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
Mar 2, 2020 • 33min
Episode 48: Jailhouse Lawyers Speak's 2020 Call To Action
Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS) is a collective of imprisoned human rights advocates. We talk about their recent national call for outside solidarity actions from August 21st through September 9th. We also talk about the state of prisoner movements today and solidarity organizing on the outside. He also discusses the dangers of celebrities co-opting prisoner resistance and speaking over their demands to impose bad solutions, like recent calls for increases in the numbers of prison guards in Mississippi. JLS has an International Law Project underway to document the inhumane conditions in prisons in all 50 US states, for the purpose of presenting these conditions before the UN Human Rights council. We talk about that project as well as JLS’s organizational stance on the 2020 elections.
Feb 10, 2020 • 1h 27min
Episode 47 - The Young Lords - A Radical History by Johanna Fernández
In this episode we talk to author, professor, and organizer Johanna Fernández. Fernández is an assistant professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York and editor of the book Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In this episode, Johanna Fernández talks to us about her brand new book The Young Lords: A Radical History, which Robin DG Kelley has called “the definitive history of the Young Lords.” It is a history that has deep theoretical and practical lessons and implications for the movements of today and we urge everyone to pick it up and to study it with as many folks as you can. In this episode we talk about the origins of the Young Lords in Chicago, and the revolutionary theorization and praxis of the New York Young Lords. We talk about the Young Lords revolutionary public health work, how the women of the Young Lords tackled issues of patriarchy and gender politics within the party, and what differentiated the Lords' methods from groups utilizing the Saul Alinsky method. We also discuss how the conditions of the era, the climate of internationalism, the war on Vietnam, decolonization, and the beginnings of deindustrialization shaped their movement.
Feb 3, 2020 • 1h 17min
Episode 46 - The Steroids of Orientalism with Sina Rahmani of The East Is A Podcast
In this episode we talk to Sina Rahmani about Edward Said’s theory of orientalism and how we see it playing out in the discourse surrounding the US assassination of Qasim Soleimani, Iran’s retaliatory strikes on the largest American military base in Iraq, and the Trump's decision not to respond with further military action. Sina also challenges Western portraits of Iran as well as the dominant narratives around the events of the last month or so. Sina Rahmani earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the creator of The East is a Podcast
Jan 13, 2020 • 1h 4min
Episode 45: The Nation Of Islam Against The Carceral State In Garrett Felber's Those Who Know Don't Say
In this episode we talk to author Garrett Felber about his book Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, The Black Freedom Struggle, and the Carceral State which is out today, January 13th. 2020. The book is a political history of the Nation of Islam which centers the NOI and anticarceral organizing in the story of the postwar Black freedom struggle and the rise of mass incarceration. Felber is an assistant professor of History at the University of Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on twentieth-century African American social movements, Black radicalism, and the carceral state. Felber was the lead organizer of the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration conference in December 2019, and is the Project Director of the Parchman Oral History Project (POHP), a collaborative oral history, archival, and documentary storytelling project on incarceration in Mississippi. Felber is also a co-founder of Liberation Literacy, an abolitionist collective inside and outside Oregon prisons. He also spearheaded the Prison Abolition Syllabus, a collaborative reading list published by Black Perspectives which highlighted and contextualized prison strikes in 2016 and 2018. Felber is also the coeditor of the Portable Malcolm X Reader with the late Manning Marable and is currently working on a biography of former political prisoner Martin Sostre.
Jan 2, 2020 • 34min
Special Episode - Free The Gadsden 6
In this special episode, Jared talks to a prisoner named Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, founder of the Free Alabama Movement. Bennu is currently serving a life without parole sentence in the state of Alabama and we talk about his first interactions with the criminal justice system as a child. This is a conversation about family separation, denial of due process, institutional racism, judicial and law enforcement collusion, and the impact that these practices can have on the trajectory of someone’s life. The interactions Bennu describes altered the trajectory of the lives of six teenagers in 1988 in profoundly negative ways. This is the story of the Gadsden 6 and it is a story that matters to the individuals who remain without parole opportunities due to the circumstances Bennu describes, but it also matters to the thousands of people across the US who are still behind bars because of similar treatment at the hands of the state. Link to Bennu's certified court records, posted at his request.
Dec 16, 2019 • 1h 27min
Episode 43: Serving The People with Delency and Blake from Hella Black Podcast
In this episode, we got the opportunity to sit down with two amazing organizers and fellow radical podcast hosts. If you’re not familiar, Hella Black Podcast is an Oakland based audio experience brought to you by Delency Parham and Blake Simons. Their hope for each episode is to educate and inform their listeners about all things related to Blackness. Their podcast is important because it uplifts the voices of Black radical organizers who are doing the work in the field. We talk to Blake and Delency about their own politicization, and how Hella Black Podcast got started. They talk to us about their organizing with People’s Breakfast Oakland, and what it was like to have Colin Kaepernick stop by and work with them on his birthday. We discuss Blake's relationship to Jalil Muntaqim and the ongoing struggles of political prisoners in the US. We also talk about the uptick of presidential organizing with the election, and their own disappointment with folks putting so effort into that arena of organizing. Delency and Blake also share their own thoughts on the necessity of aligning theory to practice and getting involved at the grassroots level, even if it’s on the smallest scale.
Nov 13, 2019 • 1h 38min
Episode 42: Noname's Book Club
In this episode we talk to Noname about Noname’s Bookclub, and the inspiration behind it and her aspirations for it, including her plot to take down Amazon. We get into conversations about capitalism, socialism, Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Noname’s critique of American Exceptionalism in Song 32, and broader discussions about representation and the state of hip hop music today as a cultural vehicle for progressive change.
Oct 20, 2019 • 1h 8min
Episode 41: Racism and Capitalism in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race For Profit
In this episode we interviewed professor and author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about her latest book Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. The book has already been put on the long-list for the National Book Award. Taylor is also the author of From #BlackLivesMatter To Black Liberation, which articulates many of the historical arguments she references throughout our conversation. In 2017, she also published How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. In this interview we discuss some of the central themes of Race For Profit, and some of the historical figures within it. The book is a thorough analysis of how racism and capitalism in the US worked together through public and private partnership, after organizers and rebellions brought about the formal end of redlining at the end of the 1960’s. We talk to Taylor about why this book - which is based on her dissertation ended up being her third book. Additionally through the course of the conversation Taylor provides her insight into key questions for socialists in the US today, including questions surrounding the Sanders campaign, the lack of US internationalism. For context this interview took place back in July, but we agreed to time it with the release of the book. Which is available now from University of North Carolina press and comes out everywhere this week. Photo Credit: Sameer A. Khan/ Fotobuddy
Oct 18, 2019 • 1h 14min
Episode 40: Aminta Zea - Solidarity Against Empire
In this episode we interview, Aminta Zea, a Marxist Leninist organizer based out of Washington DC. Aminta was a participant in the Venezuelan Embassy Protection Collective's efforts to protect the embassy from US seizure, in violation of international law, in 2019. Aminta also travelled to and organized in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela this year. With her work she aims to build a bridge between people's struggles throughout the globe in order to further progress the anti-capitalist fight in the 21st century. Aminta is a freelance journalist, artist, and cultural creator and is in the process of making a documentary series that showcases the struggles of the working class in the United States.
Oct 11, 2019 • 57min
Episode 39: No New Jails NYC featuring Ngozi Alston and Marlene Nava Ramos
This week we have a special episode with two organizers from the No New Jails NYC campaign. They are in a current struggle against jail construction in NYC, which is one of the most important abolitionist campaigns going on around the world right now. Ngozi Alston and Marlene Nava Ramos are volunteer organizers with No New Jails NYC, a multi-racial, multi-gender, and intergenerational campaign aimed to shut down Rikers without building new jails. Ngozi is also a community organizer with BYP100, and centers disability justice through a Black queer feminist lens in her work throughout NYC. Marlene is a member of the NYC Chapter of Critical Resistance, a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, and teaches at Lehman College and the Bard College Prison Initiative. Please listen to the episode and see how you can get involved ahead of key votes October 17th, in addition, listen to how you can start or get involved in a similar struggle wherever you are.
