The Progressive

From the Working Class History podcast, acclaimed author, poet and Professor of Children’s Literature Michael Rosen talks about his anthology, Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain, which gathers together short stories from the labor and socialist press between 1880 and 1920. The Working Class History podcast is put out by an international collective of worker-activists whose social media and podcast project uncovers our collective history of fighting for a better world and promotes it to educate and inspire a new generation of activists. 

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

#LaborRadioPod #History #WorkingClass #ClassStruggle @GeorgetownKILWP #LaborHistory @UMDMLA @ILLaborHistory @AFLCIO @StrikeHistory #LaborHistory @wrkclasshistory

Eric Monnet joins us to discuss his book *Controlling Credit: Central Banking and the Planned Economy in Postwar France, 1948-1973.* Prior to the neoliberalizations of the late 20th century, most central banks in Europe worked very differently than they do today. Interest rates played less of a role than credit controls in a more concentrated, segmented, and statist banking system. Representatives from all across the economy  - farmers, workers, industrialists - sat on important decision making boards that oversaw credit policy "in the general interest." A vision for "nationalizing" credit brought together right-wing Bonapartists, Gaulists, and neo-Simonian planners focused on efficiency with left-wing forces of the popular front focused more on social justice. But starting in the late 1960s, technocratic pressure to liberalize financial markets from economists and the bureaucracy overwhelmed the merely "particular" social interests which were embedded and represented in the French credit system.

Andrew Elrod from seven episodes back also joins the team!

What is the Marxist theory of class? Did Marx have a mature class theory in Capital or is Marx's theory of class unfinished and ultimately unclear? Many scholars contend that Marx does not have a clear class theory. But too often Marxists do not offer any alternative to the theory of class, so Marxism ends up with very little to say about class.

Our guest in this episode, Raju Das, disagrees with many contemporary Marxists who tend to sideline Marx's theory of class. In this conversation, we learn that Marx does have a theory of class and we break it all down and show how central it is to his thought. 

We begin with a critique of Analytical Marxist and Post-structuralist Marxist theories of class and we learn about a more materialist and dialectical foundation for class theory. Das helps us to theorize class at both the transhistorical level and at the level of capitalism. 

Raju Das is the author of Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World.

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022), leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy.

What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death.

Nancy Fraser is Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fortunes of Feminism and The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born, and co-author of Capitalism: A Conversation and Feminism for the 99%.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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President Biden’s announcement two weeks ago that his administration was canceling up to $20,000 of student debt for borrowers who make under $125,000 was met with strong reactions.  But debt relief from the federal government has historical precedent.

We speak with Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, about how we as a country have dealt with debt in the past.

Sam is back! He and Emma are joined by Jamie Martin, Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University, to discuss his recent book The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Economic Global Governance. First, Sam and Emma dive into developments in Ukraine as the UN sends in Nuclear Inspectors, a massive flood in Pakistan displacing millions, and the clear public support behind Biden’s student debt relief. Jamie Moran then joins as he gets right into the story of liberalism’s international systems based on sovereign encroachment, and why the conventional narrative begins with the Bretton-Woods conference in 1944 that saw the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, aligning with the United States emerging from its isolationism to the peak of a globalized liberal order, and being followed (with the failure of the Bretton-Woods system in the ‘70s) by a new project of neoliberal hyper globalization, forcing austere reform on what they saw as “developing economies.” Next, Professor Martin dives into why HIS history of the subject started well before Bretton-Woods, seeing the leveraging of sovereign states by international economic coalitions into painful domestic reform as a tale as old as capitalism, burgeoning in the middle of the 19th Century with the nation-state boom bringing countless new governments onto the international stage, and the lasting European empires (largely France and England) granting these nations “sovereignty” under conditions of severe extraction by their former colonizers. These systems largely continued in the wake of the colonial expansions of the 18th and 19th Centuries, leading up to the first World War which saw Europe and the US create wartime international bodies that actually exercise their colonial power collectively, and translated (however poorly) into the post-war systems such as the League of Nations. Looking at the next couple of decades, Professor Martin explores how Britain (and France to a lesser extent) came to largely dominate the economic discourse of the League of Nations, employing imperial creditor arrangements in the wake of the 1920s’ depression to bolster their international leverage, and why the US’ isolation from the League was due to this very reason of protecting their own sovereignty. Walking through the years following World War II, Sam, Emma, and Jamie Martin discuss how the lack of borders allowed US creditors to overtake the Bank of England and other EU creditors by containing extortion to the financial realm, and putting them in peak position going into the Bretton-Wood conference, and ensuring the IMF and World Bank functioned under their control. Wrapping up, they explore other translations of these colonial practices around sovereignty (including the Cold War’s emphasis on anti-communism), and reflect on why a fetishized nostalgia for these systems is severely misplaced.

And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma watch Marco Rubio struggle over how “unfair” Joe Biden is being, Sam waits with beta – I mean bated –  breath for the rest of Tim Pool’s album, Mike from South Carolina calls in to discuss the GI Bill as a Vet, and Ryan from Arizona explores his states’ recent elections. Dave Rubin thanks Liberty U students for praying his gay away, Eamon from California discusses the fire hazards prevalent in the critiques of the Uvalde teachers, and Sam and Emma explore the destruction in Pakistan, plus, your calls and IMs!

Check out Jamie's book here: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976542

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