Helena Sheehan participated, as an activist, educator, and Marxist philosopher, in a great variety of radical movements and groupings, among them the New Left, the IRA, and the Communist Party of Ireland. She describes her engagements with many of the key ideas and debates around socialism and communism, both in the U.S. and abroad. (Encore … Continued
Against the Grain
12:00 PM Pacific Time: Mondays to Wednesdays
Award-winning 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.
Few things sound as American as choice. And in the United States, the freedom to send one’s child outside of the traditional public school system is a choice that has been promoted aggressively since the legal end to segregation in schools. Scholar Jon Hale traces how the notion of school choice was used to fight … Continued
William Morris’s designs are still admired and revered, but his radical politics and utopian inclinations are less well known. Michael Robertson discusses the nineteenth-century Englishman’s insistence on craftsmanship, his critiques of industrialism, his turn toward socialism, and his utopian novel News From Nowhere. (Encore presentation.) Michael Robertson, The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy Princeton University Press, … Continued
A hallmark of our age is feeling we’re perpetually struggling with time—not having enough of it to accomplish seemingly endless tasks and obligations, while swimming in a sea of distractions. Can we cope if we learn, following the gurus of time management, to become ever more disciplined and productive? Or does that just feed into … Continued
Michael Staudenmaier uses the case study of a small binational (Chicanx/Puerto Rican) revolutionary group in the U.S. to examine the phenomenon of internal colonialism; the scapegoating of populations; competing theorizations of fascism; state repression in the Americas; neo-Nazi and Klan activity; and panethnic Latinx identity and solidarity. (Encore presentation.) Michael Staudenmaier, “‘America’s Scapegoats’: Ideas of Fascism … Continued
The Republican Party is gripped by a hatred of immigrants. But geographer Reece Jones argues it has not always been so. Instead, one man, the late John Tanton, was responsible for making nativism appear a central concern of conservatives, by propagating scores of anti-immigrant organizations, some which eventually helped staff the Trump Administration. And, as … Continued
According to Joseph Masco, the two key existential dangers of our time are climate disruption and nuclear weapons. The first, he maintains, is the product of petrochemical capitalism; around the second an elaborate, fear-based U.S. national security culture has been constructed. Masco contends that addressing these twin crises requires grasping their origins and pursuing fundamental structural … Continued
Cultural and media workers disproportionately shape how other workers see themselves and the world they live in, whether it’s by selling them something or presenting them with dissenting views. As historian Shannan Clark argues, there was a time when a great many cultural workers saw consumption itself as a political act. Such workers in New … Continued
Occupy Oakland took over the plaza in front of City Hall ten years ago. Emily Brissette discusses what animated and what constrained the movement; she also considers the debate that arose after stay-away orders were issued against dozens of Occupiers. That debate, contends Brissette, featured conflicting notions of what constitutes legitimate political activity. Social Justice (Photo … Continued
Twenty years ago, the inaugural World Social Forum was convened in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Jackie Smith describes some of the networking processes and movement-building dynamics fostered by that gathering and its successors. She also discusses three strands of organizing directly influenced by the Forum: the Right to the City movement, Via Campesina, and indigenous people’s movements. … Continued