ISM | Ideas Meet Power

The Haymarket Affair did not begin with a bomb. It began with a movement. In the years before Haymarket, Chicago became the center of a growing labor revolt as workers demanded shorter hours, greater dignity, and more control over their lives. At the heart of that movement stood a small group of radical organizers: Albert and Lucy Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Lizzie Holmes, and others, f...

How can workers build power in an economy dominated by giant corporations and monopolies? To explore that question, we turn to the history of unionism and the rise of the American labor movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1905, labor organizers gathered in Chicago to found the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. Their goal was to unite w...

The moment when the belief that the United States was immune to class conflict was shattered. In July 1877, railroad workers across the United States stopped work. What began as a wage dispute in a small rail town in West Virginia quickly became the largest labor uprising in American history. Trains sat idle, freight yards were occupied, and entire cities ground to a halt. In Chicago, unemployed w...

Anarchism emerged not simply as a theory, but as a response to hunger, repression, industrial capitalism, and the growing power of the modern state. In this opening episode of Season 2, we trace anarchism's roots in the late nineteenth century, from the aftermath of the Paris Commune to the labor struggles of industrial Chicago. Through figures like Louise Michel, Lucy Parsons, Pierre-Joseph Proud...

In the wake of John Brown’s raid, Henry David Thoreau delivered one of the most forceful defenses of moral action in American history. While much of the North recoiled after Harpers Ferry, Thoreau stood up in Concord and defended Brown as a man of principle, willing to act where others would only speak. What follows is a reading of Thoreau’s A Plea for Captain John Brown , one of the clearest expr...

In October of 1859, a small band of abolitionists led by John Brown seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Their goal was simple but audacious: to ignite a mass slave uprising and bring an end to slavery by force. Within 36 hours, the raid had collapsed. Brown’s men were killed, captured, or scattered. Brown himself was wounded, arrested, and sentenced to hang. But Harpers Ferry was...

What began as a family quarrel within socialism would become a permanent schism that would shape every revolution that followed. When sailors at Kronstadt rose to demand “All power to the soviets, not the parties,” they believed they were defending the true legacy of 1917. Instead, they were crushed by the Red Army on the frozen ice of the Gulf of Finland, exactly fifty years after the Paris Commu...

For 72 days, the Paris Commune turned the capital into a living experiment in working-class democracy. Parks opened, palaces became public space, newspapers and clubs exploded with debate, and a wave of reforms tried to remake daily life from the ground up: secular schools, cooperative workshops, equal pay in the National Guard, and a new vision of the “social republic.” But outside the city walls...

In the spring of 1871, socialism briefly ruled Paris. After months of siege, starvation, and humiliation, the French capital turned inward—away from Versailles, away from empire, away from the promises of liberal republics—and toward a radical experiment in working-class self-government. In this episode, we trace how the trauma of war and betrayal gave birth to the Paris Commune, the most audaciou...

Socialism didn’t begin as a national project—it began as a wager that workers could unite across borders. In this episode, we trace the birth of internationalism: the idea that the working class, wherever it lives, shares a common struggle—and a common enemy. We open in London, September 28, 1864, inside St. Martin’s Hall, where English trade unionists and French artisans gathered for what was sup...

In the spring of 1848, Paris became the center of the socialist imagination. After the fall of the July Monarchy, a new republic promised liberty, equality, and fraternity, but what would those words actually mean for workers, women, and the poor? In this episode, we follow the rise—and violent suppression—of socialism’s first mass political experiment. Through the lives and ideas of Pierre-Joseph...

Europe in the 1840s was sleeping on a volcano. In this episode, we trace the long buildup to the Revolutions of 1848 through hunger, repression, and the slow accumulation of social pressure beneath the surface of liberal order. We begin not in Paris, but in the silk workshops of Lyon, where workers first rose as a class against industrial capitalism. From there, we follow the aftermath of the July...

Jacobinism promised equality, enforced virtue, and left a legacy the left has wrestled with ever since. Emerging from the French Revolution, Jacobinism was the first modern attempt to make politics absolute—reshaping society in the name of equality, virtue, and popular sovereignty itself. Under leaders like Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobins fused Enlightenment ideals with mass politics, revolut...

The first furnace of modern socialism. A woman enters a sick man’s room, and a knife turns a revolutionary into a secular saint. In 1793 Paris — the furnace of modern politics — the French Revolution reaches its most radical phase. From the sans-culottes and the first Paris Commune to the Constitution of 1793 and the Enragés’ demand for bread, this episode traces the earliest roots of socialist po...

Socialism is one of the most argued-over ideas in modern history — praised as a path to equality, condemned as a road to tyranny, and declared dead more than once. So what is socialism — really? In this opening episode of ISM: Ideas Meet Power , we trace socialism from its origins in the industrial revolutions of the 19th century to its global transformations in the 20th century and beyond. Throug...

ISM is a narrative history podcast about political ideologies and social movements—socialism, anarchism, fascism, liberalism, and beyond. Each season explores a major ideology through immersive storytelling and historical analysis, tracing how ideas move from theory into the real world, shaping revolutions, states, and everyday life. Ideas Meet Power. Written and produced by Matt Payne. Support, S...