Ep 368 - Socialism Unmade: Confronting Five Centuries of Capital with Ali Kadri

About this episode

Dr. Ali Kadri discusses the destructive nature of capitalism and its impact on the Arab world, exploring themes of imperialism and the consequences of debt dependence.

“...Some are dancing, some are drowning, but in the end everybody’s going to go under.” Dr. Ali Kadri (Sun Yat-sen University), author of the Unmaking of Arab Socialism , joins Steve to talk about imperialism, development, and why the Arab world keeps getting put through the capitalist meat grinder. Ali argues that capitalism isn’t just markets and greed. It’s a destructive social relationship. Once you look at it that way, many of the world’s mysteries stop being mysterious: war, austerity, pollution, and mass deaths aren’t accidents that occasionally happen to capitalism. They are outcomes to be monetized. The conversation moves to imperialism as capitalism in its concentrated, caffeinated, and brutal form, especially under finance-dominance. Ali describes genocide as both direct (bombs, occupation, ethnic cleansing) and structural (avoidable hunger, disease, debt-driven collapse). He frames the destruction of Arab socialist and anti-colonial projects as strategic for empire: control of oil, geography, and the political threat of regional solidarity. They talk about MMT’s explanation of currency and how the dollar functions as a lever. Ali sees the dollar as power, representing…

People in this episode

Host: Steven D Grumbine

Guest: Ali Kadri

Topics covered

• socialism
• capitalism
• imperialism
• Arab world
• MMT
• democracy

Keywords

• capitalism
• imperialism
• Arab socialism
• MMT
• dollar
• debt
• colonization
• war
• austerity
• pollution

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Sun Yat-sen University

Books & works: Unmaking of Arab Socialism

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