The teacher strike wave continues as more than 30,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles walk picket lines not only for the higher wages that they deserve but also for the well-funded and great schools that the city's working-class students of color have long been systematically denied—a situation that has been exacerbated by a corporate reform-led school board and superintendent dead-set on privatizing the district. UTLA has in recent years been led by a militant, rank-and-file caucus that ...
Jan 18, 2019•1 hr
Jacobin editor Alyssa Battistoni interviews Astra Taylor on her new film What is Democracy? , in which Astra asks ordinary people and political philosophers alike just that. The answers are often extraordinary and far more incisive than the mindless pablum emanating from Washington and its official interpreters. The film opens in New York on Wednesday January 16 at the IFC Center before traveling to theaters and campuses. Special guests on hand during opening week for live Q&As with Astra in...
Jan 16, 2019•58 min
<font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Suzi speaks to energy specialist and author Simon Pirani about his new book , Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption that traces the relentless rise in oil, gas, and coal use since the mid-twentieth century </font>— and shows how consumption has grown fastest since the discovery of global warming in the 1980s. Simon argues that fuels are mainly consumed through technological systems, which are in turn embedded in social, econ...
Jan 15, 2019•54 min
Typically, people think about migration as immigration : people crossing international borders from one nation-state to another. And for the past half century in the United States, people have tended to think about that immigration in a binary way: legal immigration versus illegal immigration. But to understand the origins of the immigration politics in general and the criminalization of Mexican immigrants in particular that have become the core of the Trump presidency, we must explode these cat...
Jan 10, 2019•1 hr 58 min
Dan interviews Melinda Cooper about her book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which makes the case that neoliberalism and social conservatism have been consistent collaborators in creating an economy that redistributed wealth ruthlessly upwards with a risk-absorbing family at its privatized center. Thanks to Verso Books, which has a huge collection of excellent left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig...
Jan 04, 2019•1 hr 46 min
Suzi talks to scholar activist Richard Walker about his new book, Pictures of a Gone City, an urban geography of the San Francisco Bay Area, America’s richest and fastest changing metropolis. Walker explains both the miracle of Silicon Valley — including the sometimes delusional ideas behind this new tech boom, and the heavy price being paid for it in terms of affordability, traffic paralysis, environmental disruption, as well as the political challenges and movements it has spawned. We then spe...
Dec 31, 2018•49 min
Trump and fossil-fueled conservatives have pit working-class prosperity against environmentalism. This, of course, is incredibly dangerous. It's also premised on a misreading of environmental politics as having nothing to do with human well-being. But climate change, of course, threatens not only non-human nature but also the entirety of human life that is fundamentally dependent on it. Right now, coastal homes and cities, agriculture, wildfire-prone forests, and the water supply are all under t...
Dec 27, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Historian Adam Tooze, the author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World , explains how crisis in an unprecedentedly powerful and interconnected global banking system coursed through American homes and European sovereign debt markets, exploding into the Tea Party and the European politics of austerity — and, ultimately, leading to today's legitimation crisis of the reigning political establishment and economic order. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of...
Dec 19, 2018•2 hr 2 min
In this episode, Suzi talks to Jacobin contributing editor Sebastian Budgen about the gilet jaunes protests rocking France, named for the yellow traffic vests the protestors wear. The movement was ignited by President Emmanuel Macron’s so called climate measures — hiking gas taxes and reducing the speed limit, but quickly included other basic economic demands about low wages and the increasing impossibility of making ends meet, while the wealthy were getting tax breaks. Sebastian Budgen looks at...
Dec 17, 2018•1 hr
Robert Pollin, lead author of this paper , on how to pay for Medicare for All — covering everyone and saving money. Then, Anton Jäger on the problems with the anti-/post-work position.
Dec 17, 2018•52 min
There has been no greater exemplar of zombie neoliberalism in power than French President Emanuel Macron's imperial technocracy. Now, with the rise of the Yellow Vest ( Gilets jaunes ) movement, there no clearer evidence that zombie neoliberalism is bound to fail. This crisis cannot be solved with the centrist policies and politics that caused it in the first place. But where will the movement head, and who will benefit politically?And what does this reveal about neoliberal approaches to the cli...
Dec 15, 2018•1 hr 13 min
Marissa Brostoff and Andrea Long Chu discuss Sex and the City and the X-Files, unraveling the tangled history of Marxism and queer theory, Cynthia Nixon the democratic socialist versus Miranda the straight corporate lawyer misrecognized as a lesbian, feminism as consumption in Giuliani's New York, the remarkable resilience of heterosexuality, the Cold War's paranoiac aftershocks, history's startling return, the alt-right’s nostalgia for postmodernism, the takeover of reality by reality TV, men w...
Dec 12, 2018•1 hr 53 min
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment , on the politics of guns.
Dec 10, 2018•52 min
Suzi speaks first with Mike Parker, author, rabble-rouser, and union activist, who worked for thirty-tow years in auto in Detroit, about what is behind GM’s decision to close five plants, four in the US and one in Canada, affecting some 15,000 workers and their families as well as the towns and cities from Lordstown in Ohio to Detroit in Michigan. Ed Broadbent, former NDP Leader and Member of Parliament from 1975–1989, brings the Canadian perspective and reaction. Ed hails from Oshawa, Ontario, ...
Dec 05, 2018•58 min
On Saturday, Dan was in New York to interview Fernando Haddad and Yanis Varoufakis. Haddad is the former Workers Party mayor of São Paulo who recently lost Brazil's presidential election to far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. Varoufakis was the Greek Finance minister who tried and failed to fight the Troika's imposition of austerity and today is a leader of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025. Unsurprisingly, their topic was the fight against right-wing populism. Thanks to Verso Books. Check o...
Dec 05, 2018•1 hr 48 min
How unlucky it was for Angela Nagle to make her so-called left case against immigration the same week that Hillary Clinton reprised her neoliberal case for border crackdowns. In reality, solidarity with immigrant workers has long been a core tenant for much of the socialist left and labor movement, while neoliberalism, despite pretenses to the contrary, has always been implemented alongside repression. Dan interviews Richard Seymour, a founding editor of Salvage , who has done some excellent wor...
Nov 29, 2018•1 hr 49 min
Guns in general, and American gun culture in particular, have created a horrific bloodbath. But much of the liberal gun control movement has, in concert with the NRA and Republican right, worked to make the war on guns a central facet of mass incarceration. The upshot is that we have the worst of both worlds: a society flooded with guns, where the paradigmatic white "good guy with a gun" treasures his weapons as a bedrock constitutional right even as the supposed "bad guys with a gun," often bla...
Nov 25, 2018•35 min
Black Lives Matter is a poignant slogan and a powerful force for social transformation. It’s also shorthand for a huge array of organizations, mostly led by people that you've never heard of, working the daily hard grind of ordinary organizing that stitches together spectacular mass actions into a movement. That's the subject of the new book Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century by Dan’s guest, historian and activist Barbara Ransby. Thanks to Verso Books....
Nov 21, 2018•1 hr 9 min
A look at the fires raging across California, and the impending teacher’s strike. Suzi talks to urban theorist Mike Davis for his “Tale of Two Fires,” contrasting the Paradise and Malibu conflagrations, which he says is like comparing two Californias. She then talks to United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) president Alex Caputo Pearl who addresses another sort of fire, this one threatening public education. Alex explains the issues behind the historic 98 percent strike-authorization vote from th...
Nov 21, 2018•54 min
Neoliberalism: we all hate it, but what does it mean? Dan talks to intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian about his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism , which tells the story of neoliberalism's Geneva School — including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke — and their vision for a new imperial order establishing rules to protect the market from political interference. It's a movement that begins with nostalgia for the bygone Habsburg Empire, moves o...
Nov 14, 2018•2 hr 14 min
The man who carried out the massacre in Pittsburgh was motivated by a belief that Jewish people were conspiring to destroy the white race by way of orchestrating mass immigration. It's a conspiracy theory with deep roots in America's violent white power movement and that today is echoed by Trump and Fox News . Dan interviews Kathleen Belew on her book Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America , a history of the white power revolutionary movement from 1975–1995. Thanks...
Nov 07, 2018•1 hr 35 min
Suzi talks to political economist Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos about the October 28 election that brought the ultra-right wing Jair Bolsonaro to power. Bolsonaro promised to cleanse Brazil of crime and corruption by killing tens of thousands — and won formidable support from the poor who have been left behind by the neoliberal policies of successive governments, and whose neighborhoods are riddled with violence and crime. They turned away from the Workers Party (PT), tainted by its austerity polic...
Nov 06, 2018•31 min
Historian Amanda Armstrong on the importance of trans politics. Then, political economist Alfredo Saad-Filho on the prospects for Brazil under the fascist Bolsonaro.
Nov 05, 2018•52 min
Historian Howard Zinn remains a model for left-wing intellectuals who want to not only convey ideas to a public beyond academia but also take action to transform the world that it is their profession to explain. Dan interviews Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor, a leading intellectual of today's resurgent socialist left, on her foreword to a new edition of Zinn's autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train . Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobo...
Nov 03, 2018•37 min
The brutality of the Saudi royal family had been hiding in plain sight. It was an open secret convenient to the political, media and business elites for whom the Kingdom means big business and an invaluable geostrategic proxy. But the brutal murder and dismemberment of a single Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, has forced Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman and his American enablers onto the defensive as the regime's brutal war on Yemen, global support for Salafist fundamentalism, and kle...
Oct 31, 2018•1 hr 19 min
Recently, Dan spoke to Nikhil Pal Singh about the unfortunate and never-ending debate over whether it was economics or racism that got Trump elected. This is a sequel to that discussion: because what Malaika Jabali powerfully exposes in a Current Affairs piece combining on-the-ground reporting in Milwaukee and historical and data analysis is that when we talk about the impact of economic crisis on Trump's victory, the condition of Black poor and working-class people—many of whom decided to stay ...
Oct 28, 2018•48 min
Jacobin Managing Editor Micah Uetricht pulls Dave-Davies-duty for Dan and interviews Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez, a DSA member running for alderwoman in Chicago. Rodríguez-Sanchez moved to Chicago from Puerto Rico, where the brutal austerity imposed on the island made her job as a teacher impossible. She has brought with her a radical tradition and a program to fight for the city's beleaguered public schools, for renters and for immigrant rights, and for a public safety agenda that prioritizes soc...
Oct 26, 2018•54 min
CORRECT EPISODE NOW POSTED. Today's episode is on the alarming new report out from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and how it is that William Nordhaus — an economist whose work is dedicated to arguing that that it would be too inefficient to address the ecological crisis aggressively and urgently — recently won the discipline's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Dan speaks to Alyssa Battisoni, a PhD candidate in political science and member of Jacobin 's editorial board...
Oct 24, 2018•33 min
A look at two forthcoming elections: the November midterms in California, and the second round of Brazil’s general election on Oct 28. Gustavo Arrellano of Orange County, author of Ask a Mexican and Taco USA, wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed that “The Spotlight may be on the OC, but Democrats are building for the long haul in the Central Valley” — in other words, he explains why winning blue in Bakersfield and Fresno is even more important than in Republican OC — and, says it could be a...
Oct 23, 2018•45 min
Leandros Fischer on German politics, with an emphasis on refugees. Then, Samuel Moyn, author of a recent Boston Review article , on why the Supreme Court sucks and what can be done about it.
Oct 23, 2018•52 min
