Jacobin Radio

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.

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.

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

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!

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, on the politics of guns.

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 inside the migrant refugee camp <font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">near the US-Mexico border, where thousands are sheltering, with hopes of entering the US. </font>

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

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.

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!

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!