Jacobin Radio

[note: this is being re-posted because the original post was accidentally deleted. So if you have already listened, no need to listen again!]Aslı Ü. Bâli joins Daniel for part one of a two-part interview on the Syrian Civil War and the murderously instrumentalized geopolitics that fuel it. Syrians continue to suffer and to die while various actors treat the conflict as a proxy for their own geopolitical ends; meanwhile, huge numbers of Syrian refugees languish in neighboring countries, and the much smaller number who have made their way to Europe and the United States have been utilized by a resurgent far-right to blame ordinary Syrians for violence rooted in the colonial operations of those very same countries that now insist on keeping the refugees out.Read: Remember Syria? by Bâli and Aziz Rana bostonreview.net/war-security/asli-bali-aziz-rana-trump-putin-syria and The U.S. Debt to Syria bostonreview.net/war-security/asli-u-bali-aziz-rana-us-debt-syriaLive recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It's called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=aboutThanks to Verso Books. Check out New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle versobooks.com/books/2698-new-dark-age And Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class by Mike Davis versobooks.com/books/2759-prisoners-of-the-american-dreamSupport this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Suzi and Alan Minsky talk to Katie Halper of WBAI's The Katie Halper Show about the role of independent media and politics in the Trumpian landscape we inhabit. Then Suzi speaks to prolific, award-winning playwright Murray Mednick, whose enigmatic "Mayakovsky and Stalin" runs until August 19 at the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood. The play examines two lives and two suicides, related but distant, responding to the liberating freedom of revolution in the Soviet Union, but then increasingly strangled and suffocated by the top down brutal dictatorship of Stalin, played by actor Maury Sterling (best known as Max on Homeland), who joins the conversation. The play traces the parallel stories of the giant of Russian poetry, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and his relationship to his love and muse, Lilya Brik (darling of Russia’s avant garde) and her husband, the literary critic Osip Brik. Their relationship exemplifies the freedom from conventional mores in the early years of the revolution. The second life and suicide is that of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's young wife who committed suicide during a state dinner in 1932, renouncing her husband and his horrific policies, reflecting her despair and suffocation being married to the supreme dictator while millions perished.

That right-wing people in the US and Europe have made George Soros the answer to so many troubling questions is not very surprising: he's a billionaire, he's Jewish and, unlike most of his cohort, he is an intellectual who spends much of his money on substantively progressive causes. Daniel Bessner's essay on him in n+1, however, not only sketches out the Right's obsessions but also offers a detailed analysis of Soros as a thinker and philanthropist — coming to the conclusion that Soros's hope for an open and pluralistic society will be forever doomed if we continue to live under the very capitalist system that made him so spectacularly rich. Here's Soros's response in the Guardian.Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It's called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about!Thanks to Verso Books. Check out eThe Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur.Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter!

Adam Tooze and Leo Panitch, separately, on globalization, Trump, the American empire, declinism, etc. Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University and serves as director of the European Institute. His new book Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World is out this week. Panitch is a professor of political science at York University and the author of many books, including The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy Of American Empire.

Sorry to Bother You is a hilarious film about the dead-serious shittiness of life under neoliberalism's flexibilized and precarious labor regime, a system teetering upon a thin line between free labor exploitation and a form of expropriation reminiscent of full-on slave labor — all at the mercy of the thinly veiled barbarity of Palo Alto-style techno-utopianism. It's about how capitalist society divides and conquers friends and family to claim not only our obedience but also our very souls, and about how the task of left organizing is to see through that game and fight together. Dan's guest today is Boots Riley, who wrote and directed the film and also fronts the left-wing hip-hop group The Coup.Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It's called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about!Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage And October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville versobooks.com/books/2731-october.Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter

If Kerri Evelyn Harris wins in Delaware, she will have knocked out an incumbent US Senator. And that would be a really big deal. Harris, a left candidate backed by Justice Democrats, is Dan's guest today. She is the latest candidate putting forward the bold proposition that in a democracy, ordinary people should govern themselves — particularly since well-credentialed incumbents like her opponent, Senator Tom Carper, so often do the bidding of corporate interests.Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It's called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about!Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies. And support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter!

Suzi talks to Jacobin's executive editor, Seth Ackerman, and editor of Critique (and Russia expert) Hillel Ticktin, about the actual state of US-Russia relations and how they are portrayed. Seth Ackerman skewers mainstream-media reporting on Russia and asks why there is such a divergence between the substance and fact of US Russia policy — and what the media obsession and hysteria over the supposed Russian threat represents. Hillel Ticktin asks why the US has been so harsh on Russia, when Putin represents a Christian capitalist, if authoritarian, politics? We’ll get his take on what is behind making Russia our archenemy once again, now that it no longer pretends to be communist, and is indeed a fraction of what it was industrially, in terms of its population, and its strength.

The SESTA/FOSTA law purportedly aims to curb sex trafficking. But as my guest Melissa Gira Grant explains, it actually denies sex workers access to online platforms to more safely conduct their business. It received just two "no" votes in the Senate: from Rand Paul and Ron Wyden. It's a problem of hegemony: prohibition has long been plain common sense. So, it's our job to change that. The first step is to make it clear that there is dissent, and that prohibition is self-evidently neither good policy nor good politics.Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It's called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity and The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur.Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter!

Kaniela Ing (kanielaing.com) is a DSA member running in Hawaii's 1st Congressional District, calling for an end to imperialism and rule by the wealthy, and for housing rights, a green New Deal, Medicare for All, and free college. And he's Dan’s guest. Ocasio-Cortez became an overnight celebrity when she defeated Joe Crowley. But what's most important is that you know who these candidates are before election day — because that's when they most need your help.Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It's called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies.Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter!

Janus was an entirely expected and atrocious decision. The conservative business interests that successfully obliterated private sector unions hope it will do the same to their public sector counterparts. Chris Maisano, a contributing editor at Jacobin, argues that labor has no choice but to return to its militant roots if it hopes to survive. In other words, to survive, labor has to fight for a lot more than mere survival.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity and The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur.Live Dig show in NYC on 8/17! Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century: facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about.Support this podcast with your $ and receive our weekly newsletter and lefty books at patreon.com/TheDig!