Fully Automated

David Bailey Our guest for this episode is David Bailey, Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies, at University of Birmingham. David is joining us to talk about his forthcoming book with Rowman & Littlefield, Protest Movements and Parties of the Left. As we’ve been arguing on this show for the last few weeks, there is no doubt at this stage that the left is 'back'. Arriving admittedly a decade or two later than Latin America’s “Pink Tide”, the left has made electoral gains recently, both in Europe, and in the US. Yet it is also clear that the left is not used to having this kind of potential. To the contrary, suffering through its long period of post-Cold War defeat, it has been content to engage in a lot of internal squabbling, and become comfortable avoiding the tough question of how it might engage ordinary people with its ideas. David Bailey’s book is a very interesting intervention, in this sense. Without necessarily taking a side in the debates he examines (to what extent should

Michael Tracey Our guest for this week’s episode is Michael Tracey, of The Young Turks — Tracey by his own account is a man of the left, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that, to read some of the commentaries that have been written about him online. He’s known primarily known for his iconoclastic views on what he calls “the Russia derangement,” something we addressed on this show all the way back in Episode One, with Tara McCormack. I encountered Tracey in Chicago last weekend, at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Convention. We set this interview up with a view primarily to talking about the Convention, and the state of the American left. In this episode, we do address those topics, including the controversy surrounding the election of Danny Fetonte to the DSA’s National Political Committee, or NPC. But with the tragic news of rightwing violence in Charlottesville, VA this morning (the interview was recorded early afternoon, on Sunday, August 13), it seemed proper to address the rise of fascism i

We have a very special guest for this episode. Douglas Lain, of Zero Books. In the interview, we discuss a range of topics, but I think the focus of the interview is on how capitalist narcissism is playing out in leftist online culture. Specifically we address: How podcasting has enabled a new debate among the left, concerning the priority of identity; The rise of the Alt-Left, and whether or how the term functions to smear those seeking to re-assert the priority of revolutionary values in leftist discourse; We also address the critical reception of Angela Nagle’s sensational new book, Kill All Normies, published by Zero Books … a book that is ostensibly about the emergence of the Alt-Right, but in this conversation, Doug and I focus mostly on the other main aspect of the book, which is Nagle’s explanation of the rise of “call out culture” on the left. Finally, with the #DSACon17 (the 2017 Democratic Socialists of America convention) starting this week, I ask Doug if he has any advice for delegates

This episode we’re talking about the 2017 British General Election, and the surprising performance of Jeremy Corbyn, and the British Labour Party. Our guest is Owen Worth, Senior Lecturer In International Relations at the University of Limerick, in Ireland. Owen specializes in the study of social movements, and has published a number of works on varieties of resistance to neoliberalism, from religious fundamentalism to more leftist expressions. On the day of the election, he had a piece published in the Irish Times, wherein he argued that Corbyn would likely do very well, as a result of the mobilization of large numbers of young “anti-establishment” voters in the UK. In the interview, you’ll hear Owen refer to something called a War of position. This is a term drawn from the theories of Antonio Gramsci. In contrast with Gramsci’s notion of the “war of movement,” which refers more to the classic revolutionary strategy of trying to seize state power by direct assault, through armed insurrections, mass protest,

Four Futures This episode is the first in an occasional ‘book club’ series of podcasts we will be doing, in an around the topic of fully automated luxury communism. This episode’s book is Four Futures, by Peter Frase (which is part of the Jacobin series, from Verso Books). My guests on the show are Laura Horn and Phil Davis. Laura is a political economist working at the University of Roskilde, just outside of Copenhagen in Denmark. While her own research has mainly focused on dimensions of capitalist restructuring in the European Union, she has a strong political and personal interest in the nexus between political economy and science fiction. Four Futures is one of the texts she uses in her course ‘Repoliticising Capitalism: Contradictions, critique and alternatives’. Phil Davis is a molecular biologist working in the Biodefense sector in the Washington DC area. He's currently working towards a master's degree in Bioinformatics from University of Maryland University College. Four Futures sits at the inter

Our guest this week is Mark G. E. Kelly, an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (2009), as well as of Biopolitical Imperialism (from Zer0 books, in 2015) and he is also working on a book called ‘For Foucault: Against Normative Political Theory’ (SUNY, expected 2018). Kelly has weighed in a number of recent 'Foucault' controversies, including the question of whether Foucault was a neoliberal. In this interview, we get into that debate. But I think for most listeners, the interesting stuff will be towards the end, where Kelly talks about Biopolitical Imperialism, and addresses the conflict in Syria. The podcast was recorded on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. In the interview, you’ll hear Kelly comment on Donald Trump’s pivot a few days previous, on Syria. Two days after the recording, on April 7, the US military launched a cruise missile attack on a Syrian airfield. The attack was carried

On this week’s show we talked about the New McCarthyism with our guest Dr Tara MacCormack, a Lecturer at University of Leicester. Tara writes on security, foreign policy, and legitimacy. Among other things, she is interested in how traditional conceptions of military and territorial security have been displaced in the last few decades, by the concept of human security. In 2010, Tara published a book with Routledge entitled 'Critique, Security and Power: The Political Limits to Emancipatory Approaches.' Our conversation this episode addressed a number of topics, including the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, reaction to the resignation of Lt. General Michael Flynn  as national security advisor, the role of the the “pro-war left” in promoting the New McCarthyism, and the question of left strategy in the aftermath of the protests against Milo Yiannopoulos, at the University of Berkeley.