Featuring Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland, and Yoletty Bracho on the US attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro. An expansive conversation analyzing Trump’s imperialist project and assessing Chavismo and its oppositions from Chávez through Maduro. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out equator.org for longform articles, public events, and reading groups Buy Middle Class New Deal at UCPress.com

Featuring Andrew Epstein on the Zohran campaign’s savvy, funny, sharp, disciplined, and moving comms operation. As one hundred thousand volunteers knocked three million doors, Andrew and a team of strategists, speechwriters, designers, and filmmakers wrote a giant love letter to New York City and inoculated voters against a lavishly-funded fusillade of smears and attacks. Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy After Savagery at Haymarketbooks.org Buy From Apartheid to Democracy at UCPress.com

Featuring Sumaya Awad, Sumathy Kumar, and Nathan Gusdorf on building power on the ground as our allies exercise it from above in the service of a larger hegemonic project to transform the United States. As Zohran Mamdani takes office on January 1, it’s time for governance—and all of the opportunities, constraints, and contradictions that entails. A recording of last week’s live Dig in Brooklyn. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig we have so much cool new merch Buy After Savagery at Haymarketbooks.org Buy From the Clinics to the Capitol at UCPress.com

Featuring Eric Blanc, Leah Greenberg, and Waleed Shahid on the liberal resistance’s sharp left turn since Trump returned to the White House. Libs are voting Zohran at the ballot box, fighting ICE in the streets, and just generally looking favorably upon socialism. This discussion puts the moment in historic context and plots out the strategic exigencies and opportunities ahead. Rest in power Asad Haider. Check out our 2018 interview with Asad on his book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump thedigradio.com/podcast/mistaking-identity-politics Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Learning to Live in the Dark at Haymarketbooks.org Buy Will Work for Food at UCPress.com

Featuring Tascha Van Auken on how Zohran’s campaign mobilized an army of 100,000 volunteers to knock three million doors. Van Auken has been an architect of NYC-DSA’s field operation and its general electoral strategy since the beginning. Organizers everywhere have a lot to learn. Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht. 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 of governance with NYC-DSA leaders Sumathy Kumar and Sumaya Awad alongside the Fiscal Policy Institute’s Nathan Gusdorf. Free entry but please RSVP. Party afterwards! eventbrite.com/e/zohran-and-the-return-of-municipal-socialism-tickets-1972951976472 Buy No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine at Haymarketbooks.org Read the latest issue from The Nation‘s Books & the Arts section TheNation.com/books-and-the-arts

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 opportunities and contradictions of governance with NYC-DSA leaders Sumathy Kumar and Sumaya Awad alongside the Fiscal Policy Institute’s Nathan Gusdorf. Free entry but please RSVP. Party afterwards! eventbrite.com/e/zohran-and-the-return-of-municipal-socialism-tickets-1972951976472 Buy No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine and Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy at Haymarketbooks.org

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 of governance with NYC-DSA leaders Sumathy Kumar and Sumaya Awad alongside the Fiscal Policy Institute’s Nathan Gusdorf. Free entry but please RSVP. Party afterwards! eventbrite.com/e/zohran-and-the-return-of-municipal-socialism-tickets-1972951976472

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 US and China—and a lot more. In New York City? See Thea discuss Extraction with David Wallace-Wells. Friday, November 14 at McNally Jackson Seaport. Say hi to Dan if you attend! Tickets here: mcnallyjackson.com/event/thea-riofrancos-david-wallace-wells Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Black History is for Everyone at Haymarketbooks.org Get your first month free at OVID.tv using promo code DIG25

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 the latest issue from The Nation‘s Books & the Arts section TheNation.com/books-and-the-arts

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 Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Dan in the New Yorker newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/daniel-denvir-digs-zohran-mamdani Buy From Apartheid to Democracy at UCPress.com Read the latest issue from The Nation‘s Books & the Arts section TheNation.com/books-and-the-arts/

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. Next up: a view from the Global South with Jane Nalunga and Walden Bello. Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Their End is Our Beginning at Haymarketbooks.org Read the latest issue from The Nation‘s Books & the Arts section TheNation.com/books-and-the-arts

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. Assets like homes, the value of which spiraled ever upward until the Global Financial Crisis. The crash made the politics of revolutionary conservatism that dominate us today with MAGA. But the crisis also revealed powerful monetary tools that we could wield to make socialism—if only we organize the power necessary to seize them. The SECOND in a two-part series. Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Get your first month free at OVID.tv using promo code DIG25 Visit dropsitenews.com/DIG20 for 20% off an annual Drop Site subscription

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 in a two-part series. Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Challenging the Myths of US History at UCPress.edu Buy Trouble! at Coal Creek at Haymarketbooks.org

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 Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Visit dropsitenews.com/DIG20 for 20% off an annual Drop Site subscription Buy Gaza Catastrophe at UCPress.edu

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: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag Get your first month free at OVID.tv using promo code DIG25 Buy Learning to Live in the Dark at Haymarketbooks.org

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 TrueAnon. Free for Patreon supporters $10/mo and up. Get your tickets here littlefieldnyc.com/event/?wfea_eb_id=1549778040839 Subscribe to the Palestinian Festival of Literature’s book subscription program palfest.org/bookshelf Buy We Are the Union at UCPress.edu

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 interview with Robin Kelley on Hammer and Hoe thedigradio.com/podcast/hammer-and-hoe-with-robin-d-g-kelley Support signalhill.fm/support Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 Episode Party November 7 in Brooklyn! Emceed by Brace and Liz from TrueAnon. Free for Patreon supporters $10/mo and up. Get your tickets here littlefieldnyc.com/event/?wfea_eb_id=1549778040839 Buy Fake Work at Haymarketbooks.com Get 50% off Fascist Yoga and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code ‘DIG50′.

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 movement struggle. But while much has been achieved, Johnson and his allies have also suffered many defeats–and the mayor’s approval ratings are alarmingly low. In this episode, three long-time local organizers, including a socialist member of city council, analyze the state of the left’s bid for governing power and what broader lessons it holds. Recorded live in Chicago. Dig 500th Episode Party November 7 in Brooklyn! Emceed by Brace and Liz from TrueAnon. Free for Patreon supporters $10/mo and up. Get your tickets here littlefieldnyc.com/event/?wfea_eb_id=1549778040839 Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Get 50% off Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code ‘DIG50′. Buy Fake Work at Haymarketbooks.com

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% off A People’s History of Psychoanalysis and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code ‘DIG50′. Register for Summer Rejuvenation by July 27th at Comrades.education

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 conference. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

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 2025 issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly at www.socres.org  Get 50% off Immigration Detention Inc. and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code DIG50

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: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence at Haymarketbooks.com In These Times is offering 78% off print subscriptions for Dig listeners at Inthesetimes.com/dig

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 on the history of Arab politics (lots on Iran in the final episodes). Find both series here: thedigradio.com/series Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig In These Times is offering 78% off print subscriptions for Dig listeners at Inthesetimes.com/dig Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

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 and authoritarian repression intensify. To do that, we need to learn from the 2020 uprising. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out Long Haul at longhaulmag.com Buy Fake Work at Haymarketbooks.com Subscribe to Dissent at dissentmag.org/subscribe

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 capitalist extremism—a politics that promoted IQ as the measure of individual and racial value; hard borders for humans with free trade for capital; and gold as the only true currency. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org Register for “Our Collective Is the Prize” at Comrades.education before May 31

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/TheDig Buy Enemy Feminisms and I Didn’t Come Here to Lie 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 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 Reconsidering Reparations at Haymarketbooks.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the second in a three-part series, takes the story from World War I’s hyper-nationalist, xenophobic First Red Scare, through the convulsions of the middle decades of the 20th century: the Communist Party USA, the New Deal, World War II, the civil rights movement, the Warren Court, and ultimately the Cold War, when American liberalism, anti-communism, and empire triumphed. Buy Iran in Revolt at Haymarketbooks.com Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org before April 25th for an early bird discount! Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American capitalist, imperialist project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the first in a three-part series, traces the foundation of the American settler empire from the revolutionary generation up to the eve of World War I. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy White City, Black City at Plutobooks.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Jeff Schuhrke on his book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. During the Cold War, organized labor’s top leadership acted as an agent of the US national security state abroad: undermining left-wing unions, fomenting right-wing coups, and promoting the US-led capitalist order. At home, those same forces destroyed left-wing unions and organizers. That history goes a long way in explaining the weakened, conservative, and ineffectual workers’ movement we still confront today. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig [don’t sign up using the Patreon iPhone app because the ghouls at Apple are now requiring a fee! use a web browser or non-iPhone app] Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org before April 25th for an early bird discount! Buy Hidden San Francisco at Plutobooks.com

Featuring more analysis from Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on the shape of global geopolitics and geoeconomics. We discuss: the fault lines of the green energy transition; the US and China battle for dominance while the rest of the world seeks advantage and opportunities for leverage; the US and Russia’s full-throttle commitment to fossil capitalism; the IMF’s ongoing imposition of neoliberal austerity on the world’s poorest countries, which, in opposition to these plans, want to remake the entire world capitalist system. Plus: Why the economic weapon failed against China and Russia, and a lot more. The second in a two-part series. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to The Polycrisis newsletter phenomenalworld.org/series/the-polycrisis Download a free copy of The Spectre of State Capitalism by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon academic.oup.com/book/57552 Transnational Institute reports: The New Frontline: The US-China Battle for Control of Global Networks tni.org/en/article/the-new-frontline Geopolitics of Capitalism: State of Power 2025 tni.org/en/publication/geopolitics-of-capitalism Get 50% off Pirate Care and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code ‘DIG50′.

Featuring Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on a global conjuncture defined by Washington’s shredding of the liberal international order’s legitimacy amid a panic over decline: the escalating Cold War with China; Gaza genocide; Trump’s tariff wars and militarism, and his pivot toward Putin on Ukraine; European defense buildup and fiscal revolution; what this all means for the poor majority of the Global South, and more. Part one of a two-part series. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to The Polycrisis newsletter phenomenalworld.org/series/the-polycrisis Download a free copy of The Spectre of State Capitalism by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon academic.oup.com/book/57552 Transnational Institute reports: The New Frontline: The US-China Battle for Control of Global Networks tni.org/en/article/the-new-frontline Geopolitics of Capitalism: State of Power 2025 tni.org/en/publication/geopolitics-of-capitalism Buy Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal at Haymarketbooks.com Buy Nuclear Is Not The Solution at Versobooks.com

Featuring Eric Blanc on We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. Interview conducted by guest host Gabriel Winant. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Defend federal workers and federal services: actionnetwork.org/forms/let-us-work/ Contact the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) for help organizing your workplace: workerorganizing.org Contact Workers Organizing Workers (WOW) if you are interested in taking a job in a strategic industry to unionize it: form.jotform.com/250337473301045 Buy All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence at Haymarketbooks.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring TrueAnon hosts Brace Belden and Liz Franczak on our freakish and reactionary tech oligarchy. Musk and friends built a technological infrastructure that has warped everyone’s minds, including their own. Now they’re seizing the state. The hideous AI “art” we discuss: https://bit.ly/4ksG1aM http://bit.ly/3DmDfTD Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org before April 25th for an early bird discount! Use code “DIG” for 30% off a subscription to The-Syllabus.com

Featuring Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Mike McCarthy on the MAGA and DOGE war on woke; the complicity of bankrupt liberal identity politics; and the centrality of various oppressions to the class domination of capital and struggles against it. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Read Mike’s article “The Problem of Class Abstractionism” epublications.marquette.edu/socs_fac/356 Buy Enemy Feminisms at Haymarketbooks.com Buy Solidarity Betrayed at Plutobooks.com

Featuring Danielle Carr on the history and present state of American unwellness and how that’s been shaped by psychiatry, prescription drugs, neuroscience, popular culture, smartphones and social media. We trace the rise of psychiatry as a Gilded Age human science, the disastrous contradictions of asylum deinstitutionalization, the invention of neuroscience and deep brain stimulation, Elon Musk’s Neuralink fraudulence, how Adderall made the Internet run, the liberal gospel of traumatic literalism recounted in The Body Keeps the Score, and the scientific Bonapartism of RFK Jr.’s medical freedom movement. Buy Empire of Normality at Plutobooks.com Buy Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal at Haymarketbooks.com Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our vast archives and newsletters at thedigradio.com

Featuring Chris Newman on Trump’s far-right anti-migrant agenda and Democrats’ cruel and stupid complicity. Read All-American Nativism versobooks.com/products/704-all-american-nativism Read Dan’s essay on Gaza and migration politics in n+1 nplusonemag.com/issue-48/politics/do-border Trump’s immigration executive orders propublica.org/article/donald-trump-immigration-executive-orders Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy After Accountability at Haymarketbooks.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Hannah Srajer on building tenant unions by applying labor organizing models. The Connecticut Tenants Union is partnered with SEIU 1199NE to organize fighting super majority tenant unions that win collectively bargained leases and wield working class political power. It’s a model that’s spreading nationwide. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Peruse The Dig’s vast archives at thedigradio.com Support Reclaim RI https://secure.actblue.com/donate/reclaimri Buy Not Your Rescue Project at Haymarketbooks.com Buy My Country, Africa at Versobooks.com

Featuring Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal on their book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Tenant unions fighting to transform Los Angeles, the country, and the world. Support Reclaim RI https://secure.actblue.com/donate/reclaimri Buy Abolish Rent haymarketbooks.org/books/2443-abolish-rent Subscribe to Dissent at dissentmagazine.org/subscribe Use code ‘DIG50’ for 50% off your first order at Plutobooks.com

Featuring Michael Denning on Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, collectively authored by Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Hall’s method of Marxist conjunctural analysis applied to the generalized crisis that paved the way for neoliberalism’s rise; a model for how we should ask questions about our world that will provide us with knowledge we need to change it. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our vast archives and newsletters thedigradio.com Support Atlantic Mills Tenants Union Legal Fund https://bit.ly/4jg4D61 Buy Dead Cities and Other Tales at haymarketbooks.com Donate to Jacobin Magazine at jacobin.com/donate

Featuring Michael Denning on Stuart Hall’s Marxism—a Marxism without guarantees. This is a comprehensive introduction to Marxism as a method to analyze historically specific, complex and contradictory capitalist social formations, and what that means for making, rather than assuming the existence of, a working-class socialist politics. Next week Dan interviews Denning on Policing the Crisis, a 1978 book collectively authored by Hall and his colleagues; it’s a remarkable project that anticipates today’s politics around anti-immigrant xenophobia, mass incarceration, and Trumpism. Listen to Hall’s full 1983 Inaugural Karl Marx Memorial Lecture in Sheffield youtube.com/watch?v=IP_OWahR-Gc Our two-part series on Gramsci with Denning: thedigradio.com/podcast/gramsci-hegemony-w-michael-denning/ thedigradio.com/podcast/gramsci-organization-crisis-w-michael-denning/ Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Set the Earth on Fire at Haymarketbooks.com Use code “DIG” for 30% off a subscription to The-Syllabus.com

Featuring Bassam Haddad on the historical and geopolitical origins of Assad’s rise and fall—and what might happen next. We think through the contradictions: honoring the joy felt by Syrians at Assad’s ouster while simultaneously taking stock of a truly bad geopolitical outcome. Want to learn more? Listen to Thawra, our series on the 20th century political history of the Arab East thedigradio.com/Thawra Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Palestine in a World on Fire at Haymarketbooks.com Buy Against the Crisis at Versobooks.com

Featuring Patrick Blanchfield on assassination and political violence: from the routine to the extraordinary; authored by the state, capital, the left, the right, the unwell and alienated; as an anxiety, in our fantasies, as a morbid symptom and repetition compulsion; and as expressing distinctively American logics of domination and human disposability. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Listen to the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast at ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/ Read Patrick’s essay on the death drive late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation Buy China in Global Capitalism at Haymarketbooks.com Use code “DIG” for 30% off a subscription to The-Syllabus.com

Featuring Quinn Slobodian and Wendy Brown on Trump’s triumphant return to power and the freakish, obscene, billionaire-dominated, capitalist reactionary, Christian nationalist, contradiction-ridden MAGA movement that surrounds him. A comprehensive early assessment of what is going on, where it’s coming from, and where it all might be heading. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Share Thawra with a friend thedigradio.com/Thawra Use code “DIG” for 30% off a subscription to The-Syllabus.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar in the final installment of a three-part series on Central America. This episode picks up with Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crypto enthusiasm in El Salvador; Daniel Ortega’s perversion of Sandinismo’s revolutionary legacy in Nicaragua; anti-mining movements in Panama; Honduras and Guatemala, where popular social movements have elected left presidents to confront entrenched power structures. We conclude by discussing mass migration from the region that’s taken on a mystified form in US politics as the MAGA far right’s principal scapegoat. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Share Thawra with a friend thedigradio.com/Thawra Check out nacla.org for in-depth coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean Buy Defund: Conversations Toward Abolition at haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend & Jorge Cuéllar in the second of a three (not two!) part series on the history and present of Central America. This interview picks up our discussion of revolutionary armed struggles against brutal US-backed military-oligarchic regimes in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Then, the peace accords and postwar transitions accompanied by the imposition of neoliberal economic restructuring. Finally, the rise of mass migration, new transnational gangs, and the regime of El Salvador’s authoritarian Bitcoin enthusiast Nayib Bukele. And more. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Want to learn more? Greg Grandin on The Dig: thedigradio.com/podcast/empires-workshop-with-greg-grandin We now have a special feed dedicated entirely to our Thawra series. Listen and spread the word: thedigradio.com/Thawra Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin Buy Abolish Rent at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Trump’s decisive victory, Harris’s catastrophic loss, multi-racial working-class dealignment, and where the left might go from here. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig We now have a special feed dedicated entirely to our Thawra series. Listen and spread the word: thedigradio.com/Thawra Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin Buy Solidarity is the Political Version of Love at haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar on the history of Central America. This is the first episode in a two-part series covering the late-19th and early-20th century rise of export-crop oligarchies and constant US intervention, the US-backed separation of Panama from Colombia to take control of the Canal, the CIA’s 1954 Guatemala coup, the rise of armed revolutionary movements in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and the US-backed dirty wars that were prosecuted in response—that and so much more. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Want to learn more? Greg Grandin on The Dig: thedigradio.com/podcast/empires-workshop-with-greg-grandin We now have a special feed dedicated entirely to our Thawra series. Listen and spread the word: thedigradio.com/Thawra Buy Mastering the Universe at haymarketbooks.com Buy Disaster Nationalism at versobooks.com

Featuring Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix on their book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Get 40% off The Years of Theory with code “DIG” at Versobooks.com Buy Our History is the Future at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Naomi Klein on how the pandemic turbocharged a far-right conspiracist politics that’s sweeping into power. This strange new world, however, is a product of an old contradiction: the need to disavow and deny a long history and awful present; the inability to make sense of the extreme violence and oppression that makes everyday Western capitalist society possible. We discuss Klein’s book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World and her Guardian essay “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war”: theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/05/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to Dissent magazine at Dissentmagazine.org/subscribe Buy Rosa Luxemburg at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the third and final part of the epilogue to Thawra (Revolution), our epic series on the history of revolutionary Arab politics. This episode takes us from Hamas’s victory in the 2006 legislative elections, through the siege on Gaza, to October 7, the Gaza genocide, the Axis of Resistance, and Israel’s attempt to draw Iran into a massive regional war with the US. Share Thawra with a friend thedigradio.com/Thawra Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy The Wannabe Fascists at UCPress.edu Buy Visualizing Palestine at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Jake Werner on how the US and China entered into a New Cold War and why the whole world urgently needs an alternative international order that fosters great power cooperation. Read Jake’s report A Program for Progressive China Policy quincyinst.org/research/a-program-for-progressive-china-policy/#executive-summary Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Our History is the Future at Haymarketbooks.com Use code “DIG” for 30% off a subscription to The-Syllabus.com

Featuring Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana on the history of left-wing internationalism from the Third Worldist currents that powered decolonization and struggles against neocolonialism through today’s renewed politics in solidarity with the Palestinian national liberation movement. Recorded in New York at Jewish Currents Live. Support The Dig now at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Center of the World at UCPress.edu Buy Abolish Rent at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the second of what has become a three-part epilogue to Thawra (Revolution), our series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. This episode takes us from the disastrous Oslo Accords through the 2000 Camp David Summit and the eruption of the Second Palestinian Intifada. Then the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror, the US destruction of Iraq, the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, and the rise of Islamic State. A century of Western imperialism had undermined Arab revolutionary movements and governments; the new millennium brought two decades of US-led war that destroyed the Arab state system. Atop its wreckage was the explosion of sectarian violence and murderous authoritarianism across the Arab East. Hope still resides in the power of popular renewal. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Visualizing Palestine at haymarketbooks.org Buy Exit Wounds at UCPress.edu

Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabe Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the American political conjuncture: the centrality of Palestine, the contradictions of left electoralism, renewed liberal militarism, the return of Obama-ism, the state of the labor and climate movements—and more. Recorded live at Socialism 2024 in Chicago. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Unbuild Walls at haymarketbooks.org Subscribe to Jacobin in print for $15/yr at bit.ly/digjacobin and Catalyst in print for $20/yr at bit.ly/digcatalyst

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the first of a two-part epilogue to Thawra (Revolution), our series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment covers the Iranian Islamic Revolution’s huge impact across the Arab East alongside Saudi and Egyptian efforts to foster religious conservative movements in an effort to supplant and suppress the secular nationalist left. Plus the Iran-Iraq War, the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the First Intifada, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the first US-led invasion of Iraq, and the PLO’s march toward the Oslo Accords–and how Hamas and Islamic Jihad stepped into the resulting vacuum, picking up a Palestinian armed struggle the PLO had renounced. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Nuclear Is Not The Solution at versobooks.com Buy The Wannabe Fascists at UCPress.edu

Featuring Sunaura Taylor on her book Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. What does it mean to rethink socialism and Marxism through the frameworks of disability liberation and animal liberation? How do we relate to human difference and also to non-human animals? Where does the struggle against industrial agriculture fit into the fight against capitalism? Sunaura is interviewed by her sister, Dig guest host Astra Taylor. Read about Daniel Denvir and The Dig in The Guardian theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/aug/13/dig-podcast-daniel-denvir Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Take 25% off a subscription to n+1 at nplusonemag.com/thedig Buy Unite and Win at haymarketbooks.org/books/2434-unite-and-win

Featuring Jeremy Corbyn and Laleh Khalili on internationalism and left-wing politics. A special Dig co-hosted with the Verso Podcast in front of a live London audience. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig The Socialism Conference will be held in Chicago from Aug 30 – Sept 2. Learn more and register at socialismconference.org Buy Twilight Prisoners at Haymarketbooks.com

Dan just did a live Dig in London with Jeremy Corbyn and Laleh Khalili. It was part of a podcast doubleheader that included this recording of the economics podcast Macrodose featuring Asad Rehman, James Meadway, and Thea Riofrancos. The live Dig with Corbyn and Khalili on internationalist and anti-imperialist politics will be posted in a few days. Subscribe to Macrodose at linktr.ee/macrodosepodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or wherever you get podcasts Support Macrodose at patreon.com/Macrodose The Socialism Conference will be held in Chicago from Aug 30 – Sept 2. Learn more and register at socialismconference.org

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the SIXTEENTH and final episode of Thawra (Revolution), our series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment traces a massive defeat for the Palestinian Revolution: Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and brutal siege of Beirut. Under severe pressure and isolated in the wake of Egypt’s normalization with Israel, the PLO evacuated its headquarters. What followed was a giant massacre of Palestinian civilians and the end of the decades-long era of Arab revolutionary politics to which this series has been dedicated. A substantial epilogue is coming soon. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Spread the word about Thawra thedigradio.com/Thawra Check out the Palestinian Revolution website! learnpalestine.qeh.ox.ac.uk/teach Take 25% off a subscription to n+1 at nplusonemag.com/thedig. Enter THEDIG for discount.

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the FIFTEENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment addresses the Palestinian Revolution’s project in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—leading up to the 1970 conflict with the Jordanian state and the violent expulsion of PLO guerrillas during Black September. Then, Egypt and Syria checked Israel’s power in the October War of 1973—only for Anwar Sadat to lead Egypt into Kissinger’s plan to pacify Arab revolution. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Spread the word about Thawra thedigradio.com/Thawra The Palestinian Revolution website is live! learnpalestine.qeh.ox.ac.uk/teach Buy tickets for live Dig with Corbyn in London unionchapel.org.uk/venue/whats-on/versothe-dig-live-podcast-with-jeremy-corbyn-laleh-khalili The Socialism Conference will be held in Chicago from Aug 30 – Sept 2. Learn more and register at socialismconference.org Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the FOURTEENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment covers the rise of the Palestinian Revolution and then its explosion after the Arab defeat in the June War of 1967 with Israel. Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation and Palestine, and other factions launched an armed guerrilla struggle against Israel, engaging the Palestinian people in a full-scale mobilization for their liberation. Also: Ba’athists Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq, as did Muammar Gaddafi’s Free Officers in Libya. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Spread the word about Thawra thedigradio.com/Thawra Buy Happy Apocalypse at versobooks.com Buy Love in the Time of Self-Publishing at princeton.press/love

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the THIRTEENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment covers the armed left-wing revolutionary movements that challenged British imperial power across Southern Arabia, with the National Liberation Front taking over South Yemen and Dhufari rebels in Oman waging a liberation war against the Sultan. Today’s alliance of reactionary Gulf monarchies was not inevitable; they were made by colonial power, and Arab revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s mounted a major effort to overthrow them. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy tickets for live Dig with Jeremy Corbyn in London: unionchapel.org.uk/venue/whats-on/versothe-dig-live-podcast-with-jeremy-corbyn-laleh-khalili Buy The Last Human Job at Princeton.press/job Buy How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the TWELFTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment tells the story of Saudi Arabia, a country whose reactionary, US-aligned trajectory was throughout the 1950s and 60s challenged by labor strikes, dissident currents, rebellious princes, and an anticolonial oil minister. But Saudi royal conservatism asserted itself and a friendship with Nasser’s Egypt turned into conflict. Ultimately both countries got drawn into North Yemen’s civil war, which sapped Egypt’s military strength ahead of the 1967 war with Israel. Plus: radical politics against British colonial power in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the Trucial States. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy tickets for live Dig with Jeremy Corbyn in London: unionchapel.org.uk/venue/whats-on/versothe-dig-live-podcast-with-jeremy-corbyn-laleh-khalili Buy Twilight Prisoners at haymarketbooks.com Buy Automatic Fetish at versobooks.com

Featuring Dylan Saba and Waleed Shahid on how Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the mass solidarity movement opposing it are transforming US politics. This anti-imperialist internationalist moment marks a profound turning point for the American left. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy tickets for live Dig with Jeremy Corbyn in London: unionchapel.org.uk/venue/whats-on/versothe-dig-live-podcast-with-jeremy-corbyn-laleh-khalili The Socialism Conference will be held in Chicago from Aug 30 – Sept 2. Learn more and register at socialismconference.org (early bird discount until 6/28!) Buy Unbuild Walls at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the ELEVENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment tells the story of the destruction of the two giant revolutionary projects of 1958: the union of Egypt and Syria under Nasser’s United Arab Republic and Iraq’s July Revolution that brought Qasim alongside communist allies to power. The rival radical projects of pan-Arabism and communism suffered huge blows. So did Nasser and Qasim, the era’s most significant Arab anti-imperialist leaders. Meanwhile, the Ba’ath, once ideological and idealistic, became increasingly dominated by military men who made the party into an instrument for raw domination. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy tickets for live Dig with Jeremy Corbyn in London: unionchapel.org.uk/venue/whats-on/versothe-dig-live-podcast-with-jeremy-corbyn-laleh-khalili Buy Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom at Versobooks.com Subscribe to Dissent magazine in print or online at dissentmagazine.org/subscribe

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the TENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment tells the story of Iraq’s 1958 July Revolution: a Free Officers’ coup overthrew the imperialist-aligned Hashemite monarchy and brought nationalist Abdul-Karim Qasim to power alongside a surging Communist Party. Revolutionary currents soon turned against one another, however, as did Qasim and Nasser. Conflict stemmed from serious political and strategic differences, but also petty rivalries and bitter feuds. And in Iraq, class conflict often appeared dressed up in the sectarian and ethnic modalities through which class was lived. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin Buy The Black Antifascist Tradition at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the NINTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment covers the creation of a Palestinian national liberation movement throughout the 1950s by a people dispersed by the Nakba: organizations, alliances, and theories of change assembled in the universities, cities, and refugee camps surrounding Palestine. We end with the 1959 foundation of Fatah, the first organization for Palestinians led by Palestinians focused first and foremost on Palestinian liberation. This is the story of the beginning of the Palestinian national liberation movement as we have come to know it today. Buy How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment at haymarketbooks.org Buy States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization at Versobooks.com Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Spread the word about Thawra thedigradio.com/Thawra

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the EIGHTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. A compact introduction to the Movement of Arab Nationalists, which in the 1950s built a presence that stretched across the region, from Beirut and Jordan to Cairo and the Gulf—becoming a truly powerful force in Kuwait. Led in significant part by Palestinians, its early history offers a ground-level look at the organizational and theoretical currents shaping radical Arab politics. It is also the backstory for key Marxist groups that later grew out of the Movement: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, South Yemen’s National Liberation Front, and the Dhofar Liberation Front. Buy Future of Denial at versobooks.com On May 1st, subscribe to a year of Jacobin‘s digital publication for just $1, or a year of Jacobin in print for only $10: jacobin.com/subscribe/?code=MAYDAYDIG Or this link for a gift: jacobin.com/subscribe/?type=gift&level=standard-digital&?code=MAYDAYDIG Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Spread the word about Thawra thedigradio.com/Thawra

Featuring Noura Erakat, Avi Shlaim, Ussama Makdisi, Ilan Pappé, Ghada Ageel Hamdan, and Abdel Razzaq Takriti on the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Recorded at the World Academic Forum for Palestine in Houston. We’ll be back next week with episode eight of Thawra, our rolling series on 20th century Arab radicalisms. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Donate to Palestine Legal palestinelegal.org/donate Watch more from the World Academic Forum for Palestine youtube.com/c/haymarketbooks Check out our vast archives and newsletters at thedigradio.com Buy An Enemy Such As This at haymarketbooks.org Buy The Jail is Everywhere at versobooks.com

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the SEVENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment lays out the the US’s Eisenhower Doctrine, which in 1957 inaugurated a new era of imperialism in the Middle East; the Ba’ath Party driving Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic, a superstate under Nasser’s rule, in 1958; and, later that year, Eisenhower landing US Marines in Lebanon, the first American combat operation in the region. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat at versobooks.com Subscribe to Jacobin bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the SIXTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment lays out the intensification of the Cold War across the Middle East. Western imperialist powers attempted to recruit Arab countries to the Baghdad Pact, a Middle Eastern NATO. Nasser rallied the Arab masses in opposition, becoming an anti-imperialist icon. In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. In response, the British, French, and Israelis attacked Egypt. But Nasser and Arab anti-imperialism won the day. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy What Was Neoliberalism at haymarketbooks.org Buy Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1 at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the FIFTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment lays out the early years of a struggle for Syria that would decisively shape the Arab world: the fight for independence from France, the first (CIA-backed) coup of 1949, and the rise of the Ba’ath and Communist movements. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Wont Save the Planet at versobooks.com Buy Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the FOURTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment lays out the politics surrounding the Zionist settler colonial destruction of Palestine, the Nakba of 1948, and the ground-shifting event that followed in its wake: the Nasser-led 1952 Egyptian Free Officers Movement coup that would set the tone for two decades of revolutionary nationalism across the region. Also: the Soviet camp’s support for the colonial partition of Palestine and its calamitous impact on powerful Arab communist parties. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin Buy Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1 at haymarketbooks.org/books/2096-abolition

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the THIRD episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment is a comprehensive overview of the Middle Eastern Arab state system that crystalizes with the end of British and French colonial rule. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements are Leading the Fight for our Planet at haymarketbooks.org/books/2101-environmentalism-from-below

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the second episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment lays out early 20th-century anti-colonialism: from the Iraqi, Syrian, and Palestinian Great Revolts, to the birth of Arab nationalism, Islamic resistance, Ba’athism, and communism. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Subscribe to a year of Jewish Currents at 50% off with special code DIG2024 secure.jewishcurrents.org/forms/subscribe Buy Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom at versobooks.com

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the first episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment sets the stage: European imperialism in the Arab Mashriq from the late 18th century through the early 20th. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Subscribe to a year of Jewish Currents at 50% off with special code DIG2024 secure.jewishcurrents.org/forms/subscribe Buy A Short History of Trans Misogyny at versobooks.com

Featuring Luke Messac on Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine. An estimated 100 million people in the US are in debt because they sought medical treatment. Medical debt exacerbates poor and working-class people’s physical and psychological suffering while undermining their financial well-being and freedom. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to a year of Jewish Currents at secure.jewishcurrents.org/forms/subscribe50% off with special code DIG2024 Buy What Was Neoliberalism at haymarketbooks.org/books/2056-what-was-neoliberalism

Featuring Emily Dische-Becker on how Germany became attached to a wildly narcissistic anti-antisemitism and Israeli proxy nationalism that have made it one of the most anti-Palestinian governments on earth. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletters and vast archives at thedigradio.com Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin Buy Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine before the Nakba at haymarketbooks.org/books/2325-against-erasure

Featuring Helen Lackner on the Houthis, the politics of their attacks on Red Sea shipping, and the long history of Yemen from British colonial Aden through the current civil war. Read Helen’s articles for Jacobin jacobin.com/author/helen-lackner Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements are Leading the Fight for our Planet at haymarketbooks.org/books/2101-environmentalism-from-below Buy The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger at versobooks.com

Featuring Ashley Mears on her book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. Mears, a sociologist and former fashion model, explores the super-elite “models and bottles” party scene where beautiful young women and conspicuous consumption heighten the status of rich men. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Contact Spotify and tell them: stop hiding The Dig! Why is The Dig so hard to find on Spotify? support.spotify.com/contact-spotify-support Buy Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine before the Nakba at haymarketbooks.org/books/2325-against-erasure Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15. A special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Ussama Makdisi on how Western colonialism and Zionism exploited, exacerbated, and imposed sectarianism across the Arab Middle East. This is the SECOND of a two-part interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Contact Spotify and tell them: stop hiding The Dig! Why is The Dig so hard to find on Spotify? support.spotify.com/contact-spotify-support/ Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger at versobooks.com Buy War Made Invisible thenewpress.com/books/war-made-invisible

We are OFF this week. In the meantime, peruse our vast archives at thedigradio.com. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig.

Featuring Ussama Makdisi on the late Ottoman Empire’s Arab culture of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish coexistence—an ecumenical frame that was interrupted by European colonialism and Zionism, which exacerbated and exploited sectarianism. This is the first of a two-part interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Shop Haymarket’s ALL 40% off Holiday sale at haymarketbooks.org Buy Let Them Eat Crypto at plutobooks.com

Featuring Shaul Magid on post-1948 Jewish Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism—including today’s new generation of young, militant, left-wing, anti-Zionist American Jews and the Jewish establishment’s quixotic efforts to deny and disavow them. PART TWO of a two-part interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Join Jewish Voice for Peace jewishvoiceforpeace.org/join-us Buy The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation at Versobooks.com Buy Let Them Eat Crypto at plutobooks.com

Featuring Shaul Magid on the long history of Jewish Zionism and its antagonist, Jewish anti-Zionism. Defenders of Israel defame anti-Zionists as antisemites. In fact, today’s growing ranks of anti-Zionist Jews draw on a powerful and diverse tradition. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution at haymarketbooks.org/books/2111-ireland-colonialism-and-the-unfinished-revolution Use code DIG2023 for 50% off a subscription to Jewish Currents at secure.jewishcurrents.org/forms/subscribe

Featuring Mohammed el-Kurd on Palestine. A short but expansive interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletters and vast archives at thedigradio.com Shop Haymarket’s ALL 40% off Holiday sale at haymarketbooks.org Take the Bookmatch quiz nplusonemag.com

Featuring Richard Seymour on the global politics of the Palestinian struggle and Israel’s war on Gaza. The *second* of a two-part interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy Going for Broke haymarketbooks.org/books/2097-going-for-broke Take the Bookmatch quiz nplusonemag.com

Featuring Richard Seymour on the global politics of the Palestinian struggle and Israel’s war on Gaza. The first of a two-part interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution at haymarketbooks.org/books/2111-ireland-colonialism-and-the-unfinished-revolution Buy Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism at haymarketbooks.org/books/2098-care

Featuring Beverly Gage on her masterful biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht. The Dig is an essential political education project. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig. Subscribe to Jacobin bit.ly/digjacobin Buy War Made Invisible thenewpress.com/books/war-made-invisible

Featuring Tareq Baconi on the history of Hamas. This is the context we need. And it is precisely what mainstream discourse mystifies, denies, and disavows. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Contribute to Palestinian relief: pcrf.net map.org.uk anera.org Buy Light in Gaza at haymarketbooks.org/books/1885-light-in-gaza Buy Palestine: A Socialist Introduction at haymarketbooks.org/books/1558-palestine-a-socialist-introduction

This episode is The Dig’s Palestine Teach-In. The most informative clips from our archives on Palestine and Israel. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our excellent newsletters—sent to you by email if you support us on Patreon thedigradio.com/newsletter Donate now to support Gaza relief pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/gaza-relief Buy Ten Myths About Israel at versobooks.com/products/370-ten-myths-about-israel Buy An Enemy Such As This at haymarketbooks.org/books/2106-an-enemy-such-as-this

Featuring Noura Erakat and Arielle Angel on the apartheid system and the violence it drives in Palestine. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our excellent newsletters—sent to you by email if you support us on Patreon thedigradio.com/newsletter Donate now to support Gaza relief pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/gaza-relief Buy On Edward Said haymarketbooks.org/books/1556-on-edward-said Buy Palestine: A Socialist Introduction haymarketbooks.org/books/1558-palestine-a-socialist-introduction

Featuring Vincent Bevins on If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The second of a two-part interview on this important new book. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our excellent newsletters—sent to you by email if you support us on Patreon thedigradio.com/newsletter Check out The Dig’s vast archives on Palestine thedigradio.com/category/palestine Donate now to support Gaza relief pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/gaza-relief Subscribe to Jacobin bit.ly/digjacobin Learn more about Haymarket’s Book Clubs at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Vincent Bevins on If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The first of a two-part interview on this important new book. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and ask Vincent a follow-up question. Buy Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism: Debates in the Second International, 1900-1910 haymarketbooks.org/books/2109-reform-revolution-and-opportunism Buy War Made Invisible thenewpress.com/books/war-made-invisible

Featuring Jo Guldi on the global history of the long land war—a war over everything from agrarian reform to tenant rights, from India and China to England and Ireland, from the late 19th century through the present—and into the future. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Blood Red Lines at haymarketbooks.org/books/1519-blood-red-lines Buy Abolition for the People at haymarketbooks.org/books/2095-abolition-for-the-people

Featuring Alex Han, Astra Taylor, and Rachel Gilmer on how we build powerful organizations that win both short-term fights and the long-term struggle for socialism. A live Dig recorded at the Socialism 2023 conference in Chicago. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and ask Dig guests follow-up questions! Buy Our History Has Always Been Contraband at haymarketbooks.org Buy To Build a Black Future princeton.press/blackfuture

If you look, you’ll see. Most people don’t look. Produced by Stephen Cassidy Jones and Liza Yeager. Edited by Mitchell Johnson, with editorial oversight from Daniel Denvir. Featuring Mark Pilkington, Valerie Kuletz, and Trevor Paglen. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Blood Red Lines at haymarketbooks.org Subscribe to Jacobin at bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Alex Press and Eric Blanc on surging labor militancy and why US unions must seize this historic moment. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and ask our guests follow-up questions! Learn more about Haymarket’s Book Clubs at haymarketbooks.org Subscribe to Jacobin bit.ly/digjacobin and Catalyst bit.ly/digcatalyst

Featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Latin American left and the long history of US intervention in the region. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy War Made Invisible thenewpress.com/books/war-made-invisible Buy Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge versobooks.com/products/2981-quick-fixes

Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the emerging terrain of struggle. Is American liberalism exhausted or revitalized? What are the successes and limits of the new US left electoral strategy? Is there a new anti-electoral mood amongst socialists? Why don’t we have a powerful climate movement? What forces are making and remaking the American working class today? The second and final part of a very wide-ranging interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism: Debates in the Second International, 1900-1910 haymarketbooks.org/books/2109-reform-revolution-and-opportunism

Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the American conjuncture. Did an era that began with Occupy and Ferguson—marked by teachers strikes, two Bernie campaigns, the explosive growth of DSA, Standing Rock, and summer 2020 rebellions—just end? What social, political, and economic terrain is emerging in the wake of the pandemic, and how should the left navigate it? The first of a two-part and wide-ranging interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig All Haymarket books are 40% off! Shop at haymarketbooks.org Buy After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek versobooks.com/products/496-after-work

Reporter Dharna Noor learns about the Tennessee Valley Authority: the good, the bad, the past, and the future. This is the 5th episode of The Dig Presents. Produced by Dharna Noor. Edited by Liza Yeager and Mitchell Johnson. Support The Dig at patreon.com/thedig All Haymarket books are 40% off! Shop at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Daniela Gabor, Ted Fertik, and Tim Sahay on Bidenomics. We define and debate the new American industrial policy, the energy transition, the New Cold War with China—and more. Support this podcast with a contribution at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to The Polycrisis newsletter phenomenalworld.org/series/the-polycrisis Buy Travellers of the World Revolution versobooks.com/products/2938-travellers-of-the-world-revolution Buy War Made Invisible thenewpress.com/books/war-made-invisible

Featuring China Miéville on The Communist Manifesto. Miéville is the author of A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for Dan’s event with Miéville eventbrite.com/e/digressions-china-mieville-on-the-communist-manifesto-tickets-674432434567 Subscribe to Jacobin bit.ly/digjacobin Buy A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine by David K. Seitz nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496227997

Writer and critic Andrea Long Chu wanted to ask her family one simple question. The Dig Presents is edited by Liza Yeager and Mitchell Johnson, with editorial oversight from Daniel Denvir and Alex Lewis. Support The Dig at https://www.patreon.com/thedig. Listen the episode of Al Jazeera’s The Take featuring Dig Presents reporter Omar Etman and his story, A Garden in Cairo, here.

Featuring Meredith Whittaker, Edward Ongweso Jr., and Sarah Myers West on the mundane dystopia concealed beneath the AI hype machine. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to New Left Review newleftreview.org Register for the Socialism 2023 Conference socialismconference.org

Featuring Giuliano Garavini on his book The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century. The second in a two-part series on the 20th-century history of petrostates, petrocapitalists, and the world system. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to n+1. Go to nplusonemag.com/thedig and enter THEDIG at checkout Learn more about Haymarket’s Book Clubs at haymarketbooks.org

Featuring Giuliano Garavini on his book The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century. The first of a two-part series on the 20th-century history of petrostates, petrocapitalists, and the world system. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to n+1. Go to nplusonemag.com/thedig and enter THEDIG at checkout

Featuring Brenna Bhandar on Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership. The centuries-long history of how dominant conceptions of private property were (and are) made alongside race and racial hierarchies in colonial encounters stretching from Ireland and British Columbia to Australia and Palestine. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for the Socialism Conference at socialismconference.org Buy Let This Radicalize You by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes haymarketbooks.org/books/1922-let-this-radicalize-you

A sonic memorial to the Black women of the Peoples Temple. Produced and reported by Babette Thomas. Edited by Liza Yeager and Mitchell Johnson, with editorial oversight from Daniel Denvir and Alex Lewis. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/thedig. Subscribe to The Dig Presents to find all of our documentary stories on one feed.

Featuring Quinn Slobodian on Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Radical libertarians, including anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard, envision a world of micro-polities governed by private property and contract. In fact, we already live in their world, a world of zones—places where special rules tailor-made for capitalists prevail over the ordinary laws of the nation-state. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Listen to Quinn’s interview on Globalists thedigradio.com/podcast/a-history-of-neoliberalism-with-quinn-slobodian Buy Angela Davis: An Autobiography haymarketbooks.org/books/2001-angela-davis Buy Let This Radicalize You by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes haymarketbooks.org/books/1922-let-this-radicalize-you

Featuring Jules Gill-Peterson on Histories of the Transgender Child. Amid this right-wing reaction, a discussion of the history of trans medicine and trans children—and also trans politics more generally. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for Socialism 2023 at socialismconference.org. Register before July 7 for the early bird discount rate! Subscribe to n+1 at nplusonemag.com/thedig. Enter THEDIG at checkout.

Featuring Stacy Davis Gates, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Alex Han on how Chicago’s labor left took over City Hall. Brandon Johnson’s mayoral victory, the product of a decade-plus of social movement union struggle, is a model for the left everywhere in the United States. Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht. Subscribe to n+1. Go to nplusonemag.com/thedig and enter THEDIG at checkout Buy Occupation: Organizer by Clément Petitjean haymarketbooks.org/books/2054-occupation-organizer

Featuring Nikil Saval and Helen Gym on how the history of Philadelphia social movements brought Nikil into the state senate and has made Helen, a long-time public education organizer, a frontrunner in the mayoral race. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to Dissent dissentmagazine.org/subscribe Buy Angela Davis: An Autobiography haymarketbooks.org/books/2001-angela-davis

We have as many roads in the United States as we have streams and rivers. Produced by Caroline Kanner and Jackson Roach, with original music by Jackson Roach. Edited by Liza Yeager and Mitchell Johnson. Subscribe to The Dig Presents, and support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig. Bibliography (in order of appearance): A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers at Full Speed – Chris Helzer Car Country: An Environmental History – Christopher W. Wells On Trails: An Exploration – Robert Moor Snell-Rood Lab Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet – Ben Goldfarb A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Who Belongs to the Land: An Essay on Camps, Blockades, and Indigenous Models of Remaking the World – Lou Cornum Further reading available here.

Featuring Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider on the politics of public education. The authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Education and the Future of School and co-hosts of the education policy podcast Have You Heard discuss everything from charters and vouchers to teacher social movement unionism and the right-wing cultural wars against “woke” educators. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Featuring Jane McAlevey on how to organize mass numbers of new workers into unions that wage mass strikes to fight employers and revive the labor movement. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Dan’s 2019 interview with McAlevey thedigradio.com/podcast/strike-with-jane-mcalevey Buy Set Fear on Fire by LASTESIS versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2853-set-fear-on-fire Buy The New Cold War by Gilbert Achcar haymarketbooks.org/books/2007-the-new-cold-war

Featuring Edo Konrad and Joshua Leifer on how Zionism’s long-running contradictions led to the current political crisis in Israel. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out +972 Magazine at 972mag.com Subscribe to Jewish Currents‘ Israel/Palestine newsletter at jewishcurrents.org/newsletter Buy The New Cold War: The United States, Russia, and China from Kosovo to Ukraine by Gilbert Achcar haymarketbooks.org/books/2007-the-new-cold-war

It started with a few cones and a cryptic sign. Produced by Omar Etman. Edited by Liza Yeager, Mitchell Johnson, and Daniel Denvir. Special thanks to Alan Dean, Alex Lewis, and Nihal El Aasar. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Featuring Max Fox and Chris Nealon on the late Christopher Chitty’s book Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletters and vast archive at thedigradio.com Further reading: libcom.org/article/after-fall-communiques-occupied-california viewpointmag.com/2012/09/12/towards-a-socialist-art-of-government-michel-foucaults-the-mesh-of-power thenewinquiry.com/blog/in-love-and-memory Buy Abolition Geography versobooks.com/books/3785-abolition-geography

Coming Soon: The Dig Presents is a new monthly series that features original documentary reporting, personal narrative, and other sonic experiments from a wide range of contributors.

