Jacobin Radio

Dan just moderated a discussion in Philadelphia with Senator Sanders, along with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, scholar and frequent Dig guest Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and veteran defense lawyer and advocate Premal Dharia. Bernie came to Philly because what's happening here is extraordinarily important: it's a city where for years cops have committed abuses and engaged in corruption with near impunity, and where prosecutors long looked the other way while feeding poor young black and brown men into the present-day peculiar institution of mass incarceration. Last year, Philadelphia elected Krasner, a long-time civil rights champion who pledged to fight the to end mass incarceration, as its district attorney. And that happened for the same reason that Bernie came out of nowhere and nearly ran away with the Democratic nomination in 2016: their message tapped into and was lifted up by massive grassroots movements, representing and speaking to an emerging majority that wants transformative change.An

This is part two of Dan's interview on Hannah Arendt's notion of "the right to have rights." This episode covers a lot, including why we must fight not only to expand the democratic political community but also to deepen its power—all at a time when the nativist right is exploiting the many crises unleashed by neoliberalism and empire to erect walls and punish scapegoats. One upshot is that zombie liberalism can't be the answer, because it is precisely the liberal order that is a key source of the problem.Dan’s guests today, Stephanie DeGooyer and Astra Taylor, just wrote a book about this for Verso, called the The Right to Have Rights. This is part 2. It’s strongly suggested that you listen to part 1 first.Also: check out and support the soon-to-be-made documentary Socialism: An American Story https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/socialismmovie/socialism-an-american-storyThanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police. And Work: The Last

What are rights worth when government denies people the very right to have rights? Political theorist Hannah Arendt recognized this loss of "the right to have rights" as millions of refugees found themselves without a national home in the wake of world wars. Human rights, it became clear, proved to be an empty promise for those excluded from citizenship—the foundational right to be a member of a political community. Today, this insight remains a critical one as a record number of humans transit the globe in search of economic and physical security, and far-right nativists and establishment liberals alike scapegoat them for the chaos and precarity unleashed by neoliberalism and war. As a result, migrants are condemned to second-class citizenship or even death in the Mediterranean and desert Mexican-American borderlands.My guests today, Stephanie DeGooyer and Astra Taylor, just wrote a book about this for Verso, called the The Right to Have Rights. This is part 1. Part 2 will be posted on Thursday or Friday.Tha

James Comey is liberal America’s favorite cop and now, as a result, a bestselling author as well. Patrick Blanchfield returns to talk about his Baffler review of Comey’s new book. It’s awful, of course. But it’s bad in productively revealing ways. Comey has become an icon of the liberal fetishization of the national security state as a bulwark against Trumpism—when it fact it is that very national security state and its rampant abuses that are deeply implicated in Trump’s rise. The elevation of police as a model of duty and leadership contrasted against Trump’s vulgar monstrosities renders invisible not only why Trump won but why he is so dangerous.Here’s Patrick’s review: thebaffler.com/latest/prig-and-pig-blanchfieldThanks to Verso Books. Check out Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum versobooks.com/books/2707-revolution-in-the-air And Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite And su

It's yet the latest installment in our ongoing series on the Left and electoral politics. Dan’s guest is Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Last year, Mayor Lumumba pledged to make Jackson "the most radical city on the planet." Lumumba, who comes out of a decades-old revolutionary black nationalist movement, is serious about that. But he also faces challenges: Jackson is a majority black city which, like many such cities, has much of its wealth appropriated by its largely white suburbs. The human and infrastructural needs are enormous, and the tax base is thin. This is precisely why so many on the Left have found what's going on in Jackson to be so interesting, and why Dan was eager to invite the mayor onto the show.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite and Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And pleas

The CUNY Grad Center's Kate Doyle Griffiths on teachers’ strikes and the crisis in social reproduction. Then, Thea Riofrancos and Daniel Denvir join to discuss Yascha Mounck and zombie liberalism (their review is here).

This week on Jacobin Radio, Suzi discusses the relevance of Marx for our present moment with anthropologist and Marxist geographer David Harvey. Harvey's newest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason,explicates the core of Marx's thinking in the three volumes of Capital, and in less than 200 pages, Harvey develops those ideas so we all can use them to grasp what's going on in the capitalist economy today.

It's the latest installment in our series on the left and electoral politics. Dennis Kucinich is running a viable race for governor of Ohio; Cynthia Nixon, running with Working Families Party backing, has Cuomo truly freaked out in New York; and there are major primary fights underway in California. Most everywhere, it seems, some variant of the Left is on the move. But does the fact that a onetime business-aligned Democrat like Gavin Newsom is getting away with posing as the progressive in the California race for governor indicate that the Left hasn't yet built the institutional capacity to control the leftward surge among voters? Dan thinks so. These are among the topics he discusses with Dave Weigel, a political reporter at the Washington Post.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And Work: The Last 1,000 Years by Andrea Komlosy versobooks.com/books/2608-work. And please make a contribution to support the l

In the latest installment in our series on the Left and electoral politics, we're talking about the Democratic Socialists of America's new electoral strategy. DSA has almost overnight become a serious force on an American socialist left that has for decades lacked much in the way of serious forces. One of the major reasons the organization's membership rolls blew up, of course, was because of Bernie Sanders's historic 2016 run for president, which not only electrified huge swaths of the country but reminded the radical left that the point is to win power and to govern — and that, after years on the margins, we could do so. This was in part because many Americans were no longer afraid of the s-word: socialism. Yet there is still, for many good reasons, a lot of skepticism about electoral politics in general and the Democratic Party very much in particular, inside DSA and across the socialist left. That's the needle that the new DSA electoral-strategy document tries to thread.Dan’s guests are Renée Paradis, a c

Sean Jacobs, founder of Africa Is A Country, joins Doug to discuss Winnie Mandela’s legacy. Then, Forrest Hylton talks about Colombian politics in the run-up to May’s presidential election.

Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the second of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In part 1, we talked about a lot of things, including how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible, and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism in a decolonizing world while thwarting worker organizing. In this installment, we discuss imperialist assaults on worker struggles in Iraq and Iran, the co-optation of those struggles by nationalist elites, and how those imperialist attacks facilitated the rise of the Baathist security state.We'll also look at how the true history of the '70s oil shock undermines the conventional account, how the protection of minorities was used to legitimate imperialism, how petro-dollars fueled the global arms trade, in what sense the Iraq War has been a war for oil, and the US strategy to seek advantage throug

Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the first of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In this first episode, we talk about how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible; and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism in a decolonizing world while thwarting worker organizing. On the next show, we'll discuss a lot more, including how oil companies and Western governments made autocratic governments and conservative Islamists key partners in creating the very global order that we now find in such profound crisis. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig, where you can also check out the first edition of our new we

Imagine you walk into a warehouse where the workers are on break, and you stumble into a vigorous, nuanced discussion of Marx’s notion of surplus value, how it relates to organizing on the shop floor, and how it applies to flexible and often female labor. Then the conversation turns to Gramsci and workers' councils in Turin. This is exactly what Carolina Bank Muñozfound when she visited a warehouse in Chile to study how unions responded to Walmart’s entry into Chile. The majority of Walmart's workers in Chile are unionized, and we talk to Carolina about her book, Building Power From Below, Chilean Workers Take on Walmart,<font color="#000000">and how </font>Chilean retail and warehouse workers organized rank-and-file-led unions and win real economic gains along with respect and dignity on the job. Then Nelson Lichtenstein joins the discussion on Walmart and organizing retail workers in the US. Nelson has several books on Walmart — as the face of capitalism in the twenty-first century, transforming

It’s our 100th episode and the launch of our spring fundraising drive! Aziz Rana returns to The Dig fifteen years after the invasion of Iraq to reflect on the paucity of substantive anti-imperialist politics across much of the American left. Socialism isn’t just an internationalist politics on principle: domestic and foreign struggles are inherently linked, just as the forces we struggle against are globally intertwined — and the latter benefit from perpetuating an ideology that artificially divides the two. But for decades, a bipartisan consensus has governed foreign policy, to disastrous ends. Why, Rana asks, is there no foreign policy equivalent to the new left-wing domestic policy litmus test on single-payer health care? Check out Aziz’s n+1 article here: nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-lefts-missing-foreign-policy. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art and Where Freedom St

It’s obvious that student debt can be an excruciating financial burden. But anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom explains that it has also done a lot to make American families into plunderable financial mines, part of a larger capitalist system that individualizes blame for economic failure and forces families that can to support their children into their twenties while depleting retirement savings. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out the free e-book Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo and The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Many Americans take the existence of so-called "illegal immigrants" for granted, whatever their opinion of the matter. But illegality isn't a property of immigrants; rather, it's a creation of positive law. And we can only understand how immigrants are declared "illegal" by the government by examining this country's too-often ignored history of racist and exclusionary immigration politics. Dan’s guest today is Mae Ngai, an historian at Columbia and the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing and Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig!

Education reporter and host of Have You Heard? Jennifer Berkshire on teachers’ strikes, in West Virginia and beyond. Then, Forbes contributor Stan Collender on fiscal follies in Washington, D.C.

Suzi talks to Wagner Moura, a Brazilian actor known for his work in the Elite Squad films and the Netflix series Narcos, about the volatile political situation in Brazil, where Marielle Franco, the socialist Rio City Councillor and her driver were assassinated on March 14, sparking huge protests across Brazil. Moura also talks about the film he is directing — Marighella — about the Bahian revolutionary Marxist writer and guerrilla fighter Carlos Marighella. We also hear from Brazilian political economist Pedro Paulo Zaluth Bastos and get his analysis of the political calculus in the move by the highly unpopular President Temer to put the military in charge of security, as well as the prospects for the Left in the coming election.Plus: Chris Phelps from the University of Nottingham joins us to talk about the wider implications of the month-long strike of British University lecturers, who have just reached a settlement. The strike was about much more than pensions and austerity: it struck at the heart of the qu

Perhaps nothing has more defined the monstrosity of Donald Trump than his racist demonization and targeting of immigrants from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries, and those nations he deems "shitholes." But what's seldom reported is that one of the key mechanisms the administration has used to target immigrants was rolled out under Barack Obama. It's called Secure Communities, and it's the culmination of decades of policy-making and politicking that have intertwined the US systems of mass incarceration and immigrant enforcement — facilitating the growth of both. To fight both mass deportation and mass incarceration, localities and states must move beyond what's currently defined as sanctuary, as a new report by Kade Crockford from the Century Foundation and ACLU of Massachusetts argues: tcf.org/content/report/beyond-sanctuary. Also: Check out Dan’s essay on Trump’s proposal to execute drug dealers: slate.com/technology/2018/03/trumps-call-to-execute-drug-dealers-is-a-natural-progression-of-american-policy.html

Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry talk about their new book, To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. King is often remembered for his soaring oratory. But the commonplace emphasis on his rhetoric in place of his ideas too often allows enemies of King's agenda to domesticate him or, worse, to weaponize his out-of-context words to bolster the very forces of racism and oppression that King struggled to defeat. Shelby and Terry talk about King’s theory of nonviolence (more complicated than you might think), his debate with the Black Power movement, and his thinking on gender, hope, political economy, Beloved Community, and more. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig!