Against the Grain – February 1, 2012
Gabor Mate talks about how capitalism is bad for one’s mental and physical health.

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 produced and hosted by Sasha Lilley.
Gabor Mate talks about how capitalism is bad for one’s mental and physical health.
Several highlights from the past year, including Loic Wacquant on the punitive state, Laura Nader on judging foreign cultures, Timothy Morton on ecological thinking, Robin D. G. Kelley on racial politics and anticolonialism, and Lochlann Jain on cancer in US culture.
Leftwing historian James Livingston makes the provocative argument that consumption is good for us.
In his new book “Beyond the Finite,” Iain Boyd Whyte describes how the idea of the sublime has evolved; he also traces its relationship to artistic expression and political strategy.
Social movements scholar and activist Barbara Epstein talks about the non-violent direct action movements of the 1970s and 80s, such at the Clamshell Alliance and the Livermore Action Group, that prefigured the egalitarian, consensus-based politics of the Occupy movement.
According to Max Haiven, global capitalism turns cooperative and creative activity into calcified narratives, hierarchies, and commodities. Haiven emphasizes the importance of a task he calls “commoning memory.”
Media critic Robert McChesney describes what capitalist interests have done to the non-commercial promise of the internet.
UC Santa Cruz professor Julie Guthman offers a pointed critique of the alternative food movement in her new book “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism.”
George Yancy discusses his book “Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race.”
Activist and scholar Chris Dixon talks with Sasha Lilley about anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and non-sectarian politics over the last two decades and in the Occupy movement.