A couple weeks ago, I interviewed Jamie Merchant on the pod, and we had a grand conversation about the perils of economic nationalism, inter-capitalist conflict, tech oligarchy, and the decline of the “progressive managerial state.”
Part of that conversation centered on a critique we both shared of the 2020 book Trade Wars Are Class Wars, by Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis. Our criticisms of that book have a lot to do with what we see as a very one-sided analysis of China—a refusal by Klein and Pettis to extend the reasoning they apply to China to the US or the world-system as a whole.
The clip of our discussion generated quite a few comments and messages online, so I thought it would be worth sharing that part of the conversation here (as video, above, and as a written transcript, below).
