Jacobin Radio

Suzi talks to Joel Jordan and then Alissa Quart, who in different ways are both looking at our squeezed post-recession lives and the fight to win or win back a decent standard of living. Longtime teacher and teacher-union strategist Joel Jordan joins us to talk about the spectacular mass strikes of the red-state teachers — and draw comparisons with the worsening conditions for teachers in California. Then, Suzi seapks with Alissa Quart about her new book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,which tells the stories of the financial instability — and downward mobility — of what she calls the "middle precariat": highly educated but insecure, so-called middle-class Americans who can barely afford to raise children and meet expenses.

Stephen Wertheim, a Lecturer in American and international history at Birkbeck, University of London, breaks cuts through the suffocating foreign policy debate that shapes American Empire under Trump.Peace has broken out across the Korean Peninsula—or, at least, the odds that Donald Trump will blow the world up have gone down a just a bit—at least temporarily. Yes, Trump is the one who pushed us way too close to the brink of nuclear war. And yes, he likely sought peace with Kim Jong-Un because he loves wins, whatever their political or ideological content. But wow, has the liberal reaction been revealing. According to the mindset that pervades the liberal media and political elite, a move toward peace with North Korea is bad because Trump is bad. Or perhaps worse yet, it's bad because the national security state conventional wisdom that has governed Washington under both parties for so long—purveyed by the very people who have brought us endless war almost everywhere—says that it's bad. It's clearer than ever that the task of the left to find a way out of this ideological closed circuit of the liberal vs. Trump foreign policy debate—and, if we win power, to shut down its warmongering for good.Thanks to Verso. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identityAnd register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.orgSupport this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Everyone wants to know what's wrong with Appalachia. But beginning in the 1960s, it was "white ethics"—Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews and other non-WASPs—who broke from the New Deal coalition, embracing their Ellis Island immigrant roots in reaction to the Black Freedom struggle and, ultimately, Latin American migration. Dan’s guest today is Matthew Frye Jacobson, an historian at Yale and the author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America, from Harvard University Press.Thanks to Verso. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot, now out in paperback versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage George did a Dig interview too blubrry.com/thedig/34202825/telling-a-new-story-with-george-monbiot/And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.orgSupport this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind, one very bright spot in an often disappointing landscape of mainstream immigration journalism, discusses the historical, political, and legal context of Trump’s family separation policy. Dan also just wrote a lengthy piece on this for Jacobin, which you can read at jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-immigration-child-family-separation-policyThanks to Verso Books. Check out the new paperback edition of China Miéville’s October: The Story of the Russian Revolution versobooks.com/books/2731-octoberAnd register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org.And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig.

David Harvey discusses his latest book, focusing on why understanding all three volumes of Capital is crucial for grasping Marx's ideas fully. He touches on neoliberalism, capitalism surviving climate change through mass immiseration, and linking struggles over production and consumption in the fight toward socialism.

Suzi speaks with David Graeber, whose earlier Debt: the First 5000 years was an international best-seller. From Adbusters to Occupy to the history of debt, Graeber has demonstrated his creative and provocative thinking. He takes on the biggest shibboleth — our very work — in his new book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. A recent UK poll found that 37 percent of full-time workers were sure that their jobs made no meaningful contribution to the world. Bullshit jobs are the pointless ones that could be erased — and their absence would hardly be noticed. Graeber points to the ubiquitous administrative layer that has ballooned even as joblessness has grown in the last decade, creating an entire sector in academia, health administration, human resources, public relations, financial services, telemarketing, and the like. Graeber suggests we can move from the "bullshitization" of jobs to caring jobs and a caring society, but is it possible under capitalism?

The US colony of Puerto Rico has been repeatedly shocked and Puerto Ricans are traumatized. That is precisely what successful shock doctrines like this one — which wants to remake the island into a utopia for rich Americans and crypto-bros and a dystopia for everyone else — depend upon.This is also the subject of Naomi Klein's new book from Haymarket, The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. Today, Klein returns to The Dig, and is joined by Mercedes Martínez, president of the Puerto Rican Teachers Federation.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx with Sven-Eric Liedman versobooks.com/events/1785-a-world-to-win-the-life-and-works-of-karl-marx-with-sven-eric-liedman.Also, register for the upcoming Socialism 2018 conference at SocialismConference.org.Support this podcast with $ and get our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig!

Last week, we posted an interview Dan recorded in Barcelona on Spanish politics — specifically, on the question of Catalan independence, and the municipalist movement governing cities like Barcelona. What wasn't discussed much was the fact that the conservative Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy was about to fall — which it did, just a few days later. So, Dan brought sociologist Carlos Delclós back for a follow-up interview.Production note: Dan sounds like he’s speaking in an aquarium or calling into his own show because he messed up the recording. So, don’t blame Alex Lewis.Thanks to Verso. Check out Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties by Tariq Ali versobooks.com/books/2666-street-fighting-years.Also, register for the upcoming Socialism 2018 conference at SocialismConference.orgAnd support this podcast with $ and get access to our stellar weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig!

For libertarians, liberty means something different. It’s about liberty for property owners. And in their quest to preserve that absolute freedom for the ownership class — whether their assets be human slaves, factories, or extractive industries — democracy must be curtailed and the power of the people must be checked and repressed.This is the argument put forward by Dan’s guest, historian Nancy MacLean, in her book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. The book makes a powerful argument for the anti-democratic origins and trajectory of free market fundamentalist, Koch Brothers-aligned economists who have come to profoundly shape and warp American politics to fit their dystopian vision. The book has also been controversial.Thank you to Verso Books. Check out Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite.Thank you to the Socialism 2018 conference. Register now at socialismconference.org!Want to get access to our stellar weekly newsletter? You can do so by making a contribution to the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig.

On this edition of Jacobin Radio, Suzi talks to legendary street-fighting man, author and playwright Tariq Ali about 1968 — as seen from today, fifty years later. The first cover of Black Dwarf, founded by Tariq and others in May 1968, is reproduced in the latest London Review of Books: “We Shall Fight, We Will Win, Paris, London, Rome, Berlin.” Now there is an emerging strike wave in France — and the slogan is “We are not commemorating 1968, we are continuing 1968.” Suzi talks to Tariq Ali about continuity and change since 1968.