Millennials Are Killing Capitalism

In this episode we are joined by Emmaia Gelman, author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the ADL as a Cold War neoconservative institution. Gelman excavates the Anti-Defamation League's origins as a white, settler colonial institution founded by German-Jewish elites—not to combat antisemitism broadly, but to manage class respectability and suppress Eastern European Jewish immigrant socialists whom they viewed as a racial and social threat. 
Gelman looks back at how early Jewish settlers had built fortunes through participation in 19th-century US territorial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and slavery's economic system, understanding themselves as white Europeans racially distinct from the "vermin" arriving from the Pale of Settlement. The ADL and its predecessor, the American Jewish Committee (founded 1906), operated as Progressive Era eugenicist charities designed to "correct and fix" rather than support self-determination, preemptively capturing Jewish political identity to prevent autonomous radical organizing.
Gelman traces how the ADL evolved from an instrument of McCarthyite purges—coordinating mass firings of Jewish leftists in 1951, offering its services to McCarthy committee members, and abandoning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to execution while denying antisemitism played any role in their prosecution (the judge who sentenced them sat on the ADL's Civil Rights Committee)—into a key architect of Cold War anti-communism and neoconservative "democracy promotion." The organization attacked Arab League representatives speaking about Zionist violence in Palestine as early as 1946, treating Palestinian and Arab organizing as "foreign insurgency" while framing Jewish fundraising for Israeli settlement as natural civic participation. After Israel's 1967 military victory, the ADL strategically re-racialized Jews as non-white within the framework of race liberalism, allowing it to cast Israeli militarism as defensive racial liberation and Arab calls for refugee return as antisemitic rather than anti-colonial. This racial pivot occurred precisely as European Jews had achieved economic whiteness through the GI Bill, suburbanization, and the collapse of university quotas—benefits systematically denied to Black populations through redlining.
Emmaia Gelman is the author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League as a Cold War neoconservative institution (UC Press, 2026) and co-editor of The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader (Pluto Press, 2026). She co-hosts the podcast Unpacking Zionism. Emmaia is co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City.
She is the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions in Palestine and transnational contexts. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as levers in surveillance, "anti-terror", and war. Her teaching spans academic and community spaces.
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This conversation was hosted by Josh Briond, and edited and produced by Josh and Jared. The introduction is provided by Aminta Zea (website/IG) and as always the music is provided by Televangel.

In this episode, Nihal El Aasar returns to this podcast to discuss the competing progressive alternatives in the Arab world prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. Arab attempts to join capitalist systems were obstructed by British and Zionist colonial power, leading to the maintenance of a hegemonic state. We also reference the Union of Arab States and the role of the Zionist entity in hindering regional development. Gamal Abdel Nasser and other leaders in Egypt attempted to create a sovereign economic and political space through nationalist projects. This was actively resisted by Western powers and seen as a threat to imperialist interests. The theory of dependency, as developed by Samir Amin, highlights how underdevelopment in the global South is the result of the expansion of global capital. Nihal argues that while Nasser's project was popular and supported by the masses, his distrust in popular participation and repressive actions against intellectuals helped prevent the project from fully being actualized.
The formation of Israel was intertwined with Western efforts to manage the political future of the so-called Middle Eastern region. Israel has hindered the Arab modernization project and has negatively affected the surrounding countries. We discuss how Israel exists in the region to halt the potential of the Arab people as a whole. This is done through repression, impoverishment, and preventing economic prosperity. The U.S. interests in extraction and controlling resources in the region also play a role in this. Apart from that, we meditate on Egypt's early 20th century role as a leader in the Arab world and the expectations placed on its military and economy for stability and development being largely shaped by its history of conflict with Israel and the continued presence of Zionism in the region. The military's control of the economy, rise of religious fundamentalism, and prevalence of conspiracy theories can all be traced back to this relationship.
Additionally, Egypt's 20th century development was and continued to be hindered by both structural pressures from outside and its own struggle with overextension as a newly decolonized nation. The working class in Egypt consisted mainly of peasants who were oppressed under the Egyptian monarchy. Land reforms were necessary for progress and industrialization was slowly taking place. From the start, Egyptian nationalism was formed in opposition to Zionism. Nasser faced challenges from the US and its allies and had to build up the Egyptian military in response. We discuss how the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the creation of the United Arab Republic were unprecedented events, but internal struggles and external interference ultimately led to its downfall.

The Gulf monarchies have also been deeply intertwined with imperial and capitalist interests since their founding, making them a natural opposition to Arab socialist and progressive projects. The 1973 oil embargo, El Aasar argues, was the last major act of Arab unity but was not an altruistic act of solidarity. The embargo affirmed the importance of the petrodollar for the US and was influential in bringing about the Camp David Accords, which aimed to consolidate the petrodollar and move Egypt fully from the Soviet camp to that of the United States.

We meditate on the significance of Camp David and the 1978 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, arguing that it represents a betrayal of Egyptian sovereignty and a move towards neoliberalism and repression. She also highlights how this has instilled a defeatist mindset in Egyptians and led to ongoing struggles with poverty and domestic warfare. She argues that the current regime in Egypt is a continuation of the "Camp David Republic" and that the promised benefits of peace, such as prosperity and political openness, have been left unfulfilled.
 
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Nihal is an Egyptian  writer, researcher, political analyst, radio host and DJ. She has written about politics, political economy, culture, literature and music in several publications including The Baffler, The Transnational Institute, Verso, Jacobin, Tribune, Parapraxis, Mundial, Art Review, The Wire, Protean, Novara media, and others, as well as authoring a book chapter about Egyptian political economy and consulting on related issues.

"The Condition for Freedom Is for the Egyptian Masses to Take to the Streets"Egypt's Centrality in the Struggle for Palestine" by Nihal El Aasar
 
Episode artwork includes an artificially colorized version of this photo:
"Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin acknowledge applause during a Joint Session of Congress in which President Jimmy Carter announced the results of the Camp David Accords."
full credit information here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sadat_and_Begin_clean3.jpg

In this episode we are joined by Rob Arcand to discuss his work on Spotify, streaming, and the financialization of culture. We begin with Spotify's emergence as a supposed democratizing force for working musicians, even as its model relied on surveillance and data-trawling. We explore how this data-driven promise — that listener analytics could be leveraged for touring and merch — reshaped the relationship between artists and audiences, often in ways that reinforced precarity rather than alleviated it.
From there, we turn to Arcand's comparison of Spotify's ambitions to Uber and Airbnb, situating streaming within the broader logic of platform capitalism. We discuss how corporate consolidation has shaped the power dynamics of the music industry over the past several decades, and how subscription and ad-supported services emerged from a moment of crisis as neoliberal adaptations to instability.
Our conversation also examines how disenfranchisement has paradoxically opened space for new labor struggles within the culture industries, and what a more equitable path forward might look like in an industry dominated by monopoly capitalism. We trace Spotify's shift from search-centric functionality to playlist curation, its "Music for every moment" strategy, and its rebranding from a "celestial jukebox" into lifestyle accessories for individual listeners.
Arcand helps us unpack Spotify's editorial logic — from "chill" playlists to hyperpop — and how mood-based categorization blurs the boundaries between artistic expression, consumer mood management, and financialized cultural assets. We consider the assimilation of subcultural genres into profit-seeking structures, the emergence of "Spotifycore," and the recalibration of genre itself for algorithmic infrastructures.
Rob is a writer, editor, web developer, and PhD candidate at McGill University in Montreal. He's a former staffer at Pitchfork and SPIN, and has published work on music, visual art, books, film, and technology with outlets like n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum, Art in America, The Nation, The Fader, Rolling Stone, Vice, and more. Twitter: @robarcand
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The Same Stream Twice by Rob Arcand

In this episode, we sit down with Gerald Perreira, longtime Guyanese anti-imperialist activist, educator, and organizer, for a conversation on Cuba, U.S. power, and the unfinished struggle for true independence in the Caribbean and broader Global South.

