Suzi and Alan Minsky talk to Katie Halper of WBAI's The Katie Halper Show about the role of independent media and politics in the Trumpian landscape we inhabit. Then Suzi speaks to prolific, award-winning playwright Murray Mednick, whose enigmatic "Mayakovsky and Stalin" runs until August 19 at the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood. The play examines two lives and two suicides, related but distant, responding to the liberating freedom of revolution in the Soviet Union, but then increasingly strangled and suffocated by the top down brutal dictatorship of Stalin, played by actor Maury Sterling (best known as Max on Homeland), who joins the conversation. The play traces the parallel stories of the giant of Russian poetry, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and his relationship to his love and muse, Lilya Brik (darling of Russia’s avant garde) and her husband, the literary critic Osip Brik. Their relationship exemplifies the freedom from conventional mores in the early years of the revolution. The second life and suicide is that of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's young wife who committed suicide during a state dinner in 1932, renouncing her husband and his horrific policies, reflecting her despair and suffocation being married to the supreme dictator while millions perished.
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Jacobin Radio Folgen
News, politics, history and more from Jacobin. Featuring The Dig, Long Reads, Confronting Capitalism, Behind the News, Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman, and occasional specials.
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Folge vom 13.08.2018Jacobin Radio: Katie Halper; Murray Mednick and Maury Sterling
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Folge vom 11.08.2018The Dig: Making Sense of SorosThat right-wing people in the US and Europe have made George Soros the answer to so many troubling questions is not very surprising: he's a billionaire, he's Jewish and, unlike most of his cohort, he is an intellectual who spends much of his money on substantively progressive causes. Daniel Bessner's essay on him in n+1, however, not only sketches out the Right's obsessions but also offers a detailed analysis of Soros as a thinker and philanthropist — coming to the conclusion that Soros's hope for an open and pluralistic society will be forever doomed if we continue to live under the very capitalist system that made him so spectacularly rich. Here's Soros's response in the Guardian.Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It's called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about!Thanks to Verso Books. Check out eThe Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur.Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter!
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Folge vom 10.08.2018Behind the News: Globalization, Trump, and the American EmpireAdam Tooze and Leo Panitch, separately, on globalization, Trump, the American empire, declinism, etc. Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University and serves as director of the European Institute. His new book Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World is out this week. Panitch is a professor of political science at York University and the author of many books, including The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy Of American Empire.
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Folge vom 09.08.2018The Dig: Boots Riley on Sorry to Bother You and CommunismSorry to Bother You is a hilarious film about the dead-serious shittiness of life under neoliberalism's flexibilized and precarious labor regime, a system teetering upon a thin line between free labor exploitation and a form of expropriation reminiscent of full-on slave labor — all at the mercy of the thinly veiled barbarity of Palo Alto-style techno-utopianism. It's about how capitalist society divides and conquers friends and family to claim not only our obedience but also our very souls, and about how the task of left organizing is to see through that game and fight together. Dan's guest today is Boots Riley, who wrote and directed the film and also fronts the left-wing hip-hop group The Coup.Live recording of The Dig coming up in New York City. Friday, August 17, 7 PM at Verso Books (20 Jay Street in Brooklyn). It's called Blockadia and Beyond: Left climate politics for the 21st century https://www.facebook.com/events/2042636042656908/?active_tab=about!Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage And October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville versobooks.com/books/2731-october.Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig to receive our weekly newsletter