Punkonomics (@DearBalak)

I’m grateful to my good buddy Jay Gordon who arranged this interview (sadly he’s working and cannot join us).

George Ciccariello-Maher has emerged as probably the best expert on Venezuelan political-economy over the past few years. I’m in the middle of his brilliant 1st book on the history of revolutionary movements in Venezuela entitled We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution — I learn something fascinating with every page (Kindle edition).

Find out more about his prolific work here.

George Ciccariello-Maher is a writer, radical political theorist, and currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He has taught radical theory and politics at Drexel, U.C. Berkeley, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas. He holds a B.A. in Government and Economics from St. Lawrence University, a B.A. Hons. and M.A. in Social and Political Sciences from St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from U.C. Berkeley.

He ‘s working on a second book that is a theoretical analysis of violence and revolutionary identity in French syndicalist Georges Sorel, Black revolutionary Frantz Fanon, and Latin American philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel entitled Decolonizing Dialectics.

His dispatches have appeared in Counterpunch, MR Zine, ZNet, Venezuela Analysis, Alternet, Warscapes Magazine, History Workshop Online, MediaLeft, The SF Bayview, and Wiretap Magazine, and he has written op-eds for Fox News Latino and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His academic articles have appeared or are forthcoming inTheory & Event, Latin American Perspectives, Contemporary Political Theory, Qui Parle, Monthly Review, Radical Philosophy Review, Listening, Journal of Black Studies, Human Architecture, and The Commoner, as well as numerous edited volumes.

He appears and is quoted frequently in the media on subjects ranging from Venezuelan politics to the Occupy Movement, notably Al Jazeera, Fox News Live, CNN Español, Russia Today, National Public Radio, Telemundo, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Brazil’s Gazeta do Povo and Correio Braziliense.

He is an avid translator of Latin American decolonial theory, having translated several books and dozens of articles by thinkers like Enrique Dussel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Anibal Quijano, and Santiago Castro-Gomez, among others.