The Chatterbox

In this episode, I’m joined by critical development economist Jayati Ghosh to discuss the complex relationship between imperialism and international development. In this wide-ranging conversation, we explore the problematic assumptions underlying mainstream ideas of ‘development,’ why GDP is a profoundly inadequate measure of a country’s economic well-being, and how the globalization of the international economy has shaped the structural dynamics of imperialism as a world system—as well as some of the ways that the global economy needs to be restructured in order to deliver genuine justice and sovereignty for the Global South.

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Washington, D.C. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

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Sources and helpful links:

• Amiya Bagchi — Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (Bloomsbury, 2008)

• Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Surbhi Kesar, and Devika Dutt — The Colonial Origins of Economics (Economic and Political Weekly, October 2024)

• Jostein Hauge — This year’s Nobel prize exposes economics’ problem with colonialism (The Conversation, October 2024)

• Benjamin Selwyn — Walt Rostow’s Development Theory Shows That Capitalism Relies on Brutal Violence (Jacobin, June 2023)

• Walter Rodney — How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

• Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla — The Global South Must Be at the Center of the Making of a Just Global Economic Order (interview in Jacobin, February 2023)

• Jayati Ghosh — Let’s Count What Really Matters (Project Syndicate, June 2022)

• Jayati Ghosh — Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy (Dollars and Sense, March 2017)

• Jayati Ghosh — A Life in Development Economics and Political Economy (Real World Economics Review, 2022)

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

• Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/returntobandung⁠

• Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/returntobandung/⁠

• Website:

  https://www.returntobandung.com/

Pranay Somayajula:

• Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/p_somayajula⁠

• Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/pranay.somayajula/⁠

• Website: ⁠https://www.pranaysomayajula.com/⁠

• Substack: ⁠https://www.culture-shock.xyz/⁠

Jayati Ghosh:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jayati1609

The speed with which cinema caught the public’s imagination is remarkable. The first film screenings took place in the 1890s and just two decades later, in the US alone there were thousands of nickelodeons and other spaces where you could watch a movie. Luxurious picture palaces followed soon after and not just in the West: some of India’s Art Deco cinemas are real feasts for the eyes. But the arrival of TV fundamentally changed our relationship with movie theatres and they have struggled to remain central to our film culture ever since.

Iszi Lawrence explores the 120-year development of movie theatres with film historian Professor Ross Melnick, Professor of Cinema Studies Daniela Treveri Gennari, cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi who is documenting India’s historic cinema buildings, Chinese cinema researcher Professor Jie Li and World Service listeners.

(Photo: Kannappa Cinema, Padappai, Tamil Nadu. 2024. Credit: Hemant Chaturvedi)

Guest: George Monbiot is an author, journalist, and environmental campaigner. His books include Feral, Heat, Regenesis, and his latest,  Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism co-authored with Peter Hutchison.

George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison also co-produced the film Invisible Doctrine.

The post George Monbiot on The Secret History of Neoliberalism appeared first on KPFA.

We interview Prof. Adler about his 1990 paper 'Marx, Machines, and Skill'.

This is part one. In part two we discuss his 2019 book "The 99% Economy: How Democratic Socialism Can Overcome The Crises of Capitalism".

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes, all with an Argentine theme.

We find out more about the 1985 ‘trial of the juntas’ when the country’s former military leaders stood accused of torturing and murdering thousands of their own people. And we hear from historian Dr Victoria Basualdo about life in Argentina, both before and after the trial.

Also, the story of the grandmothers who championed the study of genetics to find their missing loved ones. And why tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Buenos Aires in 2015. Plus, the bizarre story of Eva Peron's disappearing corpse. And finally, more on the Argentine animator who Walt Disney wanted to hire.

Contributors:

(Photo: Forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow giving testimony to the trial, 1985. Credit: Daniel Muzio/AFP via Getty Images)

Along with the rise of Mussolini’s fascist regime, the interwar years in Italy also saw the widespread development of its modernist interior design and furnishing practices. While the regime’s politics were overtly manifest in monumental government architecture, Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by Dr. Ignacio G. Galán examines the subtler yet effective role of household goods and decor in the cultivation of Italy’s exclusionary sense of national identity.

Presenting a fresh look at the work of various architects and designers, including iconic figures such as Gio Ponti and Carlo Enrico Rava, Dr. Galán explores how seemingly neutral products of everyday life contributed to the propagation of fascist ideology. Through extensive promotion in popular magazines and department stores, on the film sets of Cinecittà Studios, and throughout the country’s colonial territories, Italy’s modernist design practices were part of a larger political project that aimed to produce a totalizing image of cultural hegemony.

Interweaving design theory, architectural history, and media scholarship, Furnishing Fascism reexamines the period’s so-called minor arts to reveal the political entanglement of modernism in early twentieth-century Italy and offers valuable insight into the complications of cultural production under the auspices of authoritarian power.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Women’s bodies have always been the cornerstone of reproduction. So has Earth’s. It’s why the enclosure and appropriation of both is fundamental to the accumulation of the capitalist class.

On this extraordinary episode, I interview Marxist-feminist scholar, Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch, a phenomenal book which articulates how capitalism did not naturally evolve from feudalism, but necessitated the violent displacement of women’s power in their communities and control over their own reproduction. We discuss this in the context of women’s rights being violated all around the world today as we enter a period of resource scarcity, and why it is therefore imperative that the Western feminist movement recover this analysis to create an effective resistance movement.

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