[WSMDiscuss] where's the global social movement? (Moscow interview)

[Patrick Bond]

I'm not sure why, but when I was in Moscow at the end of February (for a 
People's Friendship University academic conference 
<http://africa.rudn.ru/>), a chat I had with a popular lefty 
interviewer, Konstantin Syomin, was aired on Youtube, and it received 
820 000 views in its Russian translation 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWTbvgVOnn0&feature=youtu.be>.

     Yesterday, Syomin's show released the original English version 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwTPwml2SBY>. There's discussion in 
this interview about:

  * the 'creative destruction' of capitalism now underway, what with the
    business cycle already heading into recession and debt crises before
    Covid-19 hit;
  * the IP war and need to decommodify medicines;
  * climate catastrophe and the failure of ecological-modernisation
    strategies - especially carbon trading - in contrast to
    command-and-control in the form of the UN's 1987 banning of CFCs to
    halt ozone hole growth;
  * capitalist crisis tendencies towards overproduction and
    financialisation;
  * capital's spatial fix, in the form of imperialism, and Rosa
    Luxemburg's view of capitalist/non-capitalist relations;
  * limits now clearly emerging in these crisis-displacement strategies;
  * Keynes' 1930s formula for state-led economic reflation and social
    democracy;
  * the contemporary collapse of global governance, and the BRICS as a
    false hope for an alternative;
  * Russian firms' abuse in Southern Africa (Evraz Highveld steel,
    Rosatom nuclear, VTB banking in Mozambique, Rostec platinum in
    Zimbabwe);
  * BRICS contradictions such as IMF/UNFCCC/WTO assimilation,
    extractivism, super-exploitation, centrifugal economic processes and
    internecine geopolitical divisions under Putin's 2020 lead;
  * Lenin's perspective on Cecil Rhodes and the labour aristocracy's
    xenophobia;
  * the 4IR threat to the international proletariat;
  * the unprecedented rise of world civil unrest in 2019 - but the lack
    of political ideology in these protests and need for a larger-scale
    eco-socialist theory;
  * the World Social Forum's decade of internationalism before social
    movements faded and the reformist-NGO rot set in, and the limits of
    the Arab Spring and anarchist/autonomist Occupy;
  * the difficulties of holding state power without delinking - and
    Trump's delinking as a con;
  * the Sanders opening to an idealistic U.S. left, and Big Data's
    manipulation of white workers;
  * South African austerity and the need for a united front of labour
    and social movements;
  * the evident nostalgia I witnessed for Soviet-era solidarity with
    Africans;
  * the lessons of Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky, especially the critique
    of USSR state capitalism and self-activity of the working class;
  * the attraction of Luxemburg's fight against super-exploitation,
    including race, gender and environment;
  * hopes vested in the youth generation; and even
  * how my background studying at the intellectually-bankrupt Wharton
    School of Finance - Trump's alma mater - drove me to study marxian
    political economy.

(Feedback is warmly welcomed.)


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