Episode 41: Is There a Non-Capitalist Way Forward for the Global South?

In this episode, Brendan and Andrew discuss Raya Dunayevskaya’s pamphlet––Nationalism, Communism, Marxist-Humanism, and the Afro-Asian Revolutions. Writing in 1959, she put forward a way for the newly-independent nations of the global south to free themselves from being dominated by all major capitalist powers, state-capitalist as well as private capitalist. The co-hosts explore the relevance of this perspective to today’s world, where much of “the left,” having abandoned the possibility of global social revolution, seeks instead to challenge US hegemony by constructing a multipolar capitalist order. The topics they take up include: divisions between leaders and masses in the nations of the global south; whether they can bypass a stage of capitalist industrialization; the extent to which capitalism can foster their economic development; the possibility of unifying the freedom struggles in the north and the south; and the role that Marxist-Humanism can play in achieving that unification.