We unpack the tightening of U.S. pressure on Cuba, including the attack on Cuban medical brigades across the region, and examine why Guyana's recent political decisions represent a historic betrayal of transnational solidarity. From Cuba's lifesaving medical internationalism and its decisive role in defeating apartheid forces in Angola and South Africa, to the erosion of Caribbean sovereignty under neoliberalism, we trace the deeper structures of neocolonialism and empire.

Perreira situates today's crises within a broader historical arc: the legacy of plantation economies, the transformation of postcolonial elites into managers of foreign interests, the limits of liberal democracy, and the rise of a global axis of resistance.

Gerald A. Perreira is a liberation theologian, educator and political activist. He is chairperson of Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP) based in Guyana, a member of the Governing  Council of the Global Pan African Movement (Harare) and an executive member of the Caribbean Pan-African Network (CPAN). He lived in the Libyan Jamahiriya for many years and was a founding member of the World Mathaba. He can be reached at mojadi94(at)gmail(dot)com.
 
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Guyana: A Pawn of US Imperialism
 
https://www.ovpguyana.org/

In this episode, we are joined by Idris Robinson to unpack his book, The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer, a searing meditation on race, revolt, civil war, and the psychic wreckage of American life.
Reflecting on the 2020 uprisings, Robinson challenges the myth of Black leadership, reframes racial violence through the lens of a "morbid libidinal economy," and argues that revolution is as much a transformation of the human spirit as it is a political event. Drawing on the legacies of Black insurgency, Robinson interrogates liberalism, identity politics, and the hollowing out of American cities—while pondering on what it would take to make life human again in a society built to dehumanize. He argues that racial violence, especially spectacular acts of white supremacist brutality. cannot be adequately explained by frameworks like identity politics, intersectionality, or privilege theory. Instead, these acts emerge from repressed desires and psychic forces intrinsic to white supremacy. The 2020 uprisings, in this sense, exposed both emancipatory and repressive violence rooted in these deeper libidinal dynamics.

Robinson also reflects on his personal trajectory, from Occupy Wall Street through development as a theorist, where he grounds his meditation on revolt as humanizing forces. He argues that American capitalism produces profound isolation, psychic damage, and undead social beings, hollowed out by commodification. Uprisings momentarily restore humanity by breaking atomization and re‑creating collective meaning.
 
On strategy, Robinson challenges traditional socialist models of seizing the "means of production," arguing instead that modern revolt must focus on logistics and infrastructure: transport hubs, electrical grids, supply chains, and urban circulation. He emphasizes blockades, control of space, and understanding the built environment as key to sustaining insurrection in a post‑industrial economy. We devote substantial attention to Robinson's provocative argument that civil war is not a future possibility but a current condition in the United States. Drawing on classical theory, Black radical thought, and historical analogy, he frames civil war as the collision of public (political) and private (libidinal, racial, familial) spheres. While acknowledging its violence and trauma, Robinson argues that fracture and decentralization may paradoxically make revolutionary transformation more achievable, pointing to Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War as the most emancipatory period in American history.

Idris Robinson is a philosopher from the New York hinterlands. For over a decade, he has written extensively on crisis and revolt. He is the author of The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer (MIT Press / Semiotext(e)) and Escritos desde la tierra baldía (Irrupción Ediciones). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, where he is completing a monograph-length study on the progression of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy. He is currently undergoing a legal battle with TSU after the school violated his constitutional rights by ending his contract after he gave an off-campus Pro-Palestine talk. 
 
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Links:


Order the book from Massive Bookshop
 
IdrisRobinson.me 
 
About Idris Robinson's case against Texas State University
 
Support Idris Robinson's Legal Fund