actually even started before that with his male and isaac having the same father, abraham. there never has been pieced. will there be peace? i don't know. we attempt to create situations where there's peace? absolutely. .. israeli our friends? absolutely. they have been always. many of the entities in the middle east countries have been our friends at some we have to be willing to extend the olive branch. we have to be fair and loyal. we are to try to do what is right. by the same token, i don't think we necessarily have to have our nose in everything, and, you know, i may be one of the few people, for instance, who doesn't agree with us being in afghanistan. you know, afghanistan is not one solitary nation. there are 300 tribes in

afghanistan. one doesn't listen to the other. no one has ever been able to tame afghanistan. why do we think we can tame it? there are things we can do there with covert actions, drones, pet. i have no problem with that. to send our troops over there to get killed and not change anything, not so great. >> host: dr. ben carson's book came out in 1990 followed by "think big" came out in 2000. "take the risk" 2008, "american the beautiful" 2011. and there's a new book on the way. for the last three hours we have been talking with dr. ben >> we've got more coverage of nonfiction books and the book industry every weekend on booktv, including "in depth," live every month. a three-hour look at one author's body of work with your question.

over the next few months, ben shapiro. october 6th, civil rights leader and democratic congressman from georgia, john lewis. and november 3rd, biographer kitty kelley. along with our schedule, you can also see our programs anytime at booktv.org and get the latest updates throughout the week. follow us on facebook and twitter. >> booktv continues with vijay prashad. mr. prashad talks about the protests against neoliberal economic policies by people from the global south like africa, central and latin america and a majority of asia and discusses the possibilities for an alternative system to emerge. this is about two hours. >> okay. thank you, max. thanks to the brecht forum for hosting us, thanks to all of you for coming out. i am andy, i'm an editor at

verso books, and we are the proud publishers of vijay's new book, "poorer nations." i'm going to just briefly introduce vijay. he's going to talk about his book for a bit, then we're going to have a q&a. i'll kick it off with a few questions, then we're going to turn it over to you. and as max said, we have to -- we're hoping to, you know, wait for the mic to get to you, and this is going to be recorded, it'll play on booktv on c-span at some point in the future, which is exciting. i get the feeling that a lot of people here know vijay, but just for those who don't, a little bit of bio about vijay prashad. vijay is the edward saed chair, very appropriate, at the american university of beirut right now. he was formerly and for a long time the george and martha kellner chair of south asian studies and the director of international studies at trinity

college in hartford, connecticut. and are you going back to trinity? [laughter] the future -- >> the problem, situation in beirut. >> right. he is the author of more than a dozen books if you count the books that are only available in india. unfortunately, there are a few that are only published there. this year he published two books. one of the books that we're not going to talk about but is really worth checking out is a book called uncle swame, and it's about the history and the role of south asians in america. it's a really good book. we are going to talk about his new book that was just published by verso books called "the poorer nations." and, you know, for my money vijay is unquestionably the leading historian of the global south today. not only in the sense that this

book and its prequel, "the darker nations," and the two books are really kind of a set. not only in the sense that they so thoroughly cover the rise of the political movements of the global south, but they really turn the history of the 20th century upside down. hence, our design. [laughter] but they do. i mean, in the sense that, you know, "the darker nations" tells the story of the era of the cold war from the point of view of the third world. so it's a really unusual paradigm-shifting history. and then "the poorer nations," i'm not going to talk about it much because vijay will introduce it, covers the period of the rise of what we now call the global south or the rise and fall of the global south from the point of view of the global south, the era of neoliberalism

from the point of view of the global south. so they really are books that turn the intellectual political history of the 20th century and of the present upside down. and if you haven't read them, you know, they're mind blowers. i highly recommend them. i think of all the books that i've worked on, that i've been lucky to work on as an editor -- and i worked on both of these, "the darker nations" and "the poorer nations" -- these two by far are the books that i feel most blessed to have worked on. the books that i learned the most from and the books that i'm proudest of. and i'm really proud to see vijay's ideas out there right now making an impact. he just got back from addressing, giving the keynote address to the u.n. conference on trade and development which he writes about quite a bit in "the poorer nations." and to see vijay standing in

front of this august international body of experts and development types and politicians and to deliver his radical analysis is an amazing sight. now, that is actually available on youtube on the net, his address, and in some of the questions that came afterwards with. you know, i urge you to check it out. i just wish they had panned the audience so we could have seen this motley assembly of important figures listen to you. so without further ado, the great vijay prashad. [laughter] [applause] >> well, firstly, before i say anything about andy, let me say i'm very happy to be in the protect forum. i think -- in the brecht forum. i think all of my books have had an event at the brecht forum. the most exciting for me was when the -- [inaudible] was released in 2000, and that

was held at the old brecht forum, the good brecht forum. [laughter] this is the brecht forum 2.0, the better brecht forum. that was an amazing event for me because, you know, i had written that book essentially as an antidote to the fact that nobody wanted to publish my ph.d.. it had been rejected by seven presses. and one summer i was extremely derespond dent, so i sat down and read my book which my friends said this is junk, you know? but the brecht forum was packed, i was amazed. there were all these people who were interested in understanding the south asian political dynamic in america. and that was my first event at the brecht forum. ali was there. that was my first event at the brecht forum. that to me, was -- the brecht forum, therefore, is a super institution, and i feel most at home here in new york.

andy is modest because these books are basically the work we have done together starting over a decade ago when we started to talk about why it was that at the meetings, say, of the world social forum or at that time it was the world conference against racism and other intolerances and discrimination, why it was that there was such chaos on the stage of the left. why is it that at these events there never seems to be a coherent agenda articulated? why have we dissipated into so many different issues and are unable to find a united horizon? not a single horizon, because that's impossible, but some kind of unity in a horizon. and the first time we talked about this, i had just returned from the durbin meeting and thought i'd write a book about durbin. i mean, i wrote maybe over a

hundred pages on during by was it was in danger of being forgotten. the durbin conference ended, and then 9/11 occurred a week after, and all that work that went into putting together this major u.n. conference was in danger of being lost. i started writing that book, and i remember we met, and i said i can't publish this book because it's a book of defeat. this book doesn't recognize that there's any future for our movement. you know, it's a swan song for something that never actually came together. and so then it was worthwhile to go back and ask where is the dynamic of this politics that emerges in venues such as the world social forum. you know, when you go to a wsf meeting, there are activists coming there from the landless movement in brazil. there are activists coming there who work to break israeli

apartheid. there are activists coming there from south africa who are fighting against, at the time, young state of the post-apartheid south african regime. you know, these people have a history that produced them. they are not just ordinary people who just came off the plane one day and walked into a conference and said we have a set of issues. you know, there's a history behind them. so the idea was to go back and excavate both the history and its positivity and to demonstrate what happened to that history. in other words, to go back and look at how after the colonial period there was an attempt around the world to create some kind of new vision. you know, people didn't fight against colonial authority simply to be defeated in their new order. they must have had ideas. you see, when people look back now and write the history of nationalism, those are all histories of defeat. those are gloomy histories. those are histories which

suggest, well, i mean, look at mexico, it's a failed state. but, good god, you know, when poncho villa and they were all fighting their battles in the early 1900s up to 1911 all the way to the 1930s, they weren't saying let's fight these battles so that we can produce a state that is collapsing under narco traffic and no more ability to grow maize. that was not their vision. surely, they had a vision. so the idea was to excan ca sate that vision -- excavate that vision not for one state, not for one nation because that is somewhat available. what we didn't have was a sense of their great broad-mindedness. you know, many of these people were not just interested in their land, their territory. they had an anti-imperialist agenda. they saw much further than the

confines of their own territory. they were able to dream about worlds. they were able to make different kinds of connections. they, in some cases, even knew about each other or, in fact, knew each other. they had met in plus else at the -- in brussels. they had met, perhaps, in the formation of the u.n. they had met in these spaces. but even if they didn't physically meet each other as the millions did not, i mean, the millions of people fighting against the british in india hadn't met the millions of people in egypt fighting to overthrow the yoke of the british mandate there. but yet they knew of each other. they knew, for instance, of gandhi. you know, they knew of -- i mean, it's an incredible set of stories that an egyptian assassin or collaborator in egypt, when he assassinated this collaborator was thinking of --

[inaudible] who had assassinated a british official in london. because they had a connection through the india house in london. so these people had understood that their struggle was much larger than the confines of their territory. so it was important to write the history of that dream at a much larger canvas than within the context of the history of a nation-state. because i thought that the histories of the nation state not only were they being written as a history of defeat, in fact, inevitable defeat. you know, you remember by the 1980s, '90s when the nation-states were coming under a great crisis because of the debt crisis and other things, it was ineffable that intellectually people would say nationalism is a failure, or nationalism leads to totalitarianism. but, in fact, if you go back, the story is much more complicated. and so it's not only more complicated, as i said, by

writing about the national dreams, but that the national dreams were embedded in a much broader horizon. and so the first project, actually, was to write that first dynamic, the emergence of those dreams, the contradictions in the dreams. because i'm not capable of writing only the dream of the nationalists. i mean, one of the tragedies of being a marxist is that you're confronted with the contradictions always, you know? so sometimes you have to suspend your contradictions in order to make a politics, otherwise you'll never act. everything looks like it's a bad decision. sometimes you have to act in the world. i'm going to join organizations, we're going to fight as if there are no contradictions on this particular life. but in general, history is driven by contradictions. even the dreams of the third world project were filled with contradictions, so the history

was about those contradictions as well. and lastly, when "the darker nations" was being put together, it was about the demolition of those dreams. and the argument there was that the dream was demolished by the debt crisis of the 1980s. in fact, the very intellectual context which produced me which said nationalism is always bad, etc., was a mirror reflection of the reality of that time. in other words, where the history that i wrote ended, the national third world project was basically sundayered by the 1980s as a consequence of the debt crisis, as a consequence then of the only thing being available to these states was a project of authoritarianism in cases. you know, because of that nationalism itself was getting bad name. so the fourth volume was to recover that story of how we got

to the point where the national project had collapsed. now, when i wrote that book, the first book, "darker nations," the ending was very gloomy. because this great project that i had, you know, okay, manufactured -- [laughter] maybe it was true, maybe not. some people say it's exaggerated. so what? maybe it was exaggerated. history should be written with some, you know, life in them. [laughter] if the history doesn't have life, it's not going to appeal to anybody, you know? and i'm not saying that it's propaganda. it's simply a vision of what, you know, broad strokes. you imagine how people have these kind of approaches to the world. but the collapse was very gloomy and, in fact, at the end of the book i wrote the ending in a way not fully. it was not fleshed out. there was no -- [inaudible] in other words, the third world project had been inflated x then i deflated it.

and it appeared at the end of that book that nothing is coming out of this. in other words, once more we continue to what david scott called the conscript of modernity. it's all over for these parts of the world. but, of course, i had already started work on the second volume, because the second volume could not have been part of the first book. because the first book was about the third world project. in the ashes of the third world project rose something new. as i said, history is driven by its contradictions. people are not capable of being defeated. people simply lose for the moment, and then they arrive again. they start up again. you know, it's very difficult for masses of people to suffer catastrophic defeat forever. you may defeat a generation, you may defeat two generations, but the third generation will rise against you. that's what people don't realize. they think once you declare it's the american century again,

history has ended, etc., everybody for time immemorial will lay prone and will accept that dispensation. in fact, things are more complicated already. but "the poorer nations" had another story as well. on the one hand, it was going to take up the kind of his to have graphical college of putting forward what is the next big project that is there for the south. that was one. the other kinds of things i was working against, just to tell you because i use the word contradiction 10 or 12 times already, the other things i was working against were the following kinds of narratives. one was what had happened in development theory. now, in "the darker nations" i had written about the time mainstream development thinkers, and that was -- [inaudible] completely forgotten after the 1980s.

in fact, not forgotten around the world. when i say forgotten, i mean forgotten by development studies, forgotten in the global north almost entirely. but they had a unique approach to understanding development. in other words, they were interested in issues such as construction of national markets, construction of well being of population, you know, the idea of basic needs comes out of that theory. but by the 1980s when the historical imagination collapsed and people said nationalism is bad, at the same time development studies collapsed and said, well, we're sorry that all these years we talked about substitution, industrialization, we're sorry that for all these years we talk talked about, you, tariffs and subsidy regimes. what we're going to talk about from now on is the influence of the market. and so development studies which

used to be a redoubt of the -- readout of the left or at least liberals became totally involved in a kind of market-driven development. public/private partnerships, improving market access to lift growth rates so that then all the boats can rise, you know, that kind of thinking in the development studies. secondly, the theory of new liberalism which is a correct theory and an important theory, the theory that we're being utilized as an instrument to take sections of social life which have been previously true social democracy through the influence of socialism, through the third world project, sections of social economic life had been taken states and held in the public to produce social goods such as a good bit we no

longer recognize as social, education. another one which you can't imagine as social, health care. one more, transportation. you know, these words should somehow be held in the public trust in order to provide services to the population. now, obviously, there's something paternal list about some of this, but leave that aside. that was all to go. in its place was to come if you increase the private sector involvement, services will improve. this is the kind of theory. neoliberalism, the theory of neoliberalism started to suggest that something had happened in england and in the united states, in new york. thatcher and reagan enter world history, and suddenly neoliberalism comes. that somehow these domestic policies in london, you know, in the house of commons, in washington, d.c., maybe in the u.s. treasury department engineered something called neoliberalism, and then that exported to the world. i was going to write against

that argument. so one argument to write against was what happens to development studies. secondly, what happens in the theory of neoliberalism, this idea that once again -- like all good things -- it's born in europe and exported to the rest of the world. [laughter] the third thing -- and that's a pretty mainstream approach, to think like that. the third thing i wanted to write, again, was that somehow rich people had emerged in india, in ghana, in south africa, in brazil, you know? rich people were all around the world and that there were class contradictions in the united states so that the world has become flat. the geography now is simply a flat world whether this is thomas friedman on one side or the world of capitalism on the other, the world is flat, and it's class contradictions that dominate. so there's no real geography of

imperialism. the metrics of imperialism no longer operate like it used to. so now to talk about a north/south divide, in other words, is to be an iio and that is also, to my mind, a fairly mainstream approach not only in the mainstream -- thomas friedman -- but also to the left. it's a very strong approach, that somehow there is a flattening. there's been an elite in india since -- [laughter] when they built those things, whatever those are. i mean, it's not like the existence of an elite is evidence of a flat world. there are elites in every society. but that doesn't mean the world is flat. so those are the three things i wanted to push back against. so how to do that? that's always the problem. so the book does it in a couple of different ways. one, i was interested in how in

the 1970s there is a concerted effort by the oecd countries, by the group of seven which was formed in 1974, and i tell the story of the formation of the group of seven in 1974. why did the group of seven form? they formed largely for two reasons. one is there were internal problems in europe and the united states. stagflation had begun to set in, there were serious labor issues particularly in northern europe, you know? serious labor issues emerging in the united states. so they needed to figure out how to coordinate policy among the leading industrial countries to deal with this. in other words, they wanted to protect capital against mutual -- intranational fights through devaluation policy, etc. remember, and i am not going to go into this in detail because it's written in the book, but in

the early '70s, '71 the united states rigged the gold standard so the greenback now comes forward, and you have something which you might call as dollar imperialism or whatever these days. so there was a danger that the french in particular, always the french, will somehow start an intercapitalist rivalry. so the group of seven is formed for that one reason. but the second reason is equally important, and in the literature on development it's very rarely talked about. and that is, they wanted to come together to fight against the new international economic order. a set of policies developed by the third world project which passed the united nations general assembly in 1973 alongside the use of oil as a weapon in '73. you know, again, the oil strike of '73 happened to punish israel and israel's allies. but if you read the actual

discussion in opec, it was not just for that. it was because they were very angry at the fact that this new dollar imperialism had screwed up commodity prices, and they said we have to import things from you. your prices are going up, but our oil is kept, to their mind, unnaturally low. so this pressure from the third world was the second reason the g7 was formed. the story i wanted to tell was from the '70s. how this g7 grouping but also the oecd which was formed in '61, the organization of economic cooperation and development, europe and america 's secretaries, essentially. you know, to discuss how to deal with the commodity debates and things like that, how to deal with, basically, with stabilizing commodity prices, you know, to make sure that countries that produce say only cocoa get a fair deal for this one crop that they're exporting.

and they're not entirely manipulated by the mainly european companies buying the cocoa-making chocolate and selling us chocolate. selling back chocolate to the countries that produce cocoa. so this g7 trust was not only to get these countries to fight against the emergent nie or new international economic order, but also to clean up -- [inaudible] so they cleaned out the world bank and the imf. and i tell the story of how keynesians were basically thrown out of these institutions. and an entirely new crop of people -- mainly american minted ph.d.s from economics departments -- are brought into the imf and the world bank. in other words, when later people would say 50 years is enough, later when people will say end the bank, down with imf, what they're actually saying is down with the forced '70 -- the

post-'70s world bank and imf. because interestingly, the imf before this was quite an interesting organization to. in fact, i tell the story of the man who ran the imf who had a theory that some of this oil profit should be collected in a fund and used as a recycling mechanism. now, i'm going to use all this stuff. it sounds like jargon, people close off. that's the danger with economic language. people think, oh, my god, i'll never understand all this stuff. but it's a simple issue. it's what the west or the north likes to do when it's in trouble. so when the financial crisis occurred in 2007, the north went to china and said we would like some of your surplus to be put into a stabilization fund to stabilize our turbulence. but when the south goes into a debt crisis, well, you have to be responsible. or when greece was just sort of an ornery third world country, goes into crisis, you have to deal with your own problems. but if we have a problem, then

chinese need to bail us out. you may remember or not in the 1980s japan has to bail out the u.s. so twice the united states revised its, devalued and then revalued the currency through the so-called plaza agreement and the reverse plaza agreement to make sure japanese surpluses came back to the united states. so this mechanism, the imf was willing to create a global one to create stability. so pre-the 1970s it was an interesting organization. but it had to be cleaned up and brought into line. so the argument that i'm trying to suggest here is on two fronts. one is the emergence of neoliberalism wasn't just about a municipal crisis or england's domestic financial problems. it had to do with punishing and destroying the newfound power of the third world project. it is very plain, and i quote from the g7 founding meeting which is a brilliant document.

it's available at gerald ford's library where some state department official was tasked with keeping notes. and he, i mean, it reveals these discussions where, for instance, the german premier who was a social democrat, so-called socialist, says to the americans, the italians, japanese, others i am a great friend of the union head of the -- [inaudible] union in germany. we're great friends. he helped me get elected, essential essentially, but we're going to have to let the textile sector go. we cannot maintain the textile sector any longer in germany. some scandalous things that they talk about quite openly. so it's not a conspiracy theory. you know, i'm not, i'm not manufacturing stuff. so these guys collude with each other to fix certain -- they see themselves as managers of the globe. so they collude with each other to fix certain problems in the interest of capital.

in those meetings they talk a lot about how to sort out the commodity issue, and the way to sort it out is to make sure a dynamic that has been developing in the third world project has to be sidelined. and it was a simple dynamic. the most successful commodity cartel that comes out of the third world project so peck. the -- is opec. other cartels were being formed; the cartel for cocoa, for aluminum. that is why jamaica had to be destroyed. if you've seen the great film "life and death," jamaica is one of the leading producers of box site, and -- boxite. and australians were -- [inaudible] to crash the boxite cartel, to stop this cartelization of commodities. because, you know, this was just not going to be on. they would raise the prices of primary goods. so the main discussion of the g7 was how to kill this process of

the third world project. in other words, they were quite aware that the north/south divide was going to continue. and so that's one strand that i tell in this book, the story of how unbeknownst to a lot of intellectuals who'd like to assume that this collusion globally of all elites against the whole planet. at the same time as that may be true a little bit, there's also collusion in the global north in suckering the rest of the world. so that's one dynamic. and i have a lot of fun with the evidence because, you know, thank god the united states, you know that scene from newsroom, why is this the greatest country in the world? i don't know if you've seen the tv show newsroom, anyway, whatever. some of you may have seen. he goes on and says it's not the greatest country in the world, whatever. one way it is the greatest country in the world is that documents are can kept in these

archives. [laughter] and they're incriminating archives, and they're there for the public to see, and they are really incriminating. i mean, it's quite scandalous. the second dynamic, the second chapter tells the story of the south commission. this is a story that's totally forgotten, you know? nobody remembers. one of the sad things about the south commission is that their final report was released in caracas, venezuela, on august 2, 1990. now, it may not mean anything to you unless your iraqi or kuwaiti, but that was the day that saddam hussein had the bad taste to invade kuwait. so that document disappeared. it end in bad times -- ended in bad times. but that discussion was essential because it was, it was a global discussion of intellectuals and political figures of the south trying to figure out how do we deal with

this new dispensation, how do we deal with our situation where the general agreement on trade and tariffs, the gap in its -- [inaudible] which was launched in 1986. they had made a couple of revisions in global trade which are going to be catastrophic for the rest of the world. and i'll just tell you about one of them. the most important for our understanding of globalization. in that round they changed the way intellectual property should work through a provision called trade-related intellectual property. what does it mean? it means the following. this is alexander coburn's book which will come out in september. okay. alexander coburn wrote this book. now -- bad example. andy has a very nice watch from timex. okay, it's a timex watch. now, i am an engineer in india,

and i take this watch, i take it apart, i study it, i take photographs of how it's laid out, and then i say i know how to make this. but i won't make it like this. i will have a completely different process than timex. because in the earlier intellectual property regime what was patented was the process. not the product. that means this is crucial for medicine. if you have a medicine, say an aids drug, if you can find a different way of getting to that same drug, totally legal, you don't are to pay rent to a -- don't have to pay rent to a pharmaceutical company. but intellectual property rules were changed so that the product was patented. now, if you can patent a medicine and not only patent it, but if you are able to hold a patent for a sufficient amount of time, any consumer of that product anywhere in the world, even if they manufacture it

themselves, have to pay you rent. so in other words, the global north has figured out a way to be rent seeking on their products. this is very important for how outsourcing happens from america, why you can have growth in america but no jobs. because now a small section of the american population can invent things like a medicine, a drug. and you don't need to hire people in america to make it anymore. you can make it in malaysia and sell it anywhere in the world. but you will collect rented on that med din -- rent on that medicine for as hong as you can maintain the patent on it. that was crucial to globalization. that changed. it was fought tooth and nail by the south. they lost that battle. so in the south commission, these intellectuals, these politicians gathered to discuss how do we survive in this new dispensation? and they had some furious and interesting debates. some of the debates were about

politics. in other words, they understood that the maneuver to clean up the world bank of decent people, to clean up imf of decent people, to clean up most of the u.n. bureaucracy, you know, the united states fought very cleverly after the u.n. general assembly passed a resolution that zionism is racism. they fought to delegitimize the u.n. based on that evolution. and daniel patrick moynihan was sent as u.n. ambassador to new york essentially to destroy the united nations. this is a very interesting story which i have quoted in the here from the nixon archives. because here you get the discussion between henry kissinger in one chair, nixon in another chair and moynihan. they had read moynihan's essay in "commentary" magazine. not about, you know, the black family which is moynihan's famous essay where he suggests that, you know, in the black

community men need to join the military to create masculinity. that sort of argument. he wrote another argument about the u.n. and they brought him in. this is the great liberal senator from new york. and his mission was to go to new york and to cut down the general assembly to size and to move all important business to the security council. hence, today when people say can't the u.n. do anything, they just mean the security council. this was not as it was before the 1970s. people saw the general assembly as the main body of the u.n. now we all see the security council. that was also part of the agenda, and they succeeded. you know, they succeeded in doing these things. so the part of the north/south constitution is the politics. how do we reclaim these global institutions? so they start a process called u.n. reform. how to reform the u.n. that language now has been taken over by the north how to cut down funding to u.n. agencies. but that's another story.

but that was the original discussion, how to reform the u.n., how to bring in more permanent seats to the security council, etc. the second discussion was on economics. how to deal this question of intellectual property rights, to deal with the question of debt. because they decided in these discussions that the north was no longer going to finance development. the north was no longer interested in financing development. it was interested in so-called restructuring the state of the south, a policy that the imf will then dub structural agricultural program. so they said the north is not going to be the so-called locomotive of the south. it is in the south commission that they start talking about the south being its own locomotive x. it's out of those discussions that you start to see the inklings of the emergence of the bric strategy. so that's the second argument

against the view that neoliberalism is exported from the north. in other words, what i'm suggesting is a different kind of neoliberalism emerges in the south. it has a different origin. in other words, when the chinese say we are going to grow the economy, they are not identical to -- [inaudible] they may, some of them and a number of them may revere thatcher, that's a separate issue. but the origin of their policies were not identical. i'm not saying they're good, i'm just saying they're not identical. that's the second trust, that neoliberalism has a polycentric emergence. and linked to that is another issue which i'll just briefly touch on. a few more minutes? >> sure. >> this is an important issue because, you know, when we understand globalization, we know that firms break up, etc. what people don't talk about is the politics of what happens to firms. so let's say nike was best example. nike makes nothing.

