Jacobin Radio

Veteran journalist Marc Cooper joins Suzi to talk about the landslide that wasn’t, Trump’s transition swamp, and the state of the Fourth Estate. Trump’s victory is confined to the undemocratic electoral college. His winning margin in the popular vote is 1.6 percentage points, the smallest in more than 20 years. Trump may claim an historic, unprecedented mandate, but he just squeaked by. He is stil...

Michael Meeropol , son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, talks about how the government executed his mother despite knowing her innocence. Ruth Whippman , author of BOYMOM: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity , discusses the challenges of raising boys. See recent documents shedding light on "Why Ethel's execution was wrongful": https://www.rfc.org/node/4836 Behind the News , host...

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar in the final installment of a three-part series on Central America. This episode picks up with Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crypto enthusiasm in El Salvador; Daniel Ortega’s perversion of Sandinismo’s revolutionary legacy in Nicaragua; anti-mining movements in Panama; Honduras and Guatemala, where popular social movements have elected left presidents t...

Anatol Lieven tries to divine a Trump foreign policy out of unreliable rhetoric and early appointments. Alex Vitale tries similar on Trump and criminal justice. Behind the News , hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive online: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/radio.html

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar in the second of a three (not two!) part series on the history and present of Central America. This interview picks up our discussion of revolutionary armed struggles against brutal US-backed military-oligarchic regimes in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Then, the peace accords and postwar transitions accompanied by the imposition of neoliberal...

Suzi talks to UC Berkeley sociologist Dylan Riley, who has written a great deal about fascism and far right politics. The US has just elected to the Presidency a man who represents a dire threat to democracy and constitutional rule as we know it. We get Dylan’s understanding of the specificity of Trump’s politics, the basis of his support, and the fascistic measures favored by people in and around...

Earlier this week, Joe Biden welcomed the Israeli president Isaac Herzog to the White House. Last October, Herzog announced that there were no innocent civilians in Gaza. The International Court of Justice cited his comments as evidence that the Palestinian people needed protection from the threat of genocide. Akbar Shahid Ahmed of the Huffington Post has been following the Biden administration’s...

We look at the election results that took many of us by surprise — giving Donald Trump and Republicans an across the board victory. For a look at the bigger picture, Suzi speaks to Robert Brenner, professor of history at UCLA, for analysis and some post-election blues. This podcast was recorded on November 8, before all the votes were counted along the West Coast. The final tallies will likely shr...

Doug comments on the Trump victory and the role of inflation. Dahlia Scheindlin talks about Israeli public opinion. James Foley and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, authors of a recent paper , discuss Ukrainian nationalism in the Western political imagination. Behind the News , hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global...

Oh lord almighty, when will we be rid of this man? Apparently not for another four years at least. We ring in the latest chapter of this never-ending "Trump Era" with the new biopic/origin story THE APPRENTICE (2024). Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.

Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Trump’s decisive victory, Harris’s catastrophic loss, multi-racial working-class dealignment, and where the left might go from here.  Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig We now have a special feed dedicated entirely to our Thawra series. Listen and spread the word: thedigradio.com/Thawra Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Di...

Laura Jedeed , author of a recent feature article for Lux , discusses the right’s war on North Idaho College. Mouin Rabbani talks about what’s driving Israel’s multiple wars, and the Axis of Resistance. Behind the News , hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive online .

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar on the history of Central America. This is the first episode in a two-part series covering the late-19th and early-20th century rise of export-crop oligarchies and constant US intervention, the US-backed separation of Panama from Colombia to take control of the Canal, the CIA's 1954 Guatemala coup, the rise of armed revolutionary movements in Nicaragua...

Alan Minsky sits in for host Suzi Weissman on a special pre-election edition of Jacobin Radio . In the first half, Alan speaks with economist Mark Paul, Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University, about a California ballot measure, Prop 33, that addresses one of the top concerns of voters across the country: the cost of housing. Prop 33 would eliminate statewide restrictions on rent control...

Is Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER (1979) about the Soviet Russia in which it was made? And if not, then where exactly is "The Zone"? We wade into one of the most forbidding cinematic objects of all time, but realize that the answer is only ever found within. PLUS: Justin Trudeau is historically unpopular - so why hasn't he stepped down? "US Politics Has Reached a Dead End" by Luke Savage - https://www...

Featuring Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix on their book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea . Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Get 40% off The Years of Theory with code "DIG" at Versobooks.com Buy Our History is the Future at Haymarketbooks.com

William Hartung , co-author of a recent paper for Brown University's Watson Institute , outlines how much aid the US has given to Israel over the last year (plus, he shares some wacky stuff on AI weapons). The sociologist Scott Schieman talks about his surprising research showing that people actually like their jobs. Behind the News , hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and poli...

The German Peasants’ War was the biggest social revolt in a European country during the period before the French Revolution. In the wake of the Reformation, a movement among the popular classes rose up against feudalism and aristocratic power. The revolt was brutally crushed and the challenge to the feudal order was defeated. Marxist writers like Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky later made it int...

Five years after Joker because an era-defining cultural phenomenon, its sequel, JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX (2024), is the biggest flop of the year. We sifted through the wreckage to find a purposely abrasive object, and are split on its effectiveness. Toronto listeners, see Luke speak at Progressive Publics: A Symposium Connecting Scholarship & Independent Media, November 8 - https://www.eventbrite.c...

Anatol Lieven dissects the ambitiously aggressive grand design of the Biden-Harris foreign policy. Lily Lynch, author of a recent article for The Baffler , talks about the emptying out of the Balkans. Behind the News , hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive online: https://www.leftbusinessob...

Featuring Naomi Klein on how the pandemic turbocharged a far-right conspiracist politics that’s sweeping into power. This strange new world, however, is a product of an old contradiction: the need to disavow and deny a long history and awful present; the inability to make sense of the extreme violence and oppression that makes everyday Western capitalist society possible.  We discuss Klein’s...

Paul North and Paul Reitter discuss their new translation of Marx’s Capital . Nimrod Flaschenberg and Alma Itzhaky, authors of a recent article for Jacobin , talk about the vicious political culture of Israel after October 7. Behind the News , hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive online: h...

On October 8, the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign held an online conference on “Boris Kagarlitsky and the Challenges of the Left.” Although Kagarlitsky is serving a five-year sentence in a Russian penal colony, he has just published a book called The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left . The conference addressed Kagarlitsky’s wide-ranging analysis of the...

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the third and final part of the epilogue to Thawra (Revolution), our epic series on the history of revolutionary Arab politics. This episode takes us from Hamas’s victory in the 2006 legislative elections, through the siege on Gaza, to October 7, the Gaza genocide, the Axis of Resistance, and Israel’s attempt to draw Iran into a massive regional war with the...

Last October, Long Reads spoke to Rashid Khalidi, one of the leading historians of modern Palestine , about the Israeli attack on Gaza. Few people would have guessed at the time that the mass killing of Palestinian civilians would still be happening twelve months later, and now expanding into Lebanon. The interview was conducted Wednesday, October 9th, when we were still waiting to see whether and...