Anatol Lieven: it’s not quite early 1914, but…
This is the edited transcript of an interview I did with with Anatol Lieven, Eurasia Program Director at the Quincy Institute, on Behind the News, February 16, 2023. I’ve seen people in the last week or so making analogies to early 1914. Do you get any of that feeling? Yes, to a degree. The Biden administration is still trying to keep America and NATO out of direct war with Russia, but clearly they’ve done a number of things which had they been done to the United States probably would have us in… Read More
Fresh audio product: Ukraine, Indian capitalism
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): February 16, 2023 Anatol Lieven on the slim prospects for peace in Ukraine and growing bellicosity towards China • Jairus Banaji, author of this Phenomenal World article, on the politicized structure of Indian capitalism generally, and the scandal surrounding Gautam Adani (Hindenburg report here)
Scattered speculations on the US ruling class
This is the text of a talk I gave at a virtual conference sponsored by the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice at the University of Wisconsin, February 13, 2023. The other panelists were Ho-fung Hung and Göran Therborn. It draws heavily on my Jacobin article on the ruling class and Harper’s magazine article on the WASPs but updates them to the lamentable present. In preparing these remarks, that old Gayatri Spivak title came to mind, “Scattered speculations on the question of value.” I don’t mean to cite any more of that article, something I haven’t… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): March 5, 2020 Andrew Bacevich, historian and president of the Quincy Institute, on the history and structure of the US permanent war mobilization (Harper’s article, The Age of Illusions) • Chris Brooks on the UAW bribery/embezzlement scandal (articles: ITT, Intercept)
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): October 24, 2019 Gabriel Winant, author of this article, on the professional–managerial class and its decomposition (the 1977 Ehrenreich papers are here and here; their 2013 follow-up is here) • Alan Beattie, author of this paper, on the US-led global order and its decomposition
On Panitch & Gindin and American decline
These are comments I delivered at a panel on The Making of Global Capitalism, by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, at the Rethinking Marxism conference, held at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, on September 20, 2013. I interviewed them about the book here. I want to start by saying that I greatly admire this book, and pretty much everything these two guys have done over the years. Unusually for the genre, I meant every word of the blurb I supplied for it. A while back, I was on a panel with Radikha Desai, on which she… Read More
Radio commentary, January 21, 2010
In the economic news, more stumbling along the bottom. On Thursday morning, the Labor Department (not, by the way, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the main source of data in that agency, but in this case the Employment and Training Administration, another division within the Department—sorry to go all geeky on you) reported that first-time claims for unemployment insurance, filed by people who’ve just lost their jobs, rose by a sharp 36,000 last week. The Department said, however, that this rise was mostly the result of a holiday-related processing delays and not… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 