The Dig

Featuring Malcolm Harris on What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis . An open-minded and anti-sectarian discussion about an ecumenical book that plots out three paths forward for the left—arguing we must embrace all three, simultaneously. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Live Dig in Brooklyn on December 10: Zohran and the Return of Municipal Socialism. Navigating opportuni...

Featuring Brace Belden, Liz Franczak, Gabriel Winant, Aziz Rana, Sumaya Awad, Thea Riofrancos, and Alex Lewis. Toasts and roasts celebrating 500 episodes of The Dig. Plus a short speech from Dan. Live at Brooklyn’s Littlefield. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Live Dig in Brooklyn on December 10: Zohran and the Return of Municipal Socialism. Navigating opportunities and contradictions o...

Featuring Thea Riofrancos on Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism . The green energy transition requires a vast array of inputs: copper, cobalt, rare earth elements, and the focus of this discussion, lithium—all of which must be mined from the earth. This is a wide-ranging discussion stretching from Chile to Nevada, and from the dawn of colonialism to the geoeconomic conflict between the...

Featuring Fernando Haddad on Brazilian political economy and where Brazil fits into a world capitalist system structured by relationships of domination and unequal exchange. Haddad is Finance Minister of Brazil. He served as mayor of São Paulo and in 2018 was the Workers’ Party (PT) presidential candidate. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy From Apartheid to Democracy at UCPress.com Read th...

Featuring Walden Bello and Jane Nalunga on neoliberalism’s defeat of Third Worldist radical projects and the Global South social movement and civil society networks that rose from the ashes to take on neoliberal globalization. A wide-ranging interview with two important, long-standing Global South leaders. Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag Sup...

Featuring Alexandra Wandel, Gonzalo Berrón, and Paul Adlerstein on the 1999 mass protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and on the giant global justice movement that mobilized unions, farmers, environmentalists, public interest advocates, and various radical leftists all over the world. Recorded live in Brussels with the European Trade Justice Coalition. First in a two-part series...

Featuring Melinda Cooper on Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance . Balanced budget conservatism and supply side populism engineered a politics of austerity and budget deficits. Deep cuts to the social wage like welfare reform disciplined labor so severely that Fed Chair Alan Greenspan opened the floodgates of easy money confident it would juice the price of assets alone....

Featuring Melinda Cooper on Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance . Neoliberalism remade the American economy into an engine for the appreciation of assets stretching from the single-family suburban home to the stock market. This revanchist offensive sought to enforce not only the class order and fiscal rectitude but also gender, sexual, and racial hierarchies. The FIRST...

Featuring Alberto Toscano and Stuart Schrader on Trump’s intensification of police, ICE, and military repression. What does this all reveal about MAGA’s fascist and authoritarian project—and about the illiberalism already immanent in the US carceral and imperialist state? The SECOND in a two-part series. Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag Suppo...

Featuring Alberto Toscano and Stuart Schrader on Trump’s intensification of police, ICE, and military repression. What does this all reveal about MAGA’s fascist and authoritarian project—and about the illiberalism already immanent in the US carceral and imperialist state? The FIRST in a two-part series. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode...

Featuring Ian Gavigan on how the bipartisan neoliberalization of higher education laid the groundwork for Trump’s all-out assault. Workers must unite on every campus, articulate an alternative vision for the university, and fight to win it. Check out HELU higheredlaborunited.org Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Dig 500th Episode Party November 7 in Brooklyn! Emceed by Brace and Liz from TrueA...

Featuring Robin D.G. Kelley listening back and reflecting upon old tapes of the interviews with sharecroppers he conducted in the 1980s while researching Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression . This is an episode of Signal Hill, a new audio magazine made by friends of The Dig. Produced by Conor Gillies and edited by Liza Yeager and Omar Etman. Listen to Dan’s Dig int...

Featuring Sarah Jaffe on her book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire . The ordinary death of a loved one under a capitalist order that routinely forbids sufficient time off to mourn. Workplace injuries, deindustrialization, police violence, pandemic, genocide, social murder, and how we can make sense of loss through struggle. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Dig 500th Epi...

Featuring Alex Han, Asha Ransby-Sporn, and Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor on Chicago’s left political experiment. In the wake of Zohran’s remarkable victory in New York, organizers all over the country are taking a close look at Chicago under Mayor Brandon Johnson. A Chicago Teachers Union leader elected in 2023, Johnson’s win was the culmination of years of militant labor and social...

Featuring Isabella Weber, Malcolm Harris, and Paul Williams on Abundance. A debate and discussion of: the book; the discourse; the underlying economic and political questions of how we make the affordable housing, green energy, and fast trains we need; and how actual capitalist social relations appear to us in mystified form as “supply” and “demand.” Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Get 50% o...

Featuring Aslı Bâli and Gabriel Winant on the emerging conjuncture: the Trump regime’s fascist and authoritarian second coming; the giant vacuum created by the Democratic establishment’s inability to act like an opposition party; and the resurgent dynamism and energy now coming so powerfully from our political forces on the socialist left. Conducted before a live audience at the Socialism 2025 con...

Featuring NYC DSA co-chairs Gustavo Gordillo and Grace Mausser on how Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary. NYC DSA spent years building an electoral juggernaut that has now made history and offers a model for the left everywhere across the United States. A behind-the-scenes look at how NYC DSA and the Zohran campaign did it! Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out the Summer...

Featuring Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s war on Iran, possible direct US intervention, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Chicago: come see The Dig live! secure.actblue.com/donate/thediglive Listen to Thawra and our five-part Iran series: thedigradio.com/series Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Read Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi in Sidecar newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/culmination Buy All Our Trials...

Featuring Ryann Liebenthal, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and Mike Pierce on Ryann’s book Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis . Interview by guest host Astra Taylor. We are working on an episode analyzing Israel’s war on Iran amid the ongoing Gaza genocide—it will be out soon. For now, check out our five-part series on the history of Iran and also Thawra , our 19-part series o...

Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Asha Ransby-Sporn on 2020’s summer of mass protest and rebellion sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. As Keeanga puts it: “The pressing question is how we went from twenty-six million people on the streets to a fascist in the White House?” We must urgently build organizations and movements that meet the moment as both popular resistance an...

Featuring Derek Guy on the politics, history, economics, and style of Western menswear. Guest hosted by Dennis M. Hogan. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig In These Times is offering 78% off print subscriptions for Dig listeners at Inthesetimes.com/dig Buy I Didn’t Come Here to Lie at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Quinn Slobodian on his book Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right . MAGA and its far-right populist siblings around the world aren’t just a backlash to neoliberalism. The far-right has also long been animated by extremist mutant neoliberal anarcho-capitalist and paleo-libertarian strains that in the 1980s and 90s built a new New Fusionist politics of...

Featuring Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing French party La France Insoumise. How the radical left confronts and then defeats the far-right, in France and everywhere. Recorded before an audience at n+1 ’s Brooklyn office. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for “Our Collective Is the Prize” at comrades.education Buy Reconsidering Reparations at haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the final in a four-part series, traces the great unraveling of the American empire from the 1970s to our present MAGA 2.0 moment. Would you like to know more? Aziz made a bibliography for you: thedigradio.com/newsletter102 Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheD...

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the third in what is now a four-part series, looks at how black movements responded as the Vietnam War and the limits of formal civil rights victories combined to explode the Cold War’s contradictions. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Reconside...