Imagine you had a few million ill-gotten pounds, rubles or dollars. Where would you stash it? You'd need to make sure no one knew it was yours, or where you'd nabbed it from. It turns out that the best place in the world for these money-stashing services is the UK. Oligarchs from all over the world use British financial services, overseas territories and even tube stations to hide their wealth.

Ash meets Oliver Bullough, author of Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read – how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals.

Novara Audio: Radio For A Different Politics

Downstream: How to Hide a Billion Pounds w/ Oliver Bullough

After the 2008 financial crisis, a vast number of people were booted from the formal labour market. Many of them ended up in the gig economy: Uber, Deliveroo, Fiverr. Their exploitation at the hands of these platforms is well known, but often overlooked are the processes of racialisation that contribute to this reorganisation of labour power.

In this episode, Eleanor Penny talks to TyskySour co-host Dalia Gebrial about her PhD research into what she terms 'racial platform capitalism'. Looking at Uber drivers and nannies in particular, Dalia explains how 'the racial fix' is used to justify the surveillance and punishment of a disposable workforce, and how Britain's imperial past has produced a lineage of exploitation stretching 'from plantation to platform'.

Dalia's paper, 'Racial platform capitalism: Empire, migration and the making of Uber in London', is available to read online at Sage Journals.

Novara FM: From Plantation to Platform w/ Dalia Gebrial

As Wales crash out of the World Cup after defeat against England, Keir Milburn and Tom Williams question their dedication to international football. After all, how can you support a national team if you don't believe in borders?

On the third episode of Pro Revolution Soccer, Keir and Tom are joined by writer and broadcaster David Goldblatt, author of acclaimed football history tome The Ball Is Round, to discuss football as a national culture. Is cheering for England inherently jingoistic? Or can football be the bedrock of a popular progressive identity – one that no longer feels the need to mention the war when England play Germany? David explores the political potential of the current squad and reflects on the varied responses to Qatar '22 around the world.

Pro Revolution Soccer is out every Friday until the World Cup final.

Produced by Chal Ravens. Music by Matt Huxley. Design by Pietro Garrone.

Pro Revolution Soccer Ep 3: Should You Support Your National Team?

What is it about Twitter that turns us into such objectionable creatures? What has social media done to the language we use and the way we interact with each other? Ash Sarkar talks to Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine, about the state of social media: tweets, memes, grief trolling, outrage porn, duckface, Spidermen and Jorts the Cat. Could our urge to tweet be diverted towards a more politically useful kind of writing?

Downstream: Twitter's Toxic Downfall w/ Richard Seymour

Adam Smith claimed that "the propensity to truck, barter and exchange... is common to all men", but anthropologists know that this isn't the case. In fact, humans tend towards the opposite. So why do we feel compelled to give away our wealth?

Nadia, Jem and Keir unwrap the cultural and economic pressures on doing pressies in a loosely festive edition of ACFM. Talking about Santa's workshop, energy price controls and the lavish tradition of potlatch, they bring in the works of Marcel Mauss and David Graeber plus music from The Velvet Underground and Lee 'Scratch' Perry.

An ever-expanding playlist of all the music discussed on the show can be found on Spotify – just search ACFM. 
Sign up to the ACFM mailing list via the shownotes on the Novara Media website.
Looking for a gift for the ACFM fan in your life? Head to shop.novaramedia.com

Books: Emmanuel Levinas – Totality and Infinity / E.P. Thompson – The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century / Bronislaw Malinowski – Argonauts of the Western Pacific / Georges Bataille – The Accursed Share / David Graeber – On Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit / Marcel Mauss – The Gift / Jacques Derrida – The Gift of Death

Music: The Velvet Underground – The Gift / Lee 'Scratch' Perry – Merry Christmas (Happy New Year) / El Vez – Feliz Navidad / El Vez – Feliz Navi-Nada / Fox The Fox - Precious little Diamond (Shep Pettibone Remix) / Patti Smith – Free Money / Double Exposure – My Love Is Free / The Dickies – Silent Night

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS Licence Number: LE-0016481

ACFM Podcast

ACFM Trip 30 - Gifts

Cutting-edge research has recently revealed that festive movie The Muppet Christmas Carol is actually based on a book. Many are now speculating that there may even be historical context at play. But what could it be? To unwrap the politics of A Christmas Carol, Eleanor Penny is joined by James Butler, co-founder of Novara Media and a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. 

