Class Unity: Recent Episodes
Class Unity
Gary Roth talks to Class Unity about class, higher education, and consciousness. Gary teaches Sociology at Rutgers University. He is the author of “The Educated Underclass” (Pluto, 2019) and “Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick” (Brill/Haymarket Books, 2015).
For a sample of his work, see his essay “The Overproduction of Intelligence” at the Brooklyn Rail (https://brooklynrail.org/2015/10/field-notes/the-overproduction-of-intelligence-the-reshaping-of-social-classes-in-the-united-states)
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https://classunity.org
Paul Mattick Jr. talks with Class Unity about his new book, “The Return of Inflation” (2023), about money, capital, capitalism, class, politics, and inflation.
See the following interview for details about his latest book: https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/field-notes/Understanding-Inflation-Friends-of-the-Classless-Society-speak-with-Paul-Mattick
Sarah Knuth talks to Class Unity about rentiers, the political economy of green energy, neoliberalism, and capitalism.
You can find her essay here: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1215052
And here: https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/current/thought-leadership/renewable-energy-us-tax-credits-for-wind-and-solar-mostly-benefit-big-banks/
Check out our website at: https://classunity.org
Thomas Fazi talks with Class Unity about the politics and economics as well as the problems of the European Union and issues with the contemporary left.
He is the author of:
“The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor: A Critique from the Left”, with Toby Green. Hurst. (2023)
“Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World”. Pluto. (2017)
“The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent and How we Can Take it Back”. Pluto. (2014)
You can find his work at:
https://thomasfazi.net
https://www.thomasfazi.com
https://www.compactmag.com/contributor/thomas-fazi/
https://unherd.com/author/thomas-fazi/
https://x.com/battleforeurope?lang=en
You can find Class Unity here: https://classunity.org
Please consider making a donation or joining today!
In this episode, we discuss geopolitics and the emerging age of multipolarity with Dr. Christopher Mott, Research Fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy. Dr. Mott is an international relations scholar specializing in historical geopolitics, grand strategy, and the intersection of defensive realism and sovereignty in an increasingly multipolar world.
Previously, he served as a fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C., and as a researcher at the U.S. Department of State. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and is the author of The Formless Empire: A Short History of Diplomacy and Warfare in Central Asia, which explores the rise of indigenous geopolitical strategies on the Eurasian steppe.
We discuss Dr. Mott’s analysis of contemporary geopolitics, focusing on how the American empire often cloaks its foreign policy objectives in the rhetoric of social justice—a theme he explores in his article “Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism.”
Dr. Mott’s work has appeared in The National Interest, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Agonmag, India’s World, and UnHerd.
Follow him on X (Twitter) @chrisdmott and on Substack @chrismott296764.
Articles discussed in this episode:
https://peacediplomacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Woke-Imperium.pdf
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-moralistic-risk-for-trumps-foreign-policy/
https://indiasworld.in/the-global-ngo-complex-fades-but-do-the-missionaries-remain/
https://unherd.com/2025/06/regime-change-wont-neuter-iran/?us=1
https://www.agonmag.com/p/modus-vivendi-realisms-missing-link
For membership inquiries, educational programs, and donations visit: http://classunity.org
Prof. Steve Keen talks with Class Unity about the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8, the problems with mainstream understandings of it, and the contemporary situation.
He is the author of:
The New Economics. A manifesto. Polity. (2021)
Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? Polity. (2017)
Developing an economics for the post-crisis world. World Economics Association and College Publications. (2015)
Debunking Economics. Zed Books. (2011)
Check out: Debunking Economics Podcast: with Phil Dobbie and Prof. Steve Keen (http://debunkingeconomics.com)
You can find his work at:
https://profstevekeen.substack.com
https://www.youtube.com/@profstevekeen
https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/ravel-a-thank-you-to-my-supporters
https://www.patreon.com/posts/introducing-c-tm-49053513
https://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2009/01/31/therovingcavaliersofcredit/
See also Blaire Fix’s page: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com
You can find Class Unity here: https://classunity.org
Please consider making a donation or joining today!
Walter Benn Michaels talks about the present political moment with Class Unity.
You can find one of our favorite essays by him here: https://nonsite.org/the-political-economy-of-anti-racism/
And you can find his most recent book with Adolph Reed Jr. here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/no-politics-but-class-politics/9781912475575
Consider joining or making a donation today: https://classunity.org
Joel Kotkin is a writer on urban affairs and a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast and the conservative magazine The Spectator, as well as the author of several books. In 2020, he published The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, which is the topic we’ll be discussing with him today.
Reading list for the event:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-new-green-feudalism/
https://quillette.com/2024/06/19/the-road-to-neo-feudalismhttps://nypost.com/2019/12/25/how-america-is-reverting-back-to-the-feudal-agehttps://firstthings.com/our-neo-feudal-futurehttps://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/07/gavin-newsoms-american-dystopia/For membership inquiries, educational programs, and donations visit: http://classunity.org
Costas Lapavitsas Joined Class Unity for a discussion about the 2007-9 Global Financial Crisis. We recently reviewed his works, which you can find here in our study group here: https://classunity.org/2024/04/25/the-2008-financial-crisis/
You can find him and his work here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/costas-lapavitsas
And you can find us here: https://classunity.org
Like, subscribe, join, and make a donation for class unity today!
