Socialism

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...

The Manifesto w/ China Miéville

09 Jul 2023
Featuring China Miéville on The Communist Manifesto. Miéville is the author of A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto.

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.

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.

The Big Scary 'S' Word w/ Yael Bridge

18 Oct 2021
A very short ep on a great new documentary about the history and present of American socialism: The Big Scary S-Word. It’s by Yael Bridge, and it’s the perfect film to show to your skeptical...

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:

Black Left with Charisse Burden-Stelly

11 Apr 2021
Dan interviews Charisse Burden-Stelly on racial capitalism, the history of the US Black left, and the US government’s Red Scare attacks on Black radicals.

How Left Parties Neoliberalized with Stephanie Mudge

11 Dec 2020
What happened to social democratic politics? Dan interviews sociologist Stephanie Mudge on her book Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism.

This Life with Martin Hägglund

31 Jan 2020
Dan interviews philosopher Martin Hägglund on how the way we conceive of our finite lives here on earth shapes our critique of capitalism and construction of socialism.

Socializing Ownership with Mathew Lawrence

08 Nov 2019
Mathew Lawrence, founder and director of the left-wing UK think tank Common Wealth, explains why ownership must be socialized, what that might look like, and how to make it happen.

Socialist Manifesto with Bhaskar Sunkara

16 Aug 2019
Dan talks to Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara about his book The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. We must study socialism’s history and plan for its future.

Astra Taylor on Socialism, Democracy, Liberalism

05 Jul 2019
For much of the 20th century, Cold War politics defined socialism as the antithesis of democracy. Today, an insurgent democratic socialist movement is transforming US politics. It is socialism that is at the forefront of...

The Spanish Situation with Carlos Delclós and Magda Bandera

13 Jun 2019
In Spanish politics, the center-left Socialist Party has demolished the conservative Popular Party and checked risk of a major far-right surge. But meanwhile, the once very plausible-feeling dream of an insurgent radical left Podemos gaining...

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...

Why Socialism Wins in Chicago

23 Mar 2019
Four of the five candidates endorsed by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or advanced to the runoff election on April 2, leading to talk of a Socialist Caucus on the city...

Bad Objects with Andrea Long Chu and Marissa Brostoff

11 Dec 2018
Marissa Brostoff and Andrea Long Chu discuss Sex and the City and The X-Files, unraveling the tangled history of Marxism and queer theory, Cynthia Nixon the democratic socialist versus Miranda the straight corporate lawyer misrecognized...

The Left Knows No Borders with Richard Seymour

28 Nov 2018
How unlucky it was for Angela Nagle to make her so-called left case against immigration the same week that Hillary Clinton reprised her neoliberal case for border crackdowns. In reality, solidarity with immigrant workers has...

Sawant on Socialism Against the Amazonification of Seattle

17 Oct 2018
Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant was elected to Seattle City Council way before socialism became a cool thing.  Today, Dan’s talking to Sawant about how socialists can build power and win at the local level—and how...

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...

Beyond Economism with Nancy Fraser

12 Sep 2018
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Eco-Socialism and the Climate Crisis

29 Aug 2018
Today’s episode is a long one. It’s the first of two this week on climate politics: a live event that I hosted at Verso Books in New York a couple weeks ago. Or, at least...

Boots Riley on Sorry to Bother You and Communism

09 Aug 2018
Sorry to Bother You is a hilarious film about the dead serious shitiness of life under neoliberalism’s flexibilized and precarious labor regime, a system teetering upon a thin line between free labor exploitation and a...

A New Party of a New Kind

15 Jul 2018
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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...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Winning Power

09 Jul 2018
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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...

DSA at the Ballot Box

17 Apr 2018
The latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics and we’re talking about Democratic Socialists of America’s new electoral strategy. DSA has almost overnight become a serious force on an American...

Lamb Is Not Enough. Three Leftist Women Run in Pennsylvania

17 Mar 2018
Democrat Conor Lamb’s victory is a stunning rebuke of Republicans. But Lamb is far from an ideal candidate, and so the race also raises a perennial debate between the left and liberal center over what...

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...

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...

Bhaskar on the Bolsheviks

27 Dec 2017
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...

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...

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...

An Olympic-Size Swindle in LA with Molly Lambert and Jules Boykoff

15 Sep 2017
The so-called Olympic spirit doesn’t match the reality of a highly-corporatized Games that often leaves taxpayers picking up the tab, engenders abusive policing and justifies the remaking of cities for the rich at the expense...

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...

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...

Transcript: 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,...

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,...

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...

Jacobin's All-Star Socialist Anti-Inauguration Extravaganza

21 Jan 2017
This week we re-broadcast Jacobin Magazine, Verso, and Haymarket Books’ anti-inauguration event from The Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. featuring Naomi Klein, Anand Gopal, Jeremy Scahill, Owen Jones, & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.