Bonus Episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/ep8-bonus-flawed-103879168
Or via apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cassandra-voices-podcast/id1728086643
In our latest Podcast Frank Armstrong interviews Toby Green, Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College, London and the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019).
Toby Green also wrote, along with Thomas Fazi, The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (2023). This latter work engages with the impact of lockdowns on African countries which were, for the most part, unaffected by the disease itself.
In this podcast, Green discusses the application, more widely, of a form of authoritarian capitalism that lingers to this day, with the onset of perma-crises, continued restrictions on civil rights, and the ascendancy of techno-billionaires.
He also points to an intellectual failure on the part of many on the left, who failed to recognise there were two versions of accumulation in conflict, one representing traditional forms of small businesses reliant on in-person contact, the other the monopolies which digital capitalism has favoured and whose power is now far, far greater.
Frank Armstrong previously reviewed The Covid Consensus for Cassandra Voices.
The track which features in this episode is Kurfewture (2021) by Shakalak: