Jason Wilson on how cops are more interested in surveilling the Left than the Right (article here ; Will Parrish article here ). Then, Todd Chretien reflects on the forty-two-year history of the International Socialist Organization, which dissolved itself at the end of March....
In the US, China is often viewed at best as a nefarious and enigmatic rival and at worst as a civilizational enemy. But these stories of national rivalry that permeate both major parties and the mainstream media function as a mystification, shrouding the global supply chain that connects capitalist exploitation from East to West. When we cut through the noise, a rather different picture emerges: China is home to a massive portion of the world's working-class, a class that is struggling against t...
Car dominance, public transit austerity, and the neoliberal political-economy within which both are embedded have fomented what Marx called idiocy , in its classical sense of privatized social isolation. Dan talks to geographer Kafui Attoh, the author of Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California's East Bay , about the political-economy of public transit and why the fight for transportation justice must be part of a broader struggle for the right to the city...
Suzi talks to political economist Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos about the Trump-Bolsonaro love fest in D.C. last week, and the new Brazilian-US relationship. Bolsonaro was "summoned" to Washington to support a US invasion of Venezuela under the pretext of "exporting democracy," and we ask Pedro Paulo how that will go over in Brazil — and note the irony that Bolsonaro is a staunch defender of military dictatorships and no lover of democracy. We also get Pedro Paulo's view of Brazilian politics and e...
The strike is back, and big time. Teachers in particular have been walking off the job not only to demand higher wages but also to fight for an end to privatization and for a transformation of the educational system for their students. These strikes, often led by women, are no doubt inspiring, and they have won important victories for workers and the communities they serve. We are, in other words, beginning to head in the right direction—but we're not heading there even close to fast enough. Win...
Tony Wood, author of Russia Without Putin , on contemporary Russia and Putin.
Four of the five candidates endorsed by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or advanced to the runoff election on April 2, leading to talk of a Socialist Caucus on the city council. And other progressive candidates throughout the city knocked off corporate-friendly incumbents. Dan passes the mic to guest host Micah Uetricht for an interview with United Working Families Executive Director Emma Tai and In These Times web editor Miles Kampf-Lassin on how years of grassr...
American liberty has since its foundation relied upon the dispossession of indigenous people and Mexicans, upon African enslavement and, ultimately, upon the constant fleeing outward that created an empire that none dare call by its name. As historian Greg Grandin writes in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America , this expansionist project has finally lost its ideological and material vitality, no longer able to neatly reconcile centuries of mounting con...
Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, authors (along with Nancy Fraser) of Feminism for the 99% , on a truly transformative feminism. Then, Sam Stein, author of Capital City, on bourgeois urban planning, with an emphasis on NYC.
Richard Walker, geographer and director of the Living New Deal project, on what the original New Deal can teach the Green one. Then, Aziz Rana on the need for a left internationalism .
Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou explains: it's not just that the War on Terror has warped American and European politics and society; it's that the War on Terror and Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS have become mutually-critical facets of a larger, more total global geo-political order. In other words, the terrorists and the national security states waging war against them are dependent upon one another, and together have created a more violent, divided and alienated world. Thanks to Universit...
Suzi talks to DSAers Jeremy Gong and Magally Miranda Alcazar about the larger issues they are confronting after two years of Trump, a midterm election that saw radical democratic socialists elected to Congress, and the beginning of a second Bernie Sanders campaign for president. How do they see the challenges ahead, in a more favorable national context for Democratic Socialists, thanks to Bernie, AOC, #Red4Ed striking teachers, and the Trump administration’s retrograde policies? Can the Left tak...
It's irrelevant whether establishment liberals are sincerely aware of the threat posed by climate catastrophe because they are constitutionally hemmed in by a small-bore, technocratic and profoundly neoliberal ideology. But the climate justice movement understands not only the urgency of the problem but also the magnitude of the political-economic response that solving it requires: to fight global warming, according to The Green New Deal, we must transform the unequal, alienating and exploitativ...
Striking women have begun to reclaim feminism as a project of working-class struggle against not only patriarchy's domination of women by men but also against capitalism's domination of the many by the few—a system that sexism serves. As Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser write in Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto , "Our answer to lean-in feminism is kick-back feminism. We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling while leaving the vast majority to clean up the shards. Far ...
Dan's guest is long-time organizer Jonathan Matthew Smucker, the author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. The book is both a critique of the radical left's traditional style of politics and a how-to guide to fighting and winning, from nuts-and-bolts organizing methods to theory. What is wrong with the world and how to change it are two different categories of knowledge, and effective organizing requires that we master the latter. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection o...
Suzi talks to Kate Aronoff about Bernie Sanders’s candidacy, the Green New Deal, and the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders raised a whopping $6 million the first day he announced his run for president in 2020, making him the most important candidate in the race, and not just because of the money. His 2016 run within the Democratic Party but against its politics has changed the political conversation, brought tens of thousands into the work of politics, elected a new cohort of left Democrats to — ...
Daniel Aldana Cohen , author of this article , on the role of housing in a Green New Deal. Then, Joel Whitney , author of this article , on the CIA's history as a purveyor of fake news.
Noah Kulwin, staff writer with Jewish Currents , on why Ilhan Omar’s AIPAC tweets weren't antisemitic. Then, Thea Riofrancos, one of editors of Jacobin 's Green New Deal series, on the agenda's scope and politics.
Dan discusses The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte — Marx's take on revolution and reaction in mid-nineteenth-century France, the broader theories he develops about history and the relationship between politics and the class war, and how this all might apply to today — with political sociologist Dylan Riley. Check out Dan's recent NYT op-ed, "The Case Against Border Security." Thanks to NACLA, reporting on the Americas since 1967. Check out their collection of articles on Latin American po...
Dan talks to Eric Levitz — who at New York magazine provides the sort of consistently thoughtful and deeply contextualized analysis that is often quite hard to find on mainstream news sites — about the increasingly impossible to reconcile immanent contradictions shaking the Democratic and Republican parties. Thanks to University of California Press. Check out American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams by Peter Richardson, with a foreword from Mike Davis. Please support this podcast ...
What might Bernie 2020 look like, particularly now that almost everyone claims to be for Medicare for All (whatever they might mean by that)? Will Harris's track record as a law-and-order prosecutor doom her, or will her appeal as a woman of color rally a decisive number of votes? And will Biden being exposed as utterly unfit for the 2020 Democratic base send his poll numbers crashing? What impact will AOC have on defining what voters want and demand? Dan discusses all of this and more with Bria...
<font color="#000000">The state of the economy is, despite assertions to the contrary, not strong; it is being plundered by the alliance of top corporate managers, leading financiers and political leaders from both parties. Suzi talks to </font> Robert Brenner on politics and the state of the economy — matters of great confusion if you only pay attention to the business press and politicians, who say the economy is robust, with record low unemployment, rising wages, and the recovery ...
Two left-wing Muslim women newly elected to Congress—Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib and Somali-American Ilhan Omar—are resetting the Congressional debate over Palestine. In response, they have been met with slanderous attacks. On the one hand, this is exciting: we've never had people in Congress not only criticizing Israeli brutality but also supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. On the other hand, the current debate is a sobering reminder of how amongst American elected...
Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland and Naomi Schiller on the profound economic, social, and political crisis in Venezuela. More than three million refugees and migrants have fled the country. Opposition figure Juan Guaidó has declared himself president. Trump and other right-wing leaders throughout the Americas quickly recognized him as just that. The US imposed new sanctions on Venezuela's oil and has hinted at the possibility of a military invasion. It's unclear what comes next, but foreign in...
Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, a leader of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, is on trial in New York. After twice making his way out of Mexican prisons, he was extradited to the United States. This is what counts as a major victory in the never-ending US war on drugs, which the US has in recent decades exported to Mexico. Yet El Chapo's arrest, like that of so many others, has done nothing to stop Mexican drug cartels from continuing to export massive quantities of cocaine and heroin and other drugs. Neither...
#Red4EdLA: Los Angeles teachers lead the way for the labor movement — striking FOR public education — using the strike weapon to reverse the damage of decades of neoliberal assault on everything public. Suzi talks to Joel Jordan, an education strategist currently coordinating nine of the largest urban teacher unions in California, including UTLA, about the strike strategy behind UTLA’s extraordinary historic victory. Joel lays out how UTLA’s Union Power leadership wielded the strike weapon as pa...
Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union and Jane McAlevey, author and organizer, on the union’s great victory in their LA strike, protecting public education against the plutocrats’ attacks
Historian Andrew Bacevich tries to make sense of Trump’s foreign policy. Then, Steven Maher (author of this article ) on the rise and fall of GE.
Democracy is the proposition that the people should govern themselves. But who are the people, and how should they govern? Populist movements attempt to answer these questions. In response, establishment figures insist that it is the people and their populism that pose a dangerous threat to democracy. How should we appraise our current populist moment? And how can we distinguish between populism's left and right variants? Dan interviews two experts on populism, political scientists Laura Grattan...
On this special #RedforEd edition of Jacobin Radio, Suzi speaks with former teacher, member of the School Board, City Council, and State Assembly Jackie Goldberg , who is running in the March 5 special election to the LAUSD School Board. If elected, Jackie will be an experienced and effective progressive voice for public education, opposing the charter school privatizers who were elected with money from the bank-rollers who "have stacked the deck against district public schools.” We talk to Jack...
