E272 - Merchant of Doom w/ Jamie Merchant

The Antifada

Sean KB and AP Andy

Music, Arts

4.2 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2024

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Audio from our November 23rd event at Woodbine with Jamie Merchant about his new book Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline. He sketches the economic background of the rise of populist right internationally before we transition to questions about the current moment and WI2BD.

Jamie Merchant is a Chicago-based writer, contributor to Brooklyn Rail, Baffler, and In These Times, and a member of the Chicago chapter of the Independent Labor Club (@ilcofchi).

excerpt: https://brooklynrail.org/2022/03/field-notes/Endgame-Finance-and-the-Close-of-the-Market-System/

For all bonus material and Discord access support the show at http://patreon.com/theantifada

Support Woodbine: https://www.patreon.com/woodbine

Thanks to Mike, Peter, and Chris from ILC NYC for the recording!

Song: Natalie Merchant - This House is on Fire

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, thanks for coming out everybody.
0:06.8	This is a great crowd, very exciting.
0:09.1	Yeah, give yourselves a round of applause.
0:14.6	I'm Andy, I'm part of Woodbine.
0:16.9	Tonight we're gonna be talking with Jamie Merchant.
0:19.2	He's here from Chicago to talk to us. He's the author of Endgame, Economic Nationalism and Global Decline. So I thought we know we would start off by talking a bit about the book. A large part of the book is about capitalist stagnation, capitalist crisis, the declining rate of profit, perhaps.
0:39.4	Maybe we'll get into that. Controversial subjects. But then, you know, how that economic stuff
0:45.0	leads to things like Trump, leads to things that are more on our minds politically. And it's not just
0:50.8	Trump. It's not just the Republicans and Democrats in the elections, but we're
0:55.4	seeing Trump-like figures all over the world, epidemic of right populism. And we're going to
1:01.4	hopefully move this conversation into a more open discussion. There's lots of us, so hopefully there'll
1:05.3	be lots of ideas about what we're going to do over the next four years, because, you know, we've
1:09.7	just had these elections, and in many ways the elections doesn't really change anything. But I think at least
1:15.9	it'll give us a good space these next couple months to reconsider our politics, our activity,
1:23.1	you know, our view of what's happening globally, what's happening in our own lives,
1:27.3	and think about what we're going to do as people who don't just want to be depressed nihilists saying that we're fucked.
1:33.9	Nothing wrong with that. If that's how you feel, but we don't necessarily have to feel that way.
1:38.2	And that's why I put up these images of January 20th, 2017. This was this massive black block in DC for Trump's first inauguration.
1:47.4	I think right about now they're getting kind of kettled and owned, but besides that part, there
1:52.3	were riots on K Street, like until sundown. So it was an exciting day. It was, you know,
1:58.2	the next day was the women's march in DC and nationally, where millions of women and their allies came to the streets, vowing to fight, you know, against Trump's right-wing patriarchal agenda.
2:09.2	And there was that feeling of like, this is going to be four years of real struggle.
	...

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