Statement of Principles
Prof. L. Randall Wray joined Class Unity to talk about the 2007-9 GFC and politics.
Prof. Wray is a professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City in Kansas City.
You can find Prof. Wray’s papers on the Crisis:
https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_681.pdf
https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_661.pdf
https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_587.pdf
You can find recent works and discussions with him at the following links:
https://youtu.be/RnNGlMrV-8Yhttps://www.nfrpp.org/2023/03/20/understanding-fiscal-policies-debt-and-entitlementshttp://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?auth=287
His latest book, Money for Beginners, is now available from Polity: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509554607
His 2022 book, Making Money Work for Us, is available from Polity: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509554256
His latest edited book: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/modern-monetary-theory-9781802208085.html
Recent Books:
Handbook of Economic Stagnation (with Flavia Dantas), Academic Press, Elsevier, 2022: https://www.elsevier.com/books/handbook-of-economic-stagnation/wray/978-0-12-815898-2.
Macroeconomics; Author(s): William Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, Martin Watts; Red Globe Press, Macmillan International; February 2019; https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Macroeconomics/?K=9781137610669.
Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the work of a maverick economist, Princeton University Press http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10575.html
Modern Money Theory: a primer on macroeconomics for sovereign monetary systems, Palgrave Macmillan http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/modern-money-theory-l-randall-wray/?isb=9781137539908
Check out our website here: https://classunity.org
Welcome to another Class Unity event. We are joined today by Kshama Sawant. Kshama is a socialist politician and economist who served on the Seattle City Council from 2014 to 2024. She is now running as an independent for the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington’s 9th congressional district in the 2026 election.
She was a member of Socialist Alternative (and was their only elected official) until January 2023, when she announced she would not seek re-election to the Seattle City Council to promote the “Workers Strike Back” unionization campaign. In 2024, she left Socialist Alternative to form the organization “Revolutionary Workers.”
Why We’re Launching Revolutionary Workers & Leaving Socialist Alternative:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25041448-why-were-launching-revolutionary-workers-leaving-socialist-alternative/
If you’d like to support Kshama Sawant’s campaign, see:
NATIONAL RALLY — Send Kshama to Congress!
Sunday, October 12, 2025
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
https://www.kshamasawant.org/events/3/
https://www.workersstrikeback.orghttps://www.kshamasawant.org/Twitter/X: @cmkshama
For donations, membership inquiries, and educational courses please visit http://classunity.org
Vijay Prashad talks with Class Unity about the politics and economics of imperialism as well as issues with the contemporary left.
He is the author of many books, including:
(2011) Marx’s Capital: An Introductory Reader. Contributed by Vijay Prashad, Venkatesh Athreya, Prasenjit Bose, Prabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh, T. Jayaraman, R. Ramakumar. LeftWord.
(2015) Letters to Palestine. Verso Books.
(2017) Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Climate Change. New Delhi: LeftWord Books.
(2019) Red Star Over the Third World. Pluto Press.
(2020) Washington Bullets. New Delhi: LeftWord Books.
(2022) Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, edited by Frank Barat. Haymarket Books.
(2022) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, with Noam Chomsky. The New Press.
(2024) On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle, with Noam Chomsky. The New Press.
You can find him at: https://thetricontinental.org/institutes/
You can find Class Unity here: https://classunity.org
Please consider making a donation or joining today!
In this episode, we’re joined by writer and political analyst Alex Hochuli to discuss his recent essay in American Affairs, “Technofeudalism Versus Total Capitalism.” The conversation explores the rising popularity of the “technofeudalist” thesis — associated with thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis, Cédric Durand, and Jodi Dean — and the claim that capitalism is undergoing a structural mutation into a new mode marked by digital rent extraction, platform dominance, and fragmented sovereignty.
We ask:
– What is technofeudalism, really?
– Has rent overtaken profit as capitalism’s core mechanism?
– Are Big Tech and asset managers forming a new feudal elite?
– What does this mean for politics, ideology, and the future of the left?
– And are we just caught in another cycle of declaring new “ages” without structural transformation?
Hochuli argues that what many read as a feudal regression is better understood as a deepening of capitalist modernity itself — marked by desocialization, the hollowing out of collective institutions, and the rise of algorithmic governance. The conversation also addresses the limits of post-ideological strategies, the political role of the state, and the importance of resisting the moralization of industrial capitalism.
Hochuli is a writer and political analyst based in São Paulo. He is co-host of the @BungaCast podcast (Aufhebunga Bunga), a leading platform for critical discussion on global politics, post-liberalism, and ideological drift in the post-Cold War era. His work has appeared in American Affairs, Compact, UnHerd, Damage, and other venues. He is co-author of The End of the End of History (Zero Books, 2021), a critique of political stagnation in the neoliberal era and the rise of populist disruption.
Links:Follow Hochuli on Twitter/X: @Alex__1789
Explore the podcast: @BungaCast / www.bungacast.com
The End of the End of History – Available from Zero Books
Hochuli, “Technofeudalism Versus Total Capitalism” (American Affairs, Summer 2025)
Members of Class Unity discuss the crises of capitalism, the political economy of war, and the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza with Professor Wolfgang Streeck.
Wolfgang Streeck is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. In addition to being director of that institute before his retirement, he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne, and before that Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the political economy of modern capitalism. His many books include “How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System” (2016), “Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” (2017), and “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems after Globalism” (2024).
As a basis for this conversation we read
Streeck – A Dual Crisis I: Capitalism (chapter 5 of of “Taking Back Control”)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RE3SCd7NluhCa8fx1xbHec1_5XrJEQLs/viewStreeck – Notes on the Political Economy of War
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nr-gBlaDoXy_v1dGxy3xetxX_57KoiJN/viewStreeck – Engels’s Second Theory – Technology, Warfare, and the Growth of the State
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UjVD29yPjHzvF8TMGZgYHVBvmNvZr8dw/view
Michael Hudson is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, and the author of many books and papers on political economy, the history of economics, economic history, finance, and imperialism.
Dirk Bezemer is a Dutch economist who is a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. His work addresses the financial sector, credit creation, credit cycles, monetary policy, and the cause of economic crises. In a September 2009 opinion piece in the Financial Times he wrote that a dozen economists whom he listed had predicted the 2008 financial crisis but were ignored.
For membership inquiries, donations, and educational courses, please visit http://www.classunity.org
Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. He is also an organizer with the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute’s Medicare for All – South Carolina initiative.
Reed is widely known for his writings on race, class, and American politics; his two most recent books are “The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives” and, with Walter Benn Michaels, “No Politics But Class Politics”, both from 2022. He is currently completing a book titled “When Compromises Come Home to Roost: The Decline and Transformation of the U.S. Left” From Verso, and a good part of our discussion focusses on an article drawn from one of its chapters (link below). In addition, he is the co-author, with Kenneth Warren, of “Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce this Time”(https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003569947/black-studies-cultural-politics-evasion-inequality-adolph-reed-jr-kenneth-warren?refId=222811c552-74b8-4258-8fa4-3ebd2edae170context=ubx_, about to be published by Routledge. Reed is also a regular contributor to the “Class Matters podcast”(https://classmatterspodcast.org/podcast_category/episodes/) produced by the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute.
The articles that framed our discussion:
“Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair”(https://nonsite.org/looking-backward-to-counter-mysticism-and-despair/) (June 16th, 2025)
“Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss”(https://nonsite.org/going-forward-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss/) (November 11th, 2024)
For membership inquiries, donations, and educational courses, please visit http://www.classunity.org
Members of Class Unity discuss the return of military Keynesianism, the work of the Polish Marxian economist Michał Kalecki, and the current crisis of international politics with Professor Jan Toporowski.
Jan Toporowski is Visiting Professor of Economics in the department of International Development at King’s College London. He recently retired from the position of Professor of Economics and Finance at SOAS University of London. His research is concentrated on monetary theory and policy, finance, macroeconomics, and development economics. He is also the literary executor to Michał Kalecki, who died in 1970.
Professor Toporowski has published two volumes of biography of Kalecki, and over 350 books, articles, and papers on economics and finance. Before becoming an academic he worked in fund management and international banking. He has been a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, and the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Professor Toporowski studied economics at Birkbeck College, the University of London, and the University of Birmingham, in the UK. He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge and the Bank of Finland.
His most recent books are “Interest and Capital: The Monetary Economics of Michał Kalecki” (Oxford University Press 2022) and “Polish Marxism After Luxemburg” (Emerald Press 2022).
Reading list:
Toporowski – Multilateralism and Military Keynesianism – Completing the Analysis
Toporowski – The War in Ukraine and the Revival of Military Keynesianism
Kalecki – Economic Aspects of German Rearmament
Twitter/X: @JMToporowski
For info on Prof. Toporowski:
https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff30980.ph
For more info about becoming a member of Class Unity, go to: http://www.classunity.org
In our latest speaker series, Class Unity discusses class, capitalism and higher education with Mitch Hernandez and Adam Rensch.
Mitch Hernandez is a doctoral candidate in the cultural studies and comparative literature department of the University of Minnesota. His general interests include the history of neoliberalism and the development of subjectivity in its regimes. His dissertation focuses on the university as a site of clandestine social reproduction.
Adam Rensch received his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He writes for the Brooklyn Rail on class politics and inequality. His current book project traces the historical relationship between the university creative writing programs and the decline of working class literature.
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
Hernandez — Managerialism, Debt, and the Class Composition of the University
Rensch — Academic Serfdom & the End of Higher Education
For more info about becoming a member of Class Unity, go to https//classunity.org
Class Unity members discuss the realignment, Trump’s betrayal of his anti-establishment base, geopolitical developments, and the NYC mayoral election.
For membership inquiries, political education courses, and speaker events please visit: http://www.classunity.org
find us on YouTube @Class_Unity
Class Unity speaks with Warren Mosler, a leading voice and theorist of Modern Monetary Theory. He spent much of his career in the business world as entrepreneur and investor, founding and operating a successful hedge fund. Later he became an author on economics and along with others founded a new school of economic thought that […]
Professors Radhika Desai and Paul Gottfried discuss Marxism, “Woke” ideology”, and whether Marxism is “woke”. Professor Desai teaches political economy and political science at the University of Manitoba. You can find her here: https://radhikadesai.com https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/author/radhika-desai/ https://x.com/raddesai?lang=en In her recent book, “Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy” (2022), she makes the following statement on the […]
Mattie is a social and political historian of the United States and southern Africa in the twentieth century. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2023 and is an […]
Robert C. Hockett, Professor of law at Cornell law school, joins Class Unity for part 2 of the discussion on money: how it works and how it relates to banking, capital, and investment. He makes the case for a new set of reforms designed to socialize investment. His research lies in the fields of organizational […]
Robert C. Hockett, Professor of law at Cornell law school, joins Class Unity to discuss money: how it works and how it relates to banking, capital, and investment. He makes the case for a new set of reforms designed to socialize investment. His research lies in the fields of organizational financial, and monetary law, and […]
In this episode, Jamal, Heph, Daniel, and Martin speak with Ben Thomason on USAID, the Middle East, the new Trump administration, tariffs and more. Ben Arthur Thomason is an expert on twentieth and twenty-first century US empire and international relations and completed his PhD in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in 2024. […]
FTC Manning Talks to Class Unity about Rent, Land, Class, and Politics. Support Class Unity by making a donation today: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?h… You can find the essay we discussed at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/… You can find their work at: https://independent.academia.edu… https://academicworks.cuny.edu/c… You can find us at: https://classunity.org Join us, subscribe, and donate today!
Class Unity members cover the reaction of the Democratic Party to Kamala Harris’ loss and discuss what we can expect in Donald Trump’s next presidency.
Class Unity members discuss the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, the state of the U.S. politics and the economy, and how they relate to global geopolitical developments.
Radhika Desai talks with Class Unity about geopolitical economy, imperialism, realism, the state of the left, and and dollar hegemony.
She is the author of “Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire” (2013) and “Capitalism, Coronavirus and War” (2022).
You can find Class Unity here: https://classunity.org
Please consider making a donation or joining today!
In this episode, Jamal, Heph and Daniel speak to Ben Thomason, an expert on American culture and politics, on so-called “democracy promotion,” and the way in which the US uses media and civil society to manipulate other countries in furtherance of corporate interests.
Here is some of Thomason’s recent work:
- 2022 article, “Save the Children, Launch the Bombs: Propaganda Agents Behind The White Helmets (2016) Documentary and Media Imperialism in the Syrian Civil War” – https://www.theprojectorjournal.com/save-the-children
- 2022 blog post, “directing the moderat rebels: Syria as a Digital Age Crucible for Information and propaganda warfare” – https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/directing-the-moderate-rebels-syria-as-a-digital-age-crucible-for-information-and-propaganda-warfare
- 2024 article, “The moderate rebel industry: Spaces of Western public–private civil society and propaganda warfare in the Syrian civil war” – https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352241239142
- 2024 dissertation on democracy promotion, “Making Democracy Safe for Empire: A History and Political Economy of the National Endowment for Democracy, United States Agency for International Development, and Twenty-First Century Media Imperialism” – http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1711480290212777
References:
- Marcie Smith (2019), “Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence” https://nonsite.org/change-agent-gene-sharps-neoliberal-nonviolence-part-one/
Thomason can be followed on Twitter/X @BenThomason95.
Christian Parenti talks with Class Unity about the “compatible left”, so-called Wokeness, contemporary politics, and institutions like the CIA.
Parenti is the author of “Radical Hamilton” (2020) and “Tropic of Chaos” (2011).
You can find his article here: https://catalyst-journal.com/2024/06/…
You can find Class Unity here: https://classunity.org
Please consider making a donation or joining today!
Michael Heinrich talks to Class Unity about Marx’s Capital, Politics, and the contemporary Left.
Welcome to Transmissions Episode 14!
In this episode, Jamal, Heph, and Daniel discuss the recent political victory of George Galloway, the Workers Party, and Joti Brar on “Class Unity”, and the prospects for class politics at present.
On the Class Unity podcast channel you can find Transmissions, our podcast for topical discussions and interviews, and PoliEdPod, the podcast featuring great content from our Political Education Committee.
If you are interested in this discussion, consider joining Class Unity today, and get involved in our Political Education Committee.
Please follow us on your podcast app of choice, and leave a kind review!
https://classunity.org
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Welcome to Episode 8 or CU’s PoliEdPod series! In this episode, Catherine Liu joins us for a discussion of recent debates about the relation between Republican and Democratic parties and labor.
For background, listeners may want to check out the articles which initiated this debate, by Sorab Amari and Dustin Guastella, along with a contribution by Liu herself:
- Sohrab Ahmari, “How the GOP Can Mend Fences With Unions,” https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-the-gop-can-mend-fences-with-unions/
- Dustin Guastella, “Can the Republican Party Become A Vehicle for Equality?,” https://damagemag.com/2023/12/07/can-the-republican-party-become-a-vehicle-for-equality/
- Catherine Liu, “Self Defeating Personality Disorder: some thoughts about the Ahmari/Guastella debate,” https://cliuanon.substack.com/p/self-defeating-personality-disorder?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
A video recording of this episode can be found at the link below:
—//—
One of the worlds leading Marxist economists talks to us about the recent problems of inflation, class politics, and the global economy.
Check out Lapavitsas’s latest collaborative efforts here:
- “The State of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and Hegemony,” with the EReNSEP Writing Collective (2023): https://www.versobooks.com/products/2727-the-state-of-capitalism
- “The Cost of Living Crisis: (and how to get out of it),” with James Meadway and Doug Nicholls (2023): https://www.versobooks.com/products/3146-the-cost-of-living-crisis
You can listen to the audio-only version of this event in our podcast feed, or you can watch the livestream via YouTube, below:
Hello friends! Welcome to another episode of Class Unity ‘Transmissions’!
Our guest for this episode is none other than James A. Smith, co-host with David Slavick of The Popular Show. Smith is also the author of Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism (Zer0 Books, 2019) and coauthor with Mareile Pfannebecker of Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the end of Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Smith is a defender of the idea that the 2016-2020 “Bernie moment” was a real opportunity to advance the cause of socialism. While it can be tempting today to look back and think that it was doomed from the start, Smith argues that the failure was largely self-inflicted. This means there are lessons that can be learned from the failure. However, he notes, the left today “seems worryingly uncurious about the regressive influence earlier defeated lefts have sometimes inadvertently had.”
Smith believes that the left needs to rethink its approach to political freedom. Following up on our recent episode with Efraim Carlebach on the 10-year anniversary of Mark Fisher’s famous essay, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” we chat with Smith about his recent Sublation essay, “Capitalist Realism All Over Again” (3.17.2023).
As he puts it, the left has “struggled to apply the book’s insights,” all too often succumbing to political correctness and “anti-political moralism.” Meanwhile, as evidenced in the government response to the coronavirus pandemic, capitalist elites are claiming that crises that are “too important to be hazarded to democratic oversight or protest.” When the left abandons this fight, the right will try to fill in the gap, claiming that only it can stop the power grab.
We also ask Smith about some of his recent episodes, including his interview with Matt Taibbi, one of the main journalists behind The Twitter Files. Like Taibbi, Smith believes that capitalist elites today are leveraging state powers to censor social media activity, essentially constituting a strategy of “revenge against both left and right populism.”
We also discuss a number of foreign policy matters, from the west’s war for NATO expansion in Ukraine to the iconoclastic left’s bankrupt analysis of Israel’s war in Gaza. Concerning the latter, many otherwise insightful critics have suggested that Hamas is essentially a bonapartist organization, seeking to create an islamic state. How does Smith respond to these critics? Moreover, given the difficulty of imagining the construction of a working class party in Gaza today, what should be the left position on this terrible war?
Smith can be followed on Twitter/X @thepopularpod. Curious listeners can also follow up on Smith’s work on Jacobin, where he has published numerous articles on the state of the British left:
- “The Labour Party Is Ignoring Britain’s Muslims. A Judge-Led Inquiry Won’t Change That” (12.12.2023)
- “Labour’s Left Needs to Regain the Insurgent Spirit That Made Jeremy Corbyn Leader” (07.31.2023)
- “The Labour Left’s Fatal Contradictions Are Still Unresolved” (11.04.2021)
Welcome to Episode 12 ‘Transmissions,’ a Class Unity podcast. In this lighthearted episode we discuss the question of Leftoid Busywork. We open with an except from The Phantom Tollbooth (1970), an animated adaptation of the novel by the same name, by Norton Juster.
In the clip, the young protagonist Milo meets a character named the Terrible Trivium. Milo is on a mission but he needs to make some allies along the way. The Trivium seems aware of this, and offers to help. But first, he needs hand with some tasks! “First, please help me move this pile of sand with tweezers…”
Is this cartoon a metaphor for the left? Why do so many leftist organizations engage in wasted forms of activity?
In this episode, your hosts Daniel B, Katie F, Steph K, and Nick K explore these questions, and share stories from their own organizing of “time wasted doing pointless leftoid busy work.”
Welcome to Episode 11 of Class Unity Transmissions!
In this episode, we are joined by Efraim Carlebach to discuss the 10-year anniversary of the publication of Mark Fisher’s seminal essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle.
Published on November 24, 2013, Fisher’s essay is remembered today as a powerful shot across the bows of what was known at the time as the “call out” left. In particular, the essay was a response to a recent controversy stemming from the appearance of “working class” comedian Russell Brand on the BBC’s Newsnight program. Feminists expressed outraged at the BBC’s choice to interview Brand at all, noting the sexually insensitive nature of his content. Fisher repudiated these critics as “PoshLeft moralizers” and witch-hunting scolds, leveraging Brand’s apparent deafness to the linguistic norms of the middle-class gender lexicon in exchange for online clout. In their insistence that Brand’s white male privilege made him one of the oppressors, they had blinded themselves to the foundational role of working-class culture in revolutionary politics.
Fisher’s defense of the working-class culture notwithstanding, his position on the priority of working-class politics was more ambiguous. In this discussion, we start by trying to situate Fisher as a left anti-capitalist. After his suicide in 2017, Fisher’s work on “capitalist realism” became something of a totem for the millennial left. However, as Carlebach argues, Fisher was never fully clear on what he meant by the term. On the one hand, he often referred to the idea — frequently attributed to Fredric Jameson — that we are so profoundly mentally stuck in within capitalist ideology that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” On the other, he would sometimes make the interesting move of saying that capitalist realism was specifically “a pathology of the left.”
Ultimately, the ambiguity was short-lived. Where Fisher has once posted approvingly of Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalization, a pointed criticism of the counter-cultural left, the defeat of Jermey’s Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party would see this theme would soon drop out of his work. The culturalist nature of Fisher’s defense of the working class folded easily enough into Fisher’s late-life return to the New Left, the politics of “consciousness raising,” and the idea of what he called “acid communism.”
Here he embraced the idea that capitalism is essentially a problem caused by “modernity.” Capitalism as an economic system was a problem primarily insofar as it worked towards the subsumption of belief systems, cultures and “lifeworlds.” In this respect, the influence on Fisher’s work of British New Left thinkers such as Stuart hall and Raymond Williams is evident. The political question, for Fisher, concerned the repudiation and overcoming of bourgeois epistemology. As such, his work stands as a paragon example of why it is not enough to be merely an anti-capitalist.
For Carlebach, the goal of Marxism is not so much to tear down of bourgeois society but to transcend it, and to liberate it from the contractions of capitalism, the very mode of political economy that it itself created. Marx, seeing capitalism as the harbinger of our liberation as a species, eschewed the purely negative critique of capitalism as reactionary. The point of Marxist politics therefore is not to destroy the bourgeois revolution but to liberate it from capitalism, and make its fruits and rights available to all.
This episode was recorded on Friday, September 29, 2023.
If you like this episode, kindly leave us a positive review on your podcast app!
Your hosts for this episode are:
- Nicholas Kiersey: @occupyirtheory
- C. Derick Varn: @skepoet
- Noah LC
Relevant links:
- Carlebach’s article, “Forgetting Mark Fisher,” in Platypus Review 115 (April 2019), https://platypus1917.org/2019/04/01/forgetting-mark-fisher/
- Carlebach’s discussion about Fisher with the Association for the Design of History (January 17, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/live/Y-aOATKC4J0?si=idJ4NqGYfX-iSNQr
PRODUCTION NOTE: Due to a production error, the original version of this posted episode contained an “empty air” moment around the 14:30 mark. A corrected version of the episode was posted on January 9, 2024.
If Marxism is a theory of history grounded in economics, how should Americans understand our own history from a Marxist perspective? What can the critique of political economy tell us about the major events of American life from the Revolution to the World Wars to today? What are the class dynamics animating the most crucial event of American military history, the Civil War?
In preparation for our Fall 2023 Capital Reading Group, members of CU’s PoliEd Committee got together for a one-day discussion of Karl Marx’s writings on the American Civil War. Join them in this episode of PoliEdPod, as they discuss two brief articles written early in the War in 1861: ‘The North American Civil War’ and ‘The Civil War in the United States.’ They also discuss some of Marx’s statements on the political-economic function of racism.
Both essays are available HERE.
Hello friends!
In this episode of Transmissions, we discuss the recent events unfolding in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In typical Class Unity spirit, we try to focus on the question of what it might mean to approach this conflict from a class first perspective.
A central theme of the episode is the question of how the left seems to have split around the issue of Zionism. As we note, there does seem to be an “anti-anti-zionist” strain at large in the left around this issue. Proponents of this position seem to believe that “Hamas has no support in the Palestinian population.”
Yet, while many of these critics focus on the leadership of Hamas ensconced in Qatar, we seek to address a more rare question in leftwing critiques of this conflict. Namely, who were the fighters of October 7? The key issue, we suggest, is not whether to reject or celebrate Hamas. Rather, it is to understand the objective material conditions and yearning for basic dignity that makes it so easy for Hamas to recruit.
Staying with this notion of the objective material conditions in Gaza, we submit that this might actually be one of the few cases where the admittedly overused concept of settler-colonialism might actually apply.
We discuss the dire economic predicament facing the young and highly educated population of Gaza, the numerous attempts they have made at non-violent resistance, and the brutal response of the Israeli state to these attempts.
Next, we discuss the present political situation in Israel, and the durability of US support in a context of a shifting balance of power in the region. With US power in decline, and the Israeli army no longer as unquestioningly powerful as it once appeared, where is this conflict heading?
Other key elements of this episode include the role of the right of return as a sticking point in previous attempts at creating a negotiated settlement to the conflict. How much longer can this vital question go ignored, and what are its implications for Israel’s status as a democracy? And just what is a good response to people who say Israel doesn’t target civilians?
This episode was recorded on October 29, 2023.
If you like what you hear, please leave us a positive rating on your podcast app of choice. And follow us on Twitter/X: @class_unity
Note: The views expressed in this episode are those solely of its contributors. This episode is in no manner intended as an official statement by CU on this conflict.
Welcome to episode 5, of PoliEdPod. In this episode, we present our interview with author Prof. Brett Christophers, on his book Our Lives in their Portfolios; Why Asset Managers Own the World (Verso 2023).
Our conversation covers the contemporary asset market, the rentier economy, and the changing nature of ruling class control over nearly all aspects of life in the 21st century, from basic infrastructure to real estate. We had a great conversation with Brett, and encourage everyone to give it a listen.
Further References:
- Brett Christophers, “Class, Assets and Work in Rentier Capitalism”. https://drive.google.com/file/d/16nuh…
If you like what you hear, please leave us a positive rating on your podcast app of choice. And follow us on Twitter/X: @class_unity
Hello friends!
Welcome to this special episode of Class Unity: Transmissions. In this episode, we present you a discussion addressing two topics.
First, the recent “statement from the DSA union,” complaining about how staffers are going to be laid off because of a lack of money (i.e., membership dues), whilst couching as a labor issue (“critical union jobs” must not be cut “in order to pay for non-union leadership salaries”!).
Second, we discuss a recent interaction between Briahna Joy Gray and Chris Hedges about unions, strikes, and general strikes.
The unifying thread in both these cases is the “magical thinking on the contemporary left.” The team discuss this all against the background of the massive UAW strike sweeping the US auto-manufacturing belt.
This episode features an interview with the writer Adam Theron-Lee Rensch on his book No Home For You Here: A Memoir on Class and Culture. The memoir tells the story of Rensch’s life growing up in a working class family in rural Ohio. Rensch combines social and political commentary along with vivid depictions of the struggles that face […]
The Class Unity Political Education Committee is proud to present a discussion exploring how Marxist theory understands modern history. To grasp the rise of fascism in 20th century Europe, we discuss and analyze Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s 1973 text, Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism. According to theorists like Sohn-Rethel and Michal Kalecki, the Nazi policy […]
Welcome to Episode 7 of Class Unity “Transmissions.” In this episode we are joined by Doug Lain, Commissioning Editor at Sublation Media. Lain is a real veteran of the left podcast scene. From his old philosophy podcast “Diet Soap,” which ran from 2009 through 2014, to his work as host of the Zero Books podcast, […]
“Those who own the country ought to govern it.” (John Jay) “…if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. […] our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. […] [it] ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority […]
Hello comrades! Welcome to our fifth episode of Class Unity Transmissions.
In this episode, we open with a quick check-in with our comrade Jamal, from CU Chicago, who has been studying the recent strikes in France. Then we move to our interview recorded earlier this year with Armand M, one of the authors of our article from last September, “Gay Particularity, Reconsidered.”
In the interview, we discuss some main points from Armand’s piece. We look at how, in the late 80s and 90s, activist organizations such as ACT UP participated in civil disobedience actions against insurance rate increases and worked to expand universal Medicaid benefits to include AIDS treatment. In 1990, when Congress refused to release funds already earmarked for AIDS services, claiming that patients with other conditions were more deserving, ACT UP called for national health insurance. What was it about the ACT-UP era that made the gay rights movement so capable of articulating universalistic political demands?
We also look at the struggle for gay marriage, and how it effectively diverted financial resources and political energy away from organizations prioritizing healthcare and employment. Given that the gay liberation movement has not always supported this demand, what changed? Armand discusses the role of “respectability politics” in diverting the struggle from a more traditional leftist perspective. Notwithstanding the importance of access to health insurance and spousal inheritance for partners, Armand suggests that the shift toward gay marriage should be viewed as a conservative turn in queer politics.
Next we turn to the historical emergence of queer identity. Postmodern theorists like Judith Butler tend to see politics as essentially a question of identity, and thought. In this light, politics for them is necessarily the question of a slow, patient struggle to change unconsciously held ideas. However, notes Armand, while homosexual behavior has always been present in human societies, “queer” identification is only a very recent phenomenon and its emergence, as we will see, cannot be understood apart from its specific socio-economic conditions of possibility.
We also discuss some wider literature around this topic (see links below). For example, we address Roger Lancaster’s piece in Jacobin, “Identity Politics Can Only Get Us So Far.” Lancaster raises the question of how today’s “identity” version of gay liberation struggle orbits this idea of a certain quest for one’s subjective essence. Earlier versions, to the contrary, saw “coming out” as an “indispensable means” for building a political movement. Among other things, this means that earlier liberationists generally took a dialectical approach to sexual categories. We ask Armand how this “pre-Stonewall” idea of a subjective labeling understood from the outset as something eventually to be cast aside connects with Marx’s notion of the eventual self-abolition of the “proletariat.”
Other key points raised include the relation of identity-based struggle to CU’s concept of the iron triangle, the limits of aesthetic struggle (“psychosocial emancipation),” and the extent to which Armand’s critique of the limits of contemporary gay liberation struggle might be expanded to other cases.
Your hosts for this episode are Nicholas K, Steph K, and Jamal.
Here is a list of the readings mentioned in the article:
- Andrew Davis (2010), “Queer writers/activists criticize marriage-equality movement at forum; discussion with Yasmin Nair and Ryan Conrad,” Windy City Times, http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=29057&ref=nf.
- John D’Emilio (2020), Capitalism Made Gay Identity Possible. Now We Must Destroy Capitalism, Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2020/08/gay-identity-capitalism-lgbt.
