Jacobin Radio

Rossana Rodriguez on her successful campaign as a socialist for the Chicago city council, where she will join five other socialists. Then, Benjamin Fogel, author of this and this , on the lunacy of Bolsonaro's early months as president of Brazil.

The US has played a major role in fomenting violence across Yemen, backing the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led forces attacking the country while also conducting a direct war against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula under the guise of counterterrorism. But while it's understandable that US involvement is the top focus for the American left, understanding the war in Yemen requires a much broade...

<font color="#000000">Our guest Yoav Peled argues that Netanyahu i</font>s the only issue in the April 9 election. <font color="#000000">Netanyahu is under indictment for one case of bribery and two cases of fraud, but Yoav says </font><font color="#000000">he is likely to win even though his party and their bloc </font>—<font color="#000000"> with far-rig...

Jason Wilson on how cops are more interested in surveilling the Left than the Right (article here ; Will Parrish article here ). Then, Todd Chretien reflects on the forty-two-year history of the International Socialist Organization, which dissolved itself at the end of March.

In the US, China is often viewed at best as a nefarious and enigmatic rival and at worst as a civilizational enemy. But these stories of national rivalry that permeate both major parties and the mainstream media function as a mystification, shrouding the global supply chain that connects capitalist exploitation from East to West. When we cut through the noise, a rather different picture emerges: C...

Car dominance, public transit austerity, and the neoliberal political-economy within which both are embedded have fomented what Marx called idiocy , in its classical sense of privatized social isolation. Dan talks to geographer Kafui Attoh, the author of Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California's East Bay , about the political-economy of public transit and w...

Suzi talks to political economist Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos about the Trump-Bolsonaro love fest in D.C. last week, and the new Brazilian-US relationship. Bolsonaro was "summoned" to Washington to support a US invasion of Venezuela under the pretext of "exporting democracy," and we ask Pedro Paulo how that will go over in Brazil — and note the irony that Bolsonaro is a staunch defender of military...

The strike is back, and big time. Teachers in particular have been walking off the job not only to demand higher wages but also to fight for an end to privatization and for a transformation of the educational system for their students. These strikes, often led by women, are no doubt inspiring, and they have won important victories for workers and the communities they serve. We are, in other words,...

Tony Wood, author of Russia Without Putin , on contemporary Russia and Putin.

Four of the five candidates endorsed by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or advanced to the runoff election on April 2, leading to talk of a Socialist Caucus on the city council. And other progressive candidates throughout the city knocked off corporate-friendly incumbents. Dan passes the mic to guest host Micah Uetricht for an interview with United Working Families...

American liberty has since its foundation relied upon the dispossession of indigenous people and Mexicans, upon African enslavement and, ultimately, upon the constant fleeing outward that created an empire that none dare call by its name. As historian Greg Grandin writes in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America , this expansionist project has finally lost...

Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, authors (along with Nancy Fraser) of Feminism for the 99% , on a truly transformative feminism. Then, Sam Stein, author of Capital City, on bourgeois urban planning, with an emphasis on NYC.

Richard Walker, geographer and director of the Living New Deal project, on what the original New Deal can teach the Green one. Then, Aziz Rana on the need for a left internationalism .

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou explains: it's not just that the War on Terror has warped American and European politics and society; it's that the War on Terror and Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS have become mutually-critical facets of a larger, more total global geo-political order. In other words, the terrorists and the national security states waging war against them are dependent upon one...

Suzi talks to DSAers Jeremy Gong and Magally Miranda Alcazar about the larger issues they are confronting after two years of Trump, a midterm election that saw radical democratic socialists elected to Congress, and the beginning of a second Bernie Sanders campaign for president. How do they see the challenges ahead, in a more favorable national context for Democratic Socialists, thanks to Bernie,...

It's irrelevant whether establishment liberals are sincerely aware of the threat posed by climate catastrophe because they are constitutionally hemmed in by a small-bore, technocratic and profoundly neoliberal ideology. But the climate justice movement understands not only the urgency of the problem but also the magnitude of the political-economic response that solving it requires: to fight global...

Striking women have begun to reclaim feminism as a project of working-class struggle against not only patriarchy's domination of women by men but also against capitalism's domination of the many by the few—a system that sexism serves. As Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser write in Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto , "Our answer to lean-in feminism is kick-back feminism. We have no...

Dan's guest is long-time organizer Jonathan Matthew Smucker, the author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. The book is both a critique of the radical left's traditional style of politics and a how-to guide to fighting and winning, from nuts-and-bolts organizing methods to theory. What is wrong with the world and how to change it are two different categories of knowledge, and effective org...

Suzi talks to Kate Aronoff about Bernie Sanders’s candidacy, the Green New Deal, and the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders raised a whopping $6 million the first day he announced his run for president in 2020, making him the most important candidate in the race, and not just because of the money. His 2016 run within the Democratic Party but against its politics has changed the political conversatio...

Daniel Aldana Cohen , author of this article , on the role of housing in a Green New Deal. Then, Joel Whitney , author of this article , on the CIA's history as a purveyor of fake news.

Noah Kulwin, staff writer with Jewish Currents , on why Ilhan Omar’s AIPAC tweets weren't antisemitic. Then, Thea Riofrancos, one of editors of Jacobin 's Green New Deal series, on the agenda's scope and politics.

Dan discusses The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte — Marx's take on revolution and reaction in mid-nineteenth-century France, the broader theories he develops about history and the relationship between politics and the class war, and how this all might apply to today — with political sociologist Dylan Riley. Check out Dan's recent NYT op-ed, "The Case Against Border Security." Thanks to NACL...

Dan talks to Eric Levitz — who at New York magazine provides the sort of consistently thoughtful and deeply contextualized analysis that is often quite hard to find on mainstream news sites — about the increasingly impossible to reconcile immanent contradictions shaking the Democratic and Republican parties. Thanks to University of California Press. Check out American Prophet: The Life and Work of...

What might Bernie 2020 look like, particularly now that almost everyone claims to be for Medicare for All (whatever they might mean by that)? Will Harris's track record as a law-and-order prosecutor doom her, or will her appeal as a woman of color rally a decisive number of votes? And will Biden being exposed as utterly unfit for the 2020 Democratic base send his poll numbers crashing? What impact...

<font color="#000000">The state of the economy is, despite assertions to the contrary, not strong; it is being plundered by the alliance of top corporate managers, leading financiers and political leaders from both parties. Suzi talks to </font> Robert Brenner on politics and the state of the economy — matters of great confusion if you only pay attention to the business press and polit...