We're joined by Steve Maher, co-author with Scott Aquanno of The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock (Verso, 2024). The book argues that financialization did not hollow out the "real" economy or shrink the state. Instead, it intensified competitive discipline to maximize efficiency, profits, and the exploitation of labor, backed by an increasingly authoritarian state. That means reforming finance won't get us somewhere different. There is no postwar golden age to return to. So what do we do? Tune in to find out...

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Today we're joined by (Dr.) Danny Bessner, a professor of international studies and co-host of the American Prestige podcast, about the legacy of Cold War liberalism, its influence on US foreign policy, and what a democratic socialist approach to international affairs might entail. We dive into the contradictions of elite-driven policies, the role of class power, and the challenges faced by a potential progressive presidency in navigating global military and economic systems.

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Show Notes

We sit down with political geographer and author Matt Huber to dig into his book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso Books, 2022). Huber opens not with doom, but with a power analysis: the climate movement is losing because it's been organized around the wrong class. He breaks down how the professional-managerial class — NGOs, scientists, carbon pricing advocates — has dominated climate politics while ignoring the working class, which has both the numbers and the structural leverage to actually force change. Drawing on Marx's concept of the "hidden abode of production," Huber argues that climate responsibility is concentrated in the capitalist class that owns and profits from carbon-intensive systems — not diffused across individual consumers. The carbon footprint, after all, was a concept invented by BP.

From there we get into why degrowth is a political dead end, how the Green New Deal was co-opted by means-tested identity politics and NGO capture before it could become a genuine working-class program, and why decarbonization is fundamentally an electricity problem — one that should be led by the skilled, unionized workers who actually know how these systems work. Huber makes the case for the rank-and-file strategy, points to the UAW reform caucus and the nascent CREW inside the IBEW as proof of concept, and closes with a simple directive: stop treating climate as a single-issue movement, rebuild the labor movement, and win power first.

How We Do It is a socialist podcast focused on strategy, class power, and the political challenges facing the left today. Subscribe, share, and support the show.