- David Faes (2018), “Transgender liberation? A movement whose time has passed,” Platypus Affiliated Society, https://platypus1917.org/2018/11/02/transgender-liberation-a-movement-whose-time-has-passed/.
- JacksonLewis (2001), “Union Avoidance Training,” JacksonLewis , https://www.jacksonlewis.com/resources-publication/union-avoidance-training.
- Roger Lancaster (2017), “Identity Politics Can Only Get Us So Far,” Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2017/08/identity-politics-gay-rights-neoliberalism-stonewall-feminism-race.
For more from Class Unity, please see https://classunity.org/.
Enjoy the show!
Greetings, listeners! Welcome to another episode of Class Unity Transmissions. In this episode I am joined by Class Unity members Heph, Sarah R, Julie S, Daniel B, and Jamal. We have two big and closely interrelated topics on the table in this episode. First up is the December 1, 2022, vote by Congress to impose the “TA” (Tentative Agreement) on US rail workers, essentially prohibiting their right to strike. Following this, we move to the difficult question of whether Class Unity should remain within DSA.
As many listeners will know, ten Republicans, four Democrats, and independent Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) voted against the imposition of the TA. Doing so, they were acting to endorse the decision by rail workers earlier in the year to reject the original TA contract. That deal was voted down by four of the largest rail unions in the country, which together represent approximately 55 percent of the unionized rail labor force. Rail workers rejected the deal because it included no paid sick leave provisions, and made no effort to address rank and file complaints about unpredictable scheduling. As many critics observed at the time, including Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (Michigan), the deal was patently unfair. Essential employees had maintained their brutal schedule through the Covid-19 global pandemic, without a single paid sick day, while the rail industry recorded a record-breaking $20 billion in annual profits. As Senator Sanders (D) said on November 30, “if you can’t vote for this, don’t tell anybody that you stand with working families.”
What was perhaps more shocking was the behavior of the so-called Squad. Speaker Pelosi’s office had issued a separate resolution which called for the addition of seven days of paid sick leave for rail workers. Yet, as many commentators noted, there was absolutely no way the separate resolution was going to pass the Senate. Nevertheless, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, along with numerous other supposedly progressive politicians, endorsed the separate sick leave resolution — likely as an alibi for having supported the TA. Despite the contortions of supposedly leftist journalists like Ryan Grim, who went so far as to point to a number of small rank and file craft union locals that had endorsed the separate approach, the whole affair marks a massive betrayal of workers by progressive policymakers. Under the legislation, rail workers are ineligible even for the minimum seven paid sick leave days that federal contractors are entitled to under President Obama’s 2015 Executive Order 13706.
Now, a number of DSA chapters, caucuses, and individuals have called for the expulsion of these errant members. However, it is unlikely that they will face any form of discipline by DSA at the national level. This in mind, we turn to our second topic of discussion. Namely, what does it mean that elected politicians endorsed by DSA are acting against labor unions? Moreover, how can Class Unity remain active within an organization seemingly incapable of disciplining its endorsed electeds?
One doesn’t have to follow the track record of DSA-endorsed electeds terribly closely to see the pattern. From their early retreat on the $15 minimum wage, to their epic failure to “Force the Vote” over Nancy Pelosi’s speakership, to AOC’s capitulation on the vote to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, the record is one of abysmal failure. Many socialists have been left wondering whether DSA membership is worth it.
NOTE: This episode was recorded on Friday, December 16, 2022. Listeners should note that on Sunday, January 8, 2023, Class Unity issued a statement announcing that it could no longer continue to be part of DSA. This episode stands as a testimony to the calibre of debate that has been taking place within Class Unity about the challenges facing the American left today, and the question of DSA’s failure as a vehicle to advance our struggle.
In this very special episode of Class Unity Transmissions, we bring you the last interview ever recorded with Danny Fetonte. Danny was a well-known labor organizer in Texas, with over 30 years of experience. He worked at Bethlehem Steel for 4 years, and spent a decade working in a variety of other industrial jobs. He […]
Welcome to Class Unity’s Political Education Podcast. This is a new series which we are running on the stream in parallel to other Class Unity programing that you might already be familiar with, such as our “Transmissions” podcast. The goal of our new series is to present material from our Political Education Committee’s ongoing education […]
On May Day, we had the great pleasure of interviewing Alex Shah, Co-Founder and Staff Writer with the Toronto-based Class Collective magazine. Class Collective describes itself as “an annual literary magazine that illuminates the class struggle(s) hidden in the shadows of our culture.” We start the conversation by inviting Shah to reflect on Class Collective’s […]
Welcome to Episode 2, of Class Unity Transmissions! Our guest for this episode is George Hoare, co-host of the Bungacast (neé Aufebunga Bunga) podcast, and co-author along with Alex Hochuli and Philip Cunliffe, of The End of the End of History (Zero Books, 2021). In this episode, we begin with a discussion of Francis Fukuyama’s […]
Hello comrades! Welcome to our first ever episode of Transmissions, the official podcast of the Class Unity caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America. In this episode, we bring you first of all an interview segment on DSA’s Childcare for All campaign, with CU member Sarah R. Sarah was heavily involved in the Childcare for […]