Episode
Live! Imperial End Times: The Geopolitics of Class War in a Post-American World | Ep. 303
- Podcast
- The Un-Diplomatic Podcast
- Published
- May 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3744
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.undiplomaticpodcast.com/episodes/303-jKu_eR6D
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Summary
This episode is a live public lecture to the New Zealand Fabian Society in Wellington. Our governments are clinging to outdated mental maps of the world—maps that obscure the pain and profit associated with their foreign-policy choices. In this public talk, Dr. Van Jackson diagnoses our moment of global “polycrisis” as a crisis of capitalism anchored to a single declining hegemon. The United States has repudiated its former global role; the world is becoming more multipolar; and prolonged economic stagnation is plaguing the global North and South to varying degrees. These forces are propelling modern national states toward “primitive accumulation”—using state power to hoard both wealth and security at the expense of the working classes. Linking America’s permanent war economy to the rentier economies of wealthy nations like New Zealand, Jackson argues that imperialist statecraft is becoming a more common mode of geopolitics—a mode that benefits oligarchs and turns the institutions of “national security” against us all. Refusing this dystopian trajectory means struggling to retain our shared humanity and construct a global order without empire.