Join the Haymarket Book Club to take 50% off Everything!

Podcast

Challenging Governance Through Punishment and the Politics of Solidarity

For more than two decades, the movement to end mass incarceration has sought to challenge policing, criminalization and incarceration as harmful institutions. Amongst the harms perpetrated by these carceral systems is the punishment paradigm, a term that signifies the hegemonic power of punishment as it now exists in the U.S., embedded in culture, media, law, and policy. Despite a heightened consciousness around the negative impacts of punitive systems following the uprisings of 2020, the institutions of punishment have remained largely intact.

The Trump administration has significantly escalated the use of punishing institutions, like policing, detention, incarceration and deportation, to target migrants, dissidents, and all people at the margins. The federal government has also increased its use of punishment practices, like the threats to punish institutions for not complying with government demands, the outsourcing of punishment to everyday people, and the impunity offered for otherwise punishable offenses to those who side with the administration. This escalation has demonstrated the centrality of punishment to authoritarian regimes, and laid bare the devastating consequences for our communities.

Speakers:

Laura Whitehorn served 14+ years in federal prison for the “Resistance Conspiracy” case.” Released in 1999, she works in the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (RAPPCampaign.com), and for the release of political prisoners. She edited the "The War Before" by late Black Panther political prisoner and organizer, Safiya Bukari (feministpress.org) and helped organized the 2014 Interference Archive exhibition "Self Determination Inside/Out" which showed how the struggles of incarcerated people affected and shaped social movements on the outside. With her partner, the writer Susie Day, she was part of the prison, labor, and academic delegation to Palestine in 2016.

Nadia Ben-Youssef (she/her) is the granddaughter of artists, refugees, and revolutionaries. A human rights lawyer by training, Nadia currently serves as the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal and advocacy organization working with social movements and communities under threat to dismantle racism, cisheteropatriarchy, economic oppression and abusive state practices. She has expertise in international human rights fora and mechanisms, and extensive experience developing advocacy strategies to influence U.S. decision-makers. Her work often centers at the intersection of art and advocacy, and she curates exhibits and artistic programming that document key human rights concerns, celebrate social movements, and allow creatives the space to chart the future. Central to Nadia's lifework is a commitment to the liberation of Palestine, and she is a proud co-founder of the Adalah Justice Project. Nadia is a member of the NY State bar, and serves on the Boards of Adalah Justice Project, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Multitude Films.

Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket, 2024). Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11 and has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Teen Vogue, The Nation, Truthout, Inquest, and The Forge.

Charlene Allen is a writer and activist who works with community organizations to heal trauma and foster justice. She has been a restorative and healing justice practitioner for over a decade and advocates for policy changes to expand the use of community-based restorative practices. As a writer, Charlene’s debut novel, Play the Game, (HarperCollins, 2023), explores and advances restorative and healing justice practices in real life situations

Cameron W. Rasmussen is a social worker, researcher, educator, and facilitator. He is an assistant professor at the Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where he researches issues of accountability, violence, and justice, and the intersections of abolition and social work. Cameron is a Co-Editor of Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes and the Practice of Community Care and is a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work (NAASW).

Co-Sponsors: Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative, Center for Justice at Columbia University, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Haymarket Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/CAyIxFkh7U4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

More Episodes

Mar 4, 2021

Text Messages: Creating Worlds with Words ft. Narcy and Lowkey (10-29-20)

Join independent artists Narcy and Lowkey for a wide-ranging conversation celebrating the release of Narcy’s debut book Text Messages. ---------------------------------------------------- Independent hip-hop artists Narcy and Lowkey on art, technology, empire, and the struggle to survive the end of consumer capitalism. ---------------------------------------------------- Text Messages is the first multi-genre collection by Montreal-based Iraqi hip-hop artist, activist, and professor Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman. Composed entirely on a smartphone during air travel and married to artwork from comrades, Narcy’s writing speaks of the existential crises experienced by diasporic children of war before and during imperialism in the age of the Internet. Narcy 's verses span the space between hip-hop and manifesto, portraying a crumbling, end-stage capitalist society, visions for a new reality, and exposes the myth of multiculturalism in post-9/11 North America. The wordsmith hollows and transmogrifies the grotesque excess of the West by juxtaposing McLife with images of death, destruction, and trauma in the East. From the depths of apathetic consumerism arises a voice of spiritual self-realization that explodes the misrepresented, mythical monolith of Islam in the West and with the rubble builds healing through intelligent resistance and radical love. ---------------------------------------------------------- Real name Yassin Alsalman, Narcy is a musician, director, professor, writer, and actor. He teaches a hip-hop production class and a cultural study of rap and politics at Concordia University. He is the cofounder of WeAreTheMedium, a culture point for publishing, media, and the arts. He currently resides in Montreal, has his heart in the Arab world, and is grounded on planet Earth. Most importantly, he is a father of two. Lowkey is a hip hop artist and political campaigner. He has worked with Immortal Technique , Wretch 32, Akala, Dead Prez and Outlawz. He is part of the super group Mongrel alongside members of the Arctic Monkeys, Babyshambles and Reverend And The Makers. The band released their album Better than Heavy in tandem with the Independent newspaper. In Canada order the book from Fernwood Publishers: https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/text-messages In the US and World: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1474-text-messages Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/1vo8CNFu2w0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Mar 4, 2021

The Virus, The Climate, The Alternative: Solutions to Capital’s Crises (10-29-20)

Join leading ecosocialist authors and activists Andreas Malm and Thea Riofrancos for a discussion of how to stop the climate crisis. ---------------------------------------------------- From annual ‘once a centuries’ fires, to ‘storms to end all storms’ making landfall every hurricane season, the signs that capitalist climate change represents a civilizational threat have never been more ominously evident. It has become impossible to ignore the dire need to move beyond green tinkering to an overhaul of the entire system, lest we be left with a charred and blasted husk where once there was a planet. As the global fever rages, we are faced with the choice of "Ecosocialism or Barbecue." In his new book, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm points to the state mobilizations across the globe to combat the coronavirus as an example of the scale of intervention that will be required to execute the just-transition we need. If it is possible to conjure trillions of dollars to combat an invisible, epidemiological threat, why is the climate emergency not greeted with similar sized programs? Malm will be joined for this virtual teach-in by fellow activist and author Thea Riofrancos—whose new book Resource Radicals looks at lessons for our movement from the experience in Ecuador— for a conversation that will touch on this question and many more. ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Andreas Malm is a scholar of human ecology, and the author of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, The Progress of this Storm and Fossil Capital, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2022), and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2020-2021). Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. These themes are explored in her book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and her co-authored book, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and serves on the steering committee of the organization's Ecosocialist Working Group. ---------------------------------------------------- Order a copy of Andreas Malm's Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3704-corona-climate-chronic-emergency Order his other books: The Progress of this Storm: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3140-the-progress-of-this-storm Fossil Capital: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2002-fossil-capital Order a copy of Thea Riofrancos's "Resource Radicals": https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781478008484 Order her other books: A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3107-a-planet-to-win Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/HFK8BPQfyXE Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Mar 4, 2021

Building Abolition Now! Planting Seeds, Growing Abolitionist Futures (10-29-20)

Join Critical Resistance and the AbolitionNOW coalition for the final session in their series of virtual teach-in's. ———————————————— The prison industrial complex (PIC) is sold as a solution that you turn to for all of your problems but in reality communities need specific solutions that are tailored and not carceral. This panel will explore what safety actually means and a vision for keeping communities safe from harm without prisons, police and systems of state punishment. ————————————————————— Speakers: Nia Umoja Solange Azor- BYP100 Mirian Porras - Poder Emma Moderator - Cory Lira - Critical Resistance ————————————————————— This event is presented by the AbolitionNOW Network and cosponsored by Haymarket Books, an independent, radical, non-profit publisher. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our continuing to do this important work. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/WLQqzuiTMYQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Mar 4, 2021

Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire with David McNally (11-5-20)

For the first HM online panel this year, please join us for a discussion of David McNally's book: 'Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance'. 'In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money’s origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money’s emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war. Blood and Money demonstrates the ways that money has “internalized” its violent origins, making clear that it has become a concentrated force of social power and domination. Where Adam Smith observed that monetary wealth represents “command over labor,” this paradigm shifting book amends his view to define money as comprising the command over persons and their bodies.'(Text taken from the book cover.) Join us for this discussion with David McNally (author, editor of Spectre Journal, Professor of History at University of Houston), joined by Maia Pal (HM editorial board) & Tithi Bhattacharya. PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider supporting the Historical Materialism project. Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/v6psUWDkUjc Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Mar 4, 2021

Engels at 200 with Michael Roberts & Camilla Royle (11-7-20)

Marx is often accused of what has been called a Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess, can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is called ‘nature’ – for better or worse. On the 200th anniversary of his birth, Engels too must be saved from the same charge.Actually, Engels was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing. Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature, written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way. And yet, in his book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between humans and nature. it's time to revise the revisionists. Engels and Ecology The Urban Political Ecology of Friedrich Engels - Camilla Royle This paper takes the 200th anniversary of Engels’s birth in November 1820 to rethink his contribution to what we might today call urban political ecology. Marxist thinkers within critical environmental geography, have long argued for a focus on the natural processes that constitute the urban environment, demonstrating how the urban is shaped by both social and ecological processes. Their approach is rooted in a dialectical rather than a mechanistic materialism. While some have cited Engels as an early advocate of these views, others – such as Neil Smith in Uneven Development – have been more critical of his views on nature, seeing them as representing a dualist approach alien to Marx’s understanding. This paper will address these debates by highlighting Engels’s work on housing conditions, air and water pollution as well as his writings on infectious disease pandemics of the time such as typhus and cholera. It will show how Engels’s approach to public health and his accusations of “social murder” perpetuated by the ruling class predates the analysis of structural violence developed by critical theorists of global health over a century later. It will suggest that Engels’s understanding of how capitalist social relations produced an urban environment detrimental to workers aligns with Marx’s views. PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider supporting the Historical Materialism project. Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/EbGrV9UzYo4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Mar 4, 2021

The 2020 US Election w/ Kali Akuno, Meagan Day, & Peter Drucker(11-7-20)

The 2020 US election may be the biggest crisis of bourgeois democracy since the defeat of Black Reconstruction. The past several years and weeks have been rich in lessons about the nature of the US state and its electoral system. Issues that the panelists will discuss include: the ongoing far right threat and the changing character of the Republican Party; the nature of the Democratic Party and what the left can and cannot use it for; the roots of the current political crisis in the economic crisis going back to 2008, and the impact of the pandemic; and the intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality in this current crisis. Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is the co-author with Micah Uetricht of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go From the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism (Verso, April 2020). Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Peter Drucke's long years as a socialist and queer activist began in the US in 1978, when he was 19. He is the author of Max Shachtman and His Left and of Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Haymarket). He lives in the Netherlands. Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/yenbB5fxkY4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now