Jacobin Radio Folgen

Suzi talks to longtime labor reporter and author Steven Greenhouse about the exciting new moment for labor in the US. Steven says the unionizing victories at Amazon and now 81 Starbucks stores—as well as the spread of union drives to many other workplaces in retail, higher education, the media, and healthcare—signify a moment so promising for labor that we’d have to go back to the organizing in the 1930s to see anything comparable. Suzi and Ilya Matveev, of Openleft.ru and the Russian research group Public Sociology Laboratory, discuss Russia’s war in Ukraine twelve weeks in. We get Ilya’s analysis of the domestic situation at home, politically and economically, for the regime and for the population. While polls show widespread support for Putin’s “military operation,” reports note that support for the war is tepid, not enthusiastic. Most analysts say the country is evenly divided between support and dissent regarding the war, though propaganda and penalties for speaking out influence that figure, as Putin has taken an increasingly hard line against dissent. Ilya Matveev unpacks what the polling does or doesn’t show, and we get details of the impact of economic sanctions on the population, the state of industry and the economy, the divisions in the population and among the elite – and what losing the war might mean for Putin’s hold on power.

Doug speaks with Molly White, keeper of the "Web3 Is Going Just Great" blog, on the pointless and scam-ridden world of cryptocurrencies. Also on the pod: Kathleen Belew, a scholar of white power, discusses that movement’s obsessions and unusual organization.Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html

Historian Margarita Fajardo on her book The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era. Fajardo discusses the Latin American economists at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) who conceptualized the division of the global economy between center and periphery, and how that later gave rise to dependency theory and world systems theory. Plus Cuban Revolution and the Alliance for Progress, Allende's democratic road to socialism and right-wing coups in Chile and Brazil—and more. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig