Organizing

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.

Organizing and Socialist Strategy

22 Sep 2023
Featuring Alex Han, Astra Taylor, and Rachel Gilmer on how we build powerful organizations that win both short-term fights and the long-term struggle for socialism. A live Dig recorded at the Socialism 2023 conference in...

Seizing Labor’s Moment w/ Alex Press & Eric Blanc

09 Sep 2023
Featuring Alex Press and Eric Blanc on surging labor militancy and why US unions must seize this historic moment.

Transcript: Making Sense of Antonio Gramsci

11 Jun 2023
Read the transcript of part 2 of our interview with Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci here: https://jacobin.com/2023/06/michael-denning-antonio-gramsci-strategy-intellectuals-coalitions-theory.

The Chicago Model w/ Stacy Davis Gates, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Alex Han

08 May 2023
Featuring Stacy Davis Gates, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Alex Han on how Chicago’s labor left took over City Hall. Brandon Johnson’s mayoral victory, the product of a decade-plus of social movement union struggle, is a model...

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....

How to Build a Fighting Labor Movement w/ Jane McAlevey

15 Apr 2023
Featuring Jane McAlevey on how to organize mass numbers of new workers into unions that wage mass strikes to fight employers and revive the labor movement.

The Politics and Practice of Tenant Organizing

05 Feb 2023
Featuring Shanti Singh, Tracy Rosenthal, René Moya, and Cea Weaver on the politics and practice of organizing tenants.

Transcript: Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci and Hegemony

23 Jan 2023
Jacobin’s transcript of the interview: https://jacobin.com/2023/01/michael-denning-antonio-gramsci-prison-notebooks-theory-hegemony-class-organizing

Gramsci, Organization, Crisis w/ Michael Denning

21 Jan 2023
Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. The second of a two-part interview.

Gramsci & Hegemony w/ Michael Denning

14 Jan 2023
Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. Part one of an expansive two-part interview.

Emancipation Circuit w/ Thulani Davis

18 Sep 2022
Featuring Thulani Davis on The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, a monumental history of freedpeople organizing amid the Civl War and Reconstruction.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin Kelley, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

10 Sep 2022
Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on racial capitalism, intergenerational organizing, internationalism, and a whole lot more. Dan’s live Dig interview from the Socialism 2022 conference in Chicago.

The Return of Labor Militancy

13 May 2022
Live from New York: Dan interviews Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls, Jaz Brisack of Starbucks Workers United, SEIU Local 1199NE president Rob Baril, Jacobin writer Alex Press, and Labor Notes writer Luis Feliz Leon...

Combat Liberalism w/ Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Mindy Isser, & Zachary Hershman

16 Apr 2021
Three thinkers and organizers on the much debated question of ultra-leftism post-Bernie 2020. Two texts that informed our discussion:

Digital Party with Paolo Gerbaudo

03 Feb 2021
Dan interviews sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo on his book The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy. How does the promise of direct digital democracy obscure how leaders are made more powerful and less accountable? Examples...

Identity, Power, and Speech with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

05 Dec 2020
Prevailing identity politics norms call on people “listen to the most affected” or “centre the most marginalized.” But this often works out quite badly in practice. Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on his brilliant essay “Being-in-the-Room Privilege:...

Mike Davis on This Moment

13 Nov 2020
Dan interviews Mike Davis on what the election reveals about this US political moment and the way forward for the Left.

Organize to Win with Andres Celin and Rapheal Randall

14 Aug 2020
A must-listen conversation on organizing to win with two extraordinary organizers from Philadelphia’s Youth United for Change.

Defund Police Organizers Forum

20 Jun 2020
A Dig special. Zoom forum Dan hosted with leading defund police organizers from around the country. For more info:

Uprising with Cathy Cohen, Jasson Perez, Malaika Jabali

04 Jun 2020
Dan interviews Cathy Cohen, Jasson Perez, and Malaika Jabali on this uprising, the conditions that made it possible, and where it might be headed.

Organizing Now with Sarah Jaffe & Jasson Perez

08 Apr 2020
Dan interviews veteran organizer Jasson Perez and journalist Sarah Jaffe on left organizing amid covid and where it might go.

NYC DSA on the Ballot

18 Mar 2020
Dan interviews NYC DSA down-ballot candidates. Samelys López is running for a US House seat in the Bronx. Jabari Brisport, Marcela Mitaynes, and Phara Souffrant Forrest are running for seats in the state legislature. All...

Doug Henwood on DSA

25 May 2019
DSA’s explosive growth continues; it has already, in a few short years, become the center of a renewed American socialist movement. Dan interviews Doug Henwood, who recently published a lengthy article in The New Republic...

Strike! with Jane McAlevey

27 Mar 2019
The strike is back, and big time. Teachers in particular have been walking off the job not only to demand higher wages but also to fight for an end to privatization and for a transformation...

Feminism for the 99% with Tithi Bhattacharya

06 Mar 2019
View Transcript

LA Teachers Strike with Sarah Jaffe

18 Jan 2019
The teacher strike wave continues as more than 30,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles walk picket lines not only for the higher wages that they deserve but also for the well-funded and great schools...

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...

Organizing Amid Rising Tides

31 Aug 2018
Dan speaks to Elizabeth Rush, the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a lyrical, mournful but ultimately hopeful account of people dealing with amongst the most tangible effects of global warming right now:...

A Post-Janus Plan for Labor

24 Jul 2018
Janus was an entirely expected and atrocious decision. The conservative business interests that successfully obliterated private sector unions hope it will do the same to their public-sector counterparts. Chris Maisano, a contributing editor at Jacobin,...

Julia Salazar Brings Socialist Insurgency to Brooklyn

12 Jul 2018
This week’s super series on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory and the future of left politics continues with Julia Salazar, a DSA member running for a Brooklyn state Senate in New York’s District 18. Salazar’s campaign worked...

Telling a New Story with George Monbiot

23 May 2018
A laundry list of modest policy solutions is not enough, it turns out. It’s not just that technocratic fixes-around-the-edges spectacularly fail to meet people’s needs; in failing to articulate a big picture vision of how...

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...

West Virginia and Labor after Janus with Sarah Jaffe and Gabriel Winant

13 Mar 2018
In West Virginia, a focal point of Trump-era liberal armchair ethnography, teachers have won a historic statewide strike just as the Supreme Court is poised to rule in Janus, a case that will mark the...

Nomiki Konst on the Fight Inside the Democratic Party

02 Mar 2018
Nomiki Konst, a correspondent for The Young Turks and Sanders appointee to the DNC’s Unity Reform Commission, talks about the Berniecrat struggle against a corrupt neoliberal establishment to democratize the Democratic Party. This is the...

It’s Iron Stache

20 Feb 2018
Dan talks to Randy Bryce (@IronStache), the Berniecrat ironworker taking on Paul Ryan, about how he plans to knockout the House Speaker, Scott Walker’s decimation of unions and Foxconn’s con against the people of Wisconsin....

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...

Workers' Rights Are Students' Rights

19 Jan 2018
Student workers at Rutgers University are fighting for 15 dollars 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...

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”...

Alex Press on Collective Action to Fight Sexual Harassment

27 Oct 2017
The exposure of Weinstein’s predations has reignited widespread fury over the longstanding problem of sexual harassment and assault—especially in the workplace. Jacobin editor @alexnpress discusses two new pieces she wrote on how dealing with these...

Let's Elect Left Candidates with Joe Dinkin

20 Oct 2017
Since Bernie Sanders’s success in the 2016 Democratic primary, much of the Left, from progressive Democrats to socialists, has had its sights set on something we had long at least implicitly assumed was impossible: state...

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...

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...

Sarah Jaffe: We Didn’t Start the Class War

05 Jul 2017
Workers have for years faced a neoliberal onslaught administered by a bipartisan establishment of technocratic elites who have ensured the redistribution of wealth into the hands of the rich. This is an elite that has...

Naomi Klein: No Is Not Enough

27 Jun 2017
Donald Trump appears to many in the guise of a terrifying aberration. But in reality, he is the outcome of trends that are far too normal. We need movements to come together to not only...

Sarah Jones: What's the Matter with Appalachia? Capitalism

16 May 2017
What’s the matter with Appalachia? Many liberal elites think they know the answer. Since Trump’s campaign first took off, the region has become a symbol of all that is wrong with Red State America: guns,...

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...

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...