Jacobin Radio

Christopher J. Lee, a scholar of decolonization and the South African left, explores Ruth First’s extraordinary life and work. They discuss her communist upbringing, anti-apartheid activism, role in building MK, imprisonment, exile, and partnership with Joe Slovo. The conversation also examines her groundbreaking writing on African coups, revolutionary power, and internationalist politics.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton professor, author, and co-founder of Hammer & Hope, examines a historic rejection of MAGA and the rise of socialist electoral campaigns. She discusses public provision, Democratic Party divisions, Palestine, imperial power, and the limits of elections. The conversation closes with grassroots solidarity against ICE and data centers, and the challenge of building a multiracial working-class coalition.

Political economist Alfredo Saad-Filho examines Lula’s return to power, Brazil’s fierce polarization, evangelical conservatism, corruption attacks, market reactions, and the Workers’ Party’s succession dilemma. Writer and food-systems scholar Raj Patel investigates AGRA, foundation influence, the Green Revolution’s anticommunist roots, and agroecology’s challenge to industrial farming.

Alyssa Battistoni, political theorist and Barnard professor, discusses her book Free Gifts and the ties between capitalism, freedom, and ecology. She examines class and market rule, alienation, externalities, and the limits of republican freedom. The conversation also explores existentialism, care work, reproductive labor, the commons, and democratic stewardship of nature.

Angela Gonzales-Torres, a Los Angeles organizer and democratic socialist, discusses her congressional campaign, her family’s deportation story, housing, healthcare, ICE resistance, and building politics without corporate money. Vermont Senator Tanya Vyhovsky shares firsthand scenes from wartime Ukraine, covering blackouts, Russian attacks, failed peace efforts, Europe’s security crisis, and solidarity with Ukraine’s left.

Paul Heideman, a political historian and writer for Jacobin and Catalyst, examines DSA’s transformation from a marginal organization into a major force in US politics. He and Vivek Chibber explore its electoral strategy inside the Democratic Party, Sanders-fueled growth, geographic unevenness, shifting priorities from Medicare for All to Palestine, internal tensions, and the urgent challenge of rebuilding organized labor.

Mike Beggs, an Australian political economist and University of Sydney lecturer, discusses The Blueprint for a socialist economy. Topics include worker-owned firms, public banks, democratic investment, basic income, labor mobility, inequality, markets as planning tools, economic downturns, and climate transition. He also examines why building political power and organizing labor are essential to making socialism achievable.

Bettina Engels, a Free University of Berlin scholar of Burkina Faso, social movements, and conflict, traces the country’s revolutionary tradition. She discusses the uprising that toppled Blaise Compaoré, the rise of jihadist violence, and the coups that brought Ibrahim Traoré to power. The conversation explores Traoré’s break with France, regional realignment, civil-society repression, and his contested claim to Thomas Sankara’s legacy.

Alyssa Battistoni, political theorist and Barnard professor, discusses her book Free Gifts. She explores Marxism, nature, and capitalism’s ecological crises, challenging carbon pricing and simplistic appeals to nature. The conversation examines colonial histories, wage labor, value, fossil fuels, plastics, agriculture, and the political meaning of nature’s limits.

Rodrigo Nunes, Brazilian philosopher and author of Anatomy of Disintegration, examines Bolsonaro, Lula, neoliberalism, and the forces driving Brazil’s far right. Shawn Gude, historian and author of American Socialist, explores Eugene V. Debs’s journey from labor leader to democratic socialist, his opposition to empire and racism, and the enduring cultural promise of socialism.