The ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip has been front and center in the world’s attention for the last couple of months, and it's important that we keep it there. But it's also important to remember that this latest escalation in violence is just that: an escalation, an increase in violence in a region where violence is the norm, not just militarily but also politically and economically — what we might call structural violence. The suffering in Palestine has been seen primarily as a...

Before the Zionist project and the state of Israel placed their boots on the neck of Palestine, this region was a multicultural, multi-religious land, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side-by-side in relative peace and harmony.  And despite what Israeli forces propagandize, this so-called “conflict” in the Middle East is not some millennia-old, intractable holy war between two religions. It's quite simply and very classically a case of settler-colonialism. When we see what's...

As the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians continues, it’s important that we also continue to raise a magnifying glass to its perpetrators, not just looking at the state of Israel as a whole or the IDF—as blood-soaked as their hands are—but also looking at the some of the perhaps less publicly scrutinized institutions complicit in this genocide.  In this episode in our ongoing series on Palestine, we’re going to focus on healthcare institutions and their complicity in the...

For those of us living in the United States, today — what we call Thanksgiving — is a very significant holiday because, for some of us at least, it’s a day to recognize and remember the violent, genocidal, settler-colonial history of the land we live on. Our lives here in North America are predicated on a history and a pattern that is repeating itself as we speak, most notably in occupied Palestine, where we are witnessing what feels like the culmination of a decades-long ethnic cleansing...

The Red Scare — perhaps most well known through the era of McCarthyism that dominated the social, political, and legal spheres of the U.S. in the 1950s — is actually much more than just a brief window of time where communists in the United States were vilified, criminalized, and blacklisted. The Red Scare is actually much more pervasive and longstanding, originating decades before McCarthyism and stretching well into the present. And, when combined with the Black Scare — the fear and hatred...

“This is the most important election of our lifetimes.” “Voting for a third-party candidate? Might as well throw away your vote!” “You may not like him, but you’ve just got to hold your nose and vote for him — otherwise, Trump might win.”  We're sure you’ve heard each of these lines many times — we know that we have. But, at some point you have to ask: how can every election be the most important one? Am I really throwing away my vote by voting for a candidate whose policies I agree with?...

As we continue to work towards outer transformation, building the structures and models that will shape the transition to a post-capitalist society, it’s also important to think about the inner transitions within ourselves — particularly, how we relate to one another personally and socially. How we show up together for a liberated future is the core theme of the book How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, written by our guest in this episode, Mia Birdsong. Mia is the...

Before 1948, the land of Palestine was dotted with olive groves along rolling hills between mountains and the Mediterranean sea. Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, and Christians all lived alongside one another in relative harmony, practicing agriculture and embroidery, or working in factories or along the coast in thriving port villages. Not to romanticize it too much, but in comparison to what was to come, this region was thriving.  If you’ve been paying any attention to the news lately,...

What Is To Be Done? This is the question so profoundly posed by the Russian Revolutionary and Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, in his landmark text of the same name. Although it was written well over a century ago, this text, the questions it asked, and the paths forward that it provided, are just as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago. And just as urgent. What roles do spontaneity and disciplined organization have in leftist movements? Can we focus simply on economic reform, or...

What is the connection between capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, and Christianity? How do these systems and ideologies uphold and support one another? How do we work to dismantle them and cultivate in their place a decolonized culture and politics that supports Indigenous sovereignty, human health and wellbeing, and flourishing ecosystems? These are some of the questions that we’ll explore today on this special Indigenous People’s Day conversation with Sikowis Nobiss. Sikowis is Plains...

Although the reference to war that you just heard could very much be real, actual military conflict — after all, our guest on today’s episode has fought as a freedom fighter in a Kurdish militia in Syria — today’s episode isn’t about that. It’s about a different kind of war: class war. Specifically, class conflict as it manifests in the workplace between employees and employers. You may already know about Anchor Brewery — maybe you love the beer, maybe you’ve seen the iconic steam beer...

It was once very difficult for people experiencing poverty in the Global South to obtain credit and loans because they were seen as unable to provide adequate collateral. This situation changed with the emergence of microfinance, a model pioneered by Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh which has now been widely disseminated to countries around the world.  At the heart of the Grameen system is the organization of borrowers into groups of women (97 percent of the bank’s loans are...

“It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Those words have been attributed to both the philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek decades ago, but they couldn’t feel more true today. As we continue to stare down the double barrels of climate change and COVID without any meaningful response from those who rule over us, without organized and collective action that has been able to make a transformative material impact, and for many out there without even...

Do you ever feel like time is marching in a particular direction? Towards, say, rising global temperatures, mass extinctions, ever-increasing divisions — and ultimately, towards inevitable collapse? What if this particular perception of time contributes to our feelings of despair and hopelessness about our futures? What if it limits our ability to imagine and fight for a more just, equitable, and regenerative system? In this conversation, we’ve brought on Bay Area artist and author Jenny...

When you think about the philosophies and practices of Buddhism and Marxism, you might not immediately think that they have much in common. However, you might be surprised at how much overlap and complementary resonance there actually is between these two rich and beautiful traditions.  In this conversation, we’ve brought on Breht O’Shea, a Buddhist practitioner and Marxist political educator based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Breht is the host of the podcast Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host...

When we think of health under capitalism, it's easy to go straight to the fight for universal healthcare, and understandably — that battle is one of the most contentious and important in the ongoing class war between the mass of people and those who rule us, the capitalist class. But it would be a mistake to think that that’s where our battle ends, that there isn't an expanded struggle over the ways that health and sickness are even conceptualized under the capitalist ideological framework...

Elements of capitalism have existed throughout history — in institutions like markets, class relations, ownership laws, credit systems, etc. But they were never dominant until they came together, escaping the isolated, laboratory conditions in which they once existed, to coalesce and form a world-dominating capitalist order.  How did the bubonic plague, the world-shattering pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia in the 14th century, along with the Little Ice Age that followed it, give rise in...

It’s perhaps more important than ever in these especially tumultuous, lonely, and oppressive times that we continue to believe that another world is possible. Simply reimagining the way we raise our children, the homes that we dwell in, the property we horde or share, and the form of the families we choose — can have profound and long-term impacts on the quality of our lives and on the world we’re living in more broadly. By challenging these seemingly ordinary structures of everyday life we...

The music we know today as jazz has deep and contested roots, but likely arose in New Orleans, Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The music is based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery, and particularly by the tradition of the blues, an art form known for expressing the suffering and hardship of Jim Crow America.   In his book, Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music, author and scholar Dr. Gerald Horne...

We’ve been taught to think of staggering economic inequality, the disposability of nonwhite  labor populations, hyper-exploitation, and minority rule as bugs within the capitalist system — things to be corrected by capitalist technology and innovation — but in fact, all of these things are anything but bugs — they are features of this system, baked deep into it at its very core. And, in many respects, the birthplace of modern, global capitalism, with its exclusion of racialized others, its...

Although its intellectual handmaidens love to insist otherwise — capitalism is not a system that truly embodies freedom. We all feel it, of course — that nagging sense that we lack any agency over the choices that shape our lives, the frustration we feel at our bosses, the tension we feel with our landlords, the sense that we’re all just stuck in a rat race. We might lack the language to articulate it, or a framework within which to situate it, but we all know, deep down, that this ain’t it —...

At the beginning of the 20th century, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advances of technology, that no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week. The challenge, in Keynes's view, would be how to fill all of our newfound leisure time without going crazy.’   That obviously never happened — so, what went wrong? Technology has advanced to the point where we could all be working much less, and with all sorts of...

Our transgender comrades are under attack — not just by incendiary reactionaries on the right, but also by many of those on the more liberal or even left side of the political spectrum. The attacks come in many forms, from outright violence, to genocidal language, to the often arbitrary and reactionary demarcations around what constitutes “womanhood,” to the “just asking questions” industrial complex led by liberal institutions like the New York Times.  In this episode, we explore a robust...

Imagine this week you spent half your time growing, harvesting, preserving, and cooking food for yourself, your family, and perhaps your community — and the other half your time doing something else that you love, something that brings you joy — perhaps writing, podcasting, coaching, caring for others, or anything else. How would you feel? What would change about your relationship to food, to place, to work, and to the seasons? This is the lifestyle model championed by farmer and writer Naoki...

For the past couple of years, the city of Atlanta, Georgia, has been pushing forward a project known as “Cop City” — a tactical training compound featuring a mock city which has been referred to as a kind of 'war base' where police will learn military-style tactics and maneuvers. The $90 million compound would be built on somewhere between over 300 acres of forest in Atlanta — a space known as the Weelaunee Forest, one of the largest urban forests in the country. As a result of this...