Episode 1379
The ends of Roman history / Edward J. Watts
Aug 25 2021
It is the peculiarity of our historical time that revolution is not in the cards - so I'm asking if this is not very likely to happen, do we have to give up? I say no, we can find resources for a radical change, without the crutch of a revolution, without the crutch of crisis, without the crutch of utopia - even the wonderful socialist utopia. We do not need it to go in a different direction, the direction against capitalism.
While Chuck is out this week, we revisit our first interview from 2020. Theorist Albena Azmanova examines the dynamics of post-2008 precarity capitalism, the left's long failure to strike through capitalism's competitive production of profit, and explains why radical change for the precarious multitude is possible without a revolutionary break - but through subversive pragmatism.
Albena is author of Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia from Columbia University Press.
Micah Herskind
Jun 25
Resisting "Cop City" in America's Most Surveilled, Unequal City / Micah Herskind
Follow
Weekly Mailing List
New interviews every Monday
Aug 25 2021
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
There are more white people living in poverty in the USA than any other ethnic group. Not exactly, though. About 67-70% of people living in poverty are white, but that includes white people of Latino, Latina, LatinX identification. Somewhere between 34 to 40 million people live below the poverty line in the USA, and even just non-Latin white people still make up a whopping 40% of those living in poverty.
Steven Pinker, the famous popular writer of questionable brain-candy books, tends to rejigger all the figures he uses – inflating, or at best leaning toward the largest estimates of populations living in violence and poverty in past times, while both theoretically minimizing and leaning toward the minimal numbers of current rates of violence and poverty in order to prove his point that human history represents a trend of progress in material existence for all people.
So forgive me for being a little squishy while using the figures I’ve given above, but as I do so, I’ll be transparent about the process. White folk of northern extraction make up 40% of the impoverished in the US. 40%. That’s almost 50%. That’s roughly their percentage of the entire US population as a whole, give or take. There are about 40 million people in the USA living below the poverty line, and the poverty line is widely acknowledged to be a laughable gauge of what constitutes poverty, constructed as it is by people who aren’t poor. So there’s probably more poor people than official definitions indicate.
I’m going to suggest, with a Pinkeresque fungibility of reported statistics, that about 70 million people in the USA, about 20% of the population, are poor, including the functionally poor, which means people who have to pay half or more of their income for shelter, who opt out of necessary visits to health professionals for lack of funds, who have trouble affording healthy food, who have no choice but to work more than one fulltime job, or work one fulltime job that sucks, who have to work gig jobs but think they’re not poor because they sell their homemade jewelry on Etsy on the side, who go without medication, have severely limited if any time to themselves, or are burdened by snowballing debt due to predatory lending or predatory credit or a punitive civic system of fines.
Easily one in five people in the wealthiest... read more