undesirable, irrelevant or dangerous. In 'globalization', the world economy is unified by markets and no states matter. In 'US hegemony', or in the turbo-charged version of it that became prominent under George Bush Jr, 'empire', only the 'hegemonic' or 'imperial' country, which enforces the unity of the world economy, matters. By contrast, geopolitical economy places nation-states, national economies and their necessary plurality centre stage. It does not do so because it wishes to be narrowly national or sow divisions, but because it recognises that humanity's existing divisions are real, material and momentous. Denying them only accentuates them and acknowledging them permits us to think about how humanity can truly achieve peace, equality, prosperity, unity and, not least, ecological sustainability.
There are two reasons why the cosmopolitan approaches conceive of the world economy as a seamless whole: an intrinsic intellectual one and a political one. The intrinsic intellectual reason is that they are founded on neoclassical economics with its twin 'Ricardian fictions'. They are Say's Law and Comparative Advantage, the former accepted by David Ricardo and the latter fashioned by him. They yield a conception of capitalism that is wrong. The reasons why this wrong conception is used - and here we come to the political reason - is that it serves certain interests; it is ideological. Ideologies are not mere errors, but ones that serve the purposes of powerful actors, in this case, powerful capitalist countries against the rest of the world. By insisting that there are no gluts in capitalism, no overproduction of commodities and, by implication, of capital, Say's Law denies the key contradictions of capitalism. Comparative advantage then steps in to disguise the reality of inter-state relations in capitalism, which is conflictual and oppressive because countries with excess commodities
and capital need outlets for them with myths about free trade and capital flows being beneficial for all countries.
The reality, since the birth of capitalism, has been radically different. Capitalism's contradictions mean that powerful capitalist countries, suffering gluts of capital and commodities and needing resources and labour, have sought to dominate and exploit other societies by opening them up. An extensive literature on 'underdevelopment' since Marx and continuing into the World Systems and Dependency traditions has detailed the consequences of such opening up. On the one hand, it turns these societies into receptacles for surplus commodities and capital, resulting in deindustrialisation and/or domination of industry by foreign capital. This may be bad enough, but there is worse. Without industrialization or with only limited foreign-dominated industrialization, these countries' economies are relegated to producing raw materials at low cost (as Patnaik and Patnaik 2016 emphasise), sustaining the labour thus rendered supernumerary and supplying it to the dominant countries in the exact quantities and at the exact times required.
Given that free trade and openness have such destructive consequences where they can be imposed, it is little wonder (as Chang 2002 noted) that powerful countries have never truly practiced it. They only imposed it on societies they control, formally or informally. The result of this process has been to divide the world into the powerful countries that are able to produce goods of high value and the poor countries that remain producers of low value products. However, this process has not been one-sided. Some countries resisted it, seeking economic sovereignty through protection, national industrial and development policies and the like in a long chain of historic events going back to the time when Germany, Japan and the United States pursued their industrialization as a way of countering British world market dominance in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the multipolarity that is the talk of the twenty-first century.
In this now centuries-long process, the rhetoric of free trade and openness has served chiefly to justify formal colonial or informal subjugation of other countries. Between them, the twin Ricardian fictions obscure how capitalism's contradictions and expansionism have already broken up the world economy into numerous national states and economies whose interests are at odds with one another as powerful states pursue expansionism and others resist it as best they can.
This is the reality that geopolitical economy recognises and on which it is founded. It locates the motor, or driver, of the evolution of the world order of capitalism in the contradictions that plague its powerful national capitalisms. These contradictions then set the agenda of their domestic policies and their interaction with the rest of the world through actions that largely fall under the rubric of imperialism. These contradictions were, of course, most extensively explored and analysed by Karl Marx and his followers.
However, there are also other extensive bodies of thought that precede and follow neoclassical economics (which most systematically denies any contradictions, as we have discussed) that can contribute to our understanding of these contradictions and, thus, of geopolitical economy. There was, firstly, classical political economy - the largely bourgeois intellectual enterprise of trying to make sense of the emerging capitalist society. It too wrestled with capitalism's contradictions - whether its exponents complained of gluts of goods and clamoured for colonies or of falling profits. (They also clamoured for colonies in order to export the surplus population which, as Marx pointed out, capitalism always produces, leading to the settler colonialism that populated four more continents with populations of European extraction).
Through his engagement with classical political economy, Marx resolved its difficulties and produced a stunning indictment of capitalism. Only then did neoclassical economics emerge to defend capitalism on the flimsy basis provided by the twin Ricardian fictions mentioned above. While, naturally, it soon became the favoured approach to understanding the capitalist economy in the homelands of capitalism, even there it soon faced powerful new intellectual challenges. Major figures, such as John Maynard Keynes, Thorstein Veblen and Karl Polanyi, rejected neoclassical economists' view of capitalism and considered capitalism inherently contradictory and, therefore, expansionist.
While geopolitical economy thus draws on non-Marxist as well as Marxist traditions, it also distances itself from the forms of Marxism that result from the interaction of Marxism with neoclassical economics. They have unfortunately become quite influential among Marxists even though they contest the core of Marx's analysis and/or reject key contradictions of capitalism which he identified (Desai 2016c). Some of them regard imperialism as historically real, but not theoretically connected to capitalism - saying essentially that while imperialism "can and does happen and it does aid capitalist accumulation ... it is not required by the logic of capitalism" (Zarembka 2003, 8). Others analyse imperialism, but without recourse to Marx's value analysis of capitalism. The result has been that many scholars in left circles either naturalise the world's division into rich and poor countries (rather than seeing that it is the result of capitalism and its dynamics) or try to understand imperialism without the application of Marxist theory (This intellectual evolution among Marxist economists is discussed fully in Desai, 2020 forthcoming). These currents represent a sharp break from the vast literature on the theoretically necessary relationship between capitalism and imperialism going back to Marx and Engels themselves, the classical theories of imperialism of such Marxists as Hilferding, Bukharin, Lenin and Luxemburg and theories of social liberals like John Hobson.
Geopolitical economy rejects the first tendency and, while benefitting from the contributions of the second, ploughs a new and different furrow. Whereas most left writing on imperialism treats it as an unchanging structure, a core proposition of geopolitical economy is that imperialism has gone through a clear trajectory, first rising to its peak on the eve of the First World War and then entering a long decline that led to contemporary multipolarity, though not without important reverses. . Formidable as it is with its subjugation of all-too-many countries and peoples and exaction of untold human and material costs, imperialism meets with resistance both from rival powers and from its victims. Indeed, imperialism reached its high noon when the dominant imperialism of Britain had to contend with rivals. The combined development of Britain's rivals led to intense competition for colonies because at the time there were still weak states and state-less territories that could be conquered or otherwise subjugated. This competition culminated in the First World War. Imperialism's long-drawn-out and still ongoing decline began here. To be sure, this decline was accompanied by great and murderous violence and wars, not least because established structures of power do not take their decline with equanimity, but fight it. The First World War inaugurated the Thirty Years' crisis of 1914-45, including the Second World War, with an umbilical link joining the two. Since then the long-drawn-out decline of imperialism witnessed the wars of the Cold War and then the New Cold War.
This violent resistance to its decline could not, however, hide the recession of imperial power. The Thirty Years' Crisis was bookended by the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution that was in good part inspired and supported by its Russian predecessor (Cheng and Yang, forthcoming 2020). Allied victory in the Second World War would not have been
possible without the Soviet Union's tremendous contribution in material and lives, which was possible only thanks to its inter-war industrialization despite ongoing efforts of the imperial powers to impede it. And Soviet support was also critical in the long process of decolonization that issued out of the end of the Second World War and the Thirty Years' crisis of imperialism and ended formal colonialism, though not without considerable rear-guard action from the imperial powers. And, under Soviet leadership, the Communist Bloc now subtracted vast territories and populations from the capitalist world. It is little wonder, then, that the 'Cold War' began almost before the Second World War ended, with the United States bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not so much to end the war as to signal to the Soviet Union that the United States now possessed weapons able to wreak hitherto unimaginable destruction (Desai and Heller 2019).
While the economic performance of the decolonized Third World did not live up to expectations, the regained policy autonomy of these countries did lead to sufficient growth in a sufficient number of countries to justify the notion of the 'rise of the rest', particularly the BRICs countries led by China. As already mentioned, the current economic and military aggression of the US and the West is itself a reaction to this decline and loss of power and to the West's reluctance to recognise, let alone accept, it.
