Jacobin Radio

Suzi talks to political economist Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos about the Trump-Bolsonaro love fest in D.C. last week, and the new Brazilian-US relationship. Bolsonaro was "summoned" to Washington to support a US invasion of Venezuela under the pretext of "exporting democracy," and we ask Pedro Paulo how that will go over in Brazil — and note the irony that Bolsonaro is a staunch defender of military dictatorships and no lover of democracy. We also get Pedro Paulo's view of Brazilian politics and economics under their new tweeter in chief — who campaigned as a murderous, homophobic, anti-feminist, declaring open season on the Left and on the Amazon rainforest, but governs as an extreme neoliberal.

The strike is back, and big time. Teachers in particular have been walking off the job not only to demand higher wages but also to fight for an end to privatization and for a transformation of the educational system for their students. These strikes, often led by women, are no doubt inspiring, and they have won important victories for workers and the communities they serve. We are, in other words, beginning to head in the right direction—but we're not heading there even close to fast enough. Winning working class power is not only necessary to meet people's immediate material needs. It is necessary if we are to accomplish a profound democratization of this country, which is what we must do if we are to implement a just energy transition that heads off what scientists have determined to be imminent climate catastrophe. Dan talks to Jane McAlevey about the labor movement and strikes.Jane's Catalystarticle The Strike as the Ultimate Structure Test.And her Jacobinarticle Organizing to Win a Green New Deal.Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Tony Wood, author of Russia Without Putin, on contemporary Russia and Putin.

Four of the five candidates endorsed by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or advanced to the runoff election on April 2, leading to talk of a Socialist Caucus on the city council. And other progressive candidates throughout the city knocked off corporate-friendly incumbents. Dan passes the mic to guest host Micah Uetricht for an interview with United Working Families Executive Director Emma Tai and In These Times web editor Miles Kampf-Lassin on how years of grassroots organizing—and partnerships between labor and community groups and socialists—can produce a sea change in urban politics.Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

American liberty has since its foundation relied upon the dispossession of indigenous people and Mexicans, upon African enslavement and, ultimately, upon the constant fleeing outward that created an empire that none dare call by its name. As historian Greg Grandin writes in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, this expansionist project has finally lost its ideological and material vitality, no longer able to neatly reconcile centuries of mounting contradictions. And so politics returned to the border as American expansion hit a wall—figuratively and, as Trump has demanded, very literally. "Trumpism," Grandin writes, "is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring. There is no 'divine, messianic' crusade that can harness and redirect passions outward. Expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy interests, reconcile contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger."Thanks to University of California Press. Check out No Go WorldL How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics by Ruben Andersson ucpress.edu/book/9780520294608/no-go-worldAnd thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, authors (along with Nancy Fraser) of Feminism for the 99%, on a truly transformative feminism. Then, Sam Stein, author of Capital City, on bourgeois urban planning, with an emphasis on NYC.

Richard Walker, geographer and director of the Living New Deal project, on what the original New Deal can teach the Green one. Then, Aziz Rana on the need for a left internationalism.

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou explains: it's not just that the War on Terror has warped American and European politics and society; it's that the War on Terror and Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS have become mutually-critical facets of a larger, more total global geo-political order. In other words, the terrorists and the national security states waging war against them are dependent upon one another, and together have created a more violent, divided and alienated world.Thanks to University of California Press. Check out Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard by Peter Linebaugh ucpress.edu/book/9780520299467/red-round-globe-hot-burningAnd to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Suzi talks to DSAers Jeremy Gong and Magally Miranda Alcazar about the larger issues they are confronting after two years of Trump, a midterm election that saw radical democratic socialists elected to Congress, and the beginning of a second Bernie Sanders campaign for president. How do they see the challenges ahead, in a more favorable national context for Democratic Socialists, thanks to Bernie, AOC, #Red4Ed striking teachers, and the Trump administration’s retrograde policies? Can the Left take over the Democratic Party and should that be their aim? Or should the social-movement work of DSA, independent of the Dems, be their focus? How do they define socialism, and what should socialists do given the structures of our politics and economy?Then, Suzi talks to Randy Shaw about his new book,Generation Priced Out — which is a call to action that addresses the national crisis of housing, city by city, looking at how policy and neglect, as well as economic crisis, has led to skyrocketing rents and home values that have priced out the working and middle class of urban America such that young people today join the exodus from the city or face homelessness because they cannot afford to live in our cities. Generation Priced Out not only tells the stories of those impacted by the national housing crisis in more than a dozen cities, he makes the argument that cities can and must address the housing needs of residents of all income levels — and he offers specific strategies, honed from his own decades of experience as a housing activist to reverse rising economic and racial inequality.

It's irrelevant whether establishment liberals are sincerely aware of the threat posed by climate catastrophe because they are constitutionally hemmed in by a small-bore, technocratic and profoundly neoliberal ideology. But the climate justice movement understands not only the urgency of the problem but also the magnitude of the political-economic response that solving it requires: to fight global warming, according to The Green New Deal, we must transform the unequal, alienating and exploitative system that carbon emissions are rooted in. Dan interviews Green New Deal architect Rhiana Gunn-Wright.Read Jacobin's Green New Deal series jacobinmag.com/series/green-new-dealThanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Striking women have begun to reclaim feminism as a project of working-class struggle against not only patriarchy's domination of women by men but also against capitalism's domination of the many by the few—a system that sexism serves. As Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser write in Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, "Our answer to lean-in feminism is kick-back feminism. We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling while leaving the vast majority to clean up the shards. Far from celebrating women CEOs who occupy corner offices, we want to get rid of CEOs and corner offices." Dan interviews Tithi Bhattacharya.Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Dan's guest is long-time organizer Jonathan Matthew Smucker, the author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. The book is both a critique of the radical left's traditional style of politics and a how-to guide to fighting and winning, from nuts-and-bolts organizing methods to theory. What is wrong with the world and how to change it are two different categories of knowledge, and effective organizing requires that we master the latter.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support us with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Suzi talks to Kate Aronoff about Bernie Sanders’s candidacy, the Green New Deal, and the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders raised a whopping $6 million the first day he announced his run for president in 2020, making him the most important candidate in the race, and not just because of the money. His 2016 run within the Democratic Party but against its politics has changed the political conversation, brought tens of thousands into the work of politics, elected a new cohort of left Democrats to — and thanks to Bernie, all the candidates are now at least proclaiming support for Medicare for All, striking teachers, and a Green New Deal. As Kate Aronoff puts it, “The types of ideas laughed off in the 2016 primary as magical unicorns are now firmly in the party’s mainstream, even as they make its top brass sweat.”

Daniel Aldana Cohen, author of this article, on the role of housing in a Green New Deal. Then, Joel Whitney, author of this article, on the CIA's history as a purveyor of fake news.

Noah Kulwin, staff writer with Jewish Currents, on why Ilhan Omar’s AIPAC tweets weren't antisemitic. Then, Thea Riofrancos, one of editors of Jacobin's Green New Deal series, on the agenda's scope and politics.

Dan discusses The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte — Marx's take on revolution and reaction in mid-nineteenth-century France, the broader theories he develops about history and the relationship between politics and the class war, and how this all might apply to today — with political sociologist Dylan Riley.Check out Dan's recent NYT op-ed, "The Case Against Border Security."Thanks to NACLA, reporting on the Americas since 1967. Check out their collection of articles on Latin American politics at nacla.org. And thanks, as always, to Verso. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com.Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig!

Dan talks to Eric Levitz — who at New York magazine provides the sort of consistently thoughtful and deeply contextualized analysis that is often quite hard to find on mainstream news sites — about the increasingly impossible to reconcile immanent contradictions shaking the Democratic and Republican parties.Thanks to University of California Press. Check out American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams by Peter Richardson, with a foreword from Mike Davis.Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig!

What might Bernie 2020 look like, particularly now that almost everyone claims to be for Medicare for All (whatever they might mean by that)? Will Harris's track record as a law-and-order prosecutor doom her, or will her appeal as a woman of color rally a decisive number of votes? And will Biden being exposed as utterly unfit for the 2020 Democratic base send his poll numbers crashing? What impact will AOC have on defining what voters want and demand? Dan discusses all of this and more with Briahna Gray, Dave Weigel, and Waleed Shahid.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com.Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig.

<font color="#000000">The state of the economy is, despite assertions to the contrary, not strong; it is being plundered by the alliance of top corporate managers, leading financiers and political leaders from both parties. Suzi talks to </font>Robert Brenner on politics and the state of the economy — matters of great confusion if you only pay attention to the business press and politicians, who say the economy is robust, with record low unemployment, rising wages, and the recovery of the stock market. But the Fed stopped raising interest rates, wages are stagnant, precarity and insecurity are the norm, homelessness has exploded, student debt is staggering and suffocating — and teachers are striking to force states to reinvest (stop under-investing) to save public education. So what is the real story, and if the economists and pundits are getting it wrong — why is that the case? Is it cheerleading for the status quo? We get Brenner’s analysis.

Two left-wing Muslim women newly elected to Congress—Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib and Somali-American Ilhan Omar—are resetting the Congressional debate over Palestine. In response, they have been met with slanderous attacks. On the one hand, this is exciting: we've never had people in Congress not only criticizing Israeli brutality but also supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. On the other hand, the current debate is a sobering reminder of how amongst American elected officials, overwhelming, and nearly unconditional, bipartisan support for Israel remains the norm even as Democratic voters move leftward—and in increasing opposition to the occupation. Dan speaks to organizer Linda Sarsour on the politics of Palestine in flux—and how partisan polarization on the issue is accelerating, and why that's a good thing.Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland and Naomi Schiller on the profound economic, social, and political crisis in Venezuela. More than three million refugees and migrants have fled the country. Opposition figure Juan Guaidó has declared himself president. Trump and other right-wing leaders throughout the Americas quickly recognized him as just that. The US imposed new sanctions on Venezuela's oil and has hinted at the possibility of a military invasion. It's unclear what comes next, but foreign intervention would make an extremely bad situation catastrophic.Meanwhile, many reactionaries throughout the Americas are pointing to Venezuela as proof that socialism cannot work. What is the correct analysis? What does solidarity with the Venezuelan people mean for today's left? These are all extremely complicated and urgent questions. Today, Dan interviews three experts on Venezuela to help answer them.Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, a leader of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, is on trial in New York. After twice making his way out of Mexican prisons, he was extradited to the United States. This is what counts as a major victory in the never-ending US war on drugs, which the US has in recent decades exported to Mexico. Yet El Chapo's arrest, like that of so many others, has done nothing to stop Mexican drug cartels from continuing to export massive quantities of cocaine and heroin and other drugs. Neither has it caused cartels to pause the murderous bloodbath that they have visited upon the Mexican people. The Mexican state continues to be a corrupt one, and the domestic deployment of a Mexican military deeply implicated in human rights violations is set to continue. And there is still no justice for the disappeared students from Ayotzinapa. Dan interviews legendary Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernández.Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

#Red4EdLA: Los Angeles teachers lead the way for the labor movement — striking FOR public education — using the strike weapon to reverse the damage of decades of neoliberal assault on everything public. Suzi talks to Joel Jordan, an education strategist currently coordinating nine of the largest urban teacher unions in California, including UTLA, about the strike strategy behind UTLA’s extraordinary historic victory. Joel lays out how UTLA’s Union Power leadership wielded the strike weapon as part of a long-term strategy explicitly linked to upcoming strikes in Oakland and elsewhere and discusses the limitations the union faced, and the broad support they built and enjoyed.<o:p></o:p>

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union and Jane McAlevey, author and organizer, on the union’s great victory in their LA strike, protecting public education against the plutocrats’ attacks

Historian Andrew Bacevich tries to make sense of Trump’s foreign policy. Then, Steven Maher (author of this article) on the rise and fall of GE.

Democracy is the proposition that the people should govern themselves. But who are the people, and how should they govern? Populist movements attempt to answer these questions. In response, establishment figures insist that it is the people and their populism that pose a dangerous threat to democracy. How should we appraise our current populist moment? And how can we distinguish between populism's left and right variants? Dan interviews two experts on populism, political scientists Laura Grattan and Thea Riofrancos.Check out Thea's n+1 essays on populism here:nplusonemag.com/issue-28/politics/democracy-without-the-people-2/nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/zombie-liberalism/nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/populism-without-the-people/Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

On this special #RedforEd edition of Jacobin Radio, Suzi speaks with former teacher, member of the School Board, City Council, and State Assembly Jackie Goldberg, who is running in the March 5 special election to the LAUSD School Board. If elected, Jackie will be an experienced and effective progressive voice for public education, opposing the charter school privatizers who were elected with money from the bank-rollers who "have stacked the deck against district public schools.” We talk to Jackie about the strike, the fight to save public education, and how the forces are aligned from Los Angeles to Sacramento to Washington. Suzi also speaks to Eric Blanc, former teacher and author of the forthcoming Red State Revolt:The Teachers Strike Wave and Working Class Politics. Erichas been covering the strike for Jacobinand looks at the larger issues in the UTLA strike, the billionaires arrayed against the LA schools, the dilemma this strike poses for establishment Democrats, and why this fightback is historic.

