The Dig

Featuring Dennis Hogan on the crisis in higher education. The first in a two-part series. Next up: Donna Murch and Todd Wolfson on how university workers can fight back through industrial unionism. Read Dan’s interview in The Nation thenation.com/article/world/qa-daniel-denvir Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletters and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy On Shedding...

Featuring Shanti Singh, Tracy Rosenthal, René Moya, and Cea Weaver on the politics and practice of organizing tenants. Please donate generously to support Pioneer Tenants United zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/0ae18bb1-5cb9-475a-af13-aedbbd890497 Peruse our vast archives and weekly newsletters at thedigradio.com

Featuring Robin D.G. Kelley on Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and get our weekly newsletter by email Peruse our newsletters and vast archives at thedigradio.com Check out America as Overlord haymarketbooks.org/books/1958-america-as-overlord The Men With the Pink Triangle haymarketbooks.org/books/1935-the-men-with-the-pink-triangle

Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. The second of a two-part interview. Read the passages of Selections from the Prison Notebooks that Dan read to prepare: thedigradio.com/gramscinotebooks Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and get our weekly newsletter by email Peruse our newsletters and vast archives at thedigradio.com Check out Socialism…Seriously: A Brief Guide to Surviving...

Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. Part one of an expansive two-part interview. Read the passages of Selections from the Prison Notebooks that Dan read to prepare: thedigradio.com/gramscinotebooks Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and get our weekly newsletter by email Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com

Featuring historian Tim Barker on monetary politics, inflation, and the general capitalist conjuncture. The second of a two-part interview. Check out my July 2021 interview with Barker if you want a more expansive primer on inflation thedigradio.com/podcast/inflation-politics-with-tim-barker Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our brilliant newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.c...

Featuring historian Tim Barker on the state of monetary politics amid the current fight over inflation. Check out my July 2021 interview with Barker if you want a more expansive primer on inflation thedigradio.com/podcast/inflation-politics-with-tim-barker Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our brilliant newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com

Featuring Edward Goetz on his book New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy . Goetz tells the story of American public housing and then its destruction and dismantling, which took off in the 1980s and accelerated during the 90s under the Clinton Administration’s Hope VI program. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and get our weekly newsletter by email plus swag. Check o...

Featuring Gail Radford on her classic book Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Radford tells the story of Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the struggle to make the American housing system a radically social one. In place of the two-tier system that won out, Bauer and her allies proposed a massive federally-backed system of noncommercial housing that...

Astra Taylor interviews William Hogeland on his book Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation. Hogeland recovers a fascinating crop of mostly-forgotten rebels, the movements they led, and their radical demands that put the landlords and lenders of their day on edge. He also recounts the complex and sometimes deadly machinations that went into...

Featuring Daniel Denvir on the Citations Needed podcast (as guest, not host) debunking the argument that “woke mobs” (liberal or left identity politics) drove white working-class men into MAGA’s arms. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our vast archives and newsletters at thedigradio.com

Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the fifth and final episode in what is now a FIVE-part series. We begin this episode in 1997, with reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami’s surprise landslide election to the presidency. Then we cover the reformists running into hardliner repression and George W. Bush’s War on Terror, the 2005 election...

Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the fourth episode in what is now a FIVE-part series. We pick up in the wake of the Islamic Revolution as Khomeini consolidates power, represses his rivals, and confronts an invasion from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. We continue through the Iran-Iraq War, the mass execution of thousands of leftist priso...

Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the third episode in our four-part series. We pick up in the wake of the US-British 1953 coup against Mossadegh, assess the Shah’s repression and attempts to manufacture consent through passive revolution, and then close by laying out the 1979 Islamic Revolution in all of its wild complexity. If y...

Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the second episode in our four-part series. We begin in 1941 with the British-Soviet occupation of Iran, the ouster of Reza Shah and his replacement by his son, Mohammad Reza Shah. We continue with the rise of the Tudeh communist party, the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Mohammad Mosa...

Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran, from 1906 through the present. This episode is the first in a four-part series, covering the period from 1906 until 1941, from the Constitutional Revolution that imposed constitutional limits on the Qajar dynasty through the 1921 coup that brought to power Reza Khan—who then in 1925 deposed the Qajars and became Reza Shah...

Featuring Laura Mason on her book The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. Mason discusses Babeuf’s call to abolish property, his radically egalitarian conspiracy against the Directory government, and the end of the French Revolution. How a centrist government turned its back on popular democracy, presided over growing inequality and working-class pov...

Featuring Anton Jäger and Dominik Leusder on Europe and the European Union from the crises of social democratic welfare states in the 1970s and 80s, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, through the eurozone crisis, to the present moment of war in Ukraine, renewed NATO expansion, and a resurgent far right. Listen to Anton and Dominik’s Eurotrash podcast patreon.com/eurotrash Support this podcast at...

Featuring Daisy Pitkin on her book On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union, a memoir that powerfully captures the drama of an organizing drive—and so much more. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out The Dig newsletter at thedigradio.com Subscribe to n+1 at nplusonemag.com/thedig. Enter THEDIG at checkout for a discount.

Featuring Laura Weinrib on The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. Did you know that the ACLU was founded as a radical labor organization allied with the IWW? Weinrib traces the rise of the modern civil liberties movement, and modern constitutional liberalism more broadly, from World War I through the New Deal. She explains how the ACLU went from defending free speech as a...

Featuring Thulani Davis on The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, a monumental history of freedpeople organizing amid the Civl War and Reconstruction. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto by China Miéville haymarketbooks.org/books/1990-a-spectre-haunting

Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on racial capitalism, intergenerational organizing, internationalism, and a whole lot more. Dan’s live Dig interview from the Socialism 2022 conference in Chicago. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our archives and weekly newsletter at thedigradio.com Check out Breaking the Impasse by Kim Moody haymarketb...

Featuring Rahmane Idrissa on Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The region has been beset by jihadist insurgencies and, in the case of Mali and Burkina Faso, recent military coups. This is a comprehensive interview that puts the present conflict—which has drawn in French military and then Russian mercenary intervention—into deep historical and political-economic context from struggles over the slave t...

Featuring Quinn Slobodian on his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. The story of neoliberalism’s Geneva School—including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke—and their vision for a new global order to protect the market from democratic forces in the metropole and across the decolonizing world. An interview from archives first conducted in November 20...

Featuring Adom Getachew on the story of how decolonization struggles across the Black Atlantic tried to not only cast off European rule but also to remake the entire world system. An October 2019 episode from the archives. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig