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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome back to the new books network. I'm your host, Stephen Doseman. Gromchi's concept of hegemony is often invoked, but usually as a means of cultural critique and analysis.
However, my guest, Lorenzo Fusaro argues in his recent book, Crysis and Hegemonic Transitions, that Gromchi's work is permeated by Marx's economic critique and his theories of value. Split into two parts, the book is both a critical rereading of Gromchi, followed by a rereading of the last century of economic and political developments. The first half of the book involves a careful rereading of the key concepts in Gromchi's prison notebooks, rethinking concepts such as hegemony as being more closely related to the base, instead of simply being superstructural description. Hegemonic is not above and beyond economic dynamics and antagonisms, but emerges from them and changes alongside them.
This allows for a broadening of the theory conceptually, and also allows him to apply it to international relations, instead of being confined to a particular state. The second half of the book then traces the economic history of the 20th century, starting with the rise of the United States in the international scene in the 1920s, and following through to its eventual unraveling on the world stage in the present day. And even though the book was first published in 2018, at the end Fusaro offered some speculations on how this reworked theory of hegemony might help us think about the recent COVID crisis and its aftermath. Since the synthesizing theory, history, and economics, this is a book that offers a powerful punch and will reward readers from a number of different angles and offers some dynamic theoretical resources for understanding our current crisis and what might be just around the corner.
Lorenzo Fusaro received his PhD in International Political Economy at King's College London. He is an associate professor of political economy at the University of Ottawa, at the Metropolitan in Mexico, and is also one of the editors of the recently published Revisiting Gramsci's Laboratory. Lorenzo Fusaro, welcome to the New Books Network. Hello.
Many thanks for giving me this opportunity to present my book and thanks to all the listeners. Yeah, so to kick things off, we always like to have guests introduce themselves at the beginning. So could you maybe tell listeners a bit about your background and what your work and research tends to focus on? Well, at the moment, I'm an associate professor of political economy at the Universidad at the Altonumamento Polytana in Mexico City, and I mainly work on marks, a digital political economy, but also I have worked quite a bit on Gramsci.
The book we are going to discuss is one of the work I have written on him, and moreover, most recently, jointly with other persons I have published another book called Revissiting Gramsci's Notebooks. Wonderful. So to kick things off, your book is in large part an attempt to synthesize Gramsci's theory of hegemony with Marx's critique of political economy. So before we get to your approach to hegemony in economy, can you maybe give listeners a sense of how this sets your reading of Gramsci apart from other readings that have dominated in the last few decades, particularly, I see him usually brought up as a sort of cultural theorist or literary critic.
You are trying to bring him more towards economics. Can you maybe speak to that a bit? Yeah, I mean, if every crisis there is a lot of talk about hegemony or hegemony transitions crisis of hegemony, and of course, one of the main references or persons who has developed a tradition that has developed a concept of hegemony is Gramsci. So many analysis coming from international or critical international political economy are based on Gramsci, and I can mention, for example, World System Theory or Neo-Gramsci analysis, and basically what I attempt to do is to offer a friendly critique of these approaches, mainly because I believe that they attempt to transpose concepts with the Gramsci, actually developed for the analysis of the national situation to the international.
Okay, that's one problem they have. Most of the time, although we have critical theories, they detach themselves from the main tenets of Marxist capital. So what I attempt to do in my reading of Gramsci tries to underline the disrelation between Marxist capital and Gramsci's main work, the prison notebooks. I try to show that although the prison notebooks are mainly understood as a work on the superstructure, the ideology, also the state and so on, I believe that the lower value and the main critique of political economy that Marx develops is very important for understanding all the main Gramsci's concepts and the main narratives he is developing in his main book.
And in order to do that, basically I kept to go back to the critical edition of Gramsci's book, which of course is in Italian. And yes, that's one of the main differences I have with other interpretations. Yeah, moving into the book. So in looking at various ways of using hegemony to study economic transitions, you say a good starting point for this would be what you call hegemonic stability theory.
Can you give us a sense of what this theory is and how it helps us think of the economic transitions Marx has outlined regarding the transition from cooperative to competitive production? And in hegemonic stability theory is sort of a mainstream theory of hegemony. And what it says is basically that in order for the capitalist economy to function, it's necessary to have a hegemonic power. Actually, if you look at the history of this theory, you have an important work by Charles Berger and then Robert Diehlpin, who exactly underlined this point, not that the necessity to have a hegemonic power.
And therefore you have sort of a positive connotation when you analyze hegemony from that perspective. And you can also even speak of a benevolent hegemon and so on. And I say that this is a starting point if you want to criticize or to look critically at hegemony using for example the work of Joanna Reeg. And Joanna Reeg maintains that Roman on ground sheen that a state becomes hegemonic when it can credibly claim to be a modal force of a general expansion.
But that means that basically, I think it's looking at this critically now saying if a state wants to be hegemonic, it needs basically to convince other allied rule states or suburban states that it's in their interest to have this particular country as a hegemonic country. Why is in a Germanic with the theory of hegemonic stability, you have a position which is completely different. They say that it's necessary to have a hegemonic power. So this is why I speak or I say that it's a good point to start with.
So working towards your understanding of Gramsci, you bring up his theory of the state which you describe as being what you call an integral state involving a dialectical relationship between a couple different spheres that work together to educate citizens. Can you unpack this a bit? I mean the integral state is something that is very important in Gramsci's writings and that I somehow also use when I attempt to retearize hegemony at the international level. Because Gramsci was asking himself, well, why are we having a revolution in the East and why is in the West?
We have for example, fascism coming up, and so on. And so one of the main arguments is that the integral state as you mentioned as well understood as the dialectical unity which in political society and civil society is actually something that enables that in a situation in which you have a major crisis. The system does not collapse. So I use that element or this idea also when I try to theorize the Germanic at international level because even there it's not said that in times of crisis you automatically have a crisis of a Germanic or a hegemonic transition.
Yeah, this is what I would answer. So from here you turn, you were just mentioning crisis. So from here you go to Marx and try and synthesize Gramsci and Marx together, particularly the Marx of Daskapital with particular focus on the contradictions engendered by value and surplus value on the capitalist system as a whole and how it leads to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time. So can you maybe give us a sense of how contradictions function in Marx's theory of capital and how this fits within your reading of Gramsci?
Well, I of course, the question of contradiction in Marx's capital is a very big thing. And there are lots of works that try to figure out how the works are different opinions about that. What I tend to do and the way in which I take into consideration the contradictory character of capitalist accumulation and the different contradictions that Marx outlines in capital is to build what I refer to as an organic theory of crisis. And there I try to, basically I associate different contradictions between, for example, between production and consumption between production and exchange to different so-called monocousal crisis theories, for example, the theory of underconsumption or overproduction or another important theory of financialization and so on.
And I look at it, I look at it a bit differently. I try to find a way to articulate all these different crisis theories. And in doing so, I try to read capital from a Gramsci perspective, not where, again, contradictions are very important. We mentioned contradictions and also what Gramsci calls organic unity.
Organic unity are concepts made up of two different contradictory elements, not like consensus and coercion or civil society and political society. And the same, we might also apply when analyzing these different contradictions or concepts in capital. As I mentioned, production and consumption, production and exchange and so on. And the basic idea behind all of that is that through capitalist accumulation, the search for more and more surplus value, there is a tendency for these different parts that are the composer organic unity to separate itself from one another.
So, for example, in the case of financialization, where the fear of exchange outgrow and the touches itself from production or the same when you talk about production and consumption. Also there, you have this separation between these two elements. And so the idea is that you have as capitalism progresses, you have this increasing detachment between these different parts. But also there, it's not said that this will lead automatically to a crisis.
So the question is when do you have the situation in which a possibility of crisis turns into an actual crisis? And there I integrate the question of profitability, like you mentioned, the low-patt tendency of the rate of profit of all. And so I introduce it in order to attempt to say, okay, this detachment between, again, for example, production and exchange is not problematic in as far as the production is not. So, if the stock market is growing exponentially and so on, and production is in profitability as well, then you don't have a problem of financing this increase in the financial markets.
But when profitability doesn't grow as fast relative to this finance and so on, then you have a problem and you have also an increased probability that will turn into a crisis, a concrete crisis. So this is the way in which I try to articulate all these different contradictions in order to build an organic theory of crisis. Yeah, developing this a little more often discussion about hegemony and contradiction happens as if it only exists within a state or within certain national borders. But you argue that there's an international theory of hegemony, both with how hegemony is imposed and enforced and how contradictions can function at the international level.
