Hegemonicon - An Investigation Into the Workings of Power

In this solo season finale, William makes his case for his approach to voting in this year's presidential election. Looking ahead, he lays out his vision for where left movements need to start building infrastructure next, regardless of the election outcomes, based on what he learned from his guests this season about international solidarity. Support this show and others like it by becoming a subs...

Mijente Policy Director Jacinta González joins William for this episode. Jacinta is an expert in organizing against immigration enforcement and criminalization of Latinx and immigrant communities. Their conversation explores how local, in-person community organizing is key to defending migrants threatened by increasingly violent, aggressive, and isolationist US border and immigration policy. Suppo...

On this episode of Hegemonicon , Will talks with Ikaika Hussey, an organizer and a candidate for Hawaii State House District 29. They delve into Hawaii's often-ignored pre-colonial history and its current struggles as a state in the American empire. Support this show and others like it by becoming a subscriber at convergencemag.com/donate

Hegemonicon will be taking an intermission to record a few more episodes and wrap up this present series on internationalism. We're very much looking forward to bringing you more important and necessary discussions to tie together what we're learning about internationalism, the global role of the United States, and what that means for organizers in the belly of the beast. Thank you so much for lis...

Khury Petersen-Smith joins the show to discuss internationalist organizing and ideologies among Black communities in the US. Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He researches US empire, borders, and migration and strategizes with activists to work against the violence that the US carries out and supports around the world. Khury's work...

This episode features a conversation with two experienced unionists about the history of, and barriers to, solidarity between US workers and those abroad. Carl Rosen is the General President of UE, the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America. UE is a famously democratic, progressive, and independent union, and they have done arguably the best work of any US union in building mutu...

Cindy Wiesner of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance joins the show to share reflections on her 35 years of internationalist organizing on the US Left—from the global justice movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, through the antiwar movement of the 2000s, to the growing international climate justice movement of the 2000s–2010s. Throughout that journey, she has been working to build power from...

David Adler ( @davidrkadler ) returns to the show to share the work of Progressive International , including its election observatory, its research portal on the "Reactionary International," its online advocacy campaigns, and, most ambitiously, its efforts to cohere ideas and people that could guide a "New" New International Economic Order. David shares his perspective on where allies are to be fo...

Tim Sahay returns to the show provide a world tour of the flows and chokepoints of goods and finance that make up our global economy.  While the US economy is supposedly doing better than ever, it's a very different story in the Global South, which is suffering from lack of investment capital and economic sovereignty. Tim helps explain why, and we speculate about potential sites of leverage for re...

Van Jackson ( @realvanjackson ) joins the show to discuss the dangerous strategy of global primacy that drives US foreign policy. Van Jackson is a scholar of international relations specializing in East Asian and Pacific security, critical analysis of defense issues, and the intersection of working-class interests with foreign policy. He worked in the Department of Defense during the Obama adminis...

Will talks with Tobita Chow to set the stage for our series on internationalism. We talk about the breakdown of US global authority, the twilight of the neoliberal era, and the turn to economic nationalism in the United States and abroad. Toby helps us to see Bidenomics as a response by US capitalists to a global crisis of profitability. We try to understand the likely consequences of Bidenomics:...

Hegemonicon will return Tuesday, July 30 with interviews focusing on internationalist organizing and analysis on the US Left. Foreign policy is back on the agenda in a big way in US politics, and promises to be a top concern for the foreseeable future. Issues around Gaza, Ukraine, and China have impacted domestic politics under the Biden administration and will factor in the November election. The...

This episode wraps up the current season of Hegemonicon with one more look at "What We're Building." William sits down with Milena Velis and Jayanni Webster, who were both deeply engaged with LeftRoots, an organization that operated for about 10 years before intentionally sunsetting at the end of 2023. LeftRoots's major mission was training and preparing people to become cadre. The organization's...

In this latest episode looking at "What We're Building," Hegemonicon host William Lawrence talks with Maurice Mitchell, National Director of the Working Families Party (WFP). The WFP aims to become the leading political home for US progressives. It has built a reputation for staking out strategic electoral engagements on a state-by-state basis that have yielded some major victories in the politica...

This episode continues the podcast's exploration of what we are building on today's Left by taking a look at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Most of our audience is likely to be familiar with DSA, at least by name. It's an organization that has moved from one intra-organizational controversy to the next, with the dramas often playing out in the algorithm-driven public square of Twitter...

There’s a long-running dialogue on the Left, which has resurfaced in a big way since the pandemic, about what direct service work has to do with building political power. Some people argue that it’s just putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. We shouldn’t be doing harm reduction: we should be seeking to stop the harm in the first place, through structural change. But others argue that direct servic...

President Joe Biden, the man entrusted with our defense against Trump's MAGA fascism, is now enabling a genocide in Gaza. The situation looks bad from almost any angle. What does this mean for US progressives who prefer Biden to Trump on domestic policy, but find Biden’s current foreign policy unconscionable? Should we shut up about Palestine to shore up Biden’s popularity? Unacceptable. Is there...

The US Left is having an “internationalist moment” stemming from horror at the ongoing Israeli bombardment and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. While it’s encouraging to see Americans showing solidarity with people beyond our own borders, it doesn’t change the fact that bombs continue to fall on Gaza while the Biden administration continues to fund and arm Israel's genocide in the Gaza Strip. Howeve...

This episode continues the series on “What We’re Building” - the most relevant and necessary work happening on the US Left today. Immanuel Wallerstein, the sociologist behind World-Systems Theory, wrote: " The key problem for the Global Left is not its organization, however important that be. The key problem is lucidity. " William is joined this episode by three guests who are working to develop a...

This episode continues the series What We’re Building —a look at the most noteworthy organizations and initiatives on the US Left today.  The relationships between creditors and debtors—like those between bosses and workers and landlords and tenants—are foundational economic relationships under capitalism. All are at once sites of exploitation, and sites where class consciousness can be developed....

In 2011 the Occupy movement kicked off a new generation of left-wing protest in the US. In 2016, Bernie Sanders’ campaign harnessed the energy of the insurgent movements, and directed it to the political arena. Since then, a broad current of the US Left has been practicing the “inside/outside” strategy—building powerful organizations and protest movements outside the halls of power, while also ele...

In this episode, William continues his series on What We're Building , exploring noteworthy organizations on the US Left today. Safe and secure housing is one of the most fundamental human needs, yet housing is heavily commodified, often insecure and unaffordable. Property ownership becomes a more lofty dream for young people by the day and rent prices continue to skyrocket across the country. Mea...

As Hegemonicon continues its exploration of what the Left is building, this conversation analyzes the model for political and community organizing that has persisted since Saul Alinsky hit the field in the mid-20th century—professionalized, nonprofit-managed, and non-ideological. The anti-ideological component of this type of organizing has been the subject of ongoing critique. But other aspects,...

Last week's episode with Max Elbaum marked a transition for the podcast into an exploration of two of the biggest questions facing the Left: "How do we block the continued rise of the MAGA Right?" and "What are we building in its place?" In this and following episodes, William will seek to answer those questions by looking at current movements in progressive spaces. He begins this week by assessin...

This is the first episode in our sequence that will look at "What We Are Building"—the organizations, networks and ideas that have the most currency on the Left in late 2023. Despite his several criminal indictments, Donald Trump still leads the pack of contenders for the 2024 GOP Presidential nomination, and the Christian-nationalist MAGA movement dominates the party. Leftists in the anti-MAGA fr...