Guerrilla History - China, and the "Western Left" w/ Immanuel Ness (IB Part 2)

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

We have another fun Intelligence Briefing this time, with a special guest!  For this conversation that takes a look at China, and once again takes aim at the "Western Left", we bring back our good friend and comrade Professor Immanuel Ness.  Manny is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg.  His latest book is Organizing Insurgency: Workers' Movements in the Global South, which is available from Pluto Press: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343594/organizing-insurgency/.   You can follow him on twitter @ImmanuelNess. Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to. guerrilla history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. This is a guerrilla history intelligence briefing for those of you who don't know or are unaware. Intelligence briefings are roughly twice monthly, a little bit shorter, a little bit less formal episodes that we do, where roughly half of them are early access on Patreon and the other half are Patreon exclusives. This one is going to be an early access episode, and we've got a fan favorite returning for the episode today. So we'll talk about that in just a second. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, and I'm joined, as always, by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan.

How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry. It's great to be with you. Yeah, it's great to see you, too. I feel like it's been a little while since we've seen each other, but it hasn't been that long. and also joined as usual, but not recently, by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. It's the return of Brett, and we are so happy to see you on the call today, Brett. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm doing good. It's been a while, but I'm

definitely happy to be back in the swing of things. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Absolutely. It's felt a little bit lonely without having you here, but we're very grateful that that we have you here today, and we'll be talking again in just a couple days, actually. Yeah. And today, we're joined by a special guest who, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, is the fan favorite. Every time we have an episode with him, the response is overwhelmingly positive. We get people writing to us from all over saying that they appreciate the analysis that he brings to the show.

It's Professor Emmanuel Ness, or Manny, as we call him. And Manny is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and is a visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg, author of many, many books, including one of our episodes with him was based on one of his most recent books, Organizing Insurgency Workers' Movements in the Global South. He's got five books that are coming out relatively soon, and that's just crazy to me. And we'll talk about them a little bit later. but hello, Manny. It's nice to have you back on the show. Nice to see you. It's a pleasure

being on the show with you, Henry, as well as Adnan and Brett. Thank you so much for having me back. Of course. Like I said, every time that you're on the show, we get really, really good feedback from everybody. So we're going to keep bringing you back on as long as that's the case. So folks, feel free to keep writing if you keep wanting Manny to come back on. So last time that we had you on, Manny, we were talking mostly about the irrelevance. of the Western left. And this is a topic that we're not going to directly touch on today, but I feel like we're going to kind of hit tangentially as we go throughout the conversation because the irrelevance of the Western left is an enduring problem that we face.

The first topic that we want to talk about today, though, is China, which of course is a very, let's say, polarizing topic today, even within the left. So why don't I just open the floor to you to talk about China and particularly its role as a counter-hegemon on the global stage and perhaps the potential for socialism within China in the near future. Okay. Thank you so much. It's a very, very extensive question that we can go on for hours discussing days, years. On the question of counter-hegemony and China, I think within the last five years, it's been clear that China has become by far the most important state in the world to challenge U.S. global hegemony. Over this period of time, there had been a general consensus that the United States was the

dominant power in the world, and it remains so, in my view. But there is no question that China is becoming counter-hegemonic in a certain way. On the one hand, it has tremendous financial, economic production clout. On the other hand, and I think this is even more important, it is gaining much greater influence within the global south where the majority of the world's population live. And as a consequence of that, Notwithstanding the attacks that we hear in a quotidian basis from the Western critics,

it's gained a lot of support from populations and states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that is unprecedented at this point. They've sort of deep-sixth the Belt and Road project and have turned it into a a development project so that it's not seen as something that is being thrust down people's throats, so to speak, but seen as a way in which China can work with countries that are developing or underdeveloped to try to advance living standards, in this sense, the quality of life of people that has been so diminished by 500 years of American Western, imperial, well, Western imperialism. So I think these are the two aspects that we must look at with respect to counter-hegemony,

just a bit on that topic without going too much into it. China is encircled by the United States and its allies in the Pacific, as well as in the Indian Ocean with nuclear warheads. And it is currently developing its own effort to defend itself because the United States views China as a political, military, and economic threat to its hegemonic interests in the world as a whole. And, you know, in the last five years as well, China has also, without much expense, without great expense, tried to build up its military capacity to defend itself. And it's not postured as a aggressive means, but just as a way to defend itself, in my view. and I think most people who are unbiased on the question. So I'll stop right there.

Unless you want me to go on. No, yeah, I think that's a great place to start. I know recently we've been seeing multiple sort of developments regarding U.S. is more and more militant and, some would say, desperate stance towards China. Recently, we saw the Pentagon budget get passed. I think it was like 50 billion more than the Pentagon was even asking for. The end of the Afghanistan war, I think, is really seen by the ruling class and by the Pentagon as a necessary prerequisite to pivoting towards Asia. We see the Taiwan issue increasingly becoming a sort of, you know, spark that could start something or people are talking about, you know, what does the U.S. do if China acts aggressively toward Taiwan.

And, you know, it's worth noting that going back over Chinese history, Taiwan is is part of China. and the idea that the U.S. could come in and stop that, it'd be something like China claiming Florida, you know, and then acting like it's actually a totally separate entity and we're going to go start World War III over it. It's insane. But my question is, and you know, I could, anybody can pick this up, but I'm particularly interested in Manny's thoughts here. You know, given what's happening, given these developments, I wonder, a two-pointed question, how desperate might U.S. imperialism become in the face of, of a rising China that is strengthening bonds with multiple countries in the global south. And how do the intertwined economies of the U.S. and China impact the calculus? Because it's very different in that regard than it was during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And both countries have a lot to lose when it comes to a war economically, at least to some degree. Obviously, there's war economies and whatnot. But yeah, just what are your thoughts on how desperate the U.S. might be like,

how serious are they going to be trying to contain China and then how the intertwined economies might play into them? I think those are brilliant questions. I think they demonstrate some of the critical factors that are essentially advancing the political and military and cultural and social, et cetera, build up with respect to U.S. influence. in the region or attempted influence in the region. From the military standpoint, the Pentagon budget represents a very dangerous attempt to increase US influence in the region,

but also attack China or potentially pose a means to threaten an attack on China, whether they would do it or not is another question. I think the $50 billion more than was even asked for by the military is really telling, and it demonstrates, again, where the U.S. public, to a certain extent, are on the question of military spending. But the United States definitely feels that it has been outflanked in a number of strategic military areas. The hypersonar weapons, for instance, that are completely unique and the United States

is probably a decade behind with respect to its development is just one example of that with respect to this fear, which seems to be more related to an effort by the military industrial complex to increase its influence and monetary stakes within the region, because I think a lot of this is driven by the military industrial complex of the United States, the growth in the military budget. And Taiwan, as you pointed out, is a province of China as a historic relationship with China. Its population is primarily Han Chinese, and yet it is being used by the United States and Western powers as a means to confront China, along with the Uyghur issue in Jiangxia, as well as the Hong Kong issue, which is really bizarre to tell you the truth. So I think Taiwan, of course, there's no question. Taiwan is a huge financial power in itself.

It has financed a lot of the Chinese development, but it is also the recipient of hundreds of trillions, forgive me hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of largesse as a consequence of Chinese production and the oppression, actually, of Chinese working class to a certain degree. And that, you know, leads to the third question in terms of the intertwining of the two economies that the United States remains highly dependent on Chinese consumer goods,

and that dependence is not decreasing, it is only increasing in the last number of years. You know, certainly we hear these stories about the United States just this week, had imposed sanctions on a number of companies, surveillance companies that were operating in Jiangxang province, which I think is bogus in terms of the sanctions. Yet at the same time, the United States is increasing its imports of, you know, essential goods that are part of everyday life in this country and allow us to live what,

We can say Ulrich Braun has referred to as the imperial mode of living, a comfortable lifestyle at low cost, generally speaking. I've got to follow up on that, Manny. So we were just talking about how you mentioned China has increased its military spending recently. And by all accounts, it looks relatively defensive in origin in terms of countering a potential aggressive act by the United States. And on the other hand, we see the United States fearmongering about China to start to increase its military budget in the likelihood of an eventual conflict with China and just trying to tie some threads together. As you mentioned, the main things that the U.S. is fearmongering about with China are Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the U.Gers, as well as the South China Sea.

but I feel that perhaps as big of a role in this, and feel free to disabuse me of this, this is really the question I'm driving at. I feel like as big of a role in this is the success of the Belt and Road Initiative. As you mentioned, the Belt and Road Initiative at this point has really transitioned to being a very successful development project

within the Global South. Now, the Global South has always been the playground of the imperialist powers, and in the last 100 years, that's been particularly the United States. So we have all of these former post-colonial African nations, for example. This is just one example. They had very tight relations with their colonial powers,

when they were under colonial influence. And then even afterwards, after independence, many of them had a neocolonial relationship with their former colonial powers. But over time, that really shifted to having an undue influence by the United States on these countries through the role of things like multinational corporations. And what we're seeing now is that the influence is really shifting from being exerted by the U.S. on these developing countries, these global South countries, third world countries, what have you, to China having influence.

And it's through a completely different mechanism. It's not through these multinational corporations having, you know, exerting their influence and upholding the system of unequalification. exchange, it's as a result of development links between China and these African countries and as well as other global South areas, but Africa is the one that everybody seems to be focusing on right now. Now, the question is, there's two questions, I guess we can really turn to. Some people on the left from certain subsets of the left are claiming that the Belt and Road Initiative's development in Africa is a form of neo-imperialism by China within Africa. And I think that most

people on the left don't really believe that too heavily? Like, obviously there's some influence that's taking place as a result of the Belt and Road Initiative. But are we really going to say that it's neo-imperialism to be building docks and infrastructure hospitals in these countries? And the other question is, is the U.S. seeing the shift and influence from the U.S.'s imperial hegemonic status over these global South countries? Are they seeing the shift? towards China as a threat to themselves, not militarily, economically. And as a result, they're having to try to drum up some sort of warlike bellicose posturing against China in hopes that they can more or less start some sort of conflict that'll

draw away from the swing towards China. Adnan, do you want to ask your follow up on that now or should we just turn it over to Mani for that. Well, let's hear from Mani about that, but I think there's lots of components to this important topic that you're raising, so I'll follow up after. Those are brilliant questions, Henry. Yes, without question, leftists and liberals are highly critical of the Belt and Road project, which has now been kind of re-chartered as a development project for the Global South, so that it doesn't seem like it's a gigantic Cuban, forgive me, Chinese effort to advance its way throughout the entire world and link up the world. But it is linking up the world in a very positive way, in a way that is horizontal as opposed to, forgive me, one that is vertical.

And as you pointed out very well, it's not. really a form of neo-imperialism at all because they're not imposing their political dictates and so forth and so on with respect to how these governments should operate and in which way they should run their countries. Of course, I will be very clear to say that many of these countries, if not all of them, are part of the neoliberal capitalist order themselves. And so they are under the knuckle of the United States and Western Europe to begin with. And so China allows a bit of breathing space for some of these countries, whether their leadership is, you know, progressive or not. They allow them to take out loans at extremely favorable terms.

They do not, contrary to the popular opinion, they do not own the resources or the land. they rent it on mutually beneficial terms and so forth. So I think that this leftist and liberal criticism of China as being an imperial power in places like Africa is highly disingenuous because if we take a look at the social indicators of human development, Africa has an average age of 45, life expectancy to 50 maybe. Africa has the highest ancient mortality rates. Africa does not have clean water in many instances. It is subject to power outages and all these other forces that have to do with the actual

living standards of people with their ability to live and so forth, which is crucial. And so when we think about this Belt and Road, initiative, it is really a way to say, you know, there is an alternative to some degree to being in hoc to Western banks for trillions of dollars, if we add them all up, and that, in fact, you are the owners of your own resources. Yes, we will take a rental, you know, we will, we will rent the resources and we'll ensure that they run properly and efficiently with your help. And we will also train your populations to be able to advance their technical skills and so forth and so on. But there's just a tremendous amount of dissembling that's going on amongst

Westerners, leftists as well about African and Indian Ocean countries being in hock to China. In fact, they have on a regular basis forgiven loans and have canceled loans completely that these African countries and other countries don't have to pay. On the second question, and I think it's related to the first one, and maybe we can have discussion, is China a threat to American economic and really political interests in the region? But I would say mainly economic. I think, yes, it's not just American, it's also Western European, because they're offering economic deals at a far better and more advantageous rate and under better conditions than

the West ever did. I mean, the West is engaged in rapacious forms of extraction. They deal with extra state actors, paramilitary groups, in places like the DRC. And so the United States wants to see business as usual in terms of their ability to put forward a policy in which they can basically pillage these societies completely. And China is not doing it.

So, yes, China is a threat to the United States economically in terms of reducing the capacity of the United States and Western countries to pillage. And I could give countless examples from South African mines to the Congolese mines, to the Zambian mines in the southern part of the region, but also to agricultural businesses in cocoa, coffee, tropical fruit. and beyond. That's my take on it. I'm sorry, it went long. Yeah, no, I love that. And I'm just going to bounce off that and offer a few thoughts before Adnan jumps in here. I think it's really important to think. And when I think about, you know, is China being predatory, et cetera? You have to think how strategic China is. They're too strategic in some sense to replicate the errors of Western imperialism, which makes the entire global South have at the very least negative feelings towards the U.S. and Western Europe or on the whole hate them and, you know, try to get out

from underneath their yoke, whether that's IMF World Bank loan yoke or if it's a straight military invasion of your country, coups, the plundering of those countries, etc. China knows that if it takes that route, it is not going to be able to do what it wants to do, which is to build up genuine connections with other countries. Africa, for example, is going to explode in the 21st century. It wants to have a good, ongoing relationship with that continent. It does not want to just use overbearing force to plunder, exploit, and destroy those places like the U.S. and Western Europe has. So you have to think how much more strategic China is. And then there's also this vaccine thing. They know the U.S. and the Western corporations are not going

to open up their patents and allow the global South to have vaccines. So they see here's another opportunity for us to show the world that we are not like them. We will give you a million doses of our vaccine or whatever it's going to end up being. Simply because, we don't want to profit or we don't have some secret motive to take control of your political system, but it's because we want to foster that goodwill and that cooperation, because we know it's going to be essential going forward. Now, you know, that's because I think in part the Chinese have this apparatus of the state that can do long-term planning, that can make five-year plans, 10-year plans, can know study history and have a sort of coherent focus and

tactic to how to deal with the rest of the world, whereas in a lot of ways, especially increasingly, the U.S. in particular has no real function of the state other than military power, other than the imperial apparatus itself. You know, it's a hammer and it's looking for nails. It doesn't have the state capacity to govern. I mean, we can't even pass basic infrastructure stuff. We can't even take care of our own people here, much less formulate a five-year plan and follow through on it. And then the last thing also is climate change. China knows that it can really become a world leader if it handles climate change and if it can lead the way in green technology, lead the way in political efforts to tackle the climate crisis and maybe to help

other countries who are more disproportionately impacted by the crisis get through it in the future. And so as far as I can tell, that seems to be their strategy and that precludes a hyper-predatory recapitulation of what the West has done for the last several centuries. So, I mean, we'll see, but that's my sense of it. That's very well said. If you think about all the countries that the United States had supported in overthrowing, you know, the most well-known would be the Burkina Faso coup that the United States assisted France in overthrowing Thomas Sankara, one of the iconic figures of Africa.

