Featuring Alex Han, Asha Ransby-Sporn, and Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor on Chicago's left political experiment. In the wake of Zohran's remarkable victory in New York, organizers all over the country are taking a close look at Chicago under Mayor Brandon Johnson. A Chicago Teachers Union leader elected in 2023, Johnson's win was the culmination of years of militant labor and social movement struggle. But while much has been achieved, Johnson and his allies have also suffered many defeats--and the mayor's approval ratings are alarmingly low. In this episode, three long-time local organizers, including a socialist member of city council, analyze the state of the left's bid for governing power and what broader lessons it holds. Recorded live in Chicago.

Dig 500th Episode Party November 7 in Brooklyn! Emceed by Brace and Liz from TrueAnon. Free for Patreon supporters $10/mo and up. Get your tickets here littlefieldnyc.com/event/?wfea_eb_id=1549778040839

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Get 50% off Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code ‘DIG50'.

Buy Fake Work at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Isabella Weber, Malcolm Harris, and Paul Williams on Abundance. A debate and discussion of: the book; the discourse; the underlying economic and political questions of how we make the affordable housing, green energy, and fast trains we need; and how actual capitalist social relations appear to us in mystified form as “supply” and “demand.”

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Get 50% off A People's History of Psychoanalysis and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code ‘DIG50'.

Register for Summer Rejuvenation by July 27th at Comrades.education

Featuring Aslı Bâli and Gabriel Winant on the emerging conjuncture: the Trump regime’s fascist and authoritarian second coming; the giant vacuum created by the Democratic establishment’s inability to act like an opposition party; and the resurgent dynamism and energy now coming so powerfully from our political forces on the socialist left. Conducted before a live audience at the Socialism 2025 conference.

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Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring NYC DSA co-chairs Gustavo Gordillo and Grace Mausser on how Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary. NYC DSA spent years building an electoral juggernaut that has now made history and offers a model for the left everywhere across the United States. A behind-the-scenes look at how NYC DSA and the Zohran campaign did it!

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Check out the Summer 2025 issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly at www.socres.org 

Get 50% off Immigration Detention Inc. and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code DIG50

Featuring Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s war on Iran, possible direct US intervention, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Chicago: come see The Dig live! secure.actblue.com/donate/thediglive

Listen to Thawra and our five-part Iran series: thedigradio.com/series

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Read Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi in Sidecar
newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/culmination

Buy All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence at Haymarketbooks.com

In These Times is offering 78% off print subscriptions for Dig listeners at Inthesetimes.com/dig

Featuring Ryann Liebenthal, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and Mike Pierce on Ryann’s book Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis. Interview by guest host Astra Taylor.

We are working on an episode analyzing Israel's war on Iran amid the ongoing Gaza genocide—it will be out soon. For now, check out our five-part series on the history of Iran and also Thawra, our 19-part series on the history of Arab politics (lots on Iran in the final episodes). Find both series here: thedigradio.com/series

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In These Times is offering 78% off print subscriptions for Dig listeners at Inthesetimes.com/dig

Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Asha Ransby-Sporn on 2020's summer of mass protest and rebellion sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. As Keeanga puts it: "The pressing question is how we went from twenty-six million people on the streets to a fascist in the White House?” We must urgently build organizations and movements that meet the moment as both popular resistance and authoritarian repression intensify. To do that, we need to learn from the 2020 uprising.

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Check out Long Haul at longhaulmag.com

Buy Fake Work at Haymarketbooks.com

Subscribe to Dissent at dissentmag.org/subscribe

Featuring Derek Guy on the politics, history, economics, and style of Western menswear. Guest hosted by Dennis M. Hogan.

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In These Times is offering 78% off print subscriptions for Dig listeners at Inthesetimes.com/dig

Buy I Didn't Come Here to Lie at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Quinn Slobodian on his book Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. MAGA and its far-right populist siblings around the world aren’t just a backlash to neoliberalism. The far-right has also long been animated by extremist mutant neoliberal anarcho-capitalist and paleo-libertarian strains that in the 1980s and 90s built a new New Fusionist politics of capitalist extremism—a politics that promoted IQ as the measure of individual and racial value; hard borders for humans with free trade for capital; and gold as the only true currency.

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Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org

Register for "Our Collective Is the Prize" at Comrades.education before May 31

Featuring Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing French party La France Insoumise. How the radical left confronts and then defeats the far-right, in France and everywhere. Recorded before an audience at n+1’s Brooklyn office.

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Register for "Our Collective Is the Prize" at comrades.education

Buy Reconsidering Reparations at haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the final in a four-part series, traces the great unraveling of the American empire from the 1970s to our present MAGA 2.0 moment.

Would you like to know more? Aziz made a bibliography for you: thedigradio.com/newsletter102

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Buy Enemy Feminisms and I Didn't Come Here to Lie at Haymarketbooks.com

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the third in what is now a four-part series, looks at how black movements responded as the Vietnam War and the limits of formal civil rights victories combined to explode the Cold War's contradictions.

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Buy Reconsidering Reparations at Haymarketbooks.com

Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the second in a three-part series, takes the story from World War I’s hyper-nationalist, xenophobic First Red Scare, through the convulsions of the middle decades of the 20th century: the Communist Party USA, the New Deal, World War II, the civil rights movement, the Warren Court, and ultimately the Cold War, when American liberalism, anti-communism, and empire triumphed.

Buy Iran in Revolt at Haymarketbooks.com

Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org before April 25th for an early bird discount!

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Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American capitalist, imperialist project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the first in a three-part series, traces the foundation of the American settler empire from the revolutionary generation up to the eve of World War I.

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Buy White City, Black City at Plutobooks.com

Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Jeff Schuhrke on his book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. During the Cold War, organized labor’s top leadership acted as an agent of the US national security state abroad: undermining left-wing unions, fomenting right-wing coups, and promoting the US-led capitalist order. At home, those same forces destroyed left-wing unions and organizers. That history goes a long way in explaining the weakened, conservative, and ineffectual workers’ movement we still confront today.

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[don’t sign up using the Patreon iPhone app because the ghouls at Apple are now requiring a fee! use a web browser or non-iPhone app]

Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org before April 25th for an early bird discount!

Buy Hidden San Francisco at Plutobooks.com

Featuring more analysis from Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on the shape of global geopolitics and geoeconomics. We discuss: the fault lines of the green energy transition; the US and China battle for dominance while the rest of the world seeks advantage and opportunities for leverage; the US and Russia’s full-throttle commitment to fossil capitalism; the IMF’s ongoing imposition of neoliberal austerity on the world’s poorest countries, which, in opposition to these plans, want to remake the entire world capitalist system. Plus: Why the economic weapon failed against China and Russia, and a lot more.

The second in a two-part series.

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Subscribe to The Polycrisis newsletter phenomenalworld.org/series/the-polycrisis

Download a free copy of The Spectre of State Capitalism by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon academic.oup.com/book/57552

Transnational Institute reports:
The New Frontline: The US-China Battle for Control of Global Networks tni.org/en/article/the-new-frontline

Geopolitics of Capitalism: State of Power 2025 tni.org/en/publication/geopolitics-of-capitalism

Get 50% off Pirate Care and other books in your first order from plutobooks.com with code ‘DIG50'.

Featuring Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on a global conjuncture defined by Washington's shredding of the liberal international order’s legitimacy amid a panic over decline: the escalating Cold War with China; Gaza genocide; Trump’s tariff wars and militarism, and his pivot toward Putin on Ukraine; European defense buildup and fiscal revolution; what this all means for the poor majority of the Global South, and more. Part one of a two-part series.

Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Subscribe to The Polycrisis newsletter phenomenalworld.org/series/the-polycrisis

Download a free copy of The Spectre of State Capitalism by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon academic.oup.com/book/57552

Transnational Institute reports:
The New Frontline: The US-China Battle for Control of Global Networks tni.org/en/article/the-new-frontline

Geopolitics of Capitalism: State of Power 2025 tni.org/en/publication/geopolitics-of-capitalism

Buy Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal at Haymarketbooks.com

Buy Nuclear Is Not The Solution at Versobooks.com

Featuring Eric Blanc on We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. Interview conducted by guest host Gabriel Winant.

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Defend federal workers and federal services: actionnetwork.org/forms/let-us-work/

Contact the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) for help organizing your workplace: workerorganizing.org

Contact Workers Organizing Workers (WOW) if you are interested in taking a job in a strategic industry to unionize it: form.jotform.com/250337473301045

Buy All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence at Haymarketbooks.com

Subscribe to a year of Jacobin for only $15— a special offer for Dig listeners! bit.ly/digjacobin

Featuring TrueAnon hosts Brace Belden and Liz Franczak on our freakish and reactionary tech oligarchy. Musk and friends built a technological infrastructure that has warped everyone’s minds, including their own. Now they’re seizing the state.

The hideous AI “art” we discuss:
https://bit.ly/4ksG1aM
http://bit.ly/3DmDfTD

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Register for the Socialism Conference at Socialismconference.org before April 25th for an early bird discount!

Use code "DIG" for 30% off a subscription to The-Syllabus.com

Featuring Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Mike McCarthy on the MAGA and DOGE war on woke; the complicity of bankrupt liberal identity politics; and the centrality of various oppressions to the class domination of capital and struggles against it.

Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Read Mike’s article "The Problem of Class Abstractionism" epublications.marquette.edu/socs_fac/356

Buy Enemy Feminisms at Haymarketbooks.com

Buy Solidarity Betrayed at Plutobooks.com