May Day Amid A Plague w/ Sarah Jaffe

May Day Amid A Plague with Sarah Jaffe Full Audio & Transcript at laborwaveradio.com/sarahjaffe [edited for clarity, May 1, 2020]

Laborwave Radio in conversation with Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, which Robin D.G. Kelley called “The most compelling social and political portrait of our age.” She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

She discusses labor organizing and worker militancy amid a plague on this troubled day of celebration, May Day.

Preface “We already know, because of the climate catastrophe that is breathing down on us, that we need to radically reshape the economy and do it quickly. Well now we've seen that we can. It turns out that we can survive on the work of so-called essential workers. I think what we’re seeing is the things that are staying open right now, the things that we need, are jobs doing the work of social reproduction. Nurses are working, and members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are picking tomatoes in Florida working. The people who deliver things to you, the logistics chain, Amazon warehouse workers who have been showing us all how to be militant lately, are working. That is social reproduction work. So much of the rest of the economy doesn't actually need to exist.”

The Political Party After The Revolution w/Gianpaolo Baiocchi

Transcript Forthcoming at laborwaveradio.com/gianpaolo

Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution.

After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of considering one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society.

Our second episode is The Political Party After the Revolution featuring Gianpaolo Baiocchi, professor of individualized studies and sociology at NYU and director of the Urban Democracy Lab. He is author of We, The Sovereign which explores the possibilities of bringing about a radical utopia of popular self-rule.

“When we look at the history of political parties in the United States they are pretty consistent with their founding mission of representing political elites. Who do we want this party to be autonomous from and who do we want it to be responsive to? We have to be very clear that it's people's struggles, movements, and unions that we want it to be responsive to and that we want it to be autonomous from elite interests and existing bureaucratic formations within movements and non-profits. Everybody feels like we can't have Trump again, but having this kind of life and death thing continues to lead us to greater and greater compromises all the time. What I like about your question about the party after the revolution is might we have the freedom to rethink our structures of political representation in a way that doesn't feel like if we don't sort it out exactly this minute the world will end or the right-wing will win."

Bigger Than Bernie: The Road To Democratic Socialism with Micah Uetricht

Full audio and transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/micahuetricht

We spoke with Micah Uetricht, managing editor at Jacobin Magazine and co-author of the recent Verso title, Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From The Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.

"Bernie's campaign, and the campaigns that have followed his, should show that there is also a way to do electoral politics that is actually spurring more class struggle, not tamping it down. Marxism is about both the objective conditions that you face, as well as the subjective efforts you can make to change the world. Good Marxism, in my opinion, always focuses on doing both of those things. What opportunities the objective conditions present to you, but also what you as an individual can do swimming outside the tides of history."

In Bigger than Bernie, activist writers Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht give us an intimate map of this emerging movement to remake American politics top to bottom, profiling the grassroots organizers who are building something bigger, and more ambitious, than the career of any one candidate. As participants themselves, Day and Uetricht provide a serious analysis of the prospects for long-term change, offering a strategy for making “political revolution” more than just a campaign slogan. They provide a road map for how to entrench democratic socialism in the halls of power and in our own lives.

Bigger than Bernie offers unmatched insights into the people behind the most unique campaign in modern American history and a clear-eyed sense of how the movement can sustain itself for the long haul.

#berniesanders #jacobinmag #versobooks #micahuetricht #meaganday