Featuring Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing French party La France Insoumise. How the radical left confronts and then defeats the far-right, in France and everywhere. Recorded before an audience at n+1’s Brooklyn office. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Register for “Our Collective Is the Prize” at comrades.education Buy Reconsiderin…

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the final in a four-part series, traces the great unraveling of the American empire from the 1970s to our present MAGA 2.0 moment. Would you like to know more? Aziz made a bibliography for you: thedigradio.com…

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the third in what is now a four-part series, looks at how black movements responded as the Vietnam War and the limits of formal civil rights victories combined to explode the Cold War’s contradictions. Support…

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the second in a three-part series, takes the story from World War I’s hyper-nationalist, xenophobic First Red Scare, through the convulsions of the middle decades of the 20th century: the Communist Party USA, …

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American capitalist, imperialist project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the first in a three-part series, traces the foundation of the American settler empire from the revolutionary generation up to the eve of World War I. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/The…

Jeff Schuhrke on his book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. During the Cold War, organized labor’s top leadership acted as an agent of the US national security state abroad: undermining left-wing unions, fomenting right-wing coups, and promoting the US-led capitalist order. At home, those same forces d…

Featuring more analysis from Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on the shape of global geopolitics and geoeconomics. We discuss: the fault lines of the green energy transition; the US and China battle for dominance while the rest of the world seeks advantage and opportunities for leverage; the US and Russia’s full-throttle commitment to fossil capitalism; t…

Featuring Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on a global conjuncture defined by Washington’s shredding of the liberal international order’s legitimacy amid a panic over decline: the escalating Cold War with China; Gaza genocide; Trump’s tariff wars and militarism, and his pivot toward Putin on Ukraine; European defense buildup and fiscal revolution; what th…

Featuring Eric Blanc on We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. Interview conducted by guest host Gabriel Winant. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Defend federal workers and federal services: actionnetwork.org/forms/let-us-work/ Contact the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) for hel…

Featuring TrueAnon hosts Brace Belden and Liz Franczak on our freakish and reactionary tech oligarchy. Musk and friends built a technological infrastructure that has warped everyone’s minds, including their own. Now they’re seizing the state. The hideous AI “art” we discuss: https://bit.ly/4ksG1aM http://bit.ly/3DmDfTD Support The Dig at Patreon.co…

Featuring Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Mike McCarthy on the MAGA and DOGE war on woke; the complicity of bankrupt liberal identity politics; and the centrality of various oppressions to the class domination of capital and struggles against it. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDigRead Mike’s article "The Problem of Class Abst…

Featuring Danielle Carr on the history and present state of American unwellness and how that's been shaped by psychiatry, prescription drugs, neuroscience, popular culture, smartphones and social media. We trace the rise of psychiatry as a Gilded Age human science, the disastrous contradictions of asylum deinstitutionalization, the invention of neu…

Featuring Chris Newman on Trump's far-right anti-migrant agenda and Democrats' cruel and stupid complicity.Read All-American Nativism versobooks.com/products/704-all-american-nativismRead Dan's essay on Gaza and migration politics in n+1 nplusonemag.com/issue-48/politics/do-borderTrump's immigration executive orders propublica.org/article/donald-tr…

Featuring Hannah Srajer on building tenant unions by applying labor organizing models. The Connecticut Tenants Union is partnered with SEIU 1199NE to organize fighting super majority tenant unions that win collectively bargained leases and wield working class political power. It's a model that's spreading nationwide.Support The Dig at Patreon.com/T…

Featuring Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal on their book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Tenant unions fighting to transform Los Angeles, the country, and the world.Support Reclaim RI https://secure.actblue.com/donate/reclaimriBuy Abolish Rent haymarketbooks.org/books/2443-abolish-rentSubscribe to Dissent at dissentmagazin…

Featuring Michael Denning on Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, collectively authored by Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Hall’s method of Marxist conjunctural analysis applied to the generalized crisis that paved the way for neoliberalism's rise;…

Featuring Michael Denning on Stuart Hall’s Marxism—a Marxism without guarantees. This is a comprehensive introduction to Marxism as a method to analyze historically specific, complex and contradictory capitalist social formations, and what that means for making, rather than assuming the existence of, a working-class socialist politics. Next week Da…

Featuring Bassam Haddad on the historical and geopolitical origins of Assad’s rise and fall—and what might happen next. We think through the contradictions: honoring the joy felt by Syrians at Assad’s ouster while simultaneously taking stock of a truly bad geopolitical outcome.Want to learn more? Listen to Thawra, our series on the 20th century pol…

Featuring Patrick Blanchfield on assassination and political violence: from the routine to the extraordinary; authored by the state, capital, the left, the right, the unwell and alienated; as an anxiety, in our fantasies, as a morbid symptom and repetition compulsion; and as expressing distinctively American logics of domination and human disposabi…

In our last episode of The Verso Podcast before the winter break, our host Eleanor Penny is joined by Israeli historian, and activist Ilan Pappé, to discuss the false histories upon which the modern state of Israel is founded. We are of course still working on bringing you more of these in depth discussions with our wonderful Verso authors in our u…

Featuring Quinn Slobodian and Wendy Brown on Trump’s triumphant return to power and the freakish, obscene, billionaire-dominated, capitalist reactionary, Christian nationalist, contradiction-ridden MAGA movement that surrounds him. A comprehensive early assessment of what is going on, where it’s coming from, and where it all might be heading.Suppor…

This week we have a special episode for you as part of our inter-season programming - an interview with Matteo Pasquinelli. Of course, we’re still working hard to bring you more roundtable discussions with our wonderful Verso authors in our upcoming fourth series of The Verso Podcast, but until then we hope you’ll enjoy the exciting interim episode…

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar in the final installment of a three-part series on Central America. This episode picks up with Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crypto enthusiasm in El Salvador; Daniel Ortega’s perversion of Sandinismo’s revolutionary legacy in Nicaragua; anti-mining movements in Panama; Honduras and Guatemala, where popul…

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend & Jorge Cuéllar in the second of a three (not two!) part series on the history and present of Central America. This interview picks up our discussion of revolutionary armed struggles against brutal US-backed military-oligarchic regimes in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Then, the peace accords and postwar transiti…

On this week’s episode of The Verso Podcast we’re back to our typical format - our host, Eleanor Penny, is joined by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm to discuss their new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (BUY HERE: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3131-overshoot). We’re still working on bringing you more of these r…

Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Trump’s decisive victory, Harris’s catastrophic loss, multi-racial working-class dealignment, and where the left might go from here. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDigWe now have a special feed dedicated entirely to our Thawra series. Listen and spread the word: thedigradio.com/ThawraSubscribe to a year of Ja…

Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar on the history of Central America. This is the first episode in a two-part series covering the late-19th and early-20th century rise of export-crop oligarchies and constant US intervention, the US-backed separation of Panama from Colombia to take control of the Canal, the CIA's 1954 Guatemala coup, the …