Brett Christophers joins PTO to talked about his new book, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? We chatted about the extraordinary dominance of monopolistic rent-seeking in the UK economy, why the concept of rentierisation is more useful and accurate than the no...
2020-11-26 08:32:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Sophie Lewis joins PTO to talk about her article in The Nation, Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It. We chatted about how the Covid19 pandemic has u...
2020-11-18 15:56:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Adom Getachew and Branko Marcetic join PTO to talk about the US election results, why the 'blue wave' failed to materialise and how Joe Biden will govern with a Republican senate and a republican majority on the supreme court.
2020-11-05 12:49:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Barnaby Raine joins PTO to talk about the EHRC report into antisemitism and the Labour Party, the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the party, and what the affair tells us about the treatment of antisemitism in the UK in 2020.
2020-11-02 18:08:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Grace Blakeley joins PTO to talk about the current state of the UK economy, whether the era of austerity is over, and why even in the face of a no deal Brexit the UK is unlikely to experience an attack of the bond market vigilantes. We also talked about Grace's excellent new podcast, 2020-10-21 13:59:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Owen Hatherley and Kojo Koram join PTO to talk about Owen's essay, 'A Study in the Politics and Aesthetics of English Misery'. In the essay Owen reflects on the generational divides that have emerged over the course of the last two UK general elections by charting the musical evolution of The Smi...
2020-10-15 11:50:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Lola Olufemi joins PTO to talk about her new book, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power. We chatted about the history of black feminist organising, the problem with mainstream liberal feminism, and the generational divide in feminist circles over trans rights.
2020-10-09 10:56:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Richard Seymour joins PTO to discuss the recent anti-lockdown protests in London, the broader phenomenon of covid denialism, and whether the emergence of anti-political currents - combined with the left's decline with the defeat of the Corbyn project - is laying the basis for the emergen...
2020-10-02 19:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
In a special episode recorded for The World Transformed festival 2020, Tobita Chow and David Brophy discuss how the socialist left should think about China, how to characterise China's economy and mode of governance, and what to make of the emerging Cold War between China and the United States an...
2020-09-28 17:53:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Will Davies joins PTO to talk about the possible emergence of a UK equivalent of Fox News, what that might do to UK politics, and why breaking into broadcasting is so important for right wing media owners such as Rupert Murdoch. We also talked about whether in the years preceding the Brexit vote ...
2020-09-26 14:41:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Kate Soper joins me to talk about her new book, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. We chatted about why a transition to a sustainable, post-growth economy need not mean pr...
2020-09-23 09:59:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Nesrine Malik joins PTO to speak about the confected media furore over the BBC proms and what it tells us about the UK's culture wars. We also talked about the trajectory of the right wing press and how the left can best respond to the right's cultural turn. In the interview we spoke about Nesrin...
2020-09-06 14:44:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Bhaskar Sunkara joins me to talk about the violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin and collusion between the far right and the police, whether the frightening prospect of a second Trump administration makes a rerun of the 2016 election result less likely - in spite of Joe Biden's underwhelming policy plat...
2020-09-02 16:52:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Britain is officially in its deepest recession since records began following the unprecedented economic shutdown in response to the Covid19 pandemic. In the past six months, the UK has shed close to three quarters of a million jobs - a grim foretaste of what could be the kind of mass unemployment...
2020-08-26 11:33:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Haim Bresheeth-Zabner joins me to talk about his new book, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Force Made a Nation. We discussed how the the Zionist project in Palestine depended upon the erasure of the culture of the Pre-WWII Jewish diaspora, why it is that Israeli military op...
2020-08-22 15:14:43 +0000 UTC View Post
In late March PTO spoke to Adam Tooze whilst he was in New York as the Covid19 crisis was escalating. In today's episode we return to some of the issues we discussed back then, including the pandemic's role in the rise of China, the increasing entwinement of government and private corporations in...
2020-08-19 10:43:12 +0000 UTC View Post
What will come after the capitalocene - and is that even the right term to describe our geological era? Rosie Warren joins me to talk about The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards t...
2020-08-14 08:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
On Sunday Alexander Lukashenko, ruler of Belarus since 1994, claimed a landslide victory in the country's presidential election with an implausible 80% of the vote. Large protests broke out in the wake of the announcement of the result. I spoke to Nelly Bekus about Lukashenko's rise to power, how...
2020-08-12 18:00:14 +0000 UTC View Post
On Monday the Nobel laureate, and co-architect of the Northern Ireland peace process John Hume passed away at the age of 83. A giant of the political scene in Northern Ireland he was most well known for his role in the Good Friday Agreement that brought the so-called Troubles to a close and for h...
2020-08-06 20:20:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Tobita Chow and Jake Werner join me to talk about the roots of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between China and the United States, the reasons for bipartisan consensus on China's increasing technological prowess, and the specific character of anti-Chinese racism in the United States. ...
2020-08-04 09:37:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Rachel Shabi joins me to talk about her recent article in the New York Review of Books - 'The Pro-Privatization Shock Therapy of the UK’s Covid Response'. We talked about why the UK Government's response to the coronavirus pandemic was so heavily dependent on outsourcing to private corporations...
2020-07-30 08:45:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Journalist and broadcaster Rachel Shabi joins me to talk about her recent article in the New York Review of Books - The Pro-Privatization Shock Ther...
2020-07-30 08:20:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In the latest episode of #RedHacks - a series of conversations on journalism in the neoliberal world - Joana Ramiro talks to filmmaker and writer Ana Naomi de Sousa about being a non-white journalist in an industry stymi...
2020-07-27 12:10:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Astra Taylor and Troy Vettese join me to talk about their recent article in the Guardian in which they argue that the principal driver of zoonotic diseases is t...
2020-07-15 10:27:52 +0000 UTC View Post
On the 30th of June the city of Leicester, in the East Midlands of the UK was put back into lockdown following a spike in Covid-19 cases. The new outbreak of the virus put the spotlight on the garment district of the city - where the new outbreak may have emerged - much of which is characterised ...
2020-07-11 09:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Andreas Malm joins me to talk about his new book, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. We talked about why in the case of Covid19 most of the rich countries of the north were able to make the kinds of decisive interventions that seem to elude the...
2020-07-04 13:24:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Award-winning author, broadcaster and academic Gary Younge joins me to talk about his experience of reporting on racism in the United States for the Guardian, the current Black Lives Matter movement in the US and abroad, and why comparisons between BLM and the civil rights movement are misplaced....
2020-06-30 11:34:46 +0000 UTC View Post
On Monday evening soldiers of the Indian Army and the Chinese People's Liberation Army clashed on their disputed border in the Ladakh area of Kashmir in the Himalayas. Reportedly fighting with rocks and iron bars, no shots were fired but the Indian Army reported twenty deaths on its side and also...
2020-06-21 17:24:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Vivian Gornick joins me to talk about her classic book, The Romance of American Communism. We spoke about her experience of growing up amongst communists and socialists in the Bronx in the 1930s, how she sought to counter simplistic depictions of the lives of American communists and how ...
2020-06-18 16:31:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Nikhil Pal Singh joins me to discuss the massive protests against police violence in the United States that emerged in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. We talked about why the protests are so large and so diverse and the movement's demands for the abolition or defundi...
2020-06-10 16:58:04 +0000 UTC View Post