Against the Grain [KPFA 94.1 FM, Berkeley CA - kpfa.org]

Our lives are filled with innumerable choices, such as for the countless array of products for us to buy, assuming we can afford them. Our politics are often framed as a question of individual, not collective, choice such as the freedom to choose to have an abortion or the act of casting one’s vote in secret, away from the eyes other others. Historian Sophia Rosenfeld argues that the notion that freedom means “the freedom to choose” has been central to modern Western society, but may be coming apart.
Resources:
Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life Princeton University Press, 2025
The post Is Freedom a Choice? appeared first on KPFA.

“The bosses have two parties,” they said. “We need one of our own.” In 1996, representatives and activists from hundreds of local and international unions came together to launch a workers’ party — long missing from U.S. politics. Labor Party participant and economist Howard Botwinick discusses the organization’s challenges and promise, and the lessons from its rise and fall — including how the failure to build leftwing politics rooted in the working class created a vacuum that was ultimately filled by the right.
Resources:
Labor Party Archive
The post Lessons from the U.S. Labor Party appeared first on KPFA.

Jewish opposition to Israel, so visible recently through the spectacular actions of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, is not a recent phenomenon. Historian Marjorie Feld argues that what may seem like unprecedented criticism of Israel by U.S. Jews is part of a long tradition of dissent, which has been repressed by establishment Jewish organizations and frequently erased by historians. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Marjorie N. Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism NYU Press, 2024
Photo credit: Marcy Winograd
The post U.S. Jewish Anti-Zionism appeared first on KPFA.

After four decades of neoliberalism, capitalism is becoming neofeudal. So argues Jodi Dean, who lays out neofeudalism’s main features, explains why she believes capitalism is on the way out, and identifies which sectors of society could spearhead the struggle against neofeudalism.
Jodi Dean, Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle Verso, 2025
Excerpt of Capital’s Grave in Protean Magazine
The post Neofeudalism appeared first on KPFA.

More than two million farmworkers do the hard, sometimes backbreaking work of planting, growing, and harvesting crops in the U.S. Focusing on strawberry and grape pickers in California, David Bacon describes what the work involves, where the workers come from, and steps they’re taking to protect their rights and pursue justice. (Encore presentation.)
The Reality Check: Stories and Photographs by David Bacon
David Bacon, More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2022
(Image on main page by David Bacon.)
The post Laboring in the Fields appeared first on KPFA.

The American diet is awash in junk food. More than half the calories Americans eat come from processed food and drink. Three decades ago, with obesity on the rise, the food industry funded scientists to conclude that exercise was the answer, rather than taxing soda and reining in the marketing of processed food. Anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh weighs in on Big Soda’s influence on science — at universities, through front groups — and the ways that companies like Coca-Cola influenced public health in the U.S. and in China, one of the largest markets for processed food in the world.
Resources:
Susan Greenhalgh, Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola University of Chicago Press, 2024
Photo credit: Mike Mozart
The post How Big Soda Shaped the Science of Exercise appeared first on KPFA.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about rich people. Does his work also offer a critique of wealth and inequality? According to John Marsh, we can learn a lot about class, power, privilege, and impunity from a novel published 100 years ago.
John Marsh, A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby Monthly Review Press, 2024
The post Wealth, Inequality, and “The Great Gatsby” appeared first on KPFA.

The federal minimum wage languishes at $7.25 an hour and has not been raised since 2009. Given the disproportionate number of workers of color who receive the minimum wage or less, legal scholar Ruben Garcia argues that the fight for racial justice has to include raising the minimum wage.
Resources:
Ruben J. Garcia, Critical Wage Theory: Why Wage Justice Is Racial Justice UC Press, 2024
Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue
The post Racial Justice Through Raising the Minimum Wage appeared first on KPFA.

What did the Communist Party accomplish in California, or try to? SFSU emeritus professor Robert W. Cherny considers the party’s agendas and activities in relation to longshore workers, labor unions, political figures, and others. He also examines the stances the party took toward the Roosevelt administration, the New Deal, the Comintern, and U.S. involvement in World War II. (Encore presentation.)
Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958 University of Illinois Press, 2024
The post California’s Communists appeared first on KPFA.

While the wealthy disproportionately own real estate in the U.S., in many locales the properties of low income homeowners and especially homeowners of color are assessed and taxed at levels higher than their actual market value. On average, African Americans and Latinos pay more than ten percent higher taxes than whites for similar properties. Property law scholar Bernadette Atuahene discusses what she calls predatory governance, in which states and municipalities increase their coffers by unfairly taxing or fining people of color.
Resources:
Bernadette Atuahene, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America Little, Brown and Company, 2025
University of Chicago’s Property Tax Fairness Portal
Detroit’s Coalition for Property Tax Justice
The post Racism and Property Taxes appeared first on KPFA.

When and where did the practice of forcing incarcerated people to work without wages begin? Robin Bernstein reveals that prison-based slavery in the U.S. originated not in the South but in Auburn, New York. The Auburn System, under which incarcerated workers were prohibited from talking and were put in solitary confinement each night, spread across the U.S. and overseas. (Encore presentation.)
Robin Bernstein, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit University of Chicago Press, 2024
The post How Carceral Slavery Began appeared first on KPFA.

The rich have not been so powerful and mind-bogglingly wealthy since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Yet their grip on society has often been shrouded in a veil of adulation, enabled by a media that celebrates them rather than holding them to account. Economist Rob Larson discusses the multimillionaire and billionaire class, how they rule, and how to fight against them. (Full-length presentation.)
Resources:
World Inequality Database
Rob Larson, Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More Haymarket, 2024
The post Rule of the Billionaires appeared first on KPFA.

Driven by his determination to place workers at the center of U.S. history, David Montgomery emerged as a key architect of what’s called the New Labor History. James R. Barrett describes Montgomery’s investigations into working-class life, his political commitments, and his legacy.
Shelton Stromquist and James R. Barrett, eds., A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance University of Illinois Press, 2024
The post Labor History Pioneer appeared first on KPFA.

Schools are underfunded. Parents often struggle with long working hours and too little social support. But corporations and tech companies, awash in money and power, promise to entertain and teach children with a near infinite array of devices, apps, and products. Psychologist Susan Linn discusses how those who least care for children have so much influence over their lives: marketing to kids through an avalanche of advertisements, collecting data about their private lives, and replacing their teachers in the classroom. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Susan Linn, Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children New Press, 2023
Fairplay
The post The Monetization of American Childhood appeared first on KPFA.

The rich have not been so powerful and mind-bogglingly wealthy since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Yet their grip on society has often been shrouded in a veil of adulation, enabled by a media that celebrates them rather than holding them to account. Economist Rob Larson discusses the multimillionaire and billionaire class, how they rule, and how to fight against them.
The post Fund Drive Special: The Rule of the Billionaires appeared first on KPFA.

The rich have not been so powerful and mind-bogglingly wealthy since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Yet their grip on society has often been shrouded in a veil of adulation, enabled by a media that celebrates them rather than holding them to account. Economist Rob Larson discusses the multimillionaire and billionaire class, how they rule, and how to fight against them.
The post Fund Drive Special: The Rule of the Billionaires appeared first on KPFA.

History is being made right now, both by the Trump administration, attempting to slash the federal workforce and the public services it provides, and by federal workers and their supporters resisting those efforts in the offices and the streets. Federal worker Mark Smith discusses a day of action called by the newly formed Federal Unionists Network to save public services. And labor scholar Eric Blanc explains his broad blueprint for what can be done to upend Trump’s attack on workers and public goods.
Resources:
Save Our Services actions on February 19th
The post Fund Drive Special: Organizing for Federal Workers & Public Services appeared first on KPFA.

Every year, more than 80,000 African Americans die prematurely. The medical establishment relies on genetics or dietary patterns to explain such appalling numbers. But sociologist George Lipsitz argues that black people, as well as Native Americans and Latinos, are made sick by where they live — and that the most important cause of health hazards for people of color is residential discrimination.
Resources:
George Lipsitz, The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth UC Press, 2024
The post Health and Place appeared first on KPFA.

The prominent sociologist, writer, and U.C. Berkeley professor emeritus Michael Burawoy passed away on February 3. We present excerpts from three interviews with Burawoy, about marketization and commodification (from 2016), Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx (2019), and W. E. B. Du Bois’s understanding of the period of Reconstruction (2023).
In Memoriam: Michael Burawoy
Michael Burawoy, Public Sociology Polity, 2021
Full-length interviews with Burawoy about marketization and commodification, Bourdieu and Marx, and Du Bois (Part 1 and Part 2)
The post Remembering Michael Burawoy appeared first on KPFA.

The far right has been on the march not only in the United States, but in Italy, Hungary, France and elsewhere, united by racist nationalism, authoritarian populist rhetoric, and a call for law and order. Jordan Camp reflects on the work of Antonio Gramsci, who analyzed the rise of fascism while languishing in Mussolini’s prisons, and considers why his emphasis on understanding the conjuncture is relevant today.
Resources:
Conjuncture Web Series and Podcast
Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State University of California Press, 2016
The post Gramsci on Authoritarianism appeared first on KPFA.

Commercial sex and imperialism — army bases and brothels — have often gone hand in hand. But in the early 20th century an emergent U.S. empire defined itself as rooted in sexual purity. Historian Eva Payne describes how a heavy price for this notion of American exceptionalism was paid by women in the United States, who were policed and punished, along with those in U.S. colonies like the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone.
Resources:
Eva Payne, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution Princeton University Press, 2025
The post U.S. Empire and Sexual Morality appeared first on KPFA.

It’s an open secret that there’s an affinity between members of law enforcement and far right. White supremacist and fascist groups count police in their ranks, and many in law enforcement — from the federal down to the local level — turn a blind eye to the activities of the far right, while targeting anti-fascist and other left activists. Michael German discusses the relationship between the police and the far right.
Resources:
Michael German, Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within New Press, 2025
The post Police and the Far Right appeared first on KPFA.

U.S. imperialism has produced migration, sometimes to places you wouldn’t expect. According to Emily Mitchell-Eaton, the Marshall Islands and Arkansas are both central to the workings of empire. The perceptions of longtime residents of demographically transformed cities like Springdale, Arkansas reflect geographical imaginaries that occlude the fact of U.S. empire.
Emily Mitchell-Eaton, New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States University of Georgia Press, 2024

The post Imperial Migration appeared first on KPFA.

Billions of dollars have been spent on Alzheimer’s research over many decades, yet no effective treatment exists. Investigative journalist Charles Piller has revealed one reason for the impasse: pivotal scientific research into Alzheimer’s disease — affirming the hypothesis that it’s caused by sticky amyloid plaques in the brain — was based on manipulated images.
Resources:
Charles Piller, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s One Signal, 2025
The post Manipulating Alzheimer’s Research appeared first on KPFA.

Lawrence Grossberg explains what the cultural theorist Stuart Hall meant by a war of positions and a war of maneuvers. We also present portions of a talk Hall gave about the dynamics of media representation. And Yousuf Al-Bulushi examines certain political stances taken by South Africa’s shack dweller movement.
Lawrence Grossberg, On the Way to Theory Duke University Press, 2024
Stuart Hall: Representation and the Media
Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City Palgrave Macmillan, 2024
(Image on main page by SkepticalScience.)
The post Terrains of Struggle appeared first on KPFA.

The union movement is suffering from a conundrum. While the U.S public overwhelmingly supports unions, labor lacks the capacity to help workers organize and unionize. Labor scholar and organizer Eric Blanc argues that there is a new and promising way of organizing from the bottom up, which emerged during Trump’s first term and flourished through Covid. He believes that with worker to worker organizing, unions could see explosive growth, even during Trump’s second term.
Resources:
Eric Blanc, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big UC Press, 2025
Eric Blanc’s Labor Politics on Substack
Photo credit: dblackadder
The post Worker Organizing in the Time of Trump appeared first on KPFA.

How is the War on Terror playing out in a country like Kenya? What are its security forces doing at the U.S.’s behest, and how are ordinary Kenyans responding? Samar Al-Bulushi discusses the emergence of supranational forms of police power and their impact on human rights activism.
Samar Al-Bulushi, War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror Stanford University Press, 2024
The post Counterterrorism in Context appeared first on KPFA.

Many assume the majority of people living on the streets struggle with mental illness or just need jobs — and that homelessness is unfortunate, but intractable. Longtime advocate for the unhoused, Mary Brosnahan, argues that these are myths, and that much of what we assume about homelessness is wrong. She posits that at its root is the capitalist commodification of housing, illustrated in the past by Bronx landlords getting rid of low income tenants by burning their buildings to the ground to the systemic shortage of affordable housing today.
Resources:
Mary Brosnahan, “They Just Need to Get a Job” 15 Myths on Homelessness Beacon Press, 2024
Invisible People Finland
The post Getting Homelessness Wrong appeared first on KPFA.

What can – and can’t – you say and do as a Palestinian American teacher? Can you speak frankly about Palestine, about the occupation and oppression, about the Israel-U.S. relationship? Can you support student inquiry into matters that rankle Zionist colleagues? Social-studies educator Luma Hasan encountered intolerance and pushback while working at a reputedly liberal high school.
Kevin L. Clay and Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr., eds., The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship: Race and Revolt in Education University of Minnesota Press, 2024
Teach for Liberation
The post Palestinian Teacher’s Travails appeared first on KPFA.

We assume that the collection of our data by Big Tech companies — to scrutinize, categorize, and use for commercial and other unsanctioned purposes — is unique to our era. But scholar Anita Say Chan illustrates how the eugenics movement in the 19th and 20th centuries amassed and analyzed data in order to justify social hierarchies. She draws a line from that past to our present, but also reminds us of alternative traditions of data in the cause of social justice.
Resources:
Anita Say Chan, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future UC Press, 2025
The post The Misuse of Data from Eugenics to Big Tech appeared first on KPFA.

In his new book, Lawrence Grossberg describes ways of thinking that have laid the foundation for the development of contemporary Western theory. Two of the thinkers he writes about are Friedrich Nietzsche, who “rejected the enlightenments,” and Stuart Hall, a pioneer in the field of cultural studies.
Lawrence Grossberg, On the Way to Theory Duke University Press, 2024
(Image on main page by Nick Youngson/Alpha Stock Images.)
The post Nietzsche, Hall, and “Theory” appeared first on KPFA.

It was the first of its kind program of mass surveillance: the surreal, and initially-secret, deployment of an unmanned plane flying in circles over the city of Baltimore. Sociologist Benjamin Snyder discusses the Baltimore Police Department’s short-lived experiment in spying on the city’s residents. He considers how technologies like the spy plane are both embraced and feared –- without a deeper awareness of how flawed they often are.
Resources:
Benjamin H. Snyder, Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment UC Press, 2024
The post Baltimore’s Spy Plane appeared first on KPFA.

Classrooms are places where teaching happens. What if they were also places of healing and justice-seeking? Tessa Hicks Peterson describes educational approaches that foster well-being, empowerment, and critical thinking. She also emphasizes the need for trauma-informed pedagogical practices.
Tessa Hicks Peterson, Liberating the Classroom: Healing and Justice in Higher Education Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025
The post Healing Higher Ed appeared first on KPFA.

It’s indisputably one of the most important works in history. Karl Marx’s Capital has been perennially embraced by those trying to understand and move beyond the capitalist system—and reviled in equal measure by those defending the established order. Yet, until now, English readers of the first volume of Marx’s magnum opus have not had access to the authoritative final version edited and approved by Marx himself. Paul Reitter and Paul North discuss their new translation, based on the last German edition of Capital. (Full-length presentation.)
Resources:
Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 Princeton University Press, 2024
The post Marx’s Capital appeared first on KPFA.

In 1936, Nazi Germany hosted the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, amidst international calls to boycott. It was an enormously consequential event in the politics of the times, granting Hitler an international spotlight to promote the Third Reich. Much less known, as writer Michael Waters argues, is how Nazi eugenics and paranoia about transgender athletes gave rise to the gender surveillance that characterizes contemporary sports to this day. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Michael Waters, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024
The post The Nazi Origins of Gender Surveillance in Sports appeared first on KPFA.

In a California women’s prison, domestic violence survivors who killed their abusers in self-defense came together to practice a politics of mutual care, solidarity, and resistance. Rachel Leah Klein details the origins, efforts, and achievements of Convicted Women Against Abuse, situating their activities within the charged political context of the tough-on-crime 1990s. (Encore presentation.)
Rachel Leah Klein, “Surviving domestic and state violence: Women’s prison organising and the gendered politics of solidarity” Gender & History (open-access through August 2024)
(Image on main page by Ryan McGrady.)
The post Criminalized Survivors Mobilize appeared first on KPFA.

Why has the term complicity become so ubiquitous in recent years? Are we all complicit in the system that we live under? What use, or uses, does the notion serve? These are questions that legal scholar Francine Banner poses. She makes the argument that the term bears different meanings, sometimes holding the powerful to account and other times looking for someone to blame, rather than focusing on systemic change. She considers the shifting modern use of complicity — shaped in part by problematic scholarship on the uncaring bystander — and sees parallels in how the legal system severely penalizes those for even peripheral involvement in crimes. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Francine Banner, Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems UC Press, 2024
The post Interrogating Complicity appeared first on KPFA.

Is there such a thing as core gender identity? Are queer and trans people born that way? And what role does trauma play in shaping gender? Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and practice as well as queer and trans studies, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, each a clinician and NYU-based scholar, contest the notion that gender is fixed and innate. (Encore presentation.)
Avgi Saketopoulou & Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity The Unconscious in Translation, 2023 (use discount code “KPFA” at checkout for 25% off until July 15)
(Image on main page by Charles Hutchins.)
The post Rethinking Gender appeared first on KPFA.

Jewish opposition to Israel, so visible recently through the spectacular actions of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, is not a recent phenomenon. Historian Marjorie Feld argues that what may seem like unprecedented criticism of Israel by U.S. Jews is part of a long tradition of dissent, which has been repressed by establishment Jewish organizations and frequently erased by historians. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Marjorie N. Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism NYU Press, 2024
Photo credit: Marcy Winograd
The post U.S. Jewish Anti-Zionism appeared first on KPFA.

How did residents of shack settlements in South African cities like Durban become a formidable political force? Yousuf Al-Bulushi lays out the operating principles, goals, and methods of Abahlali, one of the most well-known radical formations in all of Africa. (Encore presentation.)
Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City Palgrave Macmillan, 2024
(Image on main page by Dexs1991.)
The post The Shack Dweller Movement appeared first on KPFA.

Over the last forty years, bottled water consumption has exploded. Once a rarefied item, global sales of bottled water dwarf every other beverage — totaling $300 billion a year. Environmental sociologist Daniel Jaffee argues that packaged water doesn’t only imperil our oceans and bodies with plastic waste, but undermines safe public water even more than water privatization. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Daniel Jaffee, Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice UC Press, 2023
The post Commodifying Water appeared first on KPFA.

In the years following the Russian Revolution, a popular resistance movement sprang up in Ukraine that drew its inspiration from a man named Nestor Makhno. Makhno went on to organize a seven-million-strong anarchist polity amidst the chaos and brutality of the Russian Civil War. Charlie Allison describes Makhno’s appeal, his political beliefs, and his rejection of Bolshevism. (Encore presentation.)
Charlie Allison, No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno PM Press, 2023
(Image on main page by Oleh Kushch.)
The post Ukrainian Anarchist appeared first on KPFA.

They struggled for public housing and public transport. They fought to reduce the police force and to have access to public space, so cities were not just playgrounds for the wealthy. More than a century ago, workers battled for the public infrastructure that we take for granted, as part of a larger struggle for socialism. Historian Shelton Stromquist discusses how we live in those socialist cities today, which elites are struggling to return to private hands.
Resources:
Shelton Stromquist, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism Verso, 2023
The post Fighting for Municipal Socialism appeared first on KPFA.

Schools are underfunded. Parents often struggle with long working hours and too little social support. But corporations and tech companies, awash in money and power, promise to entertain and teach children with a near infinite array of devices, apps, and products. Psychologist Susan Linn discusses how those who least care for children have so much influence over their lives: marketing to kids through an avalanche of advertisements, collecting data about their private lives, and replacing their teachers in the classroom.
Resources:
Susan Linn, Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children New Press, 2023
Fairplay
The post The Monetization of American Childhood appeared first on KPFA.

What if Earth were furious with humanity? What if revolutionaries took their cues from an unruly planet? Anne Stewart examines depictions of terrestrial upheaval and grassroots rebellion in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, and other works. (Encore presentation.)
Anne Stewart, Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World University of Minnesota Press, 2022
The post Angry Planet appeared first on KPFA.

How did a Scottish moral philosopher of the Enlightenment become an apostle of the libertarian right in this country? Political theorist Glory Liu traces the uses of the complex ideas Adam Smith in the United States — from the establishment of the U.S. state, through debates about slavery and inequality, to justifying the ostensible retreat of the state in our era. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Glory M. Liu, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism Princeton University Press, 2022
Image: Nicole Marie Photography
The post Claiming Adam Smith appeared first on KPFA.

A brilliant theoretical physicist best known for his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was also a socialist. John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?” Foster also talks about his new book. (Encore presentation.)
John Bellamy Foster, “Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’ and ‘Monthly Review’: A Historical Introduction” Monthly Review
John Bellamy Foster, The Dialectics of Ecology Monthly Review Press, 2024
The post Einstein’s Socialism appeared first on KPFA.

How should we understand the relationship between capitalists, big and small, and the Republican and Democratic parties — especially in the wake of Trump’s return to power? Stephen Maher discusses the sectors of capital that support and oppose him. He traces the rise of the MAGA Right to forces set in motion by the global economic crisis. And he discusses under what circumstances big business, much of which currently is wary of Trump, might throw its support behind authoritarian rule.
Resources:
Scott Aquanno and Stephen Maher, The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to Blackrock Verso, 2024
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
The post Capital, the State, and Trump appeared first on KPFA.

When the system is stacked against you, when mainstream society sidelines you (or worse), where do you look for liberatory possibilities? Eve Dunbar describes how Ann Petry, author of the 1946 novel “The Street” as well as YA novels about Harriet Tubman and Tituba, insisted on satisfaction and not merely survival. Dunbar also talks about the value of what she calls monstrous work.
Eve Dunbar, Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing under Segregation University of Minnesota Press, 2024
The post Radical Satisfaction appeared first on KPFA.

Why is it that so many schools fail at teaching their students critical thinking skills that could help them understand the world? Political scientist Agustina Paglayan argues that mass primary education from its origins was set up not to raise children’s prospects — but rather to teach them to obey. She locates the Right’s recent attacks on schooling in the context of the social upheavals of our times.
Resources:
Agustina Paglayan, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education Princeton University Press, 2024

The post Obedience and Mass Education appeared first on KPFA.

What role did Irish Catholics play within the U.S. left? Were Irish radicals more interested in freedom from British rule or in anticapitalism? And what effect did religious beliefs have on Irish Americans’ inclinations to break with the mainstream? David Emmons highlights Irish Americans’ contributions to dissidence, progressivism, and radicalism in the United States.
David Emmons, History’s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930 University of Illinois Press, 2024
The post Irish American Dissidents appeared first on KPFA.

Few things are more necessary than a roof over one’s head, and yet few things feel as precarious as housing. Rents have skyrocketed across the country, far outstripping wages, and homelessness has risen to an historic high. Fellow tenant organizers Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis argue that this is the latest chapter in a century-long assault on tenants, but that we can draw powerful lessons from housing struggles to fight for a world without landlords.
Resources:
Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis Haymarket Books, 2024
The post The War on Tenants appeared first on KPFA.

The dramatic expansion of police power in the U.S. has been fueled by sexual policing—the targeting and legal control of people’s bodies and their presumed sexual activities. So argues Anne Gray Fischer, who describes the historical trajectory of sexual policing and traces the profoundly consequential shift in its targets from white women to Black women. (Encore presentation.)
Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification University of North Carolina Press, 2022
(Image on main page by Steven Depolo.)
The post Sex, Race, and Police Power appeared first on KPFA.

Critiques of conspiracy thinking abound—but what if our world needs a conspiracy, of people willing to confront their own participation in institutional injustices? Joseph Dumit explains why large corporations knowingly engage in antihuman activities; he also draws from Adrian Piper’s insights into bullying institutions, the impact of bystanding, and the importance of blowing the whistle when we notice harm being inflicted.
Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen, eds., Conspiracy/Theory Duke University Press, 2024
Joseph Dumit, Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health Duke University Press, 2012
(Image on main page by Elvert Barnes.)

The post Conspiracies and Complicity appeared first on KPFA.

For over half a century, Big Oil and the plastics industry, through their trade associations and front groups, have sold the public the false idea that plastics are recyclable. Recycling became the mantra of good ecological stewardship, promoted by the likes of city governments, school children, and environmental groups. Davis Allen lays out the mass-marketing of a deception. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Center for Climate Integrity, The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry Deceived the Public for Decades and Caused the Plastic Waste Crisis February, 2024
The post The Plastics Recycling Deception appeared first on KPFA.

What can sex workers add to discussions around transformative justice, prison abolition, and labor organizing? Heather Berg has spoken with sex worker radicals whose perspectives on left theory and practice are informed by encounters with ever-present threats to their lives and livelihoods. (Encore presentation.)
Heather Berg, “‘If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous’: Sex Worker Community Defense” Radical History Review
Heather Berg, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism University of North Carolina Press, 2021
The post Sex Worker Theorizing appeared first on KPFA.

For decades after World War Two, the defense industry polluted the desert near Tucson’s Southside and poisoned the aquifer from which the largely Mexican American neighborhood got its drinking water. Sunaura Taylor, who was born there, reflects on lessons from the residents’ struggle — and asks what a genuine remedy might look like. She discusses an environmentalism that recognizes that we all are or will become disabled — and fights not just for the able-bodied, but to extend care to all, including the rest of the natural world.
Resources:
Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert UC Press, 2024
The post Environmentalism of the Injured appeared first on KPFA.

What are discarded materials from extractive activities like mining doing to life on the planet? According to Gabrielle Hecht, what’s happening in South Africa to and around mountainous piles of mining residues crystallizes a number of thorny environmental and sociopolitical issues faced by communities around the globe. (Encore presentation.)
Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures Duke University Press, 2023 (open access)
(Image on main page by Gabrielle Hecht.)
The post Extraction’s Heavy Toll appeared first on KPFA.

It’s both a precious resource and a dangerous pollutant, exponentially increasing crop yields, while fouling our waterways with blue-green algae. The element phosphorus has played a crucial role in agriculture and war, while its reserves are unevenly distributed, with much of the world’s supply located in the occupied territories of Western Sahara. Writer Dan Egan discusses the double-edged nature of an element that is increasingly depleted and overused. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Dan Egan, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance Norton, 2023
The post Phosphorus: Reaping the Harvest appeared first on KPFA.

More than two million farmworkers do the hard, sometimes backbreaking work of planting, growing, and harvesting crops in the U.S. Focusing on strawberry and grape pickers in California, David Bacon describes what the work involves, where the workers come from, and steps they’re taking to protect their rights and pursue justice.
The Reality Check: Stories and Photographs by David Bacon
David Bacon, More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2022
(Image on main page by David Bacon.)
The post Laboring in the Fields appeared first on KPFA.

What lessons can we learn from the ways working class people in the U.S., many of them women and people of color, took collective action during the depression of the 1930s? Historian Dana Frank discusses experiments in mutual aid and cooperatives, battles over the expulsion of Mexican and Mexican American workers, small-scale sit down strikes, including by African American wet nurses, as well as working class support for the fascist right.
Resources:
Dana Frank, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times Beacon Press, 2024
The post Collective Action in the Great Depression appeared first on KPFA.

Black parents worry about racism’s impact on their children. Jennifer C. Nash is interested in both the nature of racialized anxiety and the way it’s rendered visible to the general public. Among other things, she looks at how Black mothers have used the epistolary form to convey their concerns, fears, and hopes.
Jennifer C. Nash, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory Duke University Press, 2024
The post Conveying Black Loss appeared first on KPFA.

When we think of potentially dangerous and addictive drugs, most of us think about illegal substances like heroine or cocaine. And yet widely-prescribed drugs like Xanax, Ritalin, Adderall, and Vicodin are also addictive, but legal in the United States. Historian David Herzberg discusses the artificial distinction that has been created between addictive drugs and medicines — with the key difference being the class and race of the consumers who use them and the partial protections that one group receives and the other does not.
Resources:
David Herzberg, White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America University of Chicago Press, 2020
The post Good Patients, Bad Addicts appeared first on KPFA.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the U.S. transported refugees from Vietnam to its colonial possession Guam. In that period, Israel did something similar, offering citizenship to Vietnamese refugees, in the wake of its expanded occupation of Palestine. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi looks at the condition of refugee settlers, as well as solidarity between the indigenous inhabitants of settler colonial states. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine UC Press, 2022
The post Refugee Settlers in Guam and Palestine appeared first on KPFA.

Not one movement but a multiplicity of movements engaging in protest and direct action brought down France’s absolutist regime in 1789. Micah Alpaugh describes popular uprisings and insurrections in Paris and the provinces that operated without central leadership and later inspired anarchists around the globe.
Micah Alpaugh, The People’s Revolution of 1789 Cornell University Press, 2024
(Image on main page from Rama.)
The post French Revolutionary Movements appeared first on KPFA.

Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have been called gateway drugs to rightwing ideas for so many Americans. And while the works of the writer and philosopher have seen a resurgence since the global economic crisis, her influence has been undeniably huge and sustained since those books were originally published in mid-century. Historian Lisa Duggan examines what is at the heart of Rand’s enduring appeal. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed UC Press, 2019
The post Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed appeared first on KPFA.

What is Mexican philosophy, and what are its guiding principles? According to Carlos Alberto Sánchez, Mexican philosophy is a byproduct of Western philosophy’s role in the colonization of the Americas. He lays out some of its central concepts and considers how they apply to everyday life.
Carlos Alberto Sánchez, Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us Toward the Good Life Oxford University Press, 2024

The post Mexican Philosophy appeared first on KPFA.

Public schools have long been a battleground for the right. But since the Covid pandemic, the right has had the wind at its back, enlarging its ranks with parents frustrated by school closings and masking mandates. Education journalist Laura Pappano discusses how the far right has sowed panic over library books, gender neutral bathrooms, and the supposed teaching of Critical Race Theory — not just to take over school boards, but to cast doubt on the value of public education itself.
Resources:
Laura Pappano, Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education Beacon Press, 2024
The post The Right’s War on Schools appeared first on KPFA.

What did the abrupt transition from socialism to capitalism in the former Soviet Bloc mean for residents, radicals, and the social order? Helena Sheehan, a Marxist thinker, educator, and activist, devotes a portion of her latest book to the impact and legacy of the momentous events of 1989 and 1990. (Encore presentation.)
Helena Sheehan, Until We Fall: Long Distance Life on the Left Monthly Review Press, 2023
The post Socialism to Capitalism appeared first on KPFA.

Throughout much of the 20th century and into the 21st, the U.S. state has worked to undermine and destroy leftwing and anti-imperialist labor unions around the world. And much of those efforts were assisted by an entity ostensibly committed to the interests of American workers: the trade union federation the AFL-CIO. Historian Jeff Schuhrke argues that by doing so the AFL-CIO fueled the demise of the U.S. labor movement, as U.S. corporations could more easily move factories to other countries where militant labor opposition had been repressed.
Resources:
Jeff Schuhrke, Blue-Collar Empire:The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade Verso, 2024
Photo credit: Mattpopovich
The post U.S. Empire and the AFL-CIO appeared first on KPFA.

