Dan interviewed legendary feminist scholar Silvia Federici on Caliban and the Witch at her Brooklyn apartment. Next year, he'll make a return trip to discuss Wages for Housework. Here's the article on the Pawtucket factory strike by Joey La Neve DeFrancesco that Dan mentions jacobinmag.com/2018/06/factory-workers-strike-textile-mill-women Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig...
Sep 14, 2019•2 hr 8 min
Dan discusses the history of black politics in the US—left, nationalist, liberal, and neoliberal—with Michael Dawson. Check out New Dawn , Michael's podcast on race and capitalism: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-dawn/id1213696020 Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig...
Sep 06, 2019•1 hr 45 min
We need a Green New Deal to stop climate catastrophe. Everybody knows this. But housing has to be a key piece of the GND, as Daniel Aldana Cohen argues in the Spring 2019 issue of Jacobin on housing. Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative and coauthor, with Alyssa Battistoni, Kate Aronoff, and Thea Riofrancos, of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal from Verso Books. The four ...
Sep 05, 2019•39 min
Journalist Yasha Levine on the “democracy” demos in Moscow: for a flossier neoliberalism. Then, Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights) in Brazil on the Amazon fires: who’s setting them, why, and what can be done.
Sep 03, 2019•52 min
Writer Brian Hioe updates us on the Hong Kong protests. Then, Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association (AIPWA), on India’s ongoing crackdown in Kashmir
Aug 30, 2019•52 min
Heidi Sloan is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America running for Congress in Texas's 25th district. She's challenging a Republican incumbent, used car salesman, and incredibly rich person Roger Williams. Sloan recently sat down to talk about her story, her work with homeless people in Texas, how she came to join the DSA, her socialist political vision, and which corporate supervillain she would most like to grill as a member of the House of Representatives. Read more about Heidi at he...
Aug 29, 2019•41 min
Guest host Astra Taylor interviews Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz about Indigenous people's history to reexamine all of history, the present, and our possible futures. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig
Aug 28, 2019•1 hr 28 min
Ordinary language is the sound of hegemony; it is also an archive of the struggles to overturn it. Language is an institution and a constantly emergent field of struggle; it is the product of power relations and it is also itself power relations. Dan interviews John Patrick Leary, the author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig...
Aug 23, 2019•1 hr 59 min
The question of how socialists should engage with the labor movement has always been a critical one. One proposal: the rank-and-file strategy, which the Democratic Socialists of America adopted in its recent convention. But what is it? Labor sociologist Barry Eidlin explains. Barry Eidlin is an assistant professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States in Canada. Read Barry's short explainer on the rank-and-file strategy here...
Aug 22, 2019•41 min
<font color="#000000">Suzi talks to UCLA law professor </font> Gary Blasi , a longtime housing activist and advocate for the homeless about the staggering increase in homelessness in LA city and county (indeed across the country). But there are misconceptions about what is driving this surge in people living on the streets. Put simply, says Blasi, homeless people are homeless because they cannot afford housing, mostly in neighborhoods where they have grown up. We get Blasi's analysis...
Aug 21, 2019•54 min
Dan talks to Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara about his book The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality . We must study socialism's history and plan for its future. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig
Aug 16, 2019•2 hr 6 min
Jobs have in recent years gotten much worse for millions of service workers at Amazon, McDonalds and call centers. Dan interviews Emily Guendelsberger on her book On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig
Aug 10, 2019•2 hr 1 min
Suzi looks at the rising in Puerto Rico with professor, activist, and author Rafael Bernabe in San Juan, Puerto Rico where two weeks of massive protests brought down the corrupt government of Ricardo Rosselló, and continue amid uncertainty about what comes next. The protest movement took off after the Center for Investigative Journalism released nearly 900 pages of chat messages between Rosselló and his inner circle, revealing their misogyny, homophobia, and the contempt they held for the popula...
Aug 06, 2019•1 hr 8 min
Dan interviews Lily Geismer, the author of Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. While Boston whites fought school busing in the streets, suburban liberals along Route 128 maintained and benefited from the larger system of metropolitan residential and school segregation that made the crisis possible. Suburban liberals also played a key role in creating a new Democratic Party that embraced a superficial politics of recognition while advancing a technocr...
Aug 02, 2019•2 hr
The Democratic Socialists of America's biennial convention is in Atlanta this weekend. The rise of the DSA is one of the most promising developments in American politics in at least half a century. I talked to Andrew Sernatinger, a member of Madison DSA, an elected delegate to the convention, and a rank-and-file member of Teamsters 695, about what's at stake at the convention. You can read Andrew's pieces about the convention and the state of DSA in New Politics: https://newpol.org/&lt;wbr /...
Jul 31, 2019•40 min
Dan is taking his first week off ever in Dig history to finish his book. Here's a classic from deep in the archives: our first interview with Aziz Rana, on his book The Two Faces of American Freedom, aka episode 62. If you've already heard this one and are hungry for more content we've got everything organized by date, guest and topic at www.thedigradio.com . Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig
Jul 25, 2019•1 hr 10 min
Suzi talks to historian Myrna Santiago and immigrants' rights specialist Alicia Rusoja , who just returned from a week at the border, where they talked to men, women, and child migrants, sat in immigration court, and spoke to support groups — as well as deported veterans, and deported mothers of Dreamers in Tijuana. Their reflections and revelations include the way abuse and corruption are adding to the horrors these migrants face. Suzi then talks to Daniel Finn about British politics: while the...
