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Matt Seybold joins Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson to discuss the political economy of literary criticism from past to present, amateur to professional. Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature at Elmira College and Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. In addition to writing and teaching in the field of literature & economics, Seybold produces and hosts The American Vandal podcast, an ever-growing collection of conversations and presentations about literature, humor, and history in America that is inspired by Mark Twain’s life and legacy. 

A bright star in the firmament of justice has gone out. One of the greatest journalists of our era has passed away.

In 2023, TV studios cut back on both product and labor—and labor struck back. Writers and actors, having had enough of belt tightening and penny pinching, joined many other unions in either threatening to strike or striking. Workers changed how the story was told, showing that studios, their bloated salaries, and their failure to compensate those actually creating the profit, were to blame for the current conjuncture.

In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound.

Competition over fresh, clean water supplies is leading corporations and their partners in government into situations that transform water from a useful common good to a scarce, exchangeable asset. This process of commodification and financialization is imbricated in an ongoing colonization of nature, one starkly illustrated in settler colonial contexts like Australia.

We must redefine Soviet Georgia beyond mere nostalgia—not to consign it to the past but to invigorate it, making it a dynamic force in shaping new visions for the world.

The story of Medu is not just a South or southern African story, but an international one. No single liberation struggle can exist without the circulation and exchange of ideas, strategies, material resources, political solidarity, and culture across the globe.

Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Daniel Benson interviews Paweł Wargan on these and other questions.

In this short commentary, John Bellamy Foster describes the term after which Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism is famously named.

We are joined again by Benjamin Wilson to discuss what it is like to teach Economics from a heterodox Modern Monetary Theory perspective in 2023. In previous episodes, we have chatted with Wilson about his research, the Uni Currency project, and his innovative work experimenting with classroom currencies. Our conversation this time explores the potentials and dangers of using neoclassical textbooks in the heterodox classroom; the utility of classroom currencies for Econ classes of all levels; the place of narrative in neoclassical and heterodox theory; and so much more.

The COP28 summit taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from 30 November to 12 December is a colossal illusion, a mirage in the desert.

In the early hours of Monday, May 15, 2023, the historical highway marker recognizing the birthplace of a renown feminist, anti-racist labor organizer and defender of reproductive rights was taken down. The marker was formally approved and erected by the State, following years of community effort on behalf of this locally-born female hero. It stood […]

Is it a tragedy or a new hope? After months, in fact years of inner-party squabbling in Germany’s LINKE party (The Left), the die has been cast, the Rubicon crossed, and Sahra Wagenknecht, with nine other Bundestag deputies, has quit the party and announced their decision to found a new party in January.

Ninety-seven years back, via Giovanni Battista Morgagni, number 25, was a more modest lodging house, home of a quietly discreet pensionante called Antonio Gramsci.

In most major media accounts of settler terror against Palestinians, Israeli settler-vigilantes invariably escape critical categorization beyond the moniker of “extremist.”  Portrayals of these perpetrators of violence invariably focus on the theme of fanaticism while presenting these figures as unsavory if misguided fringe elements in Israeli society.  Such characterizations are naïve and incomplete. 

The independence of French Indochina after the Second World War triggered a wave of independence in the French-speaking African countries, and it appeared that French colonial foundations had suffered a huge blow in the early 1960s.

Again the USA marked Veterans’ Day. Now all leading German parties also want such a “Veteranentag”—to honor all those past patriots who wore uniforms, voluntarily or not, and certainly to inspire many more reluctant young men or women to put on army boots and shoulder arms.… Not so many may recall that the earlier “Armistice Day” marked the end of World War One.

This month, we speak with Larry Johnson, associate professor in the Social Foundations of Education Program at the University of South Florida, Saint Petersburg. In his pedagogy, Johnson focuses on the complex relationship between education, culture, and society with the goal of exploring policies and practices from historical and contemporary perspectives that address structural inequality, and transforming educational institutions into sites for social justice. Johnson is notably a long-time proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and variously mobilizes MMT’s insights when training our teachers-to-be.

If I were in Israel today I might well have fears from above, but immensely worse ones if I were in Gaza. Or the West Bank. As for Trump, I do still have fears of a come-back, despite his legal troubles. But my fears for world peace: are they unfounded, perhaps nightmare products of an upset stomach?

Mohammed El-Kurd is an award-winning poet, writer, journalist and organizing from Jerusalem, Occupied Palestine. He is the Palestinian correspondent for The Nation and a Civic Media Fellow at the University of Southern California. Mohammed will talk about the representation and misrepresentation of Palestinians in the U.S.