Social Movements

The Missing Revolution w/ Vincent Bevins

16 Oct 2023
Featuring Vincent Bevins on If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The second of a two-part interview on this important new book.

If We Burn w/ Vincent Bevins

09 Oct 2023
Featuring Vincent Bevins on If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The first of a two-part interview on this important new book.

Emergent Terrain w/ Akbar, Winant, & Riofrancos

24 Aug 2023
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the emerging terrain of struggle. Is American liberalism exhausted or revitalized? What are the successes and limits of the new US left electoral strategy? Is there...

Conjuncture w/ Akbar, Winant, & Riofrancos

13 Aug 2023
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the American conjuncture. Did an era that began with Occupy and Ferguson—marked by teachers strikes, two Bernie campaigns, the explosive growth of DSA, Standing Rock, and...

Philly’s Left Turn w/ Helen Gym & Nikil Saval

05 May 2023
Featuring Nikil Saval and Helen Gym on how the history of Philadelphia social movements brought Nikil into the state senate and has made Helen, a long-time public education organizer, a frontrunner in the mayoral race....

Occupy at 10 with Astra Taylor

25 Sep 2021
It’s Occupy Wall Street’s tenth anniversary. Dan interviews Astra Taylor.

The NAACP's Anti-Lynching Struggle with Megan Ming Francis

22 Nov 2020
Dan interviews political scientist Megan Ming Francis about the NAACP’s struggle against racist violence in the teens and 20s and how it remade the criminal justice system and the civil rights movement alike.

2020 with Naomi Klein and Nikhil Pal Singh

30 Oct 2020
What else to talk about right now other than everything about right now? Election, pandemic, BLM, climate, and how the left should think about and struggle with it all. Dan interviews Naomi Klein and Nikhil...

Capitalism with Michael Hardt

13 Dec 2019
An interview on how the transformation of capitalism has changed the possibilities for anti-capitalist struggle with Michael Hardt, co-author with Antonio Negri of Assembly.

Hegemony How-To with Jonathan Matthew Smucker

27 Feb 2019
Dan’s guest is long-time organizer Jonathan Matthew Smucker, the author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. The book is both a critique of the radical left’s traditional style of politics and a how-to guide...

Barbara Ransby on Black Lives Matter

21 Nov 2018
Black Lives Matter is a poignant slogan and a powerful force for social transformation. It’s also shorthand for a huge array of organizations, mostly led by people that you’ve never heard of, working the daily...

Lessons from the New Left with Max Elbaum

09 Oct 2018
Let’s ensure that the history of American socialism doesn’t repeat as farce. That’s one reason that Max Elbaum wrote Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, an account of the...

Reclaiming Philadelphia

03 Oct 2018
An interview with three members of Reclaim Philadelphia, which emerged from the Bernie 2016 campaign in Philly and has since—in a remarkably short amount of time—played a key role in getting Larry Krasner elected District...

Struggle and the State

09 May 2018
Today’s Dig is a very good and somewhat unusual Dig: Dan’s got two interviews with two different people. First, journalist Eric Blanc on the teacher strike wave that he’s been covering for Jacobin. Then comes...

Frances Fox Piven: Movements Still Matter

07 Feb 2018
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...

The Militant 70s Labor Movement You Never Heard of with Lane Windham

24 Jan 2018
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...

A New Poor People’s Campaign with Nijmie Dzurinko

16 Jan 2018
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...

Troop Veneration and US Empire with Catherine Lutz

03 Jan 2018
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...

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Recovering Identity Politics from Neoliberalism

19 Dec 2017
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”...

DSA Kicking Ass with Lee Carter and David Duhalde

17 Nov 2017
Last week was a bad week for Republicans and a good week for Democrats—and for Democratic Socialists. It’s now pretty clear that Republicans will pay a price for the fact that large numbers of Americans...

Nina Turner: Let's Keep the Political Revolution In Motion

06 Oct 2017
Former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner talks about being horrified by Trump, why single-payer is suddenly hot among likely 2020 Democratic contenders, and the work that Our Revolution is doing nationwide to fight the Democratic...

Transcript: Kate Aronoff: Populist Revolt Against The Climate Crisis

06 Sep 2017
The devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey has made the denial of climate change all the more dangerous. But @KateAronoff says that mainstream liberals and environmental groups, touting cap-and-trade and business-friendly reforms, have put forward an...

Kate Aronoff: Populist Revolt Against The Climate Crisis

06 Sep 2017
The devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey has made the denial of climate change all the more dangerous. But @KateAronoff says that mainstream liberals and environmental groups, touting cap-and-trade and business-friendly reforms, have put forward an...

Emily Atkin: Harvey Is Political

01 Sep 2017
New Republic reporter Emily Atkin (@emorwee) talks about why Harvey is already and inherently political thanks to climate change and the potential for petrochemical disaster in Houston. When people criticize “politicizing” the disaster they are...

R.L. & Ella: Here Comes the DSA Convention

01 Aug 2017
We’re taking a quick break halfway into our four-part series of interviews on Latin America because this week is a big week for the American left: Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, is holding its...

Alejandro Velasco: Explaining Venezuela's crisis

25 Jul 2017
Hugo Chávez’s rise to power inspired leftists around the world. But today, Venezuela is in a profound economic and political crisis. A huge decline in oil prices gutted the revenue stream that Venezuela depended on...

Liza Featherstone on the Fight Against Lean-In Feminism

09 May 2017
The Women’s March on Washington sent a clear message that women would be at the lead in battling the right in the years to come. But it left unresolved significant divides that pervaded the 2016...

Transcript: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Black Liberation and Socialism

25 Apr 2017
Read the transcript [here] (https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/black-lives-matter-baltimore-obama-racism-freddie-gray-election-whitelash)

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Black Liberation and Socialism

25 Apr 2017
Putting “black faces in high places,” scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, has not only failed to benefit the working class and poor black majority; it has actually harmed them by legitimating an individualistic, meritocratic narrative that...

The Democratic Socialists of America and the Fight Against Trump

21 Mar 2017
The Democratic Socialists of America are growing — suddenly and explosively. Last June ahead of the Democratic National Convention, DSA counted 6,500 members. Today, after a presidential bid from a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and Trump’s...

Charlene Carruthers: Fighting for Black Lives Under Trump

07 Mar 2017
Fighting for Black Lives Under Trump

Fighting the Trump bans: Linda Sarsour and Nicholas Espíritu

31 Jan 2017
Today, we bring you two interviews. The first is with Nicholas Espíritu from the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups mounting legal challenges against the ban, who will explain the legal and constitutional challenge...

Building a diverse working class movement to transform America

17 Jan 2017
What is to be done? How can I get involved? Those are questions that a lot of people are asking now that Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States. Today, I...

Americans in Revolt: Sarah Jaffe on social movements

13 Dec 2016
Journalist Sarah Jaffe’s new book Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt chronicles the movements for economic and racial justice that will be at the forefront of the fight against Trump. Daniel interviewed Sarah before a live...