Jacobin Radio

Featuring Daisy Pitkin on her book On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union, a memoir that powerfully captures the drama of an organizing drive—and so much more. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out The Dig newsletter at thedigradio.com Subscribe to n+1 at nplusonemag.com/thedig . Enter THEDIG at checkout for a discount.

Alex Gourevitch joins us to discuss his recent Catalyst essay that assesses the possibilities and limits of a post-work socialist society. We're also joined by Jonas Pontusson to unpack the strong electoral showing of the Swedish far right. And finally our own European editor David Broder explains what Giorgia Meloni and the Brothers of Italy's victory means for Italy. The Jacobin Show is a weekly...

This week, Grace speaks to Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People . They talk about the origins of the web, how it was enclosed and privatized, and ways we might work together to build a different model for the internet. A World to Win is a podcast from Grace Blakeley and Tribune bringing you a weekly dose of socialist news, theory, and action with guests from around the world. Thanks to o...

A memorial to Barbara Ehrenreich, who died at 81 on September 1, featuring three Behind the News interviews with her from 2004, 2005, and 2009. 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 here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html

Libertarian magicians Penn & Teller turn their gaze to the art world in TIM'S VERMEER (2013), a documentary that attempts to prove that, with just the right set of tools and a lot of money, one wealthy entrepreneur can paint a Vermeer. We discuss the bleak, empty void that is Penn & Teller's view of art. See Luke at the Toronto International Festival of Authors on September 27 - https://fe...

Featuring Laura Weinrib on The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. Did you know that the ACLU was founded as a radical labor organization allied with the IWW? Weinrib traces the rise of the modern civil liberties movement, and modern constitutional liberalism more broadly, from World War I through the New Deal. She explains how the ACLU went from defending free speech as a...

Elizabeth Schmidt joins Long Reads for a discussion about Somalia's modern history of politics, crisis, and foreign intervention. Elizabeth is professor emeritus of history at Loyola University Maryland and the author of six books about Africa, including Foreign Intervention in Africa After the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror . Read her piece, "US Interference in Somal...

Samir Sonti joins us to talk about why the Federal Reserve has so much power over the economy and why its typical response to inflation is bad for workers. But does it need to be? We're also joined by Matt Bruenig to explain the real state of childhood poverty and what we should do to erase it. Our own Paul Prescod breaks down the state of the rail worker contract negations and whether a strike is...

Grace speaks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, prison abolitionist, scholar, and professor of geography at the City University of New York. She is the author of several books, including Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and, most recently, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation . They discuss who is profiting from the criminal justice system, how existin...

Suzi talks to UCSB labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein to get his analysis of the impending rail strike and the tentative deal reached to prevent it by labor leaders, the government, and the freight rail companies. The workers are demanding paid sick days and more predictable and humane schedules, but they weren’t at the table forging the tentative agreement. They are, however, the ones who w...

We mark Queen Elizabeth's passing by looking at towering work of royalist kitsch, THE KING'S SPEECH (2010). We discuss how this Oscar-winner humanizes the monarchy in order to uphold it. See Luke speak at the Toronto International Festival of Authors on September 27 - https://festivalofauthors.ca/event/critical-conversation-new-working-class/ Hear Will on Canadaland - https://www.canadaland.com/po...

Doug discusses child poverty: How much was it down, really? Then Mario Pino offers another view of the Chilean constitutional referendum. Finally, Arielle Angel, editor of Jewish Currents and author of a new article, "Beyond Grievance," explores the problems with organizing politics around pain and the issues of "foregrounding grievance in the name of justice." Behind the News , hosted by Doug Hen...

Featuring Thulani Davis on The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, a monumental history of freedpeople organizing amid the Civil War and Reconstruction. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto by China Miéville haymarketbooks.org/books/1990-a-spectre-haunting

Suzi talks to  Pablo Abufom   and  Oscar Mendoza  to get their analysis of the monumental defeat in Chile on Sunday, September 4, when Chileans went to the polls to approve or reject a new progressive Constitution, born in response to the massive social protest movement and revolt in October 2019. The demand that grew out of that movement was for a new Constitutio...

We're joined by the left's preeminent cultural critics, Catherine Liu and Eileen Jones, to assess why cultural production is so awful right now and what its root causes are. We also have professor René Rojas to help us understand why the progressive constitution in Chile failed horribly after years of mounting social pressure. Jen Pan examines some new independent union alternatives and why they d...

Chilean political activist Antonia Atria explains why that country’s voters rejected a proposed new constitution. Juliana Fredman, a public interest lawyer in the Bay Area, analyzes Biden’s student debt relief plan. 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 here: https://www.l...

Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on racial capitalism, intergenerational organizing, internationalism, and a whole lot more. Dan's live Dig interview from the Socialism 2022 conference in Chicago. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our archives and weekly newsletter at thedigradio.com Check out Breaking the Impasse by Kim Moody haymarketbooks.o...

Deepa Kumar returns to Long Reads for a discussion about imperial militarism and its relationship to Islamophobic bigotry. Deepa is a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire . This is part two of a two-part interview. You can find the first part here . Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political top...

Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative joins to discuss the demographics of the million people in state prisons (with a coda on the fight around cash bail in New York). Then historian James Chappel talks about "postliberalism," namely the reactionary Catholic law prof Adrian Vermeule (a contributing editor of the would-be left–right hybrid magazine, Compact ). This is an encore version of a...

One of the key films of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement, Glauber Rocha's masterpiece TERRA EM TRANSE aka ENTRANCED EARTH (1967) envisions a fictional Latin American country where the left- and right-wing parties both feed from the same trough, and asks what role art can play in revolution, if any. Friend-of-the-show Violet Lucca returns to place the film within the context of Brazil after the 1964 c...

Grace is joined by  Mareile Pfannebecker  and  James A. Smith  to discuss their book  Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism . They discuss why we are working so hard, what kind of work is valued, and what a post-work future might look like. A World to Win is a podcast from Grace Blakeley and Tribune bringing you a weekly dose of socialist news, theory,...

Featuring Rahmane Idrissa on Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The region has been beset by jihadist insurgencies and, in the case of Mali and Burkina Faso, recent military coups. This is a comprehensive interview that puts the present conflict—which has drawn in French military and then Russian mercenary intervention—into deep historical and political-economic context from struggles over the slave t...

Vivek Chibber, author of Confronting Capitalism , joins Jen Pan to explain what we can learn from both the Bolshevik and social democratic past to more effectively challenge and overcome capitalism in the 21st century. David Griscom of Left Reckoning is also with us to discuss whether or not socialists can also be patriots, or if that's playing with fire. Thomas Gokey of the Debt Collective helps...

Matt Colquhoun talks about Mark Fisher on the reissue of his essay collection Ghosts of My Life . Then Matt Huber, author of a recent article for the New Left Review blog Sidecar titled " Mish-Mash Ecologism ," criticizes the climate austerity camp. Behind the News , hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Fi...

This week, Grace talks to Andrew Murray, former chair of the Stop the War Coalition, former chief of staff at the Unite trade union, and former advisor to Jeremy Corbyn. We discuss his forthcoming book, Is Socialism Possible in Britain? Reflections on the Corbyn Years , which examines the Corbyn moment within the long history of the Labour Party. A World to Win is a podcast from Grace Blakeley and...