Jacobin Radio

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The Dig: Explaining Brazil's Crisis with Alfredo Saad-Filho Oct 19, 2018

Show notes

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 catalog of left-wing books at www.versobooks.com.

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

The Dig: Sawant on Socialism Against the Amazonification of Seattle Oct 17, 2018

Show notes

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.

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

The Dig: Reasonable Men Calming You Down with Moira Weigel Oct 13, 2018

Show notes

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

The Dig: Lessons from the New Left with Max Elbaum Oct 10, 2018

Show notes

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

Jacobin Radio: Brett Kavanaugh's Banal, Reactionary Mind Oct 09, 2018

Show notes

Meagan Day, Natalie Shure, and Alissa Quart reflect with Suzi Weissman on the toxicity — and banality — of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation to the Supreme Court. We look at the way the contentious, emotional hearings exposed the fault lines between gender, privilege, class, and politics in the US — and ask why the Democrats have been so meek, diffident, and ineffective in the face of the Republican Party’s disciplined march to impose the future, violating every norm to get an extreme right-wing bloc on the Supreme Court. We also look at what that means for the fightback. Natalie Shure looks at the Federalist Society and their influence and politics that go beyond gender justice to the very defining characteristics of Kavanaugh’s ideology and the political movement that groomed him. Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America writes about class privilege and the women who are invisible to Kavanaugh and his class. Christine Blasey Ford is heard, but betrays her class by stepping forward, whereas the testimony of Debbie Ramirez, Julie Swetnick, and thousands of other women workers are disregarded.

The Dig: Lisa Duggan on the Open Secret of Sexual Assault Oct 06, 2018

Show notes

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

Behind the News: Ruling-Class Power Oct 05, 2018

Show notes

Sociologist Shamus Khan on the culture of elite schools and the sense of entitlement they breed. Then, political scientist Thea Riofrancos on the delegitimation of our ruling class and the political possibilities inhering in that.

The Dig: Reclaiming Philadelphia Oct 03, 2018

Show notes

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.

Behind the News: Winners Take All Sep 28, 2018

Show notes

Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, on the win–win business- and plutocrat-friendly philanthropy of today’s nouveau riche.

Jacobin Radio: Far-Right Rising Sep 26, 2018

Show notes

Legal analyst Harry Litman joins Suzi to unpack the legal and constitutional questions raised in both the Mueller investigation and the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The question that is on the table is whether the Constitution and the traditional practices of the American political system can protect us from the from the power of the extreme right and the march to authoritarianism.

And then Germany: The demonstrations in Chemnitz at the end of August sent chills through Europe and the world, just a year after the electoral successes of the AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in the September 2017 elections. They reflect the ascent of the far right, including outright Nazis on the German political scene. We talk to long-time analyst of the German far right, Volkhard Mosler, socialist activist in Chemnitz Gabi Engelhardt, and Einde O’Callaghan, a teacher and activist who has lived in Germany for twenty-five years to get an analysis of what is behind the rise of the Right — and the fight against it.

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