Jacobin Radio

Janus was an entirely expected and atrocious decision. The conservative business interests that successfully obliterated private sector unions hope it will do the same to their public sector counterparts. Chris Maisano, a contributing editor at Jacobin , argues that labor has no choice but to return to its militant roots if it hopes to survive. In other words, to survive, labor has to fight for a...

Journalist Jason Wilson on Trump's pardoning of Oregon ranchers Dwight Lincoln Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven Hammond, as well as on the recent right-wing riot in Portland. Then, sociologist Christy Thornton analyzes AMLO’s victory in Mexico’s election.

Checking your privilege. Invisible knapsacks. Intersectionality. In his new book from Verso, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump , Asad Haider questions the terms and concepts that underpin much liberal and left conversation about race and racism, exploring critiques advanced by the black radical tradition to mount a thoroughgoing demolition of what we now refer to as "identity p...

Suzi talks to Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Law, about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Chemerinsky writes that S enators should exercise their power and insist Kavanaugh reveal his views on crucial constitutional issues — and that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed if he refuses to answer questions. Suzi also talks to Dan La Botz about the landslide vict...

The last episode in this week's Ocasio-Cortez super series. First, an interview with Seth Ackerman on his essay "A Blueprint for a New Party," which lays out a strategy for building independent socialist power effectively, which means opportunistically seizing the Democratic Party ballot line when necessary ( jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-labor-party-ackerman/ ). Then, Kate Aron...

This week's super series on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory and the future of left politics continues with Julia Salazar, a DSA member running for a Brooklyn state Senate in New York's District 18. Salazar's campaign worked hard for Ocasio-Cortez; now, Ocasio-Cortez's team is returning the favor. Recently, The New York Daily News wondered if Salazar might be the new Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez...

Capitol Hill used to be a lonely place for a leftist. And, frankly, it still is. But now that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appears to be headed to Washington, Senator Bernie Sanders will likely have some powerful company. Today, Sanders is Dan's guest, and they're talking about the impact of Ocasio-Cortez's victory and where the Left goes from here. This is the latest interview in this week's Ocasio-C...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory should make New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a larger-than-life bully and ideologically-chameleon Democrat, very afraid. He faces a challenge from Dan's guest today, Cynthia Nixon, who has spent the years after her time on Sex in the City organizing for public education. After what happened to Joe Crowley, the left is more energized than ever. And what once appeared t...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a 28-year old Latina working-class champion committed to social transformation who beat one of the most powerful men in Congress: the King of Queens. Dan had an extended conversation with her about how organized people won her election, how she’ll stay accountable to those movements now that she’s a rock star, establishment myopia and denial, The Congressional Progressi...

Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, won an overwhelming victory in Mexico's presidential election, shattering a corrupt, old party system that brought ordinary Mexicans rampant violence and economic immiseration. But AMLO faces powerful political and economic constraints once in office—including some of his own making. Dan's guest is Christy Thornton, a professor of sociology and Latin A...

Today, we're talking about Italy, where a so-called "populist" alliance of the Five Star Movement and right-wing League just took over the government with anti-migrant and Euro-skeptic agenda. Dan's guest is David Broder, a historian of French and Italian communism and frequent contributor to Jacobin. The Five Star Movement was for a time welcomed by some on the left. But it’s not of the left; rat...

Suzi talks to Joel Jordan and then Alissa Quart, who in different ways are both looking at our squeezed post-recession lives and the fight to win or win back a decent standard of living. Longtime teacher and teacher-union strategist Joel Jordan joins us to talk about the spectacular mass strikes of the red-state teachers — and draw comparisons with the worsening conditions for teachers in Californ...

Stephen Wertheim, a Lecturer in American and international history at Birkbeck, University of London, breaks cuts through the suffocating foreign policy debate that shapes American Empire under Trump. Peace has broken out across the Korean Peninsula—or, at least, the odds that Donald Trump will blow the world up have gone down a just a bit—at least temporarily. Yes, Trump is the one who pushed us...

Everyone wants to know what's wrong with Appalachia. But beginning in the 1960s, it was "white ethics"—Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews and other non-WASPs—who broke from the New Deal coalition, embracing their Ellis Island immigrant roots in reaction to the Black Freedom struggle and, ultimately, Latin American migration. Dan’s guest today is Matthew Frye Jacobson, an historian at Yale and the autho...

Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind, one very bright spot in an often disappointing landscape of mainstream immigration journalism, discusses the historical, political, and legal context of Trump’s family separation policy. Dan also just wrote a lengthy piece on this for Jacobin , which you can read at jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-immigration-child-family-separation-policy Thanks to Verso Books. Ch...

David Harvey has taught Capital to huge numbers of people. Dan interviews him about his latest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason . Harvey explains why he thinks all three volumes are of Capital are key, why we’re still living under neoliberalism at least unless and until ethnonationalist autarchy pushes it aside, how capitalism might survive climate change via mass immiseratio...

Suzi speaks with David Graeber, whose earlier Debt: the First 5000 years was an international best-seller. From Adbusters to Occupy to the history of debt, Graeber has demonstrated his creative and provocative thinking. He takes on the biggest shibboleth — our very work — in his new book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory . A recent UK poll found that 37 percent of full-time workers were sure that their jobs...

The US colony of Puerto Rico has been repeatedly shocked and Puerto Ricans are traumatized. That is precisely what successful shock doctrines like this one — which wants to remake the island into a utopia for rich Americans and crypto-bros and a dystopia for everyone else — depend upon. This is also the subject of Naomi Klein's new book from Haymarket, The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on...

Last week, we posted an interview Dan recorded in Barcelona on Spanish politics — specifically, on the question of Catalan independence, and the municipalist movement governing cities like Barcelona. What wasn't discussed much was the fact that the conservative Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy was about to fall — which it did, just a few days later. So, Dan brought sociologist Carlos Delclós ba...

For libertarians, liberty means something different. It’s about liberty for property owners. And in their quest to preserve that absolute freedom for the ownership class — whether their assets be human slaves, factories, or extractive industries — democracy must be curtailed and the power of the people must be checked and repressed. This is the argument put forward by Dan’s guest, historian Nancy...

On this edition of Jacobin Radio, Suzi talks to legendary street-fighting man, author and playwright Tariq Ali about 1968 — as seen from today, fifty years later. The first cover of Black Dwarf, founded by Tariq and others in May 1968, is reproduced in the latest London Review of Books : “We Shall Fight, We Will Win, Paris, London, Rome, Berlin.” Now there is an emerging strike wave in France — an...

Fifty years ago, a mainstream group of high-profile Americans declared the following: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepenin...

Spanish politics are complicated. Dan speaks to Carlos Delclós, Kate Shea Baird, and Bécquer Seguín to help clarify the Catalan independence movement, the radical municipalist governments that now govern major Spanish cities including Barcelona, and the promise and problems of the left-wing party Podemos. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito...

The steady pace of school massacres has revived calls to put more cops in school, with atrocities committed by white students exploited to make schools more like prisons, and ensure that the former remain a rapid-fire pipeline into the latter. Dan’s guests are Dakota Hall, the executive sirector of Leaders Igniting Transformation, a youth-of-color-led organization fighting the school-to-prison pip...

A laundry list of modest policy solutions is not enough, it turns out. It's not just that technocratic fixes around the edges spectacularly fail to meet people's needs; in failing to articulate a big picture vision of how the world ought to be transformed, they fail to move people — either emotionally or, more concretely, to the polls. Dan’s guest George Monbiot argues that the Left needs a powerf...