Millennials Are Killing Capitalism

In this episode we interview Matt Deitsch, artist, journalist, organizer and former founder and director of March For Our Lives.  This episode is a bit different from many of ours. Rarely have we engaged with the politics of gun control, or with an area so tightly situated and controlled within the arena of electoral politics and non profit organizing. But we felt that interviewing Matt offered a unique opportunity to examine the politics of gun control in the so-called United States, and the relationship between movements against gun violence and mass shooters and the Democratic Party, their think tanks, well funded non profit organizations and the ruling class.  Matt presents a specifically interesting perspective, as someone who was activated by the devastating gun violence in Parkland Florida, and politicized through the organizing efforts they and others undertook through their organization March For Our Lives. Also as someone who provides a highly critical reflection around the work they and others undertook in relation to that movement, but who also believes they learned valuable lessons for mass organizing. Along other things Matt talks about organizing as youth, the strengths, limitations and contradictions of that, discusses moments of dialogue with other organizers and youth, particularly ones from different class and racial backgrounds and how these relationships and discussions altered their own political viewpoint around the scope of issues of violence. As someone who has spent much of the last 4 years deeply involved in electoral organizing, Matt cautions against the amount of energy put into it and highlights some of the forces most invested in that use of organizer time and effort. Ultimately Matt argues for the essential work of political education, of building power outside of the electoral arena, and holding a political horizon based in anti-imperialism, abolition, and socialism. They draw out linkages of different forms of violence and highlights the bipartisan influence of the police state and the military industrial complex on the politics of gun control reform as an antidote to violence, within the politics of either dominant party. Just as a note, this episode was recorded prior to the new bipartisan gun legislation or the court’s recent decision around concealed carry restrictions, which would likely have had minimal impact on the discussion. It was also recorded before the courts officially gutted Roe. But there are many cautionary perspectives and suggested approaches that we think warrant consideration and are relevant to a new generation of people hopefully pushed into action by the violence of all aspects of the US state. Lastly just want to thank all of our patrons for your support. These are difficult times for everyone with rising costs, and our show is totally dependent upon your support. So if you like what we do and want to contribute to our work please become a patron at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

In this episode we interview Dr. Dorothy Roberts. Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. The author of four books, including Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention and Shattered Bonds. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.   In this conversation we’re honored to host Dr. Dorothy Roberts to discussed her latest book Torn Apart: How The Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build A Safer World.  We talk to Dr. Roberts about how family policing or the so-called child welfare system functions within a larger carceral web in the United States. She talks about the geographic zones of family policing and discusses the origins of our family policing system in slavery, settler colonialism and Elizabethan poor laws. Roberts discusses the deep ableism that undergirds the family policing system and talks about how family policing has been a frontline for the war on drugs. She talks about how the system overwhelmingly disrupts predominantly Black and Brown families in the US, along with those of poor white people, noting that it also criminalizes children and is in many ways indistinguishable from other parts of the prison industrial complex. Along the way, Dr. Roberts lifts up the many struggles of families against this system, with stories of the ways the system terrorizes families, as well as the many ways that people are organizing against the system. As we close the conversation, these examples of resistance, mutual aid and organizing provide a foundation for building a reality in which family policing is abolished and replaced by a much more powerful network of care that is more effective at preventing and resolving issues of familial violence and abuse. We are only able to bring you episodes like this due to the support of our listeners. You can support us at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year. We are down a few patrons again this month, so if some new folks can join in and support that’d be really helpful in ensuring we can continue to bring you these episodes on a weekly basis. 

UPDATE: Transcript of the episode is now available here. In this episode we interview Karim from Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (NYC) and author Wendy Trevino.  Karim is an anti-prison, anti-police anarcho-communist. And an author of the book Burn Down The American Plantation. Wendy Trevino was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She lives and works in San Francisco. She is the author of Brazilian Is Not a Race and Cruel Fiction. Wendy is not an experimental writer. This conversation is a bit different than many of ours. We wanted to have a critical conversation about the western left’s response to the war in Ukraine, but often we associate anti-imperialist analyses with Marxist-Leninists.  Within the anarchist left and other parts of the western left there are those who support the Ukrainian war effort for various reasons. Although we don’t often take explicit positions as a platform, we at Millennials Are Killing Capitalism think any support for the Ukrainian war effort is mistake. Josh has co-hosted a conversation on their other platform Return To The Source podcast, and now we host this one here. In this episode Karim and Wendy provide an analysis of the situation in Ukraine, and they grapple with several of the common misconceptions or positions they encounter. They also talk about the state of affairs for the antifascist movement in the US. And they remind folks that there are many other international struggles that need support, and that there are struggles that need to continue to be waged against fascism, borders, and prisons right here in the belly of the beast. It’s a new month and as always we need the support of our listeners to keep this show going. We truly appreciate all of the folks who do contribute to the show at whatever level they can, it means everything to us and to our ability to bring you these episodes weekly. Our only financial support for this show is the support from our listeners. You can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 per month and you get emails with each episode plus periodic invitations to study groups and things like that. We’ll have another study group starting up soon this summer.  Links: RAM-NYC Burn Down The American Plantation: Call for a Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement Cruel Fiction Brazilian Is Not a Race (PDF)  

In this episode we interview Ed Mead. Mead is a veteran of the revolutionary underground organization the George Jackson Brigade which operated in solidarity with prisoner, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggles. A prolific organizer and participant of prisoner struggles both inside and outside of prisons, Ed also co-founded the prisoner organization Men Against Sexism. He also worked with a number of other organizations and struggles over the years including work with the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the Attica Brothers Legal Defense Committee, the National Lawyers Guild, Prison Legal News, and California Prison Focus.  In this conversation we talk about some lessons along the way of Ed’s political development, from social prisoner to jailhouse lawyer to organizer to revolutionary to political prisoner.  Ed offers unvarnished reflections from a life in struggle, characteristically with no holds barred for what he refers to as “the tamed left.”  Our conversation was informed by Ed Mead’s autobiography Lumpen and by Daniel Burton-Rose’s books on the George Jackson Brigade. We will include a full list of sources in the show notes. Links: Lumpen: The Autobiography of Ed Mead Theory and Practice of Armed Struggle in the Northwest: A Historical Analysis Creating A Movement With Teeth: A Documentary History of the George Jackson Brigade Guerilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970's Sundiata Acoli's Support Fund Washington Prison History Project Oral Histories

Abdul Alkalimat is a founder of the field of Black Studies and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. A lifelong scholar-activist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, he has lectured, taught and directed academic programs across the US, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and China. His activism extends from having been chair of the Chicago chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s, to a co-founder of the Black Radical Congress in 1998. This conversation is framed around his recent book The History of Black Studies. Alkalimat shares some of his background, and his experiences with the struggles for Black Studies in the 1960’s. We also talk about his role in the founding of the Institute of the Black World. In discussing Black Studies, we ask Dr. Alkalimat about the ideological strains that make it up, the origins of it as an academic discipline, and what Black Studies looked like before it was allowed into the academy and how it continues to look outside of the academy. A focus in this conversation is a discussion about social movements and the type of knowledge that is examined within them and the type of knowledge that is produced by them. Within this, we get into discussion about the role of cadre development and mass political education in social movements, and the role that Alkalimat thinks Black Studies can and should still play for these struggles.  We close with some discussion of the work Dr. Alkalimat is currently doing with the Southern Workers Assembly to organize the South.  In the show notes, we’ll include links to several of the resources Abdul Alkalimat talks about in the episode. Thank you again to all of the folks who continue to support us on patreon. If you want to support our work our greatest need right now is for patrons who support on a monthly basis, you can do that for as little as $1 a month. And if you don’t want the monthly payment, you can also make a yearly contribution. You can find our patreon at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. Now here is our conversation with Abdul Alkalimat on The History of Black Studies. Links: The History of Black Studies The Future of Black Studies (forthcoming) Abdul Alkalimat's website & weekly listserv Southern Workers Assembly The Wall of Respect New Philadelphia  The cited conversation with Africa World Now Project

In this conversation we interview Steven Osuna to discuss his piece “Class Suicide: The Black Radical Tradition, Radical Scholarship, and the Neoliberal Turn” from the 2017 collection Futures of Black Radicalism. Steven Osuna is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He is a scholar of racism and political economy; globalization, transnationalism, and immigration; and policing and criminalization. Steven was born and raised in Echo Park, Los Angeles and is a son of Mexican and Salvadoran working-class migrants. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Homies Unidos-Los Angeles and a member of the Philippines US Solidarity Organization (PUSO). In this episode Josh interviews Osuna, to discuss the role of the academic who sees their work as in solidarity with movements for the working class, anti-imperialist movements, and struggles for socialism and communism. Osuna talks about the concept of class suicide as put forth by Amilcar Cabral and additionally embodied in the theory and practice of figures like Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney. Steven also talks about his own experiences as a student of Cedric Robinson. And Steven talks about Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition alongside his own background and interest coming out of the Marxist tradition through learning about the El Salvadoran communist movement and also bringing an interest in liberation theology. Ultimately the conversation is concerned with how someone taking on a petty bourgeois position, and gaining access to the resources available in a place like a university can actually use that position and those resources in material solidarity with concrete working class struggles. Osuna does not mean this to be an abstraction, for him it means participating in working class, anti-imperialist movements and doing so by lending whatever labor those movements need rather than the position that might feel most comfortable to the petty bourgeois academic. Big shout-out to our new supporters on patreon and folks who have continued to support us. Our work is totally funded by our listeners and so we appreciate every dollar folks are able to give to keep this podcast going. If you would like to become a patron you can do so at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism at whatever you can afford, and your support makes this show possible.

In this episode we welcome back Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò. Táíwò is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Earlier this year we interviewed him to talk about his book Reconsidering Reparations. In this episode we talk about his latest book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) which hits book stores this week.  In this conversation we talk about elite capture as a concept. We talk about how elite capture has morphed dominant understandings of what folks mean by the term “identity politics” in stark contrast to the version of it put forth in the Combahee River Collective Statement back in 1977.  Femi dispels notions that the ways elites have captured and reappropriated this term are unique to identity politics, and argues persuasively that in fact elite capture is a system behavior that shows up in all kinds of places and ways within our social systems, and that social movements and our radical ideas are not immune to this process.  We also talk about some other examples and versions of elite capture big and small that are occurring all the time, and talk about how we might best fight back against this phenomenon.  In addition we get some discussion of what Táíwò refers to as deference politics, as well as politics that are based around trauma. Including some of the things that he thinks these approaches get right, and some of the things that they get wrong and ways we might differently engage the problems they seek to address. And we also get into some discussions around the attention economy and Femi touches on privilege discourse as well.  We’ve continued to take some hits to our patronage for the show lately. We just want to say that we know times are tough for everyone financially right now and we just really want to give a shout-out to everyone who is continuing to give what they can to support the show. If you haven’t become a patron yet, it’s the best way you can support our ability to bring these conversations week after week. You can do that at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year. Now here is our conversation with Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò on Elite Capture Elite Capture from Haymarket Books Elite Capture from Pluto Press Other items referenced in the show: How We Get Free by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor The conversation between Asad Haider and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on socialism and identity politics. Our own discussions with Barbara Smith of the Combahee River Collective  

In this episode we interview David Austin, and discuss his book Moving Against The System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness. David Austin is the author of Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal and Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution. He has also produced radio documentaries for CBC Ideas on the life and work of both CLR James and Frantz Fanon. A former youth worker and community organizer, he currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy and Religion Department at John Abbott College and in the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.  For Moving Against The System Austin provided an introduction and compiled and edited the speeches from the Congress of Black Writers. In this conversation we talk with David Austin about the context of this historic gathering in Montreal, Canada in 1968, amid the rising tide of the Black Power Movement. We ask Austin about the involvement of key figures from the congress including Kwame Ture, Walter Rodney, CLR James, James Forman, and Richard B. Moore among many others. David Austin also shares some great insights from the intellectual and political practice of CLR James, and the proliferation of study circles with which James engaged directly. We ask about some of the contradictions and debates that come up in the Congress around the presence or role of whites, questions of Black Nationalism and socialism, varying analyses around class and race, lessons to be derived from African history, the omission of women from the group of presenters, and some of the generational divides.  Finally, David shares some great reflections on the vibrancy of Black internationalism in the middle of the 20th Century, further highlighting figures like CLR James and Walter Rodney, and discussing Claudia Jones as an example as well. If you’re interested in picking up this book, its part of the Black Critique series from Pluto Press. And if you like the work that we do and are able to support, we definitely need new patrons to continue to sustain our work. You can support the show over on patreon for as little as $1 a month and it’s a great way to keep up with the podcast, and also you get notified when new rounds of our study group open up. Several of Austin's works, including Moving Against The System are available also through Canadian publisher Between The Lines.

This is part 2 of a 2 part conversation with the editors and contributors to a book called How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising. This book is edited by Christopher R. Rogers, Fajr Muhammad and the Paul Robeson House & Museum and is a great testament to the local dimensions of the Black uprising in Philadelphia in the months after the murder of George Floyd.  In this part of the conversation we talk to Gabriel Bryant and Abdul-Aliy Muhammad. These conversations were recorded separately, just due to availability, but are presented here as a unified whole.  Gabriel Bryant is an organizer and youth advocate for groups that have included Sankofa Community Empowerment and Philadelphia Community Bail Fund.  Abdul-Aliy Muhammad is a Philadelphia-born writer and organizer. They often write about Blackness, bodily autonomy and medical surveillance. In this conversation both Gabe and Abdul-Aliy offer reflections on the Philly Black Radical Collective and on the long work of organizing outside of the spectacle of the mass mobilization. Gabe talks about some of the nuts and bolts of community organizing and building power as well as some recent developments in solidarity organizing for political prisoners including Mumia Abu Jamal’s latest campaign #LoveNotPhear. Abdul-Aliy talks about their piece from How We Stay Free, which is titled “Black Trans Lives Matter.” They talk about organizing in defense of Black Trans and Black Queer lives and working with Dominque “Rem’mie” Fells’ family after Dominque was murdered in 2020. Featured in this conversation are also two songs from Gabe, whose stage name is Gabriel Prosser, a nod to the enslaved abolitionist who planned a massive slave rebellion in Virginia at the turn of the 19th Century. We’ll include links to Gabe’s bandcamp in the show notes. After the interviews with Abdul Aliy and Gabriel, How We Stay Free editors Christopher Rogers and Fajr Muhammad rejoin a discussion of other struggles ongoing in Philadelphia. In the show notes, we’ll include links to buy How We Stay Free, and possibly get a solidarity copy for a student, elder, organizer or political prisoner. And if you like what we do, we’re still trying to get our patreon back where it was a few months ago. We’re only down about $20 this month as we release this episode, so if a few of you can commit to $1 a month or more, or a small yearly pledge, we should be able to make that up. Black Philly Radical Collective Abdul-Aliy's piece "As Philadelphia mourns Dominique ‘Rem’mie’ Fells, Black trans lives still matter" Our previous conversation with BPRC organizers Megan Malachi & Robert Saleem Holbrook Abdul-Aliy Muhammad's latest on the struggle for MOVE family members to recover their children's remains Gabriel Prosser Bandcamp Songs featured in the episode: “New Season” Gabriel Prosser featuring Verse Mega  “F.U.T.U.R.E.” Gabriel Prosser featuring Blak Rapp Madusa - 

This is part 1 of a 2 part conversation with the editors and contributors to a book called How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising. This book is edited by Christopher R. Rogers, Fajr Muhammad and the Paul Robeson House & Museum and is a great testament to the local dimensions of the Black uprising in Philadelphia in the months after the murder of George Floyd.  In this conversation Chris and Fajr introduce themselves and talk about the book and its contents and authors, which include many important activists and organizers here in Philadelphia. After that, we talk to organizers Sterling Johnson and Wiley Cunningham from Philadelphia Housing Action.  They talk about the monumental housing struggles in Philadelphia during 2020, giving credit to their fellow housing activist Jennifer Bennetch, who passed away just recently at only 36 years old. They talk about many aspects of this complicated struggle which included a squatting movement as well as multiple encampments and complex negotiations with both Philadelphia Housing Authority and the City of Philadelphia. Although they offer understandable caution with regard to what they actually won, this struggle was historic in its scale as well as in the agreements that were leveraged through direct action. It is a struggle that warrants deeper examination by housing activists in Philadelphia and around the world, as the forces of capitalism continue to dispossess the most vulnerable. At the end of the discussion Chris brings in a note on one of the big housing campaigns currently underway in Philly, the struggle to Save the UC Townhomes, a public housing facility that the owner is attempting to sell, a move that will cause dozens of Black families to be evicted by July 22nd if it cannot be stopped through organization and direct action.  You can buy How We Stay Free, and possibly get a solidarity copy for a student, elder, organizer or political prisoner. And if you like what we do, we’re still trying to get our patreon back where it was a few months ago. We’re  only down about $20 this month as we release this episode, so if a few of you can commit to $1 a month or more, or a small yearly pledge, we should be able to make that up.  Links: How We Stay Free Paul Robeson House & Museum Website/Paul Robeson House & Museum Twitter Philadelphia Housing Action/Philadelphia Housing Action Twitter/Timeline Save The UC Townhomes/Save UC Townhomes Twitter