Jacobin Radio

Why does every new technology seem to make work harder and not easier? In 1974, Harry Braverman published a seminal text Labor and Monopoly Capital to answer that question. Combining a careful study of scientific management and technological innovation with several of Marx’s key concepts, Braverman explained why workers under capitalism are gradually transformed into mere cogs in the machine.

On the latest episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek discuss the process of managers breaking down workers’ skills and why work under capitalism tends to degrade rather than fulfill us.

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Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.

Featuring Peter Linebaugh on the Luddites’ machine-breaking revolt against the enclosure of handicraft production, the central role played by capital punishment in the consolidation of the capitalist state, and remaking the struggle against enclosure for the 21st century.

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The Dig goes deep into politics everywhere, from labor struggles and political economy to imperialism and immigration. Hosted by Daniel Denvir.

Tessa West, professor of psychology at NYU, examines the social dynamics that kept the Epstein gang together. Nick Srnicek, author of Silicon Empires, discusses AI. And Wanda Bertram breaks down the costs of mass incarceration following a new report from the Prison Policy Initiative: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money2026.html

Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global.

Last October, the war in Sudan took a new turn with the capture of El Fasher by the Rapid Support Forces. The city in western Sudan had been under siege by the RSF for more than two years before the Sudanese armed forces suddenly withdrew. After taking control of El Fasher, the RSF began to carry out a massacre of civilians. A UN fact-finding mission recently found that the crimes in El Fasher bore “hallmarks of genocide.”

The Sudanese catastrophe is all the more depressing because it comes after a brief moment of greater political openness and optimism after the ousting of a dictator in 2019.

Joshua Craze joins Long Reads to discuss the evolution of the conflict in Sudan and its likely future. Joshua has written many articles about the politics of Sudan and South Sudan for publications such as the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Jacobin.

Read Joshua’s 2023 essay for Jacobin, “Only You Can Save Darfur”: https://jacobin.com/2023/07/only-you-can-save-darfur

And find other work on his personal website: https://www.joshuacraze.com/essays

Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by features editor Daniel Finn. Produced by Conor Gillies with music by Knxwledge.

Suzi speaks to Ukrainian socialist Oleksandr Kyselov, who says the current “peace process” is a dangerous illusion. Russia’s goal, he argues, is not compromise but subjugation — and any ceasefire that doesn’t confront that reality only postpones the next war. We discuss the Witkoff-Dmitriev 28-point plan (critics call it the “DimWit plan”), exhaustion inside Ukraine, and why calls from the Western left for immediate, unconditional ceasefire, without a single protest outside a Russian embassy, are, as Kyselov puts it, “beyond naive.”

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya then joins us from her exile in Montenegro. Her father, Marxist sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, has now spent two years in Penal Colony No. 4 for opposing Putin’s war. She discusses her father’s imprisonment and the explosion of political prisoners inside Russia since 2022. Ksenia runs Freedom Zone, an organization that raises funds and organizes events globally to support political prisoners and their families. Ksenia reminds us that political prisoners don’t appear in any of the current peace negotiations, because Russia doesn't acknowledge that they exist.

Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements.