Welcome back to After Order - a series from Macrodose and the Alameda Institute - exploring power, sovereignty, and crisis in today's unstable world.

⁠⁠Event Tickets: Political Economy in a Time of Monsters ⁠⁠

In this week’s show, host James Meadway is joined by Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla - political strategist, activist, Co-General Coordinator of the Progressive International, and Executive Secretary of the Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations launched in 2025 to hold Israel accountable for its crimes in Palestine.

Varsha’s work sits at the intersection of law, empire, and resistance - as both an organiser and an intellectual, grappling with what it might mean to build a decolonial internationalism rooted in the Global South.

From Honduras, where a US corporation is suing the state for billions in a secret tribunal, to Ecuador, where an authoritarian regime with the direct assistance of the US is crushing democracy in the name of the War on Drugs, to the bombs falling on Gaza - in flagrant violation of international law - it’s clear we are living through a rupture in the global “order”. 

But Varsha argues that “order”, the so called “rules-based international system”, was always and fundamentally a veneer, one that masked the systems of coercion, extraction and exploitation that uphold global capitalism. 

In the context of war on Iran, it’s a particularly prescient argument. The veil has lifted, we are seeing the return of hard power across the world, and an open defiance of international institutions, from Cuba to Palestine. 

But we’re also seeing something else. A wave of solidarity with the victims of colonial oppression, and new forms of coordination among states seeking to resist through the cracks of disorder.

So the question at the heart of today’s conversation is this: as the old fiction of order breaks down, what comes next? 

And what would it mean to build a different kind of sovereignty - and a different kind of internationalism - in a world After Order?

Subscribe to support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/Macrodose.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your pledge is a donation supporting free public education; perks are thank-you gifts for your support.

Got a question or comment? Reach out to us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

To learn more about the work we do at Planet B Productions, head to ⁠⁠planetbproductions.co.uk⁠⁠.

Listen to Death In Westminster - a new documentary podcast from Planet B Productions & Novara Media.

On this week's Macrodose, James Meadway looks at some changing rhetoric from Keir Starmer on the changing world we live in, and how it affects our economy. But does he really get it? (1:02), And second: how the surge in energy prices is prompting a jump in home installations of renewable energy generation (5:52).

Subscribe to support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/Macrodose.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your pledge is a donation supporting free public education; perks are thank-you gifts for your support.

Got a question or comment? Reach out to us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

Event Tickets: Political Economy in a Time of Monsters

To learn more about the work we do at Planet B Productions, head to ⁠planetbproductions.co.uk⁠.

Listen to Death In Westminster - a new documentary podcast from Planet B Productions & Novara Media:
https://novaramedia.com/category/audio/death-in-westminster/#the-station

Event Tickets: Political Economy in a Time of Monsters

Welcome back to the After Order podcast - a series from Macrodose in collaboration with the Alameda Institute.

In our opening episode, host James Meadway spoke with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff about their book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, using Elon Musk as a lens to examine the intellectual contours of our emerging post-liberal moment. Together, they traced how new ideological formations may be taking shape in the aftermath of neoliberalism.

In today’s episode, we shift from those ideological roots to something more tangible, the material foundations of contemporary capitalism, and in particular, the accelerating green energy transition.

To explore this, James is joined by Thea Riofrancos, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. As governments and corporations race to decarbonise the global economy, demand for critical minerals such as lithium has surged dramatically. Yet as Thea’s work shows, this transition is not simply a story of technological progress or environmental necessity. It is also opening up new frontiers of extraction - reshaping landscapes, transforming communities, and reconfiguring geopolitical relations in the process.

At the centre of this conversation lies a pressing question: can the shift to renewable energy avoid reproducing the same extractive dynamics that defined the fossil-fuel era? And are we witnessing the emergence of a new form of “green capitalism” that carries forward many of the old logics under a different guise?

In a world After Order, where crises no longer appear as temporary disruptions but as enduring conditions, the stakes of these questions are difficult to overstate.

TICKETS: Political Economy in a Time of Monsters

On this week's Macrodose, James Meadway looks at a surprising side effect of the war on Iran. As shares in arms manufacturers take an unexpected dip, has this conflict actually damaged the Western arms industry?

Subscribe to support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/Macrodose.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your pledge is a donation supporting free public education; perks are thank-you gifts for your support.

Got a question or comment? Reach out to us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

To learn more about the work we do at Planet B Productions, head to ⁠planetbproductions.co.uk⁠.

Listen to Death In Westminster - a new documentary podcast from Planet B Productions & Novara Media:
https://novaramedia.com/category/audio/death-in-westminster/#the-station

Welcome to the After Order podcast - a new series from Macrodose and the Alameda Institute.

This series emerges from Alameda’s ongoing After Order research project, which begins from a simple but unsettling proposition, that we may no longer be living through an interregnum between stable systems, but in a period defined by recurring crises - a time after stable orders.

