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.