News, politics, history, culture, and more from Jacobin. Featuring The Dig, Long Reads, Behind the News, Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman, and occasional specia...
Behind the News: The Billionaires Killing California w/ Yasha Levine
Laura Jedeed, author of an article for the New Republic, talks about San Francisco and tech moguls’ plans to “fix” it. Yasha Levine, co-director of a new documentary, Pistachio Wars, talks about billionaire couple and self-styled philanthropists the Resnicks and their involvement in the California water crisis.
Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive online: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/radio.html
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Dig: Policing the Crisis w/ Michael Denning
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.
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Jacobin Radio: Mass Politics Today w/ Nancy Fraser
Jacobin Radio has featured many presentations from the recent conference held in honor of Boris Kagarlitsky, author of The Long Retreat, a sobering analysis of the international Left that was discussed in our previous episode, and currently a prisoner in Russia for speaking out against Putin’s war in Ukraine.
We continue with Trevor Ngwane, a South African scholar-activist at the University of Johannesburg, and Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research, who bring to the table some difficult truths and critical questions for the global Left.
After brief introductory comments from Patrick Bond, Trevor Ngwane outlines the brutal history of South Africa’s turn to neoliberalism and its consequences — widespread suffering and deepening despair among ordinary people as well as a political crisis in the African National Congress. He asks what it will take to revitalize the vibrant, militant, working-class movements that once overthrew apartheid.
Nancy Fraser then reflects on Kagarlitsky’s analysis of the chaotic political reality we face today, and raises three central strategic questions for the Left and mass politics: How can we engage with actually existing social forces towards positive social change? How do we navigate the geopolitics of war and migration in mass movement organizing? And what could a transformative working-class movement even look like in the 21st century?
Guest host Meleiza Figueroa and Alan Minsky, executive director of Progressive Democrats of America, follow with a discussion of the critical insights and questions brought up by Trevor Ngwane and Nancy Fraser, and consider what this means for American politics at this particular moment in history, as we face a new year filled with uncertainty, political confusion, and deepening crisis.
Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements.
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Behind the News: Crisis in Korea w/ Tim Shorrock
Colette Shade, author of Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, talks about culture at the turn of the millennium. Tim Shorrock discusses the political crisis in South Korea.
Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive online: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/radio.html
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Confronting Capitalism: A Return to Materialism
Foregrounding workers’ material interests used to be commonplace among socialists. But as the Left faced decades of defeat, a materialist approach to politics fell out of favor. In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber defends materialism from its critics and discusses how a materialist perspective understands rationality, the challenges around collective organizing, and cultural differences.
Read the article mentioned in this episode: https://catalyst-journal.com/2024/12/the-flight-from-materialism
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.
News, politics, history, culture, and more from Jacobin. Featuring The Dig, Long Reads, Behind the News, Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman, and occasional specials.