More Episodes
Mar 4, 2021
Teachers on Strike Are Still Teaching: Union Power & the Fight for Democracy (12-4-20)
Jesse Sharkey, Beverly J. Silver, and a panel of teacher activists discuss the power of teachers unions and the fight for racial justice, equitable funding and democracy.
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For the past 10 years teacher unionists across the country have built the most powerful strikes in a generation. From red states to blue states, Chicago to Arizona, teachers are rising up to challenge vouchers, privatization and racially disparate school funding schemes.
Why have teachers been able to turn the tables on the austerity program and charter industry in such a short period of time? What about teacher unions are strategic within the national and global economy that allows them to exercise such tremendous power and success across geography and circumstance?
Join president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Jesse Sharkey in conversation with Beverly J. Silver, one of the most foremost scholars on the strategic power of teachers' unions. Silver has studied the last 150 years of union power and ascertained some common threads that made miners, steel workers, auto-works, and now teachers so capable of shifting the narrative and balance of power in capitalist countries throughout the world. ----------------------------------------------------
Speakers:
Jesse Sharkey was appointed president of the 24,000-member Chicago Teachers Union on September 5, 2018, replacing retiring President Karen Lewis. A member of the CTU since 1998, Jesse has been a champion of workers’ rights throughout his career, believing that the Union’s true power comes from the strength of its rank-and-file and their willingness to fight for the betterment of Chicago’s public school students, families and communities.
Beverly J. Silver is Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Arrighi Center for Global Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She has written widely on the contradictions and limits of historical capitalism, major waves of labor and social conflict, the social foundations of world hegemonies, global inequality, and prospects for a post-capitalist world. She is author of two books, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870, and Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (with Giovanni Arrighi et al). Among her most recent articles are “Plunges into Utter Destruction and the Limits of Historical Capitalism” (2019) and “Crises of World Hegemony and the Speeding Up of Social History” (2021).
Barbara Madeloni, Labor Notes
Arlene Inouye, Union Power Los Angeles
Annie Tan, Movement of Rank and File Educators
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This event is sponsored by the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/e8w8pUpRnQI
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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Mar 4, 2021
No Middle Ground: Southern White Women and the Fight Against Racism (12-7-20)
Join author-activists Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Dr. Keri Leigh Merritt for a conversation about radical, antiracist movements.
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From the early Abolitionist struggle to the Black Lives Matter movement of today, white people have faced a critical choice: to stand in solidarity with those resisting slavery, Jim Crow, and racism or consent to the brutal realities of white supremacy. As the veteran Civil Rights organizer Anne Braden noted in 1958, "No white person, then as now, can be neutral on this question . . . There was no middle ground."
Join author-activists Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Dr. Keri Leigh Merritt for an insightful conversation about the history and traditions of southern whites who defied the color line to help build radical, transformative movements against racism.
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Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is the award-winning author of many articles and multiple books, including Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century and Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Recovering the Links, as well as the editor of A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood. Midlo Hall is Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History at Rutgers University. She is a lifelong political activist and spent 15 years researching and creating the Louisiana Slave Database, now accessible as part of Slave Biographies: Atlantic Database Network. She was the wife and collaborator of Communist organizer and writer Harry Haywood. Her new book, Haunted by Slavery: A Memoir of a Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in March 2021.
Keri Leigh Merritt is the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South and co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power.
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Pre-Order Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's forthcoming book Haunted by Slavery: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781642592740
Get Keri Leigh Merritt's book Masterless Men:
https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781316635438
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/FpoLcTJV4As
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past with Hamid Dabashi (12-8-20)
Join Hamid Dabashi and Ahdaf Soueif as they discuss Dabashi's new book, On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past.
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On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past is an intimate intellectual, political and personal portrait of Edward Said, one of the 20th centuries' leading public intellectuals.
Edward Said (1935-2003) was a towering figure in post-colonial studies and the struggle for justice in his native Palestine, best known for his critique of orientalism in western portrayals of the Middle East. As a public intellectual, activist, and scholar, Said forever changed how we read the world around us and left an indelible mark on subsequent generations.
Hamid Dabashi, himself a leading thinker and critical public voice, offers a unique collection of reminiscences, travelogues and essays that document his own close and long-standing scholarly, personal and political relationship with Said. In the process, they place the enduring significance of Edward Said's legacy in an unfolding context and locate his work within the moral imagination and environment of the time.
Order a copy of On Edward Said: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1556-on-edward-said
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Speakers:
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. Professor Dabashi has taught and delivered lectures in many North American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. Professor Dabashi has written 22 books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, and comparative literature to world cinema and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.
Novelist Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England, where she studied for a Ph.D. at the University of Lancaster. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Aisha (1983) and Sandpiper (1996), and two novels. In the Eye of the Sun, about a young Egyptian woman's life in Egypt and England, where she goes to study as a postgraduate, set against key events in the history of modern Egypt, was published in 1992. The Map of Love (1999), is the story of a love affair between an Englishwoman and an Egyptian nationalist set in Cairo in 1900, as secrets are uncovered by the woman's great-granddaughter, herself in love with an Egyptian musician living in New York. The Map of Love was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. In 2004, her book of essays, Mezzaterra, was published. Her most recent work is Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012), a personal account of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Ahdaf Soueif lives in London and Cairo. She writes regularly for The Guardian and is a key political commentator on Egypt and Palestine. She is the founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, Pal Fest.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/a40GsNbMguM
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (12-9-20)
A conversation about Palestine, socialism, and anti-imperialist solidarity, marking the release of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction.
Join Sumaya Awad, brian bean, Khury Petersen-Smith, and Jehad Abusalim for a timely discussion about Palestine, socialism, and anti-imperialist solidarity across borders, marking the release of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction.
Winning freedom in Palestine necessitates contending with the forces of capitalism, just as the struggle for socialism will have to take on US imperialism. A broadening movement of workers and activists see the injustices they oppose as common expressions of a cruel and irrational system—capitalism, and understand the need to posit a humane alternative: socialism. At the same time, the centrality of the Palestinian liberation struggle is becoming more and more apparent to leftists who see the relationship between liberation within the US and beyond its borders. As the US socialist movement continues to grow, it is critical that it embraces anti-imperialism, and the cause of Palestinian liberation in particular. Just as significantly, it is crucial that the growing Palestine movement orients toward socialist politics, as the only plausible means to achieve justice regionally and internationally.
Sumaya Awad and brian bean, editors of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, will be joined for a discussion about these themes by contributors Khury Petersen-Smith and Jehad Abusalim.
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction systematically tackles a number of important aspects of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, contextualizing it in an increasingly polarized world and offering a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won. Contributors include: Jehad Abusalim, Shireen Akram-Boshar, Omar Barghouti, Nada Elia, Toufic Haddad, Omar Hassan, Remi Kanazi, Annie Levin, Mostafa Omar, Khury Petersen-Smith, and Daphna Thier.
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Sumaya Awad is a Palestinian writer, analyst, and socialist organizer based in New York City. Her writings focus on Palestinian liberation, anti-imperialism, Islamophobia, and immigration, and have been featured in the Feminist Wire, In These Times, Open City, the Middle East Solidarity magazine, and Slate, among others. She is co-editor of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction.
brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist activist, writer, and speaker originally from North Carolina. He is one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. His work has been published in Jacobin, Socialist Worker, Red Flag, International Viewpoint, Bel Ahmar بالأحمر) ) and other publications. He is co-editor of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction.
Khury Petersen-Smith researches, writes, and organizes about US empire, Palestine, solidarity, and resistance. He is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is a cofounder of Black 4 Palestine, an organization of Black people in the US building solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle.
Jehad Abusalim is a PhD candidate in the History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies joint program at New York University. He studies Arab intellectual writings on Zionism from the first half of the twentieth century. He earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration and Hebrew from Al-Azhar University in Gaza. He has been published in +972 Magazine, Al Jazeera, Palestine Square, Journal for Palestine Studies, and Vox.
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Order a copy of
the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1558-palestine-a-socialist-introduction
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/YiW_E5UTiTk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Historical Materialism The Politics of the Pandemic Panel I (11-14-20)
Join us for the first of our Politics of the Pandemic panels.
Participants:
Rob Wallace
Richard Seymour
Josep Maria Antentas
George Nikolaidis (discussant)
The COVID-19 Pandemic has been both a major health emergency and the catalyst for a broader economic and social crisis. The emergence of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 points to the destructive ecological effects of contemporary capitalist accumulation, whereas the extent of the pandemic and the cost in human lives points to the many ways that vulnerability is socially produced within contemporary neoliberal capitalism. The various measures and strategies adopted to tackle the pandemic raise important questions in regards to not only their effectiveness, but also their social and political repercussions and the deep marks they are going to leave. Consequently, the pandemic makes an anticapitalist perspective urgently and critically necessary but also raises significant political and theoretical challenges for anyone seeking such a radical left approach. The two ‘Politics of the Pandemic’ panels organised as part of HM Online hope to contribute to this discussion.
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/YZk4ZCwBKxQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
People Get Ready: Opening Plenary with Alicia Garza (12-12-20)
People Get Ready—Opening Plenary: An assessment of where we are at, what we have built and what we need to do next with #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Alicia Garza featuring a performance from Kiwi Illafonte
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*Anuncio en español abajo*
In the face of violent authoritarianism, deepening economic crisis, and a deadly pandemic, Left and progressive movements have doubled down in defense of our people. Over the past two years, the global left has built powerful coalitions, engaged in electoral experiments, and steadily reshaped the political terrain. What kind of power has been built through these efforts, however, and how do we pivot from defense to offense in the years ahead?
Join Center for Political Education and Haymarket Books for a half-day symposium on Saturday, December 12th from 1 PM to 7 PM EST for a conversation on beating the right, strengthening the Left, and charting a path to power.-
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Únete con Center for Political Education y Haymarket Books para una conversación sobre cómo derrotar a la derecha, fortalecer a la Izquierda, y construir poder.
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Frente al autoritarismo violento, una crisis económica cada vez más grave, y una pandemia mortífera, los movimientos progresistas y de izquierda han redoblado su compromiso en defensa de nuestra gente. A lo largo de los últimos dos años, la izquierda global ha construido coaliciones poderosas, experimentado con proyectos electorales, y constantemente reconfigurado el terreno político. ¿Qué clase de poder se ha construido a través de estos esfuerzos, sin embargo, y cómo pasamos de la defensa a la ofensiva en los próximos años?
Únete con Center for Political Education y Haymarket Books para un simposio de medio día el Sábado, 12 de Diciembre, de 1 a 7 PM (Hora del Este de los Estados Unidos) para una conversación sobre cómo derrotar a la derecha, fortalecer a la Izquierda, y trazar un camino al poder.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/O7uEOx2CBLY
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
