Jacobin Radio Folgen

Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the first of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In this first episode, we talk about how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible; and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism in a decolonizing world while thwarting worker organizing. On the next show, we'll discuss a lot more, including how oil companies and Western governments made autocratic governments and conservative Islamists key partners in creating the very global order that we now find in such profound crisis. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig, where you can also check out the first edition of our new weekly newsletter.

Imagine you walk into a warehouse where the workers are on break, and you stumble into a vigorous, nuanced discussion of Marx’s notion of surplus value, how it relates to organizing on the shop floor, and how it applies to flexible and often female labor. Then the conversation turns to Gramsci and workers' councils in Turin. This is exactly what Carolina Bank Muñozfound when she visited a warehouse in Chile to study how unions responded to Walmart’s entry into Chile. The majority of Walmart's workers in Chile are unionized, and we talk to Carolina about her book, Building Power From Below, Chilean Workers Take on Walmart,<font color="#000000">and how </font>Chilean retail and warehouse workers organized rank-and-file-led unions and win real economic gains along with respect and dignity on the job. Then Nelson Lichtenstein joins the discussion on Walmart and organizing retail workers in the US. Nelson has several books on Walmart — as the face of capitalism in the twenty-first century, transforming American politics and business. Nelson anticipated a day of reckoning for Walmart as challenges to its "business model" grow at home and abroad — as the Chilean case shows. We'll also get Nelson's take on the "Amazon threat" and the state of US labor today in the Trump era.

It’s our 100th episode and the launch of our spring fundraising drive! Aziz Rana returns to The Dig fifteen years after the invasion of Iraq to reflect on the paucity of substantive anti-imperialist politics across much of the American left. Socialism isn’t just an internationalist politics on principle: domestic and foreign struggles are inherently linked, just as the forces we struggle against are globally intertwined — and the latter benefit from perpetuating an ideology that artificially divides the two. But for decades, a bipartisan consensus has governed foreign policy, to disastrous ends. Why, Rana asks, is there no foreign policy equivalent to the new left-wing domestic policy litmus test on single-payer health care? Check out Aziz’s n+1 article here: nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-lefts-missing-foreign-policy. Thanks to our supporters at 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 Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig!