Novara FM – Novara Media Podcasts

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” – th...

In the wake of another report depicting the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic, the idea of reform seems increasingly futile. Can the police ever be held to account? This week on Novara FM, we’re republishing James Butler’s conversation with Mark Neocleous, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University. Through his writing o...

What was the Enlightenment? A time of wigs, books and noble thoughts? Or was it a little more swashbuckling than that, and perhaps wearing an eye patch? The final book by David Graeber is concerned with pirates and their lives: nasty, brutish and short, for sure – but also free and strikingly egalitarian. In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, the late anarchist and anthropologist argues...

Are the police running out of excuses? Police wearing body cameras still kill unarmed Black people. Sexual violence remains rife after inquiries and exposés. As reforms fail, the case for much more than piecemeal change builds. But at the same time, capitalism seems to have run out of other ways to maintain social control. Real wages are falling, public services are collapsing and environmental ca...

The work that keeps us clean, fed, clothed and ready to go to work each day is known as social reproduction. Without this unwaged labour, capitalism would collapse. Yet the daily drudgery of cooking, cleaning and raising children is underpinned by our most sincere expressions of love and care. Writer and organiser Alva Gotby refers to this chimerical condition as “emotional reproduction&#822...

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.

What if all of Britain is stolen goods? In the 1970s and 80s, a series of Acts of Parliament defined who did and who didn’t count as a citizen. ‘The Law of Patriality’ might sound like an obscure detail in a dusty tome, but, argues legal scholar Nadine El-Enany, it’s fundamental to modern Britain. These laws stopped the racialised masses who had produced the wealth of the E...

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-ho...

The Aids Coalition To Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP, is one of the most effective social movements in American history. New York City author and activist Sarah Schulman has returned many times to the lessons and provocations of this radically decentralised, unapologetically confrontational direct action group, which was founded in 1987 with one goal: to end the Aids crisis. Yet through her...

The welfare state was founded in the postwar period, seemingly as payment for a profound national sacrifice. Strengthening it has been a goal of the left for decades. The argument is as simple as it is radical: the wealth of the nation must be shared among its people. But where did that wealth come from? Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Su...

What is identity politics? Recent definitions have strayed some distance from the ideas laid out by the Black radical feminists of the Combahee River Collective. In their original 1977 statement, the Boston collective established a simple but undeniable truth: what you know depends on who you are. The problem, as American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò points out, is that the most privileged member...

In 2018, Ireland voted to repeal the 8th Amendment of its constitution, which stated that a person and the foetus living inside their body had an equal right to life. Yet the struggle around abortion is not over in Ireland, or indeed anywhere else – a fact underscored by the dramatic overturning of Roe v. Wade this year, which effectively banned abortion in half of US states. In her book Repealed:...

In October 1922, fascists came to power in the March on Rome. 25,000 Blackshirts swarmed through the streets and the King invited their leader — Benito Mussolini — to form a cabinet. Now, almost exactly a century later, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) is about to become the next Prime Minister of Italy. She has praised Mussolini in the past. This...

Are families, like prisons, obsolete? Even if we might baulk at the comparison, the question can be illuminating. To choose one’s own family was long the dream of radicals. What if, instead of those we happen to be biologically related to, we could surround ourselves with care, freely chosen and freely given? After a thirty-year pause, the confinements of the pandemic have kicked off another round...

Is colonial capitalism making us sick? From the vast outdoors to the depths of our guts, centuries of colonialism have reordered life on the planet. In its wake have come the dubious efficiencies of big agribusiness and the uneven advances of modern medicine. And our bodies have responded to this colonial condition, in many cases, with inflammation. The body’s innate short-term response to infecti...

We live in a time of short-term imperatives and long-term consequences for our actions, with just a few years left to avert climate catastrophe but a planet transformed for millennia if we fail. Philosopher Roman Krznaric’s work reflects on these vast timescales and on our place within them. How can we navigate the tension between the need for immediate action and the long view of all human life?...

Everyone who’s ever been to a protest in the UK knows it: the police are not there as neutral facilitators of your democratic rights, but to squeeze the joy out of protest and make it invisible to those in power. Recently, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act has given the police even more power to restrict protests they deem disruptive, or even just noisy. To understand how we got here, f...

Even as police budgets and powers have expanded, ordinary workers are being called to carry out more and more policing functions themselves. Whether as an assistant manager in a McDonald’s or as a teacher or doctor, workers are expected to take on extra ‘guard duty’ in addition to their usual tasks, keeping watch for their bosses and capital. What does this tendency have to do with the declining p...

We’re entering an era of climate disaster and mass extinction, yet most of the proposed solutions to our predicament amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. What we need, propose environmental scholars Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese, is a totally different vision of life on Earth. Joining Aaron Bastani, the authors of Half-Earth Socialism explain why our current market-based app...

We’re reaching an eschatological tipping point, says Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat. Can humanity turn back from the brink? Joining Eleanor Penny on NovaraFM, the author of After The Apocalypse explains how the end of the world has been normalised and commodified. What can we do to break the spell of end-times nihilism, “ruin porn” and war as entertainment? Touching on the Bi...

At the beginning of the century, as Russia’s economy stabilised under Vladimir Putin, a once-great power began to engage in military conflicts abroad: Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and now in 2022, the invasion of Ukraine. This renewed assertiveness and expansionism is the product of more than just one irascible leader, however. Russia’s political players and networks have become deeply influen...

At a time when galleries and museums are caught in the middle of a culture war about representations of history, Nathalie Olah’s short volume Class – recently published as part of the Tate’s Look Again book series – offers a fresh take on the relationship between “great” art and systems of power. In conversation with Eleanor Penny, the author of Steal As Much As You Can exp...

Is there a politics of sex? One hundred years of feminist thought has shown that this question can give us a close-up view on the issues that shape our lives: power, equality, ownership, justice and the way we organise our societies. As part of Doing It Right: Sex on the Left, Novara Media’s exploration of the pains and pleasures of sex, James Butler heads to Oxford to meet Amia Srinivasan,...

Missing from a lot of leftist discussions of sex work are sex workers themselves. When it comes to developing a radical politic of sex work, this invisibility makes it difficult to adhere to the principle of “nothing about us, without us.” So for this episode of #NovaraFM, we decided to do something at once out-of-the-ordinary and unremarkable: to have a discussion with sex workers about sex work....

With the arrival of armed drones and unmanned vehicles, the world has entered a new era of warfare, one which purports to be more humane. But what if our efforts to make war more ethical – without torture, war crimes or vast casualties – have led us into an age of endless war? Yale law professor Samuel Moyn talks to Aaron Bastani about “humane war” and its integral role in maintaining...