Valdai Club

What is the best collective name for the so-called ‘Developed World’? It has names for itself; its economists speak of the Advanced or Industrialised nations and its politicians the ‘Free World’ or even the ‘Civilized world’. The rest of us have other names, not all polite: Collective West, Global North, Hegemonists, Globalists, to name but a few. Some, perhaps waking up to the new realities, are starting to speak of the global periphery. This is an interesting inversion, but may be a bit premature.

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.

All that has happened compared with colonial era and that of high imperialism is that this economic oppression – always the material basis of this profoundly unjust division of the world - has been perfected to the point where formal conquest is kept in the back pocket, writes Alan Freeman, Co-Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Institute, for the 19th Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.

If anyone tries to justify a monstrous and unnecessary human sacrifice on the grounds that it’s for the best, then they are measuring ‘good’ in dollars instead of bodies, and they’re not part of the left, because the left stands for humans, not property, Valdai Club expert Alan Freeman writes.

Why are some countries dealing with the COVID19 pandemic much better than others? The question is deceptively simple, yet the answers are highly contested. The difficulties arise from a misleading polarisation between allegedly ‘authoritarian’ and ‘liberal’ strategies.

Thanks to the role of money and entrenched class power in electoral processes, the history of liberal democracy is not exactly littered with instances of the people springing nasty surprises on the powers in the land. That, however, was precisely what the British electorate did on June 23, 2016 when it voted to leave the European Union in the face of impressive ruling class and political establishment opposition.

The 26th Valdai paper presents the basics of a strategy for re-industrialization and economic rebalancing that starts from the highest available technology at the world level.