The Dig

Featuring Ben Mabie and Salar Mohandesi on what the war on Iran tells us about US imperialism, and why the US doesn’t have a massive anti-war movement even amid historic anti-war public sentiment. Capitalist states have changed war-making in ways that insulate imperialism against popular resistance. We must make movements that can thrive and win under new conditions. Find Venezuela in Crisis at ha...

Featuring Geoff Simpson on Justice Democrats’ massive 2026 slate of insurgent House candidates taking on AIPAC/Big Tech money. Also: the history of post-Bernie 2016 primary challenges, the Israel lobby’s legitimacy crisis, radicalizing liberals, and the role of electoral politics in the larger left project. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Dig party in London with Equator magazine on March 13...

Featuring Peter Linebaugh on the Luddites’ machine-breaking revolt against the enclosure of handicraft production, the central role played by capital punishment in the consolidation of the capitalist state, and remaking the struggle against enclosure for the 21st century. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Dig party in London with Equator magazine on March 13. Info and RSVP here eventbrit...

Featuring Peter Linebaugh on the long histories of commons and commoning, connections between enclosures in Europe and imperial conquest abroad, and writing history from below. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago at Haymarketbooks.org Buy Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet at Verso...

Featuring Emilia González Avalos, Greg Nammacher, and JaNaé Bates Imari on how Minneapolis achieved its fight back against ICE/Border Patrol occupation. A decade building aligned mass movements has made Minneapolis among the best organized cities in the country. Those carefully-built structures, however, had to be nimble in confronting the federal onslaught. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig L...

Featuring Nick Srnicek on Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI . A deep exploration of the political economy of AI: the fulcrum of the authoritarian tech oligarchy—and of global contests for economic and military dominance. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Cold War on Five Continents at Haymarketbooks.org Check out equator.org for long-form articles, public events, and reading...

Featuring Aslı Bâli and Greg Grandin on the MAGA model of US imperialism. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to the Unite and Win podcast at podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unite-and-win-a-guide-to-workplace-organizing/id1866713309 Check out equator.org for longform articles, public events, and reading groups

Featuring Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland, and Yoletty Bracho on the US attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro. An expansive conversation analyzing Trump’s imperialist project and assessing Chavismo and its oppositions from Chávez through Maduro. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out equator.org for longform articles, public events, and reading groups Buy Middl...

Featuring Andrew Epstein on the Zohran campaign’s savvy, funny, sharp, disciplined, and moving comms operation. As one hundred thousand volunteers knocked three million doors, Andrew and a team of strategists, speechwriters, designers, and filmmakers wrote a giant love letter to New York City and inoculated voters against a lavishly-funded fusillade of smears and attacks. Guest hosted by Micah Uet...

Featuring Sumaya Awad, Sumathy Kumar, and Nathan Gusdorf on building power on the ground as our allies exercise it from above in the service of a larger hegemonic project to transform the United States. As Zohran Mamdani takes office on January 1, it’s time for governance—and all of the opportunities, constraints, and contradictions that entails. A recording of last week’s live Dig in Brooklyn. Su...

Featuring Eric Blanc, Leah Greenberg, and Waleed Shahid on the liberal resistance’s sharp left turn since Trump returned to the White House. Libs are voting Zohran at the ballot box, fighting ICE in the streets, and just generally looking favorably upon socialism. This discussion puts the moment in historic context and plots out the strategic exigencies and opportunities ahead. Rest in power Asad...

Featuring Tascha Van Auken on how Zohran’s campaign mobilized an army of 100,000 volunteers to knock three million doors. Van Auken has been an architect of NYC-DSA’s field operation and its general electoral strategy since the beginning. Organizers everywhere have a lot to learn. Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Live Dig in Brooklyn on December 10:...

Featuring Malcolm Harris on What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis . An open-minded and anti-sectarian discussion about an ecumenical book that plots out three paths forward for the left—arguing we must embrace all three, simultaneously. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Live Dig in Brooklyn on December 10: Zohran and the Return of Municipal Socialism. Navigating opportuni...

Featuring Brace Belden, Liz Franczak, Gabriel Winant, Aziz Rana, Sumaya Awad, Thea Riofrancos, and Alex Lewis. Toasts and roasts celebrating 500 episodes of The Dig. Plus a short speech from Dan. Live at Brooklyn’s Littlefield. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Live Dig in Brooklyn on December 10: Zohran and the Return of Municipal Socialism. Navigating opportunities and contradictions o...

Featuring Thea Riofrancos on Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism . The green energy transition requires a vast array of inputs: copper, cobalt, rare earth elements, and the focus of this discussion, lithium—all of which must be mined from the earth. This is a wide-ranging discussion stretching from Chile to Nevada, and from the dawn of colonialism to the geoeconomic conflict between the...

Featuring Fernando Haddad on Brazilian political economy and where Brazil fits into a world capitalist system structured by relationships of domination and unequal exchange. Haddad is Finance Minister of Brazil. He served as mayor of São Paulo and in 2018 was the Workers’ Party (PT) presidential candidate. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy From Apartheid to Democracy at UCPress.com Read th...

Featuring Walden Bello and Jane Nalunga on neoliberalism’s defeat of Third Worldist radical projects and the Global South social movement and civil society networks that rose from the ashes to take on neoliberal globalization. A wide-ranging interview with two important, long-standing Global South leaders. Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag Sup...

Featuring Alexandra Wandel, Gonzalo Berrón, and Paul Adlerstein on the 1999 mass protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and on the giant global justice movement that mobilized unions, farmers, environmentalists, public interest advocates, and various radical leftists all over the world. Recorded live in Brussels with the European Trade Justice Coalition. First in a two-part series...

Featuring Melinda Cooper on Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance . Balanced budget conservatism and supply side populism engineered a politics of austerity and budget deficits. Deep cuts to the social wage like welfare reform disciplined labor so severely that Fed Chair Alan Greenspan opened the floodgates of easy money confident it would juice the price of assets alone....

Featuring Melinda Cooper on Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance . Neoliberalism remade the American economy into an engine for the appreciation of assets stretching from the single-family suburban home to the stock market. This revanchist offensive sought to enforce not only the class order and fiscal rectitude but also gender, sexual, and racial hierarchies. The FIRST...

Featuring Alberto Toscano and Stuart Schrader on Trump’s intensification of police, ICE, and military repression. What does this all reveal about MAGA’s fascist and authoritarian project—and about the illiberalism already immanent in the US carceral and imperialist state? The SECOND in a two-part series. Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag Suppo...

Featuring Alberto Toscano and Stuart Schrader on Trump’s intensification of police, ICE, and military repression. What does this all reveal about MAGA’s fascist and authoritarian project—and about the illiberalism already immanent in the US carceral and imperialist state? The FIRST in a two-part series. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode...

Featuring Ian Gavigan on how the bipartisan neoliberalization of higher education laid the groundwork for Trump’s all-out assault. Workers must unite on every campus, articulate an alternative vision for the university, and fight to win it. Check out HELU higheredlaborunited.org Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Dig 500th Episode Party November 7 in Brooklyn! Emceed by Brace and Liz from TrueA...

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 int...

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 Epi...