Will talks with Tobita Chow to set the stage for our series on internationalism. We talk about the breakdown of US global authority, the twilight of the neoliberal era, and the turn to economic nationalism in the United States and abroad. Toby helps us to see Bidenomics as a response by US capitalists to a global crisis of profitability. We try to understand the likely consequences of Bidenomics: Whether it is likely to succeed or fail on its own terms, and what either would mean for the shape of global politics to come. We speculate about the prospects for building a left internationalist power bloc from within the United States.
Tobita Chow is a writer and organizer focused on questions of international political economy and transnational solidarity. He was a co-founder of Justice Is Global, a US-based progressive internationalist organization and he is also an editorial board member at Convergence Magazine, the publisher of this podcast.
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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain minor errors throughout.
[00:00:00] Tobita Chow: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. If pytonomics does have that kind of future, if it can restore strong economic growth within the United States then I think progressive forces in the country are gonna face a pretty stark choice of like you either get swept up with it, figure out how to operate within that new reality, or you get marginalized.
[00:00:26] If by dynamics is a really successful economic program, I think that’s the reality.
[00:00:37] William Lawrence: This is the hegemonic on 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.
[00:01:48] Today we’re kicking off our sequence of episodes on internationalism looking beyond the borders of the United States to understand the world system as, well, a world system. Then using that analysis to ask some tough questions about what is to be done in our organizing here in the United States. I’m really glad to be kicking off these topics today with the help of Tobita Chow.
[00:02:13] Toby is a writer and organizer focused on questions of international political economy and transnational solidarity. He was a co founder of Justices Global, a US based progressive internationalist organization. He’s now the director of federal politics and global political economy at the 128 Collective, a foundation with a focus on climate change.
[00:02:35] Toby is also an editorial board member at Convergence Magazine, the publisher of this here podcast. Toby, welcome to the show.
[00:02:43] Tobita Chow: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
[00:02:45] William Lawrence: So let’s start by having you briefly introduce yourself and what spurred your interest in internationalism. What experiences led you to identify this frame of analysis as a gap on the U.
[00:02:58] S. American left? And what have you done briefly to try to address that gap?
[00:03:05] Tobita Chow: Yeah, well, so I’m originally from Vancouver, Canada and came to the us to Chicago back in 2005. And then while in grad school without knowing really what I was getting into started to get involved in community organizing on the south side of Chicago, which I eventually like, took over my life.
[00:03:24] So that’s how I first got politically active, got involved in what I saw is like just very high quality. base building in grassroots campaigning and alongside of that was drawn into these internal political education conversations where I developed, I would say for the first time, like a real critique of capitalism and an analysis of neoliberalism and understanding how this is really about a global.
[00:03:55] system where the fates of people all around the world are tightly intertwined, such that, we’re organizing around problems facing us here in Chicago, in Illinois, in the United States, but ultimately, we can’t solve these problems without at some point taking on the task of transforming the global system as a whole and with you are standing on top of this global system significant again.
[00:04:18] fundamental political change in the U. S. has to be part of this global transformation. So we’ve got to change the world to solve the problems we face here locally, and we need to change the U. S. in order to change the world. So that was the understanding, the analysis that, that I came to. And that kind of global analysis really resonated.
[00:04:36] With some moral sentiments that I’d acquired in growing up and I’m not sure entirely how but you know growing up I had this strong moral sense of universalism that inequality was stupid and Shouldn’t be tolerated and that was true Globally and that our fates are intertwined like when I was a kid.
[00:04:55] My parents took me all around Asia My mom is Japanese and I spent a bunch of summers growing up with my family in Japan and that was a second home It then became more urgent, starting around, I think, maybe a decade ago some folks I was in conversation with including Jake Werner, who co founded Justices Global with me, came to this understanding that, we’re tracking and analyzing the rise of nationalism around the world and how this is leading to growing risks of international conflict.
[00:05:23] And it became clear that the U. S. and China were likely on some kind of collision course. And seeing that was likely to come in the future really galvanized me. I could see right away that there’d be a strong strain of racism. That would develop in the U. S. Alongside that and which then came to pass very clearly starting with the Trump campaign and victory in 2016.
[00:05:47] My first reaction was to try to get into international labor solidarity work, was involved in some tours of labor activists from, let’s see, one from Bangladesh and then some from China in the U. S. And then led to founding Justices Global to engage more in international solidarity work, try to inject that more into The organizing that I was involved with in the U S and also to intervene in U S policy and progressive politics, things like that.
[00:06:17] William Lawrence: Awesome. Thank you. I want to start out, especially because this is one of the first of a number of episodes we’re going to be doing on these kinds of topics, the international conjuncture and what it means for us in the U S I want to start by going to the balcony and looking at the big picture briefly.
[00:06:36] So just to review. Where we’ve come in the world system. The post World War II era was really defined by U. S. American dominance. The U. S. emerged from World War II as the unquestioned military and economic power on the planet. And in this post war period, I think is commonly thought of as split into two periods, 1945 to the early, mid 1970s were really the height of the Welfare state here in the U S and in Europe, the new deal order, the Bretton woods, international monetary regime, and the unquestioned primacy of U S corporations like the big three auto companies and general electric on the world stage.
[00:07:18] These are like the main productive forces in the world. in the world. Full stop. Some have called this period, the 30 glorious years of post war capitalism. And in the global South, meanwhile, this was the age of decolonization and grand programs of national economic development through actual or attempted industrialization.
[00:07:39] And meanwhile, We have a whole other story going on in the Soviet Union, but we’re going to set that aside. Of course, there’s the backdrop of the Cold War, which is playing in with all this. And then the mid 1970s marked a transition into, what is called the neoliberal period, during which the transnational mobility of capital investment really increased.
[00:08:01] Capitalists mounted an attack on the welfare state in the U. S. and in Europe eventually as well. And All countries around the world were really forced into a race towards the bottom of labor and environmental standards in order to attract capital investment. And how this looked from the global South was that soaring interest rates applied by Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker really starved the South of capital needed for development, resulting in debt crises that in many cases proved fatal to dreams of national development.
[00:08:35] Back in the North, We were sitting high on the other side of that. Corporate profits reached an all time high, or I should say some people were sitting flying high stock market appreciation really resulted in the American asset owning classes, reaping huge gains through the 1980s and the 1990s.
[00:08:52] Meanwhile, the Soviet union collapsed. And so the result was just on all fronts, us style, liberal capitalist democracy was. the unquestioned victor of the cold war. And so, this is when I was growing up, I was born in 1990 and I very much remember that end of history vibe where it was just like, it’s America, baby.
[00:09:11] And the U S is the world’s, biggest good guy. And it’s The unquestioned global superpower and the stock market is doing great and we love it now from the vantage point of today 2024. We can see that the turn of the century really marks the beginning of what I think we can now clearly identify as a third stage of the post war order, which is the stage of U.
[00:09:34] S. Decline. And really, it began, I think, with the global war on terror, which You know, it was precipitated by 9 11, but then continued through Afghanistan and Iraq and a dozen plus other countries, which really did nothing other than so more terror while also showing American vulnerability and weakness.
[00:09:54] And then in the 2008 financial crisis, the U S housing market blew up the entire global economy. And that only sowed more anti American. Resentment around the globe hurting the global economy will also further undermining the U. S. working class, which had already been taking a lot of blows as a result of these decades of neoliberalism and disinvestment.
[00:10:17] So we now have anti American sentiment abroad and also a lot of anti elite sentiment that’s getting stronger and stronger here in the United States. So now we’re. 15 to 20 years into this period of decline, it’s nearly universally agreed that neoliberalism as a global economic order is dead. The U. S.
[00:10:38] led international legal and military order is also less credible than ever and has just been suffering hugely as a result of the U. S. ‘s blanket support for Israel’s bombardment and genocide ongoing in Gaza, but it’s still very far from clear What is going to emerge from any of this, Toby I’d like you to help our listeners see this from the perspective really of the rest of the world.
[00:11:05] I think those of us who live in the United States, can imagine what this has looked like from our view. But help us see it from the rest of the world. The neoliberal order was an unjust system in many ways, totally slanted to the benefits of like multinational corporations and Wall Street, but it was a system that countries around the world bought into for several decades.
[00:11:25] And it really appeared to be the only system on offer. So people were willing, even if they had to be dragged in some cases to go along with it and make deals and try to, build a future under this kind of neoliberal globalization regime. Now there is a big scramble from for alternatives and people are going in all kinds of different directions around the world.
[00:11:44] So what has changed? What have been some of the key inflection points along the way from the perspective of the global South including, or in addition to the ones that I named?
[00:11:56] Tobita Chow: Yeah, so I think the big thing, so You know, interestingly and I think we’ll talk about this more later in terms of the turn, a kind of explicit turn against neoliberalism I would say it’s really the U.
[00:12:08] S. that is in the lead of making that turn more so. Than the rest of the world. Yeah, there’s two things that are worth considering together here. One is the legitimacy of neoliberalism as a global system, as a form of organizing the world economy. Another thing though that’s closely connected to that is the legitimacy of U.
[00:12:37] S. hegemony, because those two things have gone hand in hand since the onset of neoliberalism. So in terms of the main inflection points here I think, yeah, really key is It’s the financial crisis in 2007, 2008, and what’s happened since then is long term weak economic growth at the level of the entire global economy.
[00:13:05] And what we’ve seen both domestically in the U. S. and in other countries, and also at the level of sort of international relations, is that long term weakness is calling into question the legitimacy of neoliberalism as a way of organizing global capitalism. A lot of the problems that had already and always existed under neoliberalism intensified.
[00:13:27] But I think more than that, as the system falls into long term dysfunction, there’s this dynamic where even problems that had already existed and could previously be overlooked or sidestepped become harder and harder to ignore. And that’s a dynamic that sort of piles up until it reaches a tipping point.
[00:13:48] We’ve seen Again, this is in the U. S., but also around the world, the growth of anti establishment politics both on the left and on the right and these movements in different ways critiquing the neoliberal status quo. This includes very dangerous strains of reactionary nationalist politics.
[00:14:06] And again, we’re seeing this in the U. S., we’re seeing this around the world. And I think that the major inflection point is in the nature of the U. S. China relationship that’s having a huge impact on political economy in the U. S. and in China, but also it implicates the whole world.
[00:14:23] And I think the key thing to understand, stand here is the shift from this strong U. S. China economic relationship had been really key to neoliberalism in its heyday. The growth of China and its integration into neoliberal globalization was turned into a great benefit. for the global economy, and also a great benefit for the U.
[00:14:47] S. economy, which sits atop the whole global hierarchy. And the growth of the Chinese economy became part of global economic growth, and also growth within the U. S. What has changed there so far, starting in the 2010s was Chinese firms began to rise up the value chain where previously they were subordinate players and supply chains led by U.
[00:15:10] S. multinational corporations. Now they’re becoming competitors to U. S. firms and firms in other countries like, some European countries and some in Japan, but thinking specifically about the impacts on the U. S. China relationship Chinese businesses that previously had contributed to profits for U.
[00:15:27] S. business are now competing with U. S. businesses for profits. And this leads to a split within U. S. capital where U. S. capital particularly like multinational capital had been all gung ho about the U. S. China economic relationship. Now you see sectors of U. S. capital becoming more skeptical. U.
[00:15:44] S. political leaders starting to look ahead and get worried about the ability of U. S. capital to remain dominant going out to the future and seeing that something has to change. And then it turns out that Trump is the first to take advantage of this shift in the U. S. political economy. And that has dramatic changes for the rest of the world most notably for China, but again every other country is getting caught in the middle of this one way or the other.
[00:16:10] William Lawrence: Mhm. I’d like to ask a follow up on that, which is so I was going back and forth with somebody online the other day and they were saying isn’t this just more of the same? U. S. Power has always been self serving. The U. S. Economic prerogatives have always had the effect of somewhat yanking around nations of the south.
[00:16:27] Why was it that after 2000 and eight and the ensuing slow and weak recovery has Been accompanied by this overall decline in legitimacy of us power or a broad reaching decline of American hegemony. Whereas something like, the Volcker shock, which had a huge and negative impact on nations of the South and, their sovereignty and self determination wasn’t accompanied by this broad reaching decline in us hegemony as such.
[00:17:02] Tobita Chow: Well, I don’t know that much about the history. I’m sure there were plenty of negative reactions to Volker Schock around, around the world back in the late seventies and early eighties. In that case, like the Volker Schock was part of the creation of neoliberalism as a new global system.
[00:17:22] And it emerged as an attempt. To solve the economic dysfunctions of the 1970s. You talk about the golden era or whatever of post war capitalism and how that enters a moment, a period of transition in the seventies. The seventies were a time of pretty severe economic crisis and these economic problems that the.
[00:17:49] the dominant economic policy playbook, didn’t seem to have any solutions to. So the Volcker shock is, emerges as part of the solution to the economic problems of the seventies and is extremely painful. It’s painful for a lot of people in the U. S. It’s painful for a lot of other countries around the world, but it does successfully become part of a series of shifts, which does eventually revive.
[00:18:16] economic growth in the capitalist system within the U. S. and around the world in the form of neoliberalism. And there are promises of economic progress that are held out to countries around the world under the neoliberal order. It’s like you get with the neoliberal program, You plug into these global capital flows and free in this free new free trade regime.
[00:18:41] And that’s going to give every country in the world an opportunity for economic advancement and economic development and job growth and all of that stuff. And,
[00:18:50] William Lawrence: and if it’s going to require a coup or right, right wing military dictatorship to implement the agenda. Well, so be it. And that also happened in a lot of countries.
[00:18:58] Tobita Chow: Yeah. So yeah definitely. Definitely that kind of intervention in violence was part of forcing a number of countries into the transition. And like the neoliberal promises like we know how those turned out. But even with a very mixed record there, they were successful enough in some, successful enough in enough cases where they held some legitimacy, that was that, that created a sense of legitimacy for this new form of organizing global capitalism.
[00:19:28] And you had for a while, like fairly. Healthy growth at the level of the whole global economy and countries that were able to figure out how to plug into that in the right way did benefit and where countries failed to do that, it was like, Oh, well, you must have done something wrong. And like that sort of narrative work for a period when the system was working well.
[00:19:51] So I think like the fundamental difference. That we see since 2008 is the system is not working. A global economic growth is very weak. We can see that within the U. S. We can see that globally and part of the purported solution that we’ve seen emerging in the U. S. and some other global North countries is a turn towards economic nationalism and protectionism, which just makes it harder.
[00:20:19] For developing countries to see where are the opportunities for them now to engage in any kind of economic development. Like previously, the promise of free trade has been like, if you plug into the system in the right way you’ll get markets for your exports. You’ll get access to capital investments and that’ll give you the opportunities.
[00:20:38] Now even that neoliberal promise as flawed as it. As it has always been is being taken off the table. So what’s You know, what is there for countries to to buy into at this point?
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[00:21:51] William Lawrence: Yeah, so let’s talk then about this turn towards economic nationalism. And as you mentioned, this really is being driven by the core in the global north. I think one of the early signals came through Brexit in the UK, which was a sort of economic nationalist move that I don’t think is working out the way that some people hoped.
[00:22:11] And now in the U. S. economic nationalism, protectionism. Increasing tariffs and the have really become a bipartisan consensus under the Trump and now the Biden administrations. And this has a feedback effect through which other countries respond with their own form of economic nationalism.
[00:22:30] Although it’s a slanted playing field because the U S federal reserve sets the capital rates that then the rest of the world has to deal with. But it was the U. S. and Europe that originally defined the terms of, free trade, globalization, neoliberalism, call it what you like, and impose these terms on the rest of the globe.
[00:22:49] The global South didn’t often like it, but they had no choice but to go along. And in some cases, as you said, we’re able to benefit by it, but now it’s the North again, that’s pulling the rug out from the whole arrangement. So why is the, the capitalist core led by the US now breaking the system?
[00:23:10] Why is it the ones that are now breaking the system it had previously established?
[00:23:16] Tobita Chow: So I think it’s about just the different positions that countries hold within the. Existing world economy and also different ideological commitments and those two things tend to be connected. So, the U. S. is really in the lead here, and I think that is mainly about U.
[00:23:36] S. China competition. So, the U. S. sees itself in competition. With China for control over first the, what are seen as the most advanced industries in particular advanced semiconductors. That kind of thing. And that’s where we’ve seen, I think, some of the most escalatory actions from the U.
[00:23:55] S. is around this so called chip war with China trying to exclude China from access to the most advanced semiconductors. There’s also competition over other sectors that are seen as industries of the future, like clean energy. And both countries really see their economic futures as closely connected to these industries.
[00:24:14] And U. S. leaders in both parties now see the future of U. S. power on the global stage and also the future of the power of U. S. capital as contingent on their ability to counter this perceived threat. Threat from China, and that perceived threat is commonly over exaggerated, I think. So there’s a standard fear I feel like in D.
[00:24:39] C. is that China doesn’t just want to compete in these leading industries, but has a plan to like entirely displaced the U. S. from them and somehow turned the U. S. into a subordinate supplier lower down on Chinese led value chains or something like that. I don’t know. This is a narrative that’s out there.
[00:24:59] I find it highly implausible. I don’t see that China’s leaders want to or think that they can. Accomplish that level of damage to the U. S. economy, but that is a standard narrative. That’s out there. So it’s driven by these considerations that the U. S. is turning hard against aspects of the neoliberal playbook.
[00:25:22] And this is all about protecting, U. S. power and global dominance. This is supported also then by these sort of short term domestic political calculations, I think. I think the Trumpists correctly see that leaning into the, Economic nationalism, anti China nationalism, but not just anti China, like anti Mexico, anti, the entire global South.
[00:25:43] That those sorts, that kind of politics works to their advantage. I think what we see from the Biden team and many leading Democrats is they think that they need to compete with Republicans on that terrain. And try to compete with Republicans on being like tough in China. And so on,
[00:26:02] William Lawrence: it’s been pretty well documented that this was the conclusion after Trump beat Clinton in 2016, the Clintonite, which then became the Bidenite foreign policy establishment went into retreat during the Trump years and they concluded that they had to figure out how to rhetorically and actually be quote unquote on the side of U.
[00:26:24] S. workers, which meant being. Against the rest of the world.
[00:26:29] Tobita Chow: Yeah, exactly. And, so that’s the short term bet that they’re making, like that’s going to pay off in the current electoral cycle whether or not that turns out to be prudent in the short term I think that remains to be seen.
[00:26:42] It’s unclear to me how many, they’re hoping that there’s a bunch of swing voters who are going to be susceptible to these sorts of appeals from the side of the democratic party. I’m not sure how true that is. I guess we’ll see. I do think though that in the longterm, this is creating an overall terrain of political narratives that are going to, that in the longterm benefits Republicans.
[00:27:03] They can just, the narratives that they can put forward in this vein are just more powerful than the democratic party can wield. And I think that for the most part, voters who are highly motivated by anti China narratives are going to want Trump and not any kind of milder version of that.
[00:27:20] William Lawrence: Yeah, we want the real thing, not the squishy liberal xenophobia.
[00:27:25] Tobita Chow: Yeah, which you’ve seen, I feel like you’ve seen this before, like Democrats trying to triangulate on what was, there was right wing attacks on welfare, they’re going to triangulate on that, they’re going to triangulate on tough on crime, they’re going to triangulate on the war on terror and all of that.
[00:27:37] And what we see in every case is that in the long term, it works to the, their disadvantage.
[00:27:43] William Lawrence: So, this gets, I want you to just explain as clearly as you can why it is that economic nationalism is dangerous. Like you and others have written, and a lot of people are saying that historically it has been You know, this leads to the formation of rival blocks in which global economic competition becomes politicized and then militarized.
[00:28:07] And the culmination of this historically in multiple instances has been world war. Could you be a little bit more specific for those who are a little unfamiliar with the historical literature about the mechanisms through which this actually happens and the way. it could play out in our times today.
[00:28:26] Like, how do we get from a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs, which was announced last week, to World War III?
[00:28:34] Tobita Chow: Yeah. So, once upon a time, this is like a standard left analysis of how we got to the previous world wars. The way this works is When economic nationalism starts to lead to the, these formation of rival economic blocks that fundamentally shifts the form that competition between capitalists takes, right?
[00:29:00] So, com capitalists are always competing with each other, but some forms of competition between capitalists are much bloodier than others. So, under neoliberalism, capitalists competed through this global free market through transnational capital flows. And as we mentioned before, the establishment of the neoliberal system, that was not a clean affair.
[00:29:22] There were plenty of cases of coups and other forms of coercion to force countries into this new neoliberal order. Even so, and then, just looking, comparing to other periods in history, when the neoliberal system was established capitalists were able to compete with each other through these free and open global markets, through these transnational capital flows, and for the most part, without any military getting involved on their behalf.
[00:29:54] And during the heyday of neoliberalism. The U. S. as the global hegemon used its military in ways, at least in their eyes, in ways that were basically just keeping the world safe for global capital as a whole. And there was just this trust that if you keep the world safe for global capitalism as a whole, U.
[00:30:17] S. capital is, at the top of the hierarchy, so U. S. capital is going to benefit, so that’s going to be good for the U. S., so it’s going to be good for the, American national interest so called national interest, which is always defined with respect to the interests of U. S. capital. So that has been the form of competition between capitalism under these this free and open neoliberal world market.
[00:30:41] The shift to economic nationalism and formation of rival blocs risks creating an entirely new different dynamic where cap competition between capitalists becomes competition between nations in between imperial powers. And that gets politicized and it takes the form of competition for control over territories, which becomes militarized.
[00:31:04] And this was how old school imperialism led to a couple of world wars. It’s tied into the logic of capitalist growth under this system of territorial competition, where the growth for each imperial power becomes dependent on its ability to gain and seize exclusive economic control over other countries and territories in order to bring those countries and territories into its exclusive economic block and box out competing imperial powers.
[00:31:35] And in this way the imperial power can gain exclusive access to that country as a source of labor to exploit, as a source of natural resources to exploit, as a source of consumer markets to sell to as a target For investment from the imperial power into these countries that now controls and as early in the 20th century, you have Bukharin and others writing about how this solves the problems of overproduction and over accumulation of capital within the economy of each imperial power.
[00:32:05] And the this issue, this internal issue of overproduction and over accumulation is building up at an earlier stage of inter imperial conflict. Behind these economic nationalist tariff barriers and then this imperial expansion becomes a way to resolve that contradiction in the growth model of each imperial power.
[00:32:24] So that, that is a form of global economy and inter imperial rivalry leading to world war. We’ve seen that before. And I think there is a potential future where the failures of neoliberalism lead us into a new world. into this direction as an attempt to resolve the dysfunctions of neoliberalism.
[00:32:44] So that is one, one possible future. And we’re, that is not locked in. Like it is a risk that we are moving in that direction. There were some indications already that we are seeing this slide from economic nationalism to block formation. The U S is doing a number of things to push us. in that direction.
[00:33:05] So, there, there are things that, that the U S is doing in Latin America to try to box Chinese investment out and things like that. There’s already, we’re seeing a fragmentation in cross border investment and lending where we’re increasingly foreign investment and lending.
[00:33:21] is being reorganized to within these sort of emerging geopolitical blocks. So there, there are these indications that we’re starting to move in that direction. It is not locked in, but at some point it is possible that the system of the world economy becomes reorganized along these lines of the formation of rival exclusive blocks.
[00:33:44] And then that is the a real slippery slope to global conflict.
[00:33:50] William Lawrence: Yeah, once I started to clue into this stuff, I found it to be very frightening. It’s very frightening. And it’s also worth, I think, noting that from the perspective of the capitalists, war itself is part of the solution or can be part of the solution to a crisis of overproduction or declining profit rates.
[00:34:08] It’s actually not a coincidence that the 30 glorious years of 20th century capitalism happened from 1945 to 1975. And literally the project was rebuilding Europe, which had been utterly destroyed. During World War Two there was a lot of money to be made and a lot of investment required and large margins to be made in the process of of rebuilding Europe and other parts of the world.
[00:34:32] And so, well, yeah that’s very sobering. So war and destruction can be its way when there is no other option of hitting the reset button in a sense, or creating the opportunity for a new mode of of accumulation to develop. We’re going to come back around to some questions about what are some of the alternatives?
[00:34:51] None of this is is intended to be nostalgic for neoliberalism. Obviously neoliberalism was a brutal system in its own right. And I think a lot of us were pretty excited about the end of neoliberalism. Once it was clear in the middle of the last decade that it was fraying at the seams.
[00:35:07] So, there’s no going back to neoliberalism. There’s going to be a need for some alternative that is not what you describe. We’re going to come back to that in the conversation towards the end of the conversation. But first I want to turn the attention to the U S left and the consciousness or lack thereof on the U S left around these kinds of questions around, around internationalism.
[00:35:28] I’ve said on the show before that. I got involved in social movements and politics around the time of Occupy Wall Street, and I’m ready to admit that like my view of politics through the 2010s, it was nationalist. It, I wasn’t waving the flag, but my analysis was nationalist. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the rest of the world, but I just thought that my responsibility as a leftist in the United States was to build power in the United States by any means necessary.
[00:35:56] And I was a climate activist. So for me, that was through the lens of for the sake of decarbonizing the U S economy to stop climate change. So it was really clear to me and my comrades that, inequality is skyrocketing, economic resentment is skyrocketing in the 2010s. We need a pro worker agenda.
[00:36:11] We’re in the U S that means a pro U S American worker agenda. So that meant that. Towards the end of the decade, when I was working on the green new deal, I was happy to co sign conceptually on what on paper were economic nationalist policies. I can clearly see that now. I didn’t realize it. And then those terms at the time, this was simply part of building a climate program that could appeal to us workers at the ballot box and could appeal to us labor unions who we were working to build coalitions with.
[00:36:42] And I really wasn’t thinking about what any of this would mean. in reality or beyond the U. S. Borders. We had an essential job that was to build a U. S. Climate left that could resonate with U. S. Workers in order to build a majority and pass climate policy. So I’ve come to, have a lot of different perspective on that from where we are now.
[00:37:01] Toby, I know you’ve worked with a lot of people. Like me over the years, and you’ve been one of the people saying along the way we ought to do better than that. We have to think a little bit longer term and a little bit more holistically about these policies were actually suggesting because we’re here in the imperial core and the way that the U.
[00:37:21] S. Economy goes is going to have impacts on the rest of the world. So Could you speak about the international consciousness, or lack thereof, on the U. S. left in the 2010s? And then we’ll get into how it’s shifting now.
[00:37:35] Tobita Chow: Yeah. So, the 2010s is when I was becoming more and more politically active.
