Millennials Are Killing Capitalism

In this episode we spoke with Erica Caines, creator of Liberation Through Reading and the Liberation Through Reading Book Club. We talk about her organizing, and the importance and power of reading and political education. Erica is a self published author and local community organizer in her perspective Maryland county. Erica’s organizing is based on both an emphasis on literacy and political education. To date, she’s gifted over 1000 books to Black children and has organized an online book club with a Black Left focus that has had close to 100 participants thus far. 

This week we’re very excited to bring you a conversation with Mariame Kaba.  Mariame is an organizer, educator and curator. Her work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, transformative justice and supporting youth leadership development. After over 20 years of living and organizing in Chicago, she moved back to her hometown of New York City in May 2016. In this episode we talk to Mariame about where her interest in US Communist Party came from and talk about some of the figures, cases, positions and formations within and around CPUSA that have historical significance for her and that drew Black women into party membership particularly in the first half of the 20th century before McCarthyism really took hold. In particular Mariame talks about the CPUSA’s many examples of mass participatory defense work. We also talk about her work around clemency with FreeThemNY. We talk a little bit about Survived and Punished and Mariame’s interest in undermining the ways that the prison industrial complex violently enforces gender We end by taking a little time talking about what it means to call a protest “direct action,” and discussing recent discourses in the mainstream around “civility” in relation to protests deemed too provocative by the political class. About our guest: Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Prior to starting NIA, she worked as a program officer for education and youth development at the Steans Family Foundation where I focused on grantmaking and program evaluation. She co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) among others. She has also served on numerous nonprofit boards. She has extensive experience working on issues of racial justice, gender justice, transformative/restorative justice and multiple forms of violence. She has been active in the anti-violence against women and girls movement since 1989. Her experience includes coordinating emergency shelter services at Sanctuary for Families in New York City, serving as the co-chair of the Women of Color Committee at the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network, working as the prevention and education manager at Friends of Battered Women and their Children (now called Between Friends), serving on the founding advisory board of the Women and Girls Collective Action Network (WGCAN), and being a member of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. She co-founded and currently organizes with the Survived and Punished collective and is a founding member of the Just Practice Collaborative. She served as a member of the editorial board of Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal from January 2003 to December 2008. She is the co-editor (along with Michelle VanNatta) of a special issue of the journal about teen girls’ experiences of and resistance to violence published in December 2007. She has written and co-authored reports, articles, essays, curricula, zines, and more. She is currently an active board member of the Black Scholar. She runs the blog Prison Culture. In 2018, she co-authored the guidebook “Lifting As They Climbed” and published a children’s book titled “Missing Daddy.” She was a member and co-founder of We Charge Genocide, an inter-generational effort which documented police brutality and violence in Chicago and sent youth organizers to Geneva, Switzerland to present their report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. She is an advisory board member of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, a group (along with Project NIA and WCG) that worked to get the Chicago City Council to pass a reparations law providing restitution to the victims of Jon Burge, a police commander who tortured more than 200 criminal suspects, most of them black men, from the 1970s through the early 1990s. She is a founding advisory board member of the Chicago Community Bond Fund. The CCBF pays bond for people charged with crimes in Cook County, Illinois. Through a revolving fund, CCBF supports individuals whose communities cannot afford to pay the bonds themselves and who have been impacted by structural violence. She is also a member of Critical Resistance’s community advisory board. Critical Resistance’s vision is the creation of genuinely healthy, stable communities that respond to harm without relying on imprisonment and punishment. She was a 2016-2017 Soros Justice Fellow where she extended and expanded my work to end the criminalization of survivors of violence. Currently she is a researcher in residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Social Justice Institute of the Barnard Center for Research on Women through September 2020. She is co-leading a new initiative called Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action with Andrea J. Ritchie. Combining participatory research, data analysis, and systemic advocacy, Andrea and Mariame will work in partnership with local campaigns to identify primary pathways, policing practices, charges, and points of intervention to address the growing criminalization and incarceration of women and LGBTQ people of color for public order, survival, drug, child welfare and self-defense related offenses. Research will be disseminated in accessible formats for use by organizers, advocates, policymakers, media makers, and philanthropic partners working to interrupt criminalization at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. This initiative will also host convenings of researchers, organizers, advocates, policymakers, and philanthropic partners on key topics relating to violence and criminalization, and support partners in developing and implementing campaigns designed to interrupt criminalization of women, girls, trans and GNC people of color. She has a long history in the fields of education and youth development, having taught high school and college students in New York and Chicago. She has taught sociology and Black studies courses at Northeastern Illinois University, Northwestern University, and Columbia University. She has developed and facilitated many workshops and presented at events. She was a founding board member of the Education for Liberation Network. She studied sociology at McGill University, City College of New York, and Northwestern University. She has received several honors and awards for my work over the years. She am occasionally available to consult on various topics.

This week we have Mark Bray to talk all things in the world of anti-fascism following a slew of recent fascistic events. We touch on Bolsonaro's election in Brazil, and cover some of the points raised in Bray’s book Antifa, which if you haven’t read is an excellent history of European and American anti-fascist movements starting with those who opposed the German and Italian forms of fascism and moving into the modern era. MARK BRAY is a political organizer and historian of human rights, terrorism, and political radicalism in Modern Europe. He is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House 2017), Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero 2013), The Anarchist Inquisition: Terrorism and Human Rights in Spain and France, 1890-1910 (forthcoming), and he’s the co-editor of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader (which just came out on PM Press). His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Boston Review, and numerous edited volumes. He is currently a lecturer at Dartmouth College.

Jackie Wang is s a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, filmmaker, performer, trauma monster, and PhD candidate at Harvard University in African and African American Studies. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotexte / MIT Press), a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, and a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (Capricious). In her most recent work she has been researching the bail bonds industry and the history of risk assessment in criminal justice. Find her @LoneberryWang and loneberry.tumblr.com.

[This episode was released in October of 2018 at the time Adryan was using a prior name, we have updated the description below and have updated some of the links to contact them, however the audio is dated by the use of their prior name] This week we interviewed Adryan Corcione, a freelance cannabis and politics journalist based in Philadelphia. Their work has appeared in Vice, Leafly, Teen Vogue, and more. We talk to them about their advocacy for Comrade Alyssa, an imprisoned Black trans woman and about things like writing about Karl Marx in Teen Vogue and organizing with Philly Socialists. Follow them on twitter @mxthemme. You can learn more about Comrade Alyssa on Twitter @comradealyssa.

In this episode we talk to Ian Goodrum, who is a writer and editor at China Daily, an English-language newspaper based in Beijing. Who says that unlike his previous jobs at US newspapers, he no longer has to keep his communism a secret.  We talk to Ian about Western Media's representations of China, about notions of objectivity and subjectivity with regard to media, and about the ways and reasons through which certain situations in China can be exaggerated by the Western press. Ian also discusses how the Chinese government has been able to lift hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty, in a period when the rest of the world has seen an increase in extreme poverty. He discusses Chinese trade relations with other countries in the global south and how they differ from Western relations. Ian briefly talks about the differences between Communist parties in leadership in comparison to social democratic parties and also shares his take on the market reforms that many refer to as China's turn to capitalism, as well as his thoughts on the current direction of the Chinese economy and society. Finally Ian discusses current conditions and struggles in China. 

Devyn Springer who many of you know as @HalfAtlanta on twitter, and Jay decided to do an episode where they discuss what prison abolition is, and both of their connections to it, along with a conversation about the prison strike. We’ll be cross-promoting this episode on both of our podcasts, Millennials Are Killing Capitalism and Devyn’s Groundings Podcast. For those who don’t know Devyn, they are an accomplished artist, organizer, member of the Worker’s World Party and the host and producer of the excellent Groundings podcast.   We plan to provide more updates on the strike as it goes on. And lastly we wanted to note that this month for Black August and for the prison strike we will donating all of our patreon donations to the prison strike fundraiser.

In this episode, we speak with Hyejin Shim, a second generation queer Korean in the US. Hyejin organizes with Hella Organized Bay Area Koreans (or HOBAK) a collective that is dedicated to building solidarity towards peace and reunification in Korea.    Her other political work focuses on supporting survivors of domestic/sexual violence, particularly at the intersections of criminalization and immigration.    She is a founding member and co-organizer of Survived and Punished, and a member of the queer/trans workgroup of the Korean American Coalition to End Domestic Abuse (or KACEDA)   In this episode we speak with Hyejin to broaden our understanding US imperialism’s impact on Korea social and political life both historically and in the present day, and to get some perspective on how progress towards reunification as well as the belligerent nature of the US empire toward the DPRK impacts all Korean people.

In Episode 19, we sit down with Arielle Iniko Newton. Arielle is a writer and organizer within the Movement for Black Lives. She currently serves as Senior Editor of RaceBaitr, and Executive Director and Founder of the Black Giving Fund.  We talk with Arielle about the Black Giving Fund and it's mission, purpose and principles. We also talk about the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and why it will always be inadequate in the pursuit of Black Liberation. Arielle talks about BGF's work, giving directly to Black organizers, activists, content creators. We also speak with Arielle about the great work she's apart of over at RaceBaitR.  

In this week's short episode, we sit down with filmmaker and musician Boots Riley to talk about his debut film Sorry To Bother You, which hits theaters everywhere July 13th. Boots recently received Sundance Film Festival's Vanguard Award for the film. Boots talks with us about his artistic and organizing history, discusses how getting a film this is radical produced for mass consumption is possible in a society like ours, and discusses the importance of militant labor organizing in the left’s ability to build power.