Episodes
May 30, 2022
Season 0
Episode 0
Feminists vs. the War Machine w/ Lux Magazine
Join Lux and Haymarket for a discussion about feminist internationalism in the face of war.
How do we practice feminist internationalism? The question has never been more urgent than today, as war rages in Ukraine.
This is a problem feminists have faced many times before. Remember when Laura Bush tried to sell the war in Afghanistan as women’s liberation? At the time, the left was hampered by thin relationships with our feminist counterparts in these countries, leaving the anti-war movement vulnerable to claims that women there really did want the help of the US military. Today, we’re committed to strengthening those relationships through conversations like this one.
The spring 2022 issue of Lux features several explorations of US empire from a feminist perspective. We talk with the women of the Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association about the US withdrawal, profile National Book Award-finalist poet Solmaz Sharif whose work confronts the War on Terror and her own exile from Iran, report on Okinawa’s multigenerational anti-US-base movement, and pay tribute to Puerto Rican radical Luisa Capetillo.
This event will take on the special role that feminism continues to play in anti-imperalist struggles, from the Middle East to East Asia to Latin America, connecting these struggles, and activists, across borders.
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Speakers:
Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at New York Times Magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center. Her writing covers the War on Terror, Islamophobia, and the Middle East and South Asia. She was previously on the staff of The New Yorker and The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. She is currently working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States.
Margo Okazawa-Rey is a professor emerita at San Francisco State University and a transnational feminist activist. She works on militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women in the US and around the world. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, and was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective. Her recent publications include “‘Nation-izing’ Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Anti-militarist Feminists,” and Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives (Oxford, 2020).
Sophie Pinkham is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. She has written about Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics for The New York Review of Books, The New Left Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and many other publications. She produced the short documentary Balka, on women, drugs, and HIV in Ukraine.
Sarah Leonard (moderator) is editor-in-chief of Lux magazine. She is contributing editor to Dissent and The Nation. (@sarahrlnrd)
This event is sponsored by Lux magazine and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/vRuCwaSiHyg
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jun 2, 2022
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Salvage Live: Ukraine, Russia, NATO, & Anti-Imperialism Today
Join Salvage and Haymarket Books for a discussion of the war in Ukraine and how the international left should respond.
We are joined by the Russian socialist and anti-war activist Ilya Matveev—co-founder of openleft.ru—and Ukrainian sociologist Voldoymyr Ishchenko, for a special edition of Salvage Live on the war in Ukraine.
How did we get to this crisis? What might the future hold? How secure is Putin? Does this mark the passing of unipolar American hegemony, or not, and how should we understand imperialism today? As rival blocs spread carnage, socialist internationalism once again issues an urgent call to save the world from the flames.
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Speakers:
Ilya Matveev is a researcher and lecturer based in St Petersburg, Russia. He is a founding editor of Openleft.ru and a member of the research group Public Sociology Laboratory.
Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist based in Kyiv. He has published articles and interviews in the Guardian and New Left Review.
Barnaby Raine is writing his PhD at Columbia University on visions of ending capitalism. He teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
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This event is sponsored by Salvage and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/0VK_1JBC55w
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jun 7, 2022
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Elite Capture w/ Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò & Robin D.G. Kelley
Join Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation about the politics of solidarity in the fight against racial capitalism.
“I was waiting for this book without realizing I was waiting for this book.”—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition
“Olúfémi O. Táíwò is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalism’s latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation. The lesson is clear: only when we think for ourselves and act with each other, together in deep, dynamic, and difficult solidarity, can we begin to remake the world.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.
Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.
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Speakers:
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) and Reconsidering Reparations. His work exploring the intersections of climate justice and colonialism has been featured in The New Yorker, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, The Appeal, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, Aeon, and Foreign Policy.
Robin D.G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and the author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Dissent Magazine.
Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-capture
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/BpLX8T6phOQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jun 10, 2022
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Episode 0
How Can Feminist Solidarity Help Ukraine?
Join feminists from Ukraine and around the world for a critical discussion on building solidarity against the war and global capitalism.
Since Russia’s full-scale imperialist invasion of Ukraine was launched by Vladimir Putin on February 24, Putin’s speeches, Russian state propaganda and the actual massacres and rapes committed by the Russian army have revealed the genocidal and misogynist character of this invasion. At the same time, the resistance of the Ukrainian people has been heroic. There have been many other expressions of opposition to this war as well, ranging from global protests to humanitarian aid convoys and initiatives by individuals and groups to help the resistance in Ukraine.
