American Seances

Imagining Thucydides returned to analyze the Russia–Ukraine war, this episode reads the conflict through the lens of fear, honor, and power. It traces how psychological motives drive states, from Russia's insecurity and Ukraine's resolve to America's strategic dilemmas.The discussion highlights recurring patterns: moral rhetoric masking self-interest, alliances that entangle rather than protect, and the danger of hubris that leads great powers into costly overreach.Ultimately the episode argues for realist caution — supporting deterrence and diplomacy without seeking to remake world order — and warns that ancient instincts still shape modern catastrophe.

Seen through Marx’s lens, SNAP isn’t just welfare—it's a structural bandage that keeps millions of low-wage workers alive so the capitalist machine can keep extracting profit. The program feeds about 42 million Americans, many employed in sectors that pay subsistence wages, effectively acting as an indirect wage subsidy funded by taxpayers.Marx would argue SNAP alleviates suffering but leaves the cause—systemic wage suppression—untouched. Political rhetoric and work requirements shift blame to individuals and coerce labor while protecting profits, making the program a necessary but partial and politically contested fix.

Imagining Karl Marx in 21st-century America, this episode argues that record stock market highs reveal capitalism's drift into "fictitious capital"—wealth detached from real labor, driven by speculation, algorithms, and state support.It examines how market gains concentrate wealth, mask stagnant wages and housing crises, bind workers to the fortunes of capital through retirement schemes, and serve as a warning of deeper systemic contradictions and a looming crisis.

This episode reads Jeff Bezos and Amazon through Karl Marx's theories, arguing that Bezos exemplifies capitalism's dynamics rather than individual genius.It explores alienation in warehouses, commodity fetishism that turns collective labor into a lone visionary, monopoly and accumulation, the role of surveillance and algorithmic control, and spacefaring ambitions as capitalist expansion.Ultimately, the episode suggests Marx would see Bezos as the inevitable, concentrated expression of capitalism’s power, contradictions, and growing fragility.

This episode applies Karl Marx's analysis to the climate crisis, arguing that capitalism's drive for endless accumulation turned nature into an input and created the planetary-scale emergency we face today.It unpacks concepts like the metabolic rift, ideological denial, and class-based responsibility, critiques market-based fixes like offsets and green capitalism, and explains why Marx would call the crisis the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.The episode concludes by presenting Marx's alternative: collective control and democratic planning of production and energy to align social needs with ecological limits.