Politics Theory Other

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.

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