But this is just continuing over and again. And, you know, in some various places, Ethiopia now, so forth, the United States is engaged in warfare. China does not do that. It just doesn't do it. I mean, they may have a base in Djibouti, but that doesn't really mean the same as the constant wars that the United States engages in, whether they're, you know, regular wars or they're using various kinds of operatives, the support for coups throughout the region, the plunder of mining, industries without the return that the African countries require and this plunder, you know, eners to the West and the United States. That is not the model that China engages in. And I thought

you're absolutely correct about the vaccine and so forth, that they're trying to save lives as opposed to control. Yeah, that's very interesting. Henry was bringing up a lot of the economic dimensions of China's involvement. And I think Brett has raised some of the political differences in approach. And it reminds me very much of a friend of mine who worked in the European Commission's development arm about a decade, decade and a half ago who told me that all of the global South regimes are increasingly interested in working with China. Because when you conclude a deal with China, they come, they build the road or the dam or the electrical grid, and they don't, you know, accompany that with long lectures about what you have to change

in your society and government and, you know, so-called anti-corruption protocols and reforms, and, you know, lecture you about human rights violations and all of that. So, you know, it's just much more direct, you know, that they come. They do the development work and that's it, you know. So that's definitely borne out. And this is already 15 years ago. This has only been continuing, you know, since that time. And sometimes it seems to me that Western global governing elite seem to be caught by surprise by this.

I mean, this is not actually all that new, these relationships, the Belt and Road initiative has been going on for a long time. But what I wanted to actually raise is the geopolitical dimensions, because you mentioned that it is a counter-hegemonic force. So I'm kind of interested, perhaps you might talk a little bit more about China's role in some of these counter international coalitions and agreements, starting with like the Shanghai Cooperation Council that was very important in limiting U.S. region. control or using the war in Afghanistan to establish bases in a whole variety of neighboring

countries. They were sort of limited because in order to be part of the Shanghai Cooperation Council, you could not have foreign military bases, you know, from outside the region. And so this made staging the U.S. war and occupation in Afghanistan much more difficult because they couldn't put bases in Tajikistan and so on. So that's, since that time, it seems to be that time. It seems that there was some kind of counter coalition emerging. And I'm just reminded that recently there was this statement, you know, of 18 countries characterizing themselves as friends of the UN charter that included China and Russia and a whole set of other countries that one might recognize as those that are the most isolated

as a result of U.S. and European imperial, you know, control, exclusion, sanction, and so on. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about at the time that we're having this so-called summit for democracy and pushing this rules-based international order so-called is that we have kind of the emergence geopolitically. You know, it comes to that point that China is actually presenting an alternative and a rivalry that, you know, some on the left don't really seem to understand.

They approach it from like, well, we shouldn't have a Cold War with China, but they don't recognize that there's actually something positive happening that China is doing by realigning the geopolitical order. All very good points in my view. I mean, I think this just demonstrates the degree to which China is not an aggressive imperial power. It may be coming an imperial power, but it's very defensive in its mode. The question about the bases within Asia and the ability to gain funding from the China, the Shanghai Cooperation Council, as well as the Asian Development Bank, etc., you know,

reveals the fact that, you know, those bases that are going to be put in that region are going to be targeting China. Why would the United States have bases in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, et cetera? The purpose is to direct missiles and forward troops toward China as opposed to, and maybe Russia, too, to a certain degree, as opposed to any other region. So that makes perfect sense. It's a logical step. I think it is dissuading a lot of countries from, as you pointed out, putting forth those bases. The group of 18 that made that statement, I believe, in late September 21, were countries

that had been placed under U.S. sanction, as well as European sanction, to a great extent, have been isolated from the world economy to a large extent. and they are just calling for the United States and other leading imperialist powers, European Union countries, et cetera, to abide by the rules of the UN Charter. And these countries have been hurt tremendously, you know, one can say millions of people have died as a consequence of the policies that include war and include sanctions and include a whole host of negative policies toward these countries. So I thought that was a very important development. It would be interesting to see

more countries advance that. Just in the final point, just in the last two weeks or so, we saw two Central American countries established relationships with the People's Republic of China and cut off their relations with Taiwan. And ironically, Honduras is one of them after the elections, which brought a leftist to power and as well as El Salvador. And I think this is just demonstrating that the United States wants to have it. both ways they want to not recognize Taiwan. They want to see Taiwan an independent state in that sense. So Taiwan is not China, but they want China as a independent buffer and a potential place

where they can place missiles against the mainland China. And I think the policy may be backfiring in some respects. But I wouldn't underestimate U.S. power and its capacities to make an end run around these initiatives that are based on reality. So a lot of the Caribbean and the Central American and Latin American countries are recognizing that China is the People's Republic and that, you know, Taiwan should not be dealt with. The point of Lithuania recently trying to establish some kind of relationship with with Taiwan as an independent state is, I think, also backfiring against them.

But it doesn't seem to me that it was only initiated by Lithuania. I mean, it just boggles the mind that Lithuania would try, you know, test its ties with the People's Republic of China for increasing its connections with Taiwan, you know, unless there's some kind of corrupt deal behind it or the United States has pushed them to do so. I'm going to loop back for a second. I want to go back to the point where you ask the question, Manny, can China serve as a threat economically to the United States? And I'm just going to pull some quotes now and get your thoughts on it because you kind of address the point, you kind of address the question. But I think that we can dive a little bit

deeper into one of the reasons why that might be in my mind. So first I'm going to quote from Lenin, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. So in chapter seven, he, uh, he points out the five features, five basic features of imperialism. And I'm just going to highlight number three for a second before I quote from someone else. So, uh, feature number three is the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance. Now I'm going to turn to our mutual friend, Jose Maria Sisson, comrade Joma, who's been on our show before. I believe right after your first appearance on the show, Manny, because he does a summary of this point, instead of having to dive into Lenin's numbers and all of that to explain the

point in basic principles of Marxism, Leninism, a primer. Comrade Joma summarizes it as follows. Point three, the export of surplus capital takes the form of loans and direct investments. These serve to relieve the capitalist economy not only of its capital glut, but also of its surplus commodities. Loans facilitate the sale of surplus commodities, pave the way for direct investments, and earn interest and become converted into equity

upon failure of the debtor to pay the debt. Direct investments are forthright and even more effective than loans and gaining control over another country, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It goes on from there. The reason that I'm quoting from this is not to highlight the fact that China is essentially

giving loans and this development aid, That is not the point that I'm driving at. What I'm driving at is that the system of capitalism in the United States does have a capital glut, most certainly. And one of the valves for them to try to use up some of this capital glut, there was really two main ones. One was the global south, as was just pointed out in point number three right there. And the other was military expenditure because military expenditure is a great way to use up excess capital. You just basically turn it into bombs and then it turns into thin air. a great way of using up a capital glut.

Now, the reason that I'm bringing this up is because if China is offering, and they are, they're offering global South countries much better deals and a much better relationship than the United States was offering these countries, it kind of shuts off that valve for the capital glut to flow out of the United States. And then the question arises, what happens when that capital glut only has the military route to really relieve itself. And there's two options. Either the United States starts a big war that they're going to use a lot of capital

upon, or they're going to suffer the consequences of having that capital inflation, an economic recession, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, this has been written about for well over 100 years now. So perhaps, and I'd like your thoughts on this, perhaps the economic threat from China is not because of manufacturing, as a lot of people like to point to, perhaps it's not that these countries are getting a nice relationship with China directly, but it's that closing off of that valve for the capital glut of the United States to flow out of. Am I anywhere on the right track with this line of thinking, Manning?

Well, I think you are. I think we can't discount countries such as India and South Asian, as well as Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia and so forth where the United States has tremendous investments and not necessarily are shut off from because China for now at least. Yeah. Yeah. And so I agree completely. In fact, China has been the recipient of this capitalist glut because the United States has invested, you know, trillions of dollars into China so that it could, in return, gain hundreds of trillions of dollars in commodities. I'm sorry, I'm over there are tens of trillions of dollars in commodities. So that the United States still has that relationship with China,

but it is sort of, as you're pointing out, closing off China is closing off that relationship, with other countries, certainly countries of Africa and so forth, although I would say that for the most part, Africa is, and I really agreed with what Brett was saying earlier about Africa is really the country of this continent of the future, the 21st century. Its population will grow to over 2 billion people and so forth. There will be tremendous poverty and struggles and confrontations. And it is a source of vital minerals and commodities that are desired primarily by the imperial powers. So I think there will be a confrontation that will come between the United States and China over who will rule the day. And as we pointed out earlier,

it seems like China's model, Belt and Road Initiative, et cetera, development model is one that's far more favorable, and that's what's closing off the capital from going into China. I think the kind of capital that, forgive me, going into Africa, I think the kind of capital we're talking about is the more risky forms of investment capital that the United States financial corporations are engaged in investing in Africa because the level of exploitation is so high and the return is so much higher that it is a huge source of profits and I think it's underestimated the degree to which that's so. So I think your point is very well taken.

And certainly the Lenin quote and certainly Joma Sissan's point about the export of surplus. So I think we should look not just in the next five years, but perhaps 10, 20 years down the road and see that this confrontation will come to an ahead between the United States and China sooner rather than later. But I also think that it's important not to discount India in this calculus as well, because India has also engaged in investment in Africa as well. Of course, not on the same terms as China. They are also extractive. They've got a long history of colonization of themselves. I mean, at least not really colonization, but forced colonization as indentured servants in places like Uganda and colonization of South. Africa and so forth. So they do have relationships with the continent, too, but I think they'll

probably be a not as great and important player as the other countries, but there's no question that they exploit China, like, forgive me, I make that mistake, they exploit Africa almost to the same extent as does the United States and Western Europe. And I would also add that Israel does as well, which is a very small, relatively small state that has engaged in a lot of corrupt deals in the Maghreb western region of Africa, most notably Guinea, where billions of dollars have been spent to extract gold and other precious metals. So they're a very dangerous state. They're small and so forth, but they're also extremely involved in this game with respect to exporting capital and owning or at least renting industries or natural resources.

Yeah, Mani, I'm going to ask you a question about socialism in China here in a second. So I'm aiming towards that end here, but I just want to touch on the conflict point. I think just laying some things on the table when it comes to the outlook for a possible conflict with China might be helpful to think through some of the variables. So, you know, what this, you're absolutely right that this has to come to a head some way somehow, right? The contradiction is getting too sharp. Something has to give one way or the other. It cannot be this indefinite, you know, sort of gridlock and ramping up to some sort of conflict that never comes.

So what that will be, nobody knows. But a couple things are really important. One is how willing are U.S. allies willing or how willing are they to help the U.S. in any sort of either super-agrelipped, head-on conflict or proxy conflict or regional conflict. I think after Afghanistan, after Iraq, after the Trump era, after the instability, U.S. reputation has gone down around the world, including amongst its own allies. We're not dependable. They don't know. Can we trust America? Why do we want to get into a huge conflict with China and have the U.S. is back, right? So that will be a huge variable. How much the world is willing to go along. Now, usually you think U.S. allies,

you're like Britain, France, Germany, et cetera. But in the region, it's really going to look like India, Japan, Australia as really key possible allies in any conflict of any sort with China. And so, you know, what is their readiness for conflict? And then you also have to think of the social opposition within countries, right? China certainly wants stability. The party, the people, the country as a whole, they're not willing to risk it all on some huge World War Three conflict, right? They have to get their defenses up because they know what the U.S. is. They know what the U.S. does and they know how aggressive the U.S. can be, especially when you can challenge them on a global level. So they have to do a defensive buildup. But they want to grow their

economy. They want to lift their people out of poverty. They do not want to get stuck in some horrific, tragic World War III type scenario. So, you know, if it comes to a conflict, it's going to be the U.S. really pushing the issue and forcing China to have to do something, you know, sort of intense. And within the U.S., I mean, left, right and center, I think, well, maybe not center, but certainly on the right and on the left, there is no taste whatsoever for more war and conflict, right? A lot of people on the right will talk shit about China, but a lot of them, you know, when it comes down, do you really want to do a war? They're going to say no. And, you know, ground evasion is off the, off the charts, right? The absolute best case scenario for

the U.S. and war against China is just like messing up their eastern coast, you know, decreasing their industrial capacity, sort of containing them using, you know, regional players in the, in the area. to sort of contain them, but it's never going to be, we're going to take over, due to China, what we did to Iraq or Afghanistan, right? There's a million standing, you know, ground force troops in China with two million in reserve. It's just not going to happen. So that's another element here, how exactly would this conflict take place? And I also think that in the U.S., because there's this lack of will amongst the people to want to go to another war,

there's this media effort, right, left and center to propagandize and sort of help manufacture consent for the military industrial complex to ramp up aggression with China. And to some extent, it is successful. And I also think it's worth noting that China knows it does not have the leeway for belligerence that the U.S. does. You know, it cannot act in anything like the way that the U.S. acts globally without having, you know, fatal slices to its global reputation around the world. It doesn't have that leeway. So it's going to be much more reserved, much more conservative in its global, you know, sort of aggression and trying to play defense and all in the meantime, trying to build up allies around the world, et cetera. So just worth noting those variables

are going to come into play. Now, I'm pretty agnostic getting to the question of socialism. Right now, I, you know, maybe I just don't know enough. I try to learn a lot, but I am agnostic on the trajectory China could take, right? Like, you can see China from this point taking two very different trajectories, you know, one, you know, could it become like a more aggressive imperialist nationalist power that replicates the imperialism and neocolonialism of the West? I mean, that could happen. It's a possibility. Or could it move in the direction of socialist internationalism?

I want to believe that they would move in that direction. I think there are some signs that they could possibly move in that direction at some point. But as of right now, it's still up in the air. So that's my agnostic position. And I'm just wondering, Manny, what your thoughts are on those two possible trajectories and what you see as the hope for socialism within China? Yeah, I think, well, I agree with your points you made earlier with respect to European allies vis-à-vis the allies in the Pacific, so to speak, that the United States has that are trying to encircle China. On the question of socialism in China, I think, again, as we were discussing before about, you know, what the future holds with respect to.

to war, we really don't know to any great extent, but we do have some inkling that there has been a change that has taken place within the last 10 years. And that change is one in which there has been growing levels of class struggle in China, a proliferation of strikes. I know that some of the data comes from Western NGOs, but there is no question about it that thousands of strikes are taking place throughout China. And this is having some bearing on the Chinese Communist Party or the Communist Party of China. And this has led it to take some actions to reduce the incredible inequality that exists between a upper echelon of billionaires. I think China has the most billionaires in the world and the general working class.

much of which is oppressed. The second point would be is that China, and this is very interesting, and you will find this in the mainstream press and everything else, China is theoretically an imperial power, yet on the other hand, they're a developing country. They rely on Western and other commodity-seeking countries

for the products they produce. They pay wages that, are higher than those in most of the third world, or global south, but they are still far lower than in the United States. And I don't think people really recognize this to the degree that they should. We have a developing country, and we have a country that is in a posture to develop other countries. Their main goal in development is to reduce hunger, starvation, as I was planning up before increasing life expectancies, reducing infant mortality rates and other social human development index aspects. But the crisis in China, and we could perhaps call it that in some

respects is causing calls for greater responsibility on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to take action to reduce inequality. I don't have any doubts that this is being done voluntarily. In fact, I don't think it's being done voluntarily. I think the Chinese capitalist class is kicking and screaming in being kind of squeezed a little bit by the state because it's the popular will to reduce these tremendous levels of inequality, especially in a country that has an ideological perspective that is rooted in communism and socialism, or at the very least socialism. And the other point I may have made it earlier is that there are over a hundred million Communist Party members in China. That's a lot of people. I mean, that's one out of

every 13, 14 people that are holding the state to account in a certain way. So Xi Jinping may have, you know, a plan which he's put out what is third or fourth book this year on how China is going to move towards socialism and, you know, believes in the principles of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism. And I think that may be true, but I don't think he's doing and publishing these books because he wants to necessarily and believes very strongly in this, but because there is these class forces that are coming to a head. within China itself. So, you know, notwithstanding everything else we said before with respect to imperialism,

there's, you know, we're common, I mean, I'm a communist, we believe in class struggle. And class struggle exists in societies where there is a differentiation between ownership and working, you know, the owners of the means of the production are people who are capitalist as well as, you know, bureaucrats who control it and so forth and so on. And so I think that the best hope is that within China itself, there will be both resilience in terms of its capacity to try to move in a direction where the working classes of that country are given greater benefits, are given a real health insurance system that provides cradle to grave benefits, which they,

by the way, don't have, which, you know, has a far more comprehensive system of social benefits. And I think this is something that is not debatable whatsoever because, you know, people I think are sick and tired of the commodity system that exists in China, albeit better than better. than the United States in certain ways, even though it's a poorer country. You know, the level of inequality is not as, you know, people are far poorer, but certain aspects of life, such as the preventative health care issues and, you know, the building of infrastructure, the, you know, housing questions and so forth are being addressed to a much greater extent. And I think they're only being addressed, especially the social issues as a

consequence of these struggles that are taking place. So, you know, people say, well, China is not a democratic state. Well, you know, if I think of one of every 12 or 13, 14 people being a member of the Communist Party or any party in the United States, I think to myself, whoa, this is really amazing. We have people who are participating in a democratic system. with their own ideas, they get elected on their own without state intervention whatsoever, and they have influence. And so I think that this is a real hope. Just as a corollary to that, I think this kind of system can be extended throughout the world

through the kind of developmental approaches that China has. And I think that is a hope, I mean, if one has a hope for the world and the future, I think it will come from China and nowhere else. So that's just kind of my initial thoughts on that. Well, that's a really interesting analysis, and I think a window into some of the potentials and structures within China that people need to know more about,

appreciate better, and put into some analytical context because obviously there's going to be, there has already been a lot of propaganda about China, an authoritarian state. And it seems that part of what's happening is the, you know, we saw this with the summit on democracy, you know, this kind of branding of countries that stand in opposition to U.S. global, you know, imperial capitalism as authoritarian versus liberal democracy. And it's just a replay very much of the kind of Cold War propaganda, the way of dividing and, you know, establishing the categories of what's freedom, what's democracy, and so on. And so it seems to me

maybe history will be quite an important guide for what Brett was talking about in terms of how the nature and shape of the conflict will go forward. Obviously, the U.S. and the Soviet Union never came into direct military confrontation in the period of the Cold War, but that doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of devastating consequences globally, particularly in the global south, where this is going to be fought over once again. And that's why there are all these countries that have signed up to this friends of the UN charter or are in relationship with China or looking for their development loans from China. This is something that is reproducing that kind of a split in the geopolitics of the world. So I think, I guess the real question is, is can we learn

from the history of the western left i mean we've been talking a little bit last time and uh henry prefaced at the beginning of our conversation the irrelevance of the western left um you know this is a problem if we want to be relevant i'm wondering in terms of this analysis what would you recommend is the appropriate stance and approach what can the western left do in understanding the situation better to actually be relevant for that project of a global internationalist socialist future that is sustainable.

Thank you, Adnan, for that analysis. I agree completely. I mean, especially on the question of freedom, one person's freedom is another person's subjugation. And, you know, I don't really think many Americans, or maybe they do, want to be free to get the coronavirus and so forth. And yes, the China state has locked down in the last two years and so forth to a tremendous

degree. But I don't really equate that with lack of democracy whatsoever. You know, what can the Western left do? Of course, the Western left has a prodigious history. I think it's, it doesn't really recognize some of, it's, you know, important. contributions to the philosophy of, you know, obviously Marxism and so forth. And yet it doesn't have the malleability to adapt to the conditions that are material, which is actually a contradiction to its original ideals of sticking with the reality

and material and historical conditions that face. the world. The Western left is made up of, you know, approximately 800 million to a billion people out of 8 billion. And so we have to recognize that number is shrinking proportionally and maybe in real terms. And yet at the same time, we control, you know, I'm just going to say conservatively 80% of all the wealth on the planet in terms of financial wealth. And I'm saying we because I am part of the West. And I think that has devastating and ruinous consequences on the rest of the world. I think the Western Left can do very little in its current capacity.

We saw the elections in Germany where the liberal left comes to power, the Green Social Democratic Alliance, which will have an even more staunchly anti-Global South position and is very dangerous. I also would argue, and this is, you know, when we say Western left, dare I say there isn't one. I think that's actually true, and there may not even be a left outside of a certain number of places. By that, I mean, over the course of the last 30 to 50 years,

the left has really been crushed. And so we're really talking about, you know, liberals, conservatives, and I don't like to use the IST word and fascists. So we have to build a Western left, and that's one of the most crucial issues that is facing us. So how do we build a Western left when you have people who are interested in their own self-economic advancement, which will only take place at the expense of the rest of the world?

That's a very hard ask. And I would say that there are pockets of highly ethical and committed people in the West who believe in internationalism. And I think we need to build them. And that's what I'm trying to do. I know that we probably have to work on a more ecumenical basis. I know this sounds crazy, but in the sense that with everything we've said previously, you know, we should be able to work with anarchists, we should be able to work with Marxist, Leninists, we should be able to work with even social Democrats to fight fascism and to

fight imperialism more than anything, because that's the only hope. Otherwise, I think there isn't any hope except for these, you know, small pockets of efforts to, you know, foment social change elsewhere. Yeah, well, there's obviously a lot of thinking and work that has to go into that, but vis-a-vis the China issue, it's definitely something that is often splitting and causing controversy on the left. So it's important to clarify these conditions and also learn how to talk and cooperate with one another on the common positions that we can all hold, which is to prevent further U.S. belligerence to the detriment of, you know, the causes of social justice and equality globally. I want to thank you very much for that answer.

Unfortunately, I have to leave, but I've really enjoyed this conversation. I hope to talk with you again real soon. Thank you, Ardnan. It's been a pleasure. Pleasure to speak with you. Thank you, Adnan. See you again in just a couple days as we record the next full episode of guerrilla history. Listeners, stay tuned.

It'll drop in two weeks after this episode comes out. But you mentioned Germany briefly, Manny. And I do have some thoughts on that because immediately prior to moving to Russia, where I currently live, I had lived in Germany other than for a year and a half of the pandemic. I lived in Germany for about three years. And the depiction of the left in Germany in countries like the U.S. is really, really misleading. And that includes by Marxists themselves. I think that a lot of Marxists uphold the quote unquote left in Germany to an undue degree. I know there's a very prominent economist, Marxist economist, I know just saying

prominent Marxist economists, most of the people listen to this are going to know exactly who I'm talking about. But I'm fairly good friends with him. We email back and forth and, you know, obviously I agree with much of his analysis. But one of the things that I always vehemently disagree with when he brings it up on his show, again, listeners, you know who I'm talking about. But I don't want to criticize anybody by name. That's not what we do here.

When he talks about the SDP in Germany, the Social Democratic Party, or actually I think it's SPD in German, when he talks about them, he talks about them as a socialist party. He talks about them as a party that's deeply influenced by Marxism. And that, frankly, as somebody who lived in Germany for several years and was somewhat involved with these, that is a dramatic misrepresentation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, even dealing. which is the left, that translates as the left in German, even delinca is not a good representation of what the left should be. And that doesn't even bring into question the Greens, which as you mentioned, this new government in Germany is a coalition between the social Democrats, which are Bernie Sanders. They're social Democrats. They are not socialists. They are not Marxists. a coalition between them, the Greens, and the Greens in Germany are absolutely appallingly bad.

