Valdai Club

Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, long considered one of the jewels in the Enlightenment’s crown imagining true, well-founded and lasting peace, provides the philosophical basis of the war that the West is today waging against the World Majority, specifically against Russia, with China also in its sights, in the name of the Rules Based International Order (RUBIO), writes Radhika Desai, Professor of the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba (Canada), for the Valdai Club session at the International Kant Congress, titled “Reason and Progress? History of Civilisations Turned to the Future”.

Capital organises globally yet workers do not. As the US-led NATO powers escalate the Ukraine conflict into a new world war, this imbalance is becoming intolerable.

If denying China its sovereignty over its rightful waters is to be the goal of US policy even in the eyes of the critics of current US bellicosity, the US is unlikely to be shunted off the path of military aggression, writes Valdai Club expert Radhika Desai.

Things are really bad when employing the only means left to stave off disaster bring it closer. That is the story of the most powerful of the numerous sanctions the US has used, and convinced EU countries to use, against Russia in the war the West is waging against it over Ukraine, the freezing of its central bank reserves.

Understanding of the dollar’s world role is dominated by the ideas of ‘dollar hegemony’ and ‘US hegemony’. In this paper, based on their extensive past work, Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson reveal how these ideas are ideologies, not theories.

There is a certain irony in the US, which has distinguished itself in being unable to protect its citizens from the pandemic launching the New Cold War against China, which has been exemplary in its protection of its citizens. This is certain to have an effect on both US and international opinion, writes Valdai Club expert Radhika Desai.

Decades of neoliberal prioritising of the financial over the productive economy were already coming to a head when the pandemic hit. It has only accelerated advance toward a reckoning that was becoming long overdue after more than four decades of neoliberal policies inaugurated by Thatcher and Reagan.

Boris Johnson has been referring to himself as a One Nation Tory. The only problem is that there is little in their policies to prove it. Nor is there any sign that this will change. If anything, with Johnson appearing to want to replace Britain’s economic relations with the EU with a new closeness with the US, the direction of their policies can only visit more pain on even wider sections of the British people.

The trade wars are a necessary show that keeps them on side. They require Trump to appear tough, on China and, indeed, on the rest of the world. At the same time, trade wars come at a real cost to US companies, including big and powerful ones.

Our age is witness to a proliferation of discourses about the ‘commons’. They are emerging from more and more quarters, and the word is being applied to more things than ever before. One important strand of discourse, claiming to be communist, seeks to apply it to all kinds of spheres, from the earth and its natural bounty to culture, and to all sorts of resources, from the most immaterial, such as common knowledge, to the most material, such as the use of the earth’s finite natural resources.