Emancipations Podcast

My guest Clara Mattei has written about austerity’s dark intellectual origins in her important new book The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way for Fascism. We discuss the main ideas of this book and how the historical roots of austerity emerge as a response by the ruling class to the social democratic gains of the working class following the First World War in Europe. At the core of Dr. Mattei's book is a powerful lesson for the left, namely that conditions of economic austerity have the tendency to sap the political resolve of the working class. Austerity depoliticizes the working class and this is why liberal economists implement it. We discuss the history of how economists and technocratic policymakers invented austerity and how we can challenge it. Clara E. Mattei is a Professor of Economics and Director of the CHE, Center for Heterodox Economics, of The University of Tulsa Oklahoma, recently inaugurated in February 2025 (https://sites.utulsa.edu/chetu). Please support my efforts by becoming a Patreon member https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations 

My guest Sudip Bhattacharya studies and organizes the working class in New Jersey and he joins me to discuss the findings of his work. We explore some practical strategies for organizing the working class, the future of socialist politics and ways to overcome some of the main limitations to class politics in our time. This conversation is inspired by a new essay Sudip wrote for The Hampton Reader. Check out the book published with Iskra Press Sudip Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University. You can find his work at outlets like Protean magazine, Jacobin, Current Affairs, Black Agenda Report, among others.

I am joined by Marxist historian Ian Szabo to discuss the revival of Karl Kautsky's revolutionary thought among contemporary Marxists. We discuss a recent article on Kautsky's theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and we address the predominant misreadings and misinterpretations that exist about Kautsky, and how his thought speaks to our present. Read Ian Szabo's article "The Adolescence of a Concept: Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Karl Kautsky’s Revolutionary Writings (https://bit.ly/4hHoOaW).  Please support our efforts on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations 

Welcome to The Archimedean Point, a new series on the current political situation from a Marxist perspective. In our second episode, Daniel Tutt and Conrad Hamilton discuss the inadequacies of left-liberal accounts of racism and bigotry and why only a Marxist analysis can address the ideology of the far right. We also discuss new work by Daniel on Michel Clouscard and his book Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire and Conrad's new essay in the book After Speculative Realism. Episode One of The Archimedean Point can be found here (https://youtu.be/kTjaIm0XmZU?si=5cHD0k4gjnMsMGPT) The Archimedean Point is a reference to a concept from Lukács's History and Class Consciousness that refers to "the point from which the whole of reality can be overthrown." SHOWNOTES: The Social Formation of the Far Right https://bit.ly/3XSpR0B Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire https://bit.ly/41jfkfL After Speculative Realism https://bit.ly/4ckRup4

Welcome to a special crossover podcast discussion on Michael Mann's first major feature film Thief (1981). While Michael Mann is best known for films like HEAT and Last of the Mohicans, Thief is by far his most political film. The film explores themes of labor, exploitation, class and the inner lives of criminals and convicts. We discuss the Marxist and Freudian undertones in this great masterpiece of cinema. This conversation is hosted by Mtume Gant, filmmaker, professor and host of Within Our Gates podcast and Daniel Tutt, philosopher and host of the Emancipations podcast.  Please support us at https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations Please support Within Our Gates at https://www.patreon.com/c/Tumes/home 

I am joined by K. Daniel Cho to discuss his provocative new book Genius After Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan which argues that genius is not exceptional talent or intelligence but is related to and illuminated by the psychological concept of sublimation. Beginning with a close examination of Freud's work on Leonardo da Vinci, Cho analyzes film, art, our relationship to nature, politics, group psychology, love, and philosophy to demonstrate that genius, far from an elitist notion, is universally available through a different approach to ideas of imperfection, disappointment, and failure. Learn more about the book. K. Daniel Cho is Professor of Education at Otterbein University in Columbus, USA. He works on psychoanalysis in a variety of disciplinary contexts. He is the author of Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education and coeditor of Marcuse’s Challenge to Education.

My guest is Dr. Immanuel Ness, one of the foremost scholars of contemporary imperialism, workers’ social organization, Global South political economy, socialism and migration. We discuss the concept of economic imperialism in today's time and how the theory of imperialism has changed since the time of Lenin. We also discuss the theory of the labor aristocracy in Marxist thought, whether China is truly a socialist country and the status of working class struggles in China compared to America. Immanuel Ness is an American academic, and Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York, Brooklyn, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. His academic focus is on workers' organization, migration, mobilization and politics. His latest book is entitled Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries and is published with Polity Press. Learn more about our work and join our community at https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups

I am joined by the philosopher Mladen Dolar, one of the most important Lacanian philosophers working today. A founder of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, Mladen Dolar has written important works on Hegel, Marx and numerous works on Lacanian thought. In this podcast, we discuss his experience studying with Lacan in Paris and the legacy of the 1960s on today's politics. We then turn to a discussion of Dolar's new book Rumors, a philosophical essay on the persistent problem of rumors from the time of Socrates to the present. We examine how Socrates, Rousseau, Kafka and Kierkegaard each faced the problem of rumors and sought to overcome the stain of rumors on philosophy. Dolar writes that “rumors present another face of the big other, not the face of knowledge and truth but something that nobody quite believes to be true yet it unfailingly works and is given a questionable credence and general currency.” Learn more about Mladen Dolar's new book https://amzn.to/4b7WlJJ

I am joined by political theorist Jodi Dean to discuss her provocative new book Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Jodi Dean is one of the most vocal proponents of the "neofeudal thesis", the idea that capitalism has regressed to a neofeudal arrangement characterized by the delinking of capitalist accumulation from production, the end of competition, rent-seeking, predation and plunder. No longer can Marxists rely on a developmentalist theory of capitalism and a proletariat tied to productive labor as the means to abolishing capitalism. Dean argues that we must completely re-think the proletariat and that the global service sector points the way to a renewal of working class agitaiton and revolutionary activity. Jodi Dean is a political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. Her books include The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging , Blog Theory and several others. Please check out Capital's Grave and order a copy here. Join our Patreon to gain access to our interviews before they go live to the public and become a member of our study group collective where we read important books in Marxist thought and philosophy https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups 

My guest Russell Jacoby is credited with coining the concept "public intellectual." He has written extensively on socialism in America, western Marxism and Freudian Marxism. We begin with a discussion of his criticism of Domenico Losurdo's recently translated work Western Marxism, we then discuss his recent Jacobin article "American Marxism Got Lost on Campus", the work of Christopher Lasch (Jacoby's Ph.D. advisor) and how Marxism can become "plain" again. Jacoby offers advice for Marxist scholars and writer to better reach the public and transcend academic specialization. Russell Jacoby is the author of seven books including The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America and Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. He is Emeritus professor of History at UCLA.