They're eco-imperialists in every sense of the word, both in terms of having a global North chauvinistic perspective on green politics, as well as being flat-out imperialists in terms of wanting to expand NATO budgets, wanting to expand the military within Germany itself, wanting, being bellicose in terms of its positioning towards other countries. This is the Green Party that we're talking about here, this, this war-loving global North chauvinist party, they are not left by any stretch of the imagination other than the fact that they say, we want to ameliorate climate change. That's their only left-wing position and even their proposals for getting there, are

chauvinist in favor of the global north. And then the third member of the coalition is the Free Democratic Party, which is a almost libertarian free market capitalist party. This is the coalition in Germany. But yet we're still hearing that this is the insurgency of the left in Germany because the head of this coalition is the social democratic party. Never mind that the rest of the coalition are these eco-imperialists and this free market libertarian party. In addition to that, and I'm sorry for rambling on. something that gets under my skin when I hear it. Delinka, which, as I said, is still not a very good representation of what the left should be,

you know, Western left or any sort of left. This is not what the left should be, although one of the two co-chairs right now was better than the previous co-chairs. Janine Whistler is better than what they had previously. They got absolutely annihilated in the latest election, so much so that they almost lost parliamentary standing other than because there was a weird by rule that because they had a certain number of seats previously and because there was a certain amount of people that were signed up to the party, not necessarily that voted for them, that they were able to keep a parliamentary

amount that was to allow them to continue drawing federal funds. Without that, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation and Germany would have lost all of its federal funding. That's how bad delinca did in this last election, and yet we still hear about how there was this left surge in Germany, something that gets under my skin. But as you mentioned, Manny, and I'm sorry for rambling so long, this is, as you said, is there a Western left? I think that that is a very big question that we have to answer. Obviously, there's members of a Western left, but I don't think that there's any sort of coherent Western left in just about any country. Look in Adnan's Canada, The NDP, I'm sorry, Adnan, I know you're a member of the NDP, and some of their local

writing chapters are quite good. I will go out there and say that some of the local writing chapters of the NDP are quite good. But overall, it's a neoliberal party that is friendly with unions historically. The U.S. has nothing even remotely equating to that. Germany has this garbage coalition that I just described. The Scandinavian countries, which are, you know, what our left wing, quote unquote, politicians in the U.S. uphold as these great countries. In Denmark, we have parties, the governing parties have laws that go into place where they remove ethnic minorities from neighborhoods to keep the ethnic purity of some neighborhoods. Literally, these are laws that passed in the last couple years. In Sweden, we have governments

that, as we talked about recently, you and I, Brett, with Torkel-Lausen on Rev. Left, this is a, a country that is rooted deeply in the system of imperialism. And these are the countries that we're holding up on the far left fringes of the United States political discourse. It is very depressing. And I know that there's not really a question there. So I'll just kind of put that out there for Brett or you, Manny, to if there's anything that you want to say on it. Like I said, it was more of a rant than any sort of coherent message. I said that was a brilliant kind of exposition of where we are today. So I don't think it was a rant at all. I just want to add one thing to the Green Party of Germany that their foreign policy chief,

who is going to be the foreign minister, she will be advocating a so-called human rights agenda, which will contribute to higher levels of militarism against the Russians in the Ukraine region, but also with respect to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. And I think that just kind of sum it up, we don't have a left and that, you know, I almost, no, I don't almost, you know, not knowing Germany as intimately as you, I would say that Merkel was probably a far more stabilizing force for peace. and even on a level, you know, even equity, then this coalition that is denoted as being a left

insurgency. It's just bizarre. Yeah, and just adding my two cents into that, focusing on the U.S. left, because that's where I come out of, you know, how do you build it, you know, like for the left to exist in the United States, right? It needs to be, in my opinion, it needs to be organized on at least a national level. You know, we have like micro little community organizations. but that's not going to be able to do anything against the global juggernaut of, you know, Western capitalism and imperialism. So that's our task. You know, I think the U.S. would go fascist 99 times out of 100 before it would go socialist, right? Under like, under increasing pressure internally within the U.S., you'd just be given the settler colonial, white supremacist nature of the

country and the nationalism. And it would just, it would be more reactionary, I think, nine times out of 10 if got to play over and over again. So the question becomes, what does the left do? What can the, what can the U.S. left in particular contribute to the global socialist movement? And I think that's really where anti-imperialism comes in. And of course, you need to not just be anti-imperialist in words, although that's a start, people's political consciousness developing, pointing out how imperialism is terrible, I think is essential. And like, you know, pointing out, for example, to like regular Americans who might not be committed socialists or whatever, be like, you know, you want health care, you want housing. There's homeless people,

miles of homeless people in every major city in the United States. We can't even get paid paternity leave, you know, child care, et cetera, et cetera, living wage. But meanwhile, we have trillions and trillions of dollars going to the defense budget, the Pentagon for these endless wars, etc. Right. So if you're talking to the average American and you're trying to push across an anti-imperialist politics, simply to get the American boot off the neck of movements around the world. That could be an appeal that would be widely acceptable, I think, to an average American who would not go all the way with like a robust anti-imperialist politics. So these are ways that we can operate in the U.S. to try to get that boot off of the neck. And I think once that happens or

into any degree that it can happen, and of course, China as a counter hegemon plays into this as well, I think with the pressure of climate change, you'll see the global South begin, especially in lieu of that American boot on their neck to experiment with different ways of organizing their economy, different ways of structuring their ecological relationship, just out of pure necessity, those will be coming looking more and more like socialism or pushing whole societies in the direction of a more rational, more sustainable way of living, which could look like socialism depending on the place and context. So for me, it's not so much that the US left in particular is going to like storm the White House and take

power and create the, you know, communist state of the United States. But it's like, how can we get that imperialist apparatus weekend, tie up the U.S. state here at home, maybe with protest, riots, et cetera, and try to allow the global South to be able to freely flourish in the way that they, that they want to. And I think that would be a contribution that the U.S. could make. But there's the chauvinism and this U.S. exceptionalism in American leftist minds that, like, the U.S. left is going to somehow be like the deciding factor or be the leader of the global revolution. And I think we should disabuse ourselves with that notion. But as far as eucumenical socialism, I think it is important. It's going to have to happen. But I think on the Marxist left, we can hold the line on

anti-imperialism. Say, if we were going to, if we're going to get together and work around shared interest, we both have to come to at least some sort of agreement that the U.S. imperial apparatus is a threat to humanity, is an existential threat to the survival of our civilization, and is a murderous terrorist organization the world over and needs to be confronted. And if you're willing to say like, yes, that's bad and we should do what we can to work together to confront that, then we'll work with you. But if you're going to prop up chauvinism in the place of anti-imperialist politics, as you were saying, Henry, you know, example after example of left liberal formations that do nothing when it comes to anti-imperialism. And in fact,

their whole political project seems intertwined with it and want to perpetuate it. And I think that could be a strong dividing line like, you know, we're not willing to work with you if that's going to be your political project. But if you're willing to agree with us on this, we can work around shared interest. I don't know. Those are just some random thoughts that came to head when you guys were talking. Let me just hop in one second because Manny mentioned a minister of Germany. It reminds me I just saw a story yesterday where the new German, I think she's new, German defense minister, Christine Lambrecht, she's from the Social Democratic Party. She just made a visit to a NATO base in Lithuania.

And her one message there that she gave out was, Russia cannot dictate NATO's policies on regional security. But what is NATO's policies right now? NATO was trying to expand right onto the Russian border, which is something that there had been a promise that would not happen. This is under Bush the first. He and Gorbachev had a spoken agreement that NATO would not expand to anywhere near the Russian border, especially once the Soviet Union started to come apart.

But we've seen a continual expansion of NATO even after the Cold War fell apart. And NATO was supposed to be this Cold War entity. And so Russia, and I'm not defending Russia. I know I live here, and a lot of people are going to be, oh, yeah, Henry, he's defending Russia because he lives in Russia. No, no, I'm not defending Russia in this. But what I'm saying is that you have, on one hand, Russia is being surrounded and choked by NATO, and they say, hey, why are you coming right up to our borders?

