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 (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2924-feminism-for-the-99), "Our answer to lean-in feminism is kick-back feminism. We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling w...
Mar 06, 2019
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...
Feb 27, 2019
Dan discusses The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—Marx's take on revolution and reaction in mid-19th 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 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/opinion/democrats-border-security-wall.html)The Case Against Border Security. Thanks to NACLA, reporting on the Americas sinc...
Feb 20, 2019
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 new 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 with ...
Feb 16, 2019
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' 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 Briah...
Feb 13, 2019
View Transcript 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 ...
Feb 06, 2019
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...
Feb 02, 2019
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...
Jan 30, 2019
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...
Jan 23, 2019
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
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 inc...
Jan 16, 2019
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 cate...
Jan 10, 2019
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
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 wellbeing. 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 th...
Dec 27, 2018
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 le...
Dec 19, 2018
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 clima...
Dec 15, 2018
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
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
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 work...
Nov 29, 2018
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
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
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—in...
Nov 14, 2018
The man who carried out the massacre in Pittsburgh was apparently 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 1975-199...
Nov 07, 2018
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.versoboo...
Nov 03, 2018
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
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
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
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. Tha...
Oct 24, 2018
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
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 mean...
Oct 17, 2018
