Spare us your victory lap
The real nature of the war in Sudan, the fantasy of Keynesianism, and more
A few weeks ago, Public Seminar published Udeepta Chakravarty’s analysis of electioneering in India. Now the results are in: for the first time in ten years, Modi will have to govern with a coalition. But just how much, Chakravarty asks, in a follow-up essay, should liberals be celebrating?
Exiled Sudanese author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin joins Anna Simone Reumert for a conversation about the violence wracking Sudan—and why it should not be mistaken for a civil war.
And Anna Pick interviews Scott Aquanno and Stephen Maher about the origins of contemporary finance and the myth of the parasite in their new book, The Fall and Rise of Capitalism (Verso, 2024).
“The gun has become a type of thinking”
Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin and Anna Simone Reumert
Reumert: The RSF [Rapid Support Forces] is using their position as westerners from Darfur to claim that they are marginalized, as if striking a war on the rich. What do you make of this? Does social class play a role in Sudan’s war?
Baraka Sakin: The RSF men are not more marginalized than the rest of Sudan. They are striking terror on our society, raping, looting, destroying our culture and universities. Their recruits are young and uneducated—they don’t understand what it means to be marginalized. They are only thinking of their own benefits. They have no morals. And they cannot be part of Sudan’s future for this reason. Not because they represent any certain tribe but because they represent a certain behavior. They are war machines.
Is Finance a “Parasite”?
Scott Aquanno, Stephen Maher, and Anna Pick
Maher: So often you see this idea that we had a pre-financialized, “good” capitalism between 1945 and 1979, and we should just find a way of going back to it by reigning in a “parasitic” financial sector. We show that’s not possible because that never existed: financialization emerged right in the heart of the post-war Golden Age precisely because of the contradictions of internationalization—non-financial corporations financialized as part of the globalization process. And as that process unfolded, the interests of finance and industry became more and more closely entangled with one another. So the idea that you can go back to Keynesianism is based on a false perception of what Keynesianism was.
The Future for India’s Opposition
Udeepta Chakravarty
Hindu nationalism has achieved hegemony. There is a consolidated Hindu voting bloc on which the Hindu nationalist forces can rely for electoral victories despite alienating vast sections of India’s poor and marginalized. It means that electoral competition in India now occurs substantively over only 65 percent of the electorate, outside the Hindu voting bloc—mostly the poor and voters in those peripheral states where subnational and regional identities dominate. The challenge for the opposition going forward will be to play a defensive battle to keep BJP limited to their 35 percent vote share and below the absolute majority in terms of seats.