Millennials Are Killing Capitalism

Torkil Lauesen, longtime revolutionary activist and author of works on imperialism and unequal exchange. He discusses the long, historical-materialist transition to socialism. He explains how unequal exchange sustained 20th-century capitalism and how shifting global power and China’s rise change the terrain. He also explores method: identifying the principal contradiction to guide strategic choices for future struggles.

Vlad (Austin organizer building ties with affected families), Ezzy (Chicago organizer coordinating anti-police and immigrant justice work), and Kenny (New Mexico organizer shaping strategy on police brutality, homelessness, and anti-ICE actions) discuss tactics and lessons from recent ICE raids. They cover sustaining mass resistance, coordinating national surges, turning local outrage into prolonged campaigns, and building lasting neighborhood relationships.

In this conversation a group of us interviewed Dr. Ali Kadri about his book The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction. This conversation was the final discussion in a study group which began last October and involved participants from all over the world. The book provides a theoretical framework which understands waste as a value making process where war-making, the wasting of social classes, and the wasting of social nature become central to capitalist accumulation and to how capital resolves crises in accumulation. The questions in this discussion were those that remained for some of the members upon reading and discussing the work over the last few months. In some cases you will hear members of the group ask their questions directly, in others I ask based on individual questions provided by members or common themes that came up among multiple participants from the group. We get into the imperialist aggression against Iran, the role of patriarchy and racism within Dr. Kadri's analysis, and questions of optimism or hope against the death dealing forces of imperialism. To gain a further understanding of Dr. Ali Kadri's work, check out the first interview we conducted with him back in 2023, and of course check out his books as well as various interviews available online, we will link some of these in the show description. This study group was really rewarding once again, thank you to all of our participants and to Dr. Ali Kadri. In our current study group - which is already full - we are discussing Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Our next one will be announced in March, so to ensure you have an opportunity to join us, since they almost always fill up quite quickly, make sure you are signed up on our patreon for as little as $1 a month, all patrons are welcome to join us in these study groups and they are a great place to deepen our knowledge and analysis collectively. Links: European Class Struggle Starts at the Bottom of the Sea with Iker Suárez "War Is the Basis of Accumulation" - Ali Kadri on Genocide, Waste, Imperialism, and the Commodification of Death Check out Guerrilla History's Ali Kadri archives Resistance Is Fertile also has some interviews with Ali Kadri

Dr. Ashley D. Farmer, a historian of Black women and radical politics, guides a lively tour of Queen Mother Audley Moore’s life. Short vignettes cover Moore’s Garveyite roots, migration-driven organizing in Los Angeles and Harlem, her role in founding grassroots reparations, tense ties with parties and state surveillance, and the women-centered networks that sustained long-term Black nationalist work.

In this conversation we speak with Ed Vogel from Southerners Against Surveillance Systems & Infrastructure about the rapid expansion of various police surveillance programs. We talk about the nexus of private corporations, policing agencies, and nonprofit foundations and organizations that facilitate the expansion of these technologies and how they seek to circumvent democratic processes and oversight mechanisms. We discuss ICE, Customs & Border Patrol, Atlanta's Cop City, Shot Spotter, Flock Safety, Fusus, and automated license plate readers. Ed also talks about what we do and don't know about the role played by corporations like Target and Home Depot in the policing surveillance network. As we see the terror that ICE is enacting in Minneapolis, this conversation offers a set of analyses that can help us understand the problem of ICE's power beyond simply the goons kidnapping or executing people in the street. Rather than just focusing on the expanding problem, we do talk about some of the ways that local communities are fighting back and winning campaigns against the adoption of these technologies. We also talk about maintaining good digital hygiene as an act of solidarity for people in social movements. There are a number of articles that Ed either authored, co-authored, or contributed documents to in the show description. We reference these throughout the conversation and recommend you read them for further details. Southerners Against Surveillance Systems & Infrastructure has a hands-on digital security workshop Wednesday, February 4th. During the session they will walk through how to better protect yourself and community against how ICE is accessing phone data for their kidnappings. Follow SASSI on IG or Bluesky or visit their website. Recently we also featured Dwayne Monroe during one of our livestreams to talk about ICE's use of the surveillance program known as Webloc, the SASSI training will address how to protect cellphone data from this program. If you like the work that we do, please consider becoming a patron for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. It is through the support of our listeners and viewers that we sustain this work and the ability to bring you these conversations. By Enabling Police Surveillance, Elected Officials Fuel Trump's Agenda A Nashville Proposal Could Outsource Surveillance and Policing to a Nonprofit ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows ACPC and Lucy Parsons Labs win open records lawsuit against Atlanta Police Foundation Police surveillance tech and Cop Cities are the State's complementary counterinsurgency strategy Safety from Surveillance Turning Death into a Commodity Background Photo Credit Chad Davis

In this episode we are joined by Wassila Abboud to discuss her essay, "The Dining Table and the Drone." Our conversation begins with her meditations on grief in Lebanon. We explore how people often name today's grief through the language of past griefs — and what this transference between past and present reveals about the psyche under domination. From there, we turn to Walter Benjamin's "angel of history" and why Abboud argues this analogy fails to capture Lebanon's relationship to catastrophe. We discuss why so many returns cluster around 1982, how that year fractured grief itself, reshaping collective memory, political imagination, and the vocabulary of resistance. We examine the paradoxical meaning of ceasefire, the choreography of repeated displacement, and the temporal logic of domination that ensures catastrophe is always waiting just beyond its declaration. Our conversation also situates Lebanon's grief in relation to Gaza's present devastation, asking what it reveals about the impossibility of stability in a regional order sustained by capital accumulation and the extraction of life. We trace the sequence of events between 1978 and 1982 — from Operation Litani to the Camp David Accords and Israel's full-scale invasion of Beirut — not simply as military maneuvers but as the crystallization of a regional order that fractured Lebanon's political landscape and redefined resistance. Wassila Abboud is a cultural worker and writer researching between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her work engages with critical theory, philosophy, and culture and takes on both a speculative and materialist approach, examining the conditions of past and present historical struggles. (Follow her on IG: @wassila_) If you like what we do and want to support our ability to have more conversations like this. Please consider becoming a Patron. You can do so for as little as a 1 Dollar a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

Austin Cole, an organizer and community planning practitioner focused on environmental justice, sheds light on Toni Morrison's concept of rootedness and its implications for urban planning. He critiques liberal planning methods, emphasizing Black self-determination and the legacy of plantation economies. Cole introduces the idea of counter-war against structural oppression, explores the concept of the Black commune, and discusses strategies to avoid elite capture. He stresses the importance of grassroots consciousness-building and community defense against systemic injustices.

This is the audio from a livestream video we hosted with Hala Sabbah from The Sameer Project on December 3rd, 2025. Hala returned to the program to talk about life in Gaza nearly two months into the so-called "ceasefire." We spoke about the realities on the ground and the needs of people in Gaza right now, what is getting into the strip and what is not, and how the Sameer Project is working within the current conditions in Gaza. We also talk about the need for continued organizing, boycotts, and direct action against the zionist entity. And we spoke about creative ways people can fundraise for Sameer Project and other local groups operating on the ground in Gaza. RETURN HOME x The Sameer Project Sameer Project's linktree

In this episode, we are joined by organizers from the Lowcountry Action Committee to discuss climate justice in South Carolina's Lowcountry. We begin with a discussion about climate reparations and the state's unfortunate priorities. We go on to explore the history of phosphate mining and its exploitation of newly emancipated Africans, the ecological destruction it caused, and its legacy of environmental racism. We then turn to hurricane season and the anxiety it provokes in vulnerable working-class and poor Black communities, followed by the toxic legacy of military pollution and "forever chemicals" in North Charleston. Finally, we reflect on political consciousness, the fight against capital, and whether the Gullah Geechee are punished for their self-determination—echoing Haiti's revolutionary legacy. Lowcountry Action Committee is a Black led grassroots organization dedicated to Black liberation through service, political education, and collective action in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. If you like what we do want to support our ability to have more conversations like this, please consider becoming a patron for as little as one dollar a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism, you can also support via a one-time donation at BuyMeACoffee.com/MAKCapitalism The piece the conversation is based on this issue of Surge: Lowcountry Climate Magazine Lowcountry Action Committee's Website, LinkTree, Youtube

In this episode, recorded in the summer of 2024, Josh interviewed two organizers from the Lowcountry Action Committee. Lowcountry Action Committee is a Black African grassroots organization dedicated to Black liberation through service, political education, and collective action in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Our conversation centers around their 2024 piece on environmental racism, where they trace the climate catastrophe, threatening to wash away Gullah Geechee homelands back to the phosphate mining industry of the eighteen sixties. We discuss how today's disproportionate exposure of Black communities to hazardous waste sites, landfills, incinerators is inseparable from the region's history of chattel slavery and why Black people must be at the vanguard of the environmental movement. We then situate the crisis within the broader context of the Black Belt, a historical homeland of Africans trafficked to North America. Now among the most vulnerable regions to climate change, drawing on Kali Akuno's prediction that large portions of the Black Belt may be underwater by 2050. We explore what displacement, housing costs, and organized abandonment mean for Black communities in the Carolinas and beyond. The conversation also turns to international frameworks, particularly Cuba's model of sustainable development and the parallels between Cuban soil erosion and sea level rise and the ecological challenges facing Gullah Geechee communities. We discuss how the Lowcountry itself lives under a kind of economic blockade, how this juxtaposition illuminates environmental racism, neocolonialism, and anti-Blackness. If you like what we do want to support our ability to have more conversations like this, please consider becoming a patron for as little as one dollar a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism, you can also support via a one-time donation at BuyMeACoffee.com/MAKCapitalism Lowcountry Action Committee's Website, LinkTree, Youtube Crisis in the Carolinas: Racial Disparities, the Climate Catastrophe and Environmental Racism in the Lowcountry Cuba's Life Task: Combatting Climate Change (Tarea Vida) Organizing to Free the Land with Kali Akuno