Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
We created this podcast in recognition that there are a number of podcasts for the American “left,” but many of them focus heavily on the organizing of social democrats, progressives, and liberal democrats. Aside from that, on the left we are always fighting a war of ideas and if we do not continue to build platforms to share those ideas and the stories of their implementation from a leftist perspective, they will continue to be ignored, misrepresented, and dismissed by the capitalist media and as a result by the general public.
Our goal is to provide a platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world. Our goal is to center organizers who represent and work with marginalized communities building survival programs, defense programs, political education, and counterpower.
We also plan to bring in perspectives on and from the global south to highlight anti-capitalist struggles outside the imperial core. We view solidarity with decolonization, indigenous, anti-imperialist, environmentalist, socialist, and anarchist movements across the world as necessary steps toward meaningful liberation for all people.
Too often within the imperial core we focus on our own struggles without taking the time to understand those fighting for freedom from beneath the empire’s thumb. It is important to highlight these struggles, learn what we can from them, offer solidarity, and support with action when we can. It is not enough to Fight For $15 an hour and Single-Payer within the core, while the US actively fights against the self-determination of the people of the global economically and militarily.
We recognize that except for the extremely wealthy and privileged, our fates and struggles are intrinsically connected. We hope that our podcast becomes a meaningful platform for organizers and activists fighting for social change to connect their local movements to broader movements centered around the fight to end imperialism, capitalism, racism, discrimination based on gender identity or sexuality, sexism, and ableism.
If you like our work please support us at www.patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism
Our goal is to provide a platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world. Our goal is to center organizers who represent and work with marginalized communities building survival programs, defense programs, political education, and counterpower.
We also plan to bring in perspectives on and from the global south to highlight anti-capitalist struggles outside the imperial core. We view solidarity with decolonization, indigenous, anti-imperialist, environmentalist, socialist, and anarchist movements across the world as necessary steps toward meaningful liberation for all people.
Too often within the imperial core we focus on our own struggles without taking the time to understand those fighting for freedom from beneath the empire’s thumb. It is important to highlight these struggles, learn what we can from them, offer solidarity, and support with action when we can. It is not enough to Fight For $15 an hour and Single-Payer within the core, while the US actively fights against the self-determination of the people of the global economically and militarily.
We recognize that except for the extremely wealthy and privileged, our fates and struggles are intrinsically connected. We hope that our podcast becomes a meaningful platform for organizers and activists fighting for social change to connect their local movements to broader movements centered around the fight to end imperialism, capitalism, racism, discrimination based on gender identity or sexuality, sexism, and ableism.
If you like our work please support us at www.patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism
Episodes
Mentioned books
Oct 6, 2020 • 1h 31min
“Solidarity Doesn’t Mean Making Statements” - Laura Whitehorn On The Material Practice Of Anti-Racism
In this episode we interview Laura Whitehorn. Laura Whitehorn is a co-founder and organizer with the RAPP Campaign (Release Aging People in Prison). Whitehorn is a veteran organizer of numerous organizations, including Friends of SNCC, the Weathermen, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, the May 19th Communist Organization, and the Madame Binh Graphics Collective among others. A committed anti-imperialist, Laura Whitehorn spent 14 years incarcerated in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy and destruction of Government property in what has been called the “Resistance Conspiracy” case. We talk to Whitehorn about her organizing history, anti-racism, the work of the RAPP Campaign, freeing political prisoners, COINTELPRO, and some of the errors made by white activists during the New Left era that we must still grapple with today. Whitehorn also discusses Zoom, youtube, and Facebook, banning a recent talk she gave with Leila Khaled. Along that topic, Whitehorn talks about being an anti-Zionist Jew, and the violence of settler colonialism in the US and the Israeli state.
Sep 30, 2020 • 1h 4min
“Abolition is Inherently Experimental” Craig Gilmore on Fighting Prisons and Defunding Police
In this episode we interview Craig Gilmore. Gilmore is a prison abolitionist, cofounder of California Prison Moratorium Project, and a member of the Community Advisory board of Critical Resistance. Gilmore shares practical examples of prison abolitionists stopping new prison construction in California and how those examples have helped inform organizer approaches to stopping new prisons and jails. We also talk about possible lessons these abolitionist fights have to the fight to defund police. Gilmore also addresses various recent critiques of abolition on the left. And talks about work he uses to orient his abolitionist practice, including explaining what he thinks the relevance of Amilcar Cabral and the PAIGC is to abolitionist fights in the US. In conversation we also talk about violence, harm, self defense, and the opportunities and threats of this moment.
Sep 24, 2020 • 1h 5min
"It's Really Up To Us" Barbara Smith on Combahee, Coalitions and Dismantling White Supremacy
Barbara Smith co-founded the seminal Black Feminist Socialist organization the Combahee River Collective and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She is an educator, organizer, scholar and publisher and theorist of Black Feminist politics. In this episode we talk about Barbara Smith’s latest piece on the Hamer-Baker plan to dismantle white supremacy. We also discuss the work of the Combahee River Collective and Kitchen Table. Smith talks about the challenges of coalitional politics and the need for white political groups to desegregate their personal lives as a necessary precondition to desegregating their political spaces. She also discusses some of her role models including Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Howard Zinn and her comradeship with Audre Lorde and others. Smith also discusses the term identity politics, which first appeared in the Combahee River Collective Statement and her own opinion on its current use and demonization.
Sep 17, 2020 • 1h 11min
Black Communists Against US Racial Capitalism with Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly
In this episode we talk to author, scholar and educator Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly. Burden-Stelly is currently a visiting scholar in the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago. She also serves as an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College. Along with Dr. Gerald Horne, Burden-Stelly co-authored the book W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History. We talk to Charisse about her work studying the political theory of Black Marxist Leninists from the mid-20th Century. We also discuss her work on defining anti-Blackness and anticommunism as co-constitutive structures of repression in the US. Burden-Stelly also discusses her work on Modern US Racial Capitalism, and the lineage and archive that she draws upon to put forth her analysis. This includes examining the theoretical contributions of Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Louise Thompson Patterson, and others. We also talk about how the US’s ongoing legacies of anticommunism and anti-Blackness still dictate the terms of state insurgency against material progress for Black people and a majority of the US population and people around the world.
Sep 9, 2020 • 1h 29min
Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier On The American Prisoner Movement
In this episode we interview prisoner movement historians Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier who co-authored the book Rethinking The American Prison Movement. Today is the 49th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion, and in this episode we honor the ongoing tradition of prisoner resistance by examining the history of prisoner movements, and discussing the challenges faced by prisoners as well as abolitionists on both sides of the walls amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the current movement for Black Lives in the streets. This episode is also in response to Jailhouse Lawyers Speak's national call for outside supporters to provide political education between August 21st and September 9th 2020.
Aug 24, 2020 • 1h 13min
Free the Land! Edward Onaci on the History of the Republic of New Afrika
In this episode we interview Edward Onaci. Onaci is an associate professor of history at Ursinus College. In this episode, we talk about Onaci’s recent book, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. In our discussion, Onaci traces the origins of the RNA, the New Afrikan Independence Movement, and this broader field of theory we know as New Afrikan Political Science. Along the way, Onaci highlights the influence of former UNIA and CPUSA member Queen Mother Audley Moore as well as the Obadele Brothers, Malcolm X and other key figures. He also touches on splits and ideological debates within the New Afrikan Independence Movement, and the creation of organizations like the New Afrikan People’s Organization, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and touches on the connections of recent political organizing work in Jackson Mississippi and around the US to organizing strategy first developed by those with a vision of a liberated New Afrikan nation back in the late sixties.
Aug 10, 2020 • 1h 35min
"No Place To Sit-In" Jennifer Lawson and Charlie Cobb on SNCC's Community Organizing in the Rural South
In this episode we interview SNCC Veterans Jennifer Lawson and Charles “Charlie” Cobb. They discuss their experiences organizing in rural Mississippi and Alabama with SNCC in the 1960’s at the height of the era we know as the Civil Rights Movement. They discuss working in small towns and rural Southern communities, and connecting with organizing traditions with origins in the everyday resistance to slavery. They each talk about the political evolution of the organization, changes in leadership and the international dimensions of the struggle at the time. Charlie & Jennifer both talk about the lack of contradiction between self-defense and nonviolence, as discussed in Charlie’s book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed. Jennifer shares her reflections on the roles of women within the organization. Through conversation Lawson and Cobb make visible the pockets of resistance they tapped into in the South, and demystify some of the mythology of the Civil Rights Movement along the way. photo credit (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right): Danny Lyon/Magnum, Julius Lester, Alabama Photographs and Pictures Collection/ADAH, Maria Varela/Takestock.
Aug 3, 2020 • 1h 31min
Robyn Spencer's 'The Revolution Has Come' - On The Oakland Black Panthers, Gender Politics, Internationalism, and Repression
In this episode, we interview Robyn Spencer. Robyn Spencer is a historian and the author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and The Black Panther Party In Oakland. Our conversation is centered around Spencer’s organizational history of the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party. Her work pays particular attention to the experiences and reflections of women who joined the Oakland Panthers, and to the political struggles of the party on issues of gender and patriarchy. Spencer discusses the Panthers internationalism, and legal defense strategies, the counter insurgency and repression they faced, and lessons that can be learned through a deep engagement with their efforts to build a better world.
Jul 27, 2020 • 1h 12min
"Community Is An Intentional Act" - Hanif Abdurraqib
In this episode we interview Hanif Abdurraqib. Hanif is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. Among other things, he is the best-selling and award winning author of Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest, A Forture For Your Disaster, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much. We talk to Hanif about writing, music and influences. And we move into a discussion of his own politics, and he touches on his own experiences with homelessness, eviction, and brief incarceration. We also talk about the movements he’s plugged into in Columbus, Ohio and how cultural workers can show up and support existing work. We end with a discussion of 68to05.com and some of his forthcoming projects. (photo by Marcus Jackson)
Jul 11, 2020 • 1h 11min
"Give Your House Away, Constantly" - Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time of Pandemic And Rebellion (part 2)
Fred Moten, a notable scholar in Black studies and critical theory, joins Stefano Harney, a theorist in social thought, for an engaging dialogue. They explore homelessness and belonging, weaving in personal stories about community and nostalgia. The duo discusses the politics of 'the surround', emphasizing the protection of marginalized spaces. Delving into Indigenous and Afro-pessimist ideas, they challenge traditional notions of sovereignty and critique mainstream activism. Their reflections advocate for a more profound connection to land, community, and liberation.
