Brazil is headed toward fascism by way of Jair Bolsonaro, a sexist, homophobic, and violent militarist clown nostalgic for a murderous dictatorship. How did this happen? Alfredo Saad-Filho, a professor of political economy at SOAS University of London, explains the roots of right-wing reaction and left-wing collapse — and the ultimately disastrous results of a PT governance strategy centered on an accommodation with a capitalist order that could only last as long as the global commodity boom did...
Oct 19, 2018•1 hr 10 min
Socialist Alternative's Kshama Sawant was elected to Seattle City Council way before socialism became a cool thing. Today, Dan's talking to Sawant about how socialists can build power and win at the local level—and how in Seattle, that means taking on Amazon, which recently coerced her colleagues on Council to reverse themselves on a big-business tax that was earmarked to help the homeless people who have been squeezed out of the housing market by an economy dominated by those very same big busi...
Oct 17, 2018•1 hr 8 min
Today, we’re addressing one of the most obnoxious corners of the identity politics debate. And that is the corner occupied by Right Liberals who believe that any desire to change the world is a divisive symptom of maladjusted affluenza emanating from pampered college students. Moira Weigel discusses her Guardian review of The Coddling of the American Mind , which makes its case by way of pragmatic folk aphorisms like: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”. Thanks to Verso ...
Oct 13, 2018•46 min
Let’s ensure that the history of American socialism doesn’t repeat as farce. That’s one reason that Max Elbaum wrote Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che , an account of the little-remembered New Communist Movement that defined the American anti-capitalist Left of the 1970s. Their internationalism, anti-racism and cadre organization were in many ways admirable. Their dogmatism and sectarianism proved disastrous. Elbaum relates this history, and the lessons that the ...
Oct 10, 2018•1 hr 42 min
Meagan Day, Natalie Shure, and Alissa Quart reflect with Suzi Weissman on the toxicity — and banality — of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation to the Supreme Court. We look at the way the contentious, emotional hearings exposed the fault lines between gender, privilege, class, and politics in the US — and ask why the Democrats have been so meek, diffident, and ineffective in the face of the Republican Party’s disciplined march to impose the future, violating every norm to get an extreme right-wing ...
Oct 09, 2018•1 hr 3 min
Christine Blasey Ford and other women have revealed that our political-economic elite is pervaded by profound intimate violence, forms of brutal interpersonal domination that are the everyday and microcosmic connective tissue of systems of domination as a whole. Lisa Duggan offers her thoughts on how to link these individual stories that playing out at economic, political and celebrity peaks to the systems that order the world that the rest of us live in. Duggan also addresses carceral feminism ...
Oct 06, 2018•45 min
Sociologist Shamus Khan on the culture of elite schools and the sense of entitlement they breed. Then, political scientist Thea Riofrancos on the delegitimation of our ruling class and the political possibilities inhering in that.
Oct 05, 2018•52 min
An interview with three members of Reclaim Philadelphia, which emerged from the Bernie 2016 campaign in Philly and has since — in a remarkably short amount of time — played a key role in getting Larry Krasner elected District Attorney, effectively won a state legislative seat, and taken over two Democratic Wards in the city. Much of the debate on the Left over how to engage in electoral politics revolves around how to relate to the inside and outside of electoral politics as they currently exist...
Oct 03, 2018•1 hr 14 min
Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All , on the win–win business- and plutocrat-friendly philanthropy of today’s nouveau riche.
Sep 28, 2018•52 min
Legal analyst Harry Litman joins Suzi to unpack the legal and constitutional questions raised in both the Mueller investigation and the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The question that is on the table is whether the Constitution and the traditional practices of the American political system can protect us from the from the power of the extreme right and the march to authoritarianism. And then Germany: The demonstrations in Chemnitz at the end of August sent chills...
Sep 26, 2018•1 hr 4 min
Serious people in Washington are seduced by vapid and self-serving accounts of their savvy operation of the machinery of government — works like Bob Woodward's latest exercise in extended stenography Fear: Trump in the White House . The problem with Trump — for defenders of the establishment political order that helped make his presidency possible — is precisely that he's not a man like John McCain, a bloodthirsty and world-historically successful self-mythologizer. Patrick Blanchfield on his re...
Sep 26, 2018•1 hr 33 min
This episode's guests are Margaret Corvid, who recently won a city council race in Plymouth, England, and Julia Salazar, who just won the Democratic primary for New York state senate in Brooklyn.
Sep 25, 2018•52 min
The United States today exceeds at perpetually waging wars that are destined to fail to meet their purported objectives. The War on Terror is one such war. The War on Drugs is another. In both cases, failure never leads to much official questioning of the war let alone a repudiation of its underlying wisdom. The conventional wisdom is always that the war just hasn't been waged in the right way, or aggressively enough. My guest today is Leo Beletsky, who directs the Health in Justice Action Lab a...
Sep 23, 2018•45 min
For many, conservatives and liberals alike, Appalachia provides a skeleton key for interpreting changes in American politics that might otherwise be difficult to comprehend. But the way conservatives and liberals talk about Appalachia tells us a lot more about conservatives and liberals than it does about the region. Elizabeth Catte, the author of What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia , puts the region and representations of it in historical and political-economic context. Thanks to Verso ...
Sep 19, 2018•1 hr 26 min
Legendary critical theorist Nancy Fraser argues that a total analysis of capitalism requires taking Marxism beyond a narrowly economistic view. Throughout its history, capitalism has been defined not just by labor exploitation but also by the disavowal of that exploitation's own basic conditions of possibility: the things that the daily business of labor exploitation and surplus-value appropriation require from politics, care work, war-making, mining, patriarchy, racism, and more. Thanks to Vers...
Sep 12, 2018•1 hr 19 min
Suzi talks to Jacobin 's managing editor, Micah Uetricht , who has been writing about Chicago politics and Rahm Emanuel since 2011: in fact Micah Uetricht is to Rahm Emanuel what Hunter Thompson was to Richard Nixon. We get Micah's take on why "Mayor 1%" is not running for reelection, and what his legacy will likely be. Suzi then speaks to freelance writer Chloe Watlington, who has been writing about Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria for the Baffler and Teen Vogue . Chloe looks at the bizarre at...
Sep 11, 2018•48 min
Writer Joel Schalit on neofascism in Germany and Israel. Then, Heidi Matthews , assistant professor of law at York University, on #MeToo.
Sep 10, 2018•52 min
What socialism should offer is freedom by way of power and democratic control over our polity and economy—and thus over our future as a society. Matt Bruenig has one proposal out at his People's Policy Project on how to begin to do just that, and it's called a social wealth fund. The idea is that the state gradually socializes the assets of every single publicly-traded company in the United States by purchasing their stocks. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing titl...
Sep 09, 2018•52 min
Raven Rakia, a journalist with The Appeal , on the nationwide prison strike (more here and here ). Then, Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity , on race and class.
Sep 05, 2018•52 min
Nikhil Pal Singh on the unfortunate obsession shared by certain pundits, journalists and social scientists: definitively proving that Trump won because of racism, and racism alone. What drives so many people to dedicate so much time to arguing that either class or race or gender or whatever matters the most—or worse yet, matters exclusively? And what does "matter more" even mean? Plus, a Dan Denvir monologue on the identity politics debate. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out versobooks.com for loa...
Sep 05, 2018•1 hr 19 min
Dan speaks to Elizabeth Rush, the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore , a lyrical, mournful but ultimately hopeful account of people dealing with amongst the most tangible effects of global warming right now: the rising seas that are threatening poor and working-class people with dislocation, community destruction and compounded destitution. It's a beautifully-written guide to the current crisis that sugarcoats nothing yet that highlights how ordinary people can organize to ...
Aug 31, 2018•1 hr 12 min
Rob Larson, author of Capitalism vs. Freedom , explores how the “free market” is a realm of unfreedom, and Keith Gessen discusses his new novel about contemporary Russia, A Terrible Country .
Aug 29, 2018•52 min
Today's episode is a long one. It's the first of two this week on climate politics: a live event that I hosted at Verso Books in New York a couple weeks ago. Or, at least part of it is. The event livestream, which we grabbed the audio from, malfunctioned for the first half hour or so of the episode. And so, dear listeners, we made lemonade out of audiovisual lemons and re-did the first part of the interview later over the phone from Providence. Dan spoke to Audrea Lim, Thea Riofrancos, Ashley Da...
Aug 29, 2018•1 hr 49 min
Suzi Weissman talks to Robin Blackburn about Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party's left-wing leader. Drawing on Robin's article, "The Corbyn Project," in the May/June 2018 New Left Review, Suzi asks Blackburn to explore the challenges and constraints a Corbyn Labour Left government would face after a decade of Tory austerity policies — that came on the heels of Thatcher and Blair's neoliberal politics making Britain the most unequal country in Western Europe. Suzi also asks Robin what fundamental ch...
Aug 28, 2018•38 min
Josie Duffy Rice on Justice in America, her new podcast from The Appeal that she co-hosts with with Clint Smith, media coverage of criminal justice, carceral feminism and domestic violence, and the disturbing liberal affection for federal law enforcement under Trump. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out For a Left Populism by Chantal Mouffe versobooks.com/books/2748-for-a-left-populism Support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig...
Aug 25, 2018•43 min
Russia: the more your average American thinks about it, the less they seem to know. National security-state enthused liberals blame Putin and for creating what is an obviously-if-incomprehensibly made-in-America monster. Trump, in turn, cannot seem to contain his giddy enthusiasm for Putin's brand of hyper-masculine authoritarianism. Meanwhile, Russia, an actual country where roughly 144 million people live, has become mostly invisible to Americans—because it has been replaced by a caricature. S...
Aug 22, 2018•1 hr 51 min
Christina Gerhardt, author of Screening the Red Army Faction (2018, Bloomsbury), on the RAF’s history and artistic reception in the context of the German 1960s and 1970s.
Aug 17, 2018•52 min
Part two of a two-part interview with Aslı Bâli on the Syrian civil war and the larger geopolitical conflicts that shape the Middle East — with an emphasis on the role played the United States. During part one, which you should definitely listen to first, Bâli discussed the various powers sacrificing the lives of Syrian people in the pursuit of their perceived geopolitical and sectarian interests. In this installment, Bâli discusses the restrictive frames that dominates the American discussion o...
Aug 17, 2018•48 min
[note: this is being re-posted because the original post was accidentally deleted. So if you have already listened, no need to listen again!] Aslı Ü. Bâli joins Daniel for part one of a two-part interview on the Syrian Civil War and the murderously instrumentalized geopolitics that fuel it. Syrians continue to suffer and to die while various actors treat the conflict as a proxy for their own geopolitical ends; meanwhile, huge numbers of Syrian refugees languish in neighboring countries, and the ...
Aug 15, 2018•1 hr 11 min
Suzi and Alan Minsky talk to Katie Halper of WBAI's The Katie Halper Show about the role of independent media and politics in the Trumpian landscape we inhabit. Then Suzi speaks to prolific, award-winning playwright Murray Mednick , whose enigmatic "Mayakovsky and Stalin" runs until August 19 at the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood. The play examines two lives and two suicides, related but distant, responding to the liberating freedom of revolution in the Soviet Union, but then increasingly strangled...
Aug 13, 2018•57 min
