Culture, Power and Politics » Podcast

With Kojo Koram, Mike Jay, Debra Benita Shaw and Jeremy Gilbert     It is now a matter of historical record that when Nixon and his aides officially launched their ‘war on drugs’ in the late 1960s, their express intention was to criminalise black radicalism and the counterculture. But the link between racism and the drug war goes back much further than that: the prohibition of recreational drug use has been founded on explicit racism since the early 20th century. In a longer historical context, the story gets even weirder. The ‘opium wars’ of the mid 19th century were fought by Britain to force China  to accept imports of opium from British-controlled India. At the same time, generations of white bohemians have embraced drugs as a technology of self-transformation at least since the days of Coleridge and Byron. What are the implications of this history for understanding the politics of prohibition and drug use today? How does the fightback agains the ‘war on drugs’ intersect with the politics of Black Lives matter? What would a radical, rational and democratic approach to the use and regulation of drugs in the 21st century look like? We discuss these and other issues with Kojo Koram, editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line; Mike Jay, author of High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture & Mescaline: a Global History of the First Psychedelic; Jeremy Gilbert, author of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism and Debra Benita Shaw, author of Posthuman Urbanism: Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/war-on-drugs.mp3  

With Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the world of work has been the central political  battleground. What work is, who has to do it, who gets to do it and who gets rewarded for it are the most fundamental issues not just for trade-unionists and economists: but for feminists, artists, parents, teachers and, everyone else.  The reduction of the working week, the reduction of the dependence of workers on their wages, has been a central objective of progressive reform and revolutionary struggle throughout that period. Today, in an age of dual-income families and blurring boundaries between workplace and home, the question of what work gets done in the home, by whom and when – and of how to reduce the load for everyone – has never been more urgent.  We discuss the nature of work and social reproduction, and the possibilities of a future free from work, with Helen Hester, author of Xenofeminism, and Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism  and Inventing the Future.  https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/after-work.mp3

With Natalie Fenton and Tom Mills The institutions of  the modern media are supposed to serve the public interest: entertaining, educating and informing to the betterment of all. We all know that isn’t how it works. So what can we do about it? How can we challenge the concentration of information in the hands of the 1%? What does democracy mean in an era of fake news and billion-user platforms controlled by single individuals? We’ll discuss these questions and many other with Natalie Fenton, author of Digital, Political, Radical and Tom Mills, author of The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service.  https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/people-vs-the-media.mp3

With Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sara R. Farris Once an insurgent movement against patriarchy, feminism now finds itself occupying a far more complex position in the world. Powerful institutions,  major corporations and almost all political parties – even the nationalist, xenophobic right – routinely pay lip-service to the goal of sexual equality. What are we to make of all this, and what remains to be done in the pursuit of women’s liberation? We’ll discuss these questions and more with Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, and Sara Farris, author of In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism.  https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/whose-empowerment.mp3

Sorry for the poor sound quality on the recording here – we’ve figured out the technical causes and should be back to normal next week! You should be able to find a video you can watch at http://www.antiuniversity.org/Culture-Power-Politics-course-2019 As the world moves online, politics does too. Despite anxieties about the dangers and limitations of ‘clicktivism’,  online organising has become an indispensable tool for actors on every part of the political spectrum: from independent activists to major political parties. Hacking, open-source development, mobile telephony, piracy and cryptography are indispensable tools for activists all over the world, and for individuals and communities facing power-imbalances of any kind.  What are the implications for democracy and citizenship in the 21st century, and what should we be doing about it?  We discuss  all this with Alex Worrad-Andrews, software-engineer and founder member of Common Knowledge (a workers cooperative dedicated to building digital infrastructure for grassroots non-representational politics), Paolo Gerbaudo, author of The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy and Amit S. Rai, author of Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/digital-politics.mp3

  Sorry for the poor sound quality on the recording here. It’s listenable, but you can also find a video you can watch at http://www.antiuniversity.org/Culture-Power-Politics-course-2019 What do the members of today’s ruling elite think they are doing, and why? What stories do they tell themselves, and us, to justify their right to rule? Why has almost every senior politician since the 1980s promised to increase ‘social mobility’, and why have they failed? Aeron Davis, author of Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment and Jo Littler , author of Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobilitydiscuss this and other issues in the class culture of modern Britain with Jeremy Gilbert and a great group of attendees at the latest Culture, Power, Politics seminar. See https://culturepowerpolitics.org for details of the series. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/the-deserving-rich.mp3

Keir Milburn discusses his new book Generation Left with Lynne Segal, Jeremy Gilbert, and many others. For information about the culture, power, politics seminar series, go to: https://culturepowerpolitics.org. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/generation-left.mp3

  With Alex Williams    In this session Alex and Jeremy go into more detail on some of the key conceptual arguments of their forthcoming book Hegemony Now, talking about platforms as a modality of power, the nature of material and social interests, and the affective dimension of hegemonic relations. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/hegemony-now-part-2.mp3

With Grace Blakely      The ‘Private Finance Initiative’ still sounds like a dry, technical procedure that nobody could get too excited about. That’s what it’s supposed to sound like. Journalists and government have colluded for 25 years in making sure that the public don’t take too much interest in it. In fact the PFI has been central to UK government policy since the mid 1990s and has been the vehicle through which huge chunks of the British public sector have been privatised without any mandate from the people. One of Stuart Hall’s last great public interventions was to call for the launch of a public campaign against this programme in 2000 – he could see how serious its implications were. The story of the Private Finance Initiative reached its long-predicted denouement this year with the collapse of Carillion, a company employing 43,000 workers, responsible for dozens of contracts to deliver services across the UK public sector. The biggest bankruptcy in British history has exposed what many economists and political commentators have been saying for years: the PFI was a disastrous policy that was never really intended to benefit the public, but to enable multinational corporations to generate vast profits at the expense of the tax-payer, local authorities, schools and hospitals But what exactly is the PFI, how does it work, and why are the Blairites still opposed to actually scrapping it?   https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pfi.mp3

with Anna Minton and Jacob Mukherjee London’s housing market is in crisis because the global super-rich use our homes as piggy-banks and the government does nothing to stop them. Rent is becoming completely unaffordable (never mind buying a place). Gentrification is killing cultural venues all over the city, as overpriced flats crowd out the places where people gather to make some noise. At the heart of the city, the Corporation of the City of London is a law unto itself, and isn’t even democratically elected. The residents of Grenfell Tower have still not been re-housed. None of this is happening by accident, and none of it is going to change without a radical re-think of what London is for, and a radical challenge to the power of finance capital. In this session we’ll discuss these issues with two expert campaigners, and think about how they fit into the wider history of global neoliberalism. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/the-right-to-the-city.mp3