We are now ready to understand the four major ways in which Russia (pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet) has contributed to the historical evolution of the geopolitical economy of world capitalism and to geopolitical economy as a theoretical approach.
From Theorising Revolutionary Practice to Geopolitical Economy
Students of international relations, in the English-speaking West at least, are taught that the modern discipline of international relations emerged after the First World War when United States President Woodrow Wilson announced his famous Fourteen Points to ensure peace at the end of the war. These points, students are told, with their call for 'open covenants openly arrived at' and self-determination, at least in Europe, were too 'idealistic' and failed. After the end of the Second World War a new 'realism' appeared. The story of international relations is then told as an ongoing contest between its 'idealist' and 'realist' schools.
Critical writers at the time - Thorstein Veblen and Karl Polanyi (Veblen 1919, Polanyi 1944/1957, 22) come to mind - pointed out that Wilson was not actually idealist in the sense of wanting a peaceful world but politically ambitious to the point of hubris. He wanted a world pacified by the United States, which is an entirely different matter. However, even they did not point out, as Arno Mayer (1959, 265) did, that Wilson's Fourteen Points were themselves a response to, and a much diluted form of, the Bolshevik peace decree, with its demand for self-determination of the colonies and an end to annexationism and its publication of the secret annexationist treaties between the allied powers. It proved so popular across Europe among its war-weary population, that Wilson had to do his best to respond.
Moreover, the first theories of modern, capitalist, international relations already predated the war. The classical Marxist theories of imperialism were nothing if not theorization of relations between capitalist states based on an understanding of capitalism as contradictory value production and the international expansionist imperatives it generated for the states in which it developed. Most of them also paid particular attention to the new stage of development that capitalism had arrived at - which Hilferding called finance capital, Bukharin, nationalized capital and Lenin, monopoly capital - and stressed the intense competition it generated between capitalist states for colonies. There is no better theoretical understanding for the
genesis of the First World War (as Hobsbawm 1989 shows). These works, not Wilson's alleged 'idealism', were the first theorizations of modern, capitalist, international relations.
Not only were two of these works authored by Russians, the ideas in these works were deeply imbricated in Russian and Soviet history. As is well-known, the first revolution against capitalism took place not in one of Europe's most advanced capitalist countries, as Second International Marxism expected, but in one of its laggards. It was not, however, difficult to go beyond the Second International's understanding, so focused on Western Europe, by reaching into Marx's own oeuvre. The Bolsheviks did just that through the kindred concepts of Permanent Revolution and the broader concept of Uneven and Combined Development. The latter was, for Trotsky, the fulcrum of his understanding of the Russian Revolution in his famous history (Trotsky, 1934).
As Geopolitical Economy shows, this concept was rooted in the works of Marx and Engels themselves and shared widely among the Marxists of Lenin's and Trotsky's generation. Since their time, however, the concept has largely been forgotten among Marxists. Most neither know nor use the term. Of the minority who do, most use the truncated formulation, 'uneven development', to refer to imperialism, excising combined development and, therefore, any possibility of resistance to, and change in, the structures of imperialism. This implies that imperialism is largely unopposed and unchanging. Some others use the full term 'uneven and combined development', but confine the latter part of the term to the inert coexistence, in subordinated or backward societies, of advanced and backward elements - picture a modern oil refinery amid fields cultivated by oxen - again without any dynamic implication of resistance to imperialism. Finally, an even smaller number do use UCD to refer to both imperialism and resistance to it in a dynamic and dialectical manner. However, they confine its meaning to attempts to build socialist societies in backward countries.
Against these trends, Geopolitical Economy rescues the term from the condescension of recent intellectual generations to return to it the meaning that Trotsky and other Marxists and Bolsheviks of his generation gave it and the interpretation Marx and Engels's anticipations of the concept supported. In their interpretation, UCD referred to the dialectic between imperial subordination and resistance to it and was pregnant with more meaning. It gave birth to an understanding in which not classes alone but nations too were among the principal dramatis personae of the world revolution. This is the conception that Geopolitical Economy develops.
