Politics Theory Other

If you'd like to listen to the rest of this episode of PTO Extra! please consider becoming a £5 supporter at https://www.patreon.com/poltheoryother

If you'd like to listen to the rest of this episode of PTO Extra! please consider becoming a £5 supporter at https://www.patreon.com/poltheoryother

On the ongoing crisis within the Labour Party following the resignation of Morgan McSweeney, over the appointment of Jeffrey Epstein associate Peter Mandelson to the position of US ambassador. We talked about why the parliamentary Labour party has stepped back from trying to oust Keir Starmer, and whether or not a left turn from the government is now conceivable. We went on to discuss just how devastating the ongoing revelations about Peter Mandelson might prove to be for the government, and about the broader crisis of legitimacy facing the British state and its key institutions.

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.