Jul 23, 2019•57 min
Dan's lengthy interview with two brilliant Chilean social movement organizers: Alondra Carrillo and Pablo Abufom. Carrillo organizes in the country's massive feminist movement. Abufom works in the labor-backed movement for a just pension system. Read Dan's interview with Daniel Jadue, the Communist mayor of Recoleta, in Jacobin . Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig...
Jul 19, 2019•2 hr 45 min
Professor of philosophy Bernat Tort on Puerto Rico’s economic and political crisis. Then, sociologist Sahan Karatasli on Turkey’s economic and political crisis.
Jul 19, 2019•52 min
It's gotten heated this last week between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the squad, on the one hand, and Nancy Pelosi, centrist Democrats, and the House Democratic Party leadership on the other. But this conflict isn't empty intra-party bickering. It's an actual political and moral battle, with one side, AOC's, on the right side of history and one, Pelosi's, not. Miles Kampf-Lassin wrote about the battle and what it means, in an article called "They're Not Just Mad at AOC — They're Scared of Her."...
Jul 18, 2019•40 min
Dan interviews Sophie Lewis about her new book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. Something is deeply wrong with commercial surrogacy—but it's just not what you might think. What's wrong is the brute labor exploitation taking place at the reproductive crossroads of a racialized global capitalist order. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig...
Jul 11, 2019•1 hr 43 min
The New York Times recently attacked Bernie Sanders’s record on solidarity with Nicaragua in the 1980s. It probably won’t be the last time we see red-baiting attacks against Sanders in the election season, so it’s important to establish what exactly happened in Central America in the 1980s, how brutal US intervention in the region was, what the Central American solidarity movement of that era looked like, and what side of history was the right one to be on. Hilary Goodfriend discusses all of thi...
Jul 09, 2019•30 min
Suzi does three stories on this episode of Jacobin Radio, beginning with Katie Halper 's expose in Jacobin of <wbr />the New York Times 's problem with Bernie Sanders, evident in their coverage. The problem is their correspondent Sydney Ember, who has a long record of unfairly attacking Sanders — while neglecting to mention that the sources she quotes as objective authorities are corporate lobbyists and austerity ideologues. Suzi then looks at two articles in the new journal Commune , firs...
Jul 09, 2019•56 min
For much of the twentieth century, Cold War politics defined socialism as the antithesis of democracy. Today, an insurgent democratic-socialist movement is transforming US politics. It is socialism that is at the forefront of a fight for a radical deepening of democracy, one in which ordinary people exercise control over our political, economic, and social lives — and one in which the people is expansively defined to include those excluded by racist immigration law and mass incarceration. Dan di...
Jul 05, 2019•1 hr
Elizabeth Warren is, by American political standards, a very strong presidential candidate. She has taken up a robust domestic social-democratic agenda — one that, while not as strong as Bernie Sanders’s, is pretty damn good.Foreign policy, however, is a different story. Here, Elizabeth Warren is far from the most hawkish in her party. But she still leaves much to be desired, as Sarah Lazare recently wrote in a piece titled “Elizabeth Warren Can and Should Do Better on Foreign Policy.”Sarah Laza...
Jul 03, 2019•37 min
<style type="text/css"></style> <style></style> What is a socialist society going to look like? Like, actually look like? We have to have some answers to this question. Luckily, Sam Gindin has some. He talks to Micah about his article in Catalyst, “Socialism for Realists,” which you can read here .<o:p></o:p>
Jun 28, 2019•38 min
Dan's lengthy interview with Nick Estes on his remarkable book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. The problem that settler colonialism was repeatedly trying to solve by unleashing such terrific violence — through massacres, by nearly eliminating the buffalo, in reservation confinement, in dominating the Missouri River — was not just indigenous people being in the way but also the existence of a larger relat...
Jun 28, 2019•2 hr 45 min
Bernie Sanders has been talking a lot about the New Deal lately, mentioning it in his recent speech on democratic socialism. Ironically, the response from many liberals has been to argue that the New Deal wasn’t really socialism. Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman has a few quibbles. Plus, we talk about why the idea that the New Deal was racist doesn’t fully capture its relationship to white supremacy. Read Seth’s article on Bernie’s New Deal rhetoric here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/&lt;wbr /&gt;2...
Jun 26, 2019•41 min
On this episode of Jacobin Radio, Suzi focuses on the intensifying US-Iranian crisis and war brinkmanship that saw us about ten minutes away from military strikes, before Trump pulled back. We get MIT historian Pouya Alimaghum ’s analysis of the crisis, the implications and goals of the increasing bluster and ever more draconian sanctions, and what they mean for domestic dissent in Iran. Then Suzi talks to UCI professor of Chinese history Jeff Wasserstrom , who has just returned from Hong Kong a...
Jun 25, 2019•58 min
Russia intervened and Trump is a criminal who committed obstruction of justice and is surrounded by constant criminality. But it's no doubt also true that this situation and the hawkish liberal response to it have dangerously damaged US-Russia relations. At the core of Western misunderstanding is the way we think about Vladimir Putin, which is what Dan is discussing today with Tony Wood, the author of Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War . Thanks to Verso. Check o...
Jun 20, 2019•2 hr 4 min
