The steady pace of school massacres has revived calls to put more cops in school, with atrocities committed by white students exploited to make schools more like prisons, and ensure that the former remain a rapid-fire pipeline into the latter. Dan’s guests are Dakota Hall, the executive sirector of Leaders Igniting Transformation, a youth-of-color-led organization fighting the school-to-prison pipeline in Milwaukee; and Dmitri Holtzman, the director of education justice campaigns at the Center f...
May 27, 2018•42 min
A laundry list of modest policy solutions is not enough, it turns out. It's not just that technocratic fixes around the edges spectacularly fail to meet people's needs; in failing to articulate a big picture vision of how the world ought to be transformed, they fail to move people — either emotionally or, more concretely, to the polls. Dan’s guest George Monbiot argues that the Left needs a powerful new story to win power and change lives in his new book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for ...
May 23, 2018•1 hr 16 min
Author and activist Mark LeVine on the recent horrific events in Gaza and Jerusalem, which he sees as a point of no return. LeVine interprets Zionism's fundamental nature and history as one of settler colonialism, and he explains why he thinks resistance to Zionism around the world, both by Jews and non-Jews, is in the process of transforming itself and taking off.
May 21, 2018•35 min
The Brookings Institute's Carol Graham (papers here , here , and here ) on failing health and declining prospects among poor white people in the United States. Then, Kristen Ghodsee , co-author of this article , on the vile uses of anticommunism....
May 21, 2018•52 min
Israel is massacring Palestinians daring to approach a fence that occupation forces have built to shore up an ethno-state founded on the principle of apartheid. Nothing could be more clear. But you wouldn't no that from the, at best, muddied coverage that prevails in mainstream media accounts. Dan’s guest is Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, professor at George Mason University, and a powerful and eloquent voice challenging the anti-Palestine narrative — including, straight into the lion's ...
May 18, 2018•36 min
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” The rule of law: the #resistance has construed it to be a cornerstone of opposition to Trump. It is certainly alarming to live under a president who flirts with operating in a permanent and near-total state of exception. But it's the rule of law as we've known it that has blessed the wide-open floodgates of corporate money into American politics, looked the ...
May 16, 2018•1 hr 5 min
Historian Alejandro Velasco sorts fact from fiction when it comes to contemporary Venezuela. Then, Jessica Blatt, author of Race and the Making of American Political Science , on the racist origins of the discipline.
May 14, 2018•52 min
Recent cases of horrific child abuse have elicited widespread media attention. What the media coverage often misses is what these incidents reveal about a two-tiered child protection system that systemically surveils, punishes, and destroys poor black families while ignoring abuses perpetrated in affluent white homes. Dan's guest is Dorothy Roberts, who has closely studied the racism and poverty policing that pervades the child-protection system. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Revolutio n in t...
May 12, 2018•45 min
Today's Dig is a very good and somewhat unusual Dig: Dan’s got two interviews with two different people. First, journalist Eric Blanc on the teacher strike wave that he's been covering for Jacobin . Then comes the Center for Popular Democracy's Xiomara Caro Diaz on last week's May Day demonstrations against austerity in Puerto Rico. Thanks to Verso Books. Check Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art . Also, check out the Socia...
May 09, 2018•1 hr 11 min
Suzi talks to veteran union negotiator and labor writer Joe Burns about the teachers strike wave from West Virginia to Arizona — and about how public-sector workers and teachers are reviving the most powerful weapon in the working class arsenal: the strike. Then, Daniel Bessner joins Suzi in conversation about his new book Democracy in Exile — and the rise of intellectuals in foreign-policy institutions and think tanks with all their anti-democratic implications, how Trump represents a continuat...
May 07, 2018•49 min
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 ...
May 05, 2018•1 hr 21 min
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 t...
May 04, 2018•59 min
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 ...
May 02, 2018•53 min
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 ...
Apr 27, 2018•1 hr 1 min
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 w...
Apr 25, 2018•1 hr 19 min
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 ).
Apr 23, 2018•52 min
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.
Apr 23, 2018•30 min
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 ...
Apr 21, 2018•1 hr 27 min
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 ...
Apr 18, 2018•1 hr 34 min
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.
Apr 17, 2018•52 min
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, ...
Apr 14, 2018•1 hr 18 min
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 mo...
Apr 11, 2018•1 hr 15 min
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 Muñoz found when she visited a warehouse in Chile to study how unions responded to Walmart’s entry into Chile. The majority of Walmart's w...
Apr 09, 2018•47 min
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 div...
Apr 07, 2018•1 hr 26 min
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 versobo...
Apr 04, 2018•1 hr 14 min
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 Alie...
Mar 28, 2018•1 hr 16 min
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.
Mar 27, 2018•52 min
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 ...
Mar 27, 2018•52 min
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 incarce...
Mar 25, 2018•46 min
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 o...
Mar 21, 2018•1 hr 18 min
