ŷ������

It’s a crime not giving badass Hudson 5-stars��

--If you are going to choose *1* Hudson tome to dive into, you’ll be better off with The Bubble and Beyond, which:
1) summarizes “Killing the Host�� in a couple chapters
2) summarizes the infamous Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance in a couple chapters
3) summarizes debt analysis in:
a) theory/practice ( and )
b) modern/ancient histories (And Forgive Them Their Debts) which inspired David Graeber’s (RIP) masterpiece Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

--“Killing the Host�� is to me Hudson’s most frustrating framework, where he contrasts the “revolutionary productivity�� of Industrial Capitalism vs. the “parasitic neofeudalism�� of Finance Capitalism. Hudson’s critique of Finance Capitalism is of course legendary, but you can get the best of this with just #3 listed above without #1’s framing (which romanticizes Industrial Capitalism/Classical liberal political economy, i.e. Smith/Ricardo/J.S. Mill, etc.).
…This framing neglects the severe contradictions within Industrial Capitalism, and these contradictions end up re-emerging if you then try to synthesize “Killing the Host�� with Hudson’s other analyses:

1) Critiques of imperialism, where Hudson instantly flips a switch and critiques Classical Ricardian “comparative advantage�� “free trade�� as a convenient, imperialist myth.
-intro: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-intro: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
-advanced: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-advanced: Hudson's Trade, Development and Foreign Debt

2) Recognition that capitalist state spending is often driven by war spending, thus Hudson can only romanticize state protectionist industrialization (America's Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914) for so long, until you reach the US Military Industrial Complex, Japanese Miracle reindustrialization from US genocidal war on Korea, South Korea rapid industrialization from US genocidal war on Vietnam, etc: Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945-1980

3) Relating to (2) is Hudson’s deep analysis of geopolitics, which often outshines in explaining “Neoliberalism�� than the abstract idea of a neofeudal rentier backlash to progressive Industrial Capitalism. This geopolitics (i.e. how US's post-WWII global plan of Bretton Woods was predicated on US industrial surplus recycling, how US lost this surplus from its excessive war spending in Korea/Vietnam, and how US flipped to a deficit empire by unleashing Wall Street to vacuum in the world’s surpluses thus unleashing Finance) is more accessibly detailed in Varoufakis�� The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy.
...Add Prashad's The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World on the challenge of Third World industrialization to balance Varoufakis/Hudson’s Western-centric accounts.

…finally, Hudson has no answers for:
4) Romanticization of industrial productionism in the age of ecological crises. If we want to be vulgar, we may even suggest that Hudson’s central claim of Finance Capitalism’s “fictitious�� growth/value creation might be better for the environment than full-blown Industrial growth. Of course, this only makes a further mess (neglecting different forms of “growth��, debt-driven cancerous growth, etc.). Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
…if we dig deeper, we find that Hudson adopts Classical labour theory of value where “value�� is derived from labour and nature is excluded. Now, I’m wary of stirring a Marxologist debate (further complicated with Hudson’s unorthodox interpretations of Marx, esp. Marx’s crisis theory, i.e. rejecting TRPF: Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall), but one fundamental framing by David Harvey (A Companion to Marx's Capital) of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 that I find most compelling is that as a critique of Classical political economy, Marx was challenging the market economy (exchange-value dominating use-value) and how it interacts with the labour theory of value. Thus, the end goal for socialism/communism is to transcend the labour theory of value.
…regardless, not seriously incorporating nature (ex. “biophysical economics��/“thermoeconomics��) seems like a major miss in the applicability of economic theory to current real-world issues.