A World to Win: Monopsony Capitalism w/ Ashok Kumar
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2021
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Grace speaks with Ashok Kumar, senior lecturer of political economy at Birkbeck and author of Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age.
They discuss how global value chains have been reshaped under monopsony capitalism, how these changes have affected the power of workers all over the world, and how the Covid-19 pandemic will impact these trends.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to a world to win a podcast from Tribune magazine. I'm Grace Blakely bringing |
| 0:17.4 | you your weekly dose of socialist news theory and action from around the world. This week |
| 0:22.3 | I speak to Ashok Kumar, Senior Lecturer of Political Economy at Birkbeck and also of |
| 0:27.2 | monopsony capitalism, power and production in the twilight of the sweatshirt age. We discuss how |
| 0:32.6 | global value chains have been reshaped under monopsony capitalism, how these changes have affected |
| 0:37.3 | the power of workers all over the world, and how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact these trends. |
| 0:43.6 | Thank you as always to our amazing patrons you make the show possible. If you want access to |
| 0:47.4 | the full hour long episode of this show, as well as full-length interviews with previous guests |
| 0:51.0 | like Naomi Klein and Dr Cornel West, supporters at patreon at patreon.com slash a world to win pot. |
| 0:56.9 | There's a link in the description. If you want to support the show in another way, please give |
| 1:00.3 | us a rating on iTunes, keep us up in the charts, and share your favourite episodes on social media, |
| 1:04.4 | tagging at a world to win pot on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Another big thank you to Reverend |
| 1:09.8 | and the makers who have let us use their track heavyweight champion of the world as our intro and |
| 1:13.1 | outro music. And now here is Ashok Kumar to tell us what monopsony capitalism really is. |
| 1:19.8 | Hello Ashok Kumar, and thank you so much for joining me on this episode of a world to win. How |
| 1:28.4 | are you doing today? I'm good. How are you doing? Yeah, good. Thank you. So we are going to talk today |
| 1:33.7 | about your book monopsony capitalism, power and production in the twilight of the sweatshop age, |
| 1:39.3 | which I loved, and I would really recommend to all our listeners, and which recently I think |
| 1:45.1 | won an award, right? What was the award? Yeah, I won the Paul Sweezy Marxist book of the year |
| 1:53.1 | from the American Sociological Association, which I was, I mean, I was very happy about, particularly |
| 1:58.4 | because obviously winning an award feels very validating, and you're like, you know, an academic |
| 2:03.5 | publishing, you're like, you know, we're not like, it's not flying off the shelves. The only way |
... |
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