The Dig

Lisa Duggan wrote a book that explains everything you need to know about Ayn Rand and why she became so enormously consequential so that you don’t have to read Rand’s work yourself. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed is out now from University of California Press. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this pod...

The history of suburbanite reactions to school integration in Atlanta and Charlotte reveal the class power underpinning both racism and the demolition of the New Deal order. Dan interviews Matt Lassiter, discussing suburbanite resistance to school busing, why Nixon’s Silent Majority was the the product of a suburban strategy rather than a Southern one, and why the class base of all politics...

Dan interviewed legendary feminist scholar Silvia Federici on Caliban and the Witch at her Brooklyn apartment. Next year, he’ll make a return trip to discuss Wages for Housework. Here’s the article on the Pawtucket factory strike by Joey La Neve DeFrancesco that Dan mentions jacobinmag.com/2018/06/factory-workers-strike-textile-mill-women Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection...

Dan discusses the history of black politics in the US—left, nationalist, liberal, and neoliberal—with Michael Dawson. Check out New Dawn, Michael’s podcast on race and capitalism: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-dawn/id1213696020 Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com...

Guest host Astra Taylor interviews Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz about Indigenous people’s history to reexamine all of history, the present, and our possible futures. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Ordinary language is the sound of hegemony; it is also an archive of the struggles to overturn it. Language is an institution and a constantly emergent field of struggle; it is the product of power relations and it is also itself power relations. Dan interviews John Patrick Leary, the author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing t...

Dan talks to Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara about his book The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality . We must study socialism’s history and plan for its future. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Jobs have in recent years gotten much worse for millions of service workers at Amazon, McDonalds and call centers. Dan interviews Emily Guendelsberger on her book On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Lily Geismer, the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party . While Boston whites fought school busing in the streets, suburban liberals along Route 128 maintained and benefited from the larger system of metropolitan residential and school segregation that made the crisis possible. Suburban liberals also played a key role in cre...

Dan is taking his first week off ever in Dig history to finish his book. Here’s a classic from deep in the archives: our first interview with Aziz Rana, on his book The Two Faces of American Freedom, aka episode 62. If you’ve already heard this one and are hungry for more content we’ve got everything organized by date, guest and topic at www.thedigradio.com . Support this podcast...

Dan’s lengthy interview with two brilliant Chilean social movement organizers: Alondra Carrillo and Pablo Abufom. Carrillo organizes in the country’s massive feminist movement. Abufom works in the labor-backed movement for a just pension system. Read Dan’s interview with Daniel Jadue, the Communist mayor of Recoleta, in Jacobin . Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge select...

View Transcript Dan interviews Sophie Lewis about her new book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family . Something is deeply wrong with commercial surrogacy—but it’s just not what you might think. What’s wrong is the brute labor exploitation taking place at the reproductive crossroads of a racialized global capitalist order. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of...

For much of the 20th century, Cold War politics defined socialism as the antithesis of democracy. Today, an insurgent democratic socialist movement is transforming US politics. It is socialism that is at the forefront of a fight for a radical deepening of democracy, one in which ordinary people exercise control over our political, economic and social lives—and one in which the people is expansivel...

View Transcript Dan’s lengthy interview with Nick Estes on his remarkable book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance . The problem that settler colonialism was repeatedly trying to solve by unleashing such terrific violence—through massacres, by nearly eliminating the buffalo, in reservation confinement, in...

Russia intervened and Trump is a criminal who committed obstruction of justice and is surrounded by constant criminality. But it’s no doubt also true that this situation and the hawkish liberal response to it have dangerously damaged US-Russia relations. At the core of Western misunderstanding is the way we think about Vladimir Putin, which is what Dan is discussing today with Tony Wood, the...

There is perhaps no more depressing situation in Western Europe than that which prevails in Italy: a coalition government between the far-right Lega party and the now subordinate, bizarre, amorphously anti-corruption, internet-fetishist, pseudo-directly democratic Five Star Movement. In other words, Italian politics is dominated by a viciously racist anti-migrant politics; the left, along with mos...

In Spanish politics, the center-left Socialist Party has demolished the conservative Popular Party and checked risk of a major far-right surge. But meanwhile, the once very plausible-feeling dream of an insurgent radical left Podemos gaining power has faded. And fast. Dan discusses the Spanish situation with Carlos Delclós and Magda Bandera. Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7!...

The radical left has been unable to electorally capitalize on the Yellow Vest movement, a massive revolt against a vicious, unequal and alienating neoliberal order. Instead, French electoral politics has pit an insurgent far-right against a zombie liberal center that presents itself as a bulwark against the nationalist tide. Dan interviews Sebastian Budgen and Danièle Obono, a member of the Nation...

Brexit has so dominated UK politics that it has put the Labour Party in a profoundly difficult and perhaps untenable position of strategic ambiguity toward how to handle the never-ending matter of leaving the EU. Today, in part two of our five-part series on European politics, Dan discusses this all with Grace Blakeley, Maya Goodfellow, and Richard Seymour. Thanks to Verso Books, which has loads o...

This week and next, we’re bringing you five episodes on European politics. Today, we’re starting things off with Chris Bickerton and Jerome Roos for an overview of the European situation and the debate on the European left over how to approach Europe and the EU. Then, an interview on British politics with Grace Blakeley, Maya Goodfellow, and Richard Seymour. After that, a discussion of...

View Transcript US Rep. Rashida Tlaib on the local struggles that guide her work on behalf of the working class in Congress, the urgent need for a politics that puts people over profit, the question of impeachment, and why American people are coming around to supporting a free Palestine. Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register now at socialismconference.org Support this p...

Dan has in-depth discussion on Bernie’s approach to race and what he must do to win over Black voters with Malaika Jabali and Wendi Muse. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Sanders isn’t unpopular with Black voters. In fact, he has done rather well with young Black people. But to win the primary and beat Biden, he must do a lot better. In particular, Malaika and Wendi argue that Bernie m...

DSA’s explosive growth continues; it has already, in a few short years, become the center of a renewed American socialist movement. Dan interviews Doug Henwood, who recently published a lengthy article in The New Republic entitled “ The Socialist Network: Inside DSA’s struggle to move into the political mainstream .” Check out Lisa Duggan’s Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the...

Three interviews: historian Seth Rockman, scholars Crystal Eddins and Zachary Sell, and public historians Akeia Benard, Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, Elon Cook Lee and Marco McWilliams. Dan conducted six interviews on capitalism and slavery at The Dig’s recent Slavery’s Hinterlands symposium here in Rhode Island. This second of two episodes begins with Seth Rockman on the role of slavery in American c...

Three interviews: historians Linford Fisher, Christy Clark-Pujara and Joanne Melish, and Emily Owens. Dan conducted six interviews on capitalism and slavery at The Dig’s recent Slavery’s Hinterlands symposium here in Rhode Island. This first of two episodes begins with historian Linford Fisher, who explains that the English settlement of North America was a settler-colonial project tha...