More Episodes
Apr 11, 2023
Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War
Join us for discussion of Jon Melrod’s new book, Fighting Times, and the class war on the shop floor in the 1970s.
Amidst a rekindled interest in the efforts of student radicals of the 1960s to industrialize in workers’ movement as part of a larger social transformation, Jon Melrod’s Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War could not be more timely. Fighting Times recounts the thirteen-year journey of Jon Melrod to harness working-class militancy and jump start a revolution on the shop floor of American Motors. Melrod faces termination, dodges the FBI, outwits collaborators in the UAW, and becomes a central figure in a lawsuit against the rank-and-file newsletter Fighting Times, as he strives to build a class-conscious workers’ movement from the bottom up.
“An eloquent voice from the frontlines of the hard, bitter, exhilarating struggles for freedom and justice that have made the world a better place, and an inspiring guide for carrying the crucial struggle forward.”—Noam Chomsky
A radical to the core, Melrod was a key part of campus insurrection at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He left campus for the factory in 1972, hired along with hundreds of youthful job seekers onto the mind-numbing assembly line. Fighting Times paints a portrait of these rebellious and alienated young hires, many of whom were Black Vietnam vets.
Join Melrod and Barry Eidlin, author of Labor and the Class Idea, for a discussion about Fighting Times, the politics and strategies of the era, and the legacies still shaping today’s social movements.
Get Fighting Times from PM Press: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1289
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Speakers:
Jon Melrod is a former student radical and rank and file militant, as well as a lawyer in San Francisco representing political refugees. He is the author of Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War.
Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada.
This event is sponsored by PM Press and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/AvMW0MwyUz0
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Apr 12, 2023
Russia Out! Solidarity with the Ukrainian Resistance
Join a panel of activists and experts to discuss the roots, nature, and politics of the war and Ukraine's resistance.
This February marks one year since Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. On the anniversary, people around the world are organizing events in solidarity with Ukraine’s heroic struggle for self-determination. On Saturday, February 25, 2023, please join our panel of scholars and activists for a discussion of the roots, nature, and politics of the war and the resistance.
Featured Speakers:
Yuliya Yurchenko, Senior Lecturer at the University of Greenwich and author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketization to Armed Conflict.
Vladyslav Starodubstev, historian of Central and Eastern European region, and member of the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh.
Kirill Medvedev, poet, political writer, and member of the Russian Socialist Movement.
Kavita Krishnan, Indian feminist, author of Fearless Freedom, former leader of the Communist Party of India (ML).
Bill Fletcher, former President of TransAfrica Forum, former senior staff person at the AFL-CIO, and Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Including solidarity statements from among others Barbara Smith, Eric Draitser, Haley Pessin, Ramah Kudaimi, Dave Zirin, Frieda Afary, Jose La Luz, Rob Barrill, and Cindy Domingo.
This event is sponsored by The Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/WeIfVB7IykQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Apr 13, 2023
Getting to the Root: Unpacking and Dismantling the Family Policing System
Join NAASW and Haymarket for a panel discussion that will explain the harms of CAPTA and discuss what can be done about it.
The so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), does not prevent and it does not treat. Instead, it targets our most vulnerable neighbors, particularly those living in poverty and especially Black, Latinx, and Indigenous families. Through policies like mandated reporting, social workers, medical professionals, and other community helpers are made agents of the surveillance state and part of the machinery of family policing, regulation, separation, and destruction. Join NAASW and Haymarket for a panel discussion that will explain the harms of CAPTA and discuss what can be done about it.
Panelists:
Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, activist, community organizer, and educator. Her mission is to remove systemic barriers in communities of color by bringing awareness to the racial disparities in systems where people of color are disproportionately affected.
David P. Kelly, JD, MA, is Co-Director of the Family Justice Group. For over a decade he served in the United States Children’s Bureau, holding positions as Special Assistant to the Associate Commissioner, Senior Policy Advisor on Courts and Justice and overseeing the Children’s Bureau’s work with the legal and judicial community. Prior to joining the federal government, David was an Assistant Staff Director at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law and served as Senior Assistant Child Advocate at the New Jersey Office of the Child Advocate.
Matt Holm, MD, community pediatrician, Melrose, Bronx, NY
Miriam Mack is Policy Director of The Bronx Defenders’ Family Defense Practice. She received her J.D. from Boston University School of Law. Prior to joining The Bronx Defenders, Miriam was a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, focusing on issues of racial and reproductive justice.
Richard Wexler, executive director National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, author, Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse (Prometheus Books: 1990, 1995).
Jey Rajaraman joined Family Integrity & Justice Works in January 2022. Prior to that, she served as Chief Council and a supervising attorney of Legal Services of New Jersey’s Family Representation Project (FRP). FRP provides parents in child abuse or neglect and termination of parental rights litigation with information, advice and representation. Additionally, the FRP provides advice and representation to youth in DCPP’s care, both those who have become parent defendants themselves and those who are seeking aging-out services from the Division. Jey is a member of the ABA Parent Counsel Steering Committee. Jey is also an adjunct professor at Seton Hall Law School.