Together they discuss the hungry 1840s, deflationary economics, Scrooge's miserly capitalism and why Charles Dickens' conversion story is our most enduring ghost of Christmas past.

Happy Christmas from everyone at Novara Media!

Novara FM: A Christmas Carol w/ James Butler

Ash is joined by Novara's own Aaron Bastani, Moya Lothian-McLean, Michael Walker and James Butler to talk about what was bugging them in the year 2022.

From landlordism to normativity and a nasty turn in identity politics and from the declining fortunes of Europe to the absolute state of the discourse, the Novara team summarises the year that was and looks forward to another bumper year of fighting back.

Happy New Year!

Downstream: Novara's 2022 Roundtable Review

Peter Hitchens is something of an iconoclast. Among his colleagues on the right, the Mail on Sunday columnist stands out as a heterodox thinker – yet he’s perhaps one of the few who could be described as a genuine conservative. Aaron Bastani meets him to discuss his previous life as a Trotskyist and a Moscow correspondent, and to interrogate his provocative opinions on everything from the second world war and abortion rights to the end of the Soviet Union and why he doesn’t vote.

Downstream: Tories Don't Think w/ Peter Hitchens

The ACFM groupmind went into overdrive on last week's Trip, a wide-ranging conversation about the long and violent history of strikes. This time, Nadia, Jem and Keir take a closer look at cultural representations of worker organisation – that is to say, they sat themselves down with a huge stack of old movies and an extra-large bucket of opinions.

From blacklisted Hollywood dramas to bawdy British comedies, the gang survey nearly 100 years of strikes on screen – courtesy of directors like Danny DeVito, Sergei Eisenstein, Barbara Kopple and Boots Riley – and consider the changing public attitudes to labour and capital.

This episode contains some spoilers, so if you're not sure what happens to Billy Elliott in the end, proceed with caution...

Get bonus content from this episode and enhance your weird left experience by signing up to the ACFM newsletter: novara.media/ACFMnewsletter

Films: Strike / The Man in a White Suit / Salt of the Earth / I’m Alright Jack / The Working Class Goes To Heaven / Carry On At Your Convenience / The Rank and File / Tout Va Bien / Norma Rae / Matewan / Riff Raff / Hoffa / Billy Elliott / Made In Dagenham / The Full Monty / Pride / Sorry To Bother You

ACFM Microdose: Strikes on Screen

Adam Tooze returns to PTO to discuss the key causal factors that allowed fascism to emerge in the early twentieth century and whether conditions that would enable fascism on the interwar model exist today. We also talked about whether describing the Bolsanaros, the Le Pens and the Orbans of this world as fascist may be analytically wrong but tactically effective, and about how close the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s are to the fascist model.

Links:

Adam's chartbook post:

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-166-19222022-the-centenary

Eurotrash podcast episode:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/ep-6-sex-fascism-73970252

Adam on The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy:

https://soundcloud.com/poltheoryother/adam-tooze-on-nazi-ideology-and-the-german-war-economy

Adam on Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy:

https://soundcloud.com/poltheoryother/adam-tooze-on-shutdown-how-covid-shook-the-worlds-economy

Part one and two of Adam on Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World:

https://soundcloud.com/poltheoryother/20-adam-tooze-on-crashed-how-a-decade-of-financial-crises-changed-the-world

https://soundcloud.com/poltheoryother/23-adam-tooze-on-crashed-how-a-decade-of-financial-crises-changed-the-world-part-2

Fascist echoes w/ Adam Tooze

The world is drowning in cops. From uniformed guards in supermarkets to private security contractors in war zones, policing is increasingly being carried out by companies, not states. Who are they protecting?

William I. Robinson, professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, believes that the root of global over-policing is what he calls "surplus humanity" – the humans that capitalism no longer requires, but who must be controlled and violently repressed.

Using shocking data from his recent book, Global Police State, Robinson talks to Rivkah Brown about an out-of-control system, the stirrings of a global rebellion, and what social justice movements get wrong about cops.

Downstream: Novara's 2022 Roundtable Review

Novara Media

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