According to it, capitalist development is uneven, developing first in some parts of the world. Capitalism's contradictions and its consequent expansionism make such uneven development fateful for the rest of the world. Much of it succumbs and is formally or informally colonized by the more developed capitalist powers so they can externalize their contradictions. They aim to establish relations of complementarity between their own advanced economies, producing high value manufactured goods, and the economies of the rest of the world, which must be kept producing low value primary commodities or cheap manufactures, supplying labour on tap and prevented from industrialising more independently and fully.
Facing sure economic ruin, countries threatened with subjugation resist, if they can, by engaging in combined development. Trotsky was never happy with the term, but it was clear that it referred to state-led development employing the whole array of means - protection, industrial policy, planning and the rest. Its aim is to establish relations of similarity with the advanced economies so as to increase domestic productive power and prosperity and reduce their subordination. In this process, 'backward' nations may enjoy certain advantages, such as being able to industrialise with the latest technology, while the most advanced countries may be laden down with obsolete technology as the legacy of their early lead.
Attempts at combined development may fail. However, without them, no society can escape subordination (as Amsden 2007 pointed out). Russian emigre' intellectual Alexander Gerschenkron brought this idea to the mainstream of academic thinking in the United States in the form of ideas of 'late development' and 'the advantages of backwardness'. He neglected, of course, to reveal its Marxist and Bolshevik heritage (as Marcel Van der Linden 2012 pointed out).
The Russian Revolution in the World Revolution
This understanding of UCD has several implications. A major one is that productive capacity has spread in the world through successful combined development alone, not through markets or some 'purely economic' spread of capitalism and imperialism, as the cosmopolitan approaches discussed above imply.
Another is that the idea of UCD permits us to place all instances of successful development in a single frame and see them in their variety. In the industrialization of Germany, Japan and the United States against British industrial primacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these attempts took capitalist forms. However, beginning with the Russian Revolution, the world witnessed combined development also in non-capitalist, 'Communist' forms. In the cases of the Soviet Union as well as the People's Republic of China, these forms demonstrated far more formidable capacities, lifting far poorer societies from poverty and developing their productive capacities to levels that were, or could be expected to be, comparable to those of the capitalist West. They also represent the first time when combined development reached countries fated to remain outside the capitalist core. The Russian Revolution marked, in these ways, a turning point.
UCD has also been vindicated by more recent work on the more successful instances of development in the post Second World War period, such as South Korea and Taiwan (Amsden 1992 and Wade 1990). It can also be seen at work in the struggles of Bolivarian Venezuela, where the very radicalism of the attempt to resist imperialism has made it the target of some of the most vicious imperialist aggression, both economic and military. Indeed, Hugo Chavez made a critically important point when he coined the term 'pluripolarity' as preferable to multipolarity, indicating that the multiplying poles of economic power should also be understood in their great variety of political and economic forms.
Finally, in advancing multipolarity, the struggle between nations that constitutes UCD plays a central role in advancing world revolution. Contrary to the dominant understanding that often pits nation against class, the unfolding of UCD in favour of countries outside the capitalist core has a complex relation with the cause of working classes, both within and outside the core. Both can advance at the same time. In the case of the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese or Cuban revolutions, whose combined development is socialist in orientation, the role of UCD in advancing revolution is clear enough. However, the advance of multipolarity even in capitalist forms narrows the choices for capitalists in capitalism's imperial core. There is less room for them to externalize the consequences of capitalism's contradictions. They must now be dealt with internally, and this can often advance the cause of the working classes of both imperialist and anti-imperialist countries.
Let us consider one example, which concerns one of the major contradictions of capitalism, - the paucity of demand. Historically, formally and informally colonised countries have served the advanced countries as markets. As long as there were colonies, capitalist ruling classes could get away with keeping working class incomes and consumption to a minimum so as to keep their goods competitive on the world market. However, with the onset
of decolonization, advanced countries' access to colonial markets was reduced. It was no coincidence, therefore, that they had to expand their domestic markets, and this could only be done with a massive and substantial increase in working class incomes and consumption through full employment policies and welfare states, which were added to the other tools of combined development, such as protection and industrial policy.
The expansion of working-class consumption laid the foundation of the 'golden age', the most sustained growth the capitalist world and the West had witnessed. The reason had everything to do with the rollback of imperial power. With fewer colonial markets to rely on, major capitalist powers had to rely on demand from their own working masses (see Desai 2015b). At the same time, decolonization also increased growth in the former colonies. This made room for, though did not ensure, advances in the income and consumption of working people there (for instance, independent India broke the stagnation of colonialism, as shown in Nayyar 2006). The extent to which this potential was realised would depend on the balance of class forces between capitalist and propertied elites on the one hand and workers and peasants on the other.
This is just one illustration. There are many aspects to how advancing multipolarity and popular struggles can advance the prospects of transcending capitalism's injustices, anarchy and irrationality (many of them yet unanticipated) that form an agenda for future research. What are the other ways in which advancing multipolarity will narrow the options of capital? How exactly, if at all, will this expand opportunities available to working classes in the imperial and other countries? How can working people construct solidarities across the imperial divide to advance their interests? Does the development of (relatively) independent capitalisms in hitherto subordinated countries, such as India or Brazil, and in Russia, merely narrow the options of advanced country capitalists, or do they also complicate the advance of popular interests in these countries? How do reforms that such narrowing of capitalist options necessitates change the capitalist state's international personality and actions? The list is long.
Answering these questions will further develop geopolitical economy, and this is a necessary task. For now, we can safely say that if and when the world looks back on how humankind transcended capitalism and its inseparable integument, the Russian Revolution (the demise of the Soviet Union notwithstanding) will surely mark the beginning of that process.
Russia's Contribution to Multipolarity, particularly De-dollarization
Moreover, if current developments are any indication, Russia's role in advancing multipolarity is unlikely to be confined to this history. Indeed, it had not begun there: the industrialization efforts under Prime Minister Sergey Witte in the last decades of Imperial Russia may not have been spectacularly successful, but they are part of the history of attempts at combined development. Moreover, the challenge of re-industrializing Russia is making itself felt, both to the Russian government administration and to Russia's critical thinkers.
To be sure, these efforts face formidable internal obstacles, thanks to the oligarchical structure and natural resources focus the Russian economy acquired under the 'Shock Therapy' method of transition. However, the urgency of reindustrialization is being underlined, as Russia today seeks to preserve its policy-autonomy and security against an increasingly aggressive West, with its military provocations and economic sanctions. In resisting this pressure, Russia is probably playing a critical role in the further unravelling of imperialism, notwithstanding its considerable integration with the West economically, especially since the demise of the Soviet Union.
As Geopolitical Economy argues, theories of US hegemony/Empire as well as 'globalization' have been simply the ambitions of US political and business elites dressed up as theory. Since the early twentieth century, these elites have worked to secure for the United States the sort of dominance Britain enjoyed in the nineteenth century. However, even then it was clear that, despite the most zealous efforts, the United States could not match the scale of British nineteenth century dominance. Amid already far advanced multipolarity and rising nationalism, it could never secure the sort of empire Britain had. So United States ruling and policy-making elites settled instead on what they considered a lesser goal, a sort of 'dominance lite': they would seek to make the dollar the world's currency, as sterling was, and New York the world's financial centre, as London was.
Of course, what they overlooked was that the British Empire was the conditio sine qua non of sterling's and London's dominance. Their dominance rested on Britain's ability to transform colonial surpluses extracted from her non-settler colonies, such as India or the Caribbean, into the capital which Britain exported to her settler colonies, including the former settler colony that was the United States. This was how she provided the world with liquidity. Without an empire, the United States could not supply the world with liquidity by exporting capital. Indeed, the United States has been throughout its history, and remains, a sinkhole for capital. The alternative, the one the US followed - to furnish the world with liquidity by running current account deficits - was subject to the famous Triffin Dilemma: the greater the liquidity supplied by these means, the lower the dollar's value plunged, reducing the rest of the world's willingness to hold it, thus undermining its world role.
While Geopolitical Economy deals with the vicissitudes of the dollar in greater detail, for our purposes it is enough to note that, as the world demanded gold over devalued dollars, the US 'closed the gold window', effectively refusing to back the dollar with gold in 1971. Thereafter, the dollar's world role has required creating an artificial demand for dollars by inflating a series of increasingly larger, more dangerous and volatile financial asset bubbles, the largest of which burst in 2008. In its aftermath, the dollar's world role has been questioned. More and more countries are seeking alternatives to it, and Russia - by shifting to gold in its reserve accumulation, by concluding agreements with other countries to accept each other's currencies in international payments and by seeking to devise alternative payments systems - is leading the way in this process. The advance of this process, which can only spell the end of United States dominance and deepen the fissures between the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, is a critical part of the story of imperialism's decline.
Russian Critical Thought
Finally, we can expect Russia and Russian intellectuals to be involved in the further unfolding of the discourse of Geopolitical Economy through the development of its critical thinking. While Soviet official Marxism has largely been dismissed as devoid of intellectual significance (a denaturing of Marxism so it could serve as a mere ideological tool), critical and intellectually fecund currents of Marxism also emerged in the Soviet Union, and they have left important legacies. There is also the legacy of both pre- and post- Soviet Marxism that is intellectually significant. Some of the more important representatives include members of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism, such as Alexander Buzgalin, Andrei Kolganov and Lyudmila Bulavka, who deploy the philosophical insights of major Soviet era intellectuals with those of contemporary Western thinkers to understand contemporary capitalism and its culture; Boris Kagarlitsky, Ruslan Dzarasov and Oleg Barabanov, who employ political, economic and historical assessments in their critical analysis of Russia's political economy
and the possibilities for progressive politics$ and researchers working at S.Y. Witte Institute for New Industrial Development, which, under the leadership of Sergey Bodrunov, is pioneering work on Noonomy and Russian re-industrialization. The insights of these scholars are inseparable from Marx's understanding of history as the advance of the forces of production. In contributing to the conversation about their country's future, as it once again confronts imperial powers, they can be expected to develop lines of thought that will surely be compatible with geopolitical economy and may even develop it further.
However, there is more. Beyond Marxism or any theory, there is the legacy of the Soviet period as an experience of living outside capitalism. During that time, for all its problems, Soviet citizens could take for granted a many-sided social life in contrast to capitalist societies where most of it tended to be reduced to the infernal 'cash-nexus'. They had the experience of relative equality and shared a belief in the illegitimacy of inequality. The popular public life, buildings, spaces and institutions had a certain grandeur (compare the Moscow subway system, for instance, to New York's), while their Western counterparts suffered the syndrome of 'private affluence, public squalor' that John Kenneth Galbraith lamented. This legacy cannot fail to infuse Russians' thinking about their own society and its future and thereby contribute to that of the entire humanity. Moreover, Russia has also played host to some of the most profound debates on the challenges posed by capitalist modernity, whether it concerned the matter of industrialization in Imperial Russia and again in post-Communist Russia or the matter of whether Russia could take a 'peasant' road to socialism or that of the integration of nationalities.
As Russians, like other peoples around the world, seek a way out of the ravages of capitalism, I hope that this article and, at a more profound level, Geopolitical Economy contribute, however modestly, to their endeavours, not least by stirring their memories and hopes.
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Р. Десаи. Роль России в геополитэкономии мирового капитализма. Представлены основные положения недавно переведенной на русский язык книги «Геополитическая экономия: после американской гегемонии, глобализации и империи». Излагаются принципы геополитической экономии как нового подхода к осмыслению международной ситуации в эпоху многополярности. В рамках данного подхода дается оценка присущих капитализму противоречий. Подчеркивается, что государство играет определяющую роль в разрешении этих противоречий. Эволюция капиталистического миропорядка рассматривается как диалектика неравномерного и комбинированного развития, при котором ведущие страны стремятся навязать последствия накопившихся противоречий капиталистического строя и контролировать менее развитые страны и территории. Многие государства противостоят гегемонии ведущих экономик, осуществляя самостоятельно индустриализацию страны и выбор пути развития - капиталисти-
ческого или, начиная с революции 1917 г. в России, коммунистического. Подчеркивается роль российской истории и идей российских ученых в развитии геополитической экономии капиталистического мира и его трансцендентности.
Ключевые слова: геополитическая экономия, роль национальной обособленности, классы, государства, капитализм, противоречия, неравномерное и комбинированное развитие, революция 1917 г., многополярность.
