Jacobin Radio

The Women’s March on Washington showed the power of women's leadership in the battle against Trump and the Right. But significant divides that pervaded the 2016 primary campaign remain. Those debates continue to divide the feminist movement and the Left.Dan’s guest today is Liza Featherstone, a member of The Nation’s editorial board and the editor of False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Doug interviews two guests. First, Margaret Corvid on the British election, the Labour Party—and sex work. Second, Emre Öngün on Turkey’s deeper slide into authoritarianism. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Why do Republicans only seem to care about deficits and debt when they’re trying to cut social welfare programs? Dan's guest for this special episode is Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He discusses Trump’s regressive tax proposal and the GOP's never ending efforts to redistribute wealth the super-rich. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Under President Trump, the media has become a part of the story like never before. Journalistic probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable news outlets provided him with wall-to-wall free advertising and, more recently, lauded Trump as “presidential” because he decided to bomb Syria. Adam Johnson, a writer at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, breaks it down. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sebastian Budgen on the second round of the French elections, pitting a centrist against a fascist. And Sofia Japaridze on how foreign NGOs turned Georgia (the country) into a broke libertarian paradise. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Weissman interviews Tariq Ali, filmmaker, activist, and author of numerous books, on his new book The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution and the legacy of Vladimir Lenin 100 years after the Russian Revolution. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Dig normally serves up ice cold, well-digested takes. Sometimes, however, something important happens and Dan finds someone who can help us understand it quickly. Last weekend’s election in France, which advanced the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen and neoliberal centrist Emmanuel Macron to a runoff, is one such event. Sebastian Budgen is an editor for Verso Books, a contributing editor at Jacobin, and a member of the editorial board at Historical Materialism. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Putting “black faces in high places,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, has not only failed to benefit the working class and poor black majority — it has actually harmed them by pushing an individualistic, meritocratic narrative that blames poor black people’s condition on their own personal failings. Taylor is a professor of American-American studies at Princeton and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, from Haymarket Books. She is a regular contributor to Jacobin and contributed a chapter called "What about racism? Don't socialists only care about class?" to The ABCs of Socialism. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

RL interviews Chantel Johnson, whose brother Richie was one of the hundreds of young black men murdered in gun violence in Chicago in recent years. She and RL discuss the ties between violence and austerity in the city, the feeling of "conspiracy" against Richie and other poor black men like him in her neighborhood, and how anger at inequality in the city has become part of her grieving process. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Politicial scientist Thea Riofrancos on Ecuador's elections, the state of social movements and the Left there, and the decline of the pink tide in Latin America. Philosophers Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss on Jason Jorjani and the philosophy of alt-right. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Prisons don’t just keep inmates in; they keep the public out. Even at a moment when mass incarceration is under unprecedented criticism, it is hard for people on the outside to empathize with people who they cannot see or speak to. My guests today are Brett Story and Jordan Camp. Story is a filmmaker who has made an incredible new documentary called The Prison in 12 Landscapes, which shines a harsh light on America’s prison archipelago without ever taking a peek inside. Jordan Camp is a scholar of the American carceral state. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Right has long looked to lower taxes, especially for rich people, out of a belief that rich people deserve to keep their money because they earned it. In other words, taxes impinge on their freedom. Mike McCarthy argues this is the wrong way to think both about taxation and about freedom. Mike McCarthy is a sociologist at Marquette University in Milwaukee and the author of Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions Since the New Deal. He has a chapter in The ABCs of Socialism called “Don’t the rich deserve to keep most of their money?”The ABCS of Socialism is available for only $5 on Jacobin’s web site. You can get it at jacobinmag.com/store. Also, be sure to listen to the other podcasts in our ABCs series, which tackle questions that include Why do socialists talk so much about workers? Doesn’t human nature make socialism impossible? Is socialism a western, Eurocentric concept? And isn’t the United States already king of socialist? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out info

Max Sawicky on Republican tax schemes and Vijay Prashad on Syria. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Trump’s oligarchic regime is an extreme version of the imperial and economic vision that has guided presidents of both major parties. But the popularity of Trump’s chauvinist, xenophobic appeal points to a major crisis in the ideological and political-economic regime of the United States and the world for decades. That’s neoliberalism, a system that isn't quite over under Trump. But as Nicole Aschoff argues in the most recent issue of Jacobin, it has radically changed. Today, my guest is Nicole Aschoff, managing editor at Jacobin and the author of The New Prophets of Capital, part of Jacobin's Verso Series. You can read her article "The Glory Days Are Over" in the new issue of Jacobin and at jacobinmag.com. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Suzi Weissman talks with Verso Books editor Sebastian Budgen about the French elections. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of Inventing the Future, on getting beyond folk politics to a world where robots work more and people (supported by a universal basic income) work less. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You’ve probably seen the memes purporting to show just how socialist the United States already is by listing a bunch of government programs, services, and agencies. The idea that any government activity is synonymous with socialism has major political and strategic implications. After all, if our country were already at least partly socialist, then all we would have to do is keep gradually expanding government.But simply electing politicians to office or watching the government expand by its own momentum has never been, and never will be, enough. Economic power is political power, and under capitalism the owners of capital will always have the capacity to undermine popular democracy—no matter who’s in Congress or the White House.This is the last episode of The ABCs of Socialism, a four-part series taking up some of today's common questions asked about socialism. Each of those questions is also a chapter in The ABCs of Socialism, which was produced by Bhaskar Sunkara and the editors of Jacobin, and published b

Medicaid expansion saved Obamacare from repeal. There’s a lot to hate about Obamacare, but that expansion did something very good on a very large scale — and it made just enough Republicans very nervous about taking it away. It's an important lesson about economic policy generally: the more universal a program is, the greater the number of Americans who become advocates for its preservation — a fact conservatives know and fear thanks to Medicare and Social Security but that many liberals don't. Today, my guest is Matt Bruenig, a writer who is one of most incisive analysts of poverty, inequality and welfare systems, and the political conflicts that surround them. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Doug Henwood interviews Jodi Dean on why the temptations of populism should be resisted, and Jane McAlevey, author of No Shortcuts, on real organizing, not fake organizing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Suzi Weissman interviews documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis on why the Left has to present a compelling, alternative vision of a better future — or it's doomed. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.