Class Unity

Abraham taught German and European history at Princeton University from 1977 to 1985. After transitioning to law, he clerked for Judge Leonard Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1989 to 1990 and then worked as an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York City. In 1991, he joined the faculty at the University of Miami School of Law, becoming a full Professor in 1996 and later Professor Emeritus. He has taught courses in Labor and Employment Law, Property Law, Immigration Law, and Jurisprudence and Political Theory. He has also lectured internationally at institutions such as the University of Tübingen, Deakin University, the Jena Center for 20th Century History, and the University of Ulster.

Prof. L. Randall Wray joined Class Unity to talk about Modern Monetary Theory, heterodox economics, and the future of economic studies. 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. In this episode we are discussing his book, 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. For donations, membership inquiries, or educational courses, check out our website here: https://classunity.org

We are joined by William I. Robinson for a conversation on the global implications of the recent US attack on Venezuela. The discussion will place this and other acts of US aggression within the broader crisis of world capitalism, the breakdown of the post-WWII international world order, and the emergence of a global police state. Prof. Robinson’s area of study is in macro and comparative sociology, globalization and transnationalism, political economy, political sociology, development and social change, immigration, Latin America and the Third World, class and capitalism. He attempts to link his academic work to struggles in the United States and around the world for social justice. Among the undergraduate classes he teaches are: Globalization and Resistance, Sociology of Globalization, Global Inequalities, Development and Social Change in Latin America, and Twentieth-Century Revolutions in Theory and Practice. His publications and professional activities are discussed on his web page:http://robinson.faculty.soc.ucsb.edu/ Link to the article from the discussion:https://nacla.org/global-meaning-us-attack-venezuela/ For donations, membership inquiries and educational courses please visit: http://www.ClassUnity.org

Welcome to another Class Unity speaker event. Today we will be joined by authors Vijay Prashad and Michael Hudson to discuss hyper-imperialism, imperialism, and the state of global politics. 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. Vijay Prashad is an Indian author, journalist, political commentator, and Marxist. He is the executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, editor of LeftWord Books, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, and a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. For donations, educational courses and membership inquiries, please visit us at ClassUnity.org

Members of class unity discuss recent events in domestic and geopolitics: Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Denmark, Bulgaria, NATO, ICE, the Fed, Powell, Trump

Welcome to Episode 20 of Class Unity: Transmissions. For this episode, Nick is joined by Class Unity member Dave for a wide-ranging conversation with Philip Cunliffe on the question of the national interest. Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at University College London, author of The National Interest: Politics After Globalization, and co-founder and contributing editor of Aufhebunga Bunga. The discussion centers on Cunliffe’s argument that the “national interest”—long treated with suspicion on both the left and the libertarian right—has returned not as a coherent doctrine, but as a symptom of the collapse of globalization and liberal internationalism. Cunliffe defends a sovereigntist, rather than nationalist, conception of politics, insisting that the national interest should be understood as a democratic process of contestation defined by citizens rather than insulated elites. Nick and Dave press Cunliffe on whether appeals to global problems and global governance have allowed ruling classes to evade democratic accountability, and whether it is possible to retain global awareness while re-anchoring politics at the level of the nation state. The episode also digs into the book’s historical and theoretical core. Cunliffe discusses classical realism, liberal internationalism, and the Cold War transformation of the national interest into a technocratic and national security–state project. Nick and Dave challenge Cunliffe on whether realism genuinely reflected mass politics or instead replaced aristocratic judgment with expert management, and whether liberal internationalism restrained power or dissolved political responsibility by moralizing foreign policy. Throughout, the conversation returns to a central tension: how to avoid reifying the national interest while still treating it as a necessary framework for democratic struggle. Recorded on December 15, 2025, the episode also serves as a kind of end-of-year reflection on contemporary politics. From Israel and Gaza to the advent of a second Trump administration, MAGA fragmentation, and competing claims over what counts as “America First,” the discussion explores whether renewed appeals to the national interest can meaningfully hold elites accountable—or whether they risk being captured once again by narrow sectional interests and the national security state. Cunliffe reflects on the limits of optimism, arguing that while democratic contestation offers no guarantees of good outcomes, abandoning the national interest altogether leaves politics empty, moralized, and unaccountable. For donations, membership inquiries, and educational courses please visit ClassUnity.org

In today’s episode, we’re joined by Professor Ingo Schmidt for a wide-ranging discussion on economic theory and left politics. Dr. Schmidt is a Professor of Labour Studies at Athabasca University in British Columbia, Canada. His PhD research focused on trade unions and Keynesianism, and his work has placed him at the center of critical debates in political economy. Originally from Germany, Schmidt is a blacklisted economist there and has long been active in peace and international solidarity movements. He has authored or edited several books and collections including: Market populism, its right-wing offspring and left alternatives. (Policy Press, 2021) Reading Capital Today: Marx After 150 Years (Pluto, 2017) The Three Worlds of Social Democracy: A Global View (Pluto, 2015) For donations, educational courses and membership inquiries visit: http://www.ClassUnity.org

In this episode, we are joined by political theorist Clyde W. Barrow to revisit the classic debates in Marxist state theory and to consider their renewed relevance in the present conjuncture. Barrow was a guest speaker in the CU “State Theory” course that ran earlier this year, and we thought we’d invite him back for a more detailed discussion—and to explore how these debates might help guide the left through its current impasse. The conversation begins with the Poulantzas–Miliband debate of the 1960s and 1970s, situating it against the crisis of postwar Fordist–Keynesian capitalism and the broader effort by Marxists to move beyond instrumental or reductionist accounts of the capitalist state. Barrow explains why the debate remains foundational, what is often misunderstood about Miliband’s position, and why Marxist politics cannot afford to treat the state as a secondary or merely epiphenomenal problem. From there, the discussion turns to globalization and contemporary political economy, drawing on Barrow’s book Toward a Critical Theory of States: The Poulantzas–Miliband Debate after Globalization. Rejecting the idea that globalization has rendered states powerless, Barrow emphasizes the central role played by states—particularly the U.S. state—in constructing and managing global capitalism. We then examine how Marxist state theory helps illuminate recent developments in trade policy under the Trump administration, including the structural constraints that capitalist states face when they pursue policies that run counter to dominant class interests, and what this may signal about the future of the global trade regime. The latter part of the episode moves a bit more “into the weeds,” engaging debates over Lenin, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the long-standing question of what a socialist theory of government might look like. Barrow reflects on the limits of romanticized models such as the Paris Commune, the enduring tensions between democracy and state power in socialist strategy, and the usefulness of Poulantzas’s concept of authoritarian statism for understanding contemporary right-wing governments. The conversation concludes with a discussion of what Marxist state theory can tell us about the challenges facing democratic socialist governance today, using the case of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani to explore the structural and political limits confronting left projects within capitalist states. Biographical note: In recent months, Barrow has also been a prominent public critic of managerial governance and political interference in higher education and has faced disciplinary action related to his speech and public commentary. While this episode focuses on theory rather than biography, his situation has made him an important contemporary reference point in ongoing debates over academic freedom and freedom of expression in U.S. universities. Additional background: Clyde W. Barrow earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently Professor of Political Science at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and previously taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Barrow is widely known for his contributions to Marxist state theory, political sociology, and the political economy of higher education. His major books include Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928; Toward a Critical Theory of States: The Poulantzas–Miliband Debate after Globalization; The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat; and A Critique of Political Science: A History of the Caucus for a New Political Science (forthcoming), along with numerous influential articles on state power, class relations, and academic governance. For donations, educational courses, or membership inquiries please visit: http://www.classunity.org

Benjamin Studebaker talks with Class Unity about his new book, “The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut” (2023). You can find him here: https://benjaminstudebaker.com/about/ And his book here: https://www.amazon.com/Chronic-Crisis-American-Democracy-Shut/dp/3031282094 And you can find Class Unity here: https://classunity.org Please consider donating or joining today!

Vivek Chibber discusses his latest book, “The Class Matrix” (2022), as well as the so-called “cultural turn”, with Class Unity. You can find his book here: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674245136 And you can find Class Unity here: https://classunity.org

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) Consider making a donation to Class Unity to support original content like this here: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=74NKWLLEEJTLW 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.nethttps://www.thomasfazi.comhttps://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.pdfhttps://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=1https://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.comhttps://www.youtube.com/@profstevekeenhttps://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/ravel-a-thank-you-to-my-supportershttps://www.patreon.com/posts/introducing-c-tm-49053513https://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-feudalism https://nypost.com/2019/12/25/how-america-is-reverting-back-to-the-feudal-age https://firstthings.com/our-neo-feudal-future https://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.pdfhttps://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_661.pdfhttps://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_587.pdf You can find recent works and discussions with him at the following links: https://youtu.be/RnNGlMrV-8Y https://www.nfrpp.org/2023/03/20/understanding-fiscal-policies-debt-and-entitlements http://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, 20252:00 pm – 4:00 pmhttps://www.kshamasawant.org/events/3/ https://www.workersstrikeback.org https://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. […]

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/view Streeck – Notes on the Political Economy of War https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nr-gBlaDoXy_v1dGxy3xetxX_57KoiJN/view Streeck – 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 we now know as Modern Monetary Theory or MMT. “Soft Currency Economics” https://moslereconomics.com/mandatory-readings/soft-currency-economics/ “The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.” https://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Seven-Deadly-Innocent-Frauds-of-Warren-Mosler.pdf https://moslereconomics.com Twitter/X @wbmosler For more info go to https//classunity.org 

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 topics of class and left politics today: “With the conversion of the historic parties of the working class to neoliberalism, all mainstream politics has turned into a politics of neoliberalism. The main parties form a solid cross-party phalanx, a veritable establishment, operating across parties, corporate foundations, think tanks and even countries. Their unified discourse is policed by forms of censorship more effective than any in the most dystopian vision of allegedly totalitarian societies. Operating with the carrots of preferment and pay, and the sticks of being silenced (as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden most famously have been) or shunned, as with so many critical writers branded ‘conspiracy theorists’ or ‘dangerous’ or simply loony. The neoliberal establishment also equates the politics of a Johnson or Trump with the class politics of left leaders such as Corbyn or Sanders or Maduro as versions of populism, striking at both major forms of challenge to their power. Many sections of the left also act as freelance vigilantes for this establishment, particularly by attacking those questioning this neoliberal consensus, whether they call radical supporters of the rights of Palestinians ant-Semitic or accuse critics of wars of ‘democracy promotion’ of dictator-philia. [/] In this context, action on the political battlefield of the major capitalist countries is largely confined to the right. Biden’s government of the Democratic neoliberal establishment representing big corporate and financial capital was opposed most strenuously by the Trumpist right representing only slightly smaller and even less scrupulous capital with a lower tolerance for regulation, a higher propensity to squeeze wages and a greater antipathy to taxes. […] …by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the principal opposition to socially liberal corporate neoliberalism comes not from any left force but from an enrageée hard right.” Professor Gottfried taught for many years in the humanities at Elizabethtown College, has published many books on politics and the history of political thought, and is the editor of Chronicles. You can find his thoughts on the topic of this discussion here: https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/marx-was-not-woke/

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 incoming assistant professor at VMI. Mattcwebb.com Twitter/X: @mattcwebb

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 financial, and monetary law, and economics. In this episode we discuss his papers: Modern, Pre-Modern, Or Post-Modern Money? A Brief Guide For The Perplexed. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rhockett/2020/10/26/modern-pre-modern-or-post-modern-money-a-brief-guide-for-the-perplexed/ The ‘Socialization of Investment’ https://einaudi.cornell.edu/research/publications/socialization-investment Professor Hockett’s recent books include “Making capital democratic” and “Spread the Fed: Distributed Central Banking for Productive-Republican Finance” Follow Robert Hockett on Twitter/X @rch371 Screenshot For more information on Class Unity: https://classunity.org

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 economics. In this episode we discuss his papers: Modern, Pre-Modern, Or Post-Modern Money? A Brief Guide For The Perplexed. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rhockett/2020/10/26/modern-pre-modern-or-post-modern-money-a-brief-guide-for-the-perplexed/ The ‘Socialization of Investment’ https://einaudi.cornell.edu/research/publications/socialization-investment Professor Hockett’s recent books include “Making capital democratic” and “Spread the Fed: Distributed Central Banking for Productive-Republican Finance” Follow Robert Hockett on Twitter/X @rch371 For more information on Class Unity: https://classunity.org

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. Ben can be followed on Twitter/X @benthomason95

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 Tweets by Class_Unity

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, here:

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. 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. 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. 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.