Angela Olivia Burton is a public service lawyer with an emphasis on supporting the leadership of people with lived experience in the family policing and juvenile criminal punishment systems. Her recent publications include Toward Community Control of Child Welfare Funding: Repeal the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and Delink Child Protection from Family Wellbeing, with Angeline Montauban and Liberate the Black Family from Family Policing: A Reparations Perspective, with Joyce McMillan.
This event is sponsored by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/29MnYIDextQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Apr 14, 2023
Black Women Writers at Work w/ Imani Perry & Kaitlyn Greenidge
Join Imani Perry and Kaitlyn Greenidge for a discussion of Claudia Tate and Black Women Writers At Work.
Long out of print, Black Women Writers at Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in the 20th century.
Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after.
For this launch Imani Perry will be in conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge.
Get Black Women Writers at Work from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1926-black-women-writers-at-work
Speakers:
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, and in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and spent much of her youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. She lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons, Freeman Diallo Perry Rabb and Issa Garner Rabb.
Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar. Her second novel, Libertie, is published by Algonquin Books and out now.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/sYdedGXRV_g
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Apr 20, 2023
The Abolitionist Struggle to Stop Cop City: History, Geography, Intersections
Join activists from the movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta for a discussion of their struggle and its lessons.
The movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta has reopened the prospect of mass abolitionist organizing after years of ongoing racist police murder, carceral expansion, and political quietism under a Democratic administration. The movement has also built important new links between abolitionist politics and climate, labor, and urban organizing. We are excited to share this panel, intended as a contribution to this vital movement and to expanding the contemporary horizons of Left organizing in the U.S.
This panel of researchers and organizers will illuminate the deep backstory and intersectional context of the Weelaunee Forest struggle. An organizer with the member-based collective Community Movement Builders will speak to the importance of the forest movement as a struggle on behalf of ecological and racial justice. A researcher examining the international dimensions of police training and the disavowed role of police in counter-insurgency will consider the transnational circuits running throughout the proposal for Cop City. An organizer with the Southern Center for Human Rights will contextualize the fight within landscapes of abolitionism in Atlanta, including the movement against jail expansion there. A historian of the carceral state in Georgia will provide perspective on state violence in the region.
Speakers:
Micah Herskind is an organizer, policy advocate, and writer based in Atlanta, GA.
Kwame Olufemi is a community organizer who has developed worker-owned cooperatives, organized petition drives, mobilized protests, mutual aid programs, cop watches, and community safety training programs to develop safety networks independent of the police.
Stuart Schrader is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019).
Sarah Haley is a historian interested in the history of gender and women, carceral history, Black feminist history and theory, prison abolition, and feminist archival methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/hWwJkxxMuhQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Apr 21, 2023
My Country is the World: Staughton Lynd's Writings and Activism Against the War in Vietnam
Join Luke Stewart, Cathy Wilkerson, and Alice Lynd for a conversation on Staughton Lynd's struggle against the war in Vietnam.
Staughton Lynd was one of the principal intellectuals and activists making the radical argument that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was illegal under domestic and international law. Lynd was uncompromising in his courageous stance that the U.S. should immediately withdraw from Vietnam, and that soldiers and draftees should refuse to participate in the war based on their individual conscience and the Nuremberg Principles of 1950.
Lynd's writings, speeches, and interviews against the war are collected in the recently released My Country is the World. For this launch event that volume's editor, Luke Stewart, will be joined by Cathy Wilkerson and Alice Lynd for a discussion of Staughton and Alice's activism against the war and its lessons for today's anti-imperialist struggles.
Get My Country is the World from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1956-my-country-is-the-world
Speakers:
Luke Stewart is a historian focusing on the antiwar movements during the Vietnam War and the global war on terror. He has co-edited Let Them Stay: U.S. War Resisters in Canada, 2004-2016. He currently lives in Nantes, France.
Cathy Wilkerson joined Students for a Democratic Society in 1963, supporting an active civil rights movement in Chester, PA. She continued with SDS after college, becoming editor of New Left Notes and then an organizer with the SDS Washington DC Region. After the assassination of Fred Hampton in 1969 she joined Weatherman, remaining a fugitive until 1980. After getting out of prison, she worked with the Attica civil suit, and then as an educator in NYC public schools for 20 years. See also Flying Close to the Sun, My Life as a Weatherman (2007).
Staughton and Alice Lynd (respondant) were married for more than 71 years, having met during Harvard Summer School in the summer of 1950.
While Staughton spoke, wrote, and in other ways opposed the Vietnam War, Alice expressed her concerns through collecting and publishing We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors (Beacon Press, 1968), and becoming a draft counselor.
We Won’t Go was the Lynds’ first venture into doing oral history or, as Staughton put it, Doing History from the Bottom Up! (Haymarket, 2014). The Lynds partnered in editing Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Haymarket, expanded edition, 2011).
See also, Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together (Lexington Books, 2009); Moral Injury and Nonviolent Resistence: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in the Military and Behind Bars (PM Press, 2017); and Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History (Orbis Books, 3d ed. 2018).
