Kersplebedeb Statement on Zak Cope's About Face (Aug. 16 2024)
TLDR: Zak Cope has renounced his former anti-imperialist views and has embraced “the West,” zionism, and the legacies and ongoing realities of colonialism and imperialism. Kersplebedeb Publishing stands by Zak’s previous work and is saddened to see him now embracing the structures of oppression, exploitation, and genocide which he previously had stood against.
LONGER VERSION:
We at Kersplebedeb Publishing were surprised to learn (to say the least) that Zak Cope, author of Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism—which we published two editions of in 2012 and 2015, respectively—has had a dramatic change of opinion on seemingly every aspect of political economy in the last year (he implies that it was sparked by the events of October 7, 2023). In the Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Geopolitics (2024), which Cope edited and to which he contributed two chapters, he describes his “personal and intellectual commitment to free markets, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law and the conservative and classical liberal values that uphold the same.” He declares his support for “the people of... Israel in their just struggle to overcome the imperialist and totalitarian forces bent on their destruction.”
Despite this description of the opponents of the zionist state as “imperialist,” it is not clear whether Cope—who has been mainly known as a prominent theorist of anti-imperialism and defender of the theory of a global labour aristocracy—now thinks imperialism does not exist or just that it is a good thing. He compares foreign direct investment from the Global North into the Global South to “people who spend less than they earn... loan[ing] to those who spend more than they earn.” He denies that there is anything morally problematic in this relationship, arguing to the contrary that “free trade can and has led to historically unprecedented reductions in poverty rates worldwide.” He states that “Europe’s industrialization and economic take-off was largely endogenous, driven by technological innovation, entrepreneurship, liberal institutions, and scientific culture,” while “Colonialism and the slave trade played a relatively minor role.”
Cope now espouses right-wing shibboleths, such as the historically ignorant view that Nazi Germany was socialist (!) or that a domination of the social sciences by Marxism and postcolonialism (“the academic study of the cultural, political, and economic legacies of colonialism and imperialism,” as he defines it) has “seriously curtailed academic freedom.” He derisively refers to the concept of “European, Western, and ‘White’ oppression, exploitation, and racism,” a use of scare quotes implying that he views the entire concept of whiteness as being of questionable analytic utility, at a minimum. (Elsewhere, he uses scare quotes on “First World” and “Third World,” as well as “core” and “periphery.”) He approvingly cites Thatcher’s aphorism about socialism being broken by its dependence on an exhaustible supply of “other people’s money.” He rejects the labour theory of value and calls “counter[ing] anti-capitalism with reasoned, fact-based, and historically grounded argument... one of the most urgent cultural and political challenges of our time.”
In a footnote, he “retract[s]” Divided World and The Wealth of Some Nations (which he published with Pluto Press in 2019) for the reason that they are “based on Marxist views that are outright false or misleadingly one-sided.”
We share Cope’s desire to make a clear distinction between his past work and his output today and going forward—barring a second 180° degree rotation.
Cope’s argument in Divided World Divided Class and similar writings was nothing more nor less than an assertion of the humanity of the people of the Third World (or Global South) and an attempt to explain their dehumanization in the realm of ideas (racism and national chauvinism) by reviewing their position in the realm of economics, as those who produce most of the world's enormous wealth yet receive scarcely any of its benefit. If there was a weakness to his approach, it was his reliance on a lot of numbers and statistics and math (themselves often the mystifying product of bourgeois economics) to show what could be illustrated much more simply and clearly in more concrete terms. But so it goes with “immanent critique”—our thought at the time was (and is now) that given the use of bourgeois economics to muddy the waters in order to hide the reality of imperialist exploitation, that there was value in using it to clarify and demystify.
Cope’s new position—which comes as an utter shock to us, and which we find difficult to believe he can himself take seriously—does indeed amount to a complete reversal of this: a dehumanization of the global majority and an obfuscation and denial of the racism and national chauvinism to which they are subject.
Zak, wtf?
Note to Readers: Kersplebedeb is making the ebook version of Divided World Divided Class, which we still consider to be a valuable contribution to understanding the world we live in, available free of charge via the leftwingbooks.net website: www.leftwingbooks.net//divided-world-divided-class-ebook
