Season 3 opens with an exercise in socialist imagination with organizers from the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. A few days after Biden’s inauguration, we held our own counter-inauguration laying out our alternative‘100 Days’ program. This is not purely a speculative exercise—the extent to which Biden’s presidency goes beyond a “return to normal” will depend crucially on the left’s ability to mobilize around some of the demands and aspirations you’ll hear in this episode. Part 1: DSA’s National Political Education Committee, the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC) and the Socialist Feminist working group.
To date there have been more than 200 documented strikes, walkouts and other types of labor protest in the U.S. by essential workers in warehouses, meat processing plants, hospitals and grocery stores. What might this wave of activity mean for the labor movement after the pandemic? Guest: Eric Blanc, author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Verso: 2019), and organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America's Emergency Worker Organizing Committee (EWOC) ...
We discuss specific demands socialists should make of the Biden administration with regard to climate change, and the administration’s potential responsiveness, or “push ability” as Riofrancos calls it. More generally, we consider the differences between the U.S.’s two major political parties on climate change: how large and significant are these differences? Riofrancos also describes her research on the extraction of lithium, a key component of rechargeable batteries, and the political challenges this extraction poses for the left. Thea Riofrancos is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College, and has served as visiting researcher in universities in Chile and Ecuador. She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), and co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Riofrancos is also an organizer with the Ecosocialist Working Group of the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA. ...
This podcast began during the summer with the premise that the mass death, disease and economic misery caused by the pandemic are themselves political forces. Now, as summer dissolves into fall, these forces are converging with the most consequential struggle for state power in recent U.S. history. My starting point for this second season of the podcast is that we, as socialists in the U.S., have to grasp both the promise and peril of this convergence. To the themes of the first season—labor, unions, protest, socialist education—the fall edition adds electoral strategy, a closer look into the connections between race and class in the U.S., and the pandemic’s impact in other countries. ...
