Donald and Rudy join Jairus Banaji, author of Theory as History and A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism to discuss his theoretical contributions around the mode of production debates. We begin with his political starts in the UK and in India, and how he saw the organizational and cultural failures of the left in both countries, the debates on the mode of production in India and what he brought to this debate using the theories of formal and real subsumption. We turn to his analysis of the modes of production in Ancient Rome, the method of historical materialism, the origins of capitalism and the moments of truth in the existing camps, the very particular emergence of capitalism in the US, the importance of vertical integration and how all of this plays in to the debates around merchant capitalism. Finally, we discuss capitalism in the Islamic world, imperialism and unequal exchange, and the importance of having open theoretical debate in Marxism.