David Adler (@davidrkadler) returns to the show to share the work of Progressive International, including its election observatory, its research portal on the “Reactionary International,” its online advocacy campaigns, and, most ambitiously, its efforts to cohere ideas and people that could guide a “New” New International Economic Order. David shares his perspective on where allies are to be found in the pursuit of a just global system. David Adler is a political economist and the co-General Coordinator of Progressive International. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Colegio de México and a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. He writes regularly for The Guardian.
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This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.
[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights.
[00:00:07] David Adler: It is the case that four sentences of alleged piece of legislation can be responsible for the administration of 400 million people on the other side of the world because of our structural might and to have a more clear minded, more developed sense of these I don’t want to say pressure points, but these parts of U. S. policy, which can be won.
[00:00:37] William Lawrence: This is the Hegemonicon podcast, where we are investigating the workings of power. What is power? How does it work? Who has it? What are they doing with it? How the heck do we get it? And other small questions like that. I’m your host, William Lawrence, and I’m an organizer from Lansing, Michigan. Currently I work with the Rent is Too Damn High Coalition, an alliance of tenant unions and housing justice groups across the state of Michigan.
[00:01:06] Formerly, I was a climate justice organizer for 10 years, including as a co founder of Sunrise Movement, the youth organization that put the green new deal on the political map. Just a quick note. We recorded the interviews for this season between May and July. Now we’re releasing them in August and September.
[00:01:24] A lot has happened in the world in between those times, such as Biden dropping out of the race. So if you hear us speaking with blissful ignorance of what was to come, that’s what’s going on. But I think that the conversations are going to hold up very well for our tasks of building an internationalist left in the months and years to come.
[00:01:49] Hello, friends, and welcome back to the hegemonic on podcast. I’m your host, William Lawrence, and I’m recording from Lansing, Michigan, USA. I’m very glad to be rejoined by David Adler, a previous guest and a friend of the show. David is a political economist and the co general coordinator of the progressive international.
[00:02:12] He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Colegio de Mexico and a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and he joins us now from Mexico City. David, welcome.
[00:02:25] David Adler: Thanks so much for having me back. I feel very lucky to be a twice appearing guest.
[00:02:31] William Lawrence: Repeat guests. Yeah.
[00:02:32] One of the first. So this is, you’re, you are the perfect guest for our current sequence of episodes, which is really digging deep on the practice of internationalism, which is, I think, one of the, well, it really is the question of the day, given the increasingly violent and chaotic world scene that we are observing with horror.
[00:02:53] David, broadly speaking, I want to discuss two topics with you today. One is who, and the other is what, who are the countries and movements of the global South that are most mobilized in the task of building a progressive internationalist world order and who in the global North is the most receptive To those visions and that work.
[00:03:18] And then second what are some of the key ideas and visions and frameworks that are actually finding traction among those progressive internationalist forces and what are the tangible and concrete struggles that we’ll need to initiate or coalesce in order for those ideas to become reality. You’re the perfect person to be talking about this with.
[00:03:41] You’re the co general coordinator of the progressive international, which Is involved in so much of this work on a truly global international scale. So I want to begin with a few questions that give our listeners a sense for the progressive international’s actual work, which is really impressive and wide ranging, as I’ve said, so.
[00:04:00] I’d like to begin with your democratic observer missions. You’re headed on a delegation this weekend. Well, you’re in Mexico, but you’ll be participating in a, in an international delegation to observe the elections there and monitor any reactionary anti democratic interference. In recent years, I’ve seen you on similar missions in Turkey, Columbia, Peru, Guatemala, and those are just the ones I’ve seen come across my Twitter feed, so I think there are probably others.
[00:04:26] How do these delegations get arranged? What is the tangible work of these missions and why is this observer work an important part of the International’s men mission?
[00:04:37] David Adler: I think that our observatory is a great place to start this discussion actually. And instead of a more conceptual discussion of the meaning of internationalism, because it helps us focus very clearly on, on the question of the toolkit is a question I think.
[00:04:53] Conceptually and practically, it’s really essential for us to think about as internationalists, people who are listening to this program, as well as both of us, and certainly myself in the daily work of trying to coordinate this broad network convened to our progressive international. And so I think it’s helpful to tell the story of how this observatory was founded, and what is the work that it does, and why do I think it’s important.
[00:05:15] And to do that, we have to go back to October 2019 when a nefarious coup in the words of Evo Morales was conducted against the governments of the MAS, the Movement Toward Socialism in the country of Bolivia. Many of your listeners will probably remember there were accusations of fraud.
[00:05:38] That led to the toppling of the Morales government. I think it’s important to tell that story because I think it also sheds light on precisely the South North and North South dynamics that you hinted to in the introduction, why that fault line is very important. So let’s focus on this critical moment which is going to help us understand and not just the role and the need for a progressive international.
[00:06:01] But also the dynamics of our foe, of our opponent, of our nemesis, which is the Reaction International, how those forces coalesce, and understanding that Reaction International is going to be very helpful in terms of making sense of what are the tactics that will be necessary for us to win the world that we need.
[00:06:22] So in October, November 2019, the drumbeat had already been building for a long time. That the only way for Evo Morales to win these elections, despite the overwhelming mandates of the MAS, which is the name of the political party that had won three times putting him in three successive mandates, the overwhelming mandates, the drumbeat had been building for a while.
[00:06:42] NGOs, validate your acta, check your votes, Seeding this narrative that there was going to be fraud in the Bolivian election. And it’s important to mention that financing, a critical component of that financing for these NGOs was coming from the National Endowment for Democracy. So coming from the United States directly into this sort of Bolivian civil society initiatives that were essentially internal opposition initiatives to the government of Evo Morales.
[00:07:10] So, finally, on election day, a very typical thing happens in the vote count, which is that when the vote count gets rolling the election looks a certain way, certain exit polls come out, certain predictions come out, certain assumptions are made about how the vote will ultimately be counted in the end.
[00:07:25] And when you arrive at the end of the election, when the vote is actually counted, it gives you a slightly different image. That could do with the geography. Oftentimes, rural areas are voted before urban ones, because there’s more people in the cities, or vice versa. It’s easier to count in cities because it’s more accessible, and it is to count and transmit the actas, the formal vote counts, from rural areas.
[00:07:44] And so, from here is launched this incredibly potent claim of fraud by the MAS. So, from this kind of confusion I would say very artificial confusion about the nature of the vote count in Bolivia is launched as very false claim of fraud. And into that false claim of fraud that’s being led by a lot of these organizations jumps the Organization of American States.
[00:08:06] This is the Washington DC headquartered hemispheric organization of the Americas and the Caribbean, which was intended to. Provide for hemispheric governance for hemispheric issues, but ultimately became a weapon for the United States and its Cold War against communists. So we kick out Cuba, we suspend Venezuela, all of our adversaries, we exclude from the annals of the Organization of American States, and it’s no coincidence then that the primary sort of instruments to lead this coup becomes the word of the OAS and its electoral observer mission to say there was fraud.
[00:08:41] Into this vacuum of governance that’s created by this claim of fraud jumps all the great nefarious actors that you can imagine. There are British lithium companies, there’s the Catholic Church there is the Republican Party, there is the New York Times, who does a series of articles basically claiming that Evo Morales is a dictator and refuses to step down, and the OAS was damning and clear in its evidence, despite huge methodological flaws.
[00:09:06] And it’s electoral observer mission,
[00:09:10] William Lawrence: and this is stuff that is known, by the way, about the vote count that now is being piled on with doubt by the international community. Trump was making these same claims about, tranche of votes that come in late at night in Milwaukee or what have you in 2020.
[00:09:24] And at a certain point, he’s ahead in the count. And then at a certain point, he’s behind. But this is known because of the dynamics of vote counting. And you’re saying it was known as well in a Bolivian context, but there was essentially a deliberate misinformation campaign that then was amplified by all of these well, legitimate and neutral seeming international actors like the OAS.
[00:09:45] David Adler: Correct. Institutions, actors, entities, corporations, you name it, the broad tapestry that is this Reaction International jumps into the scene. And I won’t go into the long story of the Bolivian coup, but suffice it to say that lives were lost, blood was shed and an incredibly violent. Dictatorship took hold the country that brought some of the scariest, nastiest, most reactionary elements of the Bolivian far right in conjunction with the Republican Party that was then ruling in the United States who obviously always hated Evo Morales to power.
[00:10:14] Okay, now, all along we knew that vote count by the OAS It was itself fraudulence. There was very high quality research it was being conducted by the MIT Elections Lab and also by the Washington, D. C. based Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR, that was extremely cutting edge and used their own modeling to say, this was, there was no fraud here.
[00:10:35] And remember that the accusation was that the mosque couldn’t have gotten that level of votes. They were getting like 95 percent of votes in this precinct. And they used that number to say it would be impossible for the mosque to win 95 percent of votes. Now, here’s where the Progressive International jumps into action, at the invitation of the MAS, who is then looking for actors who are going to be able to support, validate, participate in electoral observation, not as a technocratic gesture, or a liberal mode of democracy promotion and defense, but rather as a frontline tool to prevent and unwind the mechanism that leads from disinformation down to dangerous.
[00:11:22] So the invitation of the mosque, we dispatch our very first electoral delegation that included international human rights lawyers statistical analysts, as well as parliament representatives who could each tap into their respective networks and capacities, from each according to ability.
[00:11:35] To try to support the MAS and its historic mission to restore democracy for the first time in history, just one year after a military coup against its government. So what we learned in the course of the Bolivian case, which is a happy story, ultimately ended up with democracy coming back to the country after much bloodshed, much mobilization, street blockades, violence committed against trade unionists and peasant organizations across the country.
[00:11:58] Was that. There was a tool there that could be used that democratic elections, let’s say the electoral process is neither the be all nor the end all of the democratic process, nor is it the essence of politics, right? So much of politics in the United States gets squeezed into this idea, we joke about this all the time, just vote or go to the ballot box if you have a complaint about democracy.
[00:12:23] We understand that’s a faulty view, but it is a crunch point, it’s a crunch point, and we know that the reactionary international works very opportunistically. They’re not sitting behind closed doors tapping their fingers against the, the table planning conspiracies all the time. Sometimes that happens.
[00:12:38] But most of what they’re doing is identifying those pressure points, pushing those pressure points and then leaping in once the door has been opened to assert themselves, assert their vision and their program in power. So from the basis of this successful electoral delegation. We thought it would be important to build a kind of whole observatory.
[00:12:59] And the reason why that was important for us to build out an institution was because we saw that the way that electoral observation was being done was itself a rather corrupt methodology. So the old way that electoral observation was done was a collusive deal between the observer and the electoral authority.
[00:13:14] The electoral authority would gain the legitimacy. of having William Lawrence present for an election, right, with his shiny U. S. American passport. Huge
[00:13:23] William Lawrence: legitimacy conferred, yes.
[00:13:25] David Adler: And you would sign a contract saying, okay, we won’t speak with the media, we won’t tweet, all we’ll do is prepare a report that will turn into the authorities to help them, improve, I’m putting that between air and air quotes here their process in the future.
[00:13:36] Now what that meant is that most observers went there basically for vacation. They wanted a picture with their favorite candidate. They wanted to drink some pina coladas in the hotel and go to a couple voting stations, take a couple selfies and go home. And what we discovered is that in this new, very 21st century information environment in particular with all those crunch points that we’ve already discussed, there’s One needs to be much more agile.
[00:13:56] The methodology needs to be about activating social media to to educate and mobilize people around these issues. An exit poll is not a final poll. The Volcan has a certain geography, a certain tendency to be patient, right? So that these things don’t get concretized and lead to violence in their wake.
[00:14:13] So part of what we said about doing in this observatory. was building out better tools, better methodologies, better mechanisms for democratic defense. And we’ve already seen the fruits of those efforts, as you mentioned, in a lot of these countries, right? We saw Guatemala fend off a coup. It was very important to light up the international community in defense of this very active attempt to subvert the electoral results on the day of the inauguration, as well as in the months prior.
[00:14:37] We saw in Peru the attempt to steal an election on the basis of a similar very Bolivian type of claim of 40, 000 stolen votes when the difference was 7, 000. So that would have swung the election. We were basically the only observers there to call bluff on that and say, show us the 40, 000 and really push for a democratic result in favor of then president Pedro Castillo.
[00:14:58] And other tools that are beyond the day of the election itself, right? So we’ve seen other instruments, not just false claims of fraud, but also tactics of, for example, legal warfare, which has become very important as formal, as violence, the Pinochet type of violence of, Kidnapping, disappearing, incarcerating opposition opponents is replaced by this highly developed system of lawsuits and, exile and, false claims of corruption that kind of crusade that has been, so instrumental in putting people like It’s also become clear that other tools are necessary for the internationalists, namely having a highly developed legal body legal experts who can participate and facilitate an active international and vocal and mediatic defense of these people in order to combat some of the more insidious tactics.
[00:15:47] So let’s come back to your original question and how it relates, I think, to the broader introduction that you made to the session. Which is that it’s very easy for internationalism to become about affective ties, to become about declarations and tweets, gestures of solidarity that are fundamentally rhetorical in nature.
[00:16:07] And with this observatory, it’s been one of the ways that we’ve come back down to Earth and thought about, This is not a be all, this is not the solution to the problem, neither structural nor social, nor to do with kind of the polarization of our societies, the immiseration of workers, whatever it may be.
[00:16:25] But at least at that front line, in these moments of highly, high vulnerability for, progressive and left wing forces around the world. There can be a role for international organization like ours to play in protecting the space, pushing back against primarily global North actors, be they mediatic, corporate or political in nature to create increasing room for domestic progressive actors to actually, put forward their program to be able to vote freely and fairly in a transparent process to win elections and come to government.
[00:16:59] And so each of those phases requires a different kind of tool. There’s a phrase that I really like from our Colombian members, the Colombian, the Pueblos, the People’s Congress, they say, it’s one thing to win an election. It’s another thing to win government. It’s another thing to win power.
[00:17:14] And it’s another thing to win popular power. Each one of those steps on the way from, this is just in in the, in, in the sort of democratic, formal democratic process implies a different. A different set of responsibilities, a different set of tools and tactics for the internationalists that’s trying to operate at that scale that isn’t trying to interfere in those local processes, but it’s trying to guarantee the absence of interference.
[00:17:41] In order for local actors to be well organized, not distracted by legal cases, not fearing for their lives, and to gallop forward with their transformative vision, that they can then be the basis for popular mobilization in its defense. And I think that’s a crucial piece, and it’s also what we’re trying to do here in Mexico.
[00:17:57] I could go on about the Mexican case, I don’t know when this podcast is going to come out, but I’ve gone at length as you can tell, I have plenty of nerding out I can do about these questions of observation. But I think it actually is quite rich terrain. to think about what our attendant responsibilities are.
[00:18:13] William Lawrence: Yeah, there’s a lot of
[00:18:15] David Adler: internationalists.
[00:18:16] William Lawrence: There’s a lot there. Yeah, especially this distinction between affective gestures versus high value strategic interventions. So I definitely want to come back to that piece. Thread that through. You mentioned the Reactionary International. This is a, interlocking web of right wing governments, think tanks, religious institutions, paramilitary forces, and so on.
[00:18:38] And you have launched a research portal on the Reactionary International, which has a number of briefings on different nodes in this web. I wonder if you could just say a bit more about how you. conceptualized the reactionary international and why shedding a light, giving a name to that network and then shedding light on its particular interworkings is another key emerging plank of the progressive international’s work.
[00:19:07] David Adler: The place I always start when speaking about this project, about this research consortium that we recently launched in partnership with CLACSO, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences and Transform Europe. is that we don’t actually know very much about the Reactionary International. We need to start from an honest assessment of what we know and what we don’t, and what are our known unknowns, and indeed what are our unknown unknowns about the practices and the entities and the business of the Reactionary International.
[00:19:34] I always give a simple example that I think is very illustrative, which is You know, we’ve been lucky enough to have a series of investigative pieces or large scale consortia of journalists who have been focused on these questions of spyware that have revealed that in certain cases, technologies like Pegasus have been targeted to journalists and opposition candidates and activists by, let’s say autocratic governments.
[00:20:00] We’ve also been lucky enough to have whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. Who alert us to plans and technologies by our own national security agency to spy on friends and foes like, but for you and me, we still don’t really know what’s on that cell phone. We don’t, we entrusted in all the technologies that we use with, with our most intimate secrets and details and schemes and plans, but we don’t even know really who’s reading it and how they’re reading it.
[00:20:26] And it’s something that we just learned to live with. And that’s a simple example, but I think it also applies at a larger scale to sort of financial networks. Similarly in financial networks, we’ve been lucky enough to have exposés like the Lux Leaks, Pandora Papers, Panama Papers that reveal.
[00:20:42] The sort of architecture of tax havenry and financial machinations but in general, there’s a lot that we don’t know about how reactionary forces are funded, how money is moving across borders who it’s supporting and how, we really don’t know this. We know we don’t know this.
[00:21:00] And so, over the course of the past few years, we’ve gotten so many. queries and requests from our members and friends and allies to say, Hey, I’ve been a victim of some of these insidious attacks. Can you help me understand who they are? To give you an example from here in Mexico in the course of just recent weeks of this campaign, we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of tweets.
[00:21:25] Emerging from Colombia, from Spain, from Argentina in particular, that are with hashtags that emerge from nowhere to get them trending, changing the kind of really flooding this already quite polluted information sphere. And we don’t know who’s orchestrating them and how much they’re paying and how that money is moving.
[00:21:42] And it’s certainly illegal, right? So there are tools that we could use. Should we be able to shed light on, on these activities, but we don’t really know enough about them. So there’s a good case study that we developed of this kind of cluster of spyware digital mercenary agencies in Tel Aviv the NSO group among them team Jorge is one of these who brags openly on record.
[00:22:05] Not on record, but now it’s on record by a really impressive investigation from last year. Of actively interfering in a range of electoral cases, both in Latin America and in Africa. And that’s, through hacking people’s phones to get sensitive information. That’s through this kind of bot warfare.
[00:22:22] And that’s not to say that disinformation is everything. It’s just to say, Both it’s important for us to get a grip on what, I’m not one of these people who thinks Cambridge Analytica was the reason Trump won. It’s important for two reasons. One, it’s important to know who are the actors and how they’re influencing these democratic processes.
[00:22:39] And two, because by and large, they’re illegal. And I’m also not obsessively legalistic in the way that I think, but one of the instruments that we do have in progressive government is a justice ministry, is a secretary of justice or whatever that position may be, an attorney general, who’s able to take these actresses to task and launch their own more public investigations without having to rely on the courageous, backroom dealings of a sort of, justice ministry.
[00:23:07] At Pubco or Yeah. Guardian or New York Times journalist. Right. To help us make sense and ultimately to seek accountability for some of those more criminal Yeah. Dealings. And so the goal of the research consortium is first of all, to not let these reactionary actors get away with it, so to speak.
[00:23:25] A lot of what happens at the speed of our politics today, crazy shit happens and then just gets swept away in the great ocean of 21st century politics. And so it’s to remember and build a kind of repository or to build a set of case studies that can actually be like, this is how it worked.
[00:23:45] So not just to do that, but also to be a helpful instrument for our kind of friends in government to say, you should feel free to lead on these things once we have the capacity and the legal authority to do so, whether that’s from a legislative kind of parliamentary angle or from an executive.
[00:24:01] One. And so the goal, if people want to go see this for themselves at reactionary. international, which we tried to make a kind of very accessible site is to not just show the who and the what. So to have a database there, but not just to have a database, but also have these case studies that illustrate the how do they coordinate?
[00:24:18] Because it goes back to the Bolivia conversation. Many people have this idea that reactionary forces are sitting there around a big round table. But really it’s about, creating these openings and sowing chaos which ultimately brings us to the kind of great grand asymmetry of left and right wing politics because, right wing politics thrives on that entropic dynamism, right?
[00:24:41] If you can introduce confusion and chaos into the situation. They have the military might and the economic force and the, allies in high Northern institutions to deliver them, straight into power from that vacuum, as we saw in Bolivia. And we require strong social fabrics.
[00:25:00] Solidarity.
[00:25:01] William Lawrence: Yeah. All you have to do on the other side is sow chaos and teach people to fear each other. And that’s. That’s pretty easy, especially when you have like a hundred billion dollars to do it.
[00:25:12] David Adler: Totally. Yeah. So, yeah. So, so I think, it’s a very, it’s a very humble kind of premise to say, let’s just, let’s dedicate ourselves and a bit more of our time, resource and energies to really making sense of what this thing is, to naming it for what it is.
[00:25:27] And in doing so really highlight entities of the action national that are not. Traditionally highlighted. Far too much ink, in our opinion, has been spilled to describe the eccentricities of a Javier Millet. His dogs that are clones, his sexual desires for his sister, right? Ultimately, what really matters in the Reaction International, are big consultancies like Accenture or KPMG or McKinsey that are designing these policies around super surveillance or incarceration or migrant control.
[00:25:54] Or they’re these spyware companies that are legal in the Israeli context but participating in illegal activities. Or they’re foundations built into the Atlas Network that are diffusing these dangerous ideas and building out campaigns in support of doing climate denial and driving through fracking projects, whatever it may be.
[00:26:12] William Lawrence: Yeah, these people will have no shortage of, Useful idiots like melee to to do their bidding. But as long as they can hide in the shadows. So the PA PI also does advocacy campaigns and, calls to action to support its members groups and its campaigns and to intervene in critical moments.
[00:26:29] This is the stuff that looks to me like the most legible from the perspective of the, immediate. digital advocacy campaign with a demand of the sort that many social movement organizations here in North America often participate in. So an example of this recently is that the P. I. Has been involved with a campaign targeting the prime minister of Spain, challenging him to live up to his statements of solidarity with.
[00:26:55] With Gaza and block the passage of a military cargo ship that is headed through Spanish port towards Israel. So why is this work broadly, these sorts of calls to action, why are they a part of your work? How are they initiated? And I’m really curious, like again, what is the immediate goal of these campaigns within your broader mission?
[00:27:15] Is it to build solidarity? Generally speaking, is it to achieve material outcomes? You Is there some sort of strategy around high leverage interventions or or what, so I’m curious to hear you speak about that.
[00:27:30] David Adler: I come from a lot of frustration. I think that a lot of my colleagues on our secretariat, we share, we’re from the same generation.
[00:27:37] We grew up in the wake of this great collectivist movement. What is it called? We move on, whatever it is. Yeah. This idea. I’m glad you started
[00:27:49] William Lawrence: here, by the way. Yeah, because I share that. And I, so, so yeah, carry on.
[00:27:54] David Adler: And it brings us back to this question of the toolkit. Like, so, if you go to many large INGOs websites, I won’t name them, but even Amnesty International is a good case, right?
[00:28:09] If you go to any one of these INGOs websites, it’s going to give you a bunch of information and it’s going to give you a bunch of different verbs. Get involved, take action, support, and all of them are going to lead you to a petition. And maybe a donation ask. All of them. All of them.
[00:28:26] It will all just lead to, give us your email, and give us money. And give us your email now, and maybe we’ll email you in two months to ask you for money later. Or give us money now, and while you’re giving us money also give us your email so we can ask you for money later. And this just was the paradigm for twenty years.
[00:28:41] That accompanied this great wave of transnational advocacy, where it was this idea, a very quixotic idea that your voice was going to matter as a global citizen in the new kind of transnationalized resistance that was a very late 90s, early 2000s. I’m just remembering
[00:29:02] William Lawrence: Avaz. I’m like, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.
[00:29:05] But they had, they probably had a hundred million or more email addresses worldwide. And
[00:29:09] David Adler: Yeah. You should still have heard of them because they have tens and tens of millions of dollars. They have so much money. It’s outrageous. And how many, organizations have been spun off from that.
[00:29:17] But we, I think emerged with a lot, we come of age with a lot of frustration. about this idea that’s totally useless and totally self serving in the end, and may have had some kind of potent this idea that you could bring together people across borders in support of a cause. But that’s pretty what’s the word I’m looking for?
[00:29:37] It’s pretty orthogonal to the actual, to a real, the point of power. It’s played out.
[00:29:41] William Lawrence: It’s, someone might have, we might’ve been excused for thinking that could really make a big difference. 15 years ago, but it’s 2024 now and we’ve seen what we’ve seen. Yeah.
[00:29:50] David Adler: So I think you can think of any one of these types of campaigns or initiatives in a more classical sense that we might run as having ambitions that are both high and low.
[00:30:01] I’m not even sure which one’s high and which one’s low. Let’s just call them apples and oranges. So the apple in this case would be to say, okay, we’re going to take a cause, a case that we think is really illustrative, it’s important, it’s it tells us something valuable about where the world is, right?
[00:30:17] It’s not tapping into some, it’s not save the Amazon rainforest. It’s stand up for the former mayor of Riace, Italy in the Southern region of Calabria, who’s been put in prison by Salvini for creating a safe haven for African migrants. with the support of the European Union is now facing 12 years in prison for having dared to be solidaristic to the refugees seeking their legal right to asylum in Europe and therefore facing legal consequences, having been stripped of his income and thrown in house arrest.
[00:30:55] Right? That’s a case where we can do a lot of political education, we can build a kind of global consensus, we can get people on the same page, we can bring people into the fold who are similarly enraged by this case, right, and who might want to be part of our network. Because I don’t think that’s to the point of Navas, it does matter your reach.
[00:31:16] You’re a bit, one’s ability, and this goes to the toolkit question, so having a big list, It’s huge. You can move a lot of people, change a lot of minds, bring something to people’s attention that they never would have seen in the annals of mainstream or corporate media. And that’s important.
[00:31:35] So it can’t be brushed away entirely. It just. This can’t be the epicenter of our theory of change as internationalists. But that’s, that is important. So that’s the apple or the high kind of, consensus formation and indeed list building aspects of the work. But then there’s this low, close to the ground low, not low in terms of its ambition, low as in this thing needs to be won.
[00:31:57] And that brings us back to this question of what are the pressure points? What are the things that can be won? That if you want to frame it a different, differently, that are non reformist reform. However, we apply that to causes, right? That are like non cause, cause, like are non NGO, I don’t know how I would phrase it, the essence of a non reformist reform is that when you win it.
[00:32:16] It then creates fertile ground for winning other things, right? It’s you push on a place and you reveal a whole terrain of conflict or struggle. So to come back to the case of of of our friend Mimo Lucano in Riace. You push on this case that you could bring a huge coalition of centrists and liberals and leftists, of course, to the table to say this is, of course, an offense to our humanity, an offense to the nature of solidarity, and of course, to the international right to seek asylum, whatever it may be, right?
[00:32:45] But once you push on that, then you get into a bigger question. Okay, well, what is Italy actually doing in southern in the south? What are its practices? Around Frontex you build a bridge to these other types of issues, namely the concentration camps that have been built on the Mediterranean to detain, kill, and expel migrants.
[00:33:02] And that helps us to move to another set of causes. So you know, with. The Spanish arms shipment, what, let’s take that logic and apply it there. We’ve got the, a very low thing. We have a, we’ve got this so called progressive government that has made these, this commitment. A series of commitments and it’s clearly in direct violation of those commitments.
[00:33:26] We basically know from our experience of working on that campaign that this port of Cartagena had been used many times. It was obvious for these arms shipments, right? But through that, we can talk about the UN arms treaty. We can talk about the integrity of this treaty, of which all of the European countries are signatories, where even a country like Czechia, which was the ultimate destination of one of these boats, is a signatory, and is violating the nature of that law by passing on, by being the second largest provider of weapons from Europe to Israel.
[00:33:56] So, it gives us A way of, first of all, creating an axis of antagonism and through that axis of antagonism opening up into a broader set of issues that I think are really relevant for all the type of for the politics that we’re describing.
[00:34:10] William Lawrence: I I really love that first example about from Italy.
[00:34:13] It just strikes me as obvious. Having heard that story now that it really matters that there is some organized group of people in the world who is willing to stand up for people who take acts of courage, such as that swimming upstream against a tide of nationalism and genocidal sentiment. It is incredibly important.
[00:34:37] Acts of courage, swimming upstream against those sentiments is going to be one of the things that gets us through to a better place in the midst of the tides that we’re living in.
[00:34:48] Sound on Tape: Hi there, this is Kayden, the publisher of Convergence, and the host of our weekly news magazine, Block and Build. If you’re enjoying this show, I’d love to invite you to join me every Friday for a breakdown of the headlines with the kind of insight and analysis you’ve come to expect from Convergence Magazine.
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[00:35:40] Thanks for listening.
[00:35:46] William Lawrence: I want to move on into what appears to me as like, this is all obviously very ambitious, but I would dare say this is the most ambitious plank of your work. And the Progressive International has co convened a series of dialogues, symposia and conferences to strengthen the intellectual scaffold scaffolding of our visions and tangible pathways towards a new future.
[00:36:12] Thank you. International governing and social order. Most recently you hosted a conference in Havana to mark the 50th anniversary of the new international economic order in IO and to build the framework for a new NIO for the coming decades, a new international economic order. Could you tell our listeners just a little bit about the original NIEO and I stress a little bit because I know you’ve written about this and there’s a lot of other questions I do wanna get to.
[00:36:43] But then tell us a little bit more about what ideas are at play in the new NIEO.
[00:36:50] David Adler: I think it’s really critical to revisit this history, and I promise I won’t. It’ll take longer than the time that’s been allotted to me, but I think it’s very important to this history because every day we hear these pundits and policymakers talking about the novelty of our time.
[00:37:09] Everything is supposed to feel new. The technologies are new. The crises are new. Everything’s supposed to become more complex than it’s ever been and more novel than you could have imagined 10 years ago. And it’s just not. We’re bumping up against questions that have been asked and answered by our predecessors in similar struggles and all, all around the world.
[00:37:33] And it’s so critical in a time of obviously I consider myself totally illiterate in much of the great history of. struggles around the world and I think we just need to get more read up so as not to repeat these mistakes. Right. And I think it’s helpful to look at the seventies.
[00:37:52] This is just 50 years ago. So it’s very helpful to look there. And when I started. Really becoming a student of this moment in the late sixties and early seventies, the kind of high point of third worldism. You hear these speeches which are just so relevant, not just in their general political and ideological character, but in their policy prescriptions.
