Jacobin Radio

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

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

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

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

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

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! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, on the politics of guns. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

How unlucky it was for Angela Nagle to make her so-called left case against immigration the same week that Hillary Clinton reprised her neoliberal case for border crackdowns. In reality, solidarity with immigrant workers has long been a core tenant for much of the socialist left and labor movement, while neoliberalism, despite pretenses to the contrary, has always been implemented alongside repression. Dan interviews Richard Seymour, a founding editor of Salvage, who has done some excellent work on left politics and migration:https://www.patreon.com/posts/to-win-argument-22956541https://www.patreon.com/posts/reinventing-anti-20945069Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com!Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

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

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

Historian Amanda Armstrong on the importance of trans politics. Then, political economist Alfredo Saad-Filho on the prospects for Brazil under the fascist Bolsonaro. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.comPlease support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.