The Dig

Four decades ago, Frances Fox Piven and her husband Richard Cloward published Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, a classic, clear-eyed analysis of just what the title suggests. Piven, a legendary scholar and activist, talks to Dan about her life, Occupy, Bernie, the Democratic Party, anti-war movements, black bloc, mass incarceration and more. (Also: Dan’s voice sounds a little different because he had to record in a different room.) Thanks to Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike and Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City by Andrew J. Diamond ucpress.edu/ebook.php?isbn=9780520961715

The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As is often the case, however, the focus shifted elsewhere soon after disturbances in the street came to end. Political scientist @LesterSpence recently wrote an article about why children were freezing in Baltimore public schools: the heating didn’t work, something that can only be made sense of when viewed in the longer history of capital flight, racial and class segregation, and the rise of a service-economy carceral state jacobinmag.com/2018/01/baltimore-freezing-schools-children-racism-austerity Thanks to Verso for their support. Check out The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello versobooks.com/books/2513-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism Support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig            

We are living on land from which indigenous people, over hundreds of years, were violently removed. On some level, everyone knows this—yet it’s mostly nowhere to be found in stories that Americans tell themselves about who we are as a country, and how we got here. Dan’s guest is Paul Frymer (@pfrymer), a professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. In his recent book, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion, he provides a close study of the empire America built in the late 18th and 19th century, a project of geographic expansion facilitated and also limited by the demands of racial engineering. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike And from University of California Press: Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World by Isa Blumi ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520296145  

Excitement that Democrats had developed a spine in the fight for Dreamers reverted to familiar despondency and fury when they capitulated and voted to reopen the government on Monday. @JStein_WaPo offers his analysis of the role that the media and the Democratic Party’s right flank played in pushing senators to fold. This interview was recorded Tuesday and posted early because things are moving crazy fast. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right by Liz Fekete versobooks.com/books/2555-europe-s-fault-lines And please support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Everyone agrees that the 1970s was the beginning of the end of capitalism as we had known it since the New Deal. But historian Lane Windham makes it clear that it wasn’t for a lack of worker struggle in her new book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. In case studies of union fights in department stores, shipyards, offices and textile mills, Windham explains that women and workers of color seized the civil rights victories of the 1960s to fight for economic rights in the 70s. Thank you to Verso and University of California Press. Check out The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East by Patrick Cockburn versobooks.com/books/2518-the-age-of-jihad and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520295711 Support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Student workers at Rutgers University are fighting for $15 an hour. Undergraduate history major and dining-hall worker Danny Taylor of @RutgersUSAS talks about their struggle. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert versobooks.com/books/2535-alt-america, and support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig! Also: Jacobin has published a transcription of Dan's interview with the Fields sisters jacobinmag.com/2018/01/racecraft-racism-barbara-karen-fields

Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People’s Campaign alongside other organizers shortly before he was assassinated 50 years ago. Today, organizers nationwide are relaunching that movement as The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, tackling the evil quadruplet of poverty, systemic racism, militarism, and environmental devastation. Dan’s guest is rock star organizer Nijmie Dzurinko, making her second appearance on the show. Check out Dan’s recent work slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/the-opioid-crisis-is-blurring-the-legal-lines-between-victim-and-perpetrator.html & injusticetoday.com/philadelphia-media-slam-newly-elected-da-krasner-for-firings-but-house-cleaning-advances-his-f2da076ffb06 Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism

Your first Diglet of the new year, and we’re talking about that Trump book. At n+1 Patrick Blanchfield makes the case that Fire and Fury is not, as some might think, a bunch of meaningless palace-intrigue that has distracted us from what Trump is doing to destroy the environment and wage relentless class war against the poor. Rather, the book in one fell swoop exposes the Trump administration for the dangerously hot mess that we all knew it was but were entirely unable to understand clearly because the deluge of drama and weird tweets had rendered it all banal wallpaper. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out How Will Capitalism End versobooks.com/books/2519-how-will-capitalism-end Like our show music? Check out Brodsky’s commercial and artistic work at Jeffreybrodsky.com and painterly.bandcamp.com

Chattel slavery made black women’s reproduction the source of private property—and in doing so invented race and American racism. Ever since, the denigration and regulation of black women’s childbearing has been central to the construction of white supremacy and the exploitative economic order that it protects, as scholar Dorothy Roberts explained in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, a pivotal book first published in 1997. In this episode, @DorothyERoberts talks about the book and what lessons it holds today as Trump and Republicans seek to destroy yet more of the social safety net and use racism as a smokescreen to distract white Americans from their class war against working people. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art And please support The Dig with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

The protest movement against the onset of the Iraq War was countered by a call to “support our troops” from militarists on the right. Venerating American soldiers, of course, is not about supporting actual American soldiers but is rather a rhetorical device to preclude questioning or criticism of the wars they are sent to fight. In a face-to-face interview at Brown University’s Watson Institute, anthropologist Catherine Lutz discusses John Kelly’s recent diatribe, Khizr Khan, Trump’s attack on protesting NFL players and the roots of it all in the Nixon Administration’s response to GI rebellion against the Vietnam War. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System by Wolfgang Streeck versobooks.com/books/2519-how-will-capitalism-end And support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

At the close of the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara discusses his new article on the Bolsheviks and what we can learn from and blame on them—and also what might be forgiven and moved beyond. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl and Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal at versobooks.com.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor returns to The Dig to discuss her new book How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Forty years ago, a group of black feminists coined the term “identity politics” in the Combahee River Collective Statement. For them, it was a way to identify the various ways that capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia created a set of interlocking oppressions. And the point of identifying how those systems operated together was not to create an itemized politics of particularity, as is too often the case today, but rather to create a framework for solidarity. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism and support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig.

A lengthy interview with historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields on their seminal essay collection Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Dan talks to the sister scholars about the book; how Ta-Nehisi Coates’ primordialist view of white racism spells defeat; that racism serves the interest of capitalist class war, and endless debates over Rachel Dolezal distract us from that fact; and a whole ton more. This is over two hours, so you might want to bite it off on a few chunks, or on a long drive. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso. Check out Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum versobooks.com/books/2109-tear-gas And support your (favorite?) left-wing podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig   p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}

Journalist @ryanlcooper talks about the new paper he wrote with @MattBruenig, founder of the @PplPolicyProj, a new left-wing think tank founded by Bruenig and funded by the people. Foreclosed: Destruction of Black Wealth During the Obama Presidency details how the Wall Street-induced foreclosure epidemic wiped out huge swaths of black wealth—and how Obama, the first black president, could have taken multiple actions to save most homes but did not. Check out the report http://peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Foreclosed.pdf and this article about it jacobinmag.com/2017/12/obama-foreclosure-crisis-wealth-inequality. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal versobooks.com/books/2576-radical-happiness Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

The prospect of nuclear war with North Korea sits near the top of the list of things that have been unthinkably bad about Donald Trump’s presidency. But the conflict with North Korea didn’t begin with Trump. It’s critical that we understand the Koreas and their historical context right now. Journalist @TimothyS breaks it all down—North Korea, South Korea, the role of the US and others—from World War II to the present. And he argues that peace is possible, but it can only achieved through engagement between North and South, not through bellicose US intervention. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum versobooks.com/books/2109-tear-gas. And please support us with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig