The Dig

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 org...

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-...

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 Care...

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...

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, Dives...

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 an...

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...

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...

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 p...

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 t...

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 im...

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 excellen...

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,...

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 pol...

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,...

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 startli...

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. U...

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 repres...

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...

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 th...

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...

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...

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 Movi...

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 th...

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...