Featuring Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg on how American capitalism and its illusions of whiteness both created the opioid crisis and shaped the response to it. We are discussing their book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletters and vast archives at thedigradio.com Subscribe to Jacobin bit.ly/digjacobin and Catalyst bit.ly/digcatalyst

Featuring Nelson Lichtenstein on his life and scholarship, from membership in the International Socialists and studies of the early United Auto Workers and CIO to his later turn to studying Walmart and international supply chains. Guest host Micah Uetricht interviews one of the greatest living labor historians. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletters and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy Keywords for Capitalism by John Patrick Leary haymarketbooks.org/books/1886-keywords-for-capitalism

Featuring Nadia Abu El-Haj on Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America. How the civil-military divide makes troops into super citizens and what it means that agents of state violence are turning to the grammar of identity politics—and more. The second in a two-part interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to New Left Review newleftreview.org/subscriptions/new Buy My Country is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements Against the Vietnam War haymarketbooks.org/books/1956-my-country-is-the-world

Featuring Nadia Abu El-Haj on Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America. A truly remarkable book about the unseen ideological foundations of American militarism: American civilians are enjoined to venerate troops, deferring to their traumatized positionality. The first in a two-part interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy: Fighting in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm versobooks.com/books/4138-fighting-in-a-world-on-fire The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right by David Roediger haymarketbooks.org/books/1879-the-sinking-middle-class

Featuring Donna Murch and Todd Wolfson on Rutgers University workers’ industrial unionism strategy. The second in a two-part series on the crisis in American higher education. Check out Dan’s interview in The Nation: thenation.com/article/world/qa-daniel-denvir/ Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out The Dig’s newsletters and vast archives at thedigradio.com Buy Haunted by Slavery: haymarketbooks.org/books/1557-haunted-by-slavery Buy David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse: versobooks.com/books/4145-a-companion-to-marx-s-grundrisse

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 an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century by Andrew Bacevich haymarketbooks.org/books/1949-on-shedding-an-obsolete-past

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 the 21st Century by Danny Katch haymarketbooks.org/books/1943-socialism-seriously Check out Black Women Writers at Work haymarketbooks.org/books/1926-black-women-writers-at-work

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.com Get After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America haymarketbooks.org/books/1927-after-life

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 out Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire haymarketbooks.org/books/1861-light-in-gaza

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 would appeal to and house the majority of Americans. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) by Eric Blanc haymarketbooks.org/books/1907-revolutionary-social-democracy

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 suppressing them in order to create a nation that was safe for the owning and investing classes. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his 2009 reelection and Green Movement protests, Hassan Rouhani and the nuclear accord that Trump then tore up, the 2019 mass working-class protests, and the election (but really more coronation) of right-winger Ebrahim Raisi. We end with the death of Zhina Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police and the current mass protest movement that erupted in response. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our vast archives and the rest of this series at thedigradio.com Buy Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win by Helen Shiller haymarketbooks.org/books/1952-daring-to-struggle-daring-to-win

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 prisoners, and Khamenei and Rafsanjani’s rise to power after Khomeini’s death. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our vast archives and newsletter at thedigradio.com

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 you love The Dig, support the podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out our newsletter and archives at thedigradio.com

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 Mosaddegh’s National Party coming to power, and the 1953 US-British coup that overthrew Mosaddegh and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Shah as dictator. His brutal reign continued until the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which is where we will pick up in episode three. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out The Sinking Middle Class by David Roediger haymarketbooks.org/books/1879-the-sinking-middle-class

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, the first shah of the Pahlavi dynasty. We end just before the 1941 occupation of Iran by longtime imperial powers, Britain and the Soviet Union, which forced Reza Shah out and replaced him with his son, Muhammad Reza Shah—which is where we will pick up in episode two. RIP Mike Davis. Listen to his Dig interviews here: thedigradio.com/tag/mike-davis Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Read our newsletters and explore our vast archives at thedigradio.com

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 poverty, and abetted the rise of the reactionary right that would ultimately overthrow it. Check out the newsletter and our vast archives at thedigradio.com Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 Patreon.com/TheDig to get our weekly newsletter by email Check out those newsletters and our vast archives at thedigradio.com

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 means to revolutionary ends to a liberal position exalting free speech as an end unto itself—including the anti-union speech of bosses and the political speech of corporations. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America by Joshua Frank haymarketbooks.org/books/1940-atomic-days Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages by Ray Acheson haymarketbooks.org/books/1883-abolishing-state-violence

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 haymarketbooks.org/books/1873-breaking-the-impasse

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 trade, through French colonialism, to the neocolonial imposition of neoliberalism. Idrissa’s work: newleftreview.org/issues/ii132/articles/rahmane-idrissa-the-sahel-a-cognitive-mapping newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/kabores-defeat nybooks.com/daily/2022/05/25/potent-policies-of-empire lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/rahmane-idrissa/countries-without-currency” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/rahmane-idrissa/coup-contrecouplrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/rahmane-idrissa/countries-without-currency Special outro music from Ali Farka Touré. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: haymarketbooks.org/books/1887-inside-the-second-wave-of-feminism

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 2018. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out these Haymarket titles: Keywords for Capitalism by John Patrick Leary haymarketbooks.org/books/1886-keywords-for-capitalism Struggle Makes Us Human by Vijay Prashad haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human

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

Featuring Kojo Koram on his brilliant book Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire. How neoliberalism reorganized colonial capitalist plunder to survive the Third Worldist challenge, and then boomeranged back into the British metropole—a history obscured by rendering “decolonization” into a symbolic culture war battle. Check out How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT by Elena Conis hachettebookgroup.com/titles/elena-conis/how-to-sell-a-poison/9781645036753/ Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Featuring Matt Christman on how American history brought us to this awful present. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Featuring Nancy Fraser on why a total analysis of capitalism requires taking Marxism beyond a narrowly economistic view: what everyday labor exploitation requires from politics, care work, war-making, borders, appropriation of nature, sexism, racism, and more. Dan’s 2018 interview from the archives. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Featuring Evgeny Morozov on his essay “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason.” Thinkers from the Marxist left all the way to the neoliberal and even neo-reactionary right are convinced that we’ve exited capitalism entirely and entered neo-feudalism. Morozov argues that our bleak moment is in fact still a thoroughly capitalist one. Evgeny’s essay: newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-morozov-critique-of-techno-feudal-reason Evgeny’s website: evgenymorozov.com The Syllabus: the-syllabus.com Register for Socialism 2022: socialismconference.org Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Read our newsletter and explore the archives at thedigradio.com

Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on his essay “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” an interview first posted in December 2020. This pairs well with last week’s Jared Clemons interview on In This House We Believe antiracism. Since 2020, Táíwò has published a book expanding on these ideas: Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Read Táíwò’s essay: thephilosopher1923.org/post/being-in-the-room-privilege-elite-capture-and-epistemic-deference Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Read our newsletter at thedigradio.com

Political scientist Jared Clemons on feckless liberal anti-racism: how In This House We Believe racial liberalism leaves racial capitalism’s inequalities in place and why, drawing on Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph, the Black Freedom Movement instead needs solidarity with the multi-racial working class. Read Jared’s article: jaredkclemons.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/7/5/117532940/clemons_2022_-_from_freedom_now_to_blm.pdf Interview with Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell from February 2021: thedigradio.com/podcast/conservative-intelligentsia-with-sam-adler-bell-matt-sitman/ Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Know Your Enemy hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell on terrifyingly protean right-wing American politics. Check out our newsletter: thedigradio.com/newsletter Read James Pogue on the New Right: vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets Read Mie Inouye’s Boston Review article on union salts: bostonreview.net/articles/labors-militant-minority/

Patrick Blanchfield analyzes the long history of US gun violence and the American death drive. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and get our weekly newsletter by email. Check out our most recent newsletter on the Progressive Era roots of Clintonism’s conception of the “deserving poor” thedigradio.com/newsletter32 Register for Socialism 2022 socialismconference.org

Dan’s second episode with historian Lily Geismer, who he interviewed in 2019 about Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. This interview is on Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, which details the long history of Clintonism and the Democrats’ neoliberal turn. Read the latest newsletter. It’s on what Ruthie meant when she said abolition was another word for communism: thedigradio.com/newsletter31 Listen to Geismer’s first Dig interview: thedigradio.com/podcast/race-and-class-in-the-liberal-suburbs-with-lily-geismer Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

What role does mass incarceration play in American political economy? What does that reveal about what sort of politics are required to overcome it? Ruth Wilson Gilmore with Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar, who edited the new collection Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives by Donna Murch haymarketbooks.org/books/1650-assata-taught-me

Historian Margarita Fajardo on her book The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era. Fajardo discusses the Latin American economists at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) who conceptualized the division of the global economy between center and periphery, and how that later gave rise to dependency theory and world systems theory. Plus Cuban Revolution and the Alliance for Progress, Allende’s democratic road to socialism and right-wing coups in Chile and Brazil—and more. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Live from New York: Dan interviews Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls, Jaz Brisack of Starbucks Workers United, SEIU Local 1199NE president Rob Baril, Jacobin writer Alex Press, and Labor Notes writer Luis Feliz Leon on the return of labor militancy that we see sweeping Amazon, Starbucks, and workplaces all around the US. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

A timely interview from the archives: legal scholars Aziz Rana and Amna Akbar, and Movement for Black Lives lawyer Marbre Stahly-Butts, on SCOTUS, liberal court veneration, and other big questions on the law and politics facing the left. Find Eslanda at haymarketbooks.org/books/1769-eslanda Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Ayşe Zarakol on her book Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders. How centuries of Asian empires from Genghis Khan to Timur and the early Ming Dynasty through the Ottomans and Mughals built dominant world orders and, ultimately, shaped the rise of Europe—and how that all might shape how we think about the crisis in the world order today. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out phenomenalworld.org

Destin Jenkins on his book The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City, which makes a powerful argument about how the ubiquitous and in many ways invisible dependence of American cities on municipal debt to fund basic infrastructure has devastating consequences for democracy and entrenches spatial, racial, and wealth disparities. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Tickets for live NYC show on The Return of Labor Militancy: eventbrite.com/e/the-return-of-labor-militancy-with-the-dig-and-jacobin-tickets-320732338057

Mariame Kaba and Geo Maher discuss police, the politics of policing, abolition, reform—and more. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Rupert Russell and Isabella Weber discuss Russell’s book Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World and also the current politics of inflation. Listen to Weber discuss her book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: thedigradio.com/podcast/how-china-escaped-shock-therapy-w-isabella-weber/ Look at Rupert’s precious puppy: twitter.com/rupert_russell/status/1511428696409837573?s=20&t=OPVNgfXuokFY6ZQYRkxe4g Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Astra interviews Achal Prabhala on the lethal persistence of global vaccine apartheid. Moderna is selfishly refusing to share or even sell (license) its mRNA technology, leaving much of the world unprotected from the pandemic and incubating new variants. Moderna’s annual shareholder meeting is April 28th. Join Justice is Global, Boston DSA, and others to challenge vaccine profiteering at their Cambridge headquarters. Sign up at bitly.com/modernaaction Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

The second of our two-part interview with sociologist Ho-fung Hung on Chinese political and economic history. This episode covers the 2008 financial crisis, how China’s response deepened global and domestic economic imbalances and (alongside the US) heightened geopolitical conflict, the current situation—including Russia’s invasion—and a lot more. Listen to part one first if you haven’t already. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Part one of a two-part interview with sociologist Ho-fung Hung on Chinese political economic history from the 18th century to 2008: why capitalism took off in England and then elsewhere but not in China; and then, how Maoist policy laid the groundwork for China’s ultimate capitalist takeoff and boom. Episode two will focus on the 2008 financial crisis, the deepening imbalances and heightened geopolitical conflict that resulted, and the current situation—including the impact of the crises surrounding Russia’s invasion. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Sophie Pinkham and Nick Mulder on the war, its origins, how it’s being experienced by Ukrainians, Russians, Europeans, and Americans—and also its geopolitical and global economic ramifications, particularly sanctions. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Angela Davis: An Autobiography haymarketbooks.org/books/1741-angela-davis

Tony Wood returns to The Dig to discuss Russia’s invasion, what it reflects about Russian politics and geopolitics today and historically, and how the Left should be thinking about it all. Tony’s LRB essay: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/tony-wood2/why-didn-t-they-stop-it Listen to past Dig eps for context on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Tony Wood on Russia and Putin: thedigradio.com/podcast/russia-beyond-putin-with-tony-wood Volodymyr Ishchenko on Ukraine: thedigradio.com/podcast/ukraine-w-volodymyr-ishchenko Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews historian Kim Phillips-Fein on Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. Listen to Kim’s Dig interview on Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics thedigradio.com/podcast/fear-city-with-kim-phillips-fein/ Listen to past Dig eps for context on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Tony Wood on Russia and Putin: thedigradio.com/podcast/russia-beyond-putin-with-tony-wood Volodymyr Ishchenko on Ukraine: thedigradio.com/podcast/ukraine-w-volodymyr-ishchenko Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Feminist political theorist and organizer Verónica Gago on Argentina’s massive feminist movement and strike, the ties that bind domestic labor and financial exploitation, neoliberalism from below, and more. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia haymarketbooks.org/books/1745-coup

Industrial capitalism and colonialism are literally making us sick. Raj Patel and Rupa Marya on Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Olúfẹmi Táíwò guest hosts an interview with Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla on how financial power has shaped the global economic order from colonialism through Bretton Woods, the Washington Consensus, and today’s Wall Street Consensus. Read Daniela’s work: people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/DanielaGabor Read Ndongo’s work: rosalux.de/en/profile/es_detail/N8SVHTS8SA/ndongo-samba-sylla?cHash=ccf0c8d371bde0fecbac8337bbc6f832 Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy The Border Crossed Us by Justin Akers Chacón: haymarketbooks.org/books/1655-the-border-crossed-us

An in-depth interview on the historical and political-economic context of the Ukraine crisis with Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko. Read Volodymyr’s work: truthout.org/articles/ukrainians-are-far-from-unified-on-nato-let-them-decide-for-themselves/ ponarseurasia.org/how-maidan-revolutions-reproduce-and-intensify-the-post-soviet-crisis-of-political-representation/ lefteast.org/ukraine-in-the-vicious-circle-of-the-post-soviet-crisis-of-hegemony/ lefteast.org/contradictions-post-soviet-ukraine-failure-ukraine-new-left/ Tony Wood on Russia: thedigradio.com/podcast/russia-beyond-putin-with-tony-wood/ Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Epidemiologist Justin Feldman makes a comprehensive and devastating critique of Biden’s pandemic response. Read Justin’s essay: jmfeldman.medium.com/?p=88452c696f2 Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Angela Davis: An Autobiography haymarketbooks.org/books/1741-angela-davis

Historian Gabriel Winant discusses The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. It’s a fascinating study of the emergence of the service sector and a new working class out of the wreckage of deindustrialization through the story of the rise and fall of unionized steel in Pittsburgh and its replacement by a massive hospital industry. Listen to my past interview with Winant on the social worlds that make US politics and how that sociality is rooted in the economy, carceral state, social media, religion, and more thedigradio.com/podcast/the-social-question-with-gabriel-winant Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, by David Carlin and Nicole Walker rosemetalpress.com/books/the-after-normal

Everyone feels bad right now because conditions are awful and the outlook is bleak. What is going on, and where might things be headed? How might we become unstuck from this interregnum? Dan interviews returning guests Aziz Rana, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Wendy Brown. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Episode two of our two-part series on cryptocurrency: political theorist Stefan Eich on how crypto fits into Hayek’s old neoliberal dream of private money and why that vision emerged in a new form in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Read Stefan’s article: static1.squarespace.com/static/5ae8a7b625bf02c0b85aec02/t/5c923c13eef1a1ce843836ff/1553087508427/Stefan+Eich%2C+Old+Utopias%2C+New+Tax+Havens+%282019%29.pdf Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out We’re Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson global.oup.com/academic/product/were-not-here-to-entertain-9780190908232

Edward Ongweso Jr. and Jacob Silverman on cryptocurrency, NFTs, Elon Musk, the metaverse, meme stocks, and techno-utopianism amid the crushing reality of our neoliberal hellscape. The first in a two-episode series on crypto. Read Dan’s new essay on border control politics: nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/border-crises/ Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

How neoliberal conditions create popular constituencies, ideologies, and subjectivities among poor and working-class people for a violent, mean, and repressive neoliberalism—and how those reactionary politics from below converge with those generated from above. Political theorist Rodrigo Nunes analyzes Bolsonarismo (the ideology and politics surrounding far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro) and far-right politics everywhere. Read Rodrigo’s essays: radicalphilosophy.com/article/of-what-is-bolsonaro-the-name publicbooks.org/are-we-in-denial-about-denial Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and get that newsletter

Bolsonaro is presiding over mass COVID deaths and the destruction of the Amazon. Lula is free and polling way ahead for next year’s presidential election. But the conditions that brought the far-right to power remain in place. Sociologist Sabrina Fernandes and historian Andre Pagliarini on Brazil. Check out Sabrina’s Tese Onze YouTube channel youtube.com/channel/UC0fGGprihDIlQ3ykWvcb9hg Support The Dig and receive our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

The second of Dan’s two-part interview with Piero Gleijeses on his book Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991. This is the story of Cuba’s military defense of the Angolan government against a US and South Africa-backed effort to overthrow the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The future of the entire region was on the line—including the fate of apartheid in South Africa and of Namibia, then a South African colony. Learn Southern African geography by studying these maps: thedigradio.com/visions-of-freedom-maps Support The Dig with money at Patreon.com/TheDig and receive our weekly newsletter.

Part one of Dan’s two-part interview with Piero Gleijeses on his book Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991. This is the story of Cuba’s military defense of the Angolan government against a US and South Africa-backed effort to overthrow the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The future of the entire region was on the line, including the fate of apartheid in South Africa and of Namibia, then a South African colony. Learn Southern African geography by studying these maps: thedigradio.com/visions-of-freedom-maps Support The Dig with money at Patreon.com/TheDig and receive our weekly newsletter. Check out Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters by Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674245952

Astra Taylor interviews archaeologist David Wengrow on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, his new book co-authored with the late David Graeber. Support us at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781789143799

Guest host Gabriel Winant interviews labor journalists Alex Press and Jonah Furman, as well as IATSE member Victor P. Bouzi. Listen to Primer, Alex’s podcast about Amazon patreon.com/primerpodcast Listen to Victor’s podcast WAIT, Why Am I Talking? podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wait-why-am-i-talking/id1515308564 Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

A Striketober episode from The Dig archives. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and receive our weekly newsletter by email

What are the politics of sex? Incels, porn, sexual racism, the feminist sex wars, and more. Philosopher Amia Srinivasan on her new essay collection The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Want our very good weekly newsletter emailed to you? Support us at Patreon.com/TheDig Interested in the book advertised on this week’s Dig? thenewpress.com/books/empire-of-rubber

A very short ep on a great new documentary about the history and present of American socialism: The Big Scary S-Word. It’s by Yael Bridge, and it’s the perfect film to show to your skeptical uncle or to someone new to (or curious about) socialist politics. You can watch The Big Scary S-Word on iTunes, Apple TV or a number of other sites by visiting: www.socialismmovie.com/screenings

Legendary socialist scholar Tariq Ali on the long history of Afghanistan: the 19th and early 20th-century wars against the British Empire; the communist coup, Soviet invasion, and US-backed mujahideen war; the rise of the Taliban; and the 2001 US-led NATO invasion through the recent US defeat and withdrawal. Plus, a lot about Pakistan. Pre-order Ali’s forthcoming book The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold versobooks.com/books/3939-the-forty-year-war-in-afghanistan Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and receive our weekly newsletter

Kim Stanley Robinson on science fiction, climate crisis, Marxism, geo-engineering, political violence, green Keynesianism, and a lot more. Interviewed by guest host Daniel Aldana Cohen, who read 11 of Robinson’s books during the pandemic quarantine, running from Red Mars through The Ministry for the Future. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and receive our new weekly newsletter by email.

It’s Occupy Wall Street’s tenth anniversary. Dan interviews Astra Taylor. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and get our new weekly newsletter. Listen to other pods in the retrospective series https://rosalux.nyc/occupy/

Episode three of The Dig’s War on Terror trilogy with Spencer Ackerman: Decadence, Trump, and Biden. Subscribe to Spencer’s Substack: foreverwars.substack.com/people/2576701-spencer-ackerman Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and (starting next week) get our weekly newsletter

Episode two of The Dig’s War on Terror trilogy with Spencer Ackerman: Obama, ISIS, and the Sustainable War. Subscribe to Spencer’s Substack: foreverwars.substack.com/people/2576701-spencer-ackerman Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and (starting next week) get our weekly newsletter

Episode one of The Dig’s three-part War on Terror series the with Spencer Ackerman: 9/11, bipartisan war fever, and George W. Bush. Subscribe to Spencer’s Substack: foreverwars.substack.com/people/2576701-spencer-ackerman Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and (very soon) get our weekly newsletter

Media critic Adam Johnson and New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz on the media’s warmongering attack on Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Further reading: nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/media-bias-biden-polls-approval-afghanistan-withdrawal.html thecolumn.substack.com/p/on-afghanistan-withdrawal-nyts-peter Sign up for Adam’s Substack: thecolumn.substack.com Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and get our (coming soon) weekly newsletter

Dan interviews scholars Aldo Madariaga and Camila Vergara about how Chilean politics have been playing out since the massive popular uprisings that began in October 2019. Further reading: jacobinlat.com/2021/06/19/el-neoliberalismo-atenta-contra-la-democracia-2 newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/burying-pinochet jacobinmag.com/2021/06/rene-rojas-interview-democracy-new-constitution-constituent-assembly-plebiscite-left-chile Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig and (soon) receive our weekly newsletter.

Dan interviews historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. “Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with the vengeful warrior Christ, it’s no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same way.” Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig We now have a Discord for patrons and, starting in September, a weekly email newsletter too. If you want to join our Discord and cannot afford to contribute, just send us an email.

Inflation is once again at the center of political debate. Dan interviews Tim Barker to put monetary policy in its historical and class war context. Reading: Preferred Shares by Tim Barker phenomenalworld.org/analysis/wage-share email digradiopod@gmail.com for PDFs of the following two articles: The Vietnam War and the Political Economy of Full Employment by Dean Baker, Robert Pollin and Elizabeth Zahrt Class Conflict and the “Natural Rate of Unemployment” by Robert Pollin Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig…and join The Dig’s brand new Discord!

How China rejected neoliberal orthodoxy and became the new workshop of the world. Dan interviews economist Isabella Weber on her book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Who governs? Upon closer inspection, the composition of the ruling class has undergone huge changes that are driving this political moment. Dan interviews Doug Henwood, the author of “Take Me to Your Leader,” an extensive analysis of the changing composition of the ruling class published in Jacobin: jacobinmag.com/2021/04/take-me-to-your-leader-the-rot-of-the-american-ruling-class Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig The Dig is taking it easy this summer so look for new episodes every two weeks until September.

The history of the United States is in no small part the history of US intervention in Latin America. Historian Greg Grandin on his classic book Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Watch our new Dig video shorts on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=LcZb3A986p0

The Dig is taking a break to play catch up this week and posting a favorite interview from our archives: Nick Estes on his book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. First posted on June 29 2019. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Journalist Kate Aronoff discusses climate policy and politics and her book Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—And How We Fight Back. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

How ecosocialists formed a powerful coalition with unions to fight for labor law reform and why we need a powerful labor movement to win a Green New Deal. An interview with four members of DSA’s Green New Deal Campaign Committee: Ashik Siddique, Gustavo Gordillo, Sydney Ghazarian, and Thea Riofrancos. This is a collaborative episode with Bloc Party, a podcast from Justice Democrats. Get involved in DSA’s PRO Act fight: pro-act.dsausa.org Ryan Grim’s post on breaking the filibuster: badnews.substack.com/p/how-the-filibuster-goes-down Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan speaks with Noura Erakat and Tareq Baconi: an in-depth interview on Israeli apartheid and dispossession, the history and future of the Palestinian struggle, Israeli politics, media false equivalences, and shifting US public opinion toward Palestine. DONATE NOW to the Palestinian people: We Are Not Numbers wearenotnumbers.org/home/donate Multiple organizations: muftah.org/organizations-working-in-palestine-that-need-your-support/#.YKQaGZNKhpT Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Two voices from Gaza. The first of two episodes on Palestine this week with teacher and BDS activist Aya Alghazzawi and journalist Issam Adwan, project manager for We Are Not Numbers. DONATE NOW to the Palestinian people: We Are Not Numbers wearenotnumbers.org/home/donate Multiple organizations: muftah.org/organizations-working-in-palestine-that-need-your-support/#.YKQaGZNKhpT

Dan interviews historian Robin D.G. Kelley on his classic book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

What is so-called cancel culture? Why has it suddenly emerged as arguably the issue in right-wing politics? How does today’s cancel culture discourse differ from the anti-PC discourse that first emerged in the early 1990s? How do we distinguish between liberal opponents of PC like Jonathan Chain and right-wing ones like Donald Trump? And then, finally, is there still a there there? Some problems with The Discourse that we should reflect upon? Readings: Some “Politically Incorrect” Pathways Through PC by Stuart Hall ram-wan.net/restrepo/hall/some%20politically%20incorrect%20pathways.pdf Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy by Moira Weigel theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump The Use of Free Speech in Society by Asad Haider versobooks.com/blogs/4793-the-use-of-free-speech-in-society Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Laleh Khalili on Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. The Suez Canal, the colonial roots of contemporary maritime trade, Aden dock worker radicals, why Dubai is not exceptional, the impacts of steam engines and containerization—and so much more. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

US empire in the Philippines, Filipino migration, labor organizing in the fields, and the nativist campaign for Asian exclusion. Dan interviews Rick Baldoz on his remarkable book The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Three thinkers and organizers on the much debated question of ultra-leftism post-Bernie 2020. Two texts that informed our discussion: The Liberal to Ultra-Left Pipeline: Breaking the Cycle by Brian W. Liberalism, ultraleftism or mass action, a speech delivered by Socialist Workers Party leader Peter Camejo. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Charisse Burden-Stelly on racial capitalism, the history of the US Black left, and the US government’s Red Scare attacks on Black radicals. Read Burden-Stelly’s work Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights Black Cold War Liberalism as an Agency Reduction Formation during the Late 1940s and the Early 1950s Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antiforeignness, Antiradicalism, and Antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling Caste Does Not Explain Race The Absence of Political Economy in African Diaspora Studies Meet with Charisse Burden-Stelly at the Dig’s last Book Club event thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews the hosts of Time to Say Goodbye podcast on Asian American politics and identity. Check out Time to Say Goodbye wherever you get podcasts. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

How the 60s counterculture went on to make the techno-utopian ideology that suffuses our techno-dystopian reality. Dan interviews Fred Turner on his classic From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Astra Taylor interviews Achal Prabhala on emerging global vaccine apartheid: from the neoliberal turn handing the pharmaceutical industry global patents to today’s government-funded vaccines put under private pharma control. Groups fighting global vaccine apartheid Public Citizen: citizen.org/topic/safe-affordable-drugs-devices/global-access-to-medicines MSF: msfaccess.org Prep4All: prep4all.org People’s Vaccine Alliance: peoplesvaccine.org Recent work by Prabhala: nytimes.com/2020/12/07/opinion/covid-vaccines-patents.html nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/covid-vaccines-china-russia.html theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/peoples-vaccine-coronavirus-covid-wto Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join the Dig Book Club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Why we need the PRO Act with Jimmy Williams, General Vice President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. Sign up to join DSA’s PRO Act phonebank actionnetwork.org/forms/proactphonebank Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig Book Club and discuss The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy with Paolo Gerbaudo thedigradio.com/dig-book-club. Same to zoom with Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll on their doc You Are Not a Loan.

Dan interviews Jacobin‘s Alex Press and organizer Jonah Furman on the state of the labor movement. Sign up to join DSA’s Pro Act phonebank actionnetwork.org/forms/proactphonebank Read Alex Press’s interview with political scientist Michael Goldfield on the Amazon organizing drive in Bessemer jacobinmag.com/2021/02/amazon-unionize-alabama-operation-dixie-organizing-south Subscribe to Jonah Furman’s newsletter whogetsthebird.substack.com Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig Book Club and discuss The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy with Paolo Gerbaudo thedigradio.com/dig-book-club. Same to zoom with Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll on their doc You Are Not a Loan.

We’re taking a week off to play catch up and posting an early Dig episode from the archives that people keep returning to time and again: Barbara and Karen Fields on their book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (episode 75 from December 13, 2017). Peruse The Dig’s vast archives at thedigradio.com and we’ll be back with a new ep next week. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig Book Club and discuss The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy with Paolo Gerbaudo thedigradio.com/dig-book-club. Same to zoom with Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll on their doc You Are Not a Loan.

Dan interviews Sarah Jaffe on her book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone. Support this podcast on Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig Book Club and discuss The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy with Paolo Gerbaudo thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Dan interviews Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman on the history and post-Trump trajectory of conservative intelligentsia. Listen to Know Your Enemy, their really great podcast on the American Right, wherever you get your podcasts. Sign up on Patreon for bonus episodes: patreon.com/knowyourenemy Recommended reading and listening: “What’s left of liberalism? Why the left and right both seem to agree that liberalism has failed us.” By Sam Adler-Bell “Know Your Enemy #13: What Happened to Norman? with David Klion” “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” By Rick Perlstein “The dark history of Donald Trump’s rightwing revolt.” By Timothy Shenk “The Year the Clock Broke.” By John Ganz “Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right.” By Quinn Slobodian “Leaving Conservatism Behind: How I renounced the God-and-guns conservatism of my blue-collar roots and embraced class politics.” By Matt Sitman Join the Dig Book Club and zoom with Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club. Watch their doc You Are Not a Loan here. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Jeanne Morefield on her book Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection and how the disavowed wars have come home on the American Right. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join the Dig Book Club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Check out our vast archives at thedigradio.com

Dan interviews sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo on his book The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy. How does the promise of direct digital democracy obscure how leaders are made more powerful and less accountable? Examples from Italy (Five Star Movement) and Spain (Podemos). How does the failure to incorporate people into rooted forms of political organization undermine the left’s power, coherence, and durability? Example from the USA (the funhouse mirror-appeal of a certain YouTube comedian). Related episodes from The Dig archives: Hegemony How-To with Jonathan Matthew Smucker thedigradio.com/podcast/hegemony-how-to-with-jonathan-matthew-smucker How Left Parties Neoliberalized with Stephanie Mudge thedigradio.com/podcast/how-left-parties-neoliberalized-with-stephanie-mudge Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig Book Club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Dan interviews author Fatima Bhutto on social media subjectivities; Pakistani history, politics, and identity; and her novel The Runaways. Support this podcast with a contribution at Patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig Book Club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Dan interviews Thea Riofrancos on how Ecuador’s Pink Tide government was constrained by an unequal world system and on the conflict over mining that erupted between leftist President Rafael Correa and the Indigenous movement that laid the groundwork for his rise to power. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig book club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Nikhil Pal Singh and Joe Lowndes discuss and debate today’s American Right: what sort of threat does the Far-Right pose? How does it relate to the Republican Party and to the neoliberal imperial Center? What does that mean for the Left? Read Corey Robin’s smart and short piece on impeachment jacobinmag.com/2021/01/corey-robin-what-impeachment-could-mean-trump Listen to Dan’s interview with Joe Lowndes and Daniel Martinez HoSang & Joe Lowndes on their book Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity www.thedigradio.com/podcast/right-wing-racism-with-daniel-martinez-hosang-joe-lowndes/ Support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews historian and essayist Gabriel Winant on the social worlds that make US politics and how that sociality is rooted in the economy, carceral state, social media, religion, and more. Read these n+1 essays and Dissent interview for context: We Live in a Society nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/we-live-in-a-society Coronavirus and Chronopolitics nplusonemag.com/issue-37/politics/coronavirus-and-chronopolitics-2Professional-Managerial Chasm nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/professional-managerial-chasm “What’s Actually Going on in Our Nursing Homes”: An Interview with Shantonia Jackson dissentmagazine.org/article/whats-actually-going-on-in-our-nursing-homes-an-interview-with-shantonia-jackson Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig Book Club thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

From The Dig archives: 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. We’ll be back next week with a new episode. Listen to Antibody thedigradio.com/antibody Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig book club thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

A big-picture interview with Tobita Chow and Jake Werner on China that puts today’s geopolitical conflict and repression into the context of global capitalism. Join a Dig Book Club thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Support this podcast at patreon.com/TheDig

What happened to social democratic politics? Dan interviews sociologist Stephanie Mudge on her book Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism. Join a Dig Book Club thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Support this podcast at patreon.com/TheDig

Prevailing identity politics norms call on people “listen to the most affected” or “centre the most marginalized.” But this often works out quite badly in practice. Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on his brilliant essay “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference.” It’s The Dig’s four-year anniversary. Support us at Patreon.com/TheDig and take a moment to post something to social media about why you listen to The Dig and how it has shaped your politics.

Guest host Astra Taylor interviews Thomas Frank about his book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. From The Dig archives on populism: Universalizing American Liberty with Aziz Rana Populism’s Power with Laura Grattan and Thea Riofrancos Worker Freedom with Alex Gourevitch Join a Dig Book Club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews political scientist Megan Ming Francis about the NAACP’s struggle against racist violence in the teens and 20s and how it remade the criminal justice system and the civil rights movement alike. Join a Dig book club! Next book is Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/ Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Mike Davis on what the election reveals about this US political moment and the way forward for the Left. Support this podcast at www.patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig book club! Next book is Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/

Dan interviews Cornel West on how to think about and act upon the world that this week presented to us. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

What else to talk about right now other than everything about right now? Election, pandemic, BLM, climate, and how the left should think about and struggle with it all. Dan interviews Naomi Klein and Nikhil Pal Singh. Support this podcast on Patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig Book Club. Next book is Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Political theorist Wendy Brown on how neoliberalism attacked society and democracy and in doing so laid the foundation for right-wing authoritarianism and nihilism. Episodes from the archives on neoliberalism: A History of Neoliberalism with Quinn SlobodianFamily Values with Melinda Cooper

Roberto Lovato on Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. Growing up Salvadoran-American in The Mission, fighting with the FMLN in El Salvador, making sense of MS-13, weaving back together the pieces of a transnational history severed by borders and violence. Lovato retells El Salvador and US history through his family’s story. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig book club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/

Dan interviews legal scholars Aziz Rana and Amna Akbar, and Movement for Black Lives lawyer Marbre Stahly-Butts, on SCOTUS, liberal RBG and court veneration, and other big questions on the law and politics facing the left. Join a Dig book club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Bathsheba Demuth on her monumental book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. From the 19th century through today, governments and capitalists on the Russian, Soviet, and American Arctic borderlands extract energy from a natural world whose reproductive cycles they don’t comprehend and strive to convert Indigenous people into national subjects. Support this podcast with a contribution at Patreon.com/TheDig

Guest host Astra Taylor interviews tech organizer and scholar Meredith Whittaker on the political economy of the tech leviathan that’s remaking capitalism, empire, and the carceral state. FYI: Whittaker mentioned this interview with Sarah T. Hamid on carceral technologies logicmag.io/care/community-defense-sarah-t-hamid-on-abolishing-carceral-technologies/ Support this podcast with a contribution at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews historian Paul Renfro on his book Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State. Stranger Danger is also this month’s Dig Book Club book. Read and discuss it with fellow listeners, and then on Zoom with Paul by signing up here: thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/ A relevant Dig ep from the archives: Melinda Cooper on her book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism thedigradio.com/podcast/family-values-with-melinda-cooper/ Please support this podcast with a contribution at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Tithi Bhattacharya, Daniel Bessner, Simon Torracinta on the manifold crises engulfing higher ed as covid exposes and exacerbates decades of austerity and neoliberal iniquity. “House of Cards: Can the American university be saved?” by Daniel Bessner thenation.com/article/society/gig-academy-meritocracy-trap-universities-crisis “Extinction Event: Given what is to come, schools of every kind are now at risk” by Simon Torracinta nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/extinction-event/ “After 2020, There’s No Going Back to the Old America” by Dan Denvir in Jacobin jacobinmag.com/2020/09/joe-biden-imperialism-trump-america

Dan interviews historian Matthew Countryman on his book Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Join a Dig Book Club reading group and discuss Up South with Countryman on September 12. Sign up here thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Support this podcast with a contribution at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan’s recent live event with Yanis Varoufakis on how 2020 revealed that 2008 had changed capitalism forever. Also: we had some pod feed issues last week. If you missed Dan’s interview with brilliant organizers Andres Celin and Rapheal Randall—and this is a must-listen for everyone interested in organizing—check it out: www.thedigradio.com/podcast/organize-to-win-with-andres-celin-and-rapheal-randall/

A must-listen conversation on organizing to win with two extraordinary organizers from Philadelphia’s Youth United for Change. Download their book Y’all Tryna Win or Nah?! https://www.youthunitedforchange.org/y_all_tryna_win_or_nah Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Kelly Lytle Hernández on MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Dan’s 2017 interview with Lytle Hernández on City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965: thedigradio.com/podcast/a-history-of-human-caging-with-kelly-lytle-hernandez Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan’s 2018 interview with Matthew Frye Jacobson on Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. With a new intro from Dan on the Columbus myth and the politics of white ethnicity. Support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Our police system is a product of Cold War US imperialism too. Dan interviews Stuart Schrader on Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. Support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

This is an incredible moment to learn about the Young Lords from historian Johanna Fernández, the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History. Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan talks to @loggins__ and @MuseWendi about why people are reading White Fragility and ten books about racism, capitalism, and Black radicalism that you should read instead. Check out Left POCket Project @LeftPOC Blacks In and Out of the Left by Michael C Dawson Dig interview with Michael Dawson Democracy Remixed by Cathy Cohen Dig interview with Cathy Cohen, Jasson Perez, Malaika Jabali Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil by Patricia de Santana Pinho Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields Dig interview with the Fields sisters Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja The Meaning of Freedom by Angela Davis Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing Californiaby Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Aziz Rana interviews Dan Denvir on how policing and mass incarceration became core features of the war on immigrants and on his book All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It. Please support this podcast wit $ at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy Dan’s book at versobooks.com/books/2858-all-american-nativism

Mike Davis on his classic book about why the US has long lacked strong socialist and labor politics. One recurrent answer: racism. Read Dan’s essay on the moment: jacobinmag.com/2020/06/donald-trump-war-american-democracy-riots-coronavirus Not in the mood for a long, complex Dig interview? Check out Antibody, which is like commie This American Life: thedigradio.com/antibody Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

A Dig special. Zoom forum Dan hosted with leading defund police organizers from around the country. For more info: blackvisionsmn.org byp100.org daretowin.org reclaimRI.org blmla.org If you live in RI, support the fight for a people’s budget: actionnetwork.org/petitions/say-no-to-a-brutal-austerity-budget-in-rhode-island Dan’s essay on Trump’s origins in ordinary bipartisan security politics: jacobinmag.com/2020/06/donald-trump-war-american-democracy-riots-coronavirus

Antibody is a narrative series about how Covid-19 has changed everything and nothing at all. In this episode: All Cops Are Idiots (featuring Kafui Attoh, you can buy his book here: ugapress.org/book/9780820354217/rights-in-transit) A Few Basic Demands (produced by Chenjerai Kumanyika (twitter.com/catchatweetdown) After the Peak (by Karim Sariahmed (twitter.com/sariahmed), along with Alex Azan, Belicia Ding, Nijmie Zakkiyyah Dzurinko , Vanessa K. Ferrel, Michelle Gonzalez, Musaub Khan, and Marc Shi) What We Talk About When We Talk About Mutual Aid (produced by Jackson Roach and Caroline Kanner (twitter.com/_idontCaroline) Get in touch with DCH1 Amazonians United (facebook.com/DCH1United) Support Put People First! Pennsylvania (putpeoplefirstpa.org) The mutual aid groups featured in this episode include: Ground Game LA (groundgamela.org) K Town For All (ktownforall.org) The Red Nation (therednation.org) Brave Space Alliance (bravespacealliance.org) and the Indigenous Kinship Collective (indigenouskinshipcollective.com). Further reading on mutual aid: Regan De Loggans’ mutual aid zine (mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LOGGANS-mutual-aid-zine.pdf) The complete text of Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution) Mutual Aid Hub (mutualaidhub.org)

Dan interviews returning guests Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana on the long history behind the crisis of American imperial legitimation that has become so manifest amid the pandemic. Some works by Bâli and Rana cited in this interview: bostonreview.net/war-security-politics-global-justice/asl%C4%B1-u-b%C3%A2li-aziz-rana-sanctions-are-inhumane%E2%80%94now-and-always lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/constitutionalism-and-american-imperial-imagination Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Antibody is a new narrative series about how Covid-19 has changed everything and nothing at all. In this episode: The Corner (featuring Pablo Alvarado and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network) Stranger Pleasure (featuring Samuel Delany; produced by David Gutherz) One House in Oakland (produced by Sophie Kasakove) Role Call (produced by Andrea Long Chu) Support day laborer economic survival with a contribution at ndlon.org

Dan interviews Cathy Cohen, Jasson Perez, and Malaika Jabali on this uprising, the conditions that made it possible, and where it might be headed. Support Black Visions Collective at blackvisionsmn.org Check out Malaika’s short film Left Out.

Antibody is a new narrative series about how Covid-19 has changed everything and nothing at all. In this episode: Zoom Canvass (featuring Nikil Saval) Hardwood Flesh (produced by Ari Mejia) Dial 3 to Admit Your Personal Failure (produced by Ian Lewis and Caroline Kanner) You Can’t Go Home Again (written by Alex Press) The International Trans Person Helpline (produced by Cass Adair and Arlie Adlington)

From The Dig and Jacobin: a new narrative series about how COVID-19 has changed everything and nothing at all. The first of three episodes is coming soon.

Dan interviews anthropologist Adia Benton on the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and what its politics reveal about the Covid-19 pandemic today. Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/thdig

Dan interviews Frank Rosenthal on the history of the radical science organization Science for the People and Nafis Hasan on everything about a left-wing politics of science. Subscribe to Science for the People at magazine.ScienceForThePeople.org Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan is playing catch up. Here’s a fav interview from the archives: critical theorist Nancy Fraser on how a total analysis of capitalism requires analyzing capitalism’s totality, including socially reproductive work that makes possible the world that capitalism exploits. This is painfully relevant today as people everywhere do the work of staying at home and social distancing to beat this pandemic while capitalists reap the rewards of the world’s reproduction. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Aaron Benanav, who argues that the problem isn’t that robots are stealing our jobs but rather that capitalist growth is finding its limits and making jobs worse. Read “Automation and the Future of Work” in New Left Review. Parts one and two. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig.

Dan interviews Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, the authors of Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism, to assess the campaign and the way forward. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews the makers of Blowback, a new podcast series telling the history of the Iraq War. Blowback is available only on Stitcher Premium—and for a month you can listen for free. Go to stitcherpremium.com and sign up with the code BLOWBACK. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews historian Kim Phillips-Fein about her book Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics and about how the destruction of social democracy made today’s city where coronavirus is killing its poor and working-class people. In other news: Dan’s Jacobin essay on keeping the Bernie infrastructure alive is here and the volunteer petition to do so, which you should sign, is here. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews veteran organizer Jasson Perez and journalist Sarah Jaffe on left organizing amid covid and where it might go. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves on the politics of public health and what we can learn from ACT UP. Please support The Dig with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews New York magazine writer Eric Levitz on the big corporate bailout that gave workers precious little to survive the corona crisis. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Marxist economist Grace Blakeley on coronavirus economics. Please support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Mike Davis about everything we are all suddenly trying to figure out. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews NYC DSA down-ballot candidates. Samelys López is running for a US House seat in the Bronx. Jabari Brisport, Marcela Mitaynes, and Phara Souffrant Forrest are running for seats in the state legislature. All four are campaigning on a platform of housing justice. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

An interview on how the Democratic Party got here today with Ryan Grim. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Pep talk time: Dan interviews Rep. Ilhan Omar to give us some perspective and prepare us for the fight ahead. Read the full transcript from Jacobin here. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

A special pod ep from Sunday’s live Boston canvass kickoff with Michael Brooks and Natalie Shure. Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Come see Dan discuss All-American Nativism in Boston on 3/4 facebook.com/events/522615241724284/ Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Live show with Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara and Alex Press in Cambridge, MA for Bernie 2020. Recorded the night of Nevada caucuses.  Please support us with your money at www.thedigradio.com

The Catholic Church was a powerful force throughout the first half of the 20th century. It was a force for right-wing reaction. That’s what Dan discusses today with Giuliana Chamedes, the author of the remarkable book A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe. Live Massachusetts Dig for Bernie! With Bhaskar Sunkara and Alex Press at Harvard this Saturday 2/2, 7pm: facebook.com/events/604111176850753/ Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Racism on the right wing is changing in weird and important ways, and liberal anti-racism offers no viable solution. Dan interviews Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joe Lowndes, authors of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

The protests have subsided but coronavirus has only created a deeper crisis for government legitimacy. Dan interviews long-time Hong Kong activist and writer Au Loong Yu. Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews philosopher Martin Hägglund on how the way we conceive of our finite lives here on earth shapes our critique of capitalism and construction of socialism. Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Daniel Denvir shamelessly interviewed on his own podcast by Astra Taylor about All-American Nativism. Upcoming events: 1/24 All-American Nativism Brooklyn book launch with Aziz Rana facebook.com/events/606979320053356/ 1/27 Race for Profit: A Conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor [Live Dig interview in Providence] facebook.com/events/1416403061860397/ 1/28 Rhode Island Students for Bernie Kickoff Rally with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Linda Sarsour facebook.com/events/618607768707911/ Book tour (more to be announced soon!): 1/31 Providence facebook.com/events/2432419893664520/ 2/24 Philly facebook.com/events/462775997752533/ 2/26 DC at solidstatebooksdc.com 2/28 Baltimore facebook.com/events/509390186368309/ 3/4 Boston at tridentbookscafe.com 3/11 New Orleans: All-American Nativism and A Planet to Win double book event with Thea Riofrancos at octaviabooks.com 3/17 Austin at monkeywrenchbooks.org 3/18 Dallas at deepvellum.org

The wars at home and abroad have always been connected. Dan interviews Nikhil Pal Singh on US attacks on Iran and the politics, history, and culture of American warmaking. Upcoming events: 1/24 All-American Nativism Brooklyn book launch with Aziz Rana facebook.com/events/606979320053356/ 1/27 Race for Profit: A Conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor [Live Dig interview in Providence] facebook.com/events/1416403061860397/ 1/28 Rhode Island Students for Bernie Kickoff Rally with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Linda Sarsour facebook.com/events/618607768707911/ Book tour (more to be announced soon!): 1/31 Providence facebook.com/events/2432419893664520/ 2/24 Philly facebook.com/events/462775997752533/ 2/26 DC at solidstatebooksdc.com 2/28 Baltimore facebook.com/events/509390186368309/ 3/4 Boston at tridentbookscafe.com 3/11 New Orleans: All-American Nativism and A Planet to Win double book event with Thea Riofrancos at octaviabooks.com 3/17 Austin at monkeywrenchbooks.org 3/18 Dallas at deepvellum.org

Confronting the intertwined ecological, social, economic, and political crises. Dan interviews Thea Riofrancos and Daniel Aldana Cohen, co-authors with Kate Aronoff and Alyssa Battistoni of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

We need Bernie but a lot more too. Dan does three interviews with down-ballot left insurgent candidates: Jessica Cisneros, a Justice Democrat running against incumbent conservative Democrat Henry Cuellar in Texas’s 28th congressional district; Stephen Smith, who is running a populist campaign for West Virginia governor; and Heidi Sloan, a DSA candidate in the Democratic primary for Texas’s 25th Republican-held 25th congressional district. Thanks to University of California Press. Check out their huge selection of titles at ucpress.edu Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Why we need single-payer healthcare, why Medicare for All is suddenly at the center of debate, and why this is all part of a broader struggle for health justice. Dan interviews Tim Faust. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at Patreon.com/TheDig Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

An interview on how the transformation of capitalism has changed the possibilities for anti-capitalist struggle with Michael Hardt, co-author with Antonio Negri of Assembly. Read Dan’s essay on the 20th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle jacobinmag.com/2019/11/seattle-world-trade-organization-protests-socialism Read Hardt and Negri reflect on the 20th anniversary of Empire newleftreview.org/issues/II120/articles/empire-twenty-years-on 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

On the occasion of our third anniversary we are taking a break. Here’s a classic on settler colonialism from our archives: Paul Frymer on Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. a.k.a. episode 85 from January 30 2018. Thanks to University of North Carolina Press. Check out their Justice, Power, and Politics series uncpress.org/series/justice-power-politics Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Political scientist Jeff Webber discusses the coup against Evo Morales and the recent history of Bolivia. Read “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Macho Camacho” by Jeff Webber and Forrest Hylton www.versobooks.com/blogs/4493-the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-macho-camacho-jeffery-r-webber-with-forrest-hylton-on-the-coup-in-bolivia Thanks to University of California Press. Check out their titles at ucpress.edu Support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Naomi Klein on her new essay collection On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. Thanks to University of California Press. Check out their huge selection of titles at ucpress.edu Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Maria hit Puerto Rico as austerity dismantled its social and material infrastructure. But as Yarimar Bonilla explains, these years also taught Puerto Ricans about their own collective power, fueling the summer’s mass movement that overthrew Governor Ricardo Rosselló. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Mathew Lawrence, founder and director of the left-wing UK think tank Common Wealth, explains why ownership must be socialized, what that might look like, and how to make it happen. Thanks to UNC Press. Check out Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice By Lana Dee Povitz uncpress.org/book/9781469653013/stirrings Please support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

The divide between Latin American and the United States was not always so evident. Across the hemisphere, creoles—the descendants of European settlers, born in the Americas—launched revolutions to cast off European rule and preserve their own elite position over black and indigenous people. Joshua Simon explains how rival settler-colonial projects became today’s status quo of US dominance. Thanks to n+1. Dig listeners can take 25% off a year’s subscription. Go to nplusonemag.com/thedig to subscribe, and enter THEDIG at checkout. Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Adom Getachew explains how anticolonial leaders from across the black Atlantic tried to not only cast off European rule but also end empire by constructing an egalitarian global political and economic order in its place. Thanks to University of North Carolina Press. Check out Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor uncpress.org/book/9781469653662/race-for-profit/ Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Perhaps nowhere is the far right stronger than in India. There, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, continues in power under Prime Minister Narendra Modi after winning a huge victory in this year’s elections. The BJP, however, isn’t just a party. It’s the electoral wing of a Hindu nationalist movement that constitutes the largest and most organized far-right force on earth. A deep dive with Indian scholar Achin Vanaik. Read some of his recent work: newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/achin-vanaik-india-s-two-hegemonies jacobinmag.com/author/achin-vanaik Thanks to Princeton University Press. Check out The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691181547/the-fire-is-upon-usPlease support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Alex Gourevitch about how 19th century US labor radicals remade the idea of freedom into a principle of working-class social transformation. If you want more on the debate over Lexit, which they only touched on briefly, check out this June interview with Chris Bickerton and Jerome Roos www.thedigradio.com/podcast/the-european-situation-with-chris-bickerton-and-jerome-roos Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Noura Erakat, the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, a new book that analyzes the history of settler-colonialism in Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation from just before the British mandate to the present through the lens of the law. Thanks to Haymarket Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at haymarketbooks.org Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig. We need those of you who can support us to do so because we provide every episode free to all.

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 podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 matters. Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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/TheDig

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 titles at www.versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 creating a new Democratic Party that embraced a superficial politics of recognition while advancing a technocratic elite-driven neoliberal agenda that included the demonization and persecution of poor black mothers on welfare and mass incarceration. 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

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 with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 left-wing titles at versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 expansively defined to include those excluded by racist immigration law and mass incarceration. Dan discusses this, and more, with filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor. Read Astra’s article on socialism here: newrepublic.com/article/153804/reclaiming-future-growing-appeal-socialism-age-inequality Check out her film, What is Democracy? on your preferred streaming service. And her book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, here: us.macmillan.com/books/9781250179845 Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 dominating the Missouri River—was not just indigenous people being in the way but also the existence of a larger relationship between indigenous people and the land, water and animals. The history of resisting this capitalist and colonialist dispossession has endured through the Water Protectors’ struggle at Standing Rock—which will, in retrospect, be remembered as a pivotal moment in the global struggle against climate catastrophe. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 author of Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War. Thanks to Verso. Check out their massive left-wing book selection at versobooks.com Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register now at socialismconference.org Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 most traditional forces, is in utter disarray. Today, Lega, led by Interior Minister Mateo Salvini, runs Italian politics. But the bad news is maybe also the good news: Salvini has not solved Italy’s deep rooted economic problems, and so it’s quite possible that the very same instability that abetted his rise will ultimately lead to his downfall. Dan interviews David Broder, Lorenzo Zamponi and Marta Fana. Thanks to Verso. Check out their massive left-wing book selection at versobooks.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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! Register now at socialismconference.org Check out Next Left, a new podcast from The Nation magazine: thenation.com/next-left Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 National Assembly with La France insoumise. Check out War over Peace: One Hundred Years of Israel’s Militaristic Nationalism by Uri Ben-Eliezer ucpress.edu/book/9780520304345/war-over-peace Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 of great left-wing titles at versobooks.com Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register now at socialismconference.org Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 French politics with Sebastian Budget and Danièle Obono, a member of France’s National Assembly with the left-wing La France insoumise. Then, an interview on Spanish politics with Carlos Delclós and Magda Bandera. And finally, an interview with David Broder and Marta Fana on Italy. Thanks to n+1. To get 25% off a one-year subscription, go to nplusonemag.com/thedig and enter THEDIG at checkout Check out Next Left, a new podcast from The Nation magazine: thenation.com/next-left Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 must integrate racial justice into the core of his class struggle agenda, rather than emphasizing it as a separate and siloed issue. Read Dan’s critique of Bernie’s immigration agenda jacobinmag.com/2019/04/bernie-sanders-immigrant-rights-border-policy Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register for the early-bird rate now at socialismconference.org Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 Culture of Greed ucpress.edu/book/9780520294776/mean-girl Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register for the early-bird rate now at socialismconference.org Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 capitalism. Then, scholars Crystal Eddins and Zachary Sell on revolution and counter-revolution across the racial capitalist global order. Finally, public historians Akeia Benard, Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, Elon Cook Lee and Marco McWilliams on teaching slavery today. Go to the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago July 4-7! Register for the early-bird rate now at socialismconference.org Check out Next Left, a new podcast from The Nation magazine. Their first interview is with Rep. Ilhan Omar. thenation.com/next-left Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 that required genocidally dispossessing indigenous people of their lands. What you might not know is that a central tactic for that dispossession, in New England and Virginia alike, was the threat and actual enslavement of native people, including the widespread practice of forcing native youth to labor in English homes. Then historians Christy Clark-Pujara and Joanne Melish, who pick up where Fisher leaves off: slavery wasn’t the South’s peculiar institution; it was the bedrock of the northern economy. And finally, historian Emily Owens on sexual labor under slavery: what, Owens’ work explores, did slavery and freedom mean for women for whom, in brothels or the home, sex was work? On the next episode, Dan has two more interviews looking at the big picture questions of slavery, capitalism, revolution and colonialism, and an interview with a group of public historians who teach about slavery today. Thanks to n+1. To get 25% off a one-year subscription, go to nplusonemag.com/thedig and enter THEDIG at checkout Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Donna Haraway’s work defies disciplines, combining insights from both biology and feminist thought, and drawing on her own involvement in political projects organized around feminism and radical science. Haraway’s most recent book, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, takes up these questions as the fragility of earth’s webs of life is becoming frighteningly and increasingly apparent. What are the ethical and political demands in the face of the most pressing threat of our era—catastrophic climate change? To stay with the trouble, Haraway argues, is to reject technofixes that will save us from doom on the one hand, and on the other, to reject the pessimistic idea that “it’s too late” to make the world better. The book outlines a view of what Haraway calls “multispecies flourishing” and the obstacles to achieving it through theoretical insights and speculative fiction imaginings. Interviewed by Jacobin editorial board member Alyssa Battistoni. Thanks to n+1. To get 25% off a one-year subscription, go to nplusonemag.com/thedig and enter THEDIG at checkout The documentary Donna Haraway: Story Telling For Earthly Survival is now available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo, as well as on DVD via Icarus Films. Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig Alyssa’s piece on Haraway for n+1: nplusonemag.com/issue-28/reviews/monstrous-duplicated-potent Sophie Lewis’s critique of Haraway and population politics: viewpointmag.com/2017/05/08/cthulhu-plays-no-role-for-me The Leap Manifesto: leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto The Xenofeminist Manifesto: laboriacuboniks.net

View Transcript What is gentrification? It isn’t just about what was once known as the hipster and is still known as the artist, the telltale warning signs of impending demographic change. It’s part of an entire political-economic order that has made real estate global capitalism’s most prized asset for storing wealth—one that has helped bend place-based urban governments to the will of mobile, and thus more powerful, capital. Dan interviews Samuel Stein on his book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Come to The Dig’s Slavery’s Hinterlands symposium Thursday through Saturday in Rhode Island: facebook.com/events/661508874305008/ Check out the English transcript of last week’s Spanish-language interview with Communist Chilean Mayor Daniel Jadue jacobinmag.com/2019/04/communist-party-chile-left-governance-recoleta Thanks to Verso. Check out their massive left-wing book selection at www.versobooks.com Please support us with your cash at Patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript *This episode of The Dig is a special Dig in Spanish. Visit Jacobin for a transcript in English. Este episodio de The Dig es un Dig especial en español. Entra a Jacobin para una transcripción en inglés.* Cuando se piensa en Chile desde el extranjero, generalmente surge la imagen de su pasado reciente marcado por la dictadura cívico–militar. Y esto con toda razón. El legado del régimen genocida de Pinochet todavía está presente en todas partes—en la memoria personal y colectiva, en las leyes y en una constitución profundamente neoliberal que sigue condenando al sistema político a un bipartidismo e impide las transformaciones deseadas por la soberanía popular. Daniel Jadue, el alcalde de la comuna de Recoleta, ubicada en la Región Metropolitana del Gran Santiago, se ha entregado a la empresa de construir en su territorio un laboratorio del comunismo del presente y del futuro. Junto a su equipo ha abierto una farmacia popular, una óptica popular y una linda librería popular. Todos estos servicios de primera necesidad venden sus productos a precios bajos y justos desafiando con ello a un mercado supuestamente autoregulado que en Chile sólo ha demostrado funcionar más bien estimulando prácticas de monopolio—un capitalismo salvaje. Si nos estas escuchando hoy por primera vez con este episodio especial en español y también hablas inglés, por favor revisa nuestro archivo que contiene muchísimas entrevistas con intelectuales y activistas de la izquierda: blubrry.com/thedig/

The US has played a major role in fomenting violence across Yemen, backing the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led forces attacking the country while also conducting a direct war against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula under the guise of counterterrorism. But while it’s understandable that US involvement is the top focus for the American left, understanding the war in Yemen requires a much broader analysis. The Yemeni conflict not only includes multiple outside actors but also multiple groups of Yemenis pursuing different outcomes, rooted in a complex history that few outside of Yemen understand. Explaining that context is what this show, in partnership with the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), is all about. This special episode includes two interviews with contributors to Middle East Report, MERIP’s print publication. First, up is Yemeni journalist Afrah Nasser and political scientist Stacey Philbrick Yadav; and then, Dan speaks with political-economist Adam Hanieh. Check out The Fight for Yemen, the latest issue of Middle East Report at merip.org/magazine/289/ Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.org Please support this podcast with your cash at Patreon.com/TheDig 96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

In the US, China is often viewed at best as a nefarious and enigmatic rival and at worst as a civilizational enemy. But these stories of national rivalry that permeate both major parties and the mainstream media function as a mystification, shrouding the global supply chain that connects capitalist exploitation from East to West. When we cut through the noise, a rather different picture emerges: China is home to a massive portion of the world’s working-class, a class that is struggling against the combined forces of state and global capital for dignified lives. And these struggles, contrary to conventional wisdom, are deeply connected, rather than opposed to, worker struggles in the West. Dan interviews sociologist Jenny Chan on China’s class conflict and labor movement. 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

Car dominance, public transit austerity, and the neoliberal political-economy within which both are embedded have fomented what Marx called idiocy, in its classical sense of privatized social isolation. Dan talks to geographer Kafui Attoh, the author of Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California’s East Bay, about the political-economy of public transit and why the fight for transportation justice must be part of a broader struggle for the right to the city. André Gorz’s “The social ideology of the motorcar” unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/ Two upcoming live Dig tapings in Providence! April 23: Dan interviews Sam Stein on his book Capital City facebook.com/events/2164662790291372/ May 2-4: Slavery’s Hinterlands: Capitalism and bondage in Rhode Island and across the Atlantic world facebook.com/events/661508874305008/ And check out the Philadelphia Socialist Feminist Convergence, April 26-28 socfemphilly.wordpress.com Thanks to Verso Books. Peruse their massive selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com

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 Catalyst article The Strike as the Ultimate Structure Test. And her Jacobin article Organizing to Win a Green New Deal. 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

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.com Please 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-world And 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

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-burning And 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

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-deal 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 -->

View Transcript 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.com Please 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.com Please support us with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan discusses The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—Marx’s take on revolution and reaction in mid-19th 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 new 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’ 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

View Transcript 96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE --> 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.com   Please 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.com Please 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.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Show Transcript 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

View Transcript 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.com Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript 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.com Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 wellbeing. 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

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.com Please 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

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.com Please 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-22956541 https://www.patreon.com/posts/reinventing-anti-20945069   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

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’ 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 catalogue 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

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 that 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. The New School’s Arnhold Hall at the Theresa Lang Student Center. 96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} 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 apparently 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

View Transcript Historian Howard Zinn remains a model for left-wing intellectuals who want to not only convey ideas to a public beyond academia but also take action to transform the world that it is their profession to explain. Dan interviews Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor, a leading intellectual of today’s resurgent socialist left, on her foreword to a new edition of Zinn’s autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. 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

The brutality of the Saudi royal family had been hiding in plain sight. It was an open secret convenient to the political, media and business elites for whom the Kingdom means big business and an invaluable geostrategic proxy. But the brutal murder and dismemberment of a single Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, has forced Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman and his American enablers onto the defensive as the regime’s brutal war on Yemen, global support for Salafist fundamentalism, and kleptocratric repression have suddenly been subjected to intense public scrutiny. Dissident scholar Madawi al-Rasheed explains the history and political-economy of Saudi Arabia, and the now-frustrated efforts at obfuscation mounted by bin Salman and his allies. 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

Recently, Dan spoke to Nikhil Pal Singh about the unfortunate and never-ending debate over whether it was economics or racism that got Trump elected. This is a sequel to that discussion: because what Malaika Jabali powerfully exposes in a Current Affairs piece combining on-the-ground reporting in Milwaukee and historical and data analysis is that when we talk about the impact of economic crisis on Trump’s victory, the condition of Black poor and working-class people—many of whom decided to stay home on election day—must be at its center. 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

Jacobin Managing Editor Micah Uetricht pulls Dave-Davies-duty for Dan and interviews Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez, a DSA member running for alderwoman in Chicago. Rodríguez-Sanchez moved to Chicago from Puerto Rico, where the brutal austerity imposed on the island made her job as a teacher impossible. She has brought with her a radical tradition and a program to fight for the city’s beleaguered public schools, for renters and for immigrant rights, and for a public safety agenda that prioritizes social workers over cops. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of radical titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

CORRECT EPISODE NOW POSTED. Today’s episode is on the alarming new report out from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and how it is that William Nordhaus—an economist whose work is dedicated to arguing that that it would be too inefficient to address the ecological crisis aggressively and urgently—recently won the discipline’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Dan speaks to Alyssa Battisoni, a PhD candidate in political science and member of Jacobin’s editorial board. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing books at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at www.patreon.com/TheDig

96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Brazil is headed toward fascism by way of Jair Bolsonaro, a sexist, homophobic, and violent militarist clown nostalgic for a murderous dictatorship. How did this happen? Alfredo Saad-Filho, a Professor of Political Economy at SOAS University of London, explains the roots of right-wing reaction and left-wing collapse—and the ultimately disastrous results of a PT governance strategy centered on an accommodation with a capitalist order that could only last as long as the global commodity boom did. Read “Bolsonaro’s Conservative Revolution” by Matthew Aaron Richmond https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/brazil-election-bolsonaro-evangelicals-security Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing books at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant was elected to Seattle City Council way before socialism became a cool thing. Today, Dan’s talking to Sawant about how socialists can build power and win at the local level—and how in Seattle, that means taking on Amazon, which recently coerced her colleagues on Council to reverse themselves on a big-business tax that was earmarked to help the homeless people who have been squeezed out of the housing market by an economy dominated by those very same big businesses. 96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their enormous catalogue of left-wing books at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Today, we’re addressing one of the most obnoxious corners of the identity politics debate. And that is the corner occupied by Right Liberals who believe that any desire to change the world is a divisive symptom of maladjusted affluenza emanating from pampered college students. Moira Weigel discusses her Guardian review of The Coddling of the American Mind, which makes its case by way of pragmatic folk aphorisms like: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing books at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with you money at patreon.com/TheDig

Let’s ensure that the history of American socialism doesn’t repeat as farce. That’s one reason that Max Elbaum wrote Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, an account of the little-remembered New Communist Movement that defined the American anti-capitalist Left of the 1970s. Their internationalism, anti-racism and cadre organization were in many ways admirable. Their dogmatism and sectarianism proved disastrous. Elbaum relates this history, and the lessons that the New Left failed to learn from the Old Left—lessons that today’s resurgent left would be wise to study. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing titles, including Revolution in the Air, at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with MONEY at patreon.com/TheDig

Christine Blasey Ford and other women have revealed that our political-economic elite is pervaded by profound intimate violence, forms of brutal interpersonal domination that are the everyday and microcosmic connective tissue of systems of domination as a whole. Lisa Duggan offers her thoughts on how to link these individual stories that playing out at economic, political and celebrity peaks to the systems that order the world that the rest of us live in. Duggan also addresses carceral feminism and how “believe women” obscures the way that gender and sexuality are embedded in political and economic structures. Plus, she rethinks her controversial blog post about Avital Ronell in response to grad student critics. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing books at versobooks.com And please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

An interview with three members of Reclaim Philadelphia, which emerged from the Bernie 2016 campaign in Philly and has since—in a remarkably short amount of time—played a key role in getting Larry Krasner elected District Attorney, effectively won a state legislative seat, and taken over two Democratic Wards in the city. Much of the debate on the left over how to engage in electoral politics revolves around how to relate to the inside and outside of electoral politics as they currently exist: in other words, how to approach the unfortunate reality of the Democratic Party. Reclaim Philadelphia brings an outsider perspective and base to a hard-nosed insider game. Nikil Saval, Rick Krajewski and Amanda Mcillmurray explain what they do and how they do it. Thanks to Verso Books. Peruse their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Serious people in Washington are seduced by vapid and self-serving accounts of their savvy operation of the machinery of government—works like Bob Woodward’s latest exercise in extended stenography Fear: Trump in the White House. The problem with Trump—for defenders of the establishment political order that helped make his presidency possible—is precisely that he’s not a man like John McCain, a bloodthirsty and world-historically successful self-mythologizer. Patrick Blanchfield on his review of Fear in n+1 and obituary of John McCain in The Baffler. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their massive collective of left-wing books at versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

The United States today exceeds at perpetually waging wars that it are destined to fail to meet their purported objectives. The War on Terror is one such war. The War on Drugs is another. In both cases, failure never leads to much official questioning of the war let alone a repudiation of its underlying wisdom. The conventional wisdom is always that the war just hasn’t been waged in the right way, or aggressively enough. My guest today is Leo Beletsky, who directs the Health in Justice Action Lab at at Northeastern University. He and Jeremiah Goulka recently published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the abolition of the DEA, noting that after hundreds of billions of dollars spent fatal overdose rates have skyrocketed to a historic high. Let’s #AbolishDEA. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out a huge catalogue of excellent left-wing books at versobooks.com Please support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

For many, conservatives and liberals alike, Appalachia provides a skeleton key for interpreting changes in American politics that might otherwise be difficult to comprehend. But the way conservatives and liberals talk about Appalachia tells us a lot more about conservatives and liberals than it does about the region. Elizabeth Catte, the author of What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia, puts the region and representations of it in historical and political-economic context. Thanks to Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com. And thanks to University of California Press, which just published Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century by Barbara Ransby ucpress.edu/book/9780520292710/making-all-black-lives-matter Support this podcast with money at Patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript Legendary critical theorist Nancy Fraser argues that a total analysis of capitalism requires taking Marxism beyond a narrowly economistic view. Throughout its history, capitalism has been defined not just by labor exploitation but also by the disavowal of that exploitation’s own basic conditions of possibility: the things that the daily business of labor exploitation and surplus value appropriation require from politics, care work, war-making, mining, patriarchy, racism and more. Thanks to Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com. And thanks to University of California Press. Check out Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat ucpress.edu/book/9780520298576/uberland Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

What socialism should offer is freedom by way of power and democratic control over our polity and economy—and thus over our future as a society. Matt Bruenig has one proposal out at his People’s Policy Project on how to begin to do just that, and it’s called a social wealth fund. The idea is that the state gradually socializes the assets of every single publicly-traded company in the United States by purchasing their stocks. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing titles at versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Nikhil Pal Singh on the unfortunate obsession shared by certain pundits, journalists and social scientists: definitively proving that Trump won because of racism, and racism alone. What drives so many people to dedicate so much time to arguing that either class or race or gender or whatever matters the most—or worse yet, matters exclusively? And what does “matter more” even mean? Plus, a lengthy Dan Denvir monologue on the identity politics debate on the socialist left. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out versobooks.com for loads of great left-wing titles. Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan speaks to Elizabeth Rush, the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a lyrical, mournful but ultimately hopeful account of people dealing with amongst the most tangible effects of global warming right now: the rising seas that are threatening poor and working-class people with dislocation, community destruction and compounded destitution. It’s a beautifully-written guide to the current crisis that sugarcoats nothing yet that highlights how ordinary people can organize to fight for their future and that of the planet where we live. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their massive collection of left-wing books for sale at versobooks.com And please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Today’s episode is a long one. It’s the first of two this week on climate politics: a live event that I hosted at Verso Books in New York a couple weeks ago. Or, at least part of it is. The event livestream, which we grabbed the audio from, malfunctioned for the first half hour or so of the episode. And so, dear listeners, we made lemonade out of audiovisual lemons and re-did the first part of the interview later over the phone from Providence. Dan spoke to Audrea Lim, Thea Riofrancos, Ashley Dawson and Daniel Aldana Cohen about how the left should respond to the climate crisis—and how that response, for better or for worse, will require a deep transformation in social and economic relations, and also in our built environment and how we inhabit it. In other words, eco-socialism is the only solution because we can’t achieve real ecological balance without socialism, and true socialism that delivers liberation would be concretely impossible without ecological balance. Thanks to Verso. Check out so many good lefty titles at www.versobooks.com And please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Josie Duffy Rice on Justice in America, her new podcast from The Appeal that she co-hosts with with Clint Smith, media coverage of criminal justice, carceral feminism and domestic violence, and the disturbing liberal affection for federal law enforcement under Trump. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out For a Left Populism by Chantal Mouffe versobooks.com/books/2748-for-a-left-populism Support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Russia: the more your average American thinks about it, the less they seem to know. National security-state enthused liberals blame Putin and for creating what is an obviously-if-incomprehensibly made-in-America monster. Trump, in turn, cannot seem to contain his giddy enthusiasm for Putin’s brand of hyper-masculine authoritarianism. Meanwhile, Russia, an actual country where roughly 144 million people live, has become mostly invisible to Americans—because it has been replaced by a caricature. Sean Guillory, the host of the SRB podcast and author of seansrussiablog.org, explains it all. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle versobooks.com/books/2698-new-dark-age And The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Part two of a two-part interview with Aslı Bâli on the Syrian civil war and the larger geopolitical conflicts that shape the Middle East—with an emphasis on the role played the United States. During part one, which you should definitely listen to first, Bâli discussed the various powers sacrificing the lives of Syrian people in the pursuit of their perceived geopolitical and sectarian interests. In this installment, Bâli discusses the restrictive frames that dominates the American discussion over Syria, and then assesses the lack of a coherent heterodox left-wing foreign policy in the United States—something that we desperately need as the possibility of the left taking power becomes newly plausible. Read: Remember Syria? by Bâli and Aziz Rana bostonreview.net/war-security/asli-bali-aziz-rana-trump-putin-syria and The U.S. Debt to Syria bostonreview.net/war-security/asli-u-bali-aziz-rana-us-debt-syria Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It’s called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about Thanks to Verso Books. Check out For a Left Populism by Chantal Mouffe versobooks.com/books/2748-for-a-left-populism Support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Aslı Ü. Bâli joins Daniel for part one of a two-part interview on the Syrian Civil War and the murderously instrumentalized geopolitics that fuel it. Syrians continue to suffer and to die while various actors treat the conflict as a proxy for their own geopolitical ends; meanwhile, huge numbers of Syrian refugees languish in neighboring countries, and the much smaller number who have made their way to Europe and the United States have been utilized by a resurgent far-right to blame ordinary Syrians for violence rooted in the colonial operations of those very same countries that now insist on keeping the refugees out. Read: Remember Syria? by Bâli and Aziz Rana bostonreview.net/war-security/asli-bali-aziz-rana-trump-putin-syria and The U.S. Debt to Syria bostonreview.net/war-security/asli-u-bali-aziz-rana-us-debt-syria Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It’s called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about Thanks to Verso Books. Check out New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle versobooks.com/books/2698-new-dark-age And Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class by Mike Davis versobooks.com/books/2759-prisoners-of-the-american-dream Support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

That right-wing people in the US and Europe have made George Soros the answer to so many troubling questions is not very surprising: he’s a billionaire, he’s Jewish and, unlike most of his cohort, he is an actual intellectual who spends much of his money on substantively progressive causes. Daniel Bessner’s essay on him in n+1, however, not only sketches out the right’s obsessions but also offers a detailed analysis of Soros as a thinker and philanthropist—coming to the conclusion that Soros’ hope for an open and pluralistic society will be forever doomed if we continue to live under the very capitalist system that made him so spectacularly rich. Here’s Soros’s response in The Guardian. Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It’s called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter

Sorry to Bother You is a hilarious film about the dead serious shitiness of life under neoliberalism’s flexibilized and precarious labor regime, a system teetering upon a thin line between free labor exploitation and a form of expropriation reminiscent of full-on slave labor—all at the mercy of the thinly-veiled barbarity of Palo Alto-style techno-utopianism. It’s about how capitalist society divides and conquers friends and family to claim not only our obedience but also our very souls, and about how the task of left organizing is to see through that game and fight together. Dan’s guest today is Boots Riley, who wrote and directed the film and also fronts the left-wing hip hop group The Coup. Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It’s called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage And October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville versobooks.com/books/2731-october Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter

If Kerri Evelyn Harris wins in Delaware, she will have knocked out an incumbent US Senator. And that would be a really big deal. Harris, a left candidate backed by Justice Democrats, is Dan’s guest today. She is the latest candidate putting forward the bold proposition that in a democracy ordinary people should govern themselves—particularly since well-credentialed incumbents like her opponent, Senator Tom Carper, so often do the bidding of corporate interests. Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It’s called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter

The SESTA/FOSTA law purportedly aims to curb sex trafficking. But as my guest Melissa Gira Grant explains, it actually denies sex workers access to online platforms to more safely conduct their business. It received just two “no” votes in the Senate: from Rand Paul and Ron Wyden. It’s a problem of hegemony: prohibition has long been plain common sense. So, it’s our job to change that. The first step is to make it clear that there is dissent, and that prohibition is self-evidently neither good policy nor good politics. Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It’s called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity And The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter

View Transcript Kaniela Ing (kanielaing.com) is a DSA member running in Hawaii’s 1st Congressional District, calling for an end to imperialism and rule by the wealthy, and for housing rights, a green New Deal, Medicare for All, and free college. And he’s Dan’s guest. Ocasio-Cortez became an overnight celebrity when she defeated Joe Crowely. But what’s most important is that you know who these candidates are before election day—because that’s when they most need your help. Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It’s called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter

Janus was an entirely expected and atrocious decision. The conservative business interests that successfully obliterated private sector unions hope it will do the same to their public-sector counterparts. Chris Maisano, a contributing editor at Jacobin, argues that labor has no choice but to return to its militant roots if it hopes to survive. In other words, to survive, labor has to fight for a lot more than mere survival. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity And The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur Live Dig show in NYC on 8/17! Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about Support this podcast with your $ and receive our weekly newsletter and lefty books at patreon.com/TheDig

Checking your privilege. Invisible knapsacks. Intersectionality. In his new book from Verso, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, Asad Haider questions the terms and concepts that underpin much liberal and left conversation about race and racism, exploring critiques advanced by the black radical tradition to mount a thoroughgoing demolition of what we now refer to as “identity politics”—something that had a quite different meaning when it was first coined by the black, radical lesbian feminists of the Combahee River Collective. This is not a book that dismisses racism and sexism. Quite to the contrary. Haider shows that we can only confront and defeat oppressions like racism and sexism if we recognize their relationship to the capitalist exploitation of the working class as a whole. The corollary is also true: capitalism can never be defeated without recognizing and fighting the various oppressions that help sustain it. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out We Built the Wall: How the US Keeps Out Asylum Seekers from Mexico, Central America and Beyond by Eileen Truax versobooks.com/books/2606-we-built-the-wall And Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory by Mike Davis And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDigversobooks.com/books/2779-old-gods-new-enigmas And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript The last episode in this week’s Ocasio-Cortez super series. First, an interview with Seth Ackerman on his essay “A Blueprint for a New Party,” which lays out a strategy for building independent socialist power effectively, which means opportunistically seizing the Democratic Party ballot line when necessary. jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-labor-party-ackerman/ Then, Kate Aronoff on her article “A Revolution From Within,” which explains Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, two organizations formed out of the Bernie campaign that are playing critical roles in the left electoral insurgency. dissentmagazine.org/article/transforming-electoral-process-our-revolution-justice-democrats Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

This week’s super series on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory and the future of left politics continues with Julia Salazar, a DSA member running for a Brooklyn state Senate in New York’s District 18. Salazar’s campaign worked hard for Ocasio-Cortez; now, Ocasio-Cortez’s team is returning the favor. Recently, The New York Daily News wondered if Salazar might be the new Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez responded: Salazar “isn’t the next me, she’s the first HER.” Indeed, Salazar has her own story to tell. She immigrated from Colombia as a child, and came of age as a young activist by organizing a rent strike in her Harlem building. She describes herself as a democratic socialist, which she defines as recognizing “the capitalist system as being inherently oppressive and actively working to dismantle it and to empower the working class and the marginalized in our society.” Get involved with the campaign at salazarforsenate.com Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript Capitol Hill used to be a lonely place for a leftist. And, frankly, it still is. But now that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appears to be headed to Washington, Senator Bernie Sanders will likely have some powerful company. Today, Sanders is Dan’s guest, and they’re talking about the impact of Ocasio-Cortez’s victory and where the left goes from here. This is the latest interview in this week’s Ocasio-Cortez super series, which has already included interviews with Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon. Next up is DSA member Julia Salazar, who is running for state senate in Brooklyn. Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory should make New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a larger-than-life bully and ideologically-chameleon Democrat, very afraid. He faces a challenge from Dan’s guest today, Cynthia Nixon, who has spent the years after her time on Sex in the City organizing for public education. After what happened to Joe Crowley, the left is more energized than ever. And what once appeared to be a long-shot attack on the king of New York politics now appears like it might just hit its target. This is the second episode in this week’s super series on left electoral politics in the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning win. Thanks to Verso. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a 28-year old Latina working-class champion committed to social transformation who beat one of the most powerful men in Congress: the King of Queens. Dan had an extended conversation with her about how organized people won her election, how she’ll stay accountable to those movements now that she’s a rock star, establishment myopia and denial, The Congressional Progressive Caucus’ shortcomings, and where the insurgency goes from here. Then Intercept D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim on left media and left electoral politics, why mainstream media missed Ocasio-Cortez, and why Emily’s List fails to support left women challengers. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx with Sven-Eric Liedman versobooks.com/events/1785-a-world-to-win-the-life-and-works-of-karl-marx-with-sven-eric-liedman And the new paperback edition of China Miéville’s October: The Story of the Russian Revolution versobooks.com/books/2731-october And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, won an overwhelming victory in Mexico’s presidential election, shattering a corrupt, old party system that brought ordinary Mexicans rampant violence and economic immiseration. But AMLO faces powerful political and economic constraints once in office—including some of his own making. Dan’s guest is Christy Thornton, a professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins. During the last week, she was an election observer for the Scholar and Citizen Network for Democracy in Mexico. Thanks to Verso. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot, now out in paperback versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage George did a Dig interview too blubrry.com/thedig/34202825/telling-a-new-story-with-george-monbiot/ And Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity You can find lots of great left Latin America news in English at nacla.org Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Today, we’re talking about Italy, where a so-called “populist” alliance of the Five Star Movement and right-wing League just took over the government with anti-migrant and Euro-skeptic agenda. Dan’s guest is David Broder, a historian of French and Italian communism and frequent contributor to Jacobin. The Five Star Movement was for a time welcomed by some on the left. But it’s not of the left; rather, it is a product of the Italian left’s collapse.   Thanks to Verso. Check out Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies   And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org   And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Stephen Wertheim, a Lecturer in American and international history at Birkbeck, University of London, breaks cuts through the suffocating foreign policy debate that shapes American Empire under Trump.   Peace has broken out across the Korean Peninsula—or, at least, the odds that Donald Trump will blow the world up have gone down a just a bit—at least temporarily. Yes, Trump is the one who pushed us way too close to the brink of nuclear war. And yes, he likely sought peace with Kim Jong-Un because he loves wins, whatever their political or ideological content. But wow, has the liberal reaction been revealing. According to the mindset that pervades the liberal media and political elite, a move toward peace with North Korea is bad because Trump is bad. Or perhaps worse yet, it’s bad because the national security state conventional wisdom that has governed Washington under both parties for so long—purveyed by the very people who have brought us endless war almost everywhere—says that it’s bad. It’s clearer than ever that the task of the left to find a way out of this ideological closed circuit of the liberal vs. Trump foreign policy debate—and, if we win power, to shut down its warmongering for good.   Thanks to Verso. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity   And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org   Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Everyone wants to know what’s wrong with Appalachia. But beginning in the 1960s, it was “white ethics”—Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews and other non-WASPs—who broke from the New Deal coalition, embracing their Ellis Island immigrant roots in reaction to the Black Freedom struggle and, ultimately, Latin American migration. Dan’s guest today is Matthew Frye Jacobson, an historian at Yale and the author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America, from Harvard University Press. Thanks to Verso. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot, now out in paperback versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage George did a Dig interview too blubrry.com/thedig/34202825/telling-a-new-story-with-george-monbiot/ And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind, one very bright spot in an often disappointing landscape of mainstream immigration journalism, discusses the historical, political and legal context of Trump’s family separation policy. Dan also just wrote a lengthy piece on this for Jacobin, which you can read at jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-immigration-child-family-separation-policy Thanks to Verso Books. Check out the new paperback edition of China Miéville’s October: The Story of the Russian Revolution versobooks.com/books/2731-october And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript David Harvey has taught Capital to huge numbers of people everywhere. Dan interviews him about his latest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. Harvey explains why he thinks all three volumes are of Capital are key, why we’re still living under neoliberalism at least unless and until ethnonationalist autarchy pushes it aside, how capitalism might survive climate change via mass immiseration, and linking struggles over production and consumption in the fight to transform society toward socialism. And more.   Thanks to Verso. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity   Register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org   And support this podcast with $$ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript The US colony of Puerto Rico has been repeatedly shocked and Puerto Ricans are traumatized. That is precisely what successful shock doctrines like this one—which wants to remake the island into a utopia for rich Americans and crypto-bros and a dystopia for everyone else—depend upon. This is is the subject of Naomi Klein’s new book from Haymarket, The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. Today, Klein returns to The Dig, and is joined by Mercedes Martínez, president of the Puerto Rican Teachers Federation. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx with Sven-Eric Liedman versobooks.com/events/1785-a-world-to-win-the-life-and-works-of-karl-marx-with-sven-eric-liedman Also, register for the upcoming Socialism 2018 conference at SocialismConference.org Support this podcast with $ and get our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Last week, we posted an interview Dan recorded in Barcelona on Spanish politics—specifically the question of Catalan independence, and also the municipalist movement governing cities like Barcelona. What we didn’t really talk much about was the fact that the conservative Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy was about to fall—which it did, just a few days later. So, Dan brought sociologist Carlos Delclós back for a follow-up interview. Production note: Dan sounds like he’s speaking in an aquarium or calling into his own show because he fucked up the recording. So don’t blame Alex Lewis. Thanks to Verso. Check out Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties by Tariq Ali versobooks.com/books/2666-street-fighting-years Also, register for the upcoming Socialism 2018 conference at SocialismConference.org And support this podcast with $ and get access to our stellar weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

For libertarians, liberty means something different. It’s about liberty for property owners. And in their quest to preserve that absolute freedom for the ownership class—whether their assets be human slaves, factories or extractive industries—democracy must be curtailed and the power of the people must be checked and repressed. This is the argument put forward by Dan’s guest, historian Nancy MacLean, in her book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. The book makes a powerful argument for the anti-democratic origins and trajectory of free-market fundamentalist Koch-Brothers-aligned economists who have come to profoundly shape and warp American politics to fit their dystopian vision. The book has also been controversial. Thank you to Verso Books. Check out Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite. Thank you to the Socialism 2018 conference. Register now at socialismconference.org Want to get access to our stellar weekly newsletter? You can do so by making a contribution to the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

Fifty years ago, a mainstream group of high-profile Americans declared the following: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.” The Kerner Commission, established by President Johnson, embodied left liberalism at its most bold and idealistic. But that vision of radical reform was eviscerated by the American war on Vietnam, the rise of neoliberalism and the modern conservative movement, and liberal triangulation that reached its apotheosis under Bill Clinton. Dan talks to Vanessa A. Bee, a consumer protection lawyer in D.C. and a social media editor for Current Affairs magazine, about her New York magazine essay on the subject nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/how-we-can-get-a-more-equal-union.html Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and access our new weekly newsletter.

Spanish politics are complicated. Dan speaks to Carlos Delclós, Kate Shea Baird and Bécquer Seguín to help clarify the Catalan independence movement, the radical municipalist governments that now govern major Spanish cities including Barcelona, and the promise and problems of the left-wing party Podemos. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art. And Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and access our new weekly newsletter.

The steady pace of school massacres has revived calls to put more cops in school. And so atrocities committed by white students are exploited to make schools more like prisons, and ensure that the former remain a rapid-fire pipeline into the latter. Dan’s guests are Dakota Hall, the Executive Director of Leaders Igniting Transformation, a youth of color led organization fighting the school to prison pipeline in Milwaukee; and Dmitri Holtzman, the Director of Education Justice Campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show and access our weekly newsletter at Patreon.com/TheDig

A laundry list of modest policy solutions is not enough, it turns out. It’s not just that technocratic fixes-around-the-edges spectacularly fail to meet people’s needs; in failing to articulate a big picture vision of how the world ought to be transformed, they fail to move people—either emotionally or, more concretely, to the polls. Dan’s guest George Monbiot argues that the left needs a powerful new story to win power and change lives in his new book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx with Sven-Eric Liedman versobooks.com/events/1785-a-world-to-win-the-life-and-works-of-karl-marx-with-sven-eric-liedman Support this podcast with $ and get our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Israel is massacring Palestinians daring to approach a fence that occupation forces have built to shore up an ethno-state founded on the principle of apartheid. Nothing could be more clear. But you wouldn’t no that from the at best muddied coverage that prevails in mainstream media accounts. Dan’s guest  is Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, professor at George Mason University and a powerful and eloquent voice challenging the anti-Palestine narrative—including, straight into the lion’s den of TV news. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties by Tariq Ali versobooks.com/books/2666-street-fighting-years Check out the Socialism 2018 conference at socialismconference.org And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” The rule of law: the #resistance has construed it to be a cornerstone of opposition to Trump. It is certainly alarming to live under a president who flirts with operating in a permanent and near-total state of exception. But it’s the rule of law as we’ve known it that has blessed the wide-open floodgates of corporate money into American politics, looked the other way in the face of unchecked national security state abuses, christened separate and unequal schools and, of course, rubber-stamped the rise of mass incarceration. The law has no transcendent moral basis. Rather, it is shaped by political-economy. Dan’s guest is Amy Kapczynski, professor of law at Yale Law School, and a co-convenor of LPEblog.org. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Recent cases of horrific child abuse have elicited widespread media attention. What the media coverage often misses is what these incidents reveal about a two-tiered child protection system that systemically surveils, punishes and destroys poor black families while ignoring abuses perpetrated in affluent white homes. Dan’s guest is return guest Dorothy Roberts, who has closely studied the racism and poverty policing that pervades the child protection system. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum versobooks.com/books/2707-revolution-in-the-air

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 12.8px Arial; color: #222222; -webkit-text-stroke: #222222; background-color: #ffffff} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 12.8px Arial; color: #222222; -webkit-text-stroke: #222222; background-color: #ffffff; min-height: 15.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 12.8px Arial; color: #222222; -webkit-text-stroke: #222222} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.s2 {font-kerning: none; background-color: #ffffff} span.s3 {font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000} Today’s Dig is a very good and somewhat unusual Dig: Dan’s got two interviews with two different people. First, journalist Eric Blanc on the teacher strike wave that he’s been covering for Jacobin. Then comes the Center for Popular Democracy’s Xiomara Caro Diaz on last week’s May Day demonstrations against austerity in Puerto Rico. Thanks to Verso Books. Check Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art. Also, check out the Socialism 2018 Conference at SocialismConference.org. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan just moderated a discussion in Philadelphia with Senator Sanders, along with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, scholar and frequent Dig guest Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and veteran defense lawyer and advocate Premal Dharia. Bernie came to Philly because what’s happening here is extraordinarily important: it’s a city where for years cops have committed abuses and engaged in corruption with near impunity, and where prosecutors long looked the other way while feeding poor young black and brown men into the present-day peculiar institution of mass incarceration. Last year, Philadelphia elected Krasner, a long-time civil rights champion who pledged to fight the to end mass incarceration, as its district attorney. And that happened for the same reason that Bernie came out of nowhere and nearly ran away with the Democratic nomination in 2016: their message tapped into and was lifted up by massive grassroots movements, representing and speaking to an emerging majority that wants transformative change. And so this is why Bernie Sanders came to Philly: to learn about what has gone so horribly wrong with the criminal justice system and how we can all organize and do the hard work to make it right. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement by Heather Gautney versobooks.com/books/2549-crashing-the-party. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

This is part two of Dan’s interview on Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the right to have rights.” This episode covers a lot, including why we must fight not only to expand the democratic political community but also to deepen its power—all at a time when the nativist right is exploiting the many crises unleashed by neoliberalism and empire to erect walls and punish scapegoats. One upshot is that zombie liberalism can’t be the answer, because it is precisely the liberal order that is a key source of the problem. Dan’s guests today, Stephanie DeGooyer and Astra Taylor, just wrote a book about this for Verso, called the The Right to Have Rights. This is part 2. It’s strongly suggested that you listen to part 1 first. Also: check out and support the soon-to-be-made documentary Socialism: An American Story https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/socialismmovie/socialism-an-american-story Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police. And Work: The Last 1,000 Years by Andrea Komlosy versobooks.com/books/2608-work. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

What are rights worth when government denies people the very right to have rights? Political theorist Hannah Arendt recognized this loss of “the right to have rights” as millions of refugees found themselves without a national home in the wake of world wars. Human rights, it became clear, proved to be an empty promise for those excluded from citizenship—the foundational right to be a member of a political community. Today, this insight remains a critical one as a record number of humans transit the globe in search of economic and physical security, and far-right nativists and establishment liberals alike scapegoat them for the chaos and precarity unleashed by neoliberalism and war. As a result, migrants are condemned to second-class citizenship or even death in the Mediterranean and desert Mexican-American borderlands. My guests today, Stephanie DeGooyer and Astra Taylor, just wrote a book about this for Verso, called the The Right to Have Rights. This is part 1. Part 2 will be posted on Thursday or Friday. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And Work: The Last 1,000 Years by Andrea Komlosy versobooks.com/books/2608-work. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} James Comey is liberal America’s favorite cop and now, as a result, a bestselling author as well. Patrick Blanchfield returns to talk about his Baffler review of Comey’s new book. It’s awful, of course. But it’s bad in productively revealing ways. Comey has become an icon of the liberal fetishization of the national security state as a bulwark against Trumpism—when it fact it is that very national security state and its rampant abuses that are deeply implicated in Trump’s rise. The elevation of police as a model of duty and leadership contrasted against Trump’s vulgar monstrosities renders invisible not only why Trump won but why he is so dangerous.   Here’s Patrick’s review: thebaffler.com/latest/prig-and-pig-blanchfield   Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum versobooks.com/books/2707-revolution-in-the-air And Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

It’s yet the latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics. Dan’s guest is Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Last year, Mayor Lumumba pledged to make Jackson “the most radical city on the planet.” Lumumba, who comes out of a decades-old revolutionary black nationalist movement, is serious about that. But he also faces serious challenges: Jackson is a majority black city which, like many such cities, has much of its wealth appropriated by its largely-white suburbs. The human and infrastructural needs are enormous, and the tax base is thin. This is precisely why so many on the left have found what’s going on in Jackson to be so interesting, and why Dan was eager to invite the mayor onto the show. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite. And Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} It’s the latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics. Dennis Kucinich is running a viable race for governor of Ohio. Cynthia Nixon, running with Working Families Party backing, has Cuomo truly freaked out in New York. There are major primary fights underway in California—most everywhere, it seems, some variant of the left is on the move. But does the fact that a onetime business-aligned Democrat like Gavin Newsom is getting away with posing as the progressive in the California race for governor indicate that the left hasn’t yet built the institutional capacity to control the leftward surge amongst voters? Dan thinks so. These are amongst the topics that he discusses with Dave Weigel, a political reporter at the Washington Post and one of the few mainstream political reporters who really gets the left.   Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And Work: The Last 1,000 Years by Andrea Komlosy versobooks.com/books/2608-work. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} The latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics and we’re talking about Democratic Socialists of America’s new electoral strategy. DSA has almost overnight become a serious force on an American socialist left that has for decades lacked much in the way of serious forces. One of the major reasons the organization’s membership rolls blew up, of course, was because of Bernie Sanders’ historic 2016 run for president, which not only electrified huge swaths of the country but reminded the radical left that the point is to win power and to govern—and that, after years on the margins, we could do so. This was in part because many Americans were no longer afraid of the s-word: socialism. Yet there is still, for many good reasons, a lot of skepticism about electoral politics in general and the Democratic Party very much in particular, inside DSA and across the socialist left. That’s the needle that the new DSA electoral strategy document tries to thread.   Dan’s guests are Renée Paradis, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer (@ReneeParadis). She has frequently worked for electoral campaigns, including most recently as the National Voter Protection Director for Bernie 2016. Michael Kinnucan is a writer, researcher and activist in New York City. You should also follow him on Facebook, where he has a lively and incisive presence. Both are members of DSA’s National Electoral Committee and the organizing committee for NYC-DSA’s Brooklyn Electoral Working Group.   Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the second of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In part 1, we talked about a lot of things, including how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible; and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism in a decolonizing world while thwarting worker organizing. In this installment, we discuss imperialist assaults on worker struggles in Iraq and Iran, the cooptation of those struggles by nationalist elites, and how those imperialist attacks facilitated the rise of the Baathist security state. We’ll also look at how the true history of the 70s oil shock undermines the conventional account, how the protection of minorities was used to legitimate imperialism, how petro-dollars fueled the global arms trade, in what sense the Iraq War has been a war for oil, and the US strategy to seek advantage through the continuation of conflict and instability across the Middle East. Finally, we’ll address petro-imperialism’s bedrock alliance with right-wing Islamists against democratic movements of the left in Saudi Arabia and beyond, and why we must fight to ensure that the coming energy transition is a just one. That review of Yascha Mounk’s book that Dan wrote with Thea Riofrancos https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/zombie-liberalism/ Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art and and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig, where you can also check out the first edition of our new weekly newsletter.

Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the first of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In this first episode, we talk about how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible; and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism in a decolonizing world while thwarting worker organizing. On the next show, we’ll discuss a lot more, including how oil companies and Western governments made autocratic governments and conservative Islamists key partners in creating the very global order that we now find in such profound crisis. Thanks to Verso Books. and The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig, where you can also check out the first edition of our new weekly newsletter.

It’s our 100th episode and the launch of our spring fundraising drive! Aziz Rana returns to The Dig 15 years after the invasion of Iraq to reflect on the paucity of substantive anti-imperialist politics across much of the American left. Socialism isn’t just an internationalist politics on principle: domestic and foreign struggles are inherently linked, just as the forces we struggle against are globally intertwined—and the latter benefit from perpetuating an ideology that artificially divides the two. But for decades, a bipartisan consensus has governed foreign policy, to disastrous ends. Why, Rana asks, is there no foreign policy equivalent to the new left-wing domestic policy litmus test on single-payer healthcare? Check out Aziz’s n+1 article here: nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-lefts-missing-foreign-policy. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

It’s obvious that student debt can be an excruciating financial burden. But anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom explains that it has also done a lot to make American families into plunderable financial mines, part of a larger capitalist system that individualizes blame for economic failure and forces families that can to support their children into their twenties while depleting retirement savings. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out the free e-book Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo and The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Many Americans take the existence of so-called “illegal immigrants” for granted, whatever their opinion of the matter. But illegality isn’t a property of immigrants; rather, it’s a creation of positive law. And we can only understand how immigrants are declared “illegal” by the government by examining this country’s too-often ignored history of racist and exclusionary immigration politics. Dan’s guest today is Mae Ngai, an historian at Columbia and the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing and Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Perhaps nothing has more defined the monstrosity of Donald Trump than his racist demonization and targeting of immigrants from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries and those nations he deems to be “shitholes” or, according to another account, “shithouses.” But what’s seldom reported is that one of the key mechanisms that the Administration has used to target immigrants was rolled out under Barack Obama. It’s called Secure Communities, and it’s the culmination of decades of policymaking and politicking that have intertwined the United States systems of mass incarceration and immigrant enforcement—facilitating the growth of both. To fight both mass deportation and mass incarceration, localities and states must move beyond what’s currently defined as sanctuary, as a new report by Kade Crockford from the Century Foundation and ACLU of Massachusetts argues. tcf.org/content/report/beyond-sanctuary Also: Check out Dan’s essay on Trump’s proposal to execute drug dealers slate.com/technology/2018/03/trumps-call-to-execute-drug-dealers-is-a-natural-progression-of-american-policy.html And thanks to Verso Books. Check out the FREE e-book Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo and also Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art

View Transcript Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry talk about their new book To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. King is often remembered for his soaring oratory. But the commonplace emphasis on his rhetoric in place of his ideas too often allows enemies of King’s agenda to domesticate him or, worse, to weaponize his taken-out-of-context words to bolster the very forces of racism and oppression that King had struggled to defeat. Dan asks Shelby and Terry about King’s theory of nonviolence (more complicated than you might think), his debate with the Black Power movement, and his thinking on gender, hope, political economy, Beloved Community and more. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Democrat Conor Lamb’s victory is a stunning rebuke of Republicans. But Lamb is far from an ideal candidate, and so the race also raises a perennial debate between the left and liberal center over what kind of alternative to the Republican Right we need. Dan’s guests are Elizabeth Fiedler, Sara Inammorato, and Summer Lee, three leftist women running for state rep in Pennsylvania—all three DSA members endorsed by their local chapters. Other stuff: Patrick Blanchfield’s article on guns and neoliberalism discussed last week is here splinternews.com/the-market-cant-solve-a-massacre-1823745509 Thanks to Verso Books. Check out the free e-book Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo and Police: A Field Guide versobooks.com/books/2530-police Support us with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} In West Virginia, a focal point of Trump-era liberal armchair ethnography, teachers have won a historic statewide strike just as the Supreme Court is poised to rule in Janus, a case that will mark the culmination of a long right-wing effort to gut public sector unions. It’s a scary time—but maybe, just maybe, also an exciting one. Dan’s guests today are Sarah Jaffe, Nation Institute fellow and author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and labor historian Gabriel Winant. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn and Astra Taylor versobooks.com/books/2424-the-right-to-have-rights and Greece and the Reinvention of Politics by Alain Badiou versobooks.com/books/2560-greece-and-the-reinvention-of-politics. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Neoliberal culture is one that expects little from government and everything from plucky individuals—including, apparently, the self-sacrificing courage to charge an AR-15 wielding gunman while your classmates cower behind bulletproof backpacks. Writer Patrick Blanchfield returns to the show to discuss his recent essays on guns for New York magazine (forthcoming) and The Intercept (theintercept.com/2018/02/28/parkland-florida-school-shootings-arming-teachers). Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Greece and the Reinvention of Politics by Alain Badiou versobooks.com/books/2560-greece-and-the-reinvention-of-politics And support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig

How does gun culture get built from the ground up? What are the everyday politics of guns? Sociologist Jennifer Carlson does ethnographic fieldwork that provides answers to these questions, showing how men see guns as a way to be a protector in a time of economic precocity and how the NRA’s massive training operation helps shape the racialized identity of “citizen protectors” defending “sheeple” against the “wolves.” Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn and Astra Taylor versobooks.com/books/2424-the-right-to-have-rights and Greece and the Reinvention of Politics by Alain Badiou versobooks.com/books/2560-greece-and-the-reinvention-of-politics. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Nomiki Konst, a correspondent for The Young Turks and Sanders appointee to the DNC’s Unity Reform Commission, talks about the Berniecrat struggle against a corrupt neoliberal establishment to democratize the Democratic Party. This is the first in a series on electoral politics over the next couple of months that will include conversations about DSA’s electoral strategy, an interview with Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, and more. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Greece and the Reinvention of Politics by Alain Badiou versobooks.com/books/2560-greece-and-the-reinvention-of-politics and The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm versobooks.com/books/2575-the-progress-of-this-storm. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript Did the “Woke Blacks” Instagram account really cost Clinton the election? Glenn Greenwald returns to the show to ask basic but rarely asked questions about the troll army’s presumed efficacy, explain his often mischaracterized position on Russiagate, and call out Republicans and Democrats for hypocritically supporting unfettered power for national security state surveillance. Thanks to Verso and University of California Press. Check out The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn, and Astra Taylor and The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm at versobooks.com Check out Miller’s Children: Why Giving Teenage Killers a Second Chance Matters for All of Us by James Garbarino at ucpress.edu Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig!

Dan talks to Randy Bryce (@IronStache), the Berniecrat ironworker taking on Paul Ryan, about how he plans to knockout the House Speaker, Scott Walker’s decimation of unions and Foxconn’s con against the people of Wisconsin. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright versobooks.com/books/2545-climate-leviathan and Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520292635 Support us with your cash at patreon.com/TheDig

What if the Cold War only just ended in November 2016, as Donald Trump grotesquely encircled and then captured the presidency, finding it, to his surprise, unguarded? The Cold War proper, of course, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Aziz Rana, making his second Dig appearance, argues that it was a lot more than the conflict with the Evil Empire. It was a domestic order that, he writes in the latest issue of n+1, “concerned everything from the genius of America’s domestic institutions to the indispensability of its global role. These judgments gave coherence to the country’s national identity—allowing both Barack Obama and Bill Kristol to wax poetic about America’s special destiny as a global hegemon—and legitimacy to its economic policy. But with the 2016 election, the cold-war paradigm finally shattered.” Check out Aziz’s article here https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/politics/goodbye-cold-war/. Thanks to our supporters at Verso and University of California Press Check out The New Spirit of Capitalism versobooks.com/books/2513-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism andAmerican Islamophobia ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520297791!

Four decades ago, Frances Fox Piven and her husband Richard Cloward published Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, a classic, clear-eyed analysis of just what the title suggests. Piven, a legendary scholar and activist, talks to Dan about her life, Occupy, Bernie, the Democratic Party, anti-war movements, black bloc, mass incarceration and more. (Also: Dan’s voice sounds a little different because he had to record in a different room.) Thanks to Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike and Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City by Andrew J. Diamond ucpress.edu/ebook.php?isbn=9780520961715

The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As is often the case, however, the focus shifted elsewhere soon after disturbances in the street came to end. Political scientist @LesterSpence recently wrote an article about why children were freezing in Baltimore public schools: the heating didn’t work, something that can only be made sense of when viewed in the longer history of capital flight, racial and class segregation, and the rise of a service-economy carceral state jacobinmag.com/2018/01/baltimore-freezing-schools-children-racism-austerity Thanks to Verso for their support. Check out The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello versobooks.com/books/2513-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism Support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

We are living on land from which indigenous people, over hundreds of years, were violently removed. On some level, everyone knows this—yet it’s mostly nowhere to be found in stories that Americans tell themselves about who we are as a country, and how we got here. Dan’s guest is Paul Frymer (@pfrymer), a professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. In his recent book, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion, he provides a close study of the empire America built in the late 18th and 19th century, a project of geographic expansion facilitated and also limited by the demands of racial engineering. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike And from University of California Press: Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World by Isa Blumi ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520296145

Excitement that Democrats had developed a spine in the fight for Dreamers reverted to familiar despondency and fury when they capitulated and voted to reopen the government on Monday. @JStein_WaPo offers his analysis of the role that the media and the Democratic Party’s right flank played in pushing senators to fold. This interview was recorded Tuesday and posted early because things are moving crazy fast. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right by Liz Fekete versobooks.com/books/2555-europe-s-fault-lines And please support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Everyone agrees that the 1970s was the beginning of the end of capitalism as we had known it since the New Deal. But historian Lane Windham makes it clear that it wasn’t for a lack of worker struggle in her new book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. In case studies of union fights in department stores, shipyards, offices and textile mills, Windham explains that women and workers of color seized the civil rights victories of the 1960s to fight for economic rights in the 70s. Thank you to Verso and University of California Press. Check out The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East by Patrick Cockburn versobooks.com/books/2518-the-age-of-jihad and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520295711 Support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Student workers at Rutgers University are fighting for $15 an hour. Undergraduate history major and dining-hall worker Danny Taylor of @RutgersUSAS talks about their struggle. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert versobooks.com/books/2535-alt-america, and support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig! Also: Jacobin has published a transcription of Dan’s interview with the Fields sisters jacobinmag.com/2018/01/racecraft-racism-barbara-karen-fields

Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People’s Campaign alongside other organizers shortly before he was assassinated 50 years ago. Today, organizers nationwide are relaunching that movement as The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, tackling the evil quadruplet of poverty, systemic racism, militarism, and environmental devastation. Dan’s guest is rock star organizer Nijmie Dzurinko, making her second appearance on the show. Check out Dan’s recent work slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/the-opioid-crisis-is-blurring-the-legal-lines-between-victim-and-perpetrator.html & injusticetoday.com/philadelphia-media-slam-newly-elected-da-krasner-for-firings-but-house-cleaning-advances-his-f2da076ffb06 Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism

Your first Diglet of the new year, and we’re talking about that Trump book. At n+1 Patrick Blanchfield makes the case that Fire and Fury is not, as some might think, a bunch of meaningless palace-intrigue that has distracted us from what Trump is doing to destroy the environment and wage relentless class war against the poor. Rather, the book in one fell swoop exposes the Trump administration for the dangerously hot mess that we all knew it was but were entirely unable to understand clearly because the deluge of drama and weird tweets had rendered it all banal wallpaper. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out How Will Capitalism End versobooks.com/books/2519-how-will-capitalism-end Like our show music? Check out Brodsky’s commercial and artistic work at Jeffreybrodsky.com and painterly.bandcamp.com

Chattel slavery made black women’s reproduction the source of private property—and in doing so invented race and American racism. Ever since, the denigration and regulation of black women’s childbearing has been central to the construction of white supremacy and the exploitative economic order that it protects, as scholar Dorothy Roberts explained in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, a pivotal book first published in 1997. In this episode, @DorothyERoberts talks about the book and what lessons it holds today as Trump and Republicans seek to destroy yet more of the social safety net and use racism as a smokescreen to distract white Americans from their class war against working people. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art And please support The Dig with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

The protest movement against the onset of the Iraq War was countered by a call to “support our troops” from militarists on the right. Venerating American soldiers, of course, is not about supporting actual American soldiers but is rather a rhetorical device to preclude questioning or criticism of the wars they are sent to fight. In a face-to-face interview at Brown University’s Watson Institute, anthropologist Catherine Lutz discusses John Kelly’s recent diatribe, Khizr Khan, Trump’s attack on protesting NFL players and the roots of it all in the Nixon Administration’s response to GI rebellion against the Vietnam War. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System by Wolfgang Streeck versobooks.com/books/2519-how-will-capitalism-end And support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

At the close of the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara discusses his new article on the Bolsheviks and what we can learn from and blame on them—and also what might be forgiven and moved beyond. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl and Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal at versobooks.com.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor returns to The Dig to discuss her new book How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Forty years ago, a group of black feminists coined the term “identity politics” in the Combahee River Collective Statement. For them, it was a way to identify the various ways that capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia created a set of interlocking oppressions. And the point of identifying how those systems operated together was not to create an itemized politics of particularity, as is too often the case today, but rather to create a framework for solidarity. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism and support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig.

View Transcript A lengthy interview with historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields on their seminal essay collection Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Dan talks to the sister scholars about the book; how Ta-Nehisi Coates’ primordialist view of white racism spells defeat; that racism serves the interest of capitalist class war, and endless debates over Rachel Dolezal distract us from that fact; and a whole ton more. This is over two hours, so you might want to bite it off on a few chunks, or on a long drive. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso. Check out Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum versobooks.com/books/2109-tear-gas And support your (favorite?) left-wing podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig   p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}

Journalist @ryanlcooper talks about the new paper he wrote with @MattBruenig, founder of the @PplPolicyProj, a new left-wing think tank founded by Bruenig and funded by the people. Foreclosed: Destruction of Black Wealth During the Obama Presidency details how the Wall Street-induced foreclosure epidemic wiped out huge swaths of black wealth—and how Obama, the first black president, could have taken multiple actions to save most homes but did not. Check out the report http://peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Foreclosed.pdf and this article about it jacobinmag.com/2017/12/obama-foreclosure-crisis-wealth-inequality. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal versobooks.com/books/2576-radical-happiness Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript The prospect of nuclear war with North Korea sits near the top of the list of things that have been unthinkably bad about Donald Trump’s presidency. But the conflict with North Korea didn’t begin with Trump. It’s critical that we understand the Koreas and their historical context right now. Journalist @TimothyS breaks it all down—North Korea, South Korea, the role of the US and others—from World War II to the present. And he argues that peace is possible, but it can only achieved through engagement between North and South, not through bellicose US intervention. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum versobooks.com/books/2109-tear-gas. And please support us with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig

Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, explains one of Clintonism’s most dreadful results: President Trump. The new film Saving Capitalism, available on Netflix, is Reich’s quasi-autobiographical documentary about the origins of contemporary political-economic inequality. The premise that capitalism ought to be saved notwithstanding, Reich offers firsthand insight into Clinton’s rightward rush into the arms of Corporate America. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal versobooks.com/books/2576-radical-happiness And support us with your $ at Patreon.com/TheDig. We can’t do it without you.

The drug war is a cause of, not solution to, the overdose crisis. Law and public health scholar @LeoBeletsky explains the origins of the opioid overdose crisis and how drug prohibition, policing, interdiction and incarceration are at its root—and continue to help make opioid use so deadly. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2571-out-of-the-wreckage Support us with your $ at Patreon.com/TheDig We can’t do this without our listeners.

We’ve got a bonus episode for you today, which is audio from a debate between Alex Vitale—a recent guest on this show, sociologist and author of The End of Policing—and Heather Mac Donald, one of the leading intellectual champions of urban neoconservativism, overpolicing and mass incarceration at the Manhattan Institute. In a short intro, Dan explains why he’s rooting for one of these two indviduals and why that person decisively wins. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. We work really hard and don’t paywall a thing: support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig

The GOP tax plan is a monstrous giveaway to corporate America but it might not pass thanks to the same contradictions within the Republican coalition that repeatedly sunk efforts to repeal Obamacare, as journalist @ArthurDelaneyHP explains. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change by Ashley Dawson versobooks.com/books/2558-extreme-cities Support us with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Trump’s demagogic rhetoric on MS-13 is designed to obscure the truth about the reality and origins of mass Central American migration: the roots of migration from Central America lie in significant part in the violence unleashed by US-backed dirty wars and deportations of alleged gang members. The demonization of Central American gangs functions to distract the public from US complicity and legitimate a cruel deportation machine. Dan’s guest, political scientist Noelle Brigden, has spent years researching on the migrant trail. For more background, check out Dan’s Washington Post op-ed washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/07/20/deporting-people-made-central-americas-gangs-more-deportation-wont-help Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones. And please hook us up with some $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Last week was a bad week for Republicans and a good week for Democrats—and for Democratic Socialists. It’s now pretty clear that Republicans will pay a price for the fact that large numbers of Americans detest our dotard-in-chief. But last week’s election once again fails to offer any sort of definitive answer to the long-running debate between the left and the corporate Democratic establishment over who is best poised to beat Republicans. The coming anti-Republican wave is an opportunity that the left must seize. Dan’s guests are DSA member Lee Carter, who took out the Republican whip to win Virginia’s 50th House District, and David Duhalde, DSA’s Deputy Director. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy by Lewis H. Lapham versobooks.com/books/2517-age-of-folly Also, support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández tells the story of human caging in Los Angeles, from the Spanish Conquest to the mid-twentieth century, in her new book City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. It’s a story of indigenous exploitation and elimination, immigrant detention and deportation, and the suppression of cross-border revolutionary movements. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2571-out-of-the-wreckage Support us with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig.

Journalist @melissagira eviscerates a newspaper investigation that conflates sex work with trafficking. She examines how reporters unwittingly fall into a savior complex, which ends up criminalizing workers in the name of defending women’s dignity. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism https://www.versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism. And support us on Patreon.com/TheDig with some cash.

Centrist business elites believe in an America that doesn’t exist. Two guests this episode: first, @mollyesque talks about her piece “On Safari in Trump’s America” for The Atlantic. Her article follows the centrist organization Third Way on a “listening tour” of the real America. Then @EricLevitz (35:52), who just published on op-ed in the New York Times entitled “America is not ‘center-right,” sorts through research to argue that what Americans often mean when they say they are “moderate” is not the combination of superficial social progressivism and neoliberalism that Wall-Street-aligned Third Way types think they mean. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries versobooks.com/books/2501-grand-hotel-abyss Support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Why have the size of American police departments grown so dramatically in recent decades, even as crime rates have fallen? One factor may have been the growing centrality of real estate for urban economies, according to a new article published in the journal Social Forces by Adam Goldstein, a professor of sociology at Princeton, and Brenden Beck, a PhD student in sociology at CUNY. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out The End of Policing by Alex Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing Support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Aziz Rana discusses his pivotal book, The Two Faces of American Freedom. Rana overturns conventional accounts of American history, from settlement and Revolution to the Populists and the present day. In reality, settler-colonialism, empire, and a brutally exploitative economic system grounded in racial subjugation have always been at the core of the American project. But radical thinkers and movements have consistently stepped forward at critical junctures to propose transformative alternatives that would make American freedom universal. Rana’s most brilliant move is to ultimately make a devastatingly critical account of American history hopeful and optimistic.Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Alt-America:The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump versobooks.com/books/2535-alt-america Support us with $ atpatreon.com/TheDig

The exposure of Weinstein’s predations has reignited widespread fury over the longstanding problem of sexual harassment and assault—especially in the workplace. Jacobin editor @alexnpress discusses two new pieces she wrote on how dealing with these problems as individuals only ends up harming individual women and why women must organize to fight back. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism https://www.versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism And support as on Patreon.com/TheDig with some cash.

@CoreyRobin points to a tension that has defined conservatism from the get-go, between two competing conceptions of virtue and nobility: one defined by political and military distinction and another by entrepreneurial  acumen and accumulated wealth. Robin parses how Trump fits into this dynamic history, in part by taking a look back to seminal conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2571-out-of-the-wreckage And support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig Listen to Dan’s first interview with Corey blubrry.com/thedig/22226639/corey-robin-on-the-reactionaries-minds-under-trump/

Dan was on a panel last week on ending the war on drug dealers at the Drug Policy Alliance conference in Atlanta. The panel was moderated by asha bandele and included Daryl Atkinson, Constanza Sánchez Avilé, Lyn Ulbrich, Kemba Smith and Dan. Thanks for listening. Support us at patreon.com/TheDig

Since Bernie Sanders’s success in the 2016 Democratic primary, much of the Left, from progressive Democrats to socialists, has had its sights set on something we had long at least implicitly assumed was impossible: state power and governing. The question now is how to take power, and the Left is consumed by debates over how and whether to engage with the Democratic Party or, in a more limited fashion, with the Democratic Party’s ballot line. Joe Dinkin of the Working Families Party talks to Dan about the promise and pitfalls of fighting within the Democratic Party. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Extreme Cities by Ashley Dawson versobooks.com/books/2558-extreme-cities. Also, support us at Patreon.com/thedig with your money.

In his new book The End of Policing Brooklyn College sociologist @avitale makes the case that technocratic reforms won’t fix American policing. In reality, we can only fix policing by ending the carceral state and defeating neoliberalism. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert versobooks.com/books/2535-alt-america Support us with your $$ at patreon.com/thedig

Chapo went on The Dig. Dan talks to @cushbomb about optimism, pessimism, Manitowoc, reptilians, why the internet might be mostly bad, and Dan’s personal connection to the PizzaGate coverup. Toss us some cash love at Patreon.com/thedig and check out The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, from our sponsors at Verso Books. https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing

Former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner talks about being horrified by Trump, why single-payer is suddenly hot among likely 2020 Democratic contenders, and the work that Our Revolution is doing nationwide to fight the Democratic Party’s neoliberal leadership. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books, who just published Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot. Also, catch me in Atlanta at the International Drug Policy Reform conference on October 14.

Prevailing debate obscures the fact that we already have a form of gun control in the United States. As legal scholar Ben Levin explains, the problem is that it’s a form of gun control that is mostly about locking up poor black men in huge numbers. The Left should demand a society without readily available weapons of war on the streets and a society without mass incarceration. Thanks to our supporters at University of California Press. Check out their new title Race and America’s Long War from Nikhil Pal Singh. And check out Dan’s Jacobin article on carceral gun control here. Also, catch Dan in Atlanta at the International Drug Policy Reform conference on October 14.

Here’s Dan’s full interview with civil rights attorney and Democratic nominee for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. You heard some of it yesterday on the first in a four-part series on mass incarceration that we are co-producing with Cited, a podcast out of the University of British Columbia. Sponsorship from Harvard Law’s Fair Punishment Project (sign up for their newsletter: http://eepurl.com/cZMccH) and The University of Washington Center for Human Rights.

In the late 1960s, criminologists like Todd Clear predicted America would soon start closing its prisons. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Interviews with Clear, formerly incarcerated poet and legal scholar Dwayne Betts, and civil rights attorney and Democratic nominee for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. Today’s show is the first in a four-part series on mass incarceration that we are co-producing with @citedpodcast, which is out of the University of British Columbia. Special guest hosts are Cited’s @Samadeus and scholar Katherine Beckett. Sponsorship from Harvard Law’s Fair Punishment Project (sign up for the FPP newsletter: http://eepurl.com/cZMccH) and The University of Washington Center for Human Rights.

Today’s Diglet is not really diminutive at all. Dan has two interviews with two separate guests because too much has happened over the past few weeks and there are too many smart people to analyze it all. First, scholar @marisollebron on how Wall Street-imposed austerity set Puerto Rico up for devastation, and why it will be an obstacle to a just recovery. Then, Twitter expert @BrandyLJensen on recent Republican grotesqueries. Donate to Taller Salud in PR at facebook.com/taller.salud, check out puertoricosyllabus.com and support this podcast at patreon.com/thedig

Islamophobia is conventionally regarded as racist and bigoted views about Muslims expressed by ignorant individuals, including the one who somehow became president. But legal and critical race scholar @KhaledBeydoun explains that the reality is more complicated. The War on Terror perpetrated state-backed Islamophobia, which nurtured and bolstered popular anti-Muslim bigotry. Support us at Patreon.com/TheDig. Check out Beydoun’s article http://columbialawreview.org/content/islamophobia-toward-a-legal-definition-and-framework/

For this Diglet, Dan and Eve discuss Hillary Clinton’s new book What Happened. Eve also talks about spending time with Jill Stein recently, and argues that it’s wrongheaded to blame Stein for Trump. Thanks to our supporters at University of California Press. Check out their new title How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520281912“

Trump is normal in more ways than people care to admit, but he is different in that he parts from the bedrock ideology of American exceptionalism that has governed this country from its violent founding. Foreign policy scholar @stephenwertheim makes the case that the Trump Doctrine could reignite extreme nationalism and militarism but also provides the Left with an opening to finally launch a movement against American Empire. Thanks to University of California Press for their support. Check out their new title A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran https://www.ucpress.edu/ebook.php?isbn=9780520965843

The so-called Olympic spirit doesn’t match the reality of a highly-corporatized Games that often leaves taxpayers picking up the tab, engenders abusive policing and justifies the remaking of cities for the rich at the expense of ordinary and poor people. Dan’s guests today are Molly Lambert, a writer and member of Los Angeles DSA, and Jules Boykoff, the author of “Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics” from Verso. Support this pod with your money at patreon.com/thedig

This two-hour episode is a look at inequality in Houston from slavery to the present. First, Dan talks to Tyina Steptoe, historian at the University of Arizona and author of “Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City.” Then Robert D. Bullard, professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston and the “father of environmental justice.” Finally, John Henneberger, an expert in equitable disaster recovery and co-director of Texas Housers. Show your love for the show and support us at patreon.com/thedig

Immigration law scholar @crimmigration breaks down the lies, misdirections and bigoted absurdities conveyed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he announced that the Trump Administration would cruelly make some 800,000 young people who came to this country as children deportable. Read the full transcript from Jacobin here. Check out César’s blog at crimmigration.com Support us at Patreon.com/TheDig

The devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey has made the denial of climate change all the more dangerous. But @KateAronoff says that mainstream liberals and environmental groups, touting cap-and-trade and business-friendly reforms, have put forward an agenda that can’t address the crisis and won’t mobilize the masses. We need a radical and transformative climate agenda. Read the full transcript from Jacobin here. Thanks to our supporters at UNC Press and check out Knocking on Labor’s Door https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469632070/knocking-on-labors-door/ Also, support us at http://Patreon.com/TheDig and help Houston out at http://homelesshouston.org/take-action/donate

New Republic reporter Emily Atkin (@emorwee) talks about why Harvey is already and inherently political thanks to climate change and the potential for petrochemical disaster in Houston. When people criticize “politicizing” the disaster they are being political too: it is a naked effort to defend the destructive status quo of fossil-fueled neoliberal capitalism. Support us at patreon.com/thedig and please donate to homelesshouston.org/take-action/donate

Is the internet good or bad? The debate is more often than not a proxy for one about politics more generally and populism in particular. But the real issue with the internet is this: unaccountable businesses wield oligopoly power over the digital public sphere. Support us with some cash https://www.patreon.com/thedig And check out Adrian’s article http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/the-fake-news-fallacy

Dan talks to Splinter Politics Editor Alex Pareene about his recent piece “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party” and about why Phoenix is Trump’s happy place. This second weekly episode costs time and money. We can only keep it up if you contribute at patreon.com/thedig Check out Pareene’s article and podcast http://splinternews.com/charlottesville-was-a-preview-of-the-future-of-the-repu-1797988745 http://tarfureport.libsyn.com/

This is the war that never ends. The War on Terror’s permanence should be remarkable. It should be an outrage. But it is precisely because the war has become permanent that it has long since been rendered normal. Dan’s guest is historian Andrew Bacevich. Please note: they spoke before Trump’s recent announcement that the US would double down on the Afghanistan War. And please support the show at Patreon.com/thedig. We can’t do it without you.

New Republic writer Sarah Jones joins Dan to talk about Trump’s invocation of the “alt-left” and to explain the term’s unseemly centrist history. And more. We’re gonna try doing two episodes each week now: the regular long Dig on Tuesdays and a shorter, hotter-take Diglet on Fridays. This will take more time and more money. If you listen to and love the show please support us at https://www.patreon.com/thedig

The FARC peace accord is a historic victory for Colombian society. But the struggle to build an urban left strong enough to take on the country’s powerful right remains a daunting one. Today’s guest is Forrest Hylton, the author of Evil Hour in Colombia. Check out a great article from Forrest here https://www.academia.edu/26907051/The_Experience_of_Defeat_The_Colombian_Left_and_the_Cold_War_that_Never_Ended And also Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia from our supporters at University of California Press http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520293939

With Trump, Mexico is the symbol and source of so many things that are wrong with the United States. Oftentimes, these stories told about Mexico in the United States aren’t just wrong but serve to obscure the true source of our shared problems—which, more often than not, are both countries’ ruling classes. Today’s guest is Christy Thornton, a professor of history and international studies at Rowan University, and soon to be fellow at the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations at Harvard. Thanks to our supporters at University of California Press.

We’re taking a quick break halfway into our four-part series of interviews on Latin America because this week is a big week for the American left: Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, is holding its first national convention since the organization has undergone a massive explosion in size. This episode is long as hell and we apologize that some of the audio quality is a little crappier than normal. But the debate and discussion are great.

Hugo Chávez’s rise to power inspired leftists around the world. But today, Venezuela is in a profound economic and political crisis. A huge decline in oil prices gutted the revenue stream that Venezuela depended on to bankroll its social spending. The government led by Chavez’s successor Nicolás Maduro is increasingly turning to repression in response to constant, and often violent, protests from the opposition. NYU historian and NACLA Executive Editor Alejandro Velasco explains what’s happening in Venezuela, how it happened—and how the promise of the Bolivarian Revolution might still be salvaged. Thanks to our supporters at nacla.org, an unrivaled source for left-wing news on Latin America.

In Ecuador, the left won reelection this year, after Alianza PAÍS candidate Lenin Moreno, former President Rafael Correa’s vice president, narrowly won election this year. It was a major victory given the crisis hitting the pink tide of left governments throughout the region. But it was perilously close to a loss. Correa accomplished a lot for the country’s poor majority but did so thanks to a commodity boom that has since gone bust, a strategy that put the left government in conflict with indigenous and environmental movements. Dan’s guest today is Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College. Thanks to our supporters at nacla.org, the best source for left-wing analysis on Latin America.

What Trump has accomplished is spread fear through immigrant communities and, with the Muslim and refugee travel bans, made bigotry the explicit cornerstone of immigration policy. But on immigration, as on other matters, Trump does not emerge from a vacuum. Mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians have for decades built a giant deportation machine. Dan talks to Dara Lind, the immigration reporter at Vox and one of the smartest reporters on the beat to put Trump’s deportation campaign and nativist agenda in context.

Workers have for years faced a neoliberal onslaught administered by a bipartisan establishment of technocratic elites who have ensured the redistribution of wealth into the hands of the rich. This is an elite that has abetted the decimation of labor unions and whose primary disagreement are over how severely those expelled from the labor market should be allowed to suffer. My guest today is journalist Sarah Jaffe. We’re going to talk about the state of work, particularly the manufacturing and retail workers she writes about in recent pieces at The Nation and racked.com. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso and University of North Carolina Press.

Donald Trump appears to many in the guise of a terrifying aberration. But in reality, he is the outcome of trends that are far too normal. We need movements to come together to not only defeat Trump but to take on the system that made him possible. Naomi Klein takes on Trump’s brand, and offers some thoughts as to how to tarnish it, in her new book “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.” Thanks to our sponsors at versobooks.com and at FSG, promoting the excellent new book “Locking Up Our Own” by James Forman Jr.

Mass incarceration controls poor people and populations that have been excluded from the labor market. Politically, tough-on-crime rhetoric has for decades been a tool for politicians to appeal to white voters’ racism. But what’s less discussed is the complicated history of criminal justice politics within black communities and amongst black politicians. Yale Law professor James Forman talks about his new book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Thanks to sponsors at thenation.com and https://www.versobooks.com

Bernie would have won. And in the UK, he sort of did last week. The Labour Party, under left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn (full name: Jeremy Bernard Corbyn) came far from behind and stripped Prime Minister Theresa May of her majority in parliament — after the punditocracy had confidently predicted that radicals had doomed Labour to electoral oblivion. Dan speaks to Richard Seymour, the author most recently of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical politics, and a founding editor of Salvage.

Nothing that so exposes Donald Trump as a snake oil salesman as the fact that he ran a campaign pitched at white working-class anger toward so-called globalism and then stacked his administration with representatives from Big Finance. A decade after Wall Street blew up the global economy, it is now very much in the drivers seat, sucking up as much wealth as possible from regular people and redistributing it upward to the super rich. Thanks to our advertisers at The Nation! Get a deal on magazine subscription at thenation.com/dig and find their podcast at https://www.thenation.com/authors/start-making-sense/

Donald Trump won the presidency in significant part by pledging to do something that his predecessors had already mostly accomplished: building a big, beautiful wall on the border with Mexico. For liberals and centrists, the wall now shares a toxic association with Trump. But until recently, militarizing the border with Mexico was accepted as a core piece of the commonsense, bipartisan establishment immigration and drug policy agenda. Today, my guest is Peter Andreas, a professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown and the author of seminal book Border Games: Policing the US-Mexico Divide. Thanks to our supporters at University of California Press: http://www.ucpress.edu/

The drug war is winding down and heating up all at the same time. States are legalizing recreational weed while prosecutors around the country are charging dealers, including small-time ones, with murder when their drugs contribute to someone else’s fatal overdose; attorney Jeff Sessions has instructed US Attorneys to go to the max on severe mandatory minimum sentences. Rick Lines, executive director of Harm Reduction International, lays out what an alternative to the drug war should look like.

What’s the matter with Appalachia? Many liberal elites think they know the answer. Since Trump’s campaign first took off, the region has become a symbol of all that is wrong with Red State America: guns, bigotry, a willingness to get swindled by right-wing snake-oil salesmen. There is, indeed, a lot wrong with Appalachia. But what’s most wrong is that a region where people waged militant labor struggles has now been devastated by coal company greed, automation, shifts in global commodity markets and, of course, by Republican reaction and neoliberal malign neglect. Sarah Jones, social media editor at the New Republic, explores the possibilities for left-wing revival in Appalachia. Read the full transcript from Jacobin here.

The Women’s March on Washington sent a clear message that women would be at the lead in battling the right in the years to come. But it left unresolved significant divides that pervaded the 2016 primary campaign, as the many signs paying homage to Hillary Clinton made clear. Featherstone throws down Clinton’s faux feminism, the Women’s Strike, Bill de Blasio and more.

Why do Republicans only seem to care about deficits and debt when they’re trying to cut social welfare programs? Dan’s guest for this special episode is Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He discusses Trump’s regressive tax proposal and the GOP’s never ending efforts to redistribute wealth the super-rich.

The media has become a part of the story like perhaps never before. Journalist probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable news outlets provided him with wall-to-wall free advertising and, more recently, lauded Trump as “presidential” because he decided to attack Syria. Adam Johnson, a writer at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, breaks it down.

The Dig normally serves up ice cold, well-digested takes. Sometimes, however, something important happens and Dan finds someone who can help us understand it quickly. Last weekend’s election in France, which advanced the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen and neoliberal centrist Emmanuel Macron to a runoff, is one such event. Sebastian Budgen, an editor for Verso Books, a contributing editor at Jacobin, and a member of the editorial board at Historical Materialism, tells explains what’s up.

Putting “black faces in high places,” scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, has not only failed to benefit the working class and poor black majority; it has actually harmed them by legitimating an individualistic, meritocratic narrative that blames poor black people’s condition on their own personal failings. Taylor is a professor of African-American studies at Princeton and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, from Haymarket Books.

Prisons don’t just keep inmates in; they keep the public out. Even at a moment when mass incarceration is under unprecedented criticism it is quite hard for people on the outside to empathize with people who they cannot see or speak to. My guests today are Brett Story and Jordan Camp. Story is a filmmaker who has made an incredible new documentary called The Prison in 12 Landscapes, which shines a harsh light on America’s prison archipelago without ever taking a peek inside. is a scholar of the carceral state.

Trump’s oligarchic regime is an extreme version of the imperial and economic vision that has guided presidents of both major parties. But the popularity of Trump’s chauvinist, xenophobic appeal points to a major crisis in the ideological and political-economic regime of the United States and the world for decades. That’s neoliberalism, a system that isn’t quite over under Trump. But as Nicole Aschoff argues in the most recent issue of Jacobin, it has radically changed. Today, my guest is Nicole Aschoff, managing editor at Jacobin and the author of The New Prophets of Capital, part of Jacobin’s Verso Series. You can read her article “The Glory Days Are Over” in the new issue of Jacobin and at jacobinmag.com.

Medicaid expansion saved Obamacare from repeal. There’s a lot to hate about Obamacare, but that expansion did something very good on a very large scale — and it made just enough Republicans very nervous about taking it away. It’s an important lesson about economic policy generally: the more universal a program is, the greater the number of Americans who become advocates for its preservation — a fact conservatives know and fear thanks to Medicare and Social Security but that many liberals don’t. Today, my guest is Matt Bruenig, a writer who is one of most incisive analysts of poverty, inequality and welfare systems, and the political conflicts that surround them.

What a moment to read, or to re-read, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Corey Robin’s 2011 collection of essays — especially if you need to disabuse friends and family of the notion that Trump is some historic degradation of conservatism’s good name rather than a malignant, nasty outgrowth of a long history of violent reaction against left movements for equality.

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 far larger numbers than in decades past — especially young people. Today, my guests are DSA National Political Committee member Sean Monahan and National Director Maria Svart to discuss some tough questions about the fight for socialism in the coming months and years, both for DSA members (of which, full disclosure, I am one) and those who aren’t.

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 what is actually factual. Political reporters took a serious hit after Donald Trump won the Republican primary and then the presidency, and Bernie Sanders mounted a dead serious challenge to the Democratic Party’s anointed candidate. Trump is now using his bully pulpit to wage an assault on empirical reality, clinging to his own “alternative facts” and labeling the media as an opposition party purveying “fake news.” My guest today is Dave Weigel, a reporter at the Washington Post who is amongst the best in the game. Weigel has also worked for Slate and, in his early years, at the libertarian outlet Reason. He doesn’t come from the Left, but he gets us better than any mainstream reporter out there.

Fighting for Black Lives Under Trump 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 and made radical demands for social and economic justice, and to an end to police violence and mass incarceration. The movement now has to find a way forward in the time of Trump’s law-and-order backlash.

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 of American Politics, and The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. She talks with The Dig about prisons in American life.

All eyes have turned to the judiciary. It’s the one potential institutional check on Trump—aside, of course, from the shadowy national security state— at the federal level. The courts have the power to stop and strike down laws and actions that violate the law or the Constitution. Recent rulings by a federal district judge in Washington and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made this clear after they blocked Trump’s Muslim and refugee bans. But the judiciary, despite pretenses to the contrary, is fundamentally political. It can shred civil rights and economic protections as efficiently as it can protect them. Ultimately, major judicial conflicts get decided by the Supreme Court, which has been split 4-4 since Republicans blocked President Obama’s effort to nominate Merrick Garland to take the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat. Today, Dan Denvir speaks to Jed Purdy about the judiciary and other matters. Purdy is a professor at Duke Law and the author of three books on American political identity including The Meaning of Property. His most recent book is After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene and he has published articles in many, many publications.

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,” explains how economic crisis has led to upheaval in a political establishment that worked obsessively to eliminate inflation and maximize profits at the expense of general wellbeing. This crisis has produced horrific peril, as the Trump administration’s first weeks have made clear. But for the Left, it also provides historic opportunities. Blyth recently spoke with Daniel Denvir during a live taping of the Dig in front of a crowd of 150 in Providence, Rhode Island.

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 was the response from Drexel Administration, which almost immediately released a statement calling his tweets “utterly reprehensible, deeply disturbing,” and stating that they “do not in any way reflect the values of the University.” Drexel eventually backed off after a public campaign in defense of Cicariello-Maher. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px; line-height: 16.0px; font: 12.0px Geneva; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} He discusses the incident as well as issues of violence and free speech in the United States.

96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE --> Today, we bring you two interviews. The first is with Nicholas Espíritu from the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups mounting legal challenges against the ban, who will explain the legal and constitutional challenge to the Muslim and refugee ban. The second is with Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, a leading supporter of Bernie Sanders’ primary bid, and co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington. 96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

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 that she has little understanding of public education aside from her dedication to destroying it. She is the heir to an auto parts fortune and her husband, Dick, is the heir to a fortune derived from the direct sales company Amway, which the FTC at one point decided was not a pyramid scheme. Interestingly, she is also the brother of Erik Prince, who founded the infamous mercenary army Blackwater has now, according to The Intercept, been quietly advising the Trump Administration. The couple, thanks to their money and relentless ideological drive, are heavy-duty power players in Michigan politics, where they have wreaked havoc on Detroit public schools. In many ways, this oligarch’s nomination is the extreme and cartoonesque outcome of decades of bipartisan corporate-aligned policy that pushed charters and high stakes testing, and attacked the teachers unions that stood in their way. Today, we’re joined by historian Diane Ravitch, one of the country’s leading scholars of education policy and a vocal critic of corporate reform efforts that promote privatization and high-stakes testing as the solution to problems largely created by segregation, poverty and funding inequity. Amongst many other books, Ravitch is the author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”

This week we re-broadcast Jacobin Magazine, Verso, and Haymarket Books‘ anti-inauguration event from The Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. featuring Naomi Klein, Anand Gopal, Jeremy Scahill, Owen Jones, & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Start times: Naomi Klein (6:03) Anand Gopal (26:14) Jeremy Scahill (46:19) Owen Jones (1:05:00) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (1:23:18) Please consider supporting The Dig! Even a donation of just $2 or $3 dollars per month will make a huge difference. Your money goes towards studio space, production costs, and, of course, Dan’s intensive research and preparations for each episode. Your financial support will help us make this a sustainable endeavor. Support us here.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA AR-SA --> What is to be done? How can I get involved? Those are questions that a lot of people are asking now that Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States. Today, I speak to Nijmie Dzurinko, a Black woman who grew up poor in the deindustrialized Western Pennsylvania steel town of Monessen. Nijmie is one of the smartest and most experienced organizers we know. In the past, she has been Executive Director and organizer with the Philadelphia Student Union, was a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, and is a co-founder and currently co-coordinator of the group Put People First! PA.

Presidents Bush and Obama both presided over an expansive War on Terror and a national security state with a lethal and global reach. Permanent war and warrantless snooping have become the bipartisan consensus backdrop of American politics—an immutable feature of everyday life rather than outrageous abuses to be resisted or, at least, debated. Soon, Donald Trump will become president, meaning that a man brazenly indifferent to the rule of law will be in charge of a killing and surveillance machinery that is already quite lawless. Today we are joined by Glenn Greenwald, a co-founding editor of The Intercept and one of the reporters who Edward Snowden entrusted with secret NSA documents exposing mass surveillance. Glenn is one of the country’s leading critics of the national security state—and the establishment media and political figures who helped pave the way to Trump’s win.

Donald Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and pledged to build a “a big, fat, beautiful wall” on the southern border that, of course, Mexico is going to pay for. It’s no surprise that Trump’s message struck a chord: right-wing nativism has been rising for decades and hardcore xenophobes had long since taken over the Republican Party. Worse yet, so-called immigration moderates on both sides of the aisle—including Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama—have sought to placate those reactionary forces by militarizing the border and orchestrating mass deportations. Now that Trump has won the presidency, undocumented immigrants are rightly worried and mobilizing to defend their communities. Today, we are joined by two guests who can help us understand where immigration politics are heading in the months to come and how we got here. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law and the author of the blog “Crimmigration.” Chris Newman, Legal Director at the National Day Labor Organizing Network. -->

Journalist Sarah Jaffe’s new book Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt chronicles the movements for economic and racial justice that will be at the forefront of the fight against Trump. Daniel interviewed Sarah before a live audience at AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Donald Trump’s election was shocking, if actually not so surprising, and has prompted widespread protests against a cresting right-wing reaction taking shape as a strange and potent combination of white nationalism, make-believe economic populism, libertarian orthodoxy, America-first isolationism and War on Terror extremism. It has also prompted us to relaunch this podcast. Today, we’ll be discussing why Trump won and what that says about the political moment in the United States. Many apologies for the crappy quality of some of the audio. We had some technical difficulties that have been figured out for future episodes. Our guests are: Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College, and is the author of books including “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s” and “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard and the author “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.” Matt Karp is an historian at Princeton University, contributing editor at Jacobin, and the author of “This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy.” Thanks for listening. Please subscribe, leave a review and spread the word.