Over the coming weeks, host James Meadway will sit down with leading thinkers from around the globe, exploring topics from the decline of American hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world, to the struggle to reclaim digital sovereignty from Big Tech, and the geopolitical tensions emerging from the global energy transition under green capitalism.

We’ll ask, where does power actually lie in a world after order, and what new pathways might still be opened within it?

In today's episode, James meets with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff to discuss their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Using Elon Musk as a lens, Quinn and Ben unpack what they call Muskism - a new political-economic logic emerging out of the ashes of neoliberalism, and one that might - just as Fordism did a century earlier - provide a roadmap to the ideological terrain of our present moment.

If the neoliberal era is coming to an end, can Muskism help us interpret the ensuing disorder? And what can be done to push back against it?

On this week's Macrodose, James Meadway looks at the latest economics fall-out from the war on Iran (2:25), oil thieves in East Anglia, and how they are a harbinger of the near future (11:14), and Verdant - a new think tank launched by James himself (14:22).

Subscribe to support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/Macrodose.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your pledge is a donation supporting free public education; perks are thank-you gifts for your support.

Got a question or comment? Reach out to us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

To learn more about the work we do at Planet B Productions, head to ⁠planetbproductions.co.uk⁠.

Listen to Death In Westminster - a new documentary podcast from Planet B Productions & Novara Media:
https://novaramedia.com/category/audio/death-in-westminster/#the-station

UK Food resilience:
https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/news/article/uk-food-needs-radical-transformation-on-scale-not-seen-since-second-world-war
https://nationalpreparednesscommission.uk/publications/just-in-case-7-steps-to-narrow-the-uk-civil-food-resilience-gap/

Verdant's first report on government efficiency sacings:
https://www.verdantthinking.org/publications/wastenot

On this week's Macrodose, James Meadway looks at how the ongoing Iran war forms part of a longer story of US decline (0:45), why a direct consequence of the war is higher borrowing costs for government (7:50), and what the UK government actually doing in response to the crisis (12:22).

Subscribe to support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/Macrodose.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your pledge is a donation supporting free public education; perks are thank-you gifts for your support.

Got a question or comment? Reach out to us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

To learn more about the work we do at Planet B Productions, head to ⁠planetbproductions.co.uk⁠.

Listen to Death In Westminster - a new documentary podcast from Planet B Productions & Novara Media:
https://novaramedia.com/category/audio/death-in-westminster/#the-station

On this week's Macrodose, James Meadway looks at the disruption to global food supplies that surge in oil prices is now causing (2:01), how fossil fuel companies are profiteering from the crisis (5:51), and why the fresh enthusiasm for motorhome ownership is an unexpected side-effect of climate change (10:40).

Subscribe to support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/Macrodose.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your pledge is a donation supporting free public education; perks are thank-you gifts for your support.

Got a question or comment? Reach out to us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

To learn more about the work we do at Planet B Productions, head to ⁠planetbproductions.co.uk⁠.

Listen to Death In Westminster - a new documentary podcast from Planet B Productions & Novara Media:
https://novaramedia.com/category/audio/death-in-westminster/#the-station

Come to the 'Dark Money' launch event on March 19th:
https://dice.fm/event/oevl5r-dark-money-how-billionaires-destroyed-britain-and-how-to-make-them-pay-19th-mar-earth-london-tickets

On this week's Macrodose, James Meadway looks at the how the US-Israel war on Iran will impact global food prices (3:07), and how data centres are the newest target in modern warfare (9:47).

Subscribe to support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/Macrodose.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your pledge is a donation supporting free public education; perks are thank-you gifts for your support.

Got a question or comment? Reach out to us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

To learn more about the work we do at Planet B Productions, head to ⁠planetbproductions.co.uk⁠.

Apply for Planet B's Digital Content Lead job opportunity: https://planet-b-productions.homerun.co/digital-content-lead/en

Listen to Death In Westminster - a new documentary podcast from Planet B Productions & Novara Media:

https://novaramedia.com/category/audio/death-in-westminster/#the-station

Capitalism is often defended on the basis of freedom — “free markets”, free choice, as well as being credited with producing the wealth and material abundance that has freed countless people from poverty.

Marx, meanwhile, described workers under capitalism as “free in the double sense”: “free” to sell their labour power in the market, and “free” or divorced from the means of production: the land, machinery or materials to sustain themselves on their own. In other words: not particularly free, at all. 

We can add to this the countless things that are, within market systems, “free” insofar as they are assigned no value, from the free gifts of nature to uncompensated environmental destruction and the unpaid labour that creates and sustains life. 

What, then, does freedom really mean within a capitalist society? When wealth is so vastly unequal, can it really be argued that market exchange is “free” in any real sense? And when the harms of our economic actions are invisible in the prices we pay—from deforestation to child labour—can we really be said to be making “free choices”? These are the questions at the heart of Alyssa Battistoni’s book Free Gifts. In this episode, she joins Adrienne to talk about value, the politics of nature, and how we might live freely in a finite world.