Millennials Are Killing Capitalism

In this conversation we interview Alejandro Villalpando.    Alejandro Villalpando is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pan-African Studies and the Latin American Studies Program at Cal State LA. He earned his Ph.D. in Critical Ethnic Studies from UC Riverside, and an M.A. from Latin American Studies at Cal State LA. His work lies at the intersection of Black, Central American, and Ethnic Studies. His co-authored chapter entitled "The Racialization of Central Americans in the United States,” can be found in the edited volume Precarity and Belonging (Rutgers University Press, 2021). He was also a co-founder, co-organizer, and co-facilitator for a year-long political education project entitled the Abolition Open School. Villalpando is also indelibly shaped and inspired to be part of and contribute to the crafting of a world rooted in justice, equity and dignity for all by his young child and partner who remain the bedrocks of his existence. This discussion is primarily about organizing around the issue of police violence in Los Angeles, specifically south of Interstate 10 where Alejandro is born and raised and continues to live and organize. Villalpando shares a bit about his own experiences growing up in Los Angeles around police violence and around the organized abandonment and criminalization of his community by the state. He also discusses organized violence from a transnational perspective that attends to everything from imperialist wars and CIA counterinsurgency wars in Central America to both interpersonal violence and state violence in the Los Angeles area. Pushing back against these forces through political education, mobilization, and grassroots organizing, Alejandro speaks of the abolitionist work he and his partner engage in, and in the work they do with the Coalition for Community Control Over the Police and with many families who have had their loved ones taken by the state. Along the way Villalpando talks about a lot of the contradictions that come up when working to do abolitionist work in the real world with real people. And he talks about balancing some of the more practical day to day work of organizing around the vexed positions of responding to state violence, with the necessary work of world building and offering up the more expansive horizon of abolition. Alejandro and his partner are co-convening Heal Together's Anti-Carceral Care Collective which is a space for anyone who needs a grief processing space that’s anti-carceral. We just sent off our latest book to our incarcerated reading group. We want to thank Pluto Press for donating copies of Josh Myers Of Black Study. We also want to thank Massive Bookshop for kicking in for postage, and also the folks who donated some funds for postage to make that happen. And finally we want to thank our partners over at Prisons Kill. Lastly, there’s 5 days left in the month of February, we only need 2 more patrons to hit our goal for the month of adding 28 patrons to the show. So if you want to support the show, kick in $1 a month or more be a part of the amazing community of folks that make episodes like this possible on a weekly basis at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. Other links: Steven Osuna's episode (mentioned in this discussion) Jury Nullification Toolkit (also discussed in the episode) Villalpando social media links: IG: @CentAmStudies IG  IG: @SouthCentralCat911 Twitter: @CSULA_LAS

In this episode, Joy James returns to the podcast and is joined by K. Kim Holder.  Holder was a member of the Harlem Chapter of the Black Panther Party and his dissertation The Black Panther Party 1966-1972: a curriculum tool for Afrikan-American studies was the second dissertation written by a veteran of the Black Panther Party. It is credited with helping to usher in a new wave of academic interest in the party. He also contributed some reflections to Kuwasi Balagoon’s A Soldier’s Story Revolutionary Writings by a A New African Anarchist.  Joy James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. Whether as an author or editor, her books include Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, Shadowboxing, Imprisoned Intellectuals, The New Abolitionists, Resisting State Violence, the Angela Y. Davis Reader and others. The book that occasions this conversation is her latest work In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities. It has a foreward from Da’Shaun Harrison, an afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal. And features original articles, co-authored essays with Kim Holder, and interviews and discussions transcribed from various podcasts including Groundings, The Black Myths Podcast, our own interview with her from the summer of 2020 and several others. In this discussion we talk to Dr. Holder about the pieces that he and Dr. James co-author in the book and about his experiences with the Black Panther Party in Harlem. We also discuss a number of the interventions and topics covered within this book, especially the captive maternal and the role of spiritual grounding and community in relation to struggle. The book is officially out now in the UK and comes out in March in the states, you can order a copy from Divided Publishing’s website or pre-order it through other online booksellers.  We want to thank Joy James and K. Kim Holder for joining us for this conversation. Also just want to note that Joy James is currently releasing weekly episodes along with Kalonji Changa and Jared Ball over on Black Power Media. That show, which is referenced in the discussion is called Guerrilla Intellectual University. Also because certain recent developing events are referenced in the discussion, this episode was recorded on January 22, 2023. And of course if you appreciate the work that we do here bringing you these conversations on a weekly basis, the best way to help us sustain this work is to become a patron of the show. Our work is totally supported by our listeners we don’t sell any advertisements or engage in any paid promotions for the podcast so become a patron for as little as $1 a month and join the amazing people who make this show possible at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

