John Clarke of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty on what’s wrong with a universal basic income (UBI), a proposal that's become increasingly popular among part of the Left and the Right. Then, Isabel Hilton of ChinaDialogue.net on Xi Jinping’s becoming China’s president for life....
Democrat Conor Lamb's victory is a rebuke of Republicans. But Lamb is far from an ideal candidate, and so the race also raises a perennial debate between the left and liberal center over what kind of alternative to the Republican right we need. Dan’s guests are Elizabeth Fiedler, Sara Inammorato, and Summer Lee, three leftist women running for state rep in Pennsylvania — all three DSA members endorsed by their local chapters. Other stuff: Patrick Blanchfield’s article on guns and neoliberalism d...
Are we on the cusp of a new wave of worker militancy? We talk to Rebecca Cohen and Shaun Richman about the victory of West Virginia teachers (and public sector workers) and the coming Oklahoma strike as they set a date to go the West Virginia way — at the same time that the Supreme Court is likely to further weaken public sector unions with the Janus v. AFSCME decision. Shaun and Rebecca talk about the possible unintended consequences that ruling could bring about. Then Dean of Boalt Law School ...
In West Virginia, a focal point of Trump-era liberal armchair ethnography, teachers have won a historic state-wide strike just as the Supreme Court is poised to rule in Janus , a case that will mark the culmination of a long right-wing effort to gut public sector unions. It's a scary time — but maybe, just maybe, also an exciting one. Dan’s guests today are Sarah Jaffe, Nation Institute fellow and author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt , and labor historian Gabriel Winant. Thanks to ou...
Neoliberal culture expects little from government and everything from plucky individuals — including, apparently, the self-sacrificing courage to charge an AR-15 wielding gunman while your classmates cower behind bulletproof backpacks. Writer Patrick Blanchfield returns to the show to discuss his recent essays on guns for New York magazine (forthcoming) and The Intercept ( theintercept.com/2018/02/28/parkland-florida-school-shootings-arming-teachers ). Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Ch...
How does gun culture get built from the ground up? What are the everyday politics of guns? Sociologist Jennifer Carlson does ethnographic fieldwork that provides answers to these questions, showing how men see guns as a way to be a protector in a time of economic precocity and how the NRA’s massive training operation helps shape the racialized identity of “citizen protectors” defending “sheeple” against the “wolves.” Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out The Right to Have Rights by ...
Liza Featherstone, author of Divining Desire , on the history and meaning of focus groups [disclosure alert: Featherstone is the host’s wife].
Nomiki Konst, a correspondent for The Young Turks and Sanders appointee to the DNC’s Unity Reform Commission, talks about the Berniecrat struggle against a corrupt neoliberal establishment to democratize the Democratic Party. This is the first in a series on electoral politics over the next couple of months that will include conversations about DSA’s electoral strategy, an interview with Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, and more. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out...
Did the "Woke Blacks" Instagram account really cost Clinton the election? Glenn Greenwald returns to the show to ask basic but rarely asked questions about the troll army’s presumed efficacy, explain his often mischaracterized position on Russiagate, and call out Republicans and Democrats for hypocritically supporting unfettered power for national security state surveillance. Thanks to Verso and University of California Press. Check out The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hu...
On this “podcast-versary” of the premiere of Jacobin Radio – one year since her first podcast, Suzi Weissman invites Robert Brenner back for another extended conversation on the state of the economy, especially given the dramatic plunges of the stock market, the wage and inflation reports, Trump tax cuts, and the proposed infrastructure plan. Robert Brenner is Professor of History at UCLA, co-editor of Catalyst , Director of the Center for Social Theory and Contemporary History (CSTCH) and autho...
Dan talks to Randy Bryce, the Berniecrat ironworker taking on Paul Ryan, about how he plans to knockout the House Speaker, Scott Walker’s decimation of unions, and Foxconn’s con against the people of Wisconsin. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright versobooks.com/books/2545-climate-leviathan and Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violen...
What if the Cold War only just ended in November 2016, as Donald Trump grotesquely encircled and then captured the presidency, finding it, to his surprise, unguarded? The Cold War proper, of course, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Aziz Rana, making his second Dig appearance, argues that it was a lot more than the conflict with the Evil Empire. It was a domestic order that, he writes in the latest issue of n+1 , “concerned everything from the genius of America’s domestic institut...
Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University David Palumbo-Liu on the right-wing attacks on him and the question of academic freedom. The Stanford Politics article on the Thiel network Palumbo-Liu references is here . Then, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges Jodi Dean on how to think about Trump.<o:p></o:p>...
Doug Henwood on stock market madness (longer version is here ). Then Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley , joins Doug to talk about the military and intelligence roots of the internet, which live on today (hi NSA!).
Four decades ago, Frances Fox Piven and her husband Richard Cloward published Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail , a classic, clear-eyed analysis of just what the title suggests. Piven, a legendary scholar and activist, talks to Dan about her life, Occupy, Bernie, the Democratic Party, anti-war movements, black bloc, mass incarceration, and more. (Also: Dan’s voice sounds a little different because he had to record in a different room.) Thanks to Verso Books and University ...
The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As is often the case, however, the focus shifted elsewhere soon after disturbances in the street came to end. Political scientist Lester Spence recently wrote an article about why children were freezing in Baltimore public schools: the heating didn’t work, some...
We are living on land from which indigenous people, over hundreds of years, have been violently removed. Almost everyone knows this — yet it’s rarely mentioned in stories that Americans tell themselves about who we are as a country and how we got here. Dan’s guest is Paul Frymer, a professor of politics and director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. In his recent book, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion , he provides a clos...
Author Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, on Syria, Trump, and the state of the global left. Then, Jennifer Cohen, assistant professor of international studies at Miami University, joins the show to discuss feminism and economics, and a recent article in the New York Times.
Excitement that Democrats had developed a spine in the fight for Dreamers reverted to familiar despondency and fury when they capitulated and voted to reopen the government on Monday. Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein offers his analysis of the role that the media and the Democratic Party’s right flank played in pushing senators to fold. This interview was recorded Tuesday and posted early because things are moving fast.Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Europe’s Fault Lines: R...
Everyone agrees that the 1970s were the beginning of the end of capitalism as we had known it since the New Deal. But historian Lane Windham makes it clear that it wasn’t for a lack of worker struggle in her new book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide . In case studies of union fights in department stores, shipyards, offices, and textile mills, Windham explains that women and workers of color seized the civil rights victories of the 19...
Journalist Sandra Cuffe on Honduras after a stolen election and waves of official violence. Alexander Main, Senior Associate of International Policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, on US policy towards Latin America under Trump. Then, Janet Capron, author of Blue Money , on drugs and sex work in 1970s New York City.
Student workers at Rutgers University are fighting for $15 an hour. Undergraduate history major and dining-hall worker Danny Taylor of @RutgersUSAS talks about their struggle. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert versobooks.com/books/2535-alt-america , and support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig! Also: Jacobin has published a transcription of Dan's interview with the Fields sisters jacobi...
Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People’s Campaign alongside other organizers shortly before he was assassinated 50 years ago. Today, organizers nationwide are relaunching that movement as The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, tackling the evil quadruplet of poverty, systemic racism, militarism, and environmental devastation. Dan’s guest is rock star organizer Nijmie Dzurinko, making her second appearance on the show. Check out Dan’s recent work slate.com/news-an...
Suzi talks to UCLA sociologist and Iran expert Kevan Harris about the massive uprising that began in Iran at the end of December and quickly spread to every corner of the country. Persistent poverty and inequality are driving discontent, but Harris says that isn't the whole story. Suzi then talks to economist Dean Baker from the Center for Economic Research, who has some innovative ideas about how California can get around the tax-cut plan passed by the Republicans, which directly targets Califo...
Your first Diglet of the new year, and we’re talking about that Trump book. At n+1 Patrick Blanchfield makes the case that Fire and Fury is not, as some might think, a bunch of meaningless palace-intrigue that has distracted us from what Trump is doing to destroy the environment and wage relentless class war against the poor. Rather, the book in one fell swoop exposes the Trump administration for the dangerously hot mess that we all knew it was but were entirely unable to understand clearly beca...
Chattel slavery made black women’s reproduction the source of private property — and in doing so, invented race and American racism. Ever since, the denigration and regulation of black women’s childbearing has been central to the construction of white supremacy and the exploitative economic order that it protects, as scholar Dorothy Roberts explained in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty , a pivotal book first published in 1997. In this episode, Roberts talks ...
Professor Tithi Bhattacharya, editor of Social Reproduction Theory on capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and society. Social reproduction theory is a type of socialist feminist analysis of the connection between worker and society, with particular attention paid to the family and household as critical units for the reproduction of society. While this can sound abstract, social reproduction theory has a lot to contribute to today's most pressing issues, from social security reform to the #MeToo movem...
The protest movement against the onset of the Iraq War was countered by a call to “support our troops” from militarists on the Right. But venerating American soldiers is not about supporting actual American soldiers; it's a rhetorical device to preclude questioning or criticism of the wars they are sent to fight. In a face-to-face interview at Brown University’s Watson Institute, anthropologist Catherine Lutz discusses John Kelly’s recent diatribe, Khizr Khan, Trump’s attack on protesting NFL pl...
At the close of the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara discusses his new article on the Bolsheviks and what we can learn from and blame on them — and also what might be forgiven and moved beyond. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl and Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal at versobooks.com .
Doug Henwood explains the bitcoin craze, and then ex-finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis ties up some loose ends on Adults in the Room , and discusses the need for a progressive internationalism.