Can you unpack this a little bit for us? Yes, many thanks for this question. As I said at the beginning, I attempt to reread Rameshi and to offer a new way of analyzing hegemony at the international level, while funding it basically in Marxist capital. The starting point is to see that Rameshi had a dialectical analysis of international relations, so he was never analyzing a nation on its own.
He always said, okay, if you want to analyze one single nation, you have to always take into account the influence that other nations are giving to specific developments in the country or nation or state you want to analyze. At the same time, these different nations are not equal. It breaks with this idea of sovereignty amongst different national states. And there you have a hierarchy between states.
And a hegemonic state, in that sense, is comprehended as a state that has what I finally call a relative geopolitical autonomy. That means that they can take decisions in a relative, autonomous way and other states who are in the states will feel the influence of a hegemonic state. For example, I live in Mexico and the decisions that the United States take have a strong impact on what will happen in Mexico, what the Federal Reserve decides, et cetera, has a big impact on Mexico, not the other way around. Moreover, in order to reach this relative geopolitical autonomy or hegemony, you cannot look simply at economic performance, economic indicators and so on.
You have also to analyze the political element as well as finally the military element. So you have to take into account both the consensual aspect of power, also the coercive aspect of power in order to analyze hegemony at the international level. With this, I refer also to one of the previous questions regarding my reading of Ramshin. It's important to underline that an economic crisis doesn't need to transform itself into a crisis of a genuine, I mean it can, but it's not necessarily the case.
It's exactly taking into account this aspect of economic, political and also military power that enables you to say, okay, so we have a crisis, but the hegemonic state has the possibility to react to that crisis using the power, economic, political and military power. Whilst other analysis of hegemony usually say, okay, we have a decline in GDP compared to other countries, trade is declining and so on, and that is interpreted already as a crisis of hegemony or even a hegemonic transition. So I try to avoid that sort of deterministic or economic reading. So this is the way which I would answer your question.
Yeah, so that brings us through the first half of the book where you do kind of a lot of theoretical development. The second half turns into something about history book. So you start with the US's rise to hegemonic power, where it made a slow but steady ascent which came to full fruition in the 1920s. Can you explain this history and how your theory of hegemony that you've been developing helps us understand and rethink this history?
Yeah, thanks for this question. There is of course a debate now and different historical analysis on the rise of the United States to hegemony at the international level. And most analysis actually say that the US became hegemonic only after World War II. Okay, and what I'm attempting to argue in that in that first historical chapter of the book is that the US actually became hegemonic already during the interwar period after, let's say, after World War I.
With an important qualification, I was saying that hegemony has an international level, includes the economic, political, and the military moment. There are also situations in which a country tries to be hegemonic without having achieved what I refer to as a completely realized hegemony. And so I argue that the United States fully realized that it's a gem after World War II, that's correct, but after World War I they have like a weaker form of hegemony. That I refer to as a sturm un brand of hegemony.
And it's a weaker form of hegemony because indeed in that case, it's mainly based on its economic supremacy. There are some political elements, but it's not a sort of hegemony, the United States would construct true World War II and after World War II. The economic crash in the late 1920s, followed by a decade of economic depression, is often seen as unrepresentative of the contradictions of capital that Marx described. And you quote him thus, instead of investigating the nature of the conflicting elements, which erupt in the catastrophe, the apologists content themselves with denying the catastrophe itself and insisting in the face of their regular periodic recurrence that if production were carried on according to the textbook, crises would never occur.
In contrast to this apologetic tone, you offer a fairly detailed Marxist analysis of this crisis. Can you maybe give us a summary of that? Yes, and basically, I mean, the quote is interesting and I think it's a very pertinent quote, not just for the great depression, but for crisis in general, no? Because differently from the neo-classical economics and other strength between economics theory, where crises are mainly determined, so generally, the Marx, they are created by the very contradictions that build up in capitalism.
So you have this strong contrast between the mainstream view and the Marxism. And within Marxism, as I mentioned before, you have different interpretations. Before, when speaking more theoretically, I attempted to mention some of the main strands written in everything, Marxist, crisis theory, as I mentioned, under consumption or reproduction and crisis theory that emphasize the role of finance. And as well, the rate, the low of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Again, what I attempt to do is to integrate this different crisis theory. So I'm not dismissing the underconsumptionist theory proposed by Hopsbaum or those which are based more on the question of finance, which actually don't need to be necessarily Marxist. So I say, both these elements were present. On the one hand, this idea of growing inequality, wages that were not rising as fast as before, compared to production, the increase of the financial sphere, etc.
I don't deny the existence of all of those are important elements. But at the same time, we need to ask ourselves, when do these problems, or as we said before, these contradictions which are building their turn into an actual crisis? And there is where it rose on the problem of profitability. Now, and there you have those, you have analysis, for example, by Domenini and Levy to show how profitability was basically declining.
So with the client profitability, it's difficult to pay off, say, dividends and so on, which are necessary to maintain the financial sphere as it was or a growing financial sphere or to pay off debts, etc. that are building up. At the same time, lower profitability means that wages won't rise, etc. So you have also this issue of underconsumption that can manifest itself.
So this is the way in which I attempt also in this case to integrate these different crisis theories and analysis and natural analysis of crisis, of the Great Depression in this case. Right. Turning to some of the effects of the crisis, you argue that the Hegemonic Authority the US had achieved in previous decades started to unravel here, and you even paused it September 1931 as the symbolic start date for this unraveling. Can you unpack how the old hegemony came to an end in this time period?
Yeah, as I mentioned before, I start from the idea that this form of hegemony that the United States constructed in the interwar period was a weak form of hegemony. And this is why I believe the Great Depression effectively led to a crisis of US hegemony. When other states are able to construct hegemonic relations, at least regionally, so the emergence of competitors, or competitors in states that are able to construct hegemonic relations on their own, are a manifestation of a crisis of world hegemony. And I believe that this happened basically during the Great Depression.
So the main pillars upon which US or this weak form of US hegemony rested, started to crumble now or to collapse. And you can look at income, GDP, trade, but also, for example, the control of the monetary system, which the US constructed after World War I. Also, several agreements that the US made after the war started to be buoyed. So you have a German-R-R-Mament, you have Japan invading Manchuria.
So there are different elements at that point that sort of hegemony, the US constructed after World War I, basically collapsed. And this is why I speak of a first crisis of US hegemony during that period. Yeah, moving forward historically a few years, in the wake of the Second World War, the US emerged as the central hegemonic force in the world. But you argue that this wasn't simply a reassertion of the hegemony achieved before the Great Depression, but was a fundamentally new form of connection and control.
Can you tell us a bit about this new model that emerged in the wake of the war? This is the experience of the United States after World War II. It's a good example of what I referred to as fully realized hegemony. So this time around, it's not a weak form of hegemony built mainly on economic power.
It translates also at the political and military level. It's something that is a form of hegemony that is far more institutionalized compared to the previous form of hegemony. And very importantly, it's also militarily cemented. And it's important to grasp all these different elements and these complex architectures of US hegemony after World War II, in order to understand what happens afterwards.
Maybe we have a chance to talk about that. But there you have many times this idea that the US entered very shortly afterwards into another crisis of US hegemony. And there I argue that the US developed the means to attempt to avoid such a crisis. There is a broad sense that in the 2007 financial recession, US hegemony was finally threatened, and that China has more recent years started moving in to take the place where leaving empty.
But you trace the hegemonic decline of the US several decades previous and show that our hegemonic decline has been a much longer process. And also involved advances made by other nations, especially Germany and Japan, who made tremendous strides starting in the 1980s, which forced the US into a much weaker, more competitive stance. Can you give us a sense of this way or trying to rethink this decline and stretch it a bit farther back? Yeah, I mean, what you have there is a big debate, starting from the 1970s on whether the US entered into a crisis of hegemony or not.
And you have different positions, on the one hand the idea that it's not the case the US continued with hegemony, with some transformations, another complaint now that the US entered already a crisis of hegemony. I tend to argue actually that the US didn't enter into a crisis of hegemony, starting from the 1970s, exactly because, as I said before, the head means to maintain the hegemonic position. With that, I also break with that idea I started to outline at the beginning of the interview that crisis do not need to lead to, necessarily to a crisis or economic crisis, don't need to lead to a crisis of hegemony, especially when a state has the capabilities and capacities to maintain its hegemonic position. And this is, I believe, what's happened.
I mean, some argue that hegemony basically disappeared as such, even as a concept that it wasn't, that doesn't make sense to speak about hegemony, because competition between different national states has disappeared and so on. So I believe that's not the case, competition between national states is still something very relevant if we want to understand the world economy. At the same time, I believe that the US was able to block, to some extent, the ascent of competitors such as Germany or Japan, which were making advances in economic terms and so on. But even the sort of architecture that the United States constructed after World War II, they were not able to translate those sort of economic advances into the construction of hegemonic relations.
So this is why I believe, or I tried to expose that the US did not enter into a crisis after economic crisis of the 1970s. At the same time, I also argue that we slowly start, not already in the 1970s. Later on, when we analyze the rise of China, it's interesting because it occurs outside US-segemonic relations. So why if the US were able to block the ascent and the establishment of regional hegemony in Germany and Japan, it wasn't able to do that with China, exactly because it developed outside hegemonic relations.
Yeah, finally turning to the 2007 physical crisis. You actually, in a way, take the beginning of that crisis back to around 2005 with decelerated growth for housing prices, which then spiraled in a number of stages with different countries responding in different ways. And you then connect this back to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. So can you unpack how you understand this crisis?
Yeah, also in this case, I attempt to integrate these different crisis theories. Again, I mean, as in the case of the Great Depression, you have different markets arguing that it was a lander consumptionist crisis with low wages that led to high indebtedness and so on. Or relatedly, it was a crisis of overproduction or theories that argued for the increase of, or the enormous increase of the financial sphere. And you even talk about, say, financialized capitalism.
And so, and then you have others who say, now it's just the profitability or the rate of profit. So what I then attempt to do is to integrate these different aspects. And so what I argue is that attempting to exit the crisis of the 1970s and so on, the system or the capitalist world economy builds up different contradictions, which are, in fact, the analysis of financialization is one of those inequalities, is one of those low wages or flat wages or decreasing wages, are another important element, not a characterized website, no liberalism or the exit of the way in which capitalism tried to overcome the crisis of the 1970s. And so how to relate all these problems.
I say, okay, these different problems or contradictions are indeed related to profitability in the sense that the enormous increase of assets, financial assets, et cetera, becomes problematic when profitability relative to the growth of those assets remains low. So you can even argue, even if profitability rises, but not as fast or not as rapidly as it would be needed to sustain all these financial bubbles, then you have a problem. And actually, I mean, and even there you have this debate, how far the profitability grew, whether that's the problem. So I try to focus always in relative terms.
I believe that it calculated, I'm not, I mean, I saw interesting calculations that showed that the rate of profit, even if it recovered a little bit, it never reached the stage that it had, say, after World War II. So it was low profitability. But always, I repeat, compared to the growth of the financial sphere or compared to the basic behavior that we have related to, for example, inequality. So this is, again, the way in which I try to integrate these different crisis theories.
Yeah, with that, that kind of brings us through most of the book. I'm wondering if we can just go a little beyond what you wrote. We're currently on what is possibly the tail end of the COVID epidemic, although some parts of the world are still struggling, of course, but I just want to kind of ask how you see the last year functioning potentially as a sort of hegemonic crisis. Obviously a threatened public health in a huge way, but it also, the danger brought to the surface a lot of underlying economic antagonisms that were already present.
And then a little beyond that, there's also, I see a lot of people, particularly on the left, wondering if we are kind of on the tail end of neoliberalism in some way, if that crisis kind of forced that phase of capitalism on its way out. I recognize you may not have like a super flesh out answer here, but I'm just wondering if I could get your thoughts on kind of how this last year functioned as a crisis and what are maybe some signposts we should be looking for that it actually forces some sort of hegemonic transition, even if we don't know yet, if it actually will. Okay. Yeah, many thanks for this question.
As I said at the beginning, in every crisis, you have many talks about a crisis of hegemony and hegemonic transitions, particularly related, of course, to the rise of China and so on, and then many times you have this is it, now this is now the final or the final crisis of US, Germany, and so on. And I'm, as I try to demonstrate throughout this book, the economic crisis, there's no automatism that lead to a crisis of hegemony at international level. If you read the press, it's interesting because a year ago everybody was saying, okay, it's really the crisis of the US and Germany, China is actually even sending airplanes to the US with AIDS, no medical AIDS, also to other countries and so on. And now one year afterwards with the election of Biden and so on, what you read in the press is completely different, okay, you say, okay, the US is again asserting itself, it's building, it's alliances again in Europe, also in the Far East, etc, to attempt to contain the rise of China.
And so I believe that one needs to be careful. So for one thing I would say that those analysis that are mainly built on, on on on on on Gramsci, for example, a Number of Mission Analysis that actually maintained that we are in a war, whether we entered after 1970, a war that goes beyond national states has a problem in analyzing what is going on. So I think that what we are seeing is a reaffirmation of the importance of national states when we analyze and the competition between national states when we analyze the world economy. And I think that this COVID crisis is actually going towards making the states even more important and more assertive at the international level.
So there is talk about the control of specific industries. You cannot leave the specific, the production of specific and important goods to international, normal international competition. And so you have to control those. And this is building, again, some, I would say, blocks.
Okay. To summarize, I would say that the crisis might lead to, perhaps, indeed a crisis of US Germany, but understood in terms of, as I said, or defined as a situation in which you have another state that is able to construct the Germanic relations at least at the international, at least at the regional level. And that would be, in this case, China, perhaps. So there is a strong conflict going on.
But to speak about the Germanic transition, I wouldn't say that that's a far more long and complex process. Okay. Unfortunately, this increased geopolitical competition is something that might create, well, lead to a period of, well, more intense, at least political competition and even military in some parts of the world economy, I think. When it comes to neoliberalism and so on, I believe that, okay, there is a problem with the legitimacy of neoliberalism or that we might express with a concept.
I take again from Gramsci, which is the concept of the organic crisis. And this is when civil society basically, the touches itself from the state or political society, when super-denated classes stop believing in what leaders are saying, what the normal form of maintaining the consent of the population is not working in the usual manner. And this opens a very difficult situation. Again, it's not automatic, but this leads to something more progressive or so, well, we know in the US, from in Italy, in Brazil, in lots of different places, okay, with an important increase, for example, of the far right.
So it is also lead to this sort of situations. And so whether this lack of legitimacy that neoliberalism is living really indeed lead to its super-cession, I think it's a very open question. I mean, in say, in hegemony, it's placed on also at international level, it's an important role. The US have the capacity to print money, to have expensive programs and so on.
This is not the case for all countries, okay? So in some super-denated countries, you could have even a problem of over-inventedness, which might lead again to practices that we usually associate with neoliberalism, again, cuts in public spending in wages and so forth. So we have to differentiate, I think, also, when we talk about the end, we always offer the different countries, different situations and so on. Yeah, thank you very much for your thoughts on that.
So as a final question, we always like to ask what, if anything, are you working on now? Do you have any new projects you're developing or just directions you're researching in? Yeah, actually, I have two. One is more a short-term project that I'm working on with our political economy research group at University of Adonoma Metropolitana.
We are basically working on Marxist general law of capitalist accumulation. It's an important law in Marxist capital. But we notice that when you look at the literature, at least the recent literature, it's not something that academia, not only academia, is considered enough. So this is what we are working on at the moment and we are working on a book, a collected work with different essays on that subject.
And I'm also working on another project that attempts, basically, to make somehow a step backward with the work I have been presenting today. And I'm looking at different possible reasons for why some states are able to break a humanistic relationship, and finally, or possibly, why, and develop as a great power or a hegemonic state. And in doing that, I'm basically looking at a revolution. So I analyze the revolution in China as something important that enabled China to develop outside U.S.
hegemonic relations, or even looking at the U.S. revolution for independence and the civil war as a way in which also the U.S. actually was able to break with hegemonic relations, in this case, related to great Britain and so on, and then to rise as hegemonic power. So this is what I'm looking at and working on at the moment.
Yeah, excellent. You've got a lot of really good stuff in the works. It sounds like. So Lorenzo Frusaro, thank you so much for being with us.
Well, thanks to you. Many thanks for giving me this opportunity.