Ashok Kumar 🇵🇸
Political Economist | Dravidian Marxist | TikTok: comrade_ashok | twitter: broseph_stalin
monopsonycapitalism.com
- Calling a fight over Greenland a “world war” is idiotic. It would be a squabble over ice between dead empires and a rotting one. No brown or black bodies to use as cannon fodder this time. The only real outcome is the collapse of the Atlantic pact that’s defined the last 80 years.
- US withdraws all military forces from Iraq’s federal territory after 23 years.
- Went on LBC Topics covered: Tens of thousands without drinking water for nearly a week. Bills exploding. Public health emergencies. Renationalising water polls at 90%. The Greens are right. Starmer remains loyal to a failed privatised model and the companies that profit from it Renationalise water!
- 1/10 🧵 Worth engaging with the full Politics Theory Other episode. Richard Seymour offers a familiar critique of corruption, repression, and the exhaustion of Chavismo. These are real issues the left should not ignore.
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View full thread9/10 Several concrete claims were ignored: recognition of social reproduction, women-targeted cash transfers, Indigenous and collective land deeds, communal legal structures, and material South–South solidarity under blockade.
- 10/10 Bottom line: I’m not asking anyone to canonise Maduro or deny degeneration. I’m pushing back against a left habit of treating countries under economic warfare as failed thought experiments. Sanctions are economic warfare. Dismissing welfare under siege launders regime change.
- 7/10 That reality can coexist with programmes that prevent starvation and decommodify housing at scale. A materialist analysis has to hold both facts at once.
- 8/10 Scale matters. Under sanctions, a state branded uniquely corrupt built 4 million public homes. Britain, vastly richer and unconstrained, built almost none. If corruption explains everything there, then here the explanation is class power.
- 5/10 The issue is whether, under sanctions, oil collapse, and hyperinflation, Venezuela chose redistribution and social provisioning over IMF discipline, mass privatisation, and austerity.
- 6/10 Yes, corruption exists. But “corrupt” is not an argument that a policy had no material effect. Under blockade and import dependence, rents concentrate and opportunists thrive.
- 3/10 I was responding to an academic demand to name a single progressive left policy of the Maduro government. That is an empirical question, not a definitional one.
- 4/10 The “if pandemic income support is socialism then Boris Johnson is a socialist” line is clever but evasive. The issue isn’t whether income support exists in the abstract.
- 2/10 But his response shifts away from what my intervention was doing. I wasn’t offering a purity test for “real socialism,” or holding up Maduro’s Venezuela as a model.
- Spoke to The Independent on Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs on any country trading with Iran. It is economic warfare. This kind of erratic trade coercion raises the risk of doing business with the US, accelerates its isolation, and fuels global de-dollarisation www.independent.co.uk/news/world/m...
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- Yes 100%
- One year of Trump’s tariffs. Higher prices, global disruption, and political theatre. I unpack what happened to the US and world economy on Al Jazeera:
- Why Venezuela? Oil isn’t the whole story. Talking to L’Humanité about what’s actually at stake.
- Julia Hartley-Brewer: Why is colonialism bad? Me: “When Britain arrived in 1700s, India had 27% of global GDP. After 200 years of theft and millions starved to death, by 1947 India had 3% of global GDP, 90% living below the poverty line, a literacy rate of 17% and life expectancy of 27”
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- She’s the worst
- Just went on the BBC. The other guest was former adviser to disgraced opposition figure Juan Guaidó, brought on to launder Washington’s fallacious justifications for outright thuggery in Venezuela.
- Unlike what we’re told to believe in Britain, class isn’t an identity. It’s a relation.
- Who are the working class in Britain?
- It’s simple: the US has waged a decades-long economic war on the Venezuelan people since Hugo Chávez nationalised the oil, because Venezuela insists its natural resources belong to its people, not Chevron.
- 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
- Yemen’s blockade of the Red Sea against Israel’s genocide was the first successful naval blockade in history carried out by a force with no navy. Here’s how it happened. It’s open access: doi.org/10.1111/anti...
- Just got the new issue of BreakDown. I’ve got an essay in it on the strategic vulnerabilities and liabilities of fossil capital. Read it and the rest of the issue here: www.break-down.org/merging-to-s...
- Britain doesn’t need a cookie cutter of Zohran Mamdani. It needs politicians who serve the people, not the machine. Who’d rather lose power than lose conviction. We had that with Jeremy in 2017. We have it again with Zack Polanski. Me on LBC:
- To mark David Harvey’s 90th, Verso is releasing a collection of reflections on his remarkable body of work. They invited me to write about The Condition of Postmodernity, a book that reshaped how we think about capitalism and culture.
- I’m presenting some new work on factory machinery, gender, and social reproduction, how the rhythms of the machine rewire the rhythms of life. Historical Materialism, London Thurs Nov 6, 4:30 – 6:15.
- My dad on South Indian TV, tore into the criminal Zionist state, shredding the US empire’s lies, and hailing Iran and Yemen as the last ones with a spine for Palestine. Watch: youtu.be/jI30B0-t3Zc?...
- Great talk, great moves, 10/10, Danish marxism recommend @brosef-stalin.bsky.social
- Had an incredible time in Aarhus. Huge thanks to the Danish Society for Marxist Studies (@dkmarxsoc.bsky.social) organizing committee for the kind invitation
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- Had an incredible time in Aarhus. Huge thanks to the Danish Society for Marxist Studies (@dkmarxsoc.bsky.social) organizing committee for the kind invitation
- I wrote an extended essay on the transformation of the fossil fuel industry and the key vulnerabilities it exposes. These weaknesses are baked into the industry’s own logic of risk. In essence, every disruption matters. Here: t.co/tQvg4qDeJe
- Just a reminder: the Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions make it clear: occupied peoples have the right to resist, even with arms. An occupier has no right to defend their occupation:
- I’m running a workshop on the arms industry at the day school this weekend. If you’re in Bristol, register and come along! Here: t.co/AAT6IYyjMd
- I go on this atrocious show purely for catharsis. It’s therapeutic to yell at a genocide apologist:
- Another part:
- Julia Hartley-Brewer and Benjamin Butterworth discuss me post interview “Ashok and I were at London School of Economics together and he was always talking about Palestine and hating Israel then” Yes, because it didn’t start on October 7
- Six months ago, I was invited to serve as an expert witness at the public hearing on Karnataka’s landmark gig workers bill, which has now passed. The law extends protections to over two million gig workers in the state. An important step, though it doesn’t go far enough
- Article: www.outlookindia.com/national/new...
- Pre-orders are now up for the newest issue of The Break-Down. I have an essay in there on fossil fuel infrastructure and disruption www.break-down.org
- The people of Gaza live and chant “If they uproot one tree, we will plant ten in its place” as the zombie death cult approaches
- Accusations of antisemitism against Zarah and Jeremy don’t have the mileage they did in 2019. Back then, the press ran stories about Corbyn mispronouncing a pedophile’s name. Epstein. Ep-shtine. The real crime wasn’t sex trafficking, it was the wrong vowel Me for BreakThrough News:
- The choice we have in the new left party is simple: democracy or bureaucracy. Its founding conference must have one-member-one-vote, directly elected leadership, and a constitution written by members. If not, we risk repeating the failures of Labourism. Me for BreakThrough News:
- Spoke with Matt Myers for Jacobin about his new book The Halted March of the European Left, asking why the left’s surge stalled and what lessons it offers for today jacobin.com/2025/08/euro...
- I’ll be speaking at the Stop the War meeting at TUC Conference, September 9 in Brighton. If you’re there, come through
- 6 months ago, I was invited to serve as an expert witness during a hearing of this bill. Today, it’s passed! a big win for gig workers
- Half a million in! You’re not? Fix it: yourparty.uk
- France “recognising” Palestine is empty symbolism while they arm, fund, and enable Israel’s campaign of extermination. Words mean nothing without full sanctions. Now.
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- Full debate: x.com/broseph_stal...