The teacher strike wave continues as more than 30,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles walk picket lines not only for the higher wages that they deserve but also for the well-funded and great schools that the city's working-class students of color have long been systematically denied—a situation that has been exacerbated by a corporate reform-led school board and superintendent dead-set on privatizing the district. UTLA has in recent years been led by a militant, rank-and-file caucus that has shunted aside the old guard's narrow vision of service unionism in favor of a big-picture movement unionism that makes the struggles of teachers, parents and students one on and the same. Sarah Jaffe is Dan's guest for a discussion of the strike, social reproduction and lessons from Rosa Luxemburg (interview was recorded on Wednesday).Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comSupport this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Jacobin editor Alyssa Battistoni interviews Astra Taylor on her new film What is Democracy?, in which Astra asks ordinary people and political philosophers alike just that. The answers are often extraordinary and far more incisive than the mindless pablum emanating from Washington and its official interpreters. The film opens in New York on Wednesday January 16 at the IFC Center before traveling to theaters and campuses. Special guests on hand during opening week for live Q&As with Astra include Silvia Federici, Cornel West, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. For details, go to ifccenter.com/films/what-is-democracy. Those of us who don't live in New York can find other dates through the distributor at zeitgeistfilms.com. And if you want to bring this film to your school or town, and you really should, contact Zeitgeist Films! 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/TheDig

<font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Suzi speaks to energy specialist and author Simon Pirani about his new book, Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption that traces the relentless rise in oil, gas, and coal use since the mid-twentieth century </font>— and shows how consumption has grown fastest since the discovery of global warming in the 1980s. Simon argues that fuels are mainly consumed through technological systems, which are in turn embedded in social, economic, and political systems — and that the transition away from fossil fuels will mean the transformation of all of these. Then: the LA teachers strike is on! Suzi talks toArlene Inouye, secretary of United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) and co-chair of the negotiations team about what happened in bargaining, and how important this strike is for public education, indeed, for the public. UTLA is demanding a fair agreement that addresses class size, funding for nurses, counselors, and librarians, a halt to further privatization through charterization, and teacher pay. The LAUSD’s Austin Beutner failed to show up for the last two bargaining sessions, lied to the media, and presented an inadequate proposal, so now he has to face teachers, students, and community on the picket lines. After the spectacular Red State teachers' strikes of last year, the LAUSD strike has enormous potential in practical and inspirational terms — for labor and community as a whole.

Typically, people think about migration as immigration: people crossing international borders from one nation-state to another. And for the past half century in the United States, people have tended to think about that immigration in a binary way: legal immigration versus illegal immigration. But to understand the origins of the immigration politics in general and the criminalization of Mexican immigrants in particular that have become the core of the Trump presidency, we must explode these categories, identify their origins, and analyze the history that preceded them. Dan interviews Aziz Rana.Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Melinda Cooper about her book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which makes the case that neoliberalism and social conservatism have been consistent collaborators in creating an economy that redistributed wealth ruthlessly upwards with a risk-absorbing family at its privatized center.Thanks to Verso Books, which has a huge collection of excellent left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comSupport this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Suzi talks to scholar activist Richard Walker about his new book, Pictures of a Gone City, an urban geography of the San Francisco Bay Area, America’s richest and fastest changing metropolis. Walker explains both the miracle of Silicon Valley — including the sometimes delusional ideas behind this new tech boom, and the heavy price being paid for it in terms of affordability, traffic paralysis, environmental disruption, as well as the political challenges and movements it has spawned. We then speak to Jacobin’s Matt Karp, who evaluates the importance of the midterm elections and the politics of the Democratic Party, who went after suburban voters in this election. The Democrats are about to control the house, but Matt says their professional-class politics are a cul de sac, when what is needed is a political revolution driven by the needs and aspirations of the multiracial working class.

Trump and fossil-fueled conservatives have pit working-class prosperity against environmentalism. This, of course, is incredibly dangerous. It's also premised on a misreading of environmental politics as having nothing to do with human well-being. But climate change, of course, threatens not only non-human nature but also the entirety of human life that is fundamentally dependent on it. Right now, coastal homes and cities, agriculture, wildfire-prone forests, and the water supply are all under threat. And so an ecologically sustainable response to this crisis must definitionally also be a socially and economically just one: something like a Green New Deal, a broad vision that climate activists and left insurgent politicians are uniting behind. Dan's guest today, climate reporter Kate Aronoff, is going to tell us all about it — as well as about the general state of domestic and global climate politics.