nike is a brand company. it just makes the brand, and it designs shoes. then the shoes are made by subcontractors from surrey lanka to -- sri lanka to eurasia up along the eastern rim and the designs from come from oregon. go out there, they see the final product, etc. what happens is rather than build a giant shoe factory in sri lanka, they built parts of shoe manufacturing in six or seven cups. this we all know. what you don't realize is the political implication of all in this. because the one major political weapon that countries had in the previous era was nationalization. so if you came and built a factory on our territory, we couldn't nationalize the factory, and then we could control the manufacture of shoes and then sell them. but if all you're manufacturing laces, then you've nationalized

laces. so what the hell are you going to do with a factory that produces five million laces a year? you need to sell it back to those same people who will now screw you because now they say, well, you nationalized the lace factory. you're welcome to the laces. we're making another lace factory in haiti. so the one major political weapon that the third world had was removed from the arsenal of the governments through this process. so intellectual property rights, articulation of production had enormous political implications for the global south. in this way i have never you would why people say the world is -- understood why people say the world is flat. it's very uneven. and i can see there are great unevennesses in america. this is a country now which is never going to produce mass jobs if this global dispensation continues. there is no way to employ people in america if this particular global imagination continues. because as long as intellectual property rights are understood in this way, you can collect

rent or medicine, you have high growth rates. you don't need to employ people here. it's, in fact, stupid to employ people here. you're collecting rent. so the elite is perfectly happy, capital is happy, governments are sitting in their back pocket. there's no incentive to produce jobs here on economic terms. okay. because that political thing has been set aside. so in the south commission they also discuss the politics, and out of that comes the idea of creating the g15 -- a smaller set of countries. the secretary general of the south commission said we need to create locomotives of the south. release some countries to grow and then they will anchor the growth of the rest of the world. that is, essentially, the prehistory of brics. and there's a politics of that which has nothing to do with jim o'neill of goldman sachs who coins the phrase bric. because long before he wrote the phrase in a goldman report, india, brazil and south africa

had an agenda on the drugs question. i'm not going to get into that, but it's an autonomous project. finally, what does all of this have to do with the mass people's movement that our story begins with? i mean, we still hold world social forums, they still seem a little chaotic. what's the story, how does can it relate to that? the last chapter of the book is called "the dream history of the south." i mean, essentially, it's an assessment of what is the possibility of today's internationalism. and the argument that i advance is that internationalism is a premature idea at this time. in other words, internationalism was a central material idea in the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s, maybe even the '70s. but today it is nostalgic to talk easily about global solidarity. because there are vast differences in the containers

around the planet which is why it's very interesting. i look at a few examples, say the latin american example. their trust has been regeneral ated to take on a bloc that is able to take on the north/south disparity and try to create for themselves a means of moving a new history forward. even people's organizations, and i look at one, for instance, which starts out as an, on the international stage. but slowly through their experience end up with a regional understanding that we need to first develop a regional politics, a regional politics in asia. so they've moved from latin america to asia. a regional politics needs to be developed. if you look at the world social forum, the annual wsf meeting not really the interesting meeting, as you all know. the u.s. social forum is, in a

sense, more materially necessary than the cairo social forum which plays an important role although the mainstream media never acknowledges it in the arab spring. because activists were able to meet each other. you see, the thing about politics is politics is based on trust. it's not based on having the right ideas. it's based on, and it's based on power. if you don't trust people, you can't build power together. just because you and i may share some ideas, we may not trust each other sufficiently that if you say we are doing an uprising in tunisia, are you guys going out on the street, you know, in bahrain? i mean, you know, who are you? i don't -- we are on twitter together. i mean, you may be an agent of a bahraini state for all i know. you need to have some kind of emotional link to other people. so it's very interesting that the world social forum acts on one stage.

but beneath that i think concretely, history has led it to the importance of the social forum. so the argument i put forward is that internationalism is, to my mind, it was of the future, it was of the past, and it will be of the future. understanding of world events. but i'm not sure that the internationalist agenda is the political agenda for the present. the current agenda, in my opinion, is a regional agenda to build regional power, to move regional agendas forward in order to confront the condition and change those conditions to make internationalism the legitimate force of the future. so that's, basically, how the bookends. book ends. one thing i can say before i end is there is no third volume. [laughter] somebody else will have to write that, because this is done. now i am going to write some narcissistic things. [laughter] so with that, i say thank you. [applause]

>> thanks. that was great, as always. you know, one thing that, you know, i'm sure people will want to talk about this, argue with you about the question of global solidarity, international politics. i mean, that's some controversial stuff at the end of it. >> [inaudible] >> is this better? one thing that i was thinking about as you were talking that i've thought a lot about, um, with these two books is that in "the darker nations" you tell the story, you narrate the story of the rise of this internationalist, this radical, this remarkable convergence of people, ideas, movements into a kind of global platform which, you know, you were suggesting is somewhat cobbled together by

you. but, i mean, what you're doing is suggesting that there was this incredibly powerful program put together. after all, it was a conference that drew world leaders like nasser and so forth. produced all of these ideas, produced these programs, single country initiatives, global alliances of various sorts. and then it got assassinated. in the poorer nations it sort of begins with the assassination. the g7 gets together, they gun down this third world project. but the thing that occurred to me is one of the reasons you think "the darker nations" is a kind of depressing book is it does narrate the decline of the anti-colonial movements which start out as very radical, very

egalitarian, very experimental, fairly flexible, and their kind of soification into -- ossification into national authoritarian regimes. the way that they're organized as national liberation movements lends itself to the, basically, the burr boy si of each country claiming the mantle of leadership and subordinating the egalitarian movements in taking power. so by the end of the book, it's kind of like a case of assisted suicide, right, more than it is assassination by the north. whereas "poorer nations" begins with the assumption that the global north is experiencing the rise of this political movement sometimes epitomized by single countries, sometimes by these nascent global alliances,

sometimes it's a military situation -- vietnam -- at other times it's an economic situation with opec, the most successful of all the commodity cartels. so they fight back. but what is missing from "poorer nations" is a sense of where and why did the southern elite, you know, assist in their own suicide? why did they get to the point when you narrate the -- it's a very fascinating story, the rise of this south commission that almost none of us have heard from or remember. amazing global collection of people getting together toty through the ideas and come up -- to think through the ideas and come up with an agenda in the wake of the '60s, in the wake of the third world project. but the report that they produced, it's pretty an no dine. i mean, it's a disappointment. it's just boring. and its politics are completely neutered. and that wasn't just the doing

of the fightback from the g7 and from the economic and political might of the u.s. and all of its instruments that it would develop like the wto. that was something that was happening in the south. so why is that? >> yeah. that's a good question. it's, actually, that's the reason why i wanted to go to the south commission archives and see debates. because the debates are furious. i mean, it's not like -- and let me put it this way, the debates are furious, but the people who fought on the side of let's go along with the dynamical history, in other words, let's adopt some of these private/public partnerships, etc., most of them did that, argued that case either from a standpoint of banality, you know, they owned the rain forests in malaysia, this one guy. he owned huge rain forests, also in indonesia. some of them were people like that. they had their own class interests, naked class

interests. but others felt that the game was so badly lost that you just had to if you were going to be realistic, you had to engage with the terms of the north. in other words, the argument was we can't go back to the time. you know, there was a cuban -- rodriguez -- at the table who, you know, was arguing a very strong line. this is how we should go, this is terrible. there was an indian woman, one of the founders of dawn, the great third world feminist network, arguing a certain case. everybody just said to them, that's interesting what you're saying, but it's off kilter from reality. and this is a direction of reality, therefore, this is how we should go. so the final report, you're right, is an know dine because it had to be a consensus report. so it had a little of this, a little of that. what was more interesting than the report was the debate. because the debate suggests that

even those who argued for collusion, let us say, were arguing for collusion not on the side of let's accept this reality because this is the future. but let's accept that this is the reality, and how do we then move our own agenda forwardso?fe question of debt one of the most interesting interventions was against the idea that indebted countries should go one by one with to the london group, the paris group, you know, the commercial lenders, official lenders and negotiate one by one. why should you stand in a line going into a room with the lenders? i mean, it's not a fair argument. you will never get a good deal. so they argued that if they're going to deal with the debt crisis, people have to go in panels. the countries of africa should do it together. countries of asia should

renegotiate together. you cannot negotiate one against the lenders. so that led me to understand that it was not a lie down and let us adopt their reality. it was that even the ones who were most so-called collusionists, the argument was this is a reality, now how do we deal with it? we can't take the cuban view which was let's not pay the debt. let's just walk away from it all, you know? castro at the meeting in '83 said we'll all go on debt strike. which, you know, to me, sounds like a perfectly reasonable ideas. on the other hand, unless 170 countries go on debt strike, if it's only three of you, you're going to die! i mean, look at the pressure being put on ecuador over the snowden issue. korea says, okay, we'll take snowden, and they say, well, sorry, you're going to make the economy scream which is a phrase they used for chile in '71,

we'll make the economy scream. so in that sense even those who appear to be, to collude had a much more sophisticated understanding. and their view, for instance, of intellectual property was that we don't accept this, but we cannot find a way to fight it. and i thought that was very interesting. what that led me to imagine -- because many of the people in the room then go on to become heads of governments, etc. in the third chapter, i do an assessment of india, south africa, brazil, you know, what happens in the domestic policy in order to then understand ipsa and the bricks. their neoliberal policies are not identical to the united states because they're also dealing with questions of how to fight the trade war. you know, there are agricultural so-called doha issues there, agricultural protectionist things in the north. there are ways in which we are not allowed to enter their markets. we don't want them to enter our markets in these ways.

they had a different sophisticated view of what they were up against. in other words, it's hard for me to say that, you know, ronald reagan was a durbin, you know? he's -- [inaudible] he has a different approach. and reading his papers that he wrote for the south commission were, to me, largely instructive. in fact, many times writing this book i said i wanted to write a book on -- [inaudible] and i tried for several years to interview him. that was another, that's another interesting story. [laughter] but i wanted to ask him one question, you know? dr. singh, your honor, prime minister singh, you gave this speech in, you know, in sweden, i think -- finland. no, sorry -- [inaudible] you gave this speech in reykjavik in 1990, december. what happened to you between december 1990 and july 1991? [laughter] when you went back and accepted the big imf deal for india,

started lib r58ized -- liberalizing? that has been the question that motivated the third chapter, because it comes to what you think, what is the level of collusion? see, their thinking is different. his argument was we don't want aid money. aid money is not going to come from the north. they always tie aid to selling stuff which is vastly overpriced and often not the kinds of things we need. so, but we need financing. so we'll organize financing through other means. we'll organize financing through private investment, so-called foreign direct investment. the chinese said we will do fdi, but only if you allow technology transfers. the indians didn't fully insist on that. that was the chinese fighting back against the uruguay round. you know, you can't -- okay, you tell us that we can't reverse engineer and make up our own medicines? fine. tell us how to do it.

you have to give us licenses. that's why the french are furious the chinese have stolen our solar technology, and, you know, they have a wto case against them, but they'll never winter, you know? so there were -- win it, you know? there were different ways in which the collusion was happening. so i think assisted suicide is too strong. it's more a kind of jiu-jitsu of the elite that was occurring. [laughter] ..

>> i am alluding to the idea that a lot of these countries, their leaderships have installed neoliberalism with something characteristics and the analysis you are giving is one in which people like all the folks at the commission think is very smart, interesting analysis. it is more or less articulated in its position of what do you want? we have to deal with that, the no. exists and if that is so then why is it that latin america takes a different route? >> why is it that -- in other words what it seems to me you don't really explain is why is

it that these legacies of third world projects including the leading countries like indonesia and so forth go in this direction where they each actively install neoliberalism which is an important difference and another region, and venezuela another substantiating member of the third world project goes a different direction. >> sometimes -- indonesia as i document, the left is wiped out, millions of people killed. that means an entire social force that fought for indonesia to be one of the founders in indonesia so the entire generation was wiped out and it covered indonesia, a country

that had one of the largest communist party's. today there are 25 groups, there are no real organizations, of vibrant organizations like there used to be. latin america, a little bit of a story of the emergence -- there is an advantage in a long period of dictatorship. i don't think you should negate that for political reasons. a lot of people were killed, brutality was intense but also solidarity's of an emotional kind grew across different viewpoints, take brazil for example. you are asked to question why doesn't they -- walk away from the tripartite alliance, what is the m s d, the movement, what are they doing with the workers'

party today? why haven't they just walked away and become external completely? you have to understand for decades they grew an alliance with each other fighting against something. there is deep understanding of what people are attempting to do, greater latitude to create a project in unison. in the colonial period in the 1800s, liberal left wingers, even right wing, fought together in india, fought together with left-wing radicals, they fought in similar movements, produced the possibility of independence. for release 20 years or so of combined work together even though there were different approaches toward politics.

in the bulk of the global south from the 70s onward, the movements were shattered, they may have been strong but had no way of performing an agenda together. that is one important thing people underestimate in latin america. there was a period of working together, secondly, history has an amazing way of asserting did sell. my last chapter for good reason begins in '89 when there is this the people in caracas is not the first so-called i am of riot, across latin america and asia. and lost state-controlled for days and there was the bread riot in the 70s. price riots, there have been

legion's but this was special. not only were the main cities lost to the administration but it shocked the military. i put it to you with a parallel, why in egypt, one reason in 52, was because when the egyptian army went to war against the israelis they were trounced and it was a humiliation for the military and that humiliation was understood by the military in the following ways -- this bloody king used v defense budget to enrich the covers of his family and friends. we had tanks, never claimed power machinery so we were trounced by the israeli army in 48, she milly asian was important in a military coup. similarly in venezuela, a great story of a child being sick

going back to the palace where he was in charge of the palace guard and his troops telling him we don't want to shoot any more. and his brother was in the forces too. these had an impact. it was a way of asserting itself because certain conjunctions occurred. the conjunction occurs in venezuela. of the conjunction occurred in your great it wouldif the conju your great it would not have produced this. the special convention in venezuela higher oil prices, leverage politically is what enabled this to take a different

historical roots. there are major fights in kenya for instance, the battle over the election results, maitre cataclysmic fight, generation radicalized but the conjunction didn't provide it to go forward. history gives us what it gives us. rehab we have to then produce a narrative. some people, mass killing of a population. slums will play a crucial role in political power. back to the new economic development when unions are destroyed through the debt crisis i won't go into details, the debt crisis was the end of

unions in many countries, a way to cut the unions down. when unions are destroyed for many places on the left the principal space of organizing is lost, factory, industrial concern etc.. what has begun to happen after that period, the struggles were no longer struggles to the deck of production that became points of consumption. electricity, water connections, gas price in bolivia etc.. what is creative was to utilize the point of consumption and that meant a slum. in a sense you can say they were able to start a new. some say that model should be taken all over the world. everybody is able to produce. if you tell the egyptians ignore

industry and organized slums of cairo, one of the leading forces of the left in today's egypt, fighting to resuscitate something from the convulsions of this revolution are the exxon workers. and municipal unions. these unions play a very important role of value one of our read about them in the new york times, they play a major role. you can say they will be everywhere. in venezuela they were clear to move forward. despite the contradictions of the venezuelan experience, and would not have been produced there, would not have gone forward. >> let's bring it to the present day. some of the stuffy end with. you are skeptical as you just

said it of the idea of international global solidarity, not just the world's social form but the very idea but folks who were trying to organize politics, premature internationalist's but capital is internationalist and the forces that were range up against increasingly multinational so why do you think we shouldn't be organizing in ways that mirrored that? >> no question -- solutions -- have to be creative in our thinking but in few more times presidents knew who to attack. they knew to attack the money

lender and under capitalism, stand outside the goldman sachs building and medicaid and do whatever the hell, but it is structural domination, easy politics how power is organized. how do we have power organized, in that sense organizations that have attempted to build people's power, looked at many of them. what i say may sound demeaning but i don't mean it to be. some play an important role, shack workers' movement, one of

the interesting thing is they do is organize in bombay and introduce them inside africa so that is important in building for the organizers in bombay and inside africa a new rise in. it is an opportunity to travel to another country and see how different people are fighting. in that sense it broadens the horizons of activists and organizers. that is essential. but the struggles in bombay are not directly related to struggles in south africa and they create a common agenda. there shoes are different, the power structure is different, the power they build is built on a different foundation. in south africa may be the union is nearby and you have an ally. in bombay trade unions have been

the this r-rated. there are no real opportunities to have massive support, the use of trade unions in the textile industry, globalized out of bombay they don't have the unions so that means the ground in which people have to fight is the leader group so meeting south african guerrillas is actually not helping them build power. but it is doing is all broaden verizon. i have no problem with people going to different places, meeting people, understanding how it is linked but power struggles are linked is a separate issue from how to build power where we are and that should not be taken as the politics of populism. no matter how far away you are. if you are not building where you are you cannot fight against those invisible structural dominant force as we all have to combat together. south american, latin american is very important because from

that progress of experience when the bank was being formed there was pressure, the least creative role but there was pressure in the south american countries to rethink ratings agencies, should there be a rating agency, standard and poor's but that is an interesting theory, and standards, i would say why would there be a ratings agency, why don't you have popular rating agencies, you have some people chatter on how to raise countries or whatever but yet those struggles on the grounds have international implications but that is because they built power. every time there is an election in venezuela they fight and win.

if you don't build a regional power, local power, you can never confront domination and that is the danger of calling for global upsurge and waiting all your life. we have to build power even though we are building power against the global hemisphere. >> i think we should take some questions from the audience. there is a handout back there. we are going to take three or four questions and please wait for the microphone to get to you. i will and it through the masses and we will take a few questions. one in the back over there, one

in the back over there, another one, okay. here we go. why don't we start with you and let me -- >> on the question of international struggle was wondering what you thought about in palestine, specifically since the sanctions have been largely international, largely u.s. and palestinians calling for that and since it is so hard to build power on the ground because of the structures of the occupation, what you thought of that and as far as international struggle? [inaudible]

>> i want to ask you to talk a little more about something you briefly mentions which was the impact on all of this of wage stagnation, in this country i was really struck by your remark that the g-7 was created in 74 because that was right when wage growth separated in this country historically. >> has someone who went on the peace care than last year, being aware there is a big debate on the legalization of uruguay, the president of guatemala and a couple other latin american

presidents calling for debate on softer drug laws and since drug prohibition always is black-market profits and underground economy, power is the effort toward softer drug laws particularly in south america going to affect the flow of capital, the friction you described between the global morris and the global south? >> great question. palestine -- i will agree with you, it is an international struggle but the palestinian struggle is also a struggle of different countries. in the united states the struggle for solidarity with the palestinians is actually a struggle to stop u.s. occupation. is actually an american struggle.

it is important for americans -- of course the danger is americans become the story. how many remember how of many palestinians were killed but we remember the names of americans. there's nothing wrong with that because their lives are precious and they sacrificed immeasurably. that is important but not the only struggle. palestinians are very capable of fighting their battles. there can be few examples of fearlessness in fighting against military might that they demonstrated but the problem for america is not the israelis. it is the american government so the campaign in america needs to transform american imagination, that is a national struggle. it is the same in india. india buys half of israeli arms

exports and in my opinion underwrites the occupation of palestinians. in the indian movement is very clear that the struggle is about india, not that we help the palestinians. they carry their own problems as we know for several thousand years. they can do it. they don't need us. what they need us to do is to get the feet of their necks and the feed on their necks is not only the idea of soldiers, the idea of soldier made by an american in malaysia. and underwriting the ability to have more soldiers so in that sense it is not only -- it is a campaign of how countries around the world are complex that with this kind of barbarism. it is not just solidarity of opinion. this is solidarity with people

all over the world. where there is complicity of one's government in the oppression of others it is the responsibility for us to fight. therefore friends of the movement in solidarity with colombian workers was never about let's when the revolution in colombia. because we fight against polk because coca-cola is colluding with the death squads against union activists. in that sense it is about us trying to build power where we are and trying to change dispensation and the role of the places we lived in. i would say it is internationalism but not really. it is also this others thing. they don't need to be saved. they need solidarity and solera -- solidarity is misunderstood. what solidarity should been, their lives to be easier. that is how we should understand

solidarity. in the global anti world bank movement that was misunderstood, fighting to help the workers means -- rates of housing will go up, bangladeshi workers will have to commute through these neighborhoods. you don't need everybody to go there. the need to fight for a new dispensation. that is the way i would see that. the next question you asked about the gdp data, i like something crazy at the end in the book where i make the argument that american wages are industrial wages too high, makes the argument to say we should release the wages, but what the global north has done in its society is privatized all the costs so as you privatize everything, insurance,

healthcare, schooling, so many things get privatized, the burdens on families or workers or people is increased. they cannot survive unless they demand higher wages. if so much of the expense is socialize, if for instance more public transport, more high-quality schools, etc. and if you then remove pensions for instance from the responsibility of firms and nationalize them, if we are all in the pool together, then individual wages and free up your competitiveness. there are ways for a left-wing person to lie -- articulate without being a heartless person. what happens in the left is we do not want to engage with the fact because globalization, such a central feature of profittaking where wages are less or higher there, take advantage of that, there is no

way you can create solidarity of american workers with the chinese worker by e emotional abuse. anti chinese sentiment is of normal sentiment. you have to control it politically but to confront it structurally will require a push for greater social wage in america unless there is a greater demand to remove from commercial my activities, so much is socialized, we will never have in this country the ability to recreate mass jobs that are meaningful for people. it sounds like a crazy argument but i can defend it. drugs are not all drugs. marijuana, coca, they are different things and one of the things in bolivia, one of the very important claims is

intellectual property should have made it easy for the oblivion's to say remake is great toothpaste out of coca. it is better than rogaine. we can make all the stuff that is amazing and we like to sell into the world and patent it. some of this stuff. intellectual property rights are ok if you are controlling the drugs but somehow these drugs, xanax or whenever can't be patented in the north. if you produce coca reeves better than xanax, that is illegal. it is not about recreational use, they reviewed some of these

crops. your children will become a drug addict. and many of them are capable of producing medicine or everyday products that are simply not able to -- not because of the agenda necessarily. there is one way to of the explain the drug thing and secondly in the united states which is a different story, my argument is once you produce a dispensation where masses of people are not employed meaningfully, then we get bill clinton, bill clinton was the ideal manager of the american compact so you then say no social -- social welfare. and find a job. and less and less jobs at that level would be provided and you create a crime bill so you

manipulate cities, throw people in prison, your population is not the gated communities so in a sense in america prison expansion is a logical extension of neoliberalism. is not a contradiction which you can't make a moral claim that prisons are terrible, they end. prisons are structural necessity for an advanced society which is not capable of employing its citizens. if story is different from the latin american drug story which is not about keeping populations incarcerated but producing products out of your comparative advantage to grow coca. that is how i understand the drug issue. there are multiple and various ways in which the drug story has to be understood. we are not saying legalize coca to criminalize drug use

america. air thing is a completely different narrative.their thing different narrative. >> one more round. kristy, over here, folks on this side, number 4 over is there. sorry. maybe we will try to squeeze you in, number 5. [inaudible question] >> so you talked a bit, you are very resistant to this narrative of neoliberalism which begins exclusively in the north and following from the questions that have been about the drug trade and militarization in palestine and globally, what does militarization as a big part of the picture of neil liberalism as it emergeds, i was

wondering if you could talk a little bit about the forms of militarism that are compatible with liberalism with southern character and you have written a little bit about india's relationship with israel and some more examples. .. >> you describe the contradictions inherent in them as subject positions of these actors, elites within the global south, that sort of thing. so i'm wondering, as you approached this project in the

beginning a decade ago and maybe coming to the end of this book, how you understood your role in the presenting this history from a political perspective and what it's meant to tell this kind of complicated story, and this story that has a lot of failures or stumblings or contradictions in it and how that's brought you to the sort of political conclusions that you've come to. >> great. i'll do that last. i'll do that last. a good ending. >> i actually wanted to bring it back to the question that we were talking about before, the transnational solidarity movements. i guess i wanted to ask a question in terms of who do you think, what organizations or what kind of projects do you think in terms of international work or solidarity work that are good projects that people should continue? so, you know, the reason i ask is because i completely agree with all the things that you

said about, you know, kind of basing work locally. but at the same time, you know, things like the bds movement is taking kind of leadership from the people on the ground there. and as much as, you know, talking about antiwar work we want to base it locally in terms of each local area and how we can talk about the money that's spent on military and things like that, but at the same time, how do we understand that, you know, drones are not just about money, but drones are also about the lives of people and how to bring that conversation in. and, you know, i'm part of the war resistors league and the campaign against tear gas which has a global network of people who are, you know, affected by tear gas use, and that includes people from quebec, includes people that are in prison systems here that are affected by pepper spray, for example. i believe that's an important kind of movement to pursue and take forward. so, you know, what do you think

about that and what do you think about the other examples like that that we should continue, because we're based here, and we need to think about that as well. what do we do? >> [inaudible] >> okay. i'll take that last, the history one. >> [inaudible] >> history one should be last. >> thank you. one question was the soviet union. with the implosion of the soviet bloc, didn't that represent for the third world as it was called the loss of an alternative to western domination? and the second is, what is your -- you wrote a very fine book, "arab spring, libyan winter." and the doctrine of

responsibility to protect r2p came out of the u.n., served to devastate, in my opinion, the whole libyan society. isn't, doesn't that represent the renewed version of the white man's burden? >> then we'll take the final one over here. >> great questions. >> thank you so much for the talk and the brilliant book. i wanted to follow up on, i think, one of of the themes in all your work, but in "the darker nations" and the "poorer nations" about the say nas nation of -- the assassination of the minimum wage. in some ways you talk about its unfinished business. so i wonder if you could describe the relationship between struggles for a social wage and the fight against neoliberalism. >> okay, great questions. wow. [laughter] amazing questions.

none of them are easy to settle. okay, let's -- the kind of criminalization of people in america in a way, you know, it's a cognate. there's a similarity and a logic that if you read giovanni arig ariggi's work, he suggests there are certain cycles that empires have. and it's a very interesting book, "long 20th century," where he suggests that he looks at lengths of time which an empire has been in dominance or hegemony and size of its container and its influence. and he shows as time goes forward, the container has increased, but the length of dominance has decreased. and he is, essentially, using

the signs of awe touch in america are visible. and then the suggestion of adam smith is that china is coming up, in a sense. although he argues that china -- i don't fully support the argument -- has a whole different kind of capitalism. anyway, leave that aside. the real thing is there is a developed argument about the decline of america and the emergence of new centers of power. to my mind, in this book i argue there will be no china next, that what we're looking at and coming to militarization because related, what we are looking at is the emergence of, to some extempt -- and this is where i am hopeful -- of a a polycentric world. and the chinese are interesting because even though they are

making vast investments in africa, vast investments in the rest of asia, etc., they openly say and, in fact, the model suggests that they're not interested in global hegemony. and the one way in which that evidence is likely is that they got involved in the bricks block. you know? they're interested, they have a more sober understanding of managing global problems. if we can manage them multilaterally, that's better. and so they have put a lot of their power, economic power into the bricks experiment. okay. now, the reaction from the global north in this same period from the early '70s onwards as the signs of a certain kind of autumn have become clear has been militarization on a global scale. so not just criminalization of surplus populations in america, but the attempt to use military power to settle the

contradictions that look to go against you. so, for instance, at the same time as this whole pivot to asia is happening, you see, the great liberal president has decided it is time to pivot to asia. and, therefore, a certain kind of -- i'm not going to say it in some dramatic way -- reencircling of china is occurring. and you can see there are lots of blogs where you can see maps of american renewed military presence, return to philippines, okay a government had to fall in japan so that american bases remain. i don't know if you follow that. a liberal government came to power saying okinawa is closed. that government had to form. you know, that government is engineered to form so -- this is all happening at the same time to presentation is coming deny oppression is coming on china. the argument is that the united states is suffering not because

of this neoliberallization of the country, but because chinese exchange rates are a problem. you may have followed the exchange rate debate. china is, you know, they are in a sense they have too many jokers in the pack. they have put jokers up their sleeve, okay? they need to come clean. and meanwhile we have this military presence around them. now, the chinese are not fully able to match that military presence. so, for instance, in libya when u.n. resolution 1973 was passed and the chinese and russians decided not to veto it, the assumption was it would be a no-fly zone. now, technically no-fly zones have been the following: area craft flies over, and if there's any libyan aircraft that takes off and looks threatening, it will be shot down. but in 2011 the nato alliance decided to reinterpret no-fly

zones as we will destroy your airport, we will bomb your telecommunications, we'll destroy your power company, we'll destroy all your infrastructure. when they started doing that, two things happened. one, you may not have remembered, but the head of the arab league said we did not support this. then -- [inaudible] had to be brought with ban ki-moon, he held his hand and brought him in cairo, and he said i actually didn't mean to say what i said a few hours ago, i support this fully, okay? [laughter] which is i think one of the reasons nobody took him serious in the election to lead egypt. secondly, the chinese and russians quite straightforwardly said we will never allow anything like a no-fly zone under, what is it, article v of the u.n. charter. never allow it again. because this militaristic approach to resolving

contradictions on behalf of the north has gone too far. now, it's okay to then say, look, it's the chinese and russians that are responsible for the killings in syria. but i want you to think of it from this other point of view. they are looking at it in terms of are we going to allow military domination to be utilized to settle the question of the signs of autumn? and they're not prepared to do that. now, i actually don't believe -- this is parenthetical -- i don't believe it's the chinese and russian vetoes that have prevented the west from an armed operation in syria. because, after all, they did an armed operation in yugoslavia with no permission. so that is not what's stopping. in fact, i have argued for over a year that the united states is hiding behind the russians and chinese, because the israelis don't want the assad regime to fall. they prefer to bleed the syrians so another 100,000 will die rather than allow, you know, news rah and others to take power in damascus. it's the most cynical strategy.

and you may have watched samantha powell in front of congress where, you know, the great author of "problems from hell," you know, utilize that time in, i think, a very interesting way to dance around the question of syria. martin dempsey went before congress and said we are not going to intervene, the costs are too high. but it's useful to hide behind the chinese and russians and say it's their fault. what i'm just suggesting is militarization is occurring and not just from the north. the north is using aggressively military power against the world. but there is no comparison. i mean, nobody else -- the u.n. general assembly security council says all member states, this is the exact language of resolution, all member states can act. well, not all member states can act. the african union does not have the ability to enforce a november no-fly zone. the indian government does not. only nato can.

therefore, the resolution more accurately should have said nato should act, etc., etc. militarization is occurring inside societies, yes, because as inequalities rise in brazil, etc., use the heightened militarization internally just as in the united states. but there is a global militarization which is in a different register. so that's how i would see that. the question of transnational politics, i mean, give me a list of the 15 -- i mean, i'm not the validater of, okay, that's not the thing. you know the example you gave of tear gas is actually related in some way, to me, to the palestine bds issue, and it's related to an earlier campaign 20 years ago that i remember being involved in against -- [inaudible] mines. i don't know if you remember, an olympic mine is a mine that explodes hour horizontally,

therefore, decapitating legs of hundreds of people. now you have a hundred people without legs, but they are alive, whereas a mine will just kill ten people. that mine was made in louisiana, exported around the world, used in afghanistan, used all other the place, sold to different countries. in a sense, these struggles will always return to where you are if you are interested in them. see, what is the point of, say, somebody in mongolia joining anti-tear gas movement unless tear gas is extensively used in mongolia? that's how they are use -- join the movement to end tear gas use. let's have a u.n. resolution to ban tear gas. that is a legitimate international politics. but the politics that you're thinking of is that tear gas is made in the u.s., in brazil. what is it, five, six places? i read that report. basically, a handful of places.

those are the places where the campaign has to assert itself. but that doesn't mean that tomorrow the indians are going to stop manufacturing tear gas. the americans have banned it, the brazilians have banned it. at the same time, there has to be a push in the global forum to have an international convention against tear gas. but here's the thing, there are international conventions against most of these things already. one hats to fight to -- one has to fight to, i'm going to say this, it sounds idiotic but some of you, i know, will forgive me, we have to fight for the right of international law and the importance of international institutions. that is a major fight. that, in america, is a cultural fight. was because the right in america won the battle in saying that we are, you know, don't tread on me. now, states' rights on the racism front and don't tread on me, national rights on the international front. you can take some violaters to the criminal court but not an

american. so the right of international law, that is a big struggle in america, and that has to be joined, you know? i mean, we need to hear liberals be a little less apologetic for their president and a little more forthright in the defense of international law, you know? i mean, it is a scandal that despite the fact that, you know, bin laden was whoever he was, that there was so little taught in america about extrajudicial assassination and entry into a sovereign country's air space. just because the pakistani government doesn't launch a major protest, expel the ambassador doesn't mean that americans should sit back and say, well, you know, sometimes the means defines, you know -- i mean, the means is okay if the end is good. in fact, here i question was the end good? is assassination ever good? and there's, i think, too much latitude by liberals in america. that has to be confronted.

