Brett Christophers joins PTO to talked about his new book, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? We chatted about the extraordinary dominance of monopolistic rent-seeking in the UK economy, why the concept of rentierisation is more useful and accurate than the notion of financialisation when talking about the trajectory of the UK and world economies, and we also talked about how and why entrepreneurialism and competitiveness are values that are taken up far m...
2020-11-26 08:32:29 +0000 UTC
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Sophie Lewis joins PTO to talk about her article in The Nation, Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It. We chatted about how the Covid19 pandemic has underscored how dependent the nuclear family is upon the labour of others, and why the family is being called into question by mainstream political commentators. We also talked whether the call for fam...
2020-11-18 15:56:33 +0000 UTC
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Adom Getachew and Branko Marcetic join PTO to talk about the US election results, why the 'blue wave' failed to materialise and how Joe Biden will govern with a Republican senate and a republican majority on the supreme court.
2020-11-05 12:49:23 +0000 UTC
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Barnaby Raine joins PTO to talk about the EHRC report into antisemitism and the Labour Party, the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the party, and what the affair tells us about the treatment of antisemitism in the UK in 2020.
2020-11-02 18:08:52 +0000 UTC
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Grace Blakeley joins PTO to talk about the current state of the UK economy, whether the era of austerity is over, and why even in the face of a no deal Brexit the UK is unlikely to experience an attack of the bond market vigilantes. We also talked about Grace's excellent new podcast, A World To Win.
2020-10-21 13:59:55 +0000 UTC
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Owen Hatherley and Kojo Koram join PTO to talk about Owen's essay, 'A Study in the Politics and Aesthetics of English Misery'. In the essay Owen reflects on the generational divides that have emerged over the course of the last two UK general elections by charting the musical evolution of The Smiths. Comparing Morrissey’s political trajectory to those of many voters throughout the North of England, Owen investigates the roots of the North’s departure from anti-Thatcherite collectivism to ...
2020-10-15 11:50:01 +0000 UTC
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Lola Olufemi joins PTO to talk about her new book, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power. We chatted about the history of black feminist organising, the problem with mainstream liberal feminism, and the generational divide in feminist circles over trans rights.
2020-10-09 10:56:07 +0000 UTC
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Richard Seymour joins PTO to discuss the recent anti-lockdown protests in London, the broader phenomenon of covid denialism, and whether the emergence of anti-political currents - combined with the left's decline with the defeat of the Corbyn project - is laying the basis for the emergence of fascism. Finally, we talked about how the left can balance the need to defend civil liberties with taking the public health crisis seriously.
2020-10-02 19:30:02 +0000 UTC
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In a special episode recorded for The World Transformed festival 2020, Tobita Chow and David Brophy discuss how the socialist left should think about China, how to characterise China's economy and mode of governance, and what to make of the emerging Cold War between China and the United States and US allies.
2020-09-28 17:53:50 +0000 UTC
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Will Davies joins PTO to talk about the possible emergence of a UK equivalent of Fox News, what that might do to UK politics, and why breaking into broadcasting is so important for right wing media owners such as Rupert Murdoch. We also talked about whether in the years preceding the Brexit vote the left should have paid more attention to the ideology and attitudes being fostered by people such as Paul Dacre, former editor for the Daily Mail - rather than the more obvious faces of the neolibe...
2020-09-26 14:41:22 +0000 UTC
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Kate Soper joins me to talk about her new book, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. We chatted about why a transition to a sustainable, post-growth economy need not mean privation and a reduction of pleasure but instead an increase in human flourishing. We also talked about why consumerism should be seen neither as an expression of sovereign public choice, nor as mere s...
2020-09-23 09:59:42 +0000 UTC
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Nesrine Malik joins PTO to speak about the confected media furore over the BBC proms and what it tells us about the UK's culture wars. We also talked about the trajectory of the right wing press and how the left can best respond to the right's cultural turn. In the interview we spoke about Nesrine's recent Guardian article, The right's ...
2020-09-06 14:44:59 +0000 UTC
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Bhaskar Sunkara joins me to talk about the violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin and collusion between the far right and the police, whether the frightening prospect of a second Trump administration makes a rerun of the 2016 election result less likely - in spite of Joe Biden's underwhelming policy platform - and we also talked about the prospect of the American right breaking from its relative economic orthodoxy and moving towards advocacy of a meaningful industrial policy.
2020-09-02 16:52:22 +0000 UTC
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Britain is officially in its deepest recession since records began following the unprecedented economic shutdown in response to the Covid19 pandemic. In the past six months, the UK has shed close to three quarters of a million jobs - a grim foretaste of what could be the kind of mass unemployment not seen in the UK since the 1980s. PTO spoke to James Meadway about why Britain's recession is more severe than those faced by comparable economies, whether central bank economic crisis fighting mea...
2020-08-26 11:33:54 +0000 UTC
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Haim Bresheeth-Zabner joins me to talk about his new book, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Force Made a Nation. We discussed how the the Zionist project in Palestine depended upon the erasure of the culture of the Pre-WWII Jewish diaspora, why it is that Israeli military operations command near unanimous support within Israel, and how Israel's economy has become massively dependent on its military industrial complex and permanent conflict.
2020-08-22 15:14:43 +0000 UTC
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In late March PTO spoke to Adam Tooze whilst he was in New York as the Covid19 crisis was escalating. In today's episode we return to some of the issues we discussed back then, including the pandemic's role in the rise of China, the increasing entwinement of government and private corporations in the United States and Europe and the return of austerity politics.
2020-08-19 10:43:12 +0000 UTC
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What will come after the capitalocene - and is that even the right term to describe our geological era? Rosie Warren joins me to talk about The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene - an essay coauthored by Rosie that considers the entwined processes of climate change and the proletarianisation of the world's population. We talked about the debate over whethe...
2020-08-14 08:00:03 +0000 UTC
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On Sunday Alexander Lukashenko, ruler of Belarus since 1994, claimed a landslide victory in the country's presidential election with an implausible 80% of the vote. Large protests broke out in the wake of the announcement of the result. I spoke to Nelly Bekus about Lukashenko's rise to power, how Belarus differs from other post-Soviet states in its relationship to the Soviet era, and how Covid19 and its economic impact helped spark the protests.
2020-08-12 18:00:14 +0000 UTC
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On Monday the Nobel laureate, and co-architect of the Northern Ireland peace process John Hume passed away at the age of 83. A giant of the political scene in Northern Ireland he was most well known for his role in the Good Friday Agreement that brought the so-called Troubles to a close and for his commitment to nonviolent support for a gradualist route to a united Ireland. I spoke to Daniel Finn, author of One Man's Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA about Hume's legacy, the ...
2020-08-06 20:20:07 +0000 UTC
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Tobita Chow and Jake Werner join me to talk about the roots of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between China and the United States, the reasons for bipartisan consensus on China's increasing technological prowess, and the specific character of anti-Chinese racism in the United States. We also talked about how the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 signalled China's deepening integration into the US-led international order.
2020-08-04 09:37:10 +0000 UTC
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Rachel Shabi joins me to talk about her recent article in the New York Review of Books - 'The Pro-Privatization Shock Therapy of the UK’s Covid Response'. We talked about why the UK Government's response to the coronavirus pandemic was so heavily dependent on outsourcing to private corporations, and whether the UK's very heavy Covid19-related death toll will eventually erode public support for the Conservative government.
2020-07-30 08:45:41 +0000 UTC
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Journalist and broadcaster Rachel Shabi joins me to talk about her recent article in the New York Review of Books - The Pro-Privatization Shock Therapy of the UK’s Covid Response. We talked about why the UK Government's response to the coronavirus pandemic was so heavily dependent on outsourcing to private corporations, and whether the UK's...
2020-07-30 08:20:01 +0000 UTC
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In the latest episode of #RedHacks - a series of conversations on journalism in the neoliberal world - Joana Ramiro talks to filmmaker and writer Ana Naomi de Sousa about being a non-white journalist in an industry stymied by privilege.
2020-07-27 12:10:48 +0000 UTC
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Astra Taylor and Troy Vettese join me to talk about their recent article in the Guardian in which they argue that the principal driver of zoonotic diseases is the factory farming of animals and that the covid19 pandemic shows that we need to transition away from a meat-centred global food system. We also talked about an article Troy co-wrote with Drew Prende...
2020-07-15 10:27:52 +0000 UTC
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On the 30th of June the city of Leicester, in the East Midlands of the UK was put back into lockdown following a spike in Covid-19 cases. The new outbreak of the virus put the spotlight on the garment district of the city - where the new outbreak may have emerged - much of which is characterised by extremely exploitative labour practices in small factories serving giant online retailers such as Boohoo and major high street brands. I spoke to Ashok Kumar about the reshoring of garment producti...
2020-07-11 09:01:00 +0000 UTC
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Andreas Malm joins me to talk about his new book, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. We talked about why in the case of Covid19 most of the rich countries of the north were able to make the kinds of decisive interventions that seem to elude them when it comes to climate change. And we also talked about the experience of the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war, and why war communism is a better model for the kind of mobilisation needed i...
2020-07-04 13:24:23 +0000 UTC
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Award-winning author, broadcaster and academic Gary Younge joins me to talk about his experience of reporting on racism in the United States for the Guardian, the current Black Lives Matter movement in the US and abroad, and why comparisons between BLM and the civil rights movement are misplaced.
2020-06-30 11:34:46 +0000 UTC
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On Monday evening soldiers of the Indian Army and the Chinese People's Liberation Army clashed on their disputed border in the Ladakh area of Kashmir in the Himalayas. Reportedly fighting with rocks and iron bars, no shots were fired but the Indian Army reported twenty deaths on its side and also claimed casualties on the Chinese side. I spoke to Arif Rafiq about what we know about the clashes between the two regional powers, how China perceived India's annexation of Jammu and Kashmir last ye...
2020-06-21 17:24:16 +0000 UTC
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Vivian Gornick joins me to talk about her classic book, The Romance of American Communism. We spoke about her experience of growing up amongst communists and socialists in the Bronx in the 1930s, how she sought to counter simplistic depictions of the lives of American communists and how - in spite of its authoritarianism - the American Communist Party enabled ordinary men and women to feel connected to a larger human project.
2020-06-18 16:31:28 +0000 UTC
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Nikhil Pal Singh joins me to discuss the massive protests against police violence in the United States that emerged in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. We talked about why the protests are so large and so diverse and the movement's demands for the abolition or defunding of the police. We also talked about the concept of racial capitalism and how the right might seek to respond to the crisis of neoliberal legitimacy by pursuing policies that would seek to shore up ...
2020-06-10 16:58:04 +0000 UTC
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