Jacobin Radio

Suzi talks to eco-socialist writer-activist Richard Smith about a different sort of rivalry between the US and China: which leading polluter can be greener? President Biden has announced a very ambitious Green infrastructure package, and China is promising to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. At the same time, China has posted an 18.3% growth rate for the first quarter this year. What does this tel...

Every Wednesday at 6 PM ET, Jen Pan, Ariella Thornhill, and Paul Prescod host a new episode of The Jacobin Show, offering socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the episode from April 28, 2021. Adaner Usmani, assistant professor of sociology and social studies a...

This week, Grace talks to author, writer, and organiser Harsha Walia on her book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism . They discuss the nature and location of the border, its functionality to global capitalism and imperialism, and how the Left can organise to resist right-wing populism in the age of nationalism and climate breakdown. A reminder that you...

Every Saturday at 1 PM ET, Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila broadcast live from the Jacobin YouTube channel. Weekends features free-flowing and humorous commentary on current events and political strategy. This is the podcast version of the show from April 24, 2021, with Jen Pan filling in for Ana. Jacobin columnist Ben Burgis joins us to explain how and why cancel culture is eroding the left. We also...

US empire in the Philippines, Filipino migration, labor organizing in the fields, and the nativist campaign for Asian exclusion. Dan interviews Rick Baldoz on his remarkable book The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

When human rights lawyer Steven Donziger won a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the oil giant Chevron, the company retaliated by setting out to destroy Donziger’s life. Now in his twentieth month of house arrest on the orders of a Chevron-linked judge, his Kafkaesque story is a window into the corrupt and corporate-captured US legal system. Visit the #FreeDonziger website - https://www.freedonz...

We travel back to Nixon's America with 1974's DEATH WISH, the franchise-spawning Silent Majority hit in which Charles Bronson transforms from a bleeding-heart liberal to a gun-wielding avenging angel. We discuss how the film's reactionary politics and apocalyptic vision of an American city are still being replicated in conservative media today. PLUS: The Last Blockbuster, new advancements in produ...

This week, Grace talks to Mat Lawrence, director of the think tank Common Wealth, and Laurie Layborn Langton, author and researcher, about their new book Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown . Planet on Fire argues that ‘the political status quo has no answer to the devastating and inequitably distributed consequences of the climate emergency’ and, in this episode, th...

Every Wednesday at 6 PM ET, Jen Pan, Ariella Thornhill, and Paul Prescod host a new episode of The Jacobin Show, offering socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the episode from April 21, 2021, hosted by Jen and Paul. Historian Matt Karp joins us to discuss how...

Host Doug Henwood covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. In this episode, he speaks with Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht , authors of Bigger than Bernie , just out in paperback, on the legacy of the Sanders campaigns. Plus: Jane McAlevey , author and organizer, on why the union lost to Amazon in Alabama ( Nation article here ).

Every Saturday at 1 PM ET, Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila broadcast live from the Jacobin YouTube channel. Weekends features free-flowing and humorous commentary on current events and political strategy. This is the podcast version of the show from April 17, 2021. Leigh Philips, Jacobin's science writer, joins us to discuss the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause and the global vaccine rollout. We a...

A gay communist atheist directing the most reverential film ever made about Jesus Christ? It happened! Pier Paolo Pasolini's THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (1964) uses neorealist aesthetics to emphasize the material side of Jesus's life over the divine, and foregrounds His politics over his miracles. PLUS: the pleasures and perils of being extremely online during a pandemic, and what conserva...

Long Reads looks in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn. The guest is Lea Ypi, professor in political theory at the London School of Economics, and author of an essay about Rosa Luxemburg, "Reform to Revolution," which can be found here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/reform-revolution-rosa-luxem...

Three thinkers and organizers on the much debated question of ultra-leftism post-Bernie 2020. Two texts that informed our discussion: The Liberal to Ultra-Left Pipeline: Breaking the Cycle by Brian W. Liberalism, ultraleftism or mass action , a speech delivered by Socialist Workers Party leader Peter Camejo. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Every Wednesday at 6 PM ET, Jen Pan, Ariella Thornhill, and Paul Prescod host a new episode of The Jacobin Show, offering socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the episode from April 14, 2021. Kristen Ghodsee, author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism...

This week, Grace talks to Doug Henwood, Marxist, journalist, host of the Behind the News podcast, and author of many books, including the classic Wall Street: How it Works and For Whom . They discuss Biden’s stimulus package, his corporate tax hikes, and what’s been going on in US stock markets – as well as how workers can organise in the post-Covid economy. You can support our work on the show by...

Suzi talks to labor historian John Logan who assesses the historic unionization drive against Amazon at the new Bessemer Alabama warehouse — and processes the outcome: a no vote for the Retail Workers union. Front line workers took on the second largest, notoriously anti-union company in the US during a pandemic — and won widespread sympathy and media coverage — but failed to win enough votes to g...

Micah talks with Chapo Trap House's Matt Christman about historian Rick Perlstein's Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 , the politics of the 1970s and the possibilities for political alternatives to the right turn America ended up taking, the parallels of that era to the Obama/Bernie/Trump era, and (what else?) the desperate need to revive labor to escape our neverending culture wars.

Host Doug Henwood covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Doug interviews Jennifer Berkshire , co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door , about teachers’ unions and school reopenings. Plus: Helen Yaffe on Cuba’s handling of COVID-19 and their impressive vaccine development ( Counterpunch article here ).

Every Saturday at 1 PM ET, Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila broadcast live from the Jacobin YouTube channel. Weekends features free-flowing and humorous commentary on current events and political strategy. This is the podcast version of the show from April 10, 2021. Staff writer Meagan Day joins us to discuss what led to the disheartening defeat of the Amazon union drive in Alabama, how the new age of...

Filmed over three years, the new HBO docuseries Q: INTO THE STORM (2021) seeks to find an answer to the question that plagued the Trump years: who is Q, the mysterious leader of the "QAnon" movement? The documentary offers a provisional answer... but of course, there is no one simple explanation for how QAnon came to dominate the past few years. We discuss the backwash of the Trump era, PLUS: a re...

Dan interviews Charisse Burden-Stelly on racial capitalism, the history of the US Black left, and the US government's Red Scare attacks on Black radicals. Read Burden-Stelly's work: Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights Black Cold War Liberalism as an Agency Reduction Formation during the Late 1940s and the Early 1950s Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antiforeignness, Antir...

Lauren Kaori Gurley at Vice.com ’s Motherboard has covered the unionization drive at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama for more than a year. Voting ended March 29 and counting is currently underway. If they vote to join the RWDSU they will become the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country. Suzi talked to Lauren K. Gurley about Amazon’s business model, the pee scandal, and the anti-u...

Every Saturday at 1 PM ET, Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila broadcast live from the Jacobin YouTube channel. Weekends features free-flowing and humorous commentary on current events and political strategy. This is the podcast version of the show from April 3, 2021. We talk about why democracy demands that Bolivian coup plotters be punished, and with Jacobin's executive editor Seth Ackerman about why J...

Long Reads looks in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn. The guest for this episode is Christy Thornton. Christy is an assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the G...