ECONOMICS has sometimes been described as “the dismal science.” These people have clearly never had the pleasure of listening to Professor Radhika Desai.

To be precise Desai is a political economist — the discipline that she told me also more accurately describes the work of Karl Marx.

Desai, to be even more precise, puts forward geopolitical economics as part of a Marxist framework for developing a better understanding of how the international relations of capitalism integrate politics, history, class and nation.

She is one of the foremost Marxist analysts around today who can set the rise of the new multilateral world in a clear class context.

Born in the state of Gujarat in India, where she studied for her first degree in politics, she said: “I was originally going to study law but quickly became fascinated by politics and why things succeed or fail. The interplay of ideas and interests.

“I wasn’t particularly left-wing at that time. I decided to come abroad and study and eventually ended up at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario, Canada, and it was here that I began my development as a Marxist.

“I was lucky that I was taught by a group of professors who either considered themselves Marxists or were open to Marxist ideas.

“Back in India there were a lot of Marxists and I was always impressed that most of the smartest people I knew were Marxists, so I was always curious about it.”

Desai says: “My MA and PhD were both about British politics. My masters was about the Thatcherite think tanks before I did a PhD thesis on the Labour Party during the early ’80s period.”

Her main PhD analysis was about the role of intellectuals and their interactions with the Labour Party which was later published in a book called Intellectuals and Socialism.

Desai says: “It was really about how intellectuals interact with political parties. I did a kind of Gramscian analysis of the role of intellectuals.

“I argued that there was a mainstream intellectual current that became meshed with the Labour Party. As the Fabians put it, it was the marriage of brains with numbers — the rank and file. I go into the history of it and point out that the 1981 split in the Labour Party was a split between the intellectual class and the party.”

She adds: “I’m still really interested as an academic in the way that intellectuals relate to political parties.”

Desai tells me that she has never really joined a political party herself.

She says: “I have never been able to find my way around the deep undergrowth of left political parties.

“I barely start to understand one of the groups and then I hear about some factional split or another where they are similar but not quite the same.”

After being appointed to head of department at the University of Manitoba, Desai became more interested in geopolitics and wrote another book called Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalisation and Empire, in 2013.

She became involved in the World Association for Political Economy and ended up visiting China and Russia on a regular basis and developing deep international links with a range of Marxist political economists.

“I also had good relations with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, so I feel that I am part of an international network of left-wing intellectuals and scholars,” she says.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Desai was part of a group that decided to set up the International Manifesto Group.

“Some of us saw that governments were taking all sorts of different directions to deal with the pandemic so some of us decided to set up a discussion group.

“Lots of people got involved in the fortnightly meetings. The discussions got so rich that we started putting clips of some discussions on YouTube. We then decided to start doing webinars.

“The first one was on the 2020 US elections and since then we have maintained webinars as our major activity with one or two each month.”

Desai says that it was clear that the group was moving towards trying to identify what needed to be done.

“In the spring of 2021, we decided to give the group a name and it was fairly logical to call it the IMG as we were coming up with a list of what we thought should be done and so we spent the rest of the year coming up with a manifesto.

“It is a socialist and anti-imperialist document.”

The manifesto talks of how the US-sponsored cold war is also a general imperialist offensive against peoples’ autonomous development, from Palestine to Peru and from Vietnam to Venezuela.

“The variety of means through which they wage it is backed by the world’s most fearsome arsenal, including nuclear, chemical, biological and cybernetic weapons of mass destruction.”

The manifesto adds that “never has so much destructive power been concentrated in so few irresponsible and desperate hands to wield against so great a majority of the world’s people,” and that it appears at a “moment of danger from deep and wide discussions among activists of all continents representing many socialist traditions.

“The overriding principle of ‘people and planet over profits’ implies the following major demands of people and peoples struggling for socialism.”

The manifesto includes calls for community-based public health systems, decommodifying land, labour and money, universal access to work and the nationalisation of money and banking,

It also makes the point that “monopolies — such as resource extraction, transportation, the digital platforms whose private ownership prevents the full exploitation of their potential to benefit society — and the production of the essentials of life — food, housing, education or healthcare — be heavily regulated or nationalised.”

It adds: “Their private ownership ill-serves society.”

Desai and the hundreds of signatories to the manifesto argue that the “original ideals of the United Nations Charter and the principles of peaceful coexistence advocated by the Non-Aligned Movement are excellent foundations for further constructing alternatives to institutions of US and Western dominance.”

Desai says: “Capitalism is no longer able to provide the basics for most people on the planet. It cannot recover.

“What we are suffering now with all these wars and inequality and general decline is the cost of keeping capitalism in business. It simply has to go!”

She adds: “Every country will have to find their own ways. People will experiment and find the way that works best for them as long as you bend capital for social use and lay down clear limits by which corporations must proceed.”

The first line of the manifesto quotes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that the ruling class, unable to secure working people their existence, is “unfit any longer to be the ruling class” and to “impose its conditions of existence upon society.”

I agree with Desai — one of the very few people who has managed to explain key Marxist political and economic principles to me in a way that doesn’t make me scream — that the world is at a pivotal point and we need to draw on the analysis of Marxist political economists to help us navigate our way through this rapidly changing environment.