Interregnum - mail bag (part one)

If you'd like to listen to this episode of PTO Extra! please consider becoming a £5 patron of the show at patreon.com/poltheoryother Richard responds to some more excellent listener questions. Topics included: - What a left foreign policy might look like in the context of collapsing US hegemony. -Why Mark Carney called time on the so-called 'rules based order' before any major European state. - Marxist theorisations of war and whether conflict lays the basis for future economic growth - Violence and resistance in Minnesota.

Nikhil Pal Singh joins PTO to discuss his recent article in Equator, titled Homeland Empire - in which Nikhil argues that from from Venezuela to Minnesota, Donald Trump is creating a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity. We talked about how the relative shift away from the preoccupation with the southern border towards the targeting of migrants across the United States is symptomatic of this collapse of the foreign and the domestic, and about how previous administrations laid the basis for the expansion of ICE. We also talked about the extent to which the second Trump administration represents a mere deepening of pre-existing trends in American state craft and the ways in which the MAGA movement is genuinely innovative. Finally, we talked about the weaknesses of the Trump administration and why Nikhil thinks it is fundamentally unable to construct a genuinely hegemonic project.

On January 7th, Renee Nicole Good, a 37 year old prize winning poet and mother of three was murdered in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross. Sarah Jaffe has reported extensively on protests and organising in Minnesota and in today's episode we spoke about the political background to the current situation in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. We talked about the central role of the Somali community in resistance and union organising (and how this has drawn the ire of Donald Trump). And we talked about longer recent history of protest in the region that includes the state's central role in the Black Lives Matter movement. We also spoke about the entwinement of the tech industry, the surveillance state, and the border regime, and how protesters in some US cities have sought to target tech company assets that are believed to be aiding ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. SHOW NOTES: From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire - Sarah Jaffe https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/from-the-ashes-grief-and-revolution-in-a-world-on-fire/7683592?ean=9781541703490&next=t&affiliate=172 The Most Important Labor Story Right Now Is in Minnesota—It Might Be the Model We All Need: https://inthesetimes.com/article/minneapolis-stpaul-minnesota-unions-labor-strike Sarah's suggested resources: The Awood Center: https://www.awoodcenter.org/ UNIDOS-MN https://unidos-mn.org/ New Justice Project: https://www.newjusticeprojectmn.org/ Tending the Soil: https://tendingthesoil.org/ SEIU Local 26: https://www.seiu26.org/ INQUILINXS UNIDXS POR JUSTICIA: https://www.inquilinxsunidxs.org/ UNITE HERE Local 17: https://www.uniteherelocal17.org/ Take Action MN: https://takeactionminnesota.org/

In the latest episode of Interregnum, Richard Seymour discusses the Trump administrations' attack on Venezuela and its broader global and regional implications. We spoke about whether the US is retreating to becoming a mere regional power, how unprecedented the attack was (given the history of US intervention in central and South America) and we talked about why Trump's actions are - in Richard's view - hastening America's imperial decline and facilitating China's global rise.

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Last month the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference - better known as COP30 - was held in the Amazonian city of Belem in northern Brazil. The conference was widely seen as a disappointment - with a binding agreement for a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels being blocked by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other oil producing states. In the today's episode economist and activist Sabrina Fernandes joins PTO to talk about her thoughts on COP30. We spoke about how the structure of the COP process could conceivably be reformed in order to stop recalcitrant states vetoing action on climate. And we also talked about whether multi-lateral climate negotiations are being rendered irrelevant by developments in the global economy and the rapid expansion of renewable energy. We went on to talk about Sabrina's recent article in 'The Breakdown', titled Lula's Dilemma. We talked about the contradictory approach of Lula and the Brazilian worker's party towards climate and the environment and what Sabrina sees as a failing politics of "class conciliation" that has disastrous environmental consequences.

In 2006, the music streaming service Spotify, founded by Swedish entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon was launched in the context of widespread music piracy, file sharing, and declining profits for the music majors. Presenting themselves as music fans who were intent on saving the music industry, Spotify has since gone on to become the dominant music streaming platform, far eclipsing any of its rivals, and making Ek and Lorentzon billionaires. While once lauded by the media, Spotify's reputation has significantly declined as understanding of how little most musicians receive from streaming has become more widespread and as Spotify has courted controversy by populating some of its playlists with so-called "perfect fit content" - stock music produced for Spotify in order to reduce the amount of royalties the company pays to rights holders. Journalist Liz Pelly has done more than most to bring to light practices such as these and to challenge the myth-making of Spotify's founders. In today's episode we spoke about the early years of Spotify, as it emerged in the context of mass file sharing and as the major music labels were coming to see Sweden as a lost market - making it ripe as a site for experimentation with streaming. We went on to talk about how Spotify is shaping the user habits of listeners and about the damaging consequences of the datafication of music. Finally, we chatted about some of the inspiring efforts to challenge the dominance of Spotify that have emerged in recent years, as both musicians and listeners seek to find ways to create music communities and to preserve and curate music history - practices that Spotify's dominance has severely eroded.

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PTO has now been going for more than seven years and some of the earlier episodes unfortunately have truly abysmal audio quality - because of the podcasting technology of the time. But, thanks to the wonders of audio editing software in 2025, it's been possible to quite significantly improve the sound quality of those episodes, and so in the coming months there will be a few interviews from the archives appearing in your feed.  In the following interview - recorded six years ago - Alexander Gallas talks about the extent of popular support for the Thatcherite project and about the debates of the 1980s between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop regarding how to characterise Thatcherite hegemony. Alexander is the author of 'The Thatcherite Offensive: A Neo-Poulantzasian Analysis'.

Sofia Menemenlis joins PTO to chat about her recent article in The Breakdown on the concept and history of solar geoengineering - or “solar radiation management" as it has become known. We talked about how the implementation of SRM is imagined, what the potentially catastrophic side effects of such a project might be, and who the key players are in terms of research and potential deployment of the technology.