This is the 4th and final installment in our series of conversations with Zoharah Simmons, Michael Simmons, and their biographer Dan Berger. The conversations are inspired by Dan’s new book Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, which covers the lives and struggles of Zoharah and Michael in SNCC and in a variety of organizations thereafter. In this part of the discussion, we talk about the book as a love story. Not primarily of romantic love, but of the love that animates long term struggle. We also discuss Zoharah’s efforts organizing with the National Black Independent Political Party, Michael’s organizing work in Philadelphia, his efforts with the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee and work to develop a new national communist party. We also ask them to touch on their internationalist organizing efforts in the 1980’s, 90’s and beyond. We really want to express our deep gratitude to Michael, Zoharah and Dan who each spent roughly six hours recording with us. As we have said throughout the series there are many aspects of the book, that even despite this lengthy treatment from us, we just couldn’t get to, some of them beautiful, some of them very painful, but all of them full of lessons, information, and the making of history. Stayed On Freedom is out now and we hope folks will pick it up and read it for themselves. One last reminder that we have a new study group that starts next week. We’ll be reading Mao’s On Practice and On Contradiction. We’ll include a link to that in the show notes. And if you like what we do, please become a patron of the show, our show is 100% supported by our listeners through patreon. So join up for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. Links: Purchase Stayed On Freedom Support our book club for incarcerated readers. Previous Installments in this series: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3    

This is the third installment of our conversation with Zoharah and Michael Simmons, and their biographer Dan Berger, as we discuss their lives in relation to Dan’s new book Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey.   We discuss Michael and Zoharah’s organizing against the Vietnam War, especially the issue of draft resistance.  Along those lines, we talk a bit about Michael’s time locked up as a pre-trial detainee at the Atlanta Prison Farm, during the period where it served as a jail for Atlanta on the same location where Cop City has been proposed. Zoharah shares struggles against patriarchy and male chauvinism within movement spaces, specifically through her experiences at SNCC and the Nation of Islam. And she discusses her own efforts to combat it as a SNCC Program Director in Laurel, Mississippi.  After Michael’s incarceration for his resistance to the draft, both Michael and Zoharah talk about their years struggling within the American Friends Service Committee both in terms of their jobs there, but also the organizing that they launched beyond the scope of their duties, their struggles to unionize the AFSC, and dealing with the complicated relationship that a predominantly white Quaker organization had to folks like Michael, Zoharah and others who were coming out of the Black Liberation struggle with deep organizing commitments, experiences, and international solidarity. In particular Zoharah’s discussion touches on her participation in work uncovering government surveillance, repression, and counterinsurgency. Michael discusses organizing predominantly Black workers and other workers of color while also building growing connections and mobilizing solidarity with movements in Africa and South America. We want to thank Pluto Press again for donating 36 copies of the book Of Black Study by Joshua Myers. You can support shipping costs to send those books inside here.  And we have set a goal of adding 28 new patrons to the show this month to keep up with non-renewals and maintain our support base for the show. If you like what we do and want to join the amazing listeners who sustain this project, you can do so by contributing as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. Also we do have a 3 week study group coming on Mao’s lectures On Practice and On Contradiction. If you want to find out more about that we’ll include a link to that in the show notes as well. Even though this series represents one of our most sustained engagements with a subject, we also assure you that there are many wonderful stories and complicated struggle and issues covered in Stayed On Freedom that we were not able to get to in our discussion with Dan, Michael & Zoharah. We encourage folks to pick up the book if they haven’t already.  Additional Links: SNCC/Atlanta Project/Anti-Draft Protests  The Draft Program / Atlanta's Black Paper        

This is the second episode in our series on Dan Berger’s new book Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey.  We welcome back Dan Berger, and Michael and Zoharah Simmons for this discussion. Make sure you check out part one if you missed it. In part 1 Zoharah and Michael Simmons share stories from their childhoods and their early politicization, as well as their first experiences organizing with SNCC in Mississippi and Arkansas. That conversation will enrich your understanding of part 2, but this conversation also works as a standalone discussion. In this episode the focus is on the organizing work that Zoharah and Michael were a part of, how SNCC approached community organizing in Mississippi, Arkansas and then with the Atlanta Project. Building throughout this episode are the influences and experiences that organically developed into what we know as Black Power. We discuss the Black Consciousness Paper also called the Black Power statement by some, which was developed by the Atlanta Project in Vine City, in which Zoharah and Michael organized. Along the way there are very interesting lessons, experiences, and ideas for organizers and an important discussion of what the actual interventions and implications of Black Power were within SNCC and the broader Black Liberation struggle.  Make sure to pick up a copy of Stayed On Freedom by Dan Berger for more depth on many of the stories touched on here in discussion with Dan, Michael and Zoharah. It is a new month, we are fortunate that we hit our goal for 31 new patrons in January on the last day of the month. This month we will set a goal of 28 new patrons. You can become one of them and support our work here for as little as $1 per month. You can join all of our amazing patrons for as little as $1 per month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism Our January selection of our book club with Prisons Kill and Massive Bookshop was Joshua Myers book Of Black Study. We want to thank Pluto Press for generously donated 36 copies for those incarcerated readers. We do need to raise a little money for postage for that. You can support that here. Links: Our first conversation in this series with Dan Berger, Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons Our (previous) conversation with SNCC organizers Jennifer Lawson and Charles Cobb Jr Our (previous) conversation with SNCC organizers Jennifer Lawson and Dorothy Zellner Our previous episodes with Dan Berger  "The Black Consciousness Paper" The Atlanta Project (SNCC Digital Gateway)  

This conversation is centered on Dan Berger’s new book Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey.  Stayed On Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom.   Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.   We’re really excited that for our discussion of the book we get to do something a bit different than we usually do, thanks to Zoharah and Michael Simmons who join us along with Dan Berger to offer some oral history of their decades of struggle.  In this part of our conversation, we talk about their childhoods, their early politicization, defying their families in order to get directly involved in perhaps the most dangerous work in the Civil Rights Movement and we begin to talk about the Black communities they joined in the Deep South to be a part of those transformative struggles against Jim Crow.  There will be at least 2 more episodes talking with Zoharah and Michael about their long-term commitment to what Berger calls “The Long History of Black Power.” And we are so grateful to Dan, Michael and Zoharah for taking so much time to bring you these oral histories. Stayed on Freedom is on sale now and you can pick it up from our friends at Massive Bookshop and at bookstores everywhere.  As a note we have done some previous oral histories with SNCC veterans and we will include those in the show notes as well, as they provide more context for one of the most important radical struggles in the history of this country. It’s almost the end of the month and we are behind our own goal for patrons which we set monthly to keep up with non renewals and attempt to build towards the greater sustainability of the labor we put into this podcast. We need 12 more patrons to hit that goal this month. So if you’ve been thinking about it, now is a great time to kick in and support the podcast at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism Links: Purchase Stayed on Freedom from Massive Bookshop Our (previous) conversation with SNCC organizers Jennifer Lawson and Charles Cobb Jr Our (previous) conversation with SNCC organizers Jennifer Lawson and Dorothy Zellner Our previous episodes with Dan Berger 

This is the second half of our conversation with Joshua Myers on his latest book Of Black Study. In part one we covered Myers’ goals for the project and the selection of thinkers he includes. We also reviewed in some detail his chapters on W.E.B. Du Bois and Sylvia Wynter, as well as his inclusion of June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara. In this part of the discussion we focus on the interventions of Jacob Carruthers and Cedric Robinson, who Myers often places in dialogue with one another. We talk about Carruthers work toward an African historiography, and around language and African Deep Thought, going into the terms mdw ntr and whm msw and talking a bit about their meaning and importance and conceptual relevance to the Black Radical Tradition and revolutionary possibility.  Because we have two other discussions with Myers on Cedric Robinson, both of which go more in-depth on Black Marxism and Robinson’s interventions there, we focused this time on Myers work around Terms of Order and An Anthropology of Marxism. Myers closes with a reflection on the inability of the western university to accommodate radical thought in general, and Black radical thought in particular, except as a means to discipline and control it, leaving open questions of where Black Study must go from here.  We again want to thank Pluto Press for donating copies for our reading group of incarcerated folks which we support along with Massive Bookshop and Prisons Kill. This book comes out Friday on Pluto Press, so make sure to pre-order your copy or pick it up from your favorite radical bookstore.  Shout-out to all the folks who are patrons of our show and support the work we do bringing you conversations like this. You can join them and become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism  The discussion with Harold Cruse referenced in the episode. Our first interview with Joshua Myers (on Cedric Robinson) Our second interview with Joshua Myers (on his biography of Cedric Robinson) Our interviews with authors and editors of the Black Critique series     

This is part one of a two part conversation with Joshua Myers on his latest book Of Black Study.  In Of Black Study Joshua Myers examines the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers and Cedric Robinson as well as June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, and what each contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.  In this part of our two conversation on this book, Professor Myers talks about the selection of the six thinkers he centers the book around, and the type of project he is engaged in with the text. We also spend about an hour talking about two of the books chapters, the one centered around the interventions of W.E.B. Du Bois and Sylvia Wynter, as well as looking at each of their relationships to Marxist thought and analytical approaches, and their relationships to science, the humanities and academic disciplinary traditions. As well as what each of them finds among the Black masses and how what they finds there influences their work. Of Black Study is a new release from the Black Critique series on Pluto Press. This is our third conversation with Joshua Myers, both of our previous two have been discussions centered around Cedric Robinson. We have also done a number of discussions with authors and editors of the Black Critique series over the years, including discussions with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Bedour Alagraa, David Austin, and Michael Sawyer (links below). We strongly recommend this book, for anyone interested in Black Study and/or the critical interventions of the thinkers the book focuses on. It is an indispensable resource. it officially comes out later this week, but you can pre-order your copy now through Pluto Press or through our comrades over at Massive Bookshop. If you pre-order from Massive, 20% of the proceeds go to fund the abolitionist organization Project NIA. We’ve received word that Pluto Press will also be donating copies of this book to all the participants in the incarcerated study group that we support in partnership with Massive Bookshop and Prisons Kill. So we want to send a big shout-out to Pluto Press and Joshua Myers for that as well.  Part two - which focuses primarily on Myers’ chapters on Jacob Carruthers and Cedric Robinson - will come out in the next couple of days.  As always if you like what we do, and want to support our ability to do it, you can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. We have a goal of adding 31 patrons this month and currently we’re at 13, so we’re still working towards that goal.  Our first interview with Joshua Myers (on Cedric Robinson) Our second interview with Joshua Myers (on his biography of Cedric Robinson) Greg Thomas’s interview of Sylvia Wynter from Proud Flesh  From Cooperation to Black Operation (Transversal Texts conversation with Harney & Moten)  Bedour Alagraa's Interview with Sylvia Wynter “What Will Be The Cure?”  Our interviews with authors and editors of the Black Critique series  Beyond Prisons interviews with Dr. Anthony Monteiro (first interview, second interview)    

In this episode we welcome J. Moufawad-Paul back to the podcast. Previously we had him along with Alyson Escalante and Devin Zane Shaw to talk about On Necrocapitalism a collectively authored book they all worked on together along with some other authors. For today’s episode we are focused on J. Moufawad-Paul’s latest book Politics In Command: A Taxonomy of Economism. This book seeks to understand what economism is, how it is deployed through socialist analyses, and the ways in which various categories (economy, politics, class, practice, revolution, etc) are mobilized and classified according to its imaginary.  Today we talk about a range of topics related to this book, including what economism is, ways it manifests, and related issues like workerism, the concept of the labor aristocracy, and arguments around so-called identity politics. We also get into a little discussion around Marx’s model of Capital, what Samir Amin called “actually existing capitalism” vs “imaginary capitalism,” and Cedric Robinson’s idea of racial capitalism. And relatedly we talk about why class is not an identity, but rather as Moufawad-Paul puts it “class comes cloaked in the messiness of social relations.” Along the way JMP debunks some conspiratorial understandings of how capitalism works and how the ruling class reproduces itself. And we get into discussion of what Moufawad-Paul argues is the role of the vanguard party as an interventionist party that helps the working class understand itself as a combative class struggling for the overthrow of capitalism, rather than just fighting for immediate material gains in order to defend against the ravages of austerity. As we mention in the show, this book is available through Foreign Languages Press, we will include a link to that in the show notes, as well as to several of Moufawad-Paul’s other books, writings and interventions. Happy New Year to those of you who live under a Gregorian calendar. We have a goal for January of adding 31 patrons to keep up with attrition and hopefully continue to build a little bit as well. Currently we are 23 patrons away from that goal. So it’s a great time to sign up and support the show if you don’t already. You can do that for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism Politics In Command: A Taxonomy of Economism by JMP JMP's Critique of Maoist Reason  J. Moufawad-Paul's piece on sovereignty that we reference in the episode  J. Moufawad-Paul’s appearances on Revolutionary Left Radio  Some of J. Moufawad-Paul’s books from Kersplebedeb  JMP’s blog 

This is an episode we recorded about a month and a half ago for our 5th anniversary. Due to all the other stuff we were recording at the time we just held on to this one for the year end.  In this episode we grapple with a bunch of questions sent to us by patrons of the show. We are not experts, and this conversation, like all of ours is not without its own limitations and shortcomings. We hope that our answers will be taken not from a position of authority but as an understanding of a bit of where we are on the specific questions posed to us by our listeners, and a bit of where we’ve come from, and our desires for the future. Since this episode was released we have crossed the one million downloads threshold we mention in the episode, which is amazing. We just want to thank everyone, who listens to the show, who shares the show on social media and most of all our patrons who make the show possible and sustainable. Because we recorded this over a month ago, a few of the references are bit dated and there are certain developments since that we would’ve referenced if we’d recorded later. China Miéville’s discussion on the Marxist understanding of the plasticity of humanity is a concept that we would’ve weaved in, if we’d had this conversation after that one.  Also there’s a brief mention of Defend the Atlanta Forest and the Save UC Townhomes struggles in this episode. We would be remiss if we didn’t mention that Defend ATL Forest has experienced significant state repression lately, including at least half a dozen land defenders being charged with trumped up terrorism charges. We’ll include a link where you can support them in the show notes.  Also the movement to Save the UC Townhomes is still ongoing. We’ll include links to continue to follow their work and hopefully support it as well in the show notes.  Thanks to donations from Haymarket Books, China Miéville, and some additional donations for postage from our listeners as well as from Massive Bookshop, we were able to send 40 copies of A Spectre Haunting into our incarcerated reading group in partnership with Prisons Kill. We’ll have a new book coming in January so be on the look out for that.  And if you want to continue to support our work as always you can do it at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism Also we do have a discord now, so we ended up editing out a discussion of that, but if anyone wants a link to the discord, hit us up on patreon, twitter, or IG and we can give you a link to that. We talk about suggestions for guests or show ideas and there is a channel in the discord where people can make those, or they can contact us on social media to make suggestions as well.  Links: The Atlanta Solidarity Fund (For Anti-Repression/Legal support of the ATL Forest Defenders) / Defend The Atlanta Forest website Save The UC Townhomes Website