View Transcript 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
For much of the 20th 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 discusses ...
Jul 05, 2019•1 hr
View Transcript 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...
Jun 29, 2019•2 hr 45 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
There is perhaps no more depressing situation in Western Europe than that which prevails in Italy: a coalition government between the far-right Lega party and the now subordinate, bizarre, amorphously anti-corruption, internet-fetishist, pseudo-directly democratic Five Star Movement. In other words, Italian politics is dominated by a viciously racist anti-migrant politics; the left, along with most traditional forces, is in utter disarray. Today, Lega, led by Interior Minister Mateo Salvini, run...
Jun 15, 2019•1 hr 13 min
In Spanish politics, the center-left Socialist Party has demolished the conservative Popular Party and checked risk of a major far-right surge. But meanwhile, the once very plausible-feeling dream of an insurgent radical left Podemos gaining power has faded. And fast. Dan discusses the Spanish situation with Carlos Delclós and Magda Bandera. Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register now at socialismconference.org Check out Next Left, a new podcast from The Nation magazine...
Jun 13, 2019•1 hr 8 min
The radical left has been unable to electorally capitalize on the Yellow Vest movement, a massive revolt against a vicious, unequal and alienating neoliberal order. Instead, French electoral politics has pit an insurgent far-right against a zombie liberal center that presents itself as a bulwark against the nationalist tide. Dan interviews Sebastian Budgen and Danièle Obono, a member of the National Assembly with La France insoumise. Check out War over Peace: One Hundred Years of Israel’s Milita...
Jun 08, 2019•1 hr 15 min
Brexit has so dominated UK politics that it has put the Labour Party in a profoundly difficult and perhaps untenable position of strategic ambiguity toward how to handle the never-ending matter of leaving the EU. Today, in part two of our five-part series on European politics, Dan discusses this all with Grace Blakeley, Maya Goodfellow, and Richard Seymour. Thanks to Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles at versobooks.com Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! ...
Jun 07, 2019•1 hr 37 min
This week and next, we’re bringing you five episodes on European politics. Today, we’re starting things off with Chris Bickerton and Jerome Roos for an overview of the European situation and the debate on the European left over how to approach Europe and the EU. Then, an interview on British politics with Grace Blakeley, Maya Goodfellow, and Richard Seymour. After that, a discussion of French politics with Sebastian Budget and Danièle Obono, a member of France’s National Assembly with the left-w...
Jun 05, 2019•1 hr 23 min
View Transcript US Rep. Rashida Tlaib on the local struggles that guide her work on behalf of the working class in Congress, the urgent need for a politics that puts people over profit, the question of impeachment, and why American people are coming around to supporting a free Palestine. Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register now at socialismconference.org Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig...
Jun 03, 2019•36 min
Dan has in-depth discussion on Bernie’s approach to race and what he must do to win over Black voters with Malaika Jabali and Wendi Muse. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Sanders isn’t unpopular with Black voters. In fact, he has done rather well with young Black people. But to win the primary and beat Biden, he must do a lot better. In particular, Malaika and Wendi argue that Bernie must integrate racial justice into the core of his class struggle agenda, rather than emphasizing it as a separat...
May 30, 2019•1 hr 49 min
DSA’s explosive growth continues; it has already, in a few short years, become the center of a renewed American socialist movement. Dan interviews Doug Henwood, who recently published a lengthy article in The New Republic entitled “ The Socialist Network: Inside DSA’s struggle to move into the political mainstream .” Check out Lisa Duggan’s Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed ucpress.edu/book/9780520294776/mean-girl Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register for t...
May 25, 2019•1 hr 1 min
Three interviews: historian Seth Rockman, scholars Crystal Eddins and Zachary Sell, and public historians Akeia Benard, Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, Elon Cook Lee and Marco McWilliams. Dan conducted six interviews on capitalism and slavery at The Dig’s recent Slavery’s Hinterlands symposium here in Rhode Island. This second of two episodes begins with Seth Rockman on the role of slavery in American capitalism. Then, scholars Crystal Eddins and Zachary Sell on revolution and counter-revolution acros...
May 22, 2019•2 hr 37 min
Three interviews: historians Linford Fisher, Christy Clark-Pujara and Joanne Melish, and Emily Owens. Dan conducted six interviews on capitalism and slavery at The Dig’s recent Slavery’s Hinterlands symposium here in Rhode Island. This first of two episodes begins with historian Linford Fisher, who explains that the English settlement of North America was a settler-colonial project that required genocidally dispossessing indigenous people of their lands. What you might not know is that a central...
May 16, 2019•2 hr 14 min
Donna Haraway's work defies disciplines, combining insights from both biology and feminist thought, and drawing on her own involvement in political projects organized around feminism and radical science. Haraway’s most recent book, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, takes up these questions as the fragility of earth’s webs of life is becoming frighteningly and increasingly apparent. What are the ethical and political demands in the face of the most pressing threat of our er...
May 09, 2019
What is gentrification? It isn't just about what was once known as the hipster and is still known as the artist, the telltale warning signs of impending demographic change. It's part of an entire political-economic order that has made real estate global capitalism's most prized asset for storing wealth—one that has helped bend place-based urban governments to the will of mobile, and thus more powerful, capital. Dan interviews Samuel Stein on his book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Es...
May 02, 2019
*This episode of The Dig is a special Dig in Spanish. Visit Jacobin for a transcript in English. Este episodio de The Dig es un Dig especial en español. Entra a Jacobin para una transcripción en inglés.* Cuando se piensa en Chile desde el extranjero, generalmente surge la imagen de su pasado reciente marcado por la dictadura cívico–militar. Y esto con toda razón. El legado del régimen genocida de Pinochet todavía está presente en todas partes—en la memoria personal y colectiva, en las leyes y en...
Apr 26, 2019
The US has played a major role in fomenting violence across Yemen, backing the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led forces attacking the country while also conducting a direct war against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula under the guise of counterter...
Apr 18, 2019
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...
Apr 10, 2019
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. ...
Apr 05, 2019
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...
Mar 27, 2019
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...
Mar 23, 2019
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 cont...
Mar 20, 2019
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...
Mar 13, 2019
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...
Mar 09, 2019
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