people don't confront liberals in america. that's related to drones, which is the other issue you talked about. that's not a story about yemen and afghanistan. that's an american story. that in america people have said, well, it's a cleaner way to conduct a war. our soldiers will not die. you know, that means that american liberalism is dead. it no longer exists. there is no american liberalism. it is simply a democratic party politics. it's not liberalism. so there needs to be a rejuvenation of a liberal imagination. that's how i would say that. again, a national struggle, you know? the yemenis would be happy be there was a change of view in -- if there was a change of view in america, but why bring 20 yemenis to america to try to convince americans that drones are bad. we need to be building those struggles here. that's how i would see it. it's important to give a face to the victim. that's why it's important, you know, when the bangladeshi workers came on tour, that is very important. that is, as much by the way, for

the bangladeshi workers to come here and see and talk to the people. it's not like they're here on display. they are also here the learn and grow. and i think sometimes in international -- [inaudible] that's forgotten. let's bring a yemeni here so we can parade them around, and people can say, there's a yemeni, they lost a child, that's terrible. talk to them. let them understand your struggle. why are you always bringing them to places and say talk about yemen? why not bring them to places and tell them about detroit, them them about trayvon martin, tell them about america. so that, i think, is how solidarities are produced. but it's in the future, it's not now. i mean, obviously, the ussr was a major bulwark, and, by the way, for this book i read a very interesting -- when americans took baghdad, they took saddam's private archives. saddam used to tape all his conversations. there is a terrific conversation

in the saddam archives where his top leadership is sitting around in 1991 in january, and they are saying the americans are just not going to bomb us. one of his smartest advisers said the issue is not the american issue, where are the soviets? soviet union hadn't fallen yet. where is where are the soviets? why are they going to along with that? actually, forget '91. by the '80s the soviet union had actually become less of a bulwark for pop list struggles around the world. soviet union had gone into deep crisis. in fact, the other set of documents i read for this book, i don't quote enough of them, is the politboro discussions around afghanistan which are available at the national security archives in washington d.c. those are fascinating, because there you have the senior leadership at one point saying, you know, well, at one point saying we cannot go into

afghanistan because our third world friends will be angry. you know, they recognized that that bloc exists. but then they say we just can't confront the americans. and this is 1979. this is very important for us to understand. it produced a bulwark, but its shield had begun to be severely departmented. and i think that -- dented. and i think that needs to be appreciated. one of the ways in which this neoliberal trust is able to succeed is not only that the banks are cleaned up, imf is cleaned up, but the soviets from period failed to produce be and articulate any kind of alternative on the world stage. that's a big issue that needs on the confronted. you know, and i think that that should not be put down to, well, you know, it's a condemnation of their own project. but that by this period they had been greatly weakened. this would not have been the situation in the '50s, '60s and into the '70s when they would have confronted. after all, khrushchev has

provided the most colorful speech when took his shoe off and was beating the lectern at the general assembly. you've got to watch the video of this. it's, i think, on youtube. and then chavez comes and supplants it by saying there's the sulfur -- [laughter] that was better. [laughter] then he showed chomsky's book, which was great. so that's how i would understand the soviet question. i mean, i've already talked a little bit about responsibility to protect. there's a responsibility to protect which doesn't often get read, and that is the -- [inaudible] of dissent coming from many countries including, by the way, i'm proud to say -- i haven't said very good things about india, but i'm proud to say even this last indian ambassador to the u.n., many points spoke in the security council saying we need to reassess h2 -- r2p.

it's at the discretion of the members of the permanent security council. they picker -- they pick and choose. you cannot cherry pick which countries you will protect and which you will not. therefore, let's go and overthrow quaff my, meanwhile president obama was visiting with ecuador's leader. but they were exchanging birthday greetings and things like that. what putin was arguing was there's a cherry bigging in r2p. you cannot have an international principle where you pick which populations are worth defending. so that's the whole thing. and, unfortunately, there's not much debate on that, you know? public debate. and i hope with samantha power's success to the -- she was one of the architects for r2p. and i hope in the united states people will question this, you know? especially now that she has common straited that power makes you -- demonstrated that power

makes you hypocritical. [laughter] you've got to always be american and protect people, and then i don't know if you watched the bit where she was asked about some statements she had made where she kept interrupting the senator and saying i love the united states, it's the greatest country in the world. and she asked the question again, she said america's the greatest country in the world. once you get into the seat of power, you basically lose your mind. [laughter] so that's that bit. finally, the use of history. no, social ways, ah. so what is the social way? i mean, it's a great concept, it's not a radical, marxist, you know, leninist -- it's a liberal concept. it's disappeared. it's what i was talking about earlier, that, you know, let me put it in two ways. everybody works in a society, everybody. whether you earn b a wage or not, you work. you volunteer in a library, if you are, you know, raising children, everybody is working. people who have a job raise

monetary where they earn a salary. some part of their salary is collected as deferred raises meaning they don't claim it, it gets into a fund. we call that taxation. i will claim those wages in a different way is how one should think of to it. those who don't monitorrize their contribution to society, they volunteer, or they sing songs on the street or they raise children or whatever they do, they are not monetizing, they are yet providing money into the social wage. in a positive way, but there is no dollar going in there. they're also deferring wages. their, in fact, deferring 100% of their wages. they are saying i will do these beautiful things for society, i'll dress up like a clown, and i'll run down broadway, and it will make a hundred -- thousands of people will smile at me. and then they'll go back home or go to work, and they'll be happy questioner for it -- happier for it. i have contribute today the gross domestic product, but nobody has paid me anything.

somebody says i raise children, but i gave 100% of my wage in aerdeferred fashion to society. so if you understand the social wage in that way, then that wage is not at the discretion of governments to decide how to use. in other words, we've collected taxes, now we have to write down the debt, or we have to buy guns, or we have to give tax writeoff, move the west side of highways so goldman sachs' limos can turn right. these are not decisions the government can make arbitrarily. if you understand it as a social wage, there's an obligation to enhance people's actually lives because they have deferred wages in order to receive something else back. goldman has not deferred its, you know, money to have the fee removed so limos can turn. that is the idea of social wage, and it has to be understood in a broad way that only 5% of my monetized wage is deferred, but somebody else's 100% is deferred. it's not like i pay tax, so i

need something back. everybody contributes, and that contribution must go to enhancing our lives. that's the social wage. it's a big fight to bring that idea back, but, my god f that ideas doesn't come back, then it's socialism or barbarism. and by the way, we are at barbarism 100.0 already: the only, you know, just to make it less scary to people, it should be now social wage or barbarism. that's the communism of the 21st century. social wagism. it's actually a liberal idea, you know? but it's forgotten. people have claimed that i've paid into it, i should get back and, therefore, george bush could say, well, don't pay into it. simply give each potential -- each person a fund. you monetize your deferred compensation. it's a terrible idea. it further damages the ability of people to have a social thing. and by the way, the link to

having a social wage is that it's dramatic create important for society. -- dramatically important for society. because then people start to see objectively their interests are united. you know, one of the great tricks of american history is rather than do countercyclical spending through social expenditure, countercyclical spending in america has always been done through military spending. you spend militarily to bring the economy back to life. that was the whole post-war golden age, etc. so in that sense one has to confront this idea, you know, because it was easy to do countercyclical spending with the military because it's already a hierarchical society, you know, in military encampments. but society is not hierarchical, and the more you begin to feel objectively that your ties with other people are there, you might be able to create a movement where people subjectsively relate -- subjectively relate to a common agenda. and because we don't have any

objective basis for commonality, why should you expect people subjectively to have a -- it's a moral claim. why? we have no objective community, why should we have a subjective one? finally, uses of history. now, so obviously, history has its own logic, you know? one doesn't write history in order to convey a certain politics alone. there are multiple ways in which you go into projects. i mean, my interest in the first part was recovery. was recovering of forgotten history. the combined agenda was forgotten. and that, i thought, was itself important. a history of recovery as a legitimate practice in the historical profession. go back and you say there was this great riot or strike, and you value orize it. in that sense, that is a completely normal thing. this book is called a possible

history, subtitle, which many people were not sure what we would make of this strange subtitle. why not, you know, a people's history has another story we won't get into, but possible history is my different approach to history. in other words, i feel like if you're writing the history of a contemporary era, the -- [inaudible] has not flown. all these dynamics are still alive. they're alive and well. so it's not a recovery. i think you have to be able to his to have size contemporary developments in order to provide, i think, oxygen to the movements we have. what do i mean by that? if you understand the movements are in a historical, decontextualized way, then you might not ever reflect on the strategy that you're promoting. in left movements for about a hundred years, every three, four years parties and organizations held a conference or a congress.

at the congress the leadership used to present in a sense the history of the last four years. not the party program, but the political and organizational report. and then the party people would debate. that history is not correct. this is actually should be added in, that should be added in. ..