Socialism Unmade: Confronting Five Centuries of Capital
Steve talks with Dr. Ali Kadri whose academic work focuses on the political economy of development, imperialism, and the Arab world.
“…Some are dancing, some are drowning, but in the end everybody’s going to go under.”
Dr. Ali Kadri (Sun Yat-sen University), author of the Unmaking of Arab Socialism, joins Steve to talk about imperialism, development, and why the Arab world keeps getting put through the capitalist meat grinder. Ali argues that capitalism isn’t just markets and greed. It’s a destructive social relationship. Once you look at it that way, many of the world’s mysteries stop being mysterious: war, austerity, pollution, and mass deaths aren’t accidents that occasionally happen to capitalism. They are outcomes to be monetized.
The conversation moves to imperialism as capitalism in its concentrated, caffeinated, and brutal form, especially under finance-dominance. Ali describes genocide as both direct (bombs, occupation, ethnic cleansing) and structural (avoidable hunger, disease, debt-driven collapse). He frames the destruction of Arab socialist and anti-colonial projects as strategic for empire: control of oil, geography, and the political threat of regional solidarity.
They talk about MMT’s explanation of currency and how the dollar functions as a lever. Ali sees the dollar as power, representing control over global resources and labor. Debt dependence becomes a kind of colonization by spreadsheet.
“If the dollar stops for a minute or for a month or so, then we have people going hungry. And so this is a form of colonization, a form of death by the dollar.”
They close by pulling democracy down from the clouds. Steve suggests bourgeois elections merely deliver a reshuffling of managers for the same system, and Ali produces a simple metaphor: a multiple-choice exam. The choices have been pre-loaded. And in elections, the result is still class rule.
Dr. Ali Kadri is a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-sen University. He has previously held senior roles at the National University of Singapore and the London School of Economics. His academic work focuses on the political economy of development, imperialism, and the Arab world. He is the author of several important books, including The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction; China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism; and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.
Listening to Kadri's description of human life & nature as the true base commodities of capitalism gave me the same feeling as going to the eye doctor & when they flip the lens thingy you can see just a bit more clearly. He exudes such deep internalized understanding of the topic, not just broad theoretical knowledge. Fantastic episode.
Fantastic episode so far! I'm going to go back to finish listening, but I had to stop to comment on the brilliant work here!