Just wanna link to a 1 hour episode from Ben Norton and Radhika Desai from two weeks ago where they discuss parts of her newest book, Capitalism, Coronavirus, and War, the "sequel" to her first book, Geopolitical Economy (both books are freely available as PDFs if interested). So if you've got an hour free to listen to it then I would recommend it.

They cover the broad strokes of, well, capitalism, coronavirus, and war. A little more specifically they talk about the well-trodden stuff to us all here about how capitalism in the West has evolved into neoliberal, financialized capitalism as a response to the two world wars, how this reached an apex of (subjective) imperial strength in approximately the 80s, and how the real economy has been stagnant or declining ever since 2008 in America and Europe. They contrast this both to capitalist countries that have retained some state control of industries like Russia but also Germany and Singapore, and to socialist countries like China and Cuba, and show how these different groups of countries did better or worse in the coronavirus pandemic in terms of lives saved and how it was a really revealing moment of how neoliberalism is completely unable to respond to these crises (and the lack of anchoring to reality as stock market and bourgeoisie wealth only increased as industries plummeted). And now onto the current crisis of NATO's war on Russia and soon-to-be war on China, where in the first case, countries like Germany are being forcibly "neoliberalized" and having their industry looted in order to satiate the international bourgeoisie over the industrial national bourgeoisie; and in the second case, where the United States seeks dominance over a country whose only actual crime (once we get past the claims about Ughyur genocides and political repression and what have you) is having a bigger and more successful economy than the United States, with all the benefits that will give them, and the US believes this must be a zero-sum game.

There's a nice soundbite quote at the end where Desai is dunking on the twisting of academic's understanding of Marxism over the last... well, century, but definitely in the post-Soviet era, saying, to quote, "...so in all of these ways we have now created a situation in which you have major intellectuals who are often professors in mainstream academic universities who say on the one hand they are Marxists, and on the other hand that Marx was wrong. Well, what could be more useful to the establishment?" And how there's an increasing realization among people that neoliberalism has reached a dead end and we must do something differently (although I expect there to be a lot of resistance to the idea that that has to be socialism and we'll likely see a lot of people proposing ideas that are essentially just capitalism but with some odd quirk or something as they fail to realize the depth of the problem).