Jacobin Radio

Doug Henwood interviews the former Greek minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis, discussing the interminable euro crisis, austerity, Brexit, the nationalist international (Trump, Le Pen, etc.), and DiEM25, among other things.

The Democratic Socialists of America are growing — suddenly and explosively. Last June ahead of the Democratic National Convention, DSA counted 6,500 members. Today, after a presidential bid from a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and Trump’s terrifying election, membership has grown to more than 19,000 and counting. People are considering socialism, long a dirty word in American politics, in...

We are happy to announce that we will be hosting journalist and author Doug Henwood’s show Behind the News on Jacobin Radio. In addition to writing a number of excellent books and many articles on finance and politics over the years, Henwood has hosted a consistently excellent radio show, interviewing experts on a wide range of topics both domestic and international. Behind the News is one of the...

Since leaving the joke-rap/not-joke-rap group Das Racist in 2012, Victor Vasquez, AKA Kool AD, has stayed busy. His many artistic endeavors—music, visual art, a novel, and even a kids book ('The Selfish Shellfish')—frequently seek to imagine life in a post-capitalist utopia. In an interview with Jacobin's Tanner Howard, he discusses gentrification in Oakland, "the hustle" under capitalism, and why...

Suzi Weissman interviews longtime Marxist writer Mike Davis on the questions facing the Left in the wake of Donald Trump's victory. How did Hillary Clinton and Democrats lose this election so badly? How should we think about the white working class in Trump's win? Can the Sanders coalition be kept alive as an independent movement bridging the racial and cultural divides among American working peop...

Sure, the concept of socialism sounds nice, but people aren’t very nice, right? Isn’t capitalism much more suited to human nature — a nature dominated by competitiveness and venality? Isn't socialism great in theory but terrible in practice? Adaner Usmani, a PhD candidate in sociology at New York University, answers these questions in a discussion with Jacobin's Jason Farbman. This is the second e...

On the Left, few forms of mainstream journalism are more detested than political reporting. It often substitutes the horse race for substance, dresses up conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom as real analysis, and resorts to the false balance of he-said-she-said instead of establishing facts. Political reporters took a serious hit after Donald Trump won the Republican primary and then the preside...

Socialists put the working class at the center of their political vision. But why, exactly? Vivek Chibber, Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, answers this question here, as well as capitalism's inability "to deliver the goods" for workers, who exactly workers are, the precarity of work today, and the problems with the twe...

The Movement for Black Lives’ insistence that black lives matter is deceptively straightforward and minimal. But it has transformed black politics, and American politics as a whole. From the tension and contradiction of the Obama years, in which a black man became the most powerful person on earth but conditions continued to worsen for black people as a whole, the Movement for Black Lives erupted...

Episode 2 of Stockton to Malone. No interview here, just RL and Micah discussing RL's performance of the socialist equivalent of Kendrick Lamar's "Control" at the Young Democratic Socialists conference, Micah's years speaking with extreme vocal fry to atone for his white male privilege, that time Obama took the bowling alley out of the White House and replaced it with a basketball court, and RL's...

Mass incarceration should be central to any analysis of American political economy. It's also a moral monstrosity. But before The New Jim Crow and anti-mass incarceration activists across the country loudly insisted this was the case, it received little attention. Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown o...

American slaveholders before the Civil War oversaw an incredibly brutal economic system that generated enormous wealth for a tiny elite while denying enslaved Africans the most basic rights. But they also presided over American foreign policy, overseeing US territorial and economic expansion. As historian Matt Karp explains in This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign...

The horrors of the Trump administration have shown no signs of slowing in the month he has been in office. But so far, neither has the pushback we've seen in the streets. The protests have reminded Ellie Mae O'Hagan of the anti-austerity protests in the United Kingdom — both in terms of the hope they represent and the potential dangers and pitfalls they face. O'Hagan wrote about this in a recent a...

Donald Trump's viciously xenophobic policies have put the word "sanctuary" on many people's lips. But immigrant rights organizers under Trump don't have to reinvent the wheel: the 1980s saw a vibrant sanctuary movement in response to US intervention in Central America. Hilary Goodfriend is a researcher based in San Salvador, El Salvador, who has covered Central America for Jacobin. Here, she talks...

All eyes have turned to the judiciary. It’s the one potential institutional check on Trump on the federal level (aside from the national security state). But the judiciary, despite pretenses to the contrary, is fundamentally political. It has historically shred civil rights and economic protections more often than it has protected them. Today, Dan Denvir speaks to Jed Purdy about the judiciary and...

The Salvadoran Civil War is one of the most brutal conflicts in recent history. The United States funded far-right, quasi-fascist forces who had no qualms with bathing the country in blood in the name of anti-communism. Few incidents illustrate this better than the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the country's top Catholic leader, whose brief period speaking out on behalf of the poor and...

The first episode of Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman, featuring a wide-ranging interview with Bhaskar Sunkara and Robert Brenner that covers prospects for resistance with a rising anti-Trump sentiment but a weakened labor movement, the Democrats' refusal to learn any lessons from November's election, and the widespread support for a social-democratic agenda that the Left can capitalize on. Bhaska...

Betsy DeVos is now Secretary of Education. A far-right billionaire heiress to a pyramid scheme — sorry, alleged pyramid scheme — who has never spent a day teaching but has devoted much of her career to dismantling public education, her tenure will likely prove disastrous for schools. But DeVos's nomination also drew unprecedented pushback, forcing a tie on her confirmation vote that Vice President...

Mark Blyth wasn't surprised by the rise of Donald Trump, nor Brexit, nor the crises spreading across Europe. He actually predicted them all. Blyth, the author of "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea" and professor of political economy at Brown, explains how economic crisis has led to upheaval in a political establishment that worked obsessively to eliminate inflation and maximize profits at...

Welcome to the first episode of Stockton to Malone, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. For the first episode, ahead of protests and counterprotests at Planned Parenthood clinics around the country and forthcoming attacks on abortion rights under President Donald Trump, hosts RL Stephens and Micah Uetricht interview Judy Wittner. Before Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion was illegal throughout most of the...

George Cicariello-Maher is professor of political science at Drexel University and author of several books, including Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela , published by Verso as part of the Jacobin Series. He recently drew the ire of white supremacist, "alt-right" trolls after a mocking tweet about "white genocide," including death threats to his family. Perhaps more concerning wa...

On a recent episode of the podcast Bad with Money with Gaby Dunn , Gaby explored some basic questions about capitalism with Jacobin managing editor Nicole Aschoff: what is it? Why does it encourage companies like Facebook to monetize our personal lives? Why do young people think it's so bogus? Why is it so bogus? Thanks to Gaby for letting us use the interview. You can subscribe to Bad with Money...

On January 20, 2017, just a few hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump, one thousand people gathered in Washington, DC’s Lincoln Theatre (and 200,000 across the United States and abroad watched at home or at livestreaming parties) for The Anti-Inauguration, an event from Jacobin , Verso Books, and Haymarket Books. The event featured author and activist Naomi Klein, journalist Anand Gopal, th...

The depravity of Donald Trump’s fear-mongering, xenophobic, anti-Muslim politics are now in full swing. The new president has barred people from seven Muslim-majority countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — including, to an unclear and ultimately-walked back degree, lawful permanent residents, from entering the United States for ninety days. All refugees are barred for 12...

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" summary="Blog Post / Episode Notes"><tbody><tr><td colspan="3" align="left" valign="top"> Donald Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos, a free-market, far-right Christian billionaire dedicated to privatizing public schools, to be his Secretary of Education. In her confirmation hearing, DeVos made it painfully clear th...