[00:37:43] And, in my experience, I talked about having these internal political education. conversations and developing an internationalist analysis out of that. And then I looked around at the organizing that, that was going on around me, which I thought was excellent, like really excellent local level organizing and campaigns.
[00:38:01] And there was no internationalism to be found. And I wasn’t sure, I didn’t see anywhere to where that could be brought in. I just didn’t see it. Like people were doing, there, there’ve always been internationalists around. But I think my experience at the time where I was like looking for it and not finding it was just indicative of how spotty.
[00:38:16] It was
[00:38:18] William Lawrence: disconnected like there’s some people who will go to international delegations or hold some relationships or this or that, but what does it actually mean for our organizing here on the ground or the demands we’re making? Especially when it comes to, economics, sometimes there are people who are anti militarists and that’s well and good, but the idea that this would also be connected to economic policy really wasn’t there at all.
[00:38:39] Tobita Chow: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So I think big picture is like, Internationalism is hard. At the same time it’s I’ve, I’m repeatedly surprised about how quickly people can get it if you just have the right kind of organizing conversation. But like building internationalism into the form of an organization, like that is hard.
[00:39:01] It’s just not the top priority. For the vast majority of people you’re worried about your job, you’re worried about rent and your student debt and so on. And that’s what’s facing you on a day to day basis. And internationalism can feel like these big abstract questions that don’t matter to your day to day life.
[00:39:19] And in a sense, I think it can be particularly hard here in the United States because the U. S. is so powerful and so rich. It is possible that I think that makes it easier to imagine that you could fix the problems. in U. S. society just by changing things within the borders of the United States, just because of how rich and powerful this country is.
[00:39:41] It seems oh yeah, we just need to change things here and then we’ll fix all the problems. I think now that’s It’s harder as issues like climate change and pandemics become more salient. These are clearly global problems that you can’t just fix within the U. S. So I think that changes the dynamics, but yeah internationalism is hard.
[00:39:58] And I think in some ways it’s particularly hard in the United States. And there’s also, I feel like I don’t have a clear enough understanding of this, but The traditions of internationalism within the U. S. left that existed in previous generations, there was just a major generation gap that emerged, yeah, by the time we get to the 2010s, the inheritance of left internationalism in the U.
[00:40:24] S. has just, has largely been lost. And I don’t have a full take on why that is. I know, for example, that one of the, major points of internationalist movement within in the 90s was there’s the global justice movement and then the anti sweatshop movement and these things were connected. And then I know that part of what happened was those movements got completely swamped by the war on terror and then the protests against the Iraq war.
[00:40:57] And that really disrupted sort of the tradition of internationalism that existed then. And it’s mostly didn’t make it into the reemergence of progressive left politics in the 2010s. Yeah. So there’s some story there that I’m going to have Cindy Weiser on
[00:41:10] William Lawrence: from grassroots global justice to talk about that move from the from the internationalism of the, United students against sweatshops and the global justice movement and the Seattle era.
[00:41:22] And then, yeah, through the war on terror, the Iraq. Yeah, that whole trajectory you said and then because I think I became very accustomed to a story that said like the left was reborn with occupy in 2011 and then we entered this great decade of mass protest movements and like it’s like the left is back in a way it hasn’t been since the since the 1960s.
[00:41:45] Now I see how that actually Occludes the way that there was backsliding also happening in our analysis. There was a stronger analysis of U. S. Empire happening during the global justice era of the 19 nineties and early two thousands. And then that got totally swamped, totally lost. And then when it came back when the left was back in the streets in the 2010s and then through the Bernie campaign, it was like, mostly to entirely focused on these domestic economic justice and racial justice concerns, which obviously are necessary.
[00:42:15] But now we really need to be integrating all of that.
[00:42:18] Tobita Chow: Yeah. I think another dynamic here is I feel like in the different versions of left internationalism, when it was strong in different ways there were Left or progressive forces in other parts of the world that the U. S. left could really look to for inspiration and think we are in solidarity with them, or in some cases we are following their leadership.
[00:42:38] In the 60s and 70s the Vietnam War protests, in part, were just against the war. But also in part particularly like the most left forces within that they weren’t just trying to stop a bad thing. They thought, they saw themselves as in an alliance with world historical transformational forces in Vietnam and elsewhere that were seeking to transform the entire world order in a way that they felt aligned with.
[00:43:04] Maybe to a lesser extent that was also a theme in the global justice movements in the 90s. But by the time we get to the 2010s, I feel like one, one issue there is and I remember feeling this at the time as I was like trying to figure out what a new kind of internationalism could look like.
[00:43:19] It’s what are the inspiring international forces that we’re in? Allegiance with and it’s just those same links didn’t seem to exist at the time. Yeah,
[00:43:29] William Lawrence: so silver linings if we’re looking for them is that this is now shifting in a big way under the Biden administration. I think, speaking for myself, I know that the way that the whole Green New Deal, which became build back better, which became the Inflation Reduction Act.
[00:43:44] Became articulated so seamlessly with this hawkish economic nationalist turn against China was. Very sobering to me and really felt like one of those instances where you think you’ve got a plan and you’ve got a strategy and then it turns out you’re part of someone else’s strategy. It was very much like one of those moments.
[00:44:06] I was like, okay, I don’t want that to happen again. So I gotta get, I gotta get wise about this. Then, the Russian. Ukraine, I think, was another big moment that, although it feels so long ago now, that sort of announced that like the geopolitics of war and conquest are back on the agenda and we all have to form an analysis around these issues.
[00:44:27] And then of course the October 7th and the ensuing war and genocide in Gaza has, Just been the biggest story on the world stage for the last seven, eight months. And we’ve all been involved in solidarity with Palestine and reckoning with that in one way or another. So international affairs, internationalism is like thoroughly back on the agenda.
[00:44:49] That’s why I’m doing these sequence of episodes. I think historically the task of this decade is to integrate the economic or the domestic kind of economic and racial justice agenda that we developed in the 2010s with the international realities that we’re reckoning with in, in the first part of this decade.
[00:45:09] So, although I’m oversimplifying things here, I’d like to lay out a few different polls of opinion on the US left that are trying to make sense of all of these events and see if you. If you agree that these are polls that we can identify and then offer some assessments. So, I think there’s a poll.
[00:45:32] We could argue about whether this is left or not, quote unquote, but it’s Pro economic nationalism. These are people who are progressive or would even identify on the left especially, and often people affiliated with the labor movement. I hear this from to this day who are unabashedly celebrating Bidenomics including its anti Chinese protectionist elements.
[00:45:56] They celebrate this as a positive thing. I honestly think that these folks in many cases are maybe not thinking that much about geopolitics. But they’re thinking about this. This is simply what is necessary in order to support U. S. workers. And that’s our first priority. We’re thinking about the interests of U.
[00:46:13] S. workers. And so this must be a good thing. Sometimes though, these people will resort to, I think, ill informed American chauvinism or false or incomplete characterizations of the Chinese system. Or, in the best case, I’ve heard some folks try to separate military from economic policy. They’d say, we support the economic protectionism, but we don’t agree that it should become militarized.
[00:46:35] And I think it’s really debatable whether those two things actually can be separated. Okay, so that’s one poll. Another poll is anchored in just a straight up anti imperialist analysis and against U. S. American hegemony. These folks are pretty much anti U. S. intervention in any circumstance. They would be pro Palestine, opposed U.
[00:46:54] S. support for Israel, but also opposed support for Ukraine. And fully embrace China’s rise without necessarily offering any particular defense of the Chinese system as such, although some would do that, they say, well, it’s good for there to be a counterweight to the U S on the world stage. It’s good for there to be a rising power, which can become a new global superpower, because that’s going to put a check on us and the U S R the U S is the bad guy.
[00:47:18] So, and this is the bad place in this view, the U S is like, it’s the global capitalist hegemon. It’s the main vector of violence and domination on the world stage. And the best thing that could happen for the world really would be for the U. S. to collapse entirely. And so, that’s the second poll.
[00:47:35] Then I think there’s a range of people who are between these perspectives. It’s not a linear range, but there’s a sort of field here who are striving for some sort of democratic internationalism, which is pro Palestine, but also pro Ukraine, maybe mildly anti China. And they might say something like, authoritarianism of the Netanyahu type or the Putin type.
[00:48:00] Or the Xi Jinping type, all should be opposed. We’re for democracy. We’re for the workers of the world. And these folks would be concerned about the direction things are taking with our trade or military policy, but aren’t ready to adopt a wholly anti American U. S. posture. Now, like I said, I think this feels like less of a coherent poll than a sort of scattering of people who are trying to find some sort of third way between these two poles of economic nationalism and anti US imperialism.
[00:48:34] I wonder if you could comment, Toby, on how I’m characterizing this. I know I’m super oversimplifying it. What would you change or qualify? And then what’s your basic assessment of these positions?
[00:48:47] Tobita Chow: So, yeah, I think that. Basically, right, and I think my task, our task is to provide a clearer definition or create a real third pole there.
[00:49:03] As you said there’s this right now the sort of third alternative is a range of people. with this sort of collection of sentiments, but there, there’s not yet like a really coherent position with that’s presenting itself as a clear alternative in political debates. So yeah, I think that’s right.
[00:49:20] Let’s see. So first of all the second position that you lay out, which is I think of it as just the mirror image of U. S. exceptionalism or U. S. supremacy, right? So if the U. S. nationalist thinks U. S. is good and then there are the officially bad countries and they are the source of the problems in the world.
[00:49:38] The second position you talk about is like the same sort of worldview but the signs are flipped. So the U. S. is bad and is the source of all problems in the world, and the officially bad countries are actually the good guys. So China, yay, Russia, yay, and so on. I think that’s a false analysis. And then also, just in terms of like pragmatic political strategy, I think it’s self marginalizing.
[00:49:58] It doesn’t have a future. In U. S. politics and sections of the left that sort of take that, that path forward are I think running down a political dead end. From a pragmatic point of view the viability of the first position, which is basically lining up behind the Biden agenda and is the progressive wing of Bidenism.
[00:50:20] The prospects in my mind depend a lot on whether biodynamics can actually work in terms of creating a new economic system that enjoys a healthy growth by the standards of capitalism. If biodynamics does have that kind of future, if it can restore strong economic growth within the United States then I think progressive forces in the country are gonna face a pretty stark choice of you either get swept up with it, figure out how to operate within that new reality, or you get marginalized.
[00:50:57] If Bidenomics is a really successful economic program, I think that’s the reality. But I don’t, I should
[00:51:05] William Lawrence: say this is the future I’m worried about. This is one of the questions I’m asking with this series, because it’s like, if that’s true, it means that you can successfully basically buy off the majority of the American public, including the working class with an agenda, which is economic nationalist.
[00:51:22] Which does rely on militarism force projection as well as just like economic exploitation abroad. And you can repeat the, The deal, the new deal from the 20th century, we can do a green new deal where the deal is you get a cut of the profits and we’re going to walk all over the rest of the world.
[00:51:47] I’ve come to a place where I, I’m like, I don’t want to live in that world where that’s where that’s that’s possible, but I understand how, like you said if the profits really start flowing under binomics, we could end up in that situation again, where, it’s starting to look like the 20th century and the U.
[00:52:05] S. is the global hegemon and the U. S. middle class is flying high.
[00:52:09] Tobita Chow: That may be a possible future. However, as best as I can tell, I’m betting against that future, actually like I think the current strategy of by dynamics is not adequate to overcoming the dysfunctions of neoliberalism. It’s not going to be able to restore healthy growth within the U.
[00:52:31] S. economy. It’s not going to be able to deliver both profitability to U. S. firms and strong rewards to U. S. Workers. And so I think if that’s right then we should expect a future sense of crisis within at least the Democratic Party and an opening to other alternatives to solve the problems of by dynamics as they start to emerge.
[00:52:58] So that’s the bet that I’m making. And then I think the So, okay, the problem there, though, is that if the If Fidenomics does not succeed in these terms things can go in one of two directions because one alternative that is ready and raring to go is Trumpism an even more extreme and ruthless form of economic nationalism, one that does not even pay lip service to any sense of like liberal norms internationally, doesn’t worry about US legitimacy, that kind of thing.
[00:53:30] Like that alternative is ready to go. in the Trump camp. I think there’s another alternative that is more properly internationalist and is looking to reform the whole global system in ways that are more egalitarian. And that’s our task is to formulate that. And, but that needs to be much, much more clearly defined.
[00:53:48] And yeah, part of that perspective. Is having consistent democratic principles caring about issues of inequality internationally and yeah being critical of governments in a consistent way. And you talked about being critical of the authoritarianism that we see in Israel in Russia.
[00:54:09] In China, we need to be consistent and this is also the problem of authoritarianism is also a systemic and global one. It’s one that exists in the U. S. It’s one that exists in other countries that are supposedly friendly to the U. S. And yeah, that’s the perspective that we need to define.
[00:54:26] William Lawrence: Great. I want to just note for the listeners that we’re going to have folks on the show as part of this sequence that I think really embody the first and the second polls. People who I think are mostly thinking through the lens of economic nationalism for the U. S. working class and people who are Part of this anti, primarily anti U S imperialist mode of thinking.
[00:54:49] And so I’m looking forward to getting to hear out those perspectives a little bit more and prod on them a little bit, but let’s stick with Toby and your perspective. So, you said, okay, by nomics, you’re betting against it. Trumpism. We don’t want that. There’s Another path that needs to be pursued.
[00:55:08] What can you envision along that path? So what would be the outlines of really a transformation of the world order that would avoid spiraling great power conflict and, establish some sort of new normal for the global economy and legal and military, balance of power.
[00:55:28] Tobita Chow: Yeah, so, so my take on this is that like I said before, I think the growing dysfunctions of the neoliberal system go back to the financial crisis in 2008 and take the form of long term weakness in the global economy.
[00:55:41] And that creates the conditions under which we see this rise of nationalism in countries all around the world and also the rise of great power conflict. And one of the ways those two things get connected is that under long term conditions of weak economic growth, there are very material pressures that Push leaders in all countries to think more and more in terms of zero sum competition, where success for my country has to come at the expense of your country, because the whole global system is so weak.
[00:56:16] Growth is harder and harder to come by for each country. Growth, my country is going to have to come at the expense of yours. That is a key connection. I think between these. Disfunctions of the neoliberal system at the global level, and this rise of nationalism and great power conflict. So, what kind of transformation in the global system could overcome these dysfunctions?
[00:56:37] So again, I don’t think that Bidenomics is up to that challenge. I think what we need to see globally is changes that can address inequality at the global level both between workers and capital across all countries and critically inequality between the global north and global south countries.
[00:57:03] Addressing those two dimensions of global inequality. inequality would a create a much more just global system. It would also, I think, create conditions where the dysfunctions of the neoliberal global economy could start to get addressed because, this would create in global South countries, increased consumption, which is basically just another way of saying we’re going to address we’re going to reduce poverty.
[00:57:26] in global south countries that would create new outlets for capital investment. So just from the point of view of how of what capitalism needs to function, it would address the dysfunctions that are growing within the neoliberal system and also create a more egalitarian world order.
[00:57:43] So I want to be clear, this is not like full socialism. This is, but this is a preferable future over the course of, maybe the next few decades, something like that.
[00:57:52] William Lawrence: Why is it not full socialism? Might seem obvious to you, but I, there are people listening who are trying to go that route.
[00:57:58] So I’m just curious to hear you say why not?
[00:58:00] Tobita Chow: Fundamentally it’s a global system that’s not abolishing the exploitation of labor. Right. It’s creating a global economy. in which the terms of labor are better, less unequal than they are now, but capitalist forms of, capital labor relations are not being abolished entirely.
[00:58:19] So that’s what I mean by it’s awful socialism. More to say there, but that’s at a basic level that’s what I mean. And which means that, the left will still have work to do if, even if we achieve this, which is already hard, and one thing I’ll say is I think that these shifts.
[00:58:33] in the global economy are also what we need in order to confront the challenge of climate change. I think these two things go very closely hand in hand, like the idea of a global Green New Deal, taking the principles and ideas of the Green New Deal and extending that across borders, which is what we need to do, because climate change is an inextricably global problem, like the implementation of a global Green New Deal would involve these kinds of shifts.
[00:59:02] In the global system these corrections to these glaring forms of global inequality that i’m talking about
[00:59:08] William Lawrence: And quite concretely. I mean what it would require is a massive transfer of wealth in the form of debt relief or concessionary loans or cheap access to capital from The Global North financial institutions to the Global South.
[00:59:28] And you can do this, by the way, without needing to take a penny out of the pocket of anybody in the United States or Europe. You can do it through the lending authority of of our financial institutions and, create the currency into existence and then distribute it through special drawing rights and other forms of of financial transfers that go from the north to the south.
[00:59:48] But we’re going to talk about this more on future episodes, too. But this is like one of the central demands that has been coming from the south through the climate justice movement for decades now, but now is key. Clearer, I think, and the need for it is more apparent than ever, because the reality is that right now nations in the south are simply not able to make the investments that are required to decarbonize the economy because they are, They don’t have the capital to do it.
[01:00:18] And the fount of capital is in the financial institutions in the north.
[01:00:22] Tobita Chow: Yeah. And I think there’s, there’s other paths that people have talked about the forms of like polluter pays strategies where we extract the money from the fossil fuel industries. And then some of that can be.
[01:00:33] Can form the finances necessary for the global south’s climate needs. There’s some interesting work I’ve been following by this academic, Thomas Malwa, who studies public banks globally. And some of what he’s found is that there’s The world of public banking globally is much larger than anyone gives it credit for, and that this is potentially a source of financing for the needs of global self countries that doesn’t open them up to the rapacious demands of global capital moving through Wall Street or whatever.
[01:01:03] William Lawrence: Okay, so what is the what is the constituency that can make this happen? What is the base of power and let’s ask it two sides to it in the United States. What is the constituency that can be organized to demand this global justice agenda? And then who are the partners either, in grassroots social movements or labor forces or in government in the global South that you believe are.
[01:01:32] It can be the agents of this transformation.
[01:01:35] Tobita Chow: Yeah, this is the trillion dollar question. I think, so, what I think could bring this about is, so first of all it’s gonna take basically, I think, progressive hegemony within U. S. politics. Progressives need to build the political power necessary to win, and then this internationalist agenda has to be part of the progressive agenda that we then implement when we achieve this kind of governing power.
[01:02:01] And then the further question there is then who within the progressive coalition can lead to make this internationalist agenda more central. To the existing dominant progressive agenda, which, as you say, coming out of the 2010s, has been very focused. on, on domestic issues and all too often makes compromises around the growing trend of economic nationalism and great power conflict.
[01:02:24] So I think there’s some different areas that that give me hope. I think there’s potential to build this kind of politics within a number of immigrant communities. And one, one interesting side effect of the U. S. having been the global hegemon for so long is that so much of the world is now here.
[01:02:42] Because the U. S. has been meddling in so many different countries, like organizing in diasporic communities around international issues can get very complicated very quickly. But I think there is a material basis there of a significant part of the U. S. population that feels more directly connected.
[01:03:00] To issues in other countries and the impact that U. S. policy has on those countries. I think I mentioned before that climate change is very obviously a global problem that requires global solutions. So I think the climate movement within the progressive coalition is another key source of support for a properly internationalist agenda.
[01:03:20] I think there’s a lot of potential among progressive youth. Like we’re seeing this campus protest movement. Around the the crisis in Gaza and Israeli assault on Gaza that is also potential for renewed internationalism. The major question is for me, is labor and so this is difficult, but I think that there is still a lot of potential there’s potential in a number of like service sector, unions and I think also in sectors of the manufacturing union.
[01:03:48] So like UAW has made some significant turns towards internationalism under Sean Fain’s leadership talking about, we’re going to support organizing workers in Mexico in a new and more powerful way and this effort to engage in a deeper critique of militarism in the UAW.
[01:04:07] And it’s mixed that the UAW is also supporting the. The EV tariffs against China, but I think that’s like understandable and I think the internationalist potential within the UAW is like really significant here and hopefully we’re going to see as we’re going to see like more reform movements within different unions of the sort that we saw in the UAW.
[01:04:27] I also think we need to find allies among the more enlightened sections of the liberal internationalists. And as I said before, a bet that I’m making is that Bidenomics is not going to be enough to overcome the dysfunctions of neoliberalism. If that’s true, and as it starts to become apparent I think there is going to be an opening where some members of the liberal internationalist establishment will see the need to rethink that playbook.
[01:04:56] And I think we need to be ready to collaborate with some of those folks. And then there is the potential for. For pressure from global, from the global South from global South governments hopefully backed by social movements. There are already some countries that are standing up to demands from the United States.
[01:05:16] The most successful cases are from ones from global South countries that are. Among the wealthier countries in this cohort, more powerful, relatively more leverage like Indonesia and Mexico. But I think what we really need to see is something like the formation of a new non aligned movement that is, that seeks to define its own agenda.
[01:05:40] for what the global system needs to look like to benefit global South countries, and is demanding of all the great powers, including the U. S. and including China, this is how we want to reshape our economic relationships with all of you. And I think there are some real opportunities for that kind of global South alignment to have a real impact on the future of the whole global system and an impact on U.
[01:06:05] S. policy. But that still needs to come into existence. We need stronger alignment across Global South countries. We also need more ambitious, progressive leadership coming out of the Global South. This is something that some of us had hoped Lula might provide, that, I think that remains to be seen.
[01:06:22] And I know there’s also renewed conversation around the legacy of the Thank you. The new international economic order, one of your previous guests, David Adler has been involved in that. And so maybe there’s some potential there but I think there’s like coming
[01:06:36] William Lawrence: back too.
[01:06:37] Tobita Chow: Oh, great. Great.
[01:06:38] So yeah, I think I think there’s real potential for this to have an impact on us policy at some point in the future because you, us elites have a very well established and very strong habit of ignoring global South perspectives. But again, there could be a moment where they. They attain a greater sense of crisis around this because the existing and growing divides between global north countries and global south, south countries are a real area of weakness for the U.
[01:07:07] S. It’s something that China’s leaders are exploiting very effectively. And in trying to position themselves as the voice of the global South. And I think as that continues to develop I think there are more enlightened sections of the liberal internationalist elite that will start to take this more seriously.
[01:07:27] And then that creates an opening for leaders from the global South to have a greater impact on the perspectives in DC.
[01:07:35] William Lawrence: As you were talking, I was reminded of a quote that I cited previously on the show from Emanuel Wallerstein, who said that the key problem for the global left is not its organization, however important that may be.
[01:07:52] The key problem is lucidity. The key problem is lucidity, by which I took to mean it’s being able to articulate the nature of the system, possible futures, and these trends in real time, in time to be able to shape events, because it occurs to me that in order to accomplish what you’re describing, like The yellow brick road has to lay out.
[01:08:21] People have to be able to see the path to a transformed world system. If you’re going to convince people in the United States that global justice is possible, not only is it possible, but it’s superior to world war. Or not only is it superior to world war, but it is actually possible. Then people have to believe, they might be willing to believe that it’s superior, but is it possible?
[01:08:43] I doubt it. So let’s just do war. Because we have the troops. We have the guns. I think that’s what a lot of the political class will think. Why do we have this army if not to use it? Okay, sure. Are we going to surrender our power? Are we going to surrender our economic supremacy? Am I, as a U. S.
[01:09:00] worker, going to Surrender the privileged status of being a U. S. worker, which means being a worker in the globally supreme and dominant economy for the sake of imaginary and hypothetical more equal world economy, and is that not going to come on the back of me and my family? That has to be.
[01:09:20] Clear. People are not going to buy into that in the U. S. on a lark or a dream. People don’t care about justice like that. They care about, their own lives and their own futures. And so for this to be lucid and clear and articulated in real time with the force of real organization. As it’s happening, not after the fact.
[01:09:43] So we can say, Oh, well, Bidenism broke down, but then World War three was there to replace it. But instead to be able to give this political heft, it is a problem of organization, but it’s a problem of organization that then is integrated with analysis and for all of that to be like, in the flow of actually existing events and for that to be projected, as I said, to the grassroots, to the working class, to all the ordinary people out there, but then also to the potentially sympathetic members of the elite would love to avoid a world war if it can be avoided.
[01:10:18] I’m curious if you have any reflections on that and then any concluding thoughts as we wrap up this conversation. Yeah,
[01:10:24] Tobita Chow: I think this question of lucidity I don’t know what you had in mind, but one thing that that made me think of is the struggle that I’ve seen within the left and that I’ve also felt like in my own case of moving from a kind of politics that is oppositional and is trying to stop the bad stuff and is criticizing the bad stuff and saying you’re bad.
[01:10:49] To a new approach to politics where we’re defining progressive alternatives and being, instead of just opposing bad things, being clear about here is the world that we want to create, and here’s what it looks like concretely, and here’s how we’re going to implement it. I think we’ve come a long ways when it comes to domestic issues on moving from the oppositional footing to the footing where we’re, we are now defining.
[01:11:13] the society that we want to create. And I think we’re still in the process of figuring that out, though, when it comes to internationalist politics and the shape of the global system as a whole. I think we can do it. For all the, I’ve cast out I’ve given voice to a lot of doom in this conversation.
[01:11:33] But I think we still have time to carry that task out. And I think there are going to be opportunities for us to make real progress on it. I think that there are a lot of cosmopolitan and internationalist sentiments out there, including in U. S. society that we can tap into and turn into the ingredients of a new kind of common sense internationalism.
[01:11:58] What we need is common sense internationalism, a form of internationalist politics that can become widely shared common sense and resonate with things that people or a significant section of U. S. society need. Is already feeling and, I mentioned climate change and pandemics as two salient global challenges that make the need for internationalism very intuitive and, it was only a moment, but there was a moment during the pandemic, during the struggle against vaccine apartheid, if you’ll recall, when the U S and some other rich countries were hoarding all the vaccines and refusing to.
[01:12:37] Share the patents for the vaccines with global South countries. And at the time I was at justice is global. And we were part of this very broad coalition that was trying to address that and the very simple idea that in this, in the pandemic no one is safe unless everyone is safe, like everyone in the world has to be safe in order for me and my family to be safe.
[01:12:59] That became common sense. That was a very easy message for people to get. We had allies in Congress repeating it. It was obvious. So that was like just a moment, but it, to me I think back to that as a demonstration that even with the rise of toxic nationalism, there are places where internationalist sentiments are just lurking under the surface and that we can organize to tap into them and organize them into a political force.
[01:13:29] William Lawrence: That’s a great place to leave it. Toby, thank you so much.
[01:13:32] Tobita Chow: Thank you. Thank you.
[01:13:36] William Lawrence: 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.
[01:13:51] com slash donate. 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.