Historian Adam Tooze, the author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, explains how crisis in an unprecedentedly powerful and interconnected global banking system coursed through American homes and European sovereign debt markets, exploding into the Tea Party and the European politics of austerity — and, ultimately, leading to today's legitimation crisis of the reigning political establishment and economic order.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com!Please support The Dig with your money at patreon.com/TheDig.

In this episode, Suzi talks to Jacobin contributing editor Sebastian Budgen about the gilet jaunes protests rocking France, named for the yellow traffic vests the protestors wear. The movement was ignited by President Emmanuel Macron’s so called climate measures — hiking gas taxes and reducing the speed limit, but quickly included other basic economic demands about low wages and the increasing impossibility of making ends meet, while the wealthy were getting tax breaks. Sebastian Budgen looks at the movement’s origins, politics, support, and potential. Then Sarah Mason joins Suzi to describe her experience as a Lyft driver doing precarious work in the gig economy. She explains, in her article in the Guardian, how workers are motivated, essentially in game mode, to do insane amounts of driving, and how the insertion of the algorithm into the traditional class struggle has changed the way workers can fight.

Robert Pollin, lead author of this paper, on how to pay for Medicare for All — covering everyone and saving money. Then, Anton Jäger on the problems with the anti-/post-work position.

There has been no greater exemplar of zombie neoliberalism in power than French President Emanuel Macron's imperial technocracy. Now, with the rise of the Yellow Vest (Gilets jaunes) movement, there no clearer evidence that zombie neoliberalism is bound to fail. This crisis cannot be solved with the centrist policies and politics that caused it in the first place. But where will the movement head, and who will benefit politically?And what does this reveal about neoliberal approaches to the climate crisis? Dan's guests are Danièle Obono, a French member of parliament with the left-wing party la France Insoumise, or France Unbowed, and ROAR magazine editor Jerome Roos.Read Jerome's article in ROAR: roarmag.org/essays/gilets-jaunes-blown-old-political-categories/Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Marissa Brostoff and Andrea Long Chu discuss Sex and the City and the X-Files, unraveling the tangled history of Marxism and queer theory, Cynthia Nixon the democratic socialist versus Miranda the straight corporate lawyer misrecognized as a lesbian, feminism as consumption in Giuliani's New York, the remarkable resilience of heterosexuality, the Cold War's paranoiac aftershocks, history's startling return, the alt-right’s nostalgia for postmodernism, the takeover of reality by reality TV, men with tinfoil hats decrying the deep state from the heights of power, and the possibilities of stitching socialism and queer politics together into a robust movement for human liberation.Thank you 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/TheDig!

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, on the politics of guns.

Suzi speaks first with Mike Parker, author, rabble-rouser, and union activist, who worked for thirty-tow years in auto in Detroit, about what is behind GM’s decision to close five plants, four in the US and one in Canada, affecting some 15,000 workers and their families as well as the towns and cities from Lordstown in Ohio to Detroit in Michigan. Ed Broadbent, former NDP Leader and Member of Parliament from 1975–1989, brings the Canadian perspective and reaction. Ed hails from Oshawa, Ontario, the site of the GM plant in Canada to be closed. His father was a clerk at GM and his still living uncle, at 104, was on the GM picket line in Oshawa in 1937 in the strike that brought industrial unions to Canada. We hear what Ed, described as the “best Prime Minister Canada never had,” thinks the political leaders should be doing now that GM — bailed out with billions from Canada — has turned its back on its workers. Plus: LA Taco’s editor Daniel Hernandez, just back from Tijuana, reports on the harrowing conditions inside the migrant refugee camp <font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">near the US-Mexico border, where thousands are sheltering, with hopes of entering the US. </font>

On Saturday, Dan was in New York to interview Fernando Haddad and Yanis Varoufakis. Haddad is the former Workers Party mayor of São Paulo who recently lost Brazil's presidential election to far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. Varoufakis was the Greek Finance minister who tried and failed to fight the Troika's imposition of austerity and today is a leader of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025. Unsurprisingly, their topic was the fight against right-wing populism.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

How unlucky it was for Angela Nagle to make her so-called left case against immigration the same week that Hillary Clinton reprised her neoliberal case for border crackdowns. In reality, solidarity with immigrant workers has long been a core tenant for much of the socialist left and labor movement, while neoliberalism, despite pretenses to the contrary, has always been implemented alongside repression. Dan interviews Richard Seymour, a founding editor of Salvage, who has done some excellent work on left politics and migration:https://www.patreon.com/posts/to-win-argument-22956541https://www.patreon.com/posts/reinventing-anti-20945069Thanks 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/TheDig.

Guns in general, and American gun culture in particular, have created a horrific bloodbath. But much of the liberal gun control movement has, in concert with the NRA and Republican right, worked to make the war on guns a central facet of mass incarceration. The upshot is that we have the worst of both worlds: a society flooded with guns, where the paradigmatic white "good guy with a gun" treasures his weapons as a bedrock constitutional right even as the supposed "bad guys with a gun," often black men with a felony record, are mercilessly prosecuted for carrying. Dan talks to reporter George Joseph, who has a new piece up at Slate on former Attorney General Jeff Sessions's war on guns, which has led to a sharp increase in federal gun prosecutions — often hitting ordinary black men with felony records who are simply carrying for their own protection.Thanks to University of California Press. Check out their excellent catalog of books at ucpress.edu.Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig!

Black Lives Matter is a poignant slogan and a powerful force for social transformation. It’s also shorthand for a huge array of organizations, mostly led by people that you've never heard of, working the daily hard grind of ordinary organizing that stitches together spectacular mass actions into a movement. That's the subject of the new book Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century by Dan’s guest, historian and activist Barbara Ransby.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com.Please support The Dig with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig!

A look at the fires raging across California, and the impending teacher’s strike. Suzi talks to urban theorist Mike Davis for his “Tale of Two Fires,” contrasting the Paradise and Malibu conflagrations, which he says is like comparing two Californias. She then talks to United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) president Alex Caputo Pearl who addresses another sort of fire, this one threatening public education. Alex explains the issues behind the historic 98 percent strike-authorization vote from the UTLA membership, issues that go to the heart of the competing visions for public education from the union (UTLA), and the district (LAUSD, the second-largest in the country) that is in austerity and downsizing mode, while the union is pushing for smaller classes, more funding, more staff, and the needs of students and education as a whole.

Neoliberalism: we all hate it, but what does it mean? Dan talks to intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian about his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which tells the story of neoliberalism's Geneva School — including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke — and their vision for a new imperial order establishing rules to protect the market from political interference. It's a movement that begins with nostalgia for the bygone Habsburg Empire, moves on to fights against the decolonized world's efforts to create a New International Economic Order, and plays a key role in forming the European Economic Community and the WTO.Live Dig interview in NYC with Yanis Varoufakis on Challenging the New Right-Populism. Saturday December 1, 6pm at the New School's Arnhold Hall at the Theresa Lang Student Center.Thanks to Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out their titles at www.versobooks.com and ucpress.edu.Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig!

The man who carried out the massacre in Pittsburgh was motivated by a belief that Jewish people were conspiring to destroy the white race by way of orchestrating mass immigration. It's a conspiracy theory with deep roots in America's violent white power movement and that today is echoed by Trump and Fox News. Dan interviews Kathleen Belew on her book Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, a history of the white power revolutionary movement from 1975–1995.Thanks to Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out the excellent titles they have for sale at www.versobooks.com and www.ucpress.edu.Please support this podcast with money at patreon.com/TheDig!

Suzi talks to political economist Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos about the October 28 election that brought the ultra-right wing Jair Bolsonaro to power. Bolsonaro promised to cleanse Brazil of crime and corruption by killing tens of thousands — and won formidable support from the poor who have been left behind by the neoliberal policies of successive governments, and whose neighborhoods are riddled with violence and crime. They turned away from the Workers Party (PT), tainted by its austerity policies and corruption, like the other political parties. But what can the working class and the poor actually expect from Bolsonaro, who represents a violent extreme of authoritarian neoliberalism, on the rise across the world? We get Pedro Paulo's analysis of the vote, Bolsonaro’s political-economic strategy, and what Bolsonaro’s victory means for Brazilian democracy and Latin America as a whole.

Historian Amanda Armstrong on the importance of trans politics. Then, political economist Alfredo Saad-Filho on the prospects for Brazil under the fascist Bolsonaro.