Jacobin Radio Folgen

Socialism is in the air. But the idea of socialism is under attack—and not only from the Right. Within the Left itself, there is suspicion of an ideal many view as single-mindedly focused on economic issues and distant from other everyday sufferings, especially those of black and brown people.The underlying assumption is that socialism, a supposedly Western and white ideology, while capable of addressing economic injustices, can't speak to the lived experience of oppression and discrimination in the Global South and to oppressed groups elsewhere. Is there any validity in this criticism? We pose the question to Nivedita Majumdar, an associate professor of English at John Jay College and secretary of the Professional Staff Congress, the CUNY faculty and staff union.This is the third episode of The ABCs of Socialism, a four-part series taking up some of today's common questions asked about socialism. Each of those questions is also a chapter in The ABCs of Socialism, which was produced by Bhaskar Sunkara and the editors of Jacobin, and published by Verso Books. You can buy the book for just $5 at the Jacobin store: https://www.jacobinmag.com/store/ The sessions are recorded at the Verso loft in Brooklyn, New York, in front of a live audience.

What a moment to read, or to re-read, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, political scientist Corey Robin’s 2011 collection of essays — especially if you need to disabuse friends and family of the notion that Trump is some historic degradation of conservatism’s good name rather than a malignant, nasty outgrowth of a long history of violent reaction against left movements for equality. Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and a contributing editor at Jacobin. We’ll take a look back at The Reactionary Mind and discuss how its pre-Trumpian insights apply to a political moment quite that is quite different but, upon closer inspection, still all too familiar. A new edition of The Reactionary Mind is due out in September with new chapters on Trump and Trumpism, a chapter on Burke and his economic theory, and a chapter on Hayek, Nietzsche and neoliberalism.

Doug Henwood interviews the former Greek minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis, discussing the interminable euro crisis, austerity, Brexit, the nationalist international (Trump, Le Pen, etc.), and DiEM25, among other things.