Emancipations Podcast

I'm joined by Gabriel Delacoste to discuss the history of socialist and populist movements across Latin America, and what lessons they offer to the American left as we experience a resurgence of socialism. We analyze the history of Peronism and the thought of Ernesto Laclau, the rise and fall of the recent Chilean left movement led by Gabriel Boric, and we discuss how international solidarity can be forged to address the belligerent imperialism of the Trump administration across Latin America.

Read my recent written interview with Delacoste on "Chile’s Road from Revolt to Reaction: An Autopsy of the Boric Government" published with Cosmonaut: https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/09/chiles-road-from-revolt-to-reaction-an-autopsy-of-the-boric-government

Gabriel Delacoste is a political scientist, researcher, author, and journalist. He is a prominent left-wing intellectual voice in Uruguay. He has written for a range of press outlets and worked extensively with the renowned Uruguayan weekly Semanario Brecha. He is also a frequent contributor to la diaria, where he writes on politics and contemporary affairs. Delacoste is the author of El misterio de Alberto Methol Ferré, a book examining the complex and influential intellectual trajectory of the Uruguayan political figure Alberto Methol Ferré. He also co-authored Uruguay en el siglo incierto with Amparo Menéndez-Carrión and Rodrigo Alonso, a book that considers global geopolitical trends and their implications for Uruguay’s possible futures.

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A discussion on the new book The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism by Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn featuring guests Lisa McKenzie, Benjamin Studebaker and Mike Macnair.

In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that “the people” can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver.

Order the book now: https://www.revolpress.com/people-not-one 

Guest Bios:

Lisa McKenzie is a senior lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire whose work relates to class inequality, social justice, and British working class culture.

Mike Macnair is a British Marxist and the author of the book Revolutionary Strategy (2008) and is currently working on a second edition.

Benjamin Studebaker is an American political theorist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut (Palgrave, 2023) and Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (Edinburgh University Press).

I'm joined by Nathan Gorelick to discuss his new book, The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious. In this discussion we explore how eighteenth-century literature discloses a dimension of subjectivity that exceeds the political and philosophical categories of the Enlightenment, opening a space where the unconscious resists ideological closure. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Gorelick argues that the great literary works of the period are not simply reflections of Enlightenment thought but sites where its contradictions and limits become legible.

Our discussion ranges across Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau's Emile, de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, examining the relation between literature and the Borromean knot of the unconscious, ideology and the enlightenment. We also discuss the idea of the "literary absolute," and why literature offers a unique vantage point for understanding the relationship between ideology, desire, and the unconscious.

Purchase The Unwritten Enlightenment with promo code NUP2024 for a 25% discount: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810146761/the-unwritten-enlightenment 

Nathan Gorelick teaches in the Department of English and the First-Year Experience Program at Barnard College. His research focuses on the intersections of eighteenth-century literature, Enlightenment philosophy, psychoanalysis, and ideology critique. He is the author of The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious (Northwestern University Press, 2024), which argues that eighteenth-century literature persistently subverts the dominant philosophical and political formations of its age. His current projects include Semiotics of Ruination, a study of literary and philosophical responses to catastrophe from colonialism to the present, and a long-term investigation into the relationship between psychedelic drugs and the Freudian tradition.

Gorelick has also published widely on Continental philosophy, the Haitian Revolution, Islamophobia, ecological collapse, and psychoanalysis. He is editor of Provocations Journal, has completed the six-year Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Gifric in Quebec City, and is a Candidate in the Licensed Psychoanalysis Certificate Program at the Pulsion Institute. He also serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association's Forum on Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature.

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Was Atlantic slavery a capitalist system or a pre-capitalist system? If we understand Atlantic slavery (16th - 19th centuries) as a distinct capitalist system of domination, what does this tell us about capitalism as such, and what does it tell us bout how slavery was overthrown and eventually abolished? My guest, David McNally has written a provocative and important new book entitled Slavery and Capitalism that argues enslaved people formed a modern working class whose resistance was a form of labor struggle.

We discuss the concepts of slavery as imposing a form of "social death," and how McNally understands enslaved workers as a category of labor power responsible for generating surplus value. We also revisit the legacy of Eugene Genovese, the prominent neo-Gramscian historian and the debates he raised over rebellion and cultural resistance among the enslaved in the Antebellum South. We address the importance of the historical field known as "history from below" to understand slave rebellions and the wider historical period of slavery as well as the work of WEB Du Bois and CLR James and what they contribute to our wider understanding of the history of slavery. The main thematic areas we address in this discussion include:

The new history of capitalism and its blind spot in terms of the history of slavery.

Slavery and capitalist value as Marx understood value and the wider categories in Marx's Capital.

Personhood vs. labor power--the concept of "social death" and how to understand subaltern agency.

Slave revolts, resistance and the shortcomings of Eugene Genovese's theory of paternalism, developed in his landmark book Roll, Jordan, Roll.

The concept of the "chattel proletariat" and what it implies in terms of Marxist categories of labor.

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David McNally is an activist and the NEH Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston. He was a professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Ontario from 1983 to 2018, and was chair of the university's Department of Political Science for several years. He is the author of many books and scholarly articles and the winner of the 2012 Deutscher Memorial Award and the 2012 Paul Sweezy Award. -

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#juneteenth #emancipationspodcast

I'm joined by Marxist philosopher Kaveh Boveiri to discuss the concept of totality in Hegel and Marx. The center of our conversation is Dr. Boveiri's new book Marxian Totality: Inverting Hegel to Expound Worldly Matters. We also address the war on Iran and how the Iranian left is responding to US and Israel imperialism.

We begin by addressing the misconceptions of totality in atomistic rationalism and organicist conceptions before moving to a discussion on Hegel's concept of totality from the Science of Logic, Lukács's idea of totality in History and Class Consciousness, and we introduce the thought of Karel Kosík and his concept of concrete totality. We also discuss how Marx and Engels theorize totality from The German Ideology, Capital to the Grundrisse.

To learn more about getting a copy of Marxian Totality, please visit https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2685-marxian-totality 

Kaveh Boveiri is an instructor and researcher in the Sociology department at the Université de Montréal (UdeM), where he previously earned his PhD in philosophy. He is also a researcher for the UNESCO Chair in the Philosophical Foundations of Justice and Democratic Society at UQAM. 

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