[00:38:11] And it’s very embarrassing, it’s very sad to hear those things, because we’ve come so far. But it’s also very important because we see just how little ambition we really have today, just how big they were thinking, how structurally and transformatively they were thinking. And just how limited we are today in the ambitions and the horizons that we set for our own projects across the board and around the world.
[00:38:38] So in the late 1960s, early 70s, out of the so called non aligned movement, which was that kind of. Third camp that emerged in the third world on the basis of certain principles of international cooperation and respect for self determination and national sovereignty. There’s this push to develop a kind of vision for the New global economic governance that would accompany this great long period of post war decolonization.
[00:39:06] All these newly independent nations who are trying to establish themselves and are very worried about the long legacy or the long shadow of colonialism. That was not just in territorial colonialism, but also economic colonialism. Namely resource domination, extraction economic exploitation, the ways in which even when, the French or the English, the U.
[00:39:26] S. would leave these territories, their economic actors and their economic treaties would stay behind. And so they set about developing this very powerful vision that was ultimately passed to the United Nations in 1974 for the total transformation across many different dimensions. And it’s not as if it was.
[00:39:44] A zero sum exchange. The proposal that was emerging from the third world at that time was, we are suffering from these horrible declining terms of trade from these repetitive crises. We don’t have a chance to build up our productive capacities. And I get that, or we get that, you think you’re getting rich off of our poverty, but actually the world is suffering as a result of the great instabilities that are built into our international systems of money and finance and trade, etc.
[00:40:11] And of course, to no one’s surprise, the U. S. and its Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, said about dismantling, or pulling the teeth, was his phrase, of the original NIEO. Okay, so it’s widely considered a failure by historians, although I would challenge that interpretation. And so I think this project, 50 years later, is really about making sense of what was the NAIO, of making sense of what is its present legacy, and then also trying to develop a plan and a vision for its renovation for the 21st century.
[00:40:41] And that comes out of a similar set of frustrations about the state of debate in many of the actually existing fora. Many people listening to this program, maybe you yourself will, would have participated in a cop process, for example. These are just horrendous. I never did,
[00:40:57] William Lawrence: but this has been a major focus of emphasis among the, and something that has spurred internationalist consciousness, among the cop movement.
[00:41:04] Within the climate movement over the last 30 years. But yes, horrendous. Yeah. People who have spent the most time there are also the most pessimistic about its prospects.
[00:41:14] David Adler: Yeah. I don’t even know what prospects I would assign to the COP process, but both it’s depressing, both in the charade of the civil society, so called green zone where a lot of these INGOs come together to just dance around and whatever.
[00:41:27] I don’t know. I don’t even know what they’re doing. Show their donors that they are doing something. And then it’s equally or even more depressing in the so called blue zone, where the negotiations are actually happening and we end up with something like a loss and damage fund that’s controlled by the World Bank.
[00:41:39] And, it’s paltry compared to what’s actually required. So, we said about Tens of thousands
[00:41:44] William Lawrence: of person hours, it should be said, from really good, social movement leftists, well meaning people, have gone into something that has proven to be well, a dead end.
[00:41:54] David Adler: Yeah. And, it’s not the only tactic that’s, these are, there are many brilliant visions that are competing at the COP.
[00:42:01] It’s just, driving them to their lowest common denominator, which is a march in the street and then, a series of minor concessions by the United States. So, the question of sovereign, let alone sustainable development is left on the table and there’s a lot of reasons why that is.
[00:42:17] That’s one of them. Okay. But as I just mentioned, it’s this kind of INGO capture and you don’t have to be a kind of crazed leftist to think that there’s something about the ways in which these INGOs are designed to make us waste our time and do things that, look good, but actually don’t threaten any system.
[00:42:34] That’s, I think it’s a feature, not a bug of the way in which a lot, most of the major funding is coming into these spaces that are otherwise geared toward or aiming toward a more transformative process. But it also gets us to a question that you set out in the outset, Will, which was about Global South protagonism.
[00:42:53] And the problem that we have and one prime minister of the G77 put it well when I was in Kampala for the Third South Summit in January, is that governing now is walking, in the Global South, is, walking up a down escalator. You’ve got a series of structural crises around debts and, fiscal space and price shocks in commodities like food, right?
[00:43:14] That are heavily restricting the capacities of these governments to lead transformative processes. You’ve got huge degrees of political volatility in democracies and non democracies alike. We’re winning very insecure majorities even in places like Brazil or Colombia that make it very difficult to govern.
[00:43:31] We live in a kind of generalized crisis of governability where there’s no really strong mandate, the popular mandate is. These governments are coming into power with and then, of course, a kind of series of social divisions that make these really tough, right? Increasing amounts of religious polarization, of geographic polarization, racial polarization all of these kind of combine with the external pressure of the United States or with the global north.
[00:43:53] Which, as one, diplomat rightly observed to me when I was in Kampala, the difference between now and the 70s is the North is much more homogenous than it was 50 years ago. There’s much more coherence, diplomatic coherence, much more effective integration of their interests, however much Europe talks about strategic autonomy.
[00:44:10] It was different when De Gaulle was in outright war with Nixon over the gold standard and the exorbitant privilege of the U. S. dollar, and that created room for the global South to do better negotiations. It also was totally different with the structural leverage of the South vis a vis the fossil fuels.
[00:44:25] So when the U. S. wasn’t the fucking world leader in gas exports and actually needed to talk to the global south about its resources in a more serious way, now the U. S. is an exporter of primary commodities to the global south, as opposed to an importer. That fundamentally transforms the negotiating capacity of the global south.
[00:44:43] All this to say that there is a distinct, clear, and urgent need to bring together actors Both scholars who are leading on the kind of theory and development of the of the policy ideas with diplomats who understand the international arena and how to negotiate for these types of visions and bureaucrats, vice ministers and people who are inside the state and can really try to move a lot of these proposals.
[00:45:08] For a new agenda around sovereign development in the 21st century, one of the first things to go in the new, shall we say, cold war or the new world of great power conflict, whatever the narrative is, right? One of the first things to go is going to be a development agenda, right? Everyone’s going to get very concerned about arms and weapons and fear of invasion.
[00:45:32] And the whole agenda around development, which was premised on a period of kind of You know, not hot conflict around general agreement on rules of game and how to participate in such a way that, however, mendaciously supports a kind of program of helping the poor be less poor. I think that’s going to be one of the first things to go.
[00:45:54] So one of our major projects has been trying to bring these people together to renovate that vision. What is the new NIO? Right? And what’s a program of action? What are some of the concrete proposals that we can actually table to win that? And that’s not asking for charity. So right now, after the Havana Congress, the 50th anniversary Congress we had in Havana, now we’re deep in preparations for the program of action that we’re gonna be releasing ahead of the General Assembly in September, in New York.
[00:46:17] With a lot of government actors from South Africa and Columbia and elsewhere that we were involved with in, in Havana. Proposals that don’t rely on the charity of the North, but rely on the coordinated and collective action of the South. So, that could be on finance, where you might, there’s that great adage that it’s, You owe the bank 10, 000, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 100 million, you own the bank.
[00:46:39] A similar logic should apply to sovereign debt and organizing a kind of debtor’s club to exercise creative, greater collective force and at the bargaining table. Same with resource cartelization, exercising more power over things like cobalt and lithium and even coffee that are important commodities that circulate in the world.
[00:46:59] We need to have a better suite of policies that attend to present crises, but that don’t rely on the goodwill of the North, which is increasingly scarce but can be built by the South, for the South, in the South for a more a true and more resilient sovereign development agenda.
[00:47:17] William Lawrence: Thanks for that.
[00:47:18] I want to ask about the set of actors who are participating in these conversations that you co convene and co convene as the progressive international. You have as your members, civil society organizations and social movement groups from around the world. You also work with progressive governments and representative of governments, especially in Latin America, it would seem.
[00:47:42] And then you also have ties to, various parties in Europe. I’m curious, what is your philosophy about working with states and their representatives versus civil society groups versus opposition parties? And can you talk What criteria must be met for any of these entities to be considered members or to become collaborators with the Progressive International?
[00:48:11] David Adler: So here we need to start from a fundamental admission of weakness. The international left has, I would say, never been weaker than it is, right, right now. In 150 years. It’s really a moment of deep and debilitated correlation of forces. For the international left. So starting from that basis, we need to revisit the idea of the old internationals.
[00:48:32] Of course, we consider ourselves in the great lineage of internationals, which we’re trying to build a very ambitious idea, but we think a very necessary one. Those were all political parties. Now we know that political parties today no longer have a monopoly on collective action, on even affective connection to people.
[00:48:52] Most people in the world. trust their political parties less than they trust their local neighborhood associations or social movements of which they’re part, right? Now, you combine that with a general observation, a secular observation of our weakness, and it becomes clear that it’s going to take a village to reconstruct, to reinforce, to rebuild.
[00:49:13] The international left, generally. So, from the very beginning, we opened our doors to everyone, from parties, to movements, to unions, to research centers, to local community organizations, that, with a kind of general Marxist philosophy of from each according to ability and to each according to need and there is a role, as I just mentioned, in our observatory, right, even for, like, a small little investigative outlet, or for a think tank in our NIO project, right?
[00:49:40] Everyone has a kind of. role to play. So that I think speaks a bit about the diversity of our coalition and a bit on the political pluralism as well. Because if this was 1921 and the Russian revolution was just successful, other revolutions were going to be on the way, who, we have a common turn.
[00:49:58] Okay. Then we can argue about what strand of socialism are you, but we don’t have that privilege. We need a broad front approach to these crises. It’s clear minded in its politics. We have a very clear political declaration that is the kind of basis or the backbone of our coalition, which lays out the kind of core principles of our international, right?
[00:50:19] But we need to work with a lot of people, from the leftist social democracy all the way to the revolutionary communists. It’s, we need to have a really broad sense of who’s part of this coalition and be very clear minded about what it is, right? We’re less interested in virtue signaling, which is where a lot of us have ended up in our approach to our hyper individualized social and mediatic communication and more about identifying what are these tactics.
[00:50:46] And that puts us in two different places politically, I think. So let’s talk about the first place, the kind of progressive side of our work, the kind of more left wing and principled coalition building that we’re doing. So I think it’s important, this goes back to our conversation about what the 1990s and early 2000s were, what the avas, we move on, whatever moment was.
[00:51:08] We are not transnationalists, right? So we don’t have a fetish about. We don’t think global civil society works, and we don’t have a fetish about non state actors being the true, liberators of our time. We think we are internationalists, which means that we believe in products of national liberation, we are not, we understand the nation state has problems that need to be discussed, we’re very much related to projects that are, Reimagining and reenvisioning political community beyond the nation state.
[00:51:36] But we recognize that for the vast majority of the world, nearly all of it, the nation state remains the most recognizable vehicle for popular sovereignty and the most effective instrument for improving people’s lives and livelihoods. This is just one example. What it is. So, and in the case of democratic countries, very broadly defined, I think electoral democracies, but democratic countries, we might say, right?
[00:51:59] Those states embody in either for a period of time or through periods of time, the needs, desires, demands that are incorporated and represented in those governments. So when it comes to working with state actors, Okay. We, unlike the great kind of hand wrung complex of the 501c3s who are obsessed with maintaining, we don’t work with states, much of which comes from a kind of bending the knee to the State Department, really, because they’re so afraid of some of this kind of idea that, Everyone’s a potential adversary for the United States government.
[00:52:35] We think it’s very important to support, to work with, to collaborate with, to endorse, where it’s necessary a lot of these state led initiatives. Of course, it doesn’t mean there’s no room for criticism, but it means that, we as an organization, we don’t endorse candidates. We don’t support parties in elections.
[00:52:53] We don’t say governments are great. We stay narrowly focused on our mandate, which is to go where the international dimension has been activated, particularly the South North dimension has been activated, namely Northern entities, institutions, corporations, people, parties are intervening in Southern processes and trying to hold the line and defend the ability for those Southern, yes, states, but also parties and movements and unions to do their work without fear of interference, Or domination, exploitation, and miseration that is inflicted in many ways by this international system.
[00:53:26] That’s a long winded way of saying, yes, we work with states. on certain conditions and in certain places at certain times. Not to wave a flag, but to say, are you engaged in a kind of emancipatory project that has a clear international dimension? Oftentimes there’s things that governments are doing that are very local in nature.
[00:53:45] We don’t get involved in those things. Building social care centers, great, or building churches, right? Whatever it is. That’s not our problem. We’re not here to judge and parachute. We’re here to work with people who are part of our coalition on those projects. Now the really difficult part, now we’ve talked about the dimension that’s more progressive, aligns with our declaration, is how that combines with our broader view of the importance of the Global South as a bloc and the Group of 77, which of course is the diplomatic group that unites not just 77, but now 134 Global South nations.
[00:54:21] Now that’s really complicated. That can require us to go a bit beyond or quite beyond the boundaries of our ideological home and comfort zone to work with people and parties that, share an objective, let’s say, stripping out trips to have more room for medical innovation, right? So, if India is leading the TRIPS waiver process in the pandemic to get relief so that southern countries can innovate more vaccines to provide for their people.
[00:54:55] That’s, and we have nothing to do and everything, nothing to do with the Modi government and everything to do with its opposition. That’s a project where at the international level, where our allies are in desperate need and very interested in that kind of South collaborative effort.
[00:55:10] It’s not of interest to us, I should say, to me, but I think it’s fair to speak for the organization to, in that moment, reach for the condemnation and say but, While we’re talking about a TRIPS waiver, just want to go out of our way to say we condemn the Modi government. This is a it’s an unresolved tension.
[00:55:27] It’s an existing tension. But that, idea, which every great 20th century left wing figure has had to deal with, right? How to maintain a certain socialist, or you may even say anti imperialist, whatever it is, position, while recognizing that there are people in the broad Camp, whichever camp it may be, that don’t, overlap with your particular ideology.
[00:55:48] That’s a real challenge. And it’s a challenge that I would encourage all of us to accept.
[00:55:52] Sound on Tape: We
[00:55:53] David Adler: can’t run away from that challenge. We need to just be very clear minded, very articulated, and very honest. And I find that when I do this work, it’s highly diplomatic in nature, we can lay out political differences on the table and then find the areas where there is alignment, strategic and tactical alignment, and work together on those things.
[00:56:13] And that’s just how the world is. So trying to be, at least for us on the left, really clear minded about what we want and how we’re going to get it, and then build coalitions around, around those demands. That I think is, if you’re serious about helping people, the only way to do politics.
[00:56:30] William Lawrence: Well, I’m going to, I’m going to cut a clip of that and I’m just going to, I’m just going to send it to people whenever I see people getting caught in this bind, because, oh man, the desire to wave the flag is so strong. And then the desire to just be totally. Anti statist or, it never worked with any state agencies is also so strong.
[00:56:50] So, that was really excellent. Thank you. That would give me a lot of confidence and guidance to move forward in my own work as well. I’m wondering. Just from which parts of the world do you find that there’s the most sort of leadership and sympathy for these progressive internationalist ideas? Obviously you’re working on the north south axis, so that may presuppose the answer to some extent, but even within that and within the different, north south blocks, which regions Are leading, which regions are lagging, but maybe just waiting to be organized or, something about their domestic conditions is means that people haven’t been able to be as outspoken yet on these issues.
[00:57:28] And then which parts of the world are like the citadels of reaction where you just aren’t expecting to win many allies. in government or society. And there’s just the reactionary stronghold.
[00:57:40] David Adler: Yeah. So, I think the first answer that comes to mind, which is something that you’ve mentioned already as a major area, geographic area of our work is here in Latin America, where there is a really rich tradition of left internationalism in the region.
[00:57:54] Honestly, largely because of having to live 200 years of the so called Monroe Doctrine, which gave the US supposed license to dominate its hemisphere under the auspices of kind of an anti imperial getaway Europe, America for Americans, but has been, the dominant idea ideology or guiding force for various coups and interventions.
[00:58:14] And that has given A lot of force in, in Latin America to build left wing projects, which are fundamentally about getting out of the neocolonial traps left by the Europeans, and then re established and oftentimes deepened by the U. S. Americans. But also for a coordination across the Latin American continent, indeed in the Caribbean with the recognition that it’s going to take more collective action to resist the divide and conquer strategy that the U.
[00:58:41] S. has attempted to lead now for literally 200 years. We’re in the 200th anniversary year of the Monroe Doctrine. So, Latin America is a kind of natural home for a lot of this stuff ideas, policies, programs that are going on. And we’re seeing the left come to power in exciting new places.
[00:58:59] Colombia is its first progressive left wing government in history. Honduras triumphed against 12 years of a military coup. To come back right here in Mexico, we’re expecting a blowout victory on behalf of Morena, the kind of left social democratic party here in Mexico, bringing its first kind of Jewish and woman president to power on Sunday.
[00:59:18] So, those are really exciting, but the region’s also deeply hamstrung. It’s hamstrung by a radicalized reactionary right, finance supported, endorsed, facilitated, buttressed by reactionary forces further afield in the global north, but which are, seeking power with increasingly vicious, patriotic, and hateful programs.
[00:59:44] I don’t, I really don’t mean this in an offensive way, but there’s something also in the religious texture of Latin America that’s changing really quickly. So this was obviously a very Catholic region because of the influence of the Spanish and indeed the Portuguese colonial force, right? Through the region and inside that Catholic ideology emerged the, these liberation theology.
[01:00:11] So inside the church, which of course, for centuries was a bastion of reaction, emerged this idea that actually, Christ’s The Carpenter and our more kind of modest Christianity is really about liberation. So national liberation and salvation from poverty and building communities that became strongholds for left wing sentiment across the continent.
[01:00:33] Now, very quickly, in a span of just 20 years, heavily financed by, you guessed it, The United States, which I’ll skip to the chase, is the bastion of reaction, by a long shot, is heavily financing the emergence of these Pentecostal and Evangelical churches, which have a completely different ideological outlook which are very highly resistant to liberation theology because they’re fundamentally about prosperity in this lifetime, about accumulation, if it means dispossession that are becoming very tough to dislodge, and their own kind of lobbies.
[01:01:08] And just as they are in the United States, very difficult to bring in or to access or, I just came back from Brazil. The left in Brazil has no idea really still how to deal with evangelism as a political force that’s very aligned with Bolsonaro, the political force of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
[01:01:26] William Lawrence: And by the way they’re praying for a holy war in the Middle East.
[01:01:30] David Adler: Putting aside the Zionist dimension of this, which is also, I think, really important when you think about well, Brazil’s kind of response to the genocide in Gaza. But, I digress. The point is that, There’s a lot of potential in Latin America, but I don’t want to overstate that potential or the prospects for this so called second pink tide, because there are these issues that are structural and political and social in nature that are constraining this.
[01:01:54] I know Thierry O. Francois and I wrote a piece a long time ago when Borich was inaugurated trying to temper people’s expectations. And, I was still writing that as a kind of win, either I was right about the second thing tighter, I was proven wrong, but we actually were able to win, be better than I thought we were going to be.
[01:02:10] But I’m, a lot of those predictions. We’re true. The structural stuff is just really hard. The debt stuff is in particular is really difficult for a lot of these countries. So that’s Latin America. And then generally the topography of the left worldwide or the global South is super heterogeneous.
[01:02:25] A lot of that had to do with the legacy of the cold war. There’s parts of the world where they just massacred every communist they could find. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of it has to do with poverty and the structural constraints that have made it very difficult for left wing characters. A lot of it has to do with structural adjustments, we really went around the world and tried to create anchors for our Washington consensus that would be active barriers to any more kind of communistic or even socialistic program.
[01:02:51] So one of the major priorities we have in this year and coming years is really to build out. More effectively, our international and other continents. So we were very strong in Latin America, were strong in parts of Middle East, in South Asia, but get much stronger across the African continents. Very diverse, but we’re seeing a lot of kind of really interesting things happen in West Africa.
[01:03:11] A lot of the kind of political character of these new governments that have been much maligned in the U. S. press as kind of juntas, et cetera. They’re finding their view and their vision and their plan. Some of these are very anti colonial in nature, came about in anti French sentiment, but now need to are still discovering which way they’re going to go.
[01:03:28] And I think it’s rather undefined, but we’ve got a new government in Senegal that’s pretty, people are pretty excited about, that has a lot of these kind of more progressive tendencies, even the government in Burkina Faso, there’s room to be thinking about a software development agenda there. And then, of course, in Southeast Asia, which are some of these huge players where that face similar political challenges and structural challenges, but where there’s, and which have a less present kind of tradition of left internationalism, but that are really important.
[01:03:55] And of course, the last thing is to grapple with with the question of China itself. And the question of China itself, the reality of China itself, so one of the, for in the first four years, we really didn’t have much engagement With China, with the party, with its academics it’s just not possible.
[01:04:10] It’s not a question. It’s just, it’s a reality. It’s something that, in so far as a lot of our coalition is and the other great power of the United States, we need to be in permanent, deep and expansive dialogue with actors in China to understand exactly what are the kind of global development initiatives that they’re rolling out, how they see the role in the G77, what are the cooperative kind of.
[01:04:32] What are these initiatives? How is the BRI evolving over time? What types of lending are being done? We need to understand exactly what the, what that internationalist vision is from the Chinese side and see what are the novel coalitions that can be composed across the 77 plus China.
[01:04:47] Towards the implementation of this kind of sovereign development agenda. So I think it’s a tightly uneven, we’re trying to get more effective at building a coalition across continents and across regions. But that also involves, working a lot with the forces that are available there.
[01:05:03] You can’t we can’t invent some wonderful ideal party that, suddenly emerges and has 30 years of rich tradition of cooperating with trade. There are forces on the grounds and they exist in their own correlation of power with other local actors. And this is a very complicated equation of power.
[01:05:21] So we’re grappling with a lot of those questions now.
[01:05:24] William Lawrence: I wonder if you could say just a little bit more about, about China. I’ve, I know from talking to you now and previously that, from the perspective of your allies in the global South, you. You value the rise of China for its ability to decenter the U.
[01:05:38] S. as the sole global power, provide different options for economic development to nations of the South outside of the former, U. S. and European monopoly on development loans and patronage. And, this can all be true. And I think China is really tough for us in the West to figure out and to assess.
[01:05:57] And people can still have doubts about, and people in the South may also still have a lot of doubts about where China will go from here. Chinese ambitions to terrible territorial expansion in its neighborhood. How much of a threat is that? Chinese ambitions to dominating economic relations with countries around the world.
[01:06:16] How much of a threat is that? What is your just, basic assessment from your dialogues with your allies in the south and then your dialogues directly with people in China? What’s your assessment of China? And, should the world should the world feel fear China remotely as much as it does in person?
[01:06:33] Fears the United States is one way of asking the question
[01:06:37] David Adler: I think it’s incredible how abstract the conversation about China becomes as if there weren’t over a billion Chinese people that we could talk to And engage the ways in which that dialogue has completely closed and obviously it’s institutional right the u.
[01:06:50] s Is building a fuck of a social cultural and economic firewall to prevent any kind of engagement and I have no doubts that if Trump comes back to power, it will be criminalized from day one to have a Chinese friend to talk to anyone from the PRC. This is a very dangerous line. So, we deal with China as we deal with another country, as a big country that participates in these multilateral fora that has ambitious plans for how to support the developments of its partners.
[01:07:13] But ultimately China’s not the project. Right. So, insofar as our product is about building a strong, sovereign Southern bloc, you might even say building a kind of healthy multipolarity, then we don’t really have to worry about China as a part of that because China is fine. Like they’re, they’ve got a plan, they got money, they’ve, they’re developing their country quicker than anyone ever has.
[01:07:39] Right. Our concern is China. It’s the smaller, medium, poor country of the world that are in highly disintegrated or highly fragmented regions. And not just assuming as many people do that multipolarity is coming because I don’t think it is. We’re moving towards a pretty sterile, traditional, bipolar structure of the global order.
[01:07:59] And if we want multipolarity, which is to say, if we want, To give regions the sovereignty and resilience to defend their own political freedoms and economic rights and to develop in peace, right? Which I think is, many people are saying multi polarity is a code word for authoritarianism. It’s nonsense.
[01:08:19] It’s nonsense. What do we mean by multi polarity? We mean multiple polls. We need multiple sources of resilient power and sovereignty that have the right to decide their future and also to participate as a more equal partner in decisions of global import. So our concern is that in parts of the world, like the African continent, But also Latin America, I’ll speak from my most experience here, we are not integrating fast enough to be a major consolidated player in that new bipolar architecture.
[01:08:52] Brazil may have the force to participate as a founding member of BRICS, but Bolivia doesn’t, Guatemala doesn’t, and so it’s going to take more consolidated processes. And so when we talk about China, first of all, we need to go talk, participate, engage, as we do with all other countries. But also, see China’s global influence through the lives and livelihoods that are impacted by its, investments, cooperation, debt agreements, in, in the countries that are really the focus of our initiative,
[01:09:23] Sound on Tape: which are
[01:09:23] David Adler: these, which are the countries of the global south.
[01:09:25] Sound on Tape: And
[01:09:26] David Adler: as China gets richer and richer, the distance between China and true poor countries or true global South countries, China calls itself a natural member of the global South. That’s likely to change as it moves up the income scale and we see a different China emerge, right? Then I think it’s very critical for us to see it through our members and partners, which is to say, it’s really not up to us to judge on behalf of our partners how they see China or even how they see Russia.
[01:09:53] It’s our job to stay focused on the obstacles, impediments, and institutions that fail in the face of their development agenda or prevent or actively harm and immiserate people in these countries. Now, if they were to identify some Chinese policy these famous debt traps as being a chief obstacle to their development, okay, then we would get involved.
[01:10:19] Right? Then we would think about how we can work and facilitate how we can be a part of that struggle to have for greater fiscal resource and capacity to be able to invest in health, housing, or education. But until that point, we are responsive to the demands, priorities, and calls of our members and allies who need help.
[01:10:38] And honestly speaking, no one’s calling us for help with the Chinese. No one. No one. Lots of people are calling us for help with the Europeans in the United States. Lots of people. No one is calling us for help with the Chinese. Now, you could say, Oh, but that’s going to change. Okay, when that changes, it changes.
[01:10:54] Sound on Tape: We
[01:10:57] David Adler: work on the basis of what our members need and want, and call us to do, not finger whacking judgments let alone political dissections of the nature of regime types. It makes no sense for us to do that because it’s not focused, it’s not bringing a strategic and tactical focus that we try to be clear minded about these pressure points in the global system.
[01:11:18] William Lawrence: Thanks for that. Okay, last question. I know from some of our conversations that you aren’t optimistic about the U. S. population being won over in a major way to a progressive internationalist agenda. The U. S. Is the citadel of reaction because of the very powerful actors and very wealthy actors who are situated here.
[01:11:45] But I think you also have grown to have an assessment that is about, the extent to which these reactionary ideas also have root among segments of the U S population. So I wonder, am I stating that right? Am I putting words in your mouth? And if that is indeed the case, what are the critical tasks for those of us in the U S who are sympathetic to these ideas and want to be part of the the project and the vision that you’ve laid out for us today?
[01:12:16] David Adler: I really try not to be prescriptive to, in this way for. for activists or movement leaders who are engaged in projects of national transformation anywhere in the world. Obviously being a U. S. citizen, I feel less shy about these things but no, I think that trying to be focused about what we’re doing less quixotic or less naive about what the, what our project can achieve, I think is going to be really helpful.
[01:12:45] It is the case that four sentences of alleged piece of legislation can be responsible for the immiseration of 400 million people on the other side of the world because of our structural might. And to have a more clear minded more developed sense of these, I don’t want to say pressure points, but these parts of US policy, which can be won.
[01:13:09] I think it’s important to. feel a degree of motivation in terms of, identifying these particular pieces of legislation and building kind of consciousness around them. And my hope would be that each one of those pieces Small victories in themselves is like the mayor of Riace, right?
[01:13:30] If we can create a pathway for small victories to snowball into larger ones while, not trying to reverse engineer the, this or to engineer the system, right? We’re trying to reverse engineer justice here by starting with a small thing and put together a portrait of global justice, as pessimistic as I am about that prospect.
[01:13:50] But I think that starting from. An idea that we can win a social democratic cooperative United States which will never happen. Internal forces will never be determinative of democratic forces, I should say, of the, of, in our lifetimes of the future of, U. S. power in the global stage then I think our task is to be doing this kind of damage control and having those gestures of damage control point to even bigger areas where things can be won.
[01:14:25] That’s kind of Washington focused idea, but I don’t think really that’s a problem. I think that the bigger problem is that Washington doesn’t pivot back out to the rest of the world. That there’s a kind of idea, as you know very well, that. on the hill, the things we’re talking about are so technical and so complicated and we’re so busy that like we can’t really raise them in more movement spaces.
[01:14:47] But I do think that the movement, if we can speak of one, is ready for a conversation about some of these aspects of US legislation that are so hugely impactful for the world. So I might start there, but without getting swept up into the idea that, Bernie would have won, in this kind of more fantastical notion that we’re one step away from a social democratic government.
[01:15:13] To really be more hardheaded about the things that we can win and need to win and how each of those victories can become a bigger step towards a less violent and less vindictive United States on the world stage.
[01:15:28] William Lawrence: And even if the United States isn’t poised to become a social democratic state, that’s far from the end of the story for social democracy or socialism worldwide, because of all the other countries and projects and movements that you are in relationship with and really a vision for the new international order on an economic and a political basis, that is coming from the South.
[01:15:54] I think we need to learn how to listen. It’s not coming from here in the United States. David, this has been really excellent. I can’t wait to listen back to this just to take notes and see what all of my other questions and lines of inquiry would be for future shows and other guests I want to bring on.
[01:16:08] Is there anything else you’d want to leave us with?
[01:16:10] David Adler: No, just thank you for having me on again. And I’m very glad to be here.
[01:16:15] William Lawrence: Thank you. This podcast is written and hosted by me, William Lawrence. Our producer is Josh Elstro, and it is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. You can help support this show and others like it by becoming a subscriber of Convergence at convergencemag.
[01:16:33] com slash donate. Thank you for listening. Standard subscriptions start at 10 and really help support the sustainabilities of shows like this one. One time donations of any amount are welcome there as well. You can find a direct link to donate or subscribe in the show notes. This has been The Hegemonicon. Thanks for listening and let’s talk again soon.