Featuring Robin D.G. Kelley listening back and reflecting upon old tapes of the interviews with sharecroppers he conducted in the 1980s while researching Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression . This is an episode of Signal Hill, a new audio magazine made by friends of The Dig. Produced by Conor Gillies and edited by Liza Yeager and Omar Etman. Listen to Dan’s Dig interview with Robin Kelley on Hammer and Hoe thedigradio.com/podcast/hammer-and-hoe-with-robin-d-g-kelley Su...
Aug 27, 2025•42 min
Featuring Sarah Jaffe on her book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire . The ordinary death of a loved one under a capitalist order that routinely forbids sufficient time off to mourn. Workplace injuries, deindustrialization, police violence, pandemic, genocide, social murder, and how we can make sense of loss through struggle. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Dig 500th Episode Party November 7 in Brooklyn! Emceed by Brace and Liz from TrueAnon. Free for Patreon supporter...
Aug 16, 2025•1 hr 40 min
Featuring Alex Han, Asha Ransby-Sporn, and Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor on Chicago’s left political experiment. In the wake of Zohran’s remarkable victory in New York, organizers all over the country are taking a close look at Chicago under Mayor Brandon Johnson. A Chicago Teachers Union leader elected in 2023, Johnson’s win was the culmination of years of militant labor and social movement struggle. But while much has been achieved, Johnson and his allies have also suffered many defeats–and the m...
Aug 05, 2025
Featuring Isabella Weber, Malcolm Harris, and Paul Williams on Abundance. A debate and discussion of: the book; the discourse; the underlying economic and political questions of how we make the affordable housing, green energy, and fast trains we need; and how actual capitalist social relations appear to us in mystified form as “supply” and “demand.” Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Get 50% off A People’s History of Psychoanalysis and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with...
Jul 22, 2025•1 hr 58 min
Featuring Aslı Bâli and Gabriel Winant on the emerging conjuncture: the Trump regime’s fascist and authoritarian second coming; the giant vacuum created by the Democratic establishment’s inability to act like an opposition party; and the resurgent dynamism and energy now coming so powerfully from our political forces on the socialist left. Conducted before a live audience at the Socialism 2025 conference. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a specia...
Jul 11, 2025•1 hr 33 min
Featuring NYC DSA co-chairs Gustavo Gordillo and Grace Mausser on how Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary. NYC DSA spent years building an electoral juggernaut that has now made history and offers a model for the left everywhere across the United States. A behind-the-scenes look at how NYC DSA and the Zohran campaign did it! Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out the Summer 2025 issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly at www.socres.org Get 50% off Immigration ...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 55 min
Featuring Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s war on Iran, possible direct US intervention, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Chicago: come see The Dig live! secure.actblue.com/donate/thediglive Listen to Thawra and our five-part Iran series: thedigradio.com/series Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Read Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi in Sidecar newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/culmination Buy All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence at Haymarketbooks.com In These Times is ...
Jun 20, 2025•1 hr 33 min
Featuring Ryann Liebenthal, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and Mike Pierce on Ryann’s book Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis . Interview by guest host Astra Taylor. We are working on an episode analyzing Israel’s war on Iran amid the ongoing Gaza genocide—it will be out soon. For now, check out our five-part series on the history of Iran and also Thawra , our 19-part series on the history of Arab politics (lots on Iran in the final episodes). Find both series here: thedigradio.co...
Jun 17, 2025•2 hr 29 min
Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Asha Ransby-Sporn on 2020’s summer of mass protest and rebellion sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. As Keeanga puts it: “The pressing question is how we went from twenty-six million people on the streets to a fascist in the White House?” We must urgently build organizations and movements that meet the moment as both popular resistance and authoritarian repression intensify. To do that, we need to learn from the 2020 uprising. Support The Dig at Pa...
Jun 08, 2025•2 hr 9 min
Featuring Derek Guy on the politics, history, economics, and style of Western menswear. Guest hosted by Dennis M. Hogan. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig In These Times is offering 78% off print subscriptions for Dig listeners at Inthesetimes.com/dig Buy I Didn’t Come Here to Lie at Haymarketbooks.com
May 29, 2025•2 hr 43 min
Featuring Quinn Slobodian on his book Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right . MAGA and its far-right populist siblings around the world aren’t just a backlash to neoliberalism. The far-right has also long been animated by extremist mutant neoliberal anarcho-capitalist and paleo-libertarian strains that in the 1980s and 90s built a new New Fusionist politics of capitalist extremism—a politics that promoted IQ as the measure of individual and racial value; hard bord...
May 19, 2025•2 hr 34 min
Featuring Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing French party La France Insoumise. How the radical left confronts and then defeats the far-right, in France and everywhere. Recorded before an audience at n+1 ’s Brooklyn office. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for “Our Collective Is the Prize” at comrades.education Buy Reconsidering Reparations at haymarketbooks.com...
May 10, 2025•56 min
Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the final in a four-part series, traces the great unraveling of the American empire from the 1970s to our present MAGA 2.0 moment. Would you like to know more? Aziz made a bibliography for you: thedigradio.com/newsletter102 Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Enemy Feminisms and I Didn’t Come Here to Lie at Haymarketbooks.com...
May 03, 2025•2 hr 16 min
Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the third in what is now a four-part series, looks at how black movements responded as the Vietnam War and the limits of formal civil rights victories combined to explode the Cold War’s contradictions. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Reconsidering Reparations at Haymarketbooks.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Di...
Apr 26, 2025•1 hr 37 min
Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the second in a three-part series, takes the story from World War I’s hyper-nationalist, xenophobic First Red Scare, through the convulsions of the middle decades of the 20th century: the Communist Party USA, the New Deal, World War II, the civil rights movement, the Warren Court, and ultimately the Cold War, when American liberalism, anti-communism, and em...
Apr 19, 2025•2 hr 41 min
Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American capitalist, imperialist project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the first in a three-part series, traces the foundation of the American settler empire from the revolutionary generation up to the eve of World War I. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy White City, Black City at Plutobooks.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin...
Apr 10, 2025•2 hr 19 min
Jeff Schuhrke on his book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade . During the Cold War, organized labor’s top leadership acted as an agent of the US national security state abroad: undermining left-wing unions, fomenting right-wing coups, and promoting the US-led capitalist order. At home, those same forces destroyed left-wing unions and organizers. That history goes a long way in explaining the weakened, conservative, and ineffectual workers’ movement we...
Apr 02, 2025•1 hr 44 min
Featuring more analysis from Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on the shape of global geopolitics and geoeconomics. We discuss: the fault lines of the green energy transition; the US and China battle for dominance while the rest of the world seeks advantage and opportunities for leverage; the US and Russia’s full-throttle commitment to fossil capitalism; the IMF’s ongoing imposition of neoliberal austerity on the world’s poorest countries, which, in opposition to these plans, want to remake the entire w...
Mar 24, 2025•2 hr 19 min
Featuring Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on a global conjuncture defined by Washington’s shredding of the liberal international order’s legitimacy amid a panic over decline: the escalating Cold War with China; Gaza genocide; Trump’s tariff wars and militarism, and his pivot toward Putin on Ukraine; European defense buildup and fiscal revolution; what this all means for the poor majority of the Global South, and more. Part one of a two-part series. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to Th...
Mar 19, 2025•1 hr 52 min
Featuring Eric Blanc on We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big . Interview conducted by guest host Gabriel Winant. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Defend federal workers and federal services: actionnetwork.org/forms/let-us-work/ Contact the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) for help organizing your workplace: workerorganizing.org Contact Workers Organizing Workers (WOW) if you are interested in taking a job in a strategic indus...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 40 min
Featuring TrueAnon hosts Brace Belden and Liz Franczak on our freakish and reactionary tech oligarchy. Musk and friends built a technological infrastructure that has warped everyone’s minds, including their own. Now they’re seizing the state. The hideous AI “art” we discuss: https://bit.ly/4ksG1aM http://bit.ly/3DmDfTD Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org before April 25th for an early bird discount! Use code “DIG” for 30% off a s...
Mar 05, 2025•2 hr 32 min
Featuring Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Mike McCarthy on the MAGA and DOGE war on woke; the complicity of bankrupt liberal identity politics; and the centrality of various oppressions to the class domination of capital and struggles against it. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Read Mike’s article “The Problem of Class Abstractionism” epublications.marquette.edu/socs_fac/356 Buy Enemy Feminisms at Haymarketbooks.com Buy Solidarity Betrayed at Plutobooks.com...
Feb 26, 2025•2 hr 28 min
Featuring Danielle Carr on the history and present state of American unwellness and how that’s been shaped by psychiatry, prescription drugs, neuroscience, popular culture, smartphones and social media. We trace the rise of psychiatry as a Gilded Age human science, the disastrous contradictions of asylum deinstitutionalization, the invention of neuroscience and deep brain stimulation, Elon Musk’s Neuralink fraudulence, how Adderall made the Internet run, the liberal gospel of traumatic literalis...
Feb 17, 2025•2 hr 15 min
Featuring Chris Newman on Trump’s far-right anti-migrant agenda and Democrats’ cruel and stupid complicity. Read All-American Nativism versobooks.com/products/704-all-american-nativism Read Dan’s essay on Gaza and migration politics in n+1 nplusonemag.com/issue-48/politics/do-border Trump’s immigration executive orders propublica.org/article/donald-trump-immigration-executive-orders Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy After Accountability at Haymarketbooks.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobi...
Feb 09, 2025•2 hr 35 min
Featuring Hannah Srajer on building tenant unions by applying labor organizing models. The Connecticut Tenants Union is partnered with SEIU 1199NE to organize fighting super majority tenant unions that win collectively bargained leases and wield working class political power. It’s a model that’s spreading nationwide. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Peruse The Dig’s vast archives at thedigradio.com Support Reclaim RI https://secure.actblue.com/donate/reclaimri Buy Not Your Rescue Project at...
Feb 01, 2025•1 hr 23 min
Featuring Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal on their book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis . Tenant unions fighting to transform Los Angeles, the country, and the world. Support Reclaim RI https://secure.actblue.com/donate/reclaimri Buy Abolish Rent haymarketbooks.org/books/2443-abolish-rent Subscribe to Dissent at dissentmagazine.org/subscribe Use code ‘DIG50’ for 50% off your first order at Plutobooks.com...
Jan 27, 2025•2 hr 13 min
Featuring Michael Denning on Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order , collectively authored by Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Hall’s method of Marxist conjunctural analysis applied to the generalized crisis that paved the way for neoliberalism’s rise; a model for how we should ask questions about our world that will provide us with knowledge we need to change it. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/The...
Jan 19, 2025•2 hr 24 min
Featuring Michael Denning on Stuart Hall’s Marxism—a Marxism without guarantees. This is a comprehensive introduction to Marxism as a method to analyze historically specific, complex and contradictory capitalist social formations, and what that means for making, rather than assuming the existence of, a working-class socialist politics. Next week Dan interviews Denning on Policing the Crisis , a 1978 book collectively authored by Hall and his colleagues; it’s a remarkable project that anticipates...
Jan 11, 2025•1 hr 39 min
Featuring Bassam Haddad on the historical and geopolitical origins of Assad’s rise and fall—and what might happen next. We think through the contradictions: honoring the joy felt by Syrians at Assad’s ouster while simultaneously taking stock of a truly bad geopolitical outcome. Want to learn more? Listen to Thawra , our series on the 20th century political history of the Arab East thedigradio.com/Thawra Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Palestine in a World on Fire at Haymarketbooks.com ...
Dec 22, 2024•2 hr 38 min
Featuring Patrick Blanchfield on assassination and political violence: from the routine to the extraordinary; authored by the state, capital, the left, the right, the unwell and alienated; as an anxiety, in our fantasies, as a morbid symptom and repetition compulsion; and as expressing distinctively American logics of domination and human disposability. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Listen to the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast at ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/ Read Patrick’s essay on ...
Dec 18, 2024•1 hr 59 min