Ukrainian feminists have been an active part of the resistance both in actual combat and in various other invaluable capacities such as health care, child care, food production, communications and strategizing through social media as writers, leaders and spokeswomen. Among the more than five million Ukrainian refugees in Europe who are mostly women and children, many women are promoting valuable communication with the world.
The Russian Feminist Anti-War Resistance, though much smaller in comparison, has brought together forty different feminist groups inside Russia to oppose the invasion. They have also attempted to fight state disinformation by publicizing facts about the war through a Telegram channel. However, many of their members along with other opponents of the war within Russia have been arrested and silenced by the Russian police state and its campaign of disinformation.
Desperately needed is a coordinated global feminist solidarity effort to support the Ukrainian popular resistance and their struggle to maintain their country’s independence and democratic rights. This panel will argue that solidarity with Ukraine is critical for the present and future of women’s rights, anti-racism, labor rights, environmentalism, LGBTQ+ rights, and the right to truth and social justice seeking.
Speakers:
Yuliya Yurchenko is the author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketization to Armed Conflict (Pluto Press, 2018). She is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability Institute at the University of Greenwich, UK. She is also vice-chair of the Critical Political Economy Research Network.
Oksana Dutchak is a Ukrainian sociologist and co-editor of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, a journal of the Ukrainian left. She is the deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research in Kyiv, where she has studied work and working conditions as well as gender inequalities. She is now a refugee.
Wonda Powell is Professor Emerita of History at Los Angeles Southwest College. She continues her work in Ethnic Studies.
Sasha Talaver is a Ph.D. candidate (Gender Studies, CEU, Vienna) and currently, she is a fellow at ZZF (Leibniz Center for contemporary History Potsdam). Sasha explores the role of the state-supported women’s organization in the Soviet Union, the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee, in Soviet policy-making. Her previous research project was on the underground women's movement in Soviet Leningrad, Sasha has co-edited the book Feminist Samizdat: 40 Years After (Moscow: commonplace, 2020).
Frieda Afary is an Iranian American librarian and translator in Los Angeles and author of the forthcoming book Socialist Feminism: A New Approach (Pluto Press).
This event is sponsored by Commons: Journal of Social Criticism (Ukraine), New Politics Magazine, Internationalism From Below, and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/dXMnZ0uKzIA
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jul 13, 2022
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What's Happening in Sri Lanka? w/ Rohini Hensman & more (5-16-2022)
Join Haymarket Books and Internationalism from Below for a discussion of the multiplying crises and the emergence of a new protest movement in Sri Lanka.
***Please note: This discussion was recorded on May 16, 2022 and while the situation on the ground in Sri Lanka has changed, the background provided here remains indispensable.***
Internationalism from Below (IfB) is a grassroots, all-volunteer network of socialist internationalists whose primary orientation is to support and popularize mass struggles from below of working and oppressed peoples throughout the world. IfB opposes all kinds of state and imperial violence, and aims to provide a positive alternative to the elements of the anti-war left that whitewashes the violence of repressive regimes.
Since the beginning of the year, Sri Lanka has been facing its largest economic crisis since the country’s independence from Britain in 1948. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s regime has defaulted on the foreign loans Sri Lanka has amassed over the years, especially sovereign bonds, and struggled to deal with the economic collapse triggered by multiple factors, including the collapse of tourism revenues with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sri Lanka’s currency, the rupee, is being rapidly devalued, while average citizens cannot afford basic necessities. Since March, protests have spread across the country, and the President’s cabinet except for the Prime Minister resigned. The Rajapaksa administration—which has spent the past several years attempting to consolidate power through authoritarian measures—has ignored the growing consequences of the economic crisis caused by the build up of foreign loan obligations.
How do we make sense of the different political visions and actors in the region in light of the growing contradictions of the neoliberal economy and the limitations of authoritarian regimes to manage the effects of crisis? How are the Sri Lankan mass protests providing a new political vision against the forces of debt-run globalization as they continue to decimate regions of the global South? How do we reckon with the movement’s limits—its complex relationship with Tamil self-determination, and the historical legacy of the electoral left’s betrayal of independent mass politics, among other factors?
This panel aims to provide an introduction to the situation in Sri Lanka today from left-wing perspectives, while contextualizing it in the region’s larger political and economic history and issues. The speakers will touch on topics like Sri Lanka’s political economy, local dynamics of racism and authoritarianism in blocking class politics, and grassroots feminist movements’ program and demands.
Speakers:
Devaka Gunawardena is an independent researcher who holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a general focus on political economy.
Rohini Hensman is a writer, researcher, and activist who comes from Sri Lanka and is resident in India and has written extensively on workers’ rights, feminism, minority rights, globalisation, and a Marxist approach to struggles for democracy. Her most recent books are Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India and Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism. She has also written two novels: To Do Something Beautiful, inspired by her work with working-class women and trade unions in Bombay, and Playing Lions and Tigers, set in Sri Lanka.
Niyanthini Kadirgamar is a Ph.D. student in Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is part of the Feminist Collective for Economic Justice.
Moderator:
Promise Li is an activist and writer from Hong Kong and Los Angeles. He organizes international solidarity work with Internationalism from Below and Lausan Collective.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/o4SE9pBf4JY
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Feb 24, 2022
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Automating Banishment: The Data-Driven Policing of Stolen Land w/ Mike Davis and Stop LAPD Spying
Join members of Stop LAPD Spying! and Mike Davis for a teach-in on how police and real estate work together to control stolen land.
Surveillance and data collection have long been advanced by colonizers working to control and conquer land. While more people are beginning to understand the role of data in policing, less attention is paid to data-driven policing’s relationships to land. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a community group building power to abolish police surveillance in Los Angeles and beyond. Their new report Automating Banishment: The Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land examines the role of police data in real estate development and gentrification, with a focus on the process that has always bound policing and capitalism together: colonization.
Join us for a discussion with abolitionist organizers about the deadly violence and banishment that police data helps automate.
Read the report here: https://stoplapdspying.org/automating-banishment-the-surveillance-and-policing-of-looted-land/
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Speakers:
Steve Diaz is with the Los Angeles Community Action Network where he has worked on campaigns to improve the overall community for long terms skid row residents.
Deshonay Dozier received her Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology at the City University of New York. Dozier’s research broadly focuses on abolition in the urban landscape. She currently holds positions as a University of California Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow and an Assistant Professor of Human Geography at CSU Long Beach. Her book manuscript, Another City is Possible: Skid Row and the Contested Development of Los Angeles examines how unhoused and poor people across multiple intersectional identities have reshaped the penal organization of their lives through alternatives visions for the city since the 1930s. Dozier has published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, and Housing Studies. Dr. Dozier’s work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies.
Shakeer Rahman is an attorney and organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition
Mike Davis, professor emeritus of creative writing at UC Riverside, joined the San Diego chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1962 at age 16 and the struggle for racial and social equality has remained the lodestar of his life. His City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles challenged reigning celebrations of the city from the perspectives of its lost radical past and insurrectionary future. His wide-ranging work has married science, archival research, personal experience, and creative writing with razor-sharp critiques of empires and ruling classes.
This event is sponsored by The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Haymarket Books.
Jan 5, 2022
Season 0
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Haymarket Poetry Presents: The Patron Saint of Making Curfew
Join Tim Staffford to celebrate the release of his new chapbook The Patron Saint of Making Curfew! Tim will be joined on the mic by special guests Natasha Carrizosa, Omar Holmon and Dan “Sully” Sullivan, for an evening hosted by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.
Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1890-the-patron-saint-of-making-curfew
Poets:
Tim Stafford is a poet and public educator from Lyons, IL. He is the editor of the Learn Then Burn all-ages anthology series on Write Bloody Publishing. He is a former Chicago Poetry Slam champion and he performs regularly across the U.S. and Europe including the 2015 Woerdz Festival in Luzern, Switzerland and the ABC Brecht Festival in Augsburg, Germany.
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is a New York Times bestselling nonfiction writer and poet. Author of seven books of poetry, her latest How to Love the Empty Air was published in 2018. Her nonfiction book Dr. Mutter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine, debuted at #7 on the New York Times Bestseller List for Books about Health and would stay on it for three months. Cristin is married to fellow bestselling author and screenwriter Ernest Cline. She lives in Austin, Texas with her family and their two eccentric rescue dachshunds.
Natasha Carrizosa won the National Poetry Award for multicultural poet of the year in 2013. She is a poet, writer, and spoken word artist. She is a published author of several projects – including heavy light, mejiafricana, and Of Fire and Rain (co-authored with Joaquin Zihuatanejo.) She has performed her work and conducted workshops for audiences in Madrid, Paris, St. Lucia, New York, Chicago, Houston and countless other cities.
Omar Holmon is an Alumni poet of Rutgers University and has competed in slam poetry for numerous years with two final stage appearances at the National Poetry Slam. He has been featured on Button Poetry, Tedx, and a commercial for Laphroaig whiskey (we outchea). In 2014 Omar Holmon Co-founded the Black Nerd Problems website with William Evans, where he spends his days writing essays on pop culture, blackness, and making top quality gifs.
Dan “Sully” Sullivan poems and performances have been featured on HBO Def Poetry Jam, WGN Morning News, and National Public Radio. Sully is a three-time Chicago Poetry Slam Champion, a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, the Earl S Ho Award for Excellence in Teaching Creative Writing, and an Indiana University Writer in South Asia Recipient. His first full-length book of poems, The Blue Line Home, is available from EM-Press.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/istJRk0L3UE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jan 26, 2022
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To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change w/ Alfred McCoy
Join two world-renowned historians, Andrew Bacevich and Alfred W. McCoy, to discuss McCoy's latest book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
In a sweep through seven centuries from 1350 to 2050, the work explains how catastrophes-- pandemics, wars, and climate crisis--have shaped the destiny of empires and world orders. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.
Get To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1742-to-govern-the-globe
Speakers:
Alfred W. McCoy holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of The Politics of Heroin, the classic study of drug trafficking that the CIA tried to suppress, and In the Shadows of the American Century.
Andrew Bacevich grew up in Indiana, graduated from West Point and Princeton, served in the army, became an academic, and is now a writer. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books, among them The New American Militarism, The Limits of Power, Washington Rules, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, and After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. He is president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank.
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This event is sponsored by TomDispatch and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/udvAt2lU1EE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jan 27, 2022
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Understanding E-Carceration: A Book Launch w/ Ruth Wilson Gilmore & James Kilgore
Join James Kilgore and Ruth Wilson Gilmore for an urgent discussion of punitive carceral technologies and Kilgore's new book.
In the last decade, as the critique of mass incarceration has grown more powerful, many reformers have embraced changes that release people from prisons and jails, but maintain some degree of surveillance. As educator, author, and activist James Kilgore brilliantly shows in his new book, these rapidly spreading reforms largely fall under the heading of “e-carceration”—a range of punitive technological interventions, from ankle monitors to facial recognition apps, that deprive people of their liberty, all in the name of ending mass incarceration.
E-carceration can block people’s access to employment, housing, healthcare, and even the chance to spend time with loved ones. Many of these technologies gather data that lands in corporate and government databases and may lead to further punishment or the marketing of their data to Big Tech.
For this launch Kilgore, himself a survivor of prison and e-carceration, will be joined in conversation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Order a copy of Understanding E-carceration: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781620976142
Moderator:
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James Kilgore is an activist, researcher, and writer based in Urbana, Illinois, where he has lived since paroling from prison in 2009. He is the director of the Challenging E-Carceration project at MediaJustice and the co-director of FirstFollowers Reentry Program in Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of five books, including Understanding E-Carceration and the award-winning Understanding Mass Incarceration (both from The New Press).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press) and the forthcoming book Change Everything (Haymarket) . Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).
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This event is sponsored by The New Press and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/fc2JaRJWcFM
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jan 28, 2022
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US Labor on the Move: The Fights Ahead in 2022
Join Haymarket and Labor Notes for a discussion about some of the key labor fights ahead in 2022.
As the coronavirus crisis continues to rock the US working class, and as corporate profits soar, organized workers are gearing up for some of the biggest fights in years, both in the workplace and in their unions. In 2022, the United Auto Workers will hold their first direct elections for top leadership after years of corruption and concessions, and gear up for the Big Three auto negotiations in 2023; the Teamsters will inaugurate new reform leadership and launch their UPS contract campaign, covering the largest private sector union contract in the country; and UFCW members on the west coast begin a coordinated contract campaign covering 100,000 grocery workers. Hear from member leaders from each of these fights on how organized workers are fighting back across the country, and learn more about the next potential flashpoints in the US labor movement.
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Speakers:
Dave Bernt, UPS Teamster
Michael Cannon, UAW
Kyong Barry, UFCW
Moderator: Jonah Furman, Labor Notes
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This event is sponsored by Labor Notes and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/he072L7Rcxw
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks