Against the Grain – April 25, 2012
Mexico-based journalist John Gibler talks about the the political economy of the US-Mexico drug trade.
12:00 PM Pacific Time: Mondays - Wednesdays
Acclaimed program of ideas, in-depth analysis, and commentary on a variety of matters—political, economic, social, and cultural—important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. Against the Grain is co-produced and co-hosted by Sasha Lilley and C. S. Soong.
Mexico-based journalist John Gibler talks about the the political economy of the US-Mexico drug trade.
Joey Cain, guest curator of an exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library, talks to Sasha Lilley about the life of Harry Hay, the communist father of the gay liberation movement.
Nancy Cohen, author of Delirium, argues that the backlash to the sexual revolution has fueled American politics for over three decades.
The lives of recent immigrants, notes UC Berkeley’s Leti Volpp, are often framed as a battle between “tradition” and “modernity.” But blaming, for example, interpersonal violence in immigrant communities on regressive non-Western cultures is deeply problematic.
Translator and biographer Richard Greeman talks about the writer and revolutionary Victor Serge–from his anarchist youth in France, his involvement with the Bolshevik Revolution, his imprisonment in Stalin’s gulag, and his dissident Marxism in the darkest days of the 20th century.
Notre Dame economist David Ruccio shares his perspective on the economic crisis, income inequalities, corporate taxation, the focus on deficits, austerity in Greece, and more.
John Marsh, author of “Class Dismissed,” discusses with Sasha Lilley why — contrary to conventional wisdom — lack of education is not the cause of poverty and economic inequality.
Amiri Baraka and Bill Fletcher, Jr., offer conflicting perspectives on Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X. Also, Patrick Dooley discusses a Tom Stoppard play about radical thinkers in 19th-century Russia.
Alondra Nelson, author of “Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination,” talks to Sasha Lilley about the little known history of the Black Panther’s medical activism, from setting up free clinics to genetic screening for sickle cell anemia.
Selma James argues that unwaged work is indispensable to capitalist production; she also discusses the relationship of gender to class.