Hot & Bothered Podcast: A New Commonwealth, with Jedediah Britton-Purdy

On this week’s show, Kate and Daniel talk to Jedediah about his vision of commonwealth politics; the challenges of organizing in a socially distanced world; where the law fits in; and whether coming together also means naming new enemies.

Jedediah Britton-Purdy (Yale University/ Youtube)

From crocus blooms to interstates, the material world we live in sets the conditions for our politics. What would it take to establish collective, democratic rule over the material terms of our shared lives? How can we, as an “infrastructure species,” transform both our physical and political infrastructures—and even ourselves in the process? And how can we build an ecosocialism that can win in the months and years ahead?

These are some of the questions guiding the work of Jedediah Britton-Purdy, professor of law at Columbia Law School and author, most recently, of This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth and After Nature. On this week’s show, Kate and Daniel talk to Jedediah about his vision of commonwealth politics; the challenges of organizing in a socially distanced world; where the law fits in; and whether coming together also means naming new enemies.

Kate also suffers through Planet of the Humans so you don’t have to, and Daniel tells us why we should be worried about Joe Biden’s commitment to a green stimulus.

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If you like the episode and want to hear more from Kate and Daniel, sign up as a monthly member at patreon.com/hotbotheredclimate today. It’s thanks to those who are able to contribute that we’re able to make the podcast free for anyone to listen to.

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Further reading

Kate: The Important Debate Planet of the Humans Misses (The New Republic)

Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans gets clean energy and climate activism terribly wrong (Leah Stokes, Vox)

How did Michael Moore become a hero to climate deniers and the far right? (George Monbiot, The Guardian)

Biden Camp Finds Selling Point in Ailing Economy: His Work on 2009 Recovery (Glenn Thrush, New York Times)

Kate: The Democrats Screwed Up (The New Republic)

Bernie Sanders’s Campaign Was Trying to Save American Democracy (Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Jacobin)

Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis (Jedediah Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski & K. Sabeel Rahman, Yale Law Journal)

Law and Political Economy Blog

Connecting the Dots Between Mass Incarceration, Health Inequity, and Climate Change (Seth J. Prins and Brett Story, American Journal of Public Health)