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Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver,

and I'm temporarily broadcasting from Santiago de Chile.

As Marx wrote in the 18th Broomer of Louis Bonaparte, humans make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already,

given and transmitted from the past. Their tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare

on the brains of the living. A nightmare indeed. But what's so remarkable about right now

is that decades, if not centuries, of built-up

contradictions of American political economy have become impossible to provisionally resolve.

The old order remains in place, but it has lost its trappings of naturalness, inevitability,

and permanence.

...