It’s indisputably one of the most important works in history. Karl Marx’s Capital has been perennially embraced by those trying to understand and move beyond the capitalist system — and reviled in equal measure by those defending the established order. Yet, until now, English readers of the first volume of Marx’s magnum opus have not had access to the authoritative final version edited and approved by Marx himself. Paul Reitter and Paul North discuss their new translation, based on the last German edition of Capital.
The post Fund Drive Special: Marx’s Capital appeared first on KPFA.

We are living through the 6th great extinction of species and governments are almost nothing to curb it. Scientist Douglas Tallamy, however, proposes a blueprint for a grassroots effort to restore habitat in a meaningful way, seeing nature not as something to be preserved in parks and reserves far from us, but all around us in our cities and suburbs, farmlands and ranches.
The post Fund Drive Special: Rebuilding Habitats in Our Yard appeared first on KPFA.

We are living through the 6th great extinction of species and governments are almost nothing to curb it. Scientist Douglas Tallamy, however, proposes a blueprint for a grassroots effort to restore habitat in a meaningful way, seeing nature not as something to be preserved in parks and reserves far from us, but all around us in our cities and suburbs, farmlands and ranches.
The post Fund Drive Special: Rebuilding Habitats in Our Yard appeared first on KPFA.

Since last autumn, we’ve witnessed an unspeakable crime perpetrated by the state of Israel with our tax dollars. And that crime has been rationalized by much of the U.S. media. Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe says that such justifications rest partly on a distorted view of the history of Palestine/Israel. He suggests that dismantling the mythologies about the formation and nature of the state of Israel is key to fighting for justice.
The post Fund Drive Special: Ilan Pappe on Zionist Mythologies appeared first on KPFA.

Degrowthers, Half Earthers, advocates of green growth—what distinguishes the ecological left’s various camps? Does it matter if an approach appears impracticable? Is only a post-capitalist future a sustainable one? And which thinkers are driving the debate, or trying to? Benjamin Kunkel considers a range of strategies advanced by contributors to New Left Review. (Encore presentation.)
Benjamin Kunkel and Lola Seaton, eds., Who Will Build the Ark? Debates on Climate Strategy from New Left Review Verso, 2023
The post Left Climate Strategies appeared first on KPFA.

Every year, more than 80,000 African Americans die prematurely. The medical establishment relies on genetics or dietary patterns to explain such appalling numbers. But sociologist George Lipsitz argues that black people, as well as Native Americans and Latinos, are made sick by where they live — and that the most important cause of health hazards for people of color is residential discrimination.
Resources:
George Lipsitz, The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth UC Press, 2024
The post Health and Place appeared first on KPFA.

When and where did the practice of forcing incarcerated people to work without wages begin? Robin Bernstein reveals that prison-based slavery in the U.S. originated not in the South but in Auburn, New York. The Auburn System, under which incarcerated workers were prohibited from talking and were put in solitary confinement each night, spread across the country and beyond.
Robin Bernstein, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit University of Chicago Press, 2024
The post How Carceral Slavery Began appeared first on KPFA.

What does the expansion and intensification of nighttime labor say about the workings of capitalism, and what did Marx say about wage labor done in the wee hours? Paul Apostolidis draws from the working-day chapter in Marx’s Capital an emphasis on social reproduction, which he believes should be a key focus of contemporary worker struggles. (Encore presentation.)
Paul Apostolidis, The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity Oxford University Press, 2019
(Image on main page by Rwendland.)
The post Nighttime Labor appeared first on KPFA.

Our world is replete with problems, calling out for repair and change. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have solutions at the ready – tech fixes and innovations that they claim will make a difference. Scholar Julie Guthman discusses the problem with such solutions, and the mindset that has permeated institutions of higher learning which reward the development of such fixes over critical thinking and systemic change.
Resources:
Julie Guthman, The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food UC Press, 2024
The post Silicon Valley’s Quick Fixes appeared first on KPFA.

No one escapes trauma or avoids stress. But what happens to our ability to imagine and pursue justice when individual and collective trauma goes unaddressed? Hala Khouri lays out a framework for understanding trauma; she also points to the important role that embodied practices can play in processes of healing and self-care.
Tessa Hicks Peterson and Hala Khouri, eds., Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change North Atlantic Books, 2024
Hala Khouri, Tessa Hicks Peterson and Keely Nguyễn, Practicing Liberation Workbook: Radical Tools for Grassroots Activists, Community Leaders, Teachers, and Caretakers Working Toward Social Justice North Atlantic Books, 2024

The post Trauma, Healing, and Social Change appeared first on KPFA.

A large segment of Americans now find work via online labor market platforms — not just low-wage drivers for Uber, but highly educated lawyers and architects, software engineers and data scientists. Sociologist of work and technology Hatim Rahman discusses the ways that algorithms are used to control these workers, intentionally keeping them constantly off guard.
Resources:
Hatim Rahman, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers UC Press, 2024
The post Digital Labor Platforms and the Control of Skilled Workers appeared first on KPFA.

Of what use is utopian thinking? Is hope something we need to cultivate, or rediscover? Jon Greenaway looks at how the German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) thought about history, human consciousness, revolution, Marxism, religion, and fascism. (Encore presentation.)
Jon Greenaway, A Primer on Utopian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Ernst Bloch ZerO Books, 2024
Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore, Working-Class Heroes PM Press/Free Dirt, 2019
The post Ernst Bloch’s Utopianism appeared first on KPFA.

The pandemic highlighted the vital importance of care work—whether childcare, nursing home care, medical care or schooling – and the struggles many people face to get sufficient care. Would more public investment solve the crisis? Historian Premilla Nadasen argues that the problem lies with contemporary capitalism itself, as care has become an enormous arena for corporate profit, in which the state is often deeply complicit. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Premilla Nadasen, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Haymarket Books, 2023
The post Profiting from Care appeared first on KPFA.

What happened to California’s prisons and jails when the Covid pandemic struck? Why did so many people die behind bars, and why were so many on the outside affected (and afflicted)? Hadar Aviram sheds light on multiple aspects of California’s Covid-19 correctional disaster, including activist efforts to prevent it. (Encore presentation.)
Hadar Aviram and Chad Goerzen, Fester: Carceral Permeability and California’s COVID-19 Correctional Disaster University of California Press, 2024
(Image on main page by Annette Teng.)
The post Covid Carceral Calamity appeared first on KPFA.

How did residents of shack settlements in South African cities like Durban become a formidable political force? Yousuf Al-Bulushi lays out the operating principles, goals, and methods of Abahlali, one of the most well-known radical formations in all of Africa.
Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City Palgrave Macmillan, 2024
(Image on main page by Dexs1991.)
The post The Shack Dweller Movement appeared first on KPFA.

While it would seem like the crisis of the political establishment would provide fertile ground for the left, instead we have seen the ascendancy of right-wing figures around the world, who denounce the establishment while shoring up the capitalist order. Often these figures are businessmen like Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi, who position themselves outside of the discredited status quo. Sociologist Leslie Gates asks why such capitalist outsiders win, looking at the very different trajectories of Venezuela and Mexico. She contrasts the victories of Hugo Chavez and Vicente Fox — the latter whose election heralded the rise of more leaders in his mold. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Leslie C. Gates, Capitalist Outsiders: Oil’s Legacies in Mexico and Venezuela University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
The post Electing Capitalist Outsiders appeared first on KPFA.

Are countries like India and South Africa still committed to coal extraction? What plans are afoot to make a just transition to renewable power? Ashley Dawson describes and evaluates struggles against extractivism and for publicly owned and democratically managed renewable energy. (Encore presentation.)
Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet Haymarket Books, 2024
The post Fossil Fuel Fights appeared first on KPFA.

Our food system, as well as our ecosystems, is clearly in crisis. Should we look to technological fixes and lab-grown meat to provide food for our future? Or, as writer Taras Grescoe suggests, should we look backwards instead to the lost foods of our past? Grescoe argues that a sustainable future necessitates cultivating food and plant diversity, while reclaiming collective practices, including those drawn from contemporary indigenous peoples. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past Greystone Books, 2023
Taras Grescoe’s Blog: lostsupper.blog
The post In Search of Lost Foods appeared first on KPFA.

In a California women’s prison, domestic violence survivors who killed their abusers in self-defense came together to practice a politics of mutual care, solidarity, and resistance. Rachel Leah Klein details the origins, efforts, and achievements of Convicted Women Against Abuse, situating their activities within the charged political context of the tough-on-crime 1990s.
Rachel Leah Klein, “Surviving domestic and state violence: Women’s prison organising and the gendered politics of solidarity” Gender & History (open-access through August 2024)
(Image on main page by Ryan McGrady.)
The post Criminalized Survivors Mobilize appeared first on KPFA.

Medicines – we’re told by the pharmaceuticals industry – are expensive by necessity owing to the high costs of research and development. Yet, as with the vaccines for Covid, much research is publicly-funded, and much comes out of universities. And, as Nick Dearden argues, only 3% of new drugs even represent actual breakthroughs. Instead most are “evergreened” drugs that Big Pharma tweaks in order to prolong its intellectual property rights. He discusses why the business of pharmaceuticals companies is not public health, but private profit. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Nick Dearden, Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health Verso, 2023
The post The Price of Big Pharma appeared first on KPFA.

Automation, its advocates contend, will usher in a new era of leisure and abundance. Is that true, and what kind of thing is automation, anyway? Salem Elzway emphasizes the political dimensions of automation, including how it’s been used against workers and how the discourse of automation has been deployed by elites.
Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff, “Whence Automation? The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History
The post The Uses of Automation appeared first on KPFA.

It’s the most important program combating food insecurity in the United States – and it originates from aid to the agricultural and food processing industries, not poverty alleviation. Christopher Bosso argues that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP — formerly known as food stamps — has survived for almost sixty years, against those would would eliminate it, precisely because of this connection to agricultural interests. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Christopher John Bosso, Why SNAP Works: A Political History — and Defense — of the Food Stamp Program UC Press, 2023
The post Food Aid to the Poor, Aid to Agriculture appeared first on KPFA.

The dramatic expansion of police power in the U.S. has been fueled by sexual policing—the targeting and legal control of people’s bodies and their presumed sexual activities. So argues Anne Gray Fischer, who describes the historical trajectory of sexual policing and traces the profoundly consequential shift in its targets from white women to Black women.
Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification University of North Carolina Press, 2022
(Image on main page by Steven Depolo.)
The post Sex, Race, and Police Power appeared first on KPFA.

How does capitalism tap into our desires with the promise of objects to satisfy us? Yet when we possess them, the urge for something new reemerges. Geographer Jared Marguiles attempts to explain that paradox by looking at some of most endangered, and coveted, species in world: cacti. He examines the market for succulents and the collectors who drive it, including the strange illicit trade in legally available cacti. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Jared D. Margulies, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade University of Minnesota Press, 2023
The post Looting Cacti appeared first on KPFA.