Not only is there no justification for coming right up to our borders, and in fact, it's going to make us have to amass troops at our borders more because you have your troops right on our borders on the outside, right? It would be like if Mexico massed a huge amount of troops from China inside the Mexican border, obviously the U.S. would also amass troops in Texas, right? It just makes sense. So if NATO troops are starting to come near the Russian border, there's going to be a bigger mass of Russian troops near its external borders as well, which is only going to rise tensions. More NATO troops are going to. to come and I mean, this is how escalation happens. And so Russia is saying, hey, we don't want to

escalate things. You know, you can believe that or not. That's up to you. They say, we don't want to escalate things, but you're putting troops right near our border. So why don't you not do that? And then we can de-escalate. And the response from this German defense minister, who again is a social Democrat, is how dare you tell NATO what we can and can't do? We will do what we want to do. And you telling us that we can't do that is showing that you have imperial ambitions once again. I mean, this is, again, what it passes for the Western left. This is a minister of the Social Democratic Party of the most powerful country in Europe. Yeah, and all that after the Second World War, when the German state had come to the gates of Moscow and besieged Leningrad.

and all these major cities of the east with intentions to, you know, essentially destroy it in the United States coming in very, very late. Harry Truman said in 1940 when he was a senator, I believe, he said, let them just fight it out. Let's let them both kill each other and we'll take over, basically. And I think that at this point, under Biden, the situation has become even. more tense than it was under Trump, ironically, because of the escalation and the coalescence of Western forces to escalate their military presence throughout Central and Eastern Europe. I mean, the British are now landing tanks in Germany and elsewhere where they had removed

them in the Trump years. I think it's a very dangerous time in Europe and Central Europe and Asia and so forth. So what can we do here in the United States, I think, is to do whatever we can to, you know, join peace groups, et cetera, to fight for peace. I'm a member of the United States Peace Council, which is part of the World Peace Council and so forth. And, you know, we've done incredible work in trying to diminish any form of imperialism and war-mongering, sanctions, et cetera.

And I think it's getting through a little. It's a very principled organization. And I think more and more people in places like Greece and so forth are opposed to an increased American and Western European presence in the ecumen of Europe, but even beyond. And so let's see what happens. I think we really need to join peace groups. Again, I'll be ecumenical. It doesn't matter which peace group you join, just join one.

Because I think with the Biden administration, we see war more on the horizon than we did under Trump in a highly ironic way. I'm talking about major war. Absolutely. And just to reiterate what you said there about joining peace groups, I think there is a wide mainstream appeal that can be made to regular people that might not know as much about international relations or have as robust of a politic as us, just regular Americans that you can make that pitch. Like, we do not need to be, you know, in the, you know, going to war with these different countries or ratcheting up aggression, et cetera. Most Americans really hate that shit and don't like it. But I think that

also speaks to the anti-democratic nature of the U.S. state where, you know, there are huge majorities, like just like, for example, this recent Saudi arms sale, right? It was, it was, it was right, left, and center, you had majorities and the Republicans, independents and Democrats against this, you know, no, no, no. And they went through with it anyway. And I think that in and of itself is going to be a growing contradiction over the next several years as Americans right, left and center are like, hey, we have so many damn problems here in the, in the U.S. We need to start, you know, addressing them. However, we will do that. And we cannot get tangled up in these trillion-dollar, you know, wars abroad coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

as we are. So that's an appeal, as you say, that can be really impactful and can really make a difference. And joining peace groups, joining anti-imperialist organizations is a way to move in that direction. If I may jump in, this isn't something that I was prepared to talk on. So I don't have the citation in front of me. Perhaps I'll remember to look it up and stick it in the notes, but knowing my memory, I probably won't. But I remember distinctly, you can, you can quote me that this poll came out. I just don't remember the exact citation, but after the 2016 election, they did some polling and sociological study where they were looking at the approval of Donald Trump versus other Republican candidates as well as Hillary Clinton in different congressional

districts. And I believe they even went down to the county level. And what they found is that the counties, or at least the congressional districts, but again, I think they went to the county level. In the counties that saw the highest percentage of people die or were wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they saw Trump's approval in those counties skyrocket during the debates when he came out and said, I'm against the endless wars. And the other Republicans, they didn't say that. You know, they hedged their bets. They understood that Americans didn't like the wars. But they didn't come out with this firm denunciation of the forer. wars in the way that Trump did, whether you believed him or not, is another question entirely.

But what we saw is that these districts that had the highest number of people that were killed or were wounded in these forever wars, which you may think might be more conservative districts anyway, you know, more people willing to go to war. I would disagree with that notion. I think that a lot of the people that are going into these forever wars right now are drafted in in the poverty draft because the military is one way to get. out of poverty, at least it's seen by many people as a way to get out of poverty. But, you know, we don't have a full draft. So a lot of people see it as kind of a mercenary force at this point. And so you might think, okay, well, the places that have the most people going

into the military are going to be inherently more conservative and therefore would be in favor of these wars. But what we saw is that those people in particular understand the horror of wars because the people from those communities were directly impacted. by it. And these are in Republican primaries that we're talking about and in places where a lot of people are going to war. And we see that Trump's approval rating was mediocre in those places until the debate started and he said, I'm against the forever wars. And then those are the places that he outperform the Republican field more than any other. And similarly, when he got to the general election debates with Hillary Clinton and he called her out for her past support,

of these forever wars, again, we saw his support rise in these exact counties and districts where the most amount of people died. So even among people who aren't on, you know, the far left like we are, there is definitely inroads to be made with a genuine anti-war message. Now, Trump, again, whether you think he was genuine or not, is less the question than the fact that his so-called or self-proclaimed anti-imperialism was not coming from a principled perspective whatsoever. If we can present a principled left anti-war message to people, even if those people themselves are not on the left, you might be able to draw them into an anti-war movement. And then who knows, eventually they might drift into more left beliefs and left causes.

but that is definitely a good starting point. I agree with both of you. I just wanted to throw that out there. Yeah, really quick. I think America is ripe for something even more broadly than what you're saying is like a multiracial working class movement that is explicitly anti-war that can articulate a working class message and can operate outside of both the Republican and the Democratic parties because those two parties as institutions have completely lost, you know,

legitimacy in the eyes of most Americans. And I think that there's a ripeness for it. Like, will it emerge? And if it does, how will it emerge, et cetera? Now, with Trump, just to just to be clear, you know, like, he's an opportunist. He sort of, he knows which way the wind's blowing. But when push came to shove, I mean, he still did that strike on the Iranian general. He still, I think, bombed that Syrian airstrip. Once he gets in in those military, industrial complex, those generals, the Pentagon start whispering in your ear, you're more likely than not to be swept in the direction of more conflict, more war, et cetera. And I think, and I think,

think, and also the president has much less control than the average American thinks when it comes to ratcheting up foreign aggression or even doing more clandestine operations like coups or sending special forces in or drone warfare, right? When it's not a huge invasion that needs Congress's approval, a lot can go under that radar and not even be really noticed by the average American. So that the actual military industrial apparatus and the rhetoric are, you know, because most Americans agree with the rhetoric, but the power lies in the hands of the military industrial complex. You know, Trump calls it the deep state. And a lot of people on the left want to say, you know, just dismiss anything Trump says is absurd. But there is a deep state. It's the CIA.

It's the military industrial complex. It's the intelligence agencies. And they're around through terms, through presidents, through shifts in the popular mood. And they're the ones that really set the agenda and over long periods of time carry out American imperialism. And we have to make that clear to the average American, I think, in whatever ways possible. Just to briefly jump in, since you mentioned the deep state, I'm going to pitch our second full episode of guerrilla history, which is why Turkey is authoritarian with Halil Kareveli. We had an interesting story that was told on there, which is that actually in Turkey in the 70s, I believe, was the beginning of a conception of a deep state, like the conception of a deep state in

itself, as opposed to seeing a military industrial complex as its own entity, which we did since the end of Eisenhower's term. But, you know, this actual so-called deep state, this interrelated these organizations that are associated with the government but aren't necessarily the elected representatives, this sort of thought of this this, this convalescence of these forces really developed. And I, again, I believe it was the 70s in Turkey. And we had a, tell us about that. And it started in Turkey, that thought of a deep state, started in Turkey before just about anywhere else.

So listeners, if you haven't listened to that episode yet, it was a very interesting episode. But you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the show's history to find it. Mani, is there anything you want to say on this topic or should we transition towards the end here? Just briefly, I'd like to say that I think that the basic premise of building anti-war, anti-imperialist organizations is a way toward, it's kind of a cathartic moment here, toward a better and more coherent left in this country. It may not be the left we want from our perspective, but it will at least reduce the potential for imperial war. I have to add, however, that we cannot include NGOs at all in this process.

They are part of the deep state, and I think that really needs to be put forward. They're funded by the major corporations, multinationals, military, industrial complex, et cetera. And I'm saying every NGO virtually. Yeah, and I can shout out other previous episodes of ours on that front as well. Going back to our first full episode with Vijay Prashad on his book, Washington Bullets, we talked about the NGOification of imperialism. Just in, I believe we only talked about it briefly. And then again, in a more recent episode, we were talking with Amanda Ye of Radio Free Amanda

about USAID. And USAID, of course, is deeply interlinked with the NGO world as well. And we talked about how that serves as a form of soft imperialism in many ways for the U.S. So I think that we both agree with you entirely on that front and Manny that we have to completely exclude NGOs from any sort of anti-imperialist movement that we're trying to build because we see that these NGOs, even if some of them start with very principled stances and principled backgrounds, but they always get swept up into this broader NGO world of this soft imperialism. Okay, so we're going to head on our way out now of the conversation, and I know we had other topics planned, but we've already been talking for like an hour and a half. So instead of covering the other topic that we had planned for this conversation, why don't instead we just tease your upcoming books, Manny? Because as I mentioned at the very top of the recording, you have

five books coming out right now, basically. And first, of all, I don't know when you sleep. I don't know how you get all of this done, but I do appreciate your lack of sleep because I learn so much from your writing and your, when you come and talk to us on a platform like this, can you just briefly talk about what these works are for the listeners? Because I think that many of them are going to be highly interesting to the listeners. And I know that before we hit record, we already talked about a couple of them that we would like to bring you on in the future to devote whole episodes to those individual works. But I do think that all five will be interesting to the listeners. So if you could just kind of bullet point them for the listeners.

Well, I would like to add that I haven't done all of them alone. So I do sleep. At least I try to sleep four or five hours a night. We have a book coming out, Stuart Davis and I, on sanctions as war. which is rooted in the United States use of economic and other sanctions against states that they consider to be opponents to make them comply or in reality to depose them as their leaders. I don't think they can do that with China and so forth, but it's a very serious issue. And that's already out, but hopefully we'll be coming out in Brill, forgive me, in Hain. market in a number of months. There's also another book, the Oxford Handbook on Economic

Imperialism, which I did with Zach Cope, which will be coming out next month. And I just finished a book on the gig economy, which I think is crucial to understand for the American working class. It does show us a certain dimension to which certain categories, especially young, workers are being highly exploited young workers of color men and women and so forth i think it's something that we cannot exclude whatsoever you know there's so much uh to speak about that issue alone um i'm doing another book on precarious labor with uh anita hammer see i'm working with other people that uh will have maybe 20 or 30 essays on precarious workers in the global south many of them uh women And finally, I'm working on a book on the migration and development policies that the Western institutions, the United States, Europe, et cetera, are trying to promote to develop countries through having people leave those countries after they're trained in skills and so forth.

but you know my you know my main goal is political and the all the books are rooted in a perspective that is counterintuitive well i don't think sanctions are counterintuitive i think we should oppose them but counterintuitive in terms of trying to tease out the truth in these these various important topics yeah that's that's it all incredibly interesting and i know that a lot of the listeners are going to say oh henry's just saying this because Manny's on the call, but I genuinely believe that Manny, Immanuel Ness, is one of our most important thinkers right now, the amount of work that you're putting out as well as the topics that you're covering and the perspective that you're providing on these topics

is absolutely invaluable, both in terms of these works that you're putting out in terms of books, as well as your work that you do at the Journal of Labor and Society, for example, where you're an editor, absolutely fantastic work. And really invaluable. I think that the listeners, if they haven't picked up something that you've written before, something that you've edited before, they really owe it to themselves to go out and grab it because the perspective that you bring and the analysis that you provide on these topics and the framework that you operate under is something that we don't see enough of.

You know, maybe in times in the past, there were more people that were thinking from this perspective. You know, I can, of course, think of some in the past. but these days the voices are few and far between and when we do have people that think in this framework they are more or less hidden from us by you know the forces of academia the forces of publishing the forces of the media and so yeah thank you manny for all the all the work that you do I really do think that you're an invaluable scholar and an invaluable thinker and I appreciate the fact that you're a friend of the show when you share that perspective with us because it's very, very important.

I'd like to say in response, in history and class consciousness, Georg Lukash argues that his work is scientific, which I try to be as much as possible, but he disowns much of his previous work and every new work is supposed to shed more light on the realities of the world. So I come from the Lukashian tradition in the sense that I believe that I, you know,

throw my previous work into the River Elb or wherever, as Brahms did, just because I think it's not really important at that because I think we need to advance our thinking. So I think that's a very important point that we should all realize that this is always a process of scientific and social. advancement and trying to understand what, okay, as Torquilowson would argue, the principal contradiction, so to speak. So that's my goal. I just want to echo Henry's sentiments as well. Thank you so much, Manny. I really learn a lot from you, and I always love talking with you. Same here, Brett. I appreciate it. And I appreciate Henry. So on that note, then, again, our guest for this intelligence briefing was a manual

Ness, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, author of many books. You should really check him out. Thanks again, Manny. How can our listeners follow you on Twitter or anywhere else that you would like to direct the listeners to be able to keep up with the work that you are doing? I'm going to try to do a lot of work. I do a lot of work. I'm you said. So I'm going to try to have a social presence at some point. But yeah, I don't really post that much, to be honest with you. But maybe I'll try to do more of that. Absolutely. I noticed

that you don't use it that much, but well, every time that you do, it's always something that I really appreciate. So I'll link to how to follow you in the description of this episode. And listeners, you should flood Manny's follower list because, again, he really is important. Brett, thanks for joining me for this episode. Can you tell the listeners how they can follow you and the work that you're doing as we close out here? Sure. Yeah, you can just go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com and find the different shows, our Patreon, social media, presence, et cetera. And that's where I sort of centralize everything. So if you're interested, go check that out.

What's the next thing that the listeners can look forward to hearing from you? Because this will be coming out today on Patreon and Friday on the general feed. Yeah, perfect. We actually have me and Adnan did it. episode on Rev Left on St. Francis of Assisi. So we have like a two-hour episode where we really dive into the life and legacy of St. Francis. And, you know, Adnan's coming from a Sufi Muslim perspective and the perspective of medieval historian. And, you know, I'm interested long running in religion and mysticism, et cetera. So it's a really interesting and timely given the holiday season episode. So if you're listening to this, it's going to be out in the next day or two,

definitely check it out. Yeah, I knew that that was coming out. That's why I asked. So I'll wrap up for Adnan then because he had to leave a little bit earlier. You can follow Adnan on Twitter at Adnan a Hussein. That's H-U-S-A-I-N. You should definitely follow Adnan's other podcasts that he does called the M-A-J-L-I-S where he talks about the Middle East in Muslim Diaspros, North Africa. Very, very interesting podcast. They learn a lot from it.

And you can follow me on Twitter at Huck-1995, H-U-S-E-S-E-S-E. c k-1995 and just as a teaser for something that i did recently uh there should be an audio book coming out from foreign languages press with my voice reading it so if my voice doesn't absolutely disgust you when you listen to this podcast and if you've made it this far obviously uh you're not that opposed to it uh if you follow the foreign languages press feed on the different podcast apps they make all of their audiobooks available for free and uh yeah i just sent over the files from one but I won't tell you what it is yet. You should definitely follow them

and you'll see when it drops as well as on Twitter. I'll promote it. As for the show, you can follow us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Score-Pod and you can support the show

monetarily because we have to buy books and platform fees and whatnot by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. So until next time, Thank you for listening and solidarity. Thank you.