Jacobin Radio

Author and activist Mark LeVine on the recent horrific events in Gaza and Jerusalem, which he sees as a point of no return. LeVine interprets Zionism's fundamental nature and history as one of settler colonialism, and he explains why he thinks resistance to Zionism around the world, both by Jews and non-Jews, is in the process of transforming itself and taking off.

The Brookings Institute's Carol Graham (papers here , here , and here ) on failing health and declining prospects among poor white people in the United States. Then, Kristen Ghodsee , co-author of this article , on the vile uses of anticommunism.

Israel is massacring Palestinians daring to approach a fence that occupation forces have built to shore up an ethno-state founded on the principle of apartheid. Nothing could be more clear. But you wouldn't no that from the, at best, muddied coverage that prevails in mainstream media accounts. Dan’s guest is Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, professor at George Mason University, and a powerfu...

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” The rule of law: the #resistance has construed it to be a cornerstone of opposition to Trump. It is certainly alarming to live under a president who flirts with operating in a permanent and near-total state of exception. But it's the rule of law as we've known...

Historian Alejandro Velasco sorts fact from fiction when it comes to contemporary Venezuela. Then, Jessica Blatt, author of Race and the Making of American Political Science , on the racist origins of the discipline.

Recent cases of horrific child abuse have elicited widespread media attention. What the media coverage often misses is what these incidents reveal about a two-tiered child protection system that systemically surveils, punishes, and destroys poor black families while ignoring abuses perpetrated in affluent white homes. Dan's guest is Dorothy Roberts, who has closely studied the racism and poverty p...

Today's Dig is a very good and somewhat unusual Dig: Dan’s got two interviews with two different people. First, journalist Eric Blanc on the teacher strike wave that he's been covering for Jacobin . Then comes the Center for Popular Democracy's Xiomara Caro Diaz on last week's May Day demonstrations against austerity in Puerto Rico. Thanks to Verso Books. Check Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Pla...

Suzi talks to veteran union negotiator and labor writer Joe Burns about the teachers strike wave from West Virginia to Arizona — and about how public-sector workers and teachers are reviving the most powerful weapon in the working class arsenal: the strike. Then, Daniel Bessner joins Suzi in conversation about his new book Democracy in Exile — and the rise of intellectuals in foreign-policy instit...

Dan just moderated a discussion in Philadelphia with Senator Sanders, along with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, scholar and frequent Dig guest Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and veteran defense lawyer and advocate Premal Dharia. Bernie came to Philly because what's happening here is extraordinarily important: it's a city where for years cops have committed abuses and engaged in corruption...

This is part two of Dan's interview on Hannah Arendt's notion of "the right to have rights." This episode covers a lot, including why we must fight not only to expand the democratic political community but also to deepen its power—all at a time when the nativist right is exploiting the many crises unleashed by neoliberalism and empire to erect walls and punish scapegoats. One upshot is that zombie...

What are rights worth when government denies people the very right to have rights? Political theorist Hannah Arendt recognized this loss of "the right to have rights" as millions of refugees found themselves without a national home in the wake of world wars. Human rights, it became clear, proved to be an empty promise for those excluded from citizenship—the foundational right to be a member of a p...

James Comey is liberal America’s favorite cop and now, as a result, a bestselling author as well. Patrick Blanchfield returns to talk about his Baffler review of Comey’s new book. It’s awful, of course. But it’s bad in productively revealing ways. Comey has become an icon of the liberal fetishization of the national security state as a bulwark against Trumpism—when it fact it is that very national...

It's yet the latest installment in our ongoing series on the Left and electoral politics. Dan’s guest is Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Last year, Mayor Lumumba pledged to make Jackson "the most radical city on the planet." Lumumba, who comes out of a decades-old revolutionary black nationalist movement, is serious about that. But he also faces challenges: Jackson is a ma...

The CUNY Grad Center's Kate Doyle Griffiths on teachers’ strikes and the crisis in social reproduction. Then, Thea Riofrancos and Daniel Denvir join to discuss Yascha Mounck and zombie liberalism (their review is here ).

This week on Jacobin Radio, Suzi discusses the relevance of Marx for our present moment with anthropologist and Marxist geographer David Harvey. Harvey's newest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason , explicates the core of Marx's thinking in the three volumes of Capital , and in less than 200 pages, Harvey develops those ideas so we all can use them to grasp what's going on in th...

It's the latest installment in our series on the left and electoral politics. Dennis Kucinich is running a viable race for governor of Ohio; Cynthia Nixon, running with Working Families Party backing, has Cuomo truly freaked out in New York; and there are major primary fights underway in California. Most everywhere, it seems, some variant of the Left is on the move. But does the fact that a onetim...

In the latest installment in our series on the Left and electoral politics, we're talking about the Democratic Socialists of America's new electoral strategy. DSA has almost overnight become a serious force on an American socialist left that has for decades lacked much in the way of serious forces. One of the major reasons the organization's membership rolls blew up, of course, was because of Bern...

Sean Jacobs, founder of Africa Is A Country , joins Doug to discuss Winnie Mandela’s legacy. Then, Forrest Hylton talks about Colombian politics in the run-up to May’s presidential election.

Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the second of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil , published in 2011 by Verso. In part 1, we talked about a lot of things, including how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible, and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persist...

Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the first of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In this first episode, we talk about how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible; and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism...

Imagine you walk into a warehouse where the workers are on break, and you stumble into a vigorous, nuanced discussion of Marx’s notion of surplus value, how it relates to organizing on the shop floor, and how it applies to flexible and often female labor. Then the conversation turns to Gramsci and workers' councils in Turin. This is exactly what Carolina Bank Muñoz found when she visited a warehou...

It’s our 100th episode and the launch of our spring fundraising drive! Aziz Rana returns to The Dig fifteen years after the invasion of Iraq to reflect on the paucity of substantive anti-imperialist politics across much of the American left. Socialism isn’t just an internationalist politics on principle: domestic and foreign struggles are inherently linked, just as the forces we struggle against a...

It’s obvious that student debt can be an excruciating financial burden. But anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom explains that it has also done a lot to make American families into plunderable financial mines, part of a larger capitalist system that individualizes blame for economic failure and forces families that can to support their children into their twenties while depleting retirement savings. Than...

Many Americans take the existence of so-called "illegal immigrants" for granted, whatever their opinion of the matter. But illegality isn't a property of immigrants; rather, it's a creation of positive law. And we can only understand how immigrants are declared "illegal" by the government by examining this country's too-often ignored history of racist and exclusionary immigration politics. Dan’s g...

Education reporter and host of Have You Heard? Jennifer Berkshire on teachers’ strikes, in West Virginia and beyond. Then, Forbes contributor Stan Collender on fiscal follies in Washington, D.C.