Jacobin Radio

Fifty years ago, a mainstream group of high-profile Americans declared the following: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution." The Kerner Commission, established by President Johnson, embodied left liberalism at its most bold and idealistic. But that vision of radical reform was eviscerated by the American war on Vietnam, the rise of neoliberalism and the modern conservative movement, and liberal triangulation that reached its apotheosis under Bill Clinton.Dan talks to Vanessa A. Bee, a consumer protection lawyer in D.C. and a social media editor for Current Affairs magazine, about her New York magazine essay on the subject: nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/how-we-can-get-a-more-equal-union.html.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and access our new weekly newsletter.

Spanish politics are complicated. Dan speaks to Carlos Delclós, Kate Shea Baird, and Bécquer Seguín to help clarify the Catalan independence movement, the radical municipalist governments that now govern major Spanish cities including Barcelona, and the promise and problems of the left-wing party Podemos.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art. And Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite. And please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and access our new weekly newsletter!

The steady pace of school massacres has revived calls to put more cops in school, with atrocities committed by white students exploited to make schools more like prisons, and ensure that the former remain a rapid-fire pipeline into the latter.Dan’s guests are Dakota Hall, the executive sirector of Leaders Igniting Transformation, a youth-of-color-led organization fighting the school-to-prison pipeline in Milwaukee; and Dmitri Holtzman, the director of education justice campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show and access our weekly newsletter at Patreon.com/TheDig!

A laundry list of modest policy solutions is not enough, it turns out. It's not just that technocratic fixes around the edges spectacularly fail to meet people's needs; in failing to articulate a big picture vision of how the world ought to be transformed, they fail to move people — either emotionally or, more concretely, to the polls.Dan’s guest George Monbiot argues that the Left needs a powerful new story to win power and change lives in his new book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis.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. And support this podcast with $ and get our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig!

Author and activist Mark LeVine on the recent horrific events in Gaza and Jerusalem, which he sees as a point of no return. LeVine interprets Zionism's fundamental nature and history as one of settler colonialism, and he explains why he thinks resistance to Zionism around the world, both by Jews and non-Jews, is in the process of transforming itself and taking off.

The Brookings Institute's Carol Graham (papers here, here, and here) on failing health and declining prospects among poor white people in the United States. Then, Kristen Ghodsee, co-author of this article, on the vile uses of anticommunism.

Israel is massacring Palestinians daring to approach a fence that occupation forces have built to shore up an ethno-state founded on the principle of apartheid. Nothing could be more clear. But you wouldn't no that from the, at best, muddied coverage that prevails in mainstream media accounts. Dan’s guest is Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, professor at George Mason University, and a powerful and eloquent voice challenging the anti-Palestine narrative — including, straight into the lion's den of TV news.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties by Tariq Ali versobooks.com/books/2666-street-fighting-years.Check out the Socialism 2018 conference at socialismconference.orgAnd support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig!

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” The rule of law: the #resistance has construed it to be a cornerstone of opposition to Trump. It is certainly alarming to live under a president who flirts with operating in a permanent and near-total state of exception. But it's the rule of law as we've known it that has blessed the wide-open floodgates of corporate money into American politics, looked the other way in the face of unchecked national-security-state abuses, christened separate and unequal schools and, of course, rubber-stamped the rise of mass incarceration. The law has no transcendent moral basis. Rather, it is shaped by political economy.Dan’s guest is Amy Kapczynski, professor of law at Yale Law School, and a co-convenor of LPEblog.org.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-policeAnd support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig!

Historian Alejandro Velasco sorts fact from fiction when it comes to contemporary Venezuela. Then, Jessica Blatt, author of Race and the Making of American Political Science, on the racist origins of the discipline.

Recent cases of horrific child abuse have elicited widespread media attention. What the media coverage often misses is what these incidents reveal about a two-tiered child protection system that systemically surveils, punishes, and destroys poor black families while ignoring abuses perpetrated in affluent white homes. Dan's guest is Dorothy Roberts, who has closely studied the racism and poverty policing that pervades the child-protection system.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum versobooks.com/books/2707-revolution-in-the-air.