In the midst of loss and death and suffering, our charge is to figure out what freedom really means—and how we take steps to get there.
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Join Marc Lamont Hill, phillip agnew, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for an urgent conversation about the ongoing struggle for freedom in the wake of the 2020 election.
The uprising of 2020 marked a new phase in the unfolding Movement for Black Lives. The brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and countless other injustices large and small, lit the spark of the largest protest movement in US history, a historic uprising against racism and the politics of disposability that the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare.
In his urgent and incisive new book We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility, Marc Lamont Hill critically examines the “pre-existing conditions” that have led us to this moment of crisis and upheaval, guiding us through both the perils and possibilities, and helping us imagine an abolitionist future.
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Marc Lamont Hill will be joined in conversation by philip agnew and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country. He is currently the host of BET News. An award-winning journalist, Dr. Hill has received numerous prestigious awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Dr. Hill is the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. Prior to that, he held positions at Columbia University and Morehouse College. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond. He is the owner of Uncle Bobbie's Bookstore in Philadelphia, PA.
phillip agnew, co-founded the Dream Defenders in 2012. His work in community organizing and art is frequently cited and highlighted nationally. He is a nationally recognized educator, strategist, writer, trainer, speaker and cultural critic. In 2018, he transitioned from his role as co-director of the Dream Defenders. In July 2019 he joined the Bernie Sanders campaign as a National Surrogate and was later named a Senior Advisor. agnew currently is an organizer with the Dream Defenders and Black Men Build. agnew is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and graduate of Florida A&M University.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Her third book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press, was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/3OtCU6ichE0
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More Episodes
Sep 26, 2022
Keywords for Capitalism: A Field Guide for Decoding the Language of Power, Society, and Politics
Join John Patrick Leary & Greg Grandin on the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths used to disguise the horrors of our political system.
From "liberal" to "the economy" the terms used by "pundits" and politicians to explain our civic structures tend to obscure as much as they reveal about the reality they ostensibly describe. Yet the enduring vocabulary of radical movement-building can be equally opaque when filtered through both the distortions of the status quo and the partisan interests of the activist left. How do we make sense of terms like "socialism" and "intersectional" that are so routinely used and abused by such a wide array of commentators from across the political spectrum?
In his new book, Keywords for Capitalism, John Patrick Leary offers a probing and insightful guide designed to equip readers with the tools to do just that. Leary takes a wit-sharpened scalpel to the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths that crowd ‘the discourse’ and reveals the ideology of the mainstream political media that lies just below the surface.
Leary will be joined for this launch event by Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin. Together they will masterfully dress down and dissect the froth of corporate media jargon that we may not even know we’re forced to swim through on a daily basis.
Get Keywords for Capitalism from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1886-keywords-for-capitalism
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Speakers:
John Patrick Leary is the author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism and A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the US Imagination. He teaches social studies in the Philadelphia public schools.
Greg Grandin is the author of The Pulitzer Prize winning The End of the Myth, Empire’s Workshop, The Empire of Necessity, and is currently the C Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6C_AoUzEviw
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Sep 26, 2022
The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right
Join David Roediger and Nan Enstad as they challenge the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination.
The slogan, “save the middle class,” has become ubiquitous within political circles, despite the fact that it misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths that the US is a providentially middle class nation.
In these discussions the middle class is implicitly white and presented—usually by liberal commentators—as unheard amidst concerns for racial justice and for the poor.
In this launch for David Roediger’s The Sinking Middle Class, the author will be joined by Nan Enstad for a discussion how the image of the United States as a middle class nation corresponds to neither contemporary nor historical reality.
Get The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1879-the-sinking-middle-class
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Speakers:
Nan Enstad is the Buttel-Sewell Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author of Cigarettes Inc: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism. Her research and teaching examines the history of global capitalism and how people have lived and struggled within and against it. She has longstanding commitments to cultural, anti-racist, ethnic, labor, queer, and gender studies that inform how she approach any subject. She is currently exploring controversies around large-scale animal agriculture.
David Roediger teaches in American Studies, History, and African and African American Studies at University of Kansas. His recent books include How Race Survived United States History and Class, Race and Marxism.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/ShDFFAROHRU
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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Sep 26, 2022
Freeing Education — Conversation 1: Deconstruction, Refusal, Departure
Join No More Exclusions, Haymarket Books, and Hajar Press for a series of conversations on abolitionist education.
Over the course of three online discussions, No More Exclusions will bring together radical voices from the UK and international community to develop an abolitionist vision of education. Exchanges will take place across different contexts, linking them via shared themes of community, resistance, and liberation in the face of education systems that insist on violence.
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Conversation 1: Deconstruction, Refusal, Departure
The first conversation will focus on unpicking the harms of schooling as part of a wider system of carceral feminism and imperialism, before turning to explore the transformational work that is currently in progress and taking stock of the struggle in education from an international perspective.
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About No More Exclusions
https://nomoreexclusions.com/
No More Exclusions is a grassroots abolitionist coalition working to end exclusion in education in all its forms.
You can find out more about NME’s work here: https://bit.ly/3Pf9mW0.
If you are able, please consider making a solidarity donation to NME’s crowdfunder here: https://bit.ly/3aPAvQv.
Speakers:
Zahra Bei (she/her) is a Recovering Teacher and Organizer with No More Exclusions.
Lola Olufemi (she/they) is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London.
Sara Bafo (she/her) is an Organiser with No More Exclusions
Cradle Community is a collective experimenting with how we build transformative justice and community accountability in our communities. If you are able, please consider supporting Cradle’s work here: https://bit.ly/3yLCvRD.
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This event series is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books, Hajar Press, and No More Exclusions.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/7uC1M5acVVQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Sep 26, 2022
What is the Relevance of the Russian Revolution Today? A Debate w/ Kshama Sawant & Eric Blanc
Tune in for a debate between Kshama Sawant and Eric Blanc, on the relevance of the Russian Revolution Today.
Few political questions from the 20th century were so fraught as how to understand the Russian Revolution. Inspiring example of workers throwing off the Tsarist yoke and rattling the foundations of capitalism, or well-spring of tyranny and the antithesis of the benighted values of ‘The West’? Even among its most ardent defenders debates raged about what lessons to draw from the experience of the revolution, and how (or whether) to replicate the organizational model of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party.
Though these very questions animated several generations of activists and organizers on the Left in countries across the globe, how relevant are they for today’s burgeoning socialist movement in a modern democratic state? What lessons can we apply to the current world situation?
Taking as their starting point the ground-breaking contributions of Eric Blanc’s Revolutionary Social Democracy, Blanc and Seattle’s socialist city councilwoman Kshama Sawant will debate exactly what we can learn from the Russian Revolution for our contemporary struggles.
Blanc and Sawant will be joined by Bryan Koulouris of Socialist Alternative, for a debate moderated by Bhaskar Sunkara.
Get a copy of Revolutionary Social Democracy from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1907-revolutionary-social-democracy
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Speakers:
Kshama Sawant is a Seattle city councilwoman and member of Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Eric Blanc is the author of Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, and an organizer with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
Bryan Koulouris is the national organizer for Socialist Alternative, and an executive committee member of International Socialist Alternative
Bhaskar Sunkara (moderator) is the founding editor of Jacobin and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.
Watch the live event recording:
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Sep 26, 2022
Learning As Rebellion: Resisting Right-Wing Attacks on Higher Ed Across the Americas
Join Haymarket Books, and NACLA for a discussion of how to resist the conservative attacks on higher education
From Brazil to Puerto Rico to the United States, conservative politicians have set their sights on schools as key ideological battlegrounds. And when vulnerable students and scholars are targeted for their identities and/or politics, universities often fail to protect them for fear of alienating donors or powerful political allies. What can we do to fight back and protect one another?
As right-wing forces work to dismantle accessible education and limit academic freedom in countries across the Americas, join us for a virtual roundtable inspired by Lorgia García Peña’s recent book, Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color. In conversation with García Peña, scholar-activists Luciana Brito and Geo Maher, with moderation by Marisol LeBrón, will discuss the recent wave of attacks on education across the Americas and envision how to build liberatory spaces of learning and transformation.
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Speakers:
Luciana Brito is a historian and professor at the Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia-Brasil, specializing in the history of slavery and abolition in Brazil and the United States. She is member of the Executive committee of ASWAD (Association for the Worldwide Diaspora), is columnist of Nexo Jornal and has been publishing a lot of academic and non-academic articles about race, gender, class and inequality in the Americas. She is the author of the book Fears of Africa: Security, Legislation and African Population in 19th Century Bahia. Instagram: @lucianabritohistoria
Marisol LeBrón is associate professor in Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua/Contra Muerto Rico: Lecciones del Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021) and Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019) and co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer and organizer, and Visiting Associate Professor of Global Political Thought at Vassar College. He has taught previously at Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the College of William and Mary's Decolonizing Humanities Project, NYU's Hemispheric Institute, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He his co-editor of the Duke University Press series Radical Américas and author of five books: We Created Chávez (Duke, 2013), Building the Commune (Verso, 2016), Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017), A World Without Police (Verso, 2021), and Anticolonial Eruptions (University of California, 2022).
Lorgia García Peña is the author of Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color and is a first generation Latinx Studies scholar. Dr. García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University and a Casey Foundation 2021 Freedom Scholar. She studies global Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora with a special focus on Black Latinidad. Dr. García Peña is the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia and of Archives of Justice (Milan-Boston).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/gJ2EnOVFAxk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Sep 26, 2022
Credible Strike Threats, Global Supply Chains & Choke Point Organizing
Join us for a discussion of global labor organizing hosted by Internationalism from Below and Haymarket Books.
The global supply chain crisis in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to reflect on the vulnerabilities of the just-in-time model of capitalist production. As capital studies and prepares for risks to the global supply chain, so must workers if we are to make global systemic changes needed to reverse the many catastrophic crises facing the planet.
The new issue of the journal New Global Studies features a forum on Workers’ Movements and the Global Supply Chain, which examines unions and global labor organizing in seven countries, identifying and assessing strategies for cross-border worker organizing at these choke points to apply pressure, extract gains, and tip the balance of power in their favor.
Join us for this discussion with two of the contributors to that forum, Robert Ovetz and Gifford Hartman, leading experts on global labor struggles and strategy.
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Robert Ovetz is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at San José State University. He focuses on global labor organizing strategy and is the Membership & Organizing Chair of his union, the SJSU chapter of California Faculty Association, an anti-racist, social justice union of 29,000 faculty members in the California State University system. He is the editor of Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives (2020) and the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (2018) and We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (2022). He writes about worker organizing for Dollars & Sense magazine, is Book Review Editor of the Journal of Labor and Society, and is a contributor to The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy (2022). He can reached at
[email protected] and his writings can be found here.
Gifford Hartman is a Certified Trainer and Instructional Assistant for the Global Labour University, a founding member of the San Francisco Bay Area-based Global Supply Chain Study/Research Group, and the International Solidarity Liaison for Railroad Workers United. Over the last 25 years he has been an adult educator, labor trainer and labor historian. Prior to that, he was a rank-and-file member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). He has helped organize workshops, seminars, conferences and educational training sessions for unions, labor activists and environmental organizations in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. His article “Supply Chain Workers’ Inquiries: Class Struggle along Value Chains” appears in the current issue of New Global Studies. He can be contacted at
[email protected] and his writings can be found here.
Moderator:
Lala Peñaranda is a climate and labor activist from Colombia, based in New York. She is a member of Internationalism from Below, Science for the People, and DSA